The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (30 page)
Jane drives south to Arizona, where she waitresses and then works part-time at a drugstore because she blows her car engine, and she has no skills that will get her a job paying more than five dollars an hour. In Arizona there is a guy she thinks she loves, but then she doesn't and suddenly it has been five years since she has been in Wisconsin. One Christmas she calls her mother and says she is okay but not coming back, and someday she might call again and “No, I'm not telling you where I am.”
In 1985 Jane gets up and looks around at the walls of her trailer. She looks in the mirror to find she's a young woman who still doesn't own a horse or live on a ranch, and she is so tired from working all the nowhere jobs and going nowhere. Once again, she puts all her things in the car and leaves. This time there is no one to argue with because she is alone in the trailer, and her few friends won't care. She drives away without calling in to say anything to anybody, with a total of $678 and a car that is as many years old as all the years it has been since she left Wisconsin.
This time Jane lands in Texas because in the back of her mind, she identifies this state as a world filled with ranches and cowboys. In all this time, Janey does not let her heart soften. She doesn't know that her mother lost seventy-five pounds and that her father's heart is not so good but he will be okay if he retires early. She doesn't know that her mother also finished a master's degree and is now a counselor at the clinic in Prairie du Chien, where she helps nineteen-year-old girls, and some much younger, who want to run away.
She doesn't know that her father has taken a cooking class and remodeled the kitchen. Her brothers are gone, and the house is big but Janey doesn't know that her parents will never sell it because they think she could come back and then what? What would she do if they weren't there?
Jane isn't aware that her cousins Mary and Sharon pray for her and still cry when they talk about her, and then say it isn't too late. Janey could come back and they would all be together. She doesn't know that even with all these changes, some things are still the same. Her uncles, all but Uncle Tommy who died that Halloween night three years ago, still come over and her father cooks and they have a few beers, but not like before.
Once when Jane's brother Bill, the one who is the cop up there in Door County, called in some favors and found his sister's phone number at the small gas station that Janey was managing, he didn't know that Janey was just about ready to leave the little Texas town and move to Austin. So Bill missed her by fourteen hours. Then his wife had a baby, and he never tried to find his lost sister again. Never again.
In Austin, things were better for Jane. She met more men, including Carlton, who wanted to marry her. Carlton hired her to manage his jewelry store, but Janey didn't love him, and she had always told herself that she would never settle. Sometime, she knew, she would fall deeply in love with a man as wild as all those miles and miles of open space she has seen. Maybe this man of her dreams would be a rancher, so she would finally get her horses and make love in the blooming sagebrush, not caring about anything but that specific moment and the way her entire body smoldered against the warm sand, and how she opened herself up—to this man and to the world beneath her.
When Janey took the job at the tire store, the biggest franchise in the whole state, life definitely seemed to change direction for her. She was too busy at first to go out much, because the last business manager had failed to do things like record sales and check inventory. She met a few people, but no one she wanted to know better.
Eventually her life took on a routine, and there were no more wild nights and crazy lovers and driving to a new town in the middle of the night. There was, in fact, absolutely nothing new, and Jane was holding herself in place as the rest of the world moved. Back in Wisconsin, her mother discovered yoga and took her father to France, where she made love to him right out in the open in the middle of the day on a grassy ledge near a long river with a name they could not pronounce.
While her parents were making love in France, Janey was neatly and efficiently filing tire order forms into her newly organized system and thinking about how Greg always bothered her at work, and nothing else. Jane was thinking of nothing else.
Then another year passed, and she met her lover Michael. The sex was just this side of marginal but Michael was mysterious, he wore cowboy boots, and he made her laugh and forget how mundane and simple her life had become. Then those articles just this week, those articles began appearing on her desk and Jane felt herself moving forward to a place that she could remember as being directly behind her.
When Jane opened her eyes after all that remembering, she was no longer crying but thirsty as hell, really thirsty. She carried the beige plastic bucket into the kitchen and dumped out the warm water that had settled in the bottom. She filled up the bucket with cold tap water and then dumped every single ice cube on top of the last three beer bottles. Her memories had sparked something. She slipped into her bedroom and exchanged her sweatpants for her little red running shorts, then grabbed a pad of paper and went back outside.
Jane was done traveling down memory lane. Now she was going to do something. She made herself a list because that was how she worked these days. When she finished writing, she cracked open another beer, and then she called the only real friend that she knew would help her. Katherine had been in her weight-lifting class, and the women had bonded over coffee and the major decision that weight lifting was not for them.
“Katherine, I need some help.”
“Who is this?”
“Oh come on. It's Jane. You know, the geeky office manger with no life.”
“Are you drinking? You never drink. Are you drinking?”
“I'm having a few beers, that's all. But Katherine, something's happened to me.”
“Jane, you are scaring me.”
“Well, get ready for the rest of this then.”
“What?”
“I told you about those articles, right. You know, articles about those women walking in Wisconsin?”
“Yes, isn't that something? What's that all about, do you think?”
“That's where I'm from.”
“Wisconsin?”
“Yes, that's where my family is, and I haven't been back there in twenty years, twenty damn years, Katherine.”
“Jane, do you want me to come over there?”
“No, no. I just need a little help. Not much, just a little help.”
Katherine said she would take care of the cat, who knows for how long, does it really matter? There wasn't much in the refrigerator, and the way Jane had everything organized at work, the place could run without her for a year and they probably wouldn't even notice that she was gone.
Jane almost fainted when a really cute limo driver knocked on her door four hours later. He was late, but not late enough for Jane to catch the next plane to Chicago. She expected some old fart of a driver, not a hunky-looking guy who smiled when he saw her in those tight jeans and a blouse that was open three buttons down and showed the tops of her firm breasts.
When the plane lifted off the runway, Jane never thought about the fact that she was pushing forty herself and had never even been on an airplane. She watched the lights of Austin glitter for a few minutes and then disappear into a thin layer of light clouds that seemed to float with her all the way to Chicago.
Her first plan was to fly on to Madison, which was just a bit closer to Prairie du Chien than Milwaukee. But just after six
A.M.
, while she was having a Bloody Mary in the O'Hare VIP lounge with the very pilot who had flown her plane, she decided to fly into Milwaukee and rent a car. That way, she could drive out to Wilkins County, which was really sort of on the way.
Milwaukee was unrecognizable to Jane as the plane circled over Lake Michigan and passed all the city rooftops. She remembered it as an ugly, old city where nothing happened and where people never changed and always did the same old things day after day, year after year. Life seemed to be hopping in this city she hadn't seen for twenty years. In the airport terminal, where Janey had to whip out a blazer to keep warm, she was astonished to see camera crews racing all over the place. “It's the women walkers,” she said to herself. “They are bringing us all in here.”
By ten
A.M.
, when Jane had downed three cups of coffee and maneuvered her car out of the lot at the airport, it was already sixty degrees. She tossed her blazer into the backseat, checked her teeth in the mirror, and headed out of the airport.
Not far from the terminal, less than two miles, Jane decided suddenly that going to find the women was ridiculous. She was certain they didn't want to be bothered, and even more certain that it would be fairly pointless to stand and watch them if she could even get close enough to see them.
Instead she swung the car around right in front of a 7-Eleven and scooted back to I-94, the freeway that traveled north. The road that would take her home. Just to see. Just to say she was sorry.
Jane smiled as familiar landmarks whizzed by her car. She set the cruise control at 70 mph and flipped on the radio. She started to sing because she was certain, after all these years, that she knew the way home. Thirty miles out of Milwaukee, where the subdivisions had given way to long fields and stands of trees that were as green as the hills along the Mississippi, Janey reached down and pulled off her silver-tipped cowboy boots, one at a time. She put them on the seat next to her and then she kept driving, barefoot and singing at the top of her lungs with the window down and those buttons on her blouse flapping against the top of her beating heart.
Newsweek,
June 12, 1989
—Features Syndicate
DEPRESSION—THE HIDDEN KILLER
Janice Simmons was a little girl when it started. Days of mood swings and anger and sadness that seemed to zip by “under a dark, dark cloud.” The inner turmoil never went away. Janice is now a young woman, a woman who has survived three suicide attempts, a broken marriage, and institutionalization—finding out nearly twenty-four years later that she suffers from a severe form of depression. Medical professionals now say her depression is treatable and more common than the rest of the world can imagine.
“If we knew then what we know now, many lives could have been saved and many women like Janice could have led much different lives,” said Dr. Bernard Calhoon with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “This depression is a disease, no one asks for it, but for years we have treated it like it's a form of leprosy.”
Calhoon and other psychiatric specialists agree that the misunderstood illnesses of the mind are often hidden by men and women who try to deal with their problems alone because they don't think anyone will understand.
“It's also no secret that people are fearful of someone with mental illness,” said Dr. Susan Ellis, with the New York Psychological Institute. “We can see a broken leg or cancer and we understand that, but when a person is depressed or on the brink of some horrible mental episode, we tend to treat that illness entirely differently.”
It hasn't been that many years since anyone who had a mental problem was simply locked away at places with names like the Territorial Insane Asylum.
“In many ways, society's means for dealing with mental illnesses of all forms have not changed much in the past fifty years,” said Ellis, who has conducted numerous studies with new drugs that are now giving hope to millions of people suffering from severe depression throughout the country. “We have the drugs, and now we need to open up the minds in the rest of the world.”
Today, thanks to research, new drugs and public awareness campaigns, life for people with severe depression no longer has a bleak future.
“There are still things to learn, but we have saved lives and there is hope,” said Calhoon. “People such as Janice Simmons can get their lives back, and that's a miracle of science.”
—30—
The Elegant Gathering: Janice
There was a time not so many years ago when I could not even imagine an adventure like this. Not so many years ago when my idea to fling myself in front of the train was interrupted by that Elegant Gathering of White Snows. Not so many years ago at all when my life was a charade of locked doors and window shades that were never lifted and lives, so many lives, that were covered in shadows, waiting, and then waiting some more for me to shift my weight and get on with it.
I think my mother knew long before I did. Long before she held me in her arms and called out my name for the very first time, whispering “Sweet baby girl, my beautiful baby girl, little Janice, what have I done, what have I done?”
Now that I have come across my own mountains and settled into life as it was meant to be in the first place, I can't help this feeling of overwhelming sadness for what life must have been like for my mother. Although the medical world of her 1930s and '40s chose to deal with mental illness by mostly ignoring it, my mother was a bright, beautiful woman who knew that if she let anyone know about her dark, secret world, very possibly the tiny fragments of her life that gave her light and hope would be torn from her. They would carry her away if they knew what she was really thinking, take her away from me.