The Elegant Gathering of White Snows

by Kris Radish

  “What do you think?” Chris asked first, already forming a story in her mind about the hardship and rigors of living on a farm.

  “Oh,” Alice said quietly. “You know, Chris, life on a farm. The Depression. Young sons killed under falling wagons . . .”

  “Stop,” shouted Chris, putting her hands over her ears. “Jesus.”

  “It's all true.” Alice continued anyway as the women moved to a clump of trees that kissed the edge of the water. “We each have our little tragedies, but you know women back then had tons of hardships and years of loss. Whoever lived on this piece of land, heavens, just think about it and the stories my own mother and grandmother told me.”

  Alice told stories, and there was a whisper of early afternoon wind that blew across the empty fields, and the sounds of toes dipping in and dipping out of the water. The disgusting echoes of cars roaring past on the highway sounded as if a convoy was stalking the women walkers.

  Janice took off her pants and waded into the water just far enough so it lapped around her thighs. She stood with her hands on her hips, her head tipped back, trying with all of her being not to slide under the water and swim into its friendly blackness.

  “This is ecstasy,” Janice told herself, edging just a bit farther into the shallow blackness of the pond. Her toes plowed through the mud, and the tips of her fingers caressed the top of the water. It was physically and mentally impossible for her to think of anything else but the water and her place in it.

  “Let's just enjoy this time here now,” Alice said. “Look at Janice. I think she's heading for nirvana.”

  Alice looked around from one woman to the next, wanting to say, “That's fine, isn't it?” The women looked into her eyes, needing to see that Alice wasn't sad anymore and that whatever they felt about her life's journey was as fine as the day that was ticking away around them.

  And Alice knew, from a glance at these girlfriends who had spared her years of anguish, that life could begin again in a flash, in a second, before a heart beats twice.

  “It's time now,” Alice told herself, pushing her hand to her own beating heart. “Time now to watch the horizon for something new.”

  In a world where every nuance, where a shift of the hand or a turn of the head, can mean something so significant that it can alter a whole life, the women might appear nonchalant to at least 49 percent of the world. But their unspoken words bound them together as if they had learned to communicate in a secret language, the one shared by many women over many years, in many lands.

  Alice unexpectedly stripped off her pants, smiling as if she had been caught doing something she absolutely loved doing but knew was incredibly wrong. The other women watched her with something akin to awe because they knew that Alice had lived most of her life in quiet acceptance.

  Before Alice could finish pulling down her brown polyester slacks, the others followed suit: J.J., Chris, Sandy, Gail and Susan were fumbling with their zippers and buttons and metal hooks as if they had just been propositioned by a sex goddess for middle-aged women. There were no second thoughts about stretch marks and rolling layers of skin and veins that glittered in the sunlight. If it had been a month later, when the sun would turn the pond into a hot mud hole, the women would have stripped naked and pounced into the pond like dolphins.

  The water was cold at first but then an electrifying numbness worked its way up their ankles and into the large bones of their legs with a kind of pain that made them all feel glad to be alive.

  “Shit, it's cold!” yelled Sandy. “But it feels kinda good in a sick sort of way.”

  “Hey Janice,” said J.J., “doesn't this make you want to pee?”

  “All the time, but who cares? The only time I really feel beautiful and thin is when I'm in water. It makes me feel free.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Gail, making small circles with her hands on the surface of the water. “When I swim, I just love to lie on my back and watch the sky. It always makes me feel as if I could stretch out my hands and become a part of the atmosphere that was designed for feathers, birds, sailing leaves.”

  “That's it,” said Janice, watching as her friends glided around her, smiling. “You know, some people eat, some read, some drink, some—excuse me Susan, some screw around. Me? I can just fill up the wading pool and be happy as hell.”

  “Do you and Paul have a water bed?” Chris asked.

  “But of course.”

  “You should move to a lake, Janice,” Gail suggested.

  “Can't afford the property taxes, sugar,” Janice mused. “I just put in one of those create-your-own-environment tapes of crashing waves, and then I make believe I'm sitting on some island or at the edge of my favorite lake in northern Wisconsin.”

  An hour passed as the women stood in the water, turning their heads toward each other and shifting their conversation from water to walking and then back again to their families and all the people who might be wondering what in the hell they were doing standing in a pond half naked during the middle of the day.

  When the cold water did finally make half of them want to go to the bathroom, the women left the pond one by one and dried off their legs in the sun before they put their clothes back on.

  “Alice, do you think it was easier to bear things back then?” Susan asked, motioning her head toward the old farmhouse. “I mean, women had babies and kept on working in the field and then made dinner and got up and did the same thing all over again the next day. As bad as it was, it seems to me that was about as good as it was going to get.”

  “Maybe things were simpler back then,” Alice said, resting her hands on her knees and bending into her words. “People found joy in simple ways, you know, like this, like putting their feet in the water and by having conversations that were meaningful and by being thankful that somehow they had managed to make it through another day.”

  Susan shrugged, and her eyes reverted to the sagging fence in front of the farmhouse. “I feel like an ass to be whining about being pregnant and having a failed marriage and never being able to bring myself to do anything about it.”

  Alice patted her arm. “Sometimes it takes a long, long time to figure out how to be happy. Seems to me that it might never be too late, though.”

  “Alice, do you think you'll be happy again?” Susan suddenly asked.

  This question brings all the whispering women to silence and everyone looks at Alice as though they want to scoop her up and carry her to a rocking chair. Alice herself isn't sure what to say so she is quiet, but only for a moment.

  “I'm tired of not being happy, really tired. You know, just walking out here like this makes me realize I have missed a lifetime of moving, relationships, experiences, of doing, of being happy,” Alice says, looking out across the tops of the trees and into the afternoon sky that is as blue as one of Janice's oceans. “I think it's okay to be sad, to hurt and to miss and to even hate, hate isn't that horrible if it makes you do something that might change what made you hate. But really, a woman shouldn't be my age and not have stripped half naked and jumped into a pond in springtime.”

  The women smile, and they know in their hearts that Alice is thanking them for walking with her, for stopping at the pond, and for moving somewhere, anywhere except where they have all been. Some of them see Alice running for school board president or burning all of her clothes and starting over the minute she gets back home. Chris sees her on a world cruise exploring some jungle with her son Richard and making certain that Chester has enough to eat back at the hotel room.

  Alice doesn't see herself anywhere yet. She is taking everything just one step at a time and that's fine with her as long as she continues to move, continues to walk away from what is behind her now and what she thinks should have been behind her a long time ago.

  “Oh girls,” she half whispers because she is crying softly. “I'm just having the greatest time.”

  “Alice . . .” Sandy reaches from the log so she can touch Alice on the cheek. “Yo
u know we love you so much.”

  “Oh, you don't have to tell me, Sandy. I know you girls love me, you're the best.”

  There are now about one million other things everyone wants to say, but there is also all the time in the world to say it now, so there is a shuffle of shoes swishing through the grass. Gail pulls Susan up to her feet and asks if anyone is starving to death.

  At the top of the hill, the highway is quiet because all the cars and reporters have dashed way to the end of the road looking for them, terrified that the women have slipped away and they will lose their story of the month. A laugh passes from one walker to the next when Chris tells them they need to pick highways with lots of taverns on them so the reporters have something to do when they stop at the next pond.

  In seconds the women reclaim the highway, feeling comfortable and joyous once again.

  Before they have walked a quarter mile, they spot a green Coleman picnic jug with a note taped to it that has been placed neatly alongside a highway sign. Janice immediately recognizes Mary's handwriting. The women gather round the jug of juice as if they have just found the first Easter basket of the season.

  I bet you are down by the pond with Janice, reads Mary's note. I can't stop long because I don't want those goddamn reporters to see me. Carry this jug just around the bend and go down the hill. I've left you some lunch. Your husbands are drinking beer together at Alex's house—I think he's trying to keep them calm. Hey, I'm not there but I'm with ya. Love, Mary (The Good Girl)

  Lunch is chicken and potato salad and carrot sticks that they can tell Mary has peeled and cut with precision. At the bottom of the bag are two bottles of wine, the same kind they had been drinking at Susan's house the day they left. Also a note urging them not to do anything else brash when they finish drinking the wine.

  “Like what else could we do?” asks J.J., who is sitting with her head lifted toward the sun and her arms wrapped around her legs.

  “Any ideas?”

  “Ravage and pillage.”

  “Been there, done that.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Ditto.”

  “Walk to the nearest airport and really escape?”

  “Not what it's cracked up to be.”

  “Guess we keep walking then,” Chris proclaims, rising after the last of the food has disappeared. “But I have a funny feeling there isn't enough wine in this basket.”

  “That's fine,” Alice says, stretching out her legs just like a runner before she rises. “We'll just all have to go to the bathroom again if we drink too much. Come on girls, we have miles to go before we sleep.”

  The women leave Mary's lunch bag on the hill and because no one has a pen or pencil, J.J. simply picks eight dandelions, and sets the yellow weeds all in a row next to the bag. She touches the flowers one by one, kisses her fingers, and then turns to join her friends who are already back on the highway with their arms pumping and their heads moving up and down as if they are all listening to the same song.

  Associated Press, April 29, 2002

  Wilkins County, Wisconsin

  NUMBER OF WALKERS INCREASES—

  SUPPORT GROWING

  If the seven women who have been walking through the rolling Wisconsin hills here were looking for solitude, they may be in trouble.

  The women walkers, an assortment of local women wearing everything from T-shirts and jeans to baseball hats and scarves, have attracted enough local, state, regional, and national attention to scare off the local birds.

  While the county sheriff here is keeping everyone away from the walkers, it's becoming more and more obvious that the group has hit a national raw nerve.

  Reports are circulating that women in at least seven other states have begun similar walks in rural areas not unlike this remote county.

  Janet Secumb, regional director of the Wisconsin Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), said she thinks women across the country are energized just thinking about supporting the walkers. She said women are being called to action to walk for their own reasons and to show some solidarity for women everywhere.

  “We're all too busy and caught up in following our schedules,” said Secumb, who threw her cell phone in her car trunk while she was talking to one reporter. “Taking off, just leaving, hey, doesn't that sound good to everyone?”

  Secumb said she has also been notified by the national NOW office that phone calls asking about new memberships have doubled since news of the walkers started making national headlines. She said women are perhaps thinking about what they gave up to have it all.

  “We all have our own ideas about why they are doing this and why we would all like to do it ourselves,” stated Secumb. “Pick a reason—personal sorrow, world peace, the need for quiet, reconciliation, the hand of another female—it's a very attractive proposition.”

  At last count about forty-five people, mostly women, were trailing behind the walkers, who continue to follow their own agenda.

  —30—

  The Women Walker Effect: Claudia

  Claudia Bandoulin was pissed. She sure as hell didn't mind being assigned to follow the story about the Wonder Women who were on a goddamned walk out in the middle of nowhere, but she couldn't believe they had assigned Bob Gilbert as her cameraman.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Claudia shouted at her editor two seconds after she slammed his door hard enough to stress-crack the frame.

  The editor winced, squeezed his eyelids shut and prayed aloud that Claudia wouldn't smack his desk. How could such a beautiful woman, the most sought-after broadcast journalist in Chicago, be so . . .

  “Now Claudia,” he began timidly, for this was not Claudia's first assault on his office. “You know Bob's the best guy we have available.”

  “He's a pig, Burt. You know this is a women's story. For chrissake, Bob may try and hump any one of them.”

  Poor Burt wanted to crawl inside of his overflowing desk drawer. In all the years he had been working at the Chicago-based CBS affiliate, he had never met anyone like Claudia, and he still had no idea how to handle her outbursts. Audiences loved Claudia, with her “young Diane Sawyer” look that was just sexy enough to make every man, woman and young adolescent drool with passion and envy. Worse for Burt, she was just good enough to make all the stations who didn't have her under contract wish they did. He couldn't say she wasn't tough, or lacked any creativity or didn't bag good stories. When a group of union guys got out of hand at a local protest, she beat the living hell out of two of them who tried to jump her while she was on-air. After that episode, Burt would have gladly given up half his inflated salary to keep her at the station for the rest of her life.

  “Look,” Burt finally said, opening up his hands as if he were about to catch a basketball. “Just get down there, and as soon as someone gets back from another assignment, I'll have them switch places with Bob.”

  “Shit, Burt, give me Jenny for this one. It might be a way for the walkers to open up to us if they are flaming feminists. An all-woman broadcast crew. They will love it.”

  “Claudia, this story is getting bigger by the minute and that's why I want you on it and Bob. Jenny is working on the story about last week's train crash. Come on, a bunch of housewives packing it in to hit the road. We could make some hay with this, baby. I've already called New York, and they want to see the piece tonight for possible national coverage.”

  Claudia looked out of the big window behind him that revealed the entire newsroom. At least fifty times during the past three years, she had wanted to throw Burt and everything in his office right through it. “Burt, if he even looks sideways at me, ‘accidentally' brushes my breasts with his arms, or tries to interfere with these women or my story, I'm going to kill the son-of-a-bitch.”

  Actually, Burt would have loved that great story for the early edition. He rose up out of his chair, looked into Claudia's beautiful brown eyes and said, “Okay. Do what you have to do, babe.”

  Bob the Swine Man wa
s waiting at her desk, his hands in his pockets. Rocking back and forth on his heels, his eyes as big as his wide-angle lens, he greeted her. “Hey, baby, how much of my time do you need?”

  “Don't call me baby,” Claudia shot back. “In fact, don't call me anything. Go wait in the fucking car. I'll be down in fifteen minutes. Clear out the backseat because that's where I'm sitting.”

  Mr. Bob now rocked in silence, his eyes starting on Claudia's face, then roaming down her body. Eventually, with a smirk, he propelled himself forward and disappeared around the corner whistling. “Shit,” Claudia muttered as she grabbed her briefcase and hollered over to the producer for video news clips on the walkers. “What do you have, Paula?”

  A small woman all but leapt over three desks to get to her. “I think you'll like this one,” Paula said, nudging close to her. “A few stations are already out there in Wisconsin, but from what I've seen, they're covering the story in a pretty bland way. Just the usual ‘The women are headed west' kind of thing.”

  “Do you have any background on the women?”

  “Not much, but someone said Chris Boyer might be with the group.”

  “You're kidding!”

  “No, though external sources are rare as hen's teeth on this one. There's like a local conspiracy to protect these women. Kinda cool in a way.”

  Claudia ignored Paula's unprofessional admiration. “My God, Chris Boyer was one of my heroines. She's the reason I got into this business to begin with. No one else was ever like her. Amazing.”

  “Here,” Paula said, sticking papers into a file and pushing it into Claudia's briefcase. “Just read this on the way down there and call me if you need anything else. I bet you'll have some ideas by the time Bob is wiping the drool off the steering wheel.”