The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (33 page)

When some sparks cracked and flew out of the fire, Sandy jumped to mash them with her feet, then walked over to Susan and kissed her on the cheek. “Two more nights? Can you handle tonight and then just a little more walking and then one final night?”

Susan nodded in agreement, and Alice shifted her weight, and then Gail jumped up and started passing out beer, hugging each one of her friends as she handed them a drink. “I love you,” she whispered six times. J.J. suggested that they forge a plan for leaving the following day.

The stars shifted then, and the brilliant spring sky looked like a dark, singular blanket that had been placed in just the perfect spot, miles above the campfire over a small Wisconsin forest where the whispers of a group of women were lifted high into the night air. Whispers filled with bonds of love and abandoned sorrow, and the hopes and wishes of these women with the courage to plow ahead through the challenges of their lives into the destinies they would fashion beyond that point. Whispers that spoke of love and loss and of circling hearts within the hot fire of friendship. Whispers that floated onto thousands of window ledges where other women were waiting for permission, for the moment when they could rise up through the dark and begin walking themselves. The whispers floated through Wilkins County and out across the Great Plains and through cornfields that were just beginning to rise up above the ankles of all the farming women.

Those women craned their necks into the night air as they walked toward the barns, and saw the flickering lights jumping back and forth between the windy whispers. These farming women who rarely rested, stopped suddenly and felt a breeze, as warm and comforting as the hot baths they dreamed about, float through their bones. The women smiled and they walked on and they felt a push at their hearts that would stay with them for a long time.

The whispers glided across the mountains that separate the east from the west, and all the women who were poised with their heads toward the hills—those women felt the last of the day's sun change from hot to cold in just a moment, in just the time it takes to blink. All those mountain women who often forget in their busy days to look west before Aspen glow, before the bright orange sun blazes a mellow, moody light on the rocky cliffs, all those women were suddenly unable to keep their eyes off the mountains. They stood quietly with their hands dangling at their sides, and watched as their day melted quickly into night. They took in breath-tiny particles of the whispers, and they felt stronger and eager to stand alone and think about the joys and sorrows of life and all the possibilities that can straddle a hungry soul.

Near the oceans and the green, lush forests along the coast for hundreds of miles, all the women who were driving home from work and picking up their children from soccer practice and dance lessons and science club, all those women were amazed when out of nowhere a warm, lusty breeze—like a lover's urgent whisper—made them stick their hands out of their car windows. These women separated their fingers and let the powerful wind move inside of their skin and into the muscles and fibers and molecules that formed their hearts and souls and every ounce of them. When the whisper of a breeze stopped as suddenly as it began, the women who had felt it gained a sudden charge of life and love. Those women smiled, and they knew that whatever they made happen next in their lives would be amazing.

The whispers picked up strength then, and floated from one country to the next, dipping down here and there when a woman stood alone or seemed frightened or unsure of which direction to turn. The whispers breezed across China and into the mountains, where beautiful women stood holding baskets full of the green leaves of a tea called The Elegant Gathering of White Snows. As these women gathered the leaves, they stopped suddenly, every single one of them, when they felt something as warm as a burning fire push across their sweaty faces. They looked from one side of the mountain to the other. They raised their eyes toward the heavens, and then they looked at each other. They were moved to tears just to know that someone else, another woman, had felt the moving wind, the whisper of this warm breeze. They cried, yet their tears were warm and soothing, and the women who were gathering the tea leaves would always remember how the warm wind stilled their hearts and made them happy for those moments on the beautiful, steep mountain.

In all the other countries, in the places where women were watching their own babies die and where sons and daughters would disappear and in all the places where soldiers carried guns and the world was always dark, even in those places there was a hint of a breeze that night. Women felt they could look up and catch the eye of a female neighbor or another woman who was headed toward the river. Without a word or a gesture, they would smile and laugh and circle their arms around each other, touching hands and hearts. In a second and then another two or three, when the whisper had moved on and the pop of a gun or the crack of another heartbreak would bring them back, they would always remember the whisper and how that woman on the street held her to her breast and felt so warm and so alive.

The force of the whisper was unknown in Wisconsin, where the women had joined their energies to create a night of love and laughter. Occasionally, one of the women would turn her head away from her friends and look into the dark night sky just to make certain that everything was real, that it really was a spring night and that everyone was actually sitting right there by the roaring fire in the middle of nowhere.

There were at least one hundred stories yet to tell, and who would go next? That was the question always, and what would they save for next time? Would there be anything left?

Alice told them about taking a bath in the barn while Chester held a lamp above her, watching for thirty minutes as she washed her face, her arms, her breasts, her small legs. “If I could do that again,” Alice told her friends, “I would make Chester put the lamp on the box and take off all of his clothes. Then I would get on top of him, all wet and soapy, and I would make love to him until he howled.”

“Alice,” said Chris, placing a hand across her friend's wrist like a doctor checking for a pulse, “you can still do that! You don't ever have to wait for anything again.”

“But the barn is gone now,” said Alice in all seriousness.

“I can get you a barn,” laughed Chris, who had almost always believed that anything and everything is possible. “I can get you a barn and a tub and I can bring you Chester, Alice. You can count on me.”

“Oh, do you think?” said Alice. “I have thought about that so many times. I can't even believe I am telling you this but Chris, could you really find me a barn?”

“Honey, I'd build it myself if I had to. I'll get you a barn. You can bet on that.”

Everyone closed their eyes and imagined Alice as a young and beautiful woman in love with a clumsy man who could never bring himself to tell his wife the secrets of his heart. They watched Alice drop her skirt and roll off her stockings and dip first one foot and then the other into the tub of steaming water. They watched as Alice ran her hand down her arm and across her beautiful breasts and then down, down into the water.

“Alice,” said Susan. “You are still a very beautiful woman.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. I've never quite felt this beautiful in my whole life.”

Then Janice talked about how she was ready to rest her heart, finally and forever in one place. “I'm tired of all this ridiculous shit that I've put Paul and the girls through. Pretty damned tired,” she told her friends as she swigged down her fourth beer. “You know what, I'm also getting a little bit crocked out here, and I feel great.”

The women laughed, and the laughter rolled from one mouth to the next, as if in the end there had just been one laugh and one mouth and one woman sitting beside a fire in the middle of the rolling Wisconsin hills.

Sandy didn't need to say it, because everyone already knew, but she did anyway. She said she had developed a severe case of the hots for Lenny Sorensen and for the first time since she had lost the true love of her life, she felt as if she might be able to love again. “The minute I saw her, standing out there like that on the lawn, my entire world pretty much dropped to a spot that lingers just below my belly button. My fingers tingled, my breasts tilted sideways, I had this sudden desire to lie down right there and shout, ‘Take me!' I kissed her, you know.”

“You're kidding!” Chris hated not to know something. “Where the hell was I?”

“Not looking.”

“So what's the plan? How are you going to make this work?”

“Perfectly. I'm going to make this work perfectly, and I'm going to do anything, whatever it takes in my world to make something happen. I've been so fucking lonely and needy and wanting and desirous.”

“All those other women in your life?”

“Just helping me fill in the blanks. I care about them all. I do. But I need someone who grabs my heart, makes me bend over with wanting, who can look into my soul and see who I am and what forms the craters of my life. It also helps if this woman happens to have breasts that call out my name and an ass that looks as if it was made to fit the contours of my hands.”

The instantaneous laughter is a bullet, ricocheting from one woman to the next. Susan alters the mood when she begins talking about the abortion and knowing there are hundreds of couples who would raise the baby, but the pregnancy would kill her, it would just kill her.

“I just can't have this baby. Physically and mentally. I'm old and tired and I need to start over. Right now. Not in a few months. I have to do it now.”

“Susan. We'll rent a big van and all go with you, honey,” said Janice. “This is your decision, and I think it's the right one. This is your life, your body, and by God, we're going to help you make it all work. Would you like us to beat the shit out of the baby's father?”

Susan told them it was a waste of perfectly good energy to want to kill someone so weak and helpless. She suggested more beer, and when they discovered that the beer was gone, the women moved to the wine, which they knew would prove to be a costly mistake in the morning, yet they forged on recklessly. Wonderful Mary had included brand-new wineglasses and bags of snacks, and if it were not for the blazing fire and the fact that they were not on Susan's floor, the women could have been anywhere, anywhere at all.

Within an hour, Alice crawled into her sleeping bag and then Susan joined her. Chris and Janice talked for another hour about collaborating on a magazine article about depression, and Janice agreed that if she shared her story, if she talked personally on a level that would expose her years of hell and heartache, maybe someone else might be spared even a day of the same misery.

“It's not the same if you don't use your real name, but sometimes people can't handle that. You'd have to ask Paul and the girls how they feel,” said Chris. “You'd have to be sure.”

“They would want me to do what I could to help someone else, that's what I think,” Janice said. “They would also know that whatever I do, it's my decision, a choice for me.”

Janice thought for a moment, added that her mother would know that with survival comes a kind of debt, a debt that needs to be repaid. “It's a cosmic thing. I've made it, and if I can help someone else make it, then something good, even something better, will come right back to me. Is that too goofy?”

“Look out, here comes the old sixties cosmic justice theory that has never been proven wrong by me. Even when I tell someone to fuck off, I usually get the same thing back. You'd think I would learn.”

“It's tough to balance how you feel inside sometimes with doing what you think needs to be done.”

“Well, I haven't killed anyone yet, and I've wanted to do that about six hundred times, so I guess I'm more in control than I think.”

As the night wore on Sandy, Gail and J.J. lingered the longest by the fire. They tossed log after log into the flames, sitting in the silence, watching the wood burn itself out until another log brought it back to life. The three women sat close, wrapped their arms around each other, held hands, waited in the cold while they took turns shuffling off to nature's bathroom in the trees.

“It's not so bad to love women, is it?” Sandy asked, rhetorically.

“I've never felt bad about all the pain and suffering we end up going through because of all the other good stuff,” said J.J. “To be totally accepted and loved and to know someone will be there for you no matter what happens is an absolutely perfect feeling.”

“I think we all have the potential of loving a woman like you do, Sandy,” Gail said, turning to look Sandy in the eyes. “Maybe this next generation of women who have been even more free with their affections and emotions than we have, maybe they will even be more honest.”

Sandy rolled onto her left hip and pushed her legs out in front of her, thinking the whole time how fine it felt to be talking about her favorite subject. “Women can find such comfort in each other, it's a shame all this sexual bullshit even got started. Some of the times when I was the saddest in my life, all I wanted was to just have someone hold me. Usually I didn't want that someone to be a man, because he was usually the reason why I was so goddamned sad to begin with. Not that I was perfect or anything, but women are so much less self-centered and more open and caring and sensitive. What was I thinking?”

J.J. reminisced. “But remember before we started telling people to eat shit, remember how people laughed about things like how we could go to the bathroom in front of each other and sleep in the same bed and how we always seemed to know how the other woman felt, remember how it really changed how we treated each other?” She smiled and stared at the fire. “My God, is there anything better than lying in bed with a friend and talking and feeling her warm legs next to yours and just knowing from the center of your being that you are safe and loved. That the world could spin away and those feelings of closeness and safety would not change?”