by Kris Radish
“Oh, sweetie . . .”
“You're my hero and you are still my best friend, and I'm so proud of you. I know all about you and Dad and how hard things are for you, and that's why, well, that's why I know why you're here. I knew right away. I'm a woman now too, Mom.”
Tears the size of her silver loop earrings run down the side of J.J.'s face. Inside the car, all the girls are sobbing. Chris has stepped to J.J.'s side and put her arm around J.J.'s waist. They are all moving, next to the Toyota ever so slowly, but they have not stopped.
“Oh, baby, I love you so much. Will you do one thing for me, baby? Just one thing?”
“Oh, Ma,” Jess says, as she wipes her face on the side of her long-sleeved T-shirt. “Don't make me take Caitlin shopping.”
“Very funny, you little smart-ass. I want you to tell your father something.”
“I thought you said not to tell anyone.”
“This is a special case.”
“What?”
“Tell him we are going camping without a tent and tell him the washer is broke.”
“What?”
“He'll know what it means.”
“Does it have something to do with all that sex you're talking about? I mean the camping part because the washer really is shot.”
“You betcha, baby. Now get out of here before I get that cop to haul your rear ends back home.”
As the Toyota pulls away, Jess hangs her head out of the window until she can no longer see her mother and the other walkers. Her hair blows around her face, dancing first one way and then the other until there is a tangled mass of it, suspended over her face like a halo. J.J. is quiet, watching as the round face of her older daughter gets smaller and smaller and then dips out of sight behind a hill that looks like it is touching the tip of the sky.
“Are you all right?” Chris asks her, as the other women slow and turn their heads to wait for the answer.
“You know that's the best damn talk I've had with that girl in three years. I had no idea she felt that way.”
“She's told me,” said Susan.
“What?” J.J. is incredulous.
“Remember last month when you asked me to take her to Milwaukee? We stopped to eat on the way home, and she told me some of this but she asked me not to tell you, because she was embarrassed.”
“Were you drinking?”
“Just one beer at a truck stop.”
“Hey, I told you not to give her any beer.”
“Wow, you are so ungrateful. I unlock her heart for you and look what it gets me.”
The women laugh, and J.J. kisses Susan on the side of the face and grabs her hand and then Alice of all people shouts, “Sex! Girls, we were talking about sex. Let's stick to the subject here.”
But the mood has suddenly shifted to friendship, and the women are thinking about each other and about their own mothers. It is warm enough to go without coats and jackets, and Sandy has taken off her shirt, which is dangling from her waist just below the edges of her black jogging bra.
“Did your mothers have friends like us?” Gail asks.
“My mother had wonderful friends,” Sandy says without hesitation. “Back then women were together all the time because few of them worked outside the home. There always seemed to be someone at our house, and they would smoke and drink coffee and then like two minutes after five P.M. if anyone was there, or really if no one was there, my mother would start to mix up martinis and that would lead to the most interesting discussions.”
“Can you remember any of it?” Janice grabs for Sandy's hand. “My mother had like, no friends, and that's why I'm weird.”
“Oh, they talked about everything and really, I think they were all in love with each other. You know, they spent more time together than they ever did with their husbands.”
This stops everyone a little short, and the women begin to think of their grandmothers and their mothers and wonder, some of them for the first time, if such a thing were possible. Before anyone can say anything, Sandy launches into a philosophical discussion about how we learn behavior from our mothers, and that's why it has always been difficult for her to be totally devoted to a husband.
“You can't say you haven't given it a good try,” Susan states before she laughs at her own joke. “What was it, three husbands? I can hardly imagine after you've been married once even thinking about doing that again.”
“Shut up,” Sandy retorts, “you can bet your sweet ass I've learned my lesson. From now on, I'm sticking with the advice my mother gave me. Enough of this man shit.”
“What advice?” Alice whispers from the end of the line, still a little peeved that they are not talking about sex anymore.
“It wasn't really what she said, it was what she did. After my father died she moved in with her best friend.”
“Like roommates move in or like lovers move in?”
“I'm certain they were lovers, but their generation was too restrained to do more than act like two matronly old bags. Still, I could tell from the way they took care of each other, and the way they always looked into each other's eyes, that their relationship was more than that.”
“Wow,” said J.J. “So that taught you to be a lesbian or something?”
“No, darling, it taught me to be true to whatever it is that I am.”
Alice suggests that they stop for a break and everyone nods, lost in the thoughts of lessons they have learned from their mothers. They head for the back side of the hill and sprawl on a patch of short grass that has somehow managed to dry in the first few hours of warm sunlight.
“You know,” Chris says, speaking for every single one of them, “our mothers really were our first friends, and they really did teach us the value of that female-to-female relationship. Just think about it. What your own daughters see you doing is mostly how they're going to handle their own relationships.”
“Can't you see it now,” says Susan, rising up on her elbows. “We are creating an entire generation of hikers.”
Susan gets serious quickly and tells everyone a story about her own mother. In 1970 when she was a junior in high school—and her many friends were more important to her than the air she breathed, especially more important than her immediate family—Susan discovered her own mother's high school photo album tucked behind boxes in the hall closet. She looked at all the faded black-and-white pictures of her mother's friends, all women she had never seen.
“Mom, who are all these women?”
“Oh, Susan, those were all my friends in high school. We did everything together.”
“But I've never seen any of them. Where are they? What happened to them?”
Susan's mother moved onto the couch next to her, put her arm around her incredulous daughter's shoulders and smiled.
“Sweetheart, I have no idea whatever happened to most of them.”
“How could that be?”
“Here's what I know for sure, Susan. I know that if a woman has one good friend, one really good friend in her entire life—someone she can count on, someone she can trust who will be there when times are hard and horrible, even if she must take risks that could hurt her—if a woman has one friend like that, she is a really lucky woman.”
Susan can remember every detail of the conversation as if it has just happened. Her mother had worn blue slacks, and her hair was tied up in one of those old, red scarves that she liked to wear on Fridays while she would clean and bake. The radio would always be on in the kitchen, and the entire house, every little nook and cranny, would smell like fresh-baked bread.
“My God,” Susan tells her walking friends. “You could have pushed me right over with a breath of fresh air. I was stunned because, well shit, in high school my friends were my whole world. But I found out later that my mother was right, and when they all left and never helped me, my mother was always there. So there was that one best friend. But she was wrong about the same thing too. She was wrong because of you, because of all of you.”
Susan's tears fall into the grass, and Alice, who is sitting next to her, follows each one with her eyes. To her the tears look like melting dew. She moves behind Susan and holds her in her lap like a baby, a small baby girl.
“This is a time, one time, when I need a friend more than anything in the whole world because of this stupid mess I've gotten myself into. My mother should see me now.” Susan lifts her eyes up toward heaven, where she imagines her mother might be watching her. “Good God, what a mess! I must have about six of someone else's friends, but I'm not about to give up any single one of you.”
Janice laughs, and Alice tilts her head back and also looks heavenward, thinking to herself that if Annie Marie had lived, she might be kind and open like Susan and that would be wonderful. J.J., Sandy and Chris laugh too, thinking about all the women they know, all the women in the world who would be green with envy to be with them, walking, talking and exploring.
The quiet of the fields surrounds them. The light in the trees and the short, soft grass wave like tiny fingers as cars again begin moving past the women. All the people inside the cars have their heads pointed sideways, wondering what in the world the women could be doing out on the grass.
Alice lifts her head like a little turtle who has spotted something in the distance. “So what about all the sex everyone but me has been getting for the past forty years?”
Associated Press, April 29, 2002
—National Release, Feature Follow
Wilkins County, Wisconsin
WALKERS MOBILIZE NATION'S HEARTS
Reporters following a group of seven women walkers here are betting the farm that they will capture the attention and imagination of women throughout the country.
With the war in Afghanistan cooling its heels, the economy in a total mess, and people still afraid to travel because of the threat of terrorism, “this phenomenon closer to home offers everyone some positive drama,” said Jim Slaveny, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter who has been hiking behind the women. “This is a glimpse into the world of women, and what could be better.”
“There isn't a woman alive who hasn't dreamed of doing this,” said Peggy Burns, a feature writer from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who admits she is tempted to step out of her pumps and into her hiking boots to join the women. “These women are on the road to becoming national heroes.”
Burns might be on the right road herself. Letters and phone calls have been pouring into Sheriff Barnes Holden's office in support of the women, and it is no surprise to him that the letter writers are mostly women. Holden said he has received offers of money and cars and food, and one group in California has volunteered to help protect the walkers from curious onlookers.
“We haven't ever seen anything like this before but I can tell you my wonderful wife is standing by the door with her own tennis shoes on,” he said. “Some days, I'd love to chuck it all and join them myself.”
In an era where meeting schedules and excess on every level have men and women running to stay in place, Holden and others who know the women say it's not hard to understand someone wanting to get away from it all.
“Even if they have seen some kind of a vision or something, really, good for them,” said Holden. “It's a free country, let's all remember that.”
The reporters tailing the walkers have vowed to stick with them, even though Holden has assigned a deputy to keep everyone from getting too close.
“I could be covering the Elmwood City Council meeting tonight,” said Slaveny. “This is the best assignment I've ever had.”
—30—
The Women Walker Effect: Margaret
It took Margaret eighteen minutes to shuffle her bony body to the edge of her hospital bed so she could turn up the small radio that was sitting on the stand beside her. Each time she managed to grab a handful of her worn and faded sheets and drag her brittle bones a centimeter or two, she could feel the insides of her legs burn like fire because of the bedsores. When she finally reached the silver volume knob, she said, “Thank you, sweet Jesus.” Her soft words echoed off the empty walls, down to the dusty floor, and across the room that Margaret had come to refer to as her cell.
She turned the radio on, then began to cry.
Breathing, moving, just being alive for another day was a great struggle for Margaret. The simple act of successfully turning on a radio overwhelmed her with joy.
In a life that now consisted of one indignity after another, Margaret found little reason to prolong her last months. Urine-filled bedpans, the stench of death, sores in her sides that gnawed at her brittle hipbones, roommates who cried for help in the night. Not one visitor in three years. In her eighty-seven years, life had given her many things and taken away just as many. In her wildest, craziest dreams she never, ever thought she would end up alone in a nursing home with absolutely nothing to look forward to but the voices on the radio.
Margaret had been living at the Wayside Home near Brenton, Ohio, for seven hundred fifty-nine days and nights. How she came to be in such a place was something she had been trying to remember for almost all of those days. She wanted to piece together her life one last time before she let herself go, before she shed her brittle bones and faltering body parts for something, anything, better.
But Margaret was having a hard time remembering. She wanted to line up all the days of her life and file through them, searching for the people and places she once loved. However, when she tried to focus on something or someone, everything grew foggy, and she could not get a clear vision of who she once had been.
Of course Margaret knew that the drugs given to her to constantly keep her asleep contributed to her forgetfulness, her inability to connect the past to the present. Knowing that gave her the courage to spit the pills into her own urine and crush them with her long fingers until they dissolved and were thrown down the toilet by the sullen, unkind attendants who brusquely tended to her.
She was right about the pills, and after ten days without them, her mind began to flow at a more even pace and life, her life, came into the clearest focus she'd experienced for nearly three years. Slowly she began to recall things—smiling faces, the tiny hands of a baby, a porch as wide as her cell, and a field, a long field that was filled with blossoming fresh corn one day and then covered with snow the next.
Margaret grabbed at the details of the men, women, and children who once again filled up her mind. Margaret knew there had been children, and she wanted to know what had happened to them. For one quick moment, she had a feeling of great sadness as she saw herself standing alone on that porch; yet there was more, much more, and she was determined now that the pills were not inside of her to retrieve those crucial memories.
On the twelfth day without them but faking her own awake-sleeping behavior that the attendants were used to, Margaret first heard about the women walkers.
Against her pillows, she listened intensely to every word of the story.
In her mind's eye, Margaret could see them. Even as she stared at the sludge-green wall of her cell, she could envisage the road they were on, even their scuffed-up shoes. Two of them were holding hands and another woman, with long hair that was as gray as winter sky, was laughing so hard and long that Margaret willed her to take a breath.
For the rest of that day, Margaret floated in her own imagination and walked with them. She felt the wind blowing and saw blackbirds chasing each other and a small robin chirping in fright as they passed by. Margaret's feet were as light as air, and she felt as if she could walk with them forever, as if they were her friends, and that if she reached out they would touch her, someone would finally touch her.
By noon Margaret felt famished. From the exertion, she told herself as she ate parts of a meal for the first time in months. The walkers rested for a while after lunch, and Margaret with them—eager to return to her own secret world. They were lying in tall grass next to a wood so that they could go to the bathroom. Then Margaret fell asleep.
While she slept, it came to her th
at the place where the women were resting was in the field of her old family farm in Wilkins County. This knowledge burst into her mind and covered her with a layer of peace. It made her smile in her sleep, though no one noticed.
Her matted hair fell in long strands down the sides of her face. The turned-up corners of her mouth, the soft lines in her face, the suddenly pink color that rose in her cheeks, made her look beautiful.
As her dreams continued, she saw her mother, with shoulders as broad and wide as the man's she had called Dah. There were brothers and sisters, so many that a shocked Margaret took a deep breath. The world around the farm was a buzz of activity as everyone worked feverishly nonstop. Margaret could feel her feet and hands and the bones in her youthful body long for something as simple as a few moments' rest.
Margaret would never be able to remember everything that passed through her mind during that sleep. She slept for hours, almost the entire day. She slept as the walkers rose and moved again down the highway. She slept as the nursing shift changed, and first one and then another attendant cracked open the door to see if she was still breathing.
Indeed Margaret was breathing. Breathing through all the winters, springs, summers and falls of her former life. She breathed through her wedding to a man who caught her eye at the local drugstore and then packed her away to live in a series of hotels and a sleazy boardinghouse while he tramped through town with his tarnished silverware and chipped china. When he didn't come home one night and then the next, she searched for him. He had fallen drunk under a wagonload of the same corn that her father might be growing, leaving her a widow with a baby inside of her and nothing of any tangible value but a cardboard suitcase.