The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (6 page)

Chris sighed loudly. “Someone will eventually call the newspapers, and people will try to figure out what we're doing, and they will say we're all lesbians or that we belong to a cult and have buried six babies in the backyard.”

“I've always wanted to be a lesbian,” Sandy mused.

“I've buried one baby,” Alice blurted out.

“I think the Catholic Church is a cult,” added J.J.

“There you have it,” Chris concluded. “We shouldn't talk to anyone. We should just walk and play it by ear. Do what we feel we should do, but we shouldn't talk. I think if we're hungry, then we'll eat. It seems like we shouldn't worry about, well, you know, normal things. We should worry about us, just us. Do you agree?”

As she spoke, Chris had been waving her arms around like a preacher. She had gestured in circles and moved her hands so her fingers pointed into the air, and she had no idea where the words or thoughts or movements were coming from exactly.

No one wanted to talk. They wanted to think and imagine and to walk until they forgot things. No one was tired. No one was cold, and food and drink were about as far from their thoughts as attending a Tupperware party. They wished it would stay dark until they were finished so that they could hide from the world for as long as they wanted to.

“Is everyone okay with this?” Sandy looked from one face to the next as another car whizzed by.

“Does anyone think we're nuts?”

Susan asked this question, thinking to herself that if she had half a brain, she would have hit the highway twenty-seven years ago, just a week after she married John. She wished she had had the guts to do something with her life besides screw her brother's boss. She was thinking that disappearing from her own life in the middle of the night with a bunch of women who love her could possibly be the smartest thing she has ever done in her life.

“Oh come on,” said Janice as if she had just been lied to and knew it. “If I stopped now, if the rest of us who really want to do this stopped now, we'd never be able to look at each other again for the rest of our lives. The one thing I know is that even if most of my life doesn't change, even if the shitty parts are still the shitty parts, I will still have done this. I will have walked.”

Before they rose to their feet and returned to the highway, J.J. made everyone stay where they were for another moment. She had this idea, this picture in her mind that she wanted to keep safe. A picture of them, just sitting there gazing out into the night as if it is something they do every Thursday night of their lives.

“I love to take a moment like this and freeze it in a sacred part of my mind,” J.J. explained. “I can remember the last time I breast-fed each one of my kids, what chair I was sitting in, what time it was, what I had on, what they had on. I remember where Tim and I first made love and how he smelled, and I remember the first time we met at Sandy's house and how the candles burned in the window and how it felt when I walked in and saw you all smile and my heart, my damn heart seemed to stop.”

“That's remarkable,” Alice told her. “Remarkable.”

“Well, I think if you don't just stop once in a while that everything important, every moment that seems big just then when you are doing it or having it, gets lost and rendered meaningless.”

“That's profound,” Chris said, imagining all of them, just as J.J. wanted her to, sitting in the dark.

“I don't mean it to be, it's just something I've always done and this, just these minutes, seem like something I don't ever want to forget because we'll stop eventually. Then we'll have to make dinner and someone will get the flu and at least one of us is bound to get pregnant again and well, we might forget that this walking and talking and sharing was important. We might forget that we cried on Susan's floor and then got pissed off about every horrible thing that has ever happened to us, and started walking.”

“I won't forget,” said Sandy.

“Me either,” said Janice.

“I'll remember,” Susan declared. “I'll always remember.”

“Me, too,” added Chris and then Alice.

“I'm in,” said Gail.

They formed a permanent memory then of each other, of the way the dark hides some parts of their faces and not others. They looked around at the buds on the trees and smelled the damp grass and watched as the moon dipped lower. The women moved as close to one another as they could, tipped back their heads so they could feel the night air brush against their smiles. They breathed slowly, uncrossed their legs and then one by one, they rose up from the ground and started walking again.

SEVEN WOMEN CONTINUE WALKING

—30—

The Women Walker Effect: Lenny

Lenny heard about the women walkers on Friday morning when she turned on the radio. “What the hell?” she said to herself because there was no one else to talk to. Lenny, whose God-given name was Elenora but who had been called Lenny her entire life, talked to herself so much that she often felt as if Jackson had never left and she hadn't been alone for three months. “That son-of-a-bitch,” she said every time his face popped into her head.

Just after the short radio report, when Lenny was imagining what the women would look like when they paraded past her front yard, the first call came. She knew it was Jackson. He called her five times a day at least, and after the first week, she never bothered to answer the phone again. She considered having the line disconnected but thought about robbers, like those idiots from Racine who held some poor woman captive because they needed a truck, and she decided to just let the damn thing ring.

Jackson sent her mail too, long letters with the address of his cheap motel scrawled across the envelope. He apologized, told her he worshipped the ground she walked on, begged her to answer the phone, anything so that he could come back home. The letters were all stacked up inside of a brown paper bag in the corner of the kitchen.

After the first two weeks he was gone, Jackson sent his buddy Pat over to make sure everything was okay. Lenny was out in the barn when he came, doing the same thing she had done every day for the past twenty-six years—hauling feed for a barn full of hogs.

“Hey, Lenny,” Pat hollered from the door.

“Well, shit, Patty boy, did that son-of-a-bitch send you to check on his little wife?”

“Come on, will ya,” Pat said, swaggering a bit in his big boots and ripped barn jacket. “Yeah, he called, so shut up and let me help you.”

“Patty, do you know what? I shut up for twenty-six years while that bastard ran all around the county with Melinda, and Grace, and whoever in the hell else happened to have a set of jugs bigger than mine. I'm not shutting up again.”

“I know he loves ya.”

“Loves me?” This cracked Lenny up. “Love for him is a hard-on. Just grab a bag and shut up yourself.”

After that, Pat showed up every night to help her, and he was smart enough not to mention anything about love or Jackson again. Lenny almost started looking forward to the sight of him bending over in the barn, but she managed to stop short of that because she never wanted to look forward to anything that had to do with a man again.

Lenny was forty-six years old, not bad looking for a woman who had lived with a bastard, raised two fairly decent kids, and hauled hog feed for most of her life. Her biggest problem now was trying to figure out what to do next.

What she really wanted to do was go back in time and graduate from college. She wanted to whack herself upside the head for having run off to marry Jackson at the end of her junior year at Iowa State University. She wanted to stop crying half the night. She wanted to press a magic button and be the kind of woman everyone thought she was—a real hard-ass.

Lenny wasn't a hard-ass. That's why she put up with Jackson for all those years, thinking day after day that tomorrow would be the day she would boot him out. But the excuses were always there. First it was the kids, then he broke his leg, then she had to have a hysterectomy, then the hogs got a virus. Then finally, there wasn't anything else, just the long nights and the begging and the stains on his clothes when she pulled them from the hamper.

The morning she kicked him out was the coldest day of the year. She pulled her father's old double-barreled shotgun on him while he was working flat out in the barn. She pushed a suitcase toward him with the tip of her work boot, threw the keys to the old car at his bad leg, and told him it was time he was moving on.

“What?” He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt.

“I've had it, you big fucking jackass.”

“Jesus, honey, put that thing down.”

“You call me honey again, touch me, even look at me, and I'll blow your balls clear to hell.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, stumbling back into the stacks of hay after he saw her eyes narrow to a slit as she brought the gun to her cheek, ready to fire, ready for anything. “What do you want?”

“I'm taking everything, and you get the suitcase and the old car. Go, go fuck your way through the rest of this county but don't ever come back here or I swear to God, I will kill you.”

Jackson left with his tail between his legs, and Lenny managed to fire a round into the air just before he got into the car, hoping the entire time that he might shit his pants. That was the strongest she had ever felt, and she had spent the last three months trying to figure out how to rekindle that feeling.

When she heard about the women, Lenny pictured each one of them strutting down the highway. The vision gave her a moment of joy. She walked with them for a minute, felt the spring air brush across her face and through her long dark hair. Her arms propelled her along—swinging back and forth as if they were on fire. The sun tanned her arms, her feet flew, she was free and happy and smiling, always smiling.

Lenny picked up the phone to call Sue, a friend who lived down on Wittenberg Road. She wanted to know if the walkers had turned or were still heading her way.

“What do you think about them?” Sue asked her.

“It sounds pretty damn wonderful to me, walking like that, not talking to anyone, being with your friends.”

“Should we run out and join them?” Sue laughed at what she thought was the absurdity of her own question.

“The thought has crossed my mind, but I just want to see them. Maybe that's what I need.”

“What you need is a good screw,” Sue told her.

Sue wanted to keep talking but Lenny suddenly had an idea. She wanted to do the chores, throw a big dinner in the oven, get some wine out of the garage, take a shower, and get those women to come into the house.

The chores were like a zillion pounds of weight around her waist that kept her tied to the farm. There had been plenty of times when Lenny had thought about shooting each one of the hogs in the head and burying them in the pit behind the fence. But she knew the hogs would eventually save her when she sold the whole damn place—lock, stock and barrel. When that would happen or how it would happen, she had no idea.

All she could think of now was the women. She fairly flew through the chores after she called Pat and told him that a friend was visiting and would help her for a few weeks. “Don't come back until I call,” she told him.

Lenny hadn't bothered to cook a big meal for months. She ate frozen burritos, salads, vegetarian pizzas—all the foods she loved but Jackson had hated. For the women, she took out two turkey breasts from the freezer, peeled a bag of potatoes, washed some broccoli, got out her mother's homemade cranberry sauce, whipped up some rolls, and breathed a sigh of relief when she found a perfectly good cherry pie lurking in the back of the freezer.

After she set the dining room table, she showered so long the water turned cold. Then she dressed for the special occasion. She put on her silver Indian bracelet from college, the ring her grandmother gave her when she graduated from high school, the one pair of jeans that had managed to fit her for five years in a row, a red flannel shirt that highlighted her dark skin, and her black cowboy boots.