The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (41 page)

Her own breath is a warm shower against my face and we have fallen to the floor and Elizabeth is finishing the poem, but I can no longer hear the words. We are swimming on the bottom of that sea and I have something bottled up so deep inside of me that I am terrified to let it go. The world would flood and thousands of people would die and there would be no space for walking and sitting and only water. This something bottled up in me is a solid block that is unmovable. It is lodged halfway between my chest and my throat and I know that it will take major surgery and thousands of plunges into the depths of this ocean to dislodge it from a place that has wrapped its hands and feet and mouth around the core of who I am and what this thing has made me.

We rock on the floor until my sobs surrender. The well is not dry but it is tired, and Elizabeth begins whispering into the side of my face. Her words travel like tiny spiders into the web of my hair and then to my ears.

“Oh, sweetie, you have so many places to go, so much to learn, so many people to cradle in your own arms.”

She stops in between each proclamation, and I cannot move. It is only possible to listen and nothing else. Listen. I am not really alive. My flesh is warm and soft but my spirit, the heart of who I am and may someday become, is a frozen block of ice the size of Alabama. If I move my hand to the center of my chest, I feel the frozen walls of caverns as deep as forever. I am freezing. Cold as hell. Elizabeth goes on and I listen because I am searching for a warm spot, just a whiff of her breath on my face.

“This day is a gift,” Elizabeth tells me in that husky prophetess voice of hers. “You cannot see it that way now, Meg. It will take you a while—but not as long as it took you to get to this place. You will see mountains explode and birds fly without wings. In weeks you will see colors you never knew existed and the sides of buildings will call your name.”

Once, she shifts her hip against my back and I remember, with a touch of reality, that she once fell and broke her leg while she was parasailing in the Caribbean. She spoke of it only once. Never limps. Ignores the occasional pain that I imagine remains as sharp as a knife rubbing up against the inside of her bony spine. The hard floor does not stop her and I move as close against her as I can get and I never want her to stop talking. Her voice is a cradle and I want to be held and rocked and tucked into bed on the back of a soft white summer swan.

“Meggie, we don't have to talk of everything now, but I have to ask you one question. Just one more question.”

“Just one?”

“It's a big one.”

“I'm ready.”

“Why are you crying?”

Tucked away behind years of life that have stacked up and blocked out the sun and my old list of dreams and the way I used to take my checkered purple bedspread and fall asleep in the tall grass behind my grandma's old house in the country is a memory of what I really wanted. This memory flashes to the front of my mind and for a second it seems as fresh and young as it did when I was sixteen and the world stretched in front of me—endless and possible, wild, free and so forever. I want to tell Elizabeth this but I am afraid. I have been afraid for so long that I cannot utter a word. So afraid that years of my life have been frozen in a parade of sameness and routine.

She strokes the side of my face and pushes my hair behind my ears and she asks me again and then again, “Why are you crying? Why are you crying?”

“It's not because of Bob,” I say.

I move up onto my side so that we are facing each other and lying in parallel lines on a floor that has seen some of the most interesting feet ever created. Elizabeth is so wise that I imagine she knows what I need to say and do and feel, but she remains silent, and then I tell her what she already knows.

“It isn't about the watching or Bob or infidelity or marriage or any goddamn thing.”

Elizabeth smiles and touches my hair again. I am frightened, scared, terrified and exhausted at the mere thought of what lies ahead, and I want to crawl under the kitchen table and stay there for ten years. Elizabeth's visitors could drop me food and gently place glasses of milk and water at the edges of their chairs. Life would be simple—hard, but simple.

“More?” she asks, stretching her legs. “Tell me more and then we will move to a comfortable spot and you can talk or cry or yell or do anything you want all night long.”

“It's me,” I say slowly, holding each word in my mouth and then tossing them around with my tongue and lips before I let them go into Elizabeth's ears. “The crying is just for me and there are miles of rivers and lakes and oceans dammed up behind this pseudo-life that has claimed me. Miles and miles.”

“Ahh . . . ,” Elizabeth says, smiling as wide as a river herself. “And so it begins.”

“It begins, Elizabeth, and I have never been so terrified in my entire life. I am frightened and scared and I don't know how to begin. I don't know which foot to put forward or how to turn on the car or move my arm. How did I regress like this, Lizzie? How in the hell did this happen?”

She closes her eyes and pulls some Magic from her mind. I want to crawl inside that space behind her eyes and see how this works, but I am too scared for even that, too scared for anything.

“Everything is so simple. Now, from this moment on you will do what you have to do, what you must do, by remembering that we have just the present. Just now. You must settle into the idea of change and you can only do that one moment at a time. There is no grand plan except the one you create, and you have lost your sense of creation, oh beautiful Meggie. It is not that far of a reach to touch what you need, what you might remember, because here you are and there are hundreds and thousands of women who will never slide to the floor like this and surrender. Those women will cascade through one day after another with a simple wish of happiness that they will never be bold enough to find.”

“Elizabeth, I am so damn tired. I am so tired.”

“I know, sweetie, I know.”

Somehow we manage to get off the floor and she drags me into the living room that is such a delightful garden of books and flowers and rocks and sticks and stones that I feel a lightness soar through my weary bones. My tiredness is a weight that I have dragged with me for so long, it is hard to move. Elizabeth has a futon that flips out into a bed in three seconds and she tells me to stretch out, which I do without hesitation. I quickly sink into another world. A world where there are thick blankets colored in purple and red. A world that smells of patchouli and has glasses on every table and towels lying in plush piles near the bathtub. A world where the door is not locked and where people come and go and leave notes of love and passion on the kitchen table. A world where anyone who enters can say and feel and be and do whatever they want and where you can sit on the roof and read a book at midnight, wear shorts when it snows or plan your outdoor exercise routines for only the days when the weather is bad, because you like it that way.

A world of passion and light. That is what I crave. No schedules or routines that mix politely with the plans of the people in your life who have no consideration for what you need and want. A world where someone, just once, says, “What can I do for you?”

Elizabeth comes back with two martini glasses that are about the size of a Miami cruise ship. She orders me to drink and sets down a pitcher of liquid that I know will ignite the lining of my stomach and send me into a place of total confession and exotic boldness. Then she lies next to me and asks me what I thought about while she was gone.

“Someone saying just once, ‘What can I do for you?'”

“Oh, no, this is where you missed the boat and plane and the whole damn train. It's not them. It has nothing to do with them and everything to do with you.”

“What?”

Elizabeth sets down her glass and molds her hands around mine, which are glued to the stem of my own martini glass. She squeezes me so hard that I am terrified I will drop some of this liquid gold—some of my salvation, the ribbons of diamonds that I will use to ignite me so I can take some kind of step forward.

“We make our own choices every single moment. Happy or sad. Married or single. Alive or dead. Miserable or content. Successful or not successful. Your life choices have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. How dare you or anyone give away the power to be. Bob and Katie and Shaun don't make you happy. The frigging new car doesn't make you happy, or the house or the job or flying to Paris.”

I am listening but I need another sip. A large sip. She releases me and goes on.

“Bob was pretty happy today. Bravo for Bob. He did something that made him happy, something that he wanted to do. He took care of himself.”

“It sure looked that way.”

“When was the last time you did something that made you happy? When?”

How could I answer this? Women aren't supposed to be happy. We are supposed to save the world and then do the wash, fill out college applications for the kids, order grass seed and walk to the store in a snowstorm for more milk. We burned our frigging bras, saved a few whales and a fraction of the environment and then we did the damn ironing while the guys barbecued. Nothing seems to have changed in a hundred years. I can't even remember the last time I thought about the mere possibility of being happy.

“Jesus, Elizabeth . . .”

“Women have blown it big-time,” she answers for me. “You know now that you have to start over, don't you? You have to learn how to crawl and then walk and then run and then fly. What the hell were you thinking giving yourself away like that?”

She is angry, just a little angry, because Elizabeth never gets angry like most people get angry. Her skin flushes just a bit. She is an amazement, and I drink my martini, which tastes like Christmas—a touch of evergreen and mint, one snowflake and an olive laced with gold, incense and Santa's garter belt—and pour another one, and I suddenly feel more exhausted than I ever have in my entire life. I need to make sure my daughter, Katie, is safe and I have to call in to work and there is Bob, wild-ass Bob, and then the next fifty years of my life. Half of my life. I have half of my life to live. Oh my God.

“Half of my life,” I say out loud.

“What?”

“I have half of my life floating around out there waiting for me.”

Elizabeth doesn't say a word but I notice her eyes light up a notch and a breath of something wild leaves her chest. She listens and I ramble and ramble and sip and sip again and I see something, not very clearly, something like a ship so far away you wonder if it isn't the wine or the bend of the horizon or the past meeting the future right there where your eyes happen to be resting for that one second. I see a glimpse of something moving so slowly, I imagine I could catch it if I barely crawled, but I cannot bear yet to reach out and touch it or see it or understand what it is. Please pass a baby blanket.

“You are starting,” she says, like a professor nodding to a class of freshmen. “Crashes, wrong turns, be prepared. But also be ready for dancing.”

“What?”

“Naked dancing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The shit is about to hit the fan, Meg darling. Lives are changing as we speak. When you leave this house, as you must eventually, everything you know will have changed. Bob. The kids. Your job. Your role in life. All of this because of your watching. It can be a glorious relief. Wonderment. Naked dancing at midnight with flames of fire or at the break of dawn when the air is fresh and hard.”

I am feeling woozy with the vodka but I almost get it. I put one hand on Elizabeth's thigh so that I can steady myself, and then I imagine me dancing naked—C-section scars, fifteen extra pounds around my middle, veins popping out like adolescent acne, dips and curves replaced by a melting pot of middle age, hair gray at the roots, scars from elbow to chin—and I am not quite sure if I should laugh or cry.

Elizabeth looks over at me and sees my eyes crinkle with deep thought, notices the questions lying right there, and she tells me to imagine it anyway. “Just imagine it.”

I do.

The light is perfect and there are miles of red desert cliffs. All of my nails are painted to match the ribbons of a summer sunset and are perfectly filed. My hair has been bleached by the sun and hangs in perfect curls down the center of my back. My skin is the color of whole wheat bread. It is the glorious moment before day surrenders—hands in the air, clouds drifting fast—into the dark eyes of night. I take off my shorts, shirt and sandals. This act does not bother me. It does not matter if anyone sees me. I do not care. The music drifts in on the edges of the night air, musty, wild, scented with the smell of sage from the desert. It is never loud, and surely I am the only woman in the world who hears it. I hear it and I begin to dance. I dance for five, ten, fifteen then twenty minutes. I dance until it is as dark as it will ever be and the sky is littered with stars, and when I finally stop and look up, a crowd of ten thousand men and women begin clapping and the sound rumbles in my ears like an explosion in my own hand.

“Dancing naked at the edge of dawn, Elizabeth. I can imagine it, but can I do it? Can I?”

My hands are in hers. She has moved to face me. I may never sleep or eat or walk again.

“Drink up, sweetie. Drink up. You are going dancing.”