The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (29 page)

She was thinking about how green Wisconsin always was in late spring, just about this time, and about how she would go with her cousins down to the Wisconsin River. They would all wade into the frigid water on a dare. Someone, never the same cousin, always jumped in first and splashed everyone else until the entire gang forgot about the cold water, the frigid winds and feet and fingers that quickly went numb.

Jane thought about campfires in the forest, and remembered from way back when she was about eleven. She and her cousins Mary and Sharon sat talking for hours and roasted an entire bag of marshmallows, then hunted through the edge of the dark trees for more wood to keep the fire burning.

Greg, the assistant manager of Big Wheel Tires, came in then to see if he had any messages in the big basket that sat at the edge of Jane's neat desk.

“What's up?” he asked.

“Oh,” Jane said, startled that someone had interrupted her thoughts.

“I haven't seen anything for you yet, Greg.”

“Whatchya readin'?”

“It's a newspaper article about those women in Wisconsin.”

“Oh yeah, I heard about them on the radio. What the heck is that all about anyways, Jane? Do ya think those babes had some bad bananas or something?”

“Greg, Greg, Greg. Could your attitude explain why none of your wives ever stayed very long?”

“Hey, it wasn't me, ya know.”

“Okay. The women are just walking, Greg, like when you and Steve go down to that rodeo for a week each year. It's the same thing. This is their rodeo.” Jane knew Greg could relate to this explanation, and anything beyond that would float right over his head. She waited for his predictable response.

“Well, it's goofy ta me, is all. Wisconsin, too. Where the heck is Wisconsin?”

“Oh Greg, it's a long ways away from here, really, really far.”

When he left, Jane didn't move. She knew Wilkins County was down south, not close to where she grew up in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. When she closed her eyes she could see the rolling hills and tractors and trees, mostly those big old oaks dotting the horizon and then usually one or two, standing alone in a big field where the farmers plowed around it and sat to have their lunch, and where there would be a big pile of rocks right by the tree that the pioneers had collected.

Jane touched the words on the newspaper with her index finger, and she imagined the women walking, maybe she even knew some of them. Imagined them walking and holding hands and stopping along the side of the road to rest. If Jane missed anything in Wisconsin, it was those times when she had so many friends and they would go so many places and share so many things. Jane had loved her friends and they had loved her but now, sitting in the tire store, she started to cry. This sudden burst of emotion startled her more than the recent appearance of the newspaper articles.

Jane forced herself to get up and go to the rest room. She washed her face, wondering as she checked to see if her eye shadow was okay, when those lines coming off the edges of her eyes had become so long. She straightened her hair and pulled down the edges of her green jacket. Back at her desk, Jane folded the newspaper article into a palm-size square and slipped it into the top section of her purse. Then she started on the summer publicity sheets.

All day long, she did a pretty good job of forgetting about Wisconsin and those walkers, distracting herself with projects she had been putting off for weeks. At lunch Jane decided to leave the office, something she rarely did. Instead of eating, she walked around the block and sat on a little concrete bench that was in front of the fountain over by the library. No one recognized her. No one said, “Hello, Jane, do you mind if I sit down?” She was all alone on the bench until 12:30
P.M.
, time for Gloria to have her lunch.

The afternoon was a blur, because the Ford salesman went nuts in the outer office and needed to have about sixteen tires mounted yesterday. Jane handled him in a calm manner, and caught Greg winking at her as she got the guy to smile and sit down and accept a ride back to his own office.

Jane stayed late that night to finish all the paperwork so she could have a fresh start in the morning. She hated coming in to yesterday's work, and now that she was pushing forty herself, she could understand what Gloria had been talking about when she said getting up every morning wasn't always easy. Jane stayed up too late each night, watching television because she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep when she went to bed anyway.

That night Jane stopped at the small corner deli, Fratanno's, near her apartment complex. She bought a little pizza with the works, even anchovies, and then turned and grabbed a six-pack of beer out of the cooler.

There were no messages on her answering machine, particularly no word from Michael, who hadn't called her in ten days. The cat was happy to squeeze out the front door when she checked her empty mailbox. In her one-bedroom apartment, she turned on the radio and then the oven, slipped out of her work clothes and into sweatpants and an old jogging bra because it was warm but not too warm, then finally sat on the couch.

The long coffee table was now covered with the unfolded newspaper clippings from her purse. Certain words seemed to stand out in the newsprint like
Wisconsin
and
women
and
support
. Jane sat with her elbows on her knees and her hands on her face. She reread each article.

The bell on the oven went off and Jane jumped up, took out the pizza and let it sit for a minute while she popped the tab on a beer. Her uncles had always loved to drink beer as they sat around outside in those dorky old lawn chairs that always had strips of plastic missing. They would fill up one of those old metal tubs with water from the hose and put all the beer, always in bottles, right in the tub, and they would sit in a circle and talk about the war, and work, and their wives, popping off beer caps and looking each other in the eye, which they usually didn't do unless they were drinking lots and lots of beer.

Jane started to cry again after that, and she let the tears come as she cut up the pizza and stood at the kitchen counter for the first bite. She decided to go outside, even though she didn't know why, and filled up her plastic wash pan with cold water and put two more beers into it and then set the pan out on the patio. Then she grabbed the pizza and sat on her lone chair, looking right into the side of the apartment building that was next door. The lawn between her apartment building and the one across this small patch of dying grass was empty. There wasn't anyone watching her from a window. No one waved. It was endless emptiness. Nothing. No one. This made Jane cry harder as she felt a growing ache of loneliness rise from her stomach and into her throat.

Jane continued to cry while she ate. She finished the entire pizza and was on to the third beer when she heard the phone ring. She jumped off her chair and grabbed the phone on the counter just in time to hear a sound, like a person finishing a cough maybe? Then there was a click. “Shoot,” she said, wiping her eyes and heading back to the chair.

Jane hardly ever drank anymore, and the third beer was making her head spin. The Texas sky was as dark as it was going to get. There were a few spring stars to the north, the same stars, Jane figured, that the women in Wisconsin might be seeing at this exact same time.

Jane returned to the living room to scoop up the newspaper articles. When she plopped back into the lawn chair, she put all the articles into a pile and then set them on her chest, right on top of her heart. She took a big gulp of beer and let her mind go back to Wisconsin again, like she had that morning at work. In the Texas night with the cold beer cuddled in her right hand and Wisconsin on her heart, Jane began to remember for the first time in many years. She smiled and closed her eyes, and nothing she saw was as horrible as she had pretended all this time.

In her family kitchen, Jane is twenty again, her hands are on her hips and around her everything is familiar. The kitchen window has a crack in the bottom that her father has been going to fix for sixteen years; the long wooden table has scratches and lines and one big crack in it where her brother Jonathan stuck that big cleaver the night her parents went square dancing.

The kitchen is also littered with her mother's “stuff”—coupons and boxes and stacks of newspapers that she will never read in her entire life. Loaves of bread wrapped in plastic with twist ties on the end are lined up against the back of the counter, and there is a little china dish filled with rings, bracelets and single earrings that have lost their partners. There are always dishes in the sink and a slab of meat is thawing on the counter for dinner.

Jane cannot see herself, but she is beautiful. Her hair is down to her waist, and she has skin the color of the milky white sky, and those legs, so long and slender for a girl who is not really tall. It is fall, and there is a nip of winter in Wisconsin. The popular wardrobe style in 1979 is jeans and sweaters and for Jane, cowboy boots—always a pair of cowboy boots since she has been a girl and dreaming of horses and cowboys and the West. Oh the West, the mountains and deserts and horses and spaces. The West.

“Mom, you can't stop me,” Jane shouts, and her mother raises her hands to her ears and is trying so hard not to shout back at her only daughter.

“Janey, this is so foolish to throw something like this away, there's just a few months left. In spring, you will be done, can't you stay and finish?”

“I hate it. I hate school and everyone there, and it's just too damned stupid.”

“Please don't swear in here, Janey. Don't swear.”

“Let's face it, Mother, you are the one who wanted to go to college, and you should go up there and finish and get the diploma, not me. I never wanted to go. You made me go.”

Her mother cries then. She is a big woman, almost as wide as the space between the counter and the refrigerator, and Jane hates her for that and for every other thing she can possibly think of.

“Look, it's not my fault you got married and had three kids and never leave the damned kitchen, and that you eat and are fat.”

The level of Jane's cruelty astounds her mother, and she lifts her head from her hands to look at a daughter whom she no longer knows. Her heart has fallen into her stomach, and Jane's mother feels as if she is going to be sick.

“Sweetheart, please don't do this. Please, oh please.”

Jane hates her mother, even as she knows her hatred is misplaced. For this is the very mother who has always been here and helped her and loved her and encouraged her to do something, to see the world and to read and travel and to give herself a chance. The mother who has worked a night job at JC Penney for six years so she can help Jane with college tuition. The mother who comes home with ankles the size of grapefruits and then eats to make herself feel better for all the dreams she had that have evaporated.

Jane can't stand it any longer. She can't stand her brothers who remind her of that damned high school, and her father who sits around drinking coffee and poking his finger into her waist, whom she hasn't seen touch or kiss her mother in, when was the last time anyway? Jane can't stand Wisconsin and the dumb-ass boyfriends who only try to screw her brains out and never listen to her stories about where she wants to go. She hates every single thing in her life except this idea, to get out, to just get out.

For Jane, there isn't much thinking left to do after that. The bags have been in the car for weeks, since she dropped out of college and never told her mother and father, since she slept in that bed with Matt for six months to get the money from what she would have spent on the dorm room, since she called that guy at the ranch and said she would be there in early September. Her mother cannot move from the kitchen. Her feet are glued to the floor, and she knows in her heart that something horrible is happening, yet there isn't one thing she can do to stop it. She hears Jane run upstairs, she hears the drawers, she knows Jane is looking for money and the little box of jewelry. She's seen that brochure from the ranch under the stack of old T-shirts.

Jane doesn't bother to say another word as she flies out of the house. She doesn't look back or wave either. Janey doesn't see that her mother is slowly falling to the floor and wrapping her arms around her own shoulders. She doesn't see her mother's heart breaking, and she is way too young to know about anguish and loss and suffering and dreams that can turn into nightmares.

In those first few minutes driving away, never cranking back the mirror to look at the house or the river or that spot where she sat with her cousins, Jane only knows she is doing the right thing. She thinks about this all the way to Colorado, where she almost dies with delight the first time she sees the mountains—first as tiny dots against the horizon, and then as a growing vision of snow and light and darkness that leave her breathless and driving faster and faster as she approaches the sloping foothills until she realizes she is going 110 mph and the car hood is shaking. She stops thinking about those wonders when she sees that she has to live in a rat-infested cabin with no indoor plumbing, and that the ranch manager will never let her tend the horses, and that her job will always be to work in the kitchen.

In a year, there is another ranch and all the men who have never noticed that it is no longer 1856 and that women can do whatever they want. Jane has managed to send home one postcard without a return address and when she leaves Colorado, she does not know that her mother is right behind her, looking for her only daughter, and she misses finding her by a single mile.