by Kris Radish
In the hours since the women have left Susan's house, since they have moved from one field to the next and walked dozens of miles, the world has already pulled on a new face, and the women are part of that changing landscape. They are determined, gleeful, thinking and sorting through thoughts and feelings as deep as the earth they stand upon. But there is Mary, slowing her pace as they leave the side of the road and bowing her head and lifting her arms to circle herself in a kind of hug as they move ahead.
Chris, the observer of the world, witnessed Mary falter, and her mind flew in several directions at once. Because of her work as a journalist, Chris has known and interviewed one hundred Marys but it was only in that moment as she looked off into the nothing, that she had an inkling of what it might be like to be a Mary, unsure of everything, always needing someone to affirm her actions, to give permission for living and walking and breathing.
The Marys of the world, thought Chris, start out in high school creeping from one boy to the next because the idea of not having a boyfriend, or just somebody always there, is so terrifying they cannot even imagine it. In her own school, there were a good dozen Marys and their weekly dramas of breakups and new romances made her laugh and provided hours of free entertainment.
The college Marys were the same girls with different faces, and even in the days of burning bras and groping for personal sexual satisfaction, she was amazed at how many Marys made it through those years with their needs intact and strong as hell. There was no time then or need or desire to figure these women out. Chris simply had no time for the man pleasers, for the women who seemed to abandon themselves for someone else, for the Marys of the world who could never quite bring themselves to walk away from or toward anything.
Her last editor had been a Mary to beat all Marys. Married and divorced three times and anxious immediately to fill the empty space next to her with anyone who had a penis and shaved something besides his legs. This editor was as complex as Chris's own heart. One minute she was making decisions that could change the course of lives, and the next she was canceling her entire life for the chance to be with someone she barely knew.
Then there is Mary Valkeen, mother of three, wife of Boyce, struggling up this highway with her arms embracing her own heart as if trying to keep it from falling outside of her chest. Chris suddenly saw in Mary's face the struggle it had been for her to walk just a few miles, and what a struggle it will be to turn away from her friends. When she slowed her pace to stay even with Mary, Chris wanted to cry out when she saw the veil of agony that had crossed her friend's face.
“Mary,” whispered Chris as they dropped back from the rest of the women and Chris laced her arm through Mary's crooked elbow. “Are you having a hard time?”
Mary looked up quickly, not surprised that someone had noticed her lack of enthusiasm. She didn't think she had the heart for it. That's what she wanted to say. “I'm embarrassed by my lack of commitment to my friends,” she wanted to admit. “I just don't need this,” she could add and then, “Oh God, I wish I could be like you. I just can't do this, because I already have what I need.”
What Mary wanted was to go home and crawl into bed next to Boyce and his thick, comforting arms. She wanted to lie there warm in her own bed with the sound of the alarm clock humming next to her left ear, and then wake up in just a few hours so she could hand her boys an apple and a granola bar before they race off for early basketball practice. “I'm not strong like you.”
“We're not that strong,” Chris responded. “You know only a few of us would do this alone, but together, well, together it's different.”
“I can't do it.” Mary clenched her fists, began to cry as they moved slower and slower behind the other women. “Don't hate me.”
“Hate you? Oh sweetie, we love you,” Chris said with love and warmth. “You don't have to stay with us if you don't want to. No one has to stay, but some of us, we just have to do this. It might seem ridiculous or goofy in a week or next year or maybe never, but right now this is the most important thing in the world to some of us.”
There was a second and then another of silence, and Chris noticed that everyone was looking down the dark highway with eyes focused somewhere else. She guessed they were thinking of everything and anything, and in a lifetime there would never be enough walking time to capture all their thoughts.
“Listen,” Chris finally told Mary. “You know it's fine to want to go home and be who you are. We'll all do that eventually too, but this walking is going to make some of us even more than who we are now. Can you understand that, Mary? You know some of us have these pains and heartaches that might only get worse if we don't do this.”
“I've never needed much,” Mary said, looking off into the night like the rest of her friends. “I used to wonder if there was something wrong with me because I wasn't like half of the other women I knew. I hate to work, hate to travel, hate to be away from the kids and Boyce. I love being in the house when the kids come home, knowing the schedules, what will happen from one day to the next. It's a comfort to me.”
Chris wished Mary would stay then just so she could prove to her that it would matter if she stayed. She wished she could convince her with her words that there was something so absolutely fabulous about connecting with other women on a grand adventure, that the insides of her kitchen cabinets could be blown to hell and back again and she still wouldn't have to leave the next intersection, where there might be a phone at the gas station.
One and then two cars passed by them, and when the women turned to look they were blinded, like unsuspecting deer paralyzed by headlights.
“Damn!” shouted Sandy. “Those cars scared the hell out of me.”
“How do you think the drivers feel?” Joanne laughed. “My God, they must think we've fallen off a bus or something.”
That's when Chris told everyone they needed to get off the highway for a few minutes. She led them through a row of bushes, not knowing what she might step on next, and sat down fast on a fallen tree where she expected to tell them about Mary and other practical matters.
“First of all,” she began, “this is a good place to rest, and second, Mary wants to stop.”
“Mary?” Everyone said her name at once, turning in the dark for an explanation that was totally unncessary. Mary has been a good listener all these months. She has come to the meetings and brought the best wine and made it clear that she loves each of them and the time they all spend together. As the women sat on logs and piles of damp leaves at the edge of a rolling field, they already knew that a dramatic movement, a surge into the night, a walk away from troubles of the heart could be a powerful force and they were feeling the power of what they were doing.
When Sandy got back from the bushes and Gail finally decided to squat instead of sit so she wouldn't get her pants wet, it was Sandy who made them think of heartaches, losses, regrets, the hand of a lost lover right there, of all the weight of the world that they were dragging among them.
“I think Mary knows she can do what she wants,” said Chris, “but we'd better talk about what we're going to do when dawn breaks and our husbands wake up to discover that we are missing and walking down some county highway in nothing more than our slippers and spring jackets.”
Alice laughed.
“Alice?” asked Joanne, who loves to be called J.J.
“Oh, I'm just thinking about Chester waking up and not knowing for a week or two that I'm even missing.”
“Shit,” bemoaned Gail, “my kids will miss me the minute they run out of milk or can't find clean underwear.”
Everyone smiled because they would at least be missed, except Susan, who has left a trail of tears from her front yard to this very spot. “Listen,” Chris began, steering them back on course. “We have to agree on some things, those of us who are going on, and Mary, you can help too.”
Mary rose just a bit when she heard this, maybe because she wanted to redeem herself. She wanted to do something that would keep her with t
he women walkers even though she was going to part from them, wouldn't be with them physically, pounding up the road. Mary leaned forward like a bird waiting for breakfast, her mouth open just a little to form an O, round and exact as a single Cheerio.
While the stars shifted and the moon dropped lower, the women made their plans. Mary would call her husband from the next gas station to come and get her, and once back at home, she would call the other husbands and tell them about this journey. No one else wanted to stop. No one blamed Mary. No one else, though, could begin to think of stopping.
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.
Associated Press, April 27, 2002
—For immediate release.
Wilkins County, Wisconsin
SEVEN WOMEN CONTINUE WALKING
The women walking through this county on what local residents say is a “pilgrimage” have stopped at a rural farmhouse for rest and food.
Although one of the women has apparently left the walk, the remaining seven are into their second day of walking and have refused to talk to reporters, police officers, or relatives who have followed them to find out what they are doing.
Sheriff Barnes Holden said the women are all good friends who apparently started walking during a weekly study group. “I don't know how much studying was going on,” he said. “My wife said things like that are usually just an excuse to get together and talk.”
The women, who walk at a steady pace, often change positions and sometimes hold hands. When approached with questions they smile, raise their hands as if to say “stop,” and keep walking.
Friday afternoon they walked off of Highway D at the intersection of Wittenberg Road and into the yard of a small farm. The women were greeted by the farm's owner, Lenny Sorensen, and quickly ushered into the house.
Neighbors said that Sorensen, 46, has been separated from her husband, Jackson, for the past several months.
Reporters who approached Sorensen were told to leave the property.
—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.<
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“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.