The Elegant Gathering of White Snows

by Kris Radish

  Mary Jean is a member of the cheerleading squad, National Honor Society, yearbook staff, and was also a member of the high school's 1967 homecoming court.

  Prom activities will begin on Friday afternoon in the high school cafeteria when the girls on prom court host a community tea.

  —30—

  The Elegant Gathering: Mary

  There's a wedding photo of Boyce and me hanging on the wall that is just next to the closet in our bedroom. I swear to God, I look at that picture about ten times a day and every single time I see my wedding gown, and Boyce in a tuxedo, I could just about faint.

  Lots of women find it highly ridiculous that someone can fall in love in high school, stay married, and then stay in love. Well, I have to admit right off the bat that it is unusual and that makes me a bit strange myself. But, I'm the one who has screwed up the statistics about young marriage and women who only sleep with one man, and although I admit I've never been 100 percent certain that I don't have a screw loose myself, I do know it's all damn right to be happy.

  Oh cripes, I have to say that I have never felt so torn in my entire life as I did the other night when I left my friends out there on the highway. But I have never been one to steer away from what I feel in my heart and because those woman are real friends, really, the best friends I have ever had in my life, I know that they understand me and that leaving them like that will be okay.

  I suppose many people would call me loony for walking away from something that looks like it's turning into an adventure of a lifetime, but I think it's just as loony to have to apologize for being happy with something so simple.

  So I'm the one who has never been raped or divorced or had an affair with my brother-in-law's uncle's cousin, although he did try, but he probably just did it because I looked so happy. I'm Mary Jean Michlienski Valkeen, the ex–prom queen who married the guy down the street, had three kids, honest-to-God sold Tupperware, candles, and then those expensive baskets and went on to attain possible great fame as the woman who took food to the women walkers but left them before they could turn around twice.

  Although really, I'm not all that simple and even though I didn't go to college or do drugs in the '60s and sleep with the entire football team or fall in love, well, physical love anyway, with someone of the same sex, that doesn't mean that I'm really that much different than everyone else out there. And I know that I'm not alone either.

  When I got home the other night after Boyce picked me up at the truck stop, I went in to kiss the boys and then checked the house over quick. Then, while Boyce flopped back into bed, mumbling, “What in the hell was that all about?” I slipped into the bathroom and spent such a long time looking at myself in the mirror that my feet fell asleep and my hands are still stiff because of how I was leaning up against the side of the vanity.

  What I saw in that mirror wasn't startling because I have been watching myself push toward my forty-eighth year for the forty-seven years in front of that. It's not like I woke up one morning and saw that my hips had spread, and the muscles in the sides of my breasts had taken a nosedive, and the lines around my mouth had suddenly turned into relatives of the Grand Canyon. I have seen this body of mine changing now for quite a long time. So I ran my fingers over the lines around my eyes and around my flabby chin and over those little hairs down there that seem to grow into monsters overnight. I looked and I looked at the gray hairs that never seem to quite make it when Denise does my roots, and when I looked way, way back inside of my eyes, I saw how I started to be and never diverted from that path even though I had more than one chance.

  In the beginning, I am sitting in the high school halls knowing with all my heart that whoever I am going to marry is inside of the building with me at just the same moment. It is a sure feeling, as sure as love itself or knowing the sun will be right up there again the next morning.

  Jackie, with her long hair and dark face, is standing over me and I am telling her the secrets of my soul. “He's here,” I tell her, leaning so the weight of my own body and my words can be supported by the metal locker. “I'm not sure yet who it is but I know he's here.”

  “Come on, Mary, that just sounds so, well, it sounds pretty stupid. You've got your whole life ahead of you and everything, and marriage, well, it sounds silly thinking of it now.”

  “I don't care,” I respond with equal certainty. “I know this is what I'm meant to do and so what difference does it make?”

  “Don't you want to go places and don't you just get sick of always having to make sure that you have a boyfriend?”

  I'm thinking down there on the floor. Thinking of Mike, and Scott, and Jim, and this boy named Shawn who transferred in from another school last fall, and how he picked me to be his girlfriend first and how that's all that mattered.

  “It's not the need so much,” I try hard to explain to her. “It's more like what if I miss the one that I'm supposed to marry.”

  “Oh shit,” said Jackie, swearing with a bit of a flair because we were just in the process of thinking it was cool to swear. “That sounds even more stupid.”

  Then I'm stuck. Trying to think of a way to tell someone that I've known since the time I was a little girl what my life was going to be like. Jackie is ready to take on the world and has been accepted to the University of Wisconsin, where she plans on living in a house with males and females. She wants to be an anthropologist and has not worn a bra since the first day of second semester. In her mind, she is a woman who knows what she wants and I am a fairly useless hunk of female parts because I'm “much simpler.” How can I make her understand something so foreign? How can I tell her that it's okay for some of us to do just the exact opposite of what she wants to do?

  “Look, I've tried to think like you but it's like trying to get Mr. Hobsin to change the style of clothes that he wears. My God, he's worn the same shirt every Tuesday since we were freshmen. You know what you want and really, I know what I want. I would think for a liberated mind that would be enough.”

  “Don't you wonder what you might miss?” Jackie asks, with her hands moving up and down as if they are the wings of a bird. “Like how could you think that you could sleep with just one guy and know all about sex? What about seeing the world? What about anything? You know I just don't get this whole thing about you.”

  Jackie's eyes are bulging while she talks, and I am at a loss to explain myself to her anymore. So I give up. I just sit on the floor and raise my shoulders up about two inches, and there is a little wall of silence that builds higher and higher between us. Finally Jackie says, “Oh brother,” and then turns to walk down the hall.

  I can't quite get up. My mind is storming around inside of my head, and I am at a loss to think of another way to relate my seventeen-year-old feelings to someone who thinks I'm as dumb as a toad. So I agree with Jackie and try to think how it must seem to someone like her to even want to know someone like me.

  “Addicted to my dreams,” I say out loud, forming the words and then running them over my lips so slowly I can almost feel the consonants sticking to the insides of my gums. “I'm addicted to my dreams.”

  Not many years later when I heard that Jackie had indeed tried every single thing she had ever talked about and was now living on some island with a bunch of people who were studying some kind of dried-up old bugs who maybe, maybe not, had some medical use, I laughed out loud at a very inappropriate moment.

  Boyce was just about to do the magical number to me and his little penis was not happy when I laughed so loud the entire moment fell apart.

  “Honey, what's this all about?” he groaned as I continued to laugh as if I'd been struck by the funniest damn thing I had ever heard.

  “Oh, I'm sorry.”

  “What is it?” He rose up on one elbow, massaging my right breast, hopeful I'm sure, that he could get back to where he had just been.

  “Well, I was thinking about high school and Jackie and how I always thought I was addicted to my own dreams and how really, s
he was too, maybe everybody was.”

  “Oh,” he sighed, rolling over and placing the pillow on top of his head. “Is this the ‘What I did and didn't do' crap all over again?”

  “It's not crap,” I said, running my fingers over his cute little rear end. “It's just that they also picked on me because I wanted to marry you and they were just as set on doing what they wanted to do.”

  Boyce and I had conversations like this on and off for a good twenty years or more, but most of them didn't end up with me becoming hysterical. Although there had been times when I really was hysterical and continued to think that something might be wrong with me because I didn't want to do what most of the other women in my generation were doing.

  “Addicted to dreams, huh?” Boyce rolled over, flinging his leg across my hips so we were lying side by side, connected in almost every possible manner. “Do women ever stop going on like this?”

  Well, I suppose now that women never stop going on about things that are important because of what we are made of and how we feel, and I can honestly say that leaving the women walkers might have been one of those great defining moments for me. In many ways it would have been so much easier for me to stay with them. After all, they are my friends and I know all these things about each one of them, and I know how important it is for them to do this. Honest to God, yesterday when I took them some food I was thinking that I might actually run into a trail of tears and blood and guts, all the other garbage of life they are hopefully leaving on the side of the road.

  Now what I would like to leave on the side of the road is how I have always felt like I had to explain myself to everyone, especially women, who might think it's nuts not to want more than what they have always had. So, really, the simple act of me coming back home is my big statement, not that I expect to ever really have to stop explaining who I am. It's just that I don't give a damn as much anymore.

  You see, I did find Boyce before I had even left high school, except I was wrong about him being in the same high school. He lived about a half a mile away from me and attended a private Catholic school near Kenosha, and I ran him off the road one night while I was driving home from cheerleading practice. I don't care what anyone else says, that's a pretty cool way to meet your future husband.

  He was running along the highway and I could tell from a few blocks away that he was cute. When I got close, something made me swerve—I have no idea what, ha, maybe it was Cupid! He jumped into the ditch. When I leapt from the car, which by the way kept on going without me and ended up in the same ditch, I saw that he really was gorgeous and although I didn't quite know that he was “the one” at that exact moment, I had a pretty good idea.

  The rest is all pretty predictable. We married when he was a sophomore in college. I worked full-time to help him through college and then graduate school. We had three boys; I worked at a bunch of part-time jobs and took my role as mother-wife-homemaker seriously. I never slept with another man, and unless Boyce is a lying dog, we've both been faithful and happy since the day we were married.

  Have I been attracted to other men? God yes. I have at least imagined myself with ten men that I can name just off the top of my head and at least ten more who have come on to me and whispered in my ear and slammed me against the side of a few walls—mostly when I was a bit younger. But like I tell Boyce, if sex with someone else is any better than what I'm already getting, then it would kill me anyway.

  Once about five years ago, I did let another man kiss me. I have no idea why this guy was so smitten with me, but then again it could have been the tequila we were drinking at Boyce's summer office party. I think the man's name was Greg or Craig, and he was some consultant they had brought in to help with a big renovation project that was going on in the office, and, hey, I was the prom queen once—and almost twice—so maybe I looked pretty damn hot that summer.

  My life hasn't been perfect. Honestly, there have been a few times when I have wondered about my interesting choices. Who doesn't have nights when they sit up long after the house is quiet, looking out into the darkness and wondering if the path they have chosen is the right one.

  The nights that were the worst for me were right after one of the boys had been born, not so much the first one, because I had no clue about what I was about to get into and I was pretty young, but later, that's when I wondered the most.

  We have a couple of acres of land that is now filled up with everything from forts and piles of junk and a couple of old cars to grass and weeds that we have never bothered to trim or prune. But when Shawn and Jake were babies, there was nothing out there but hours of darkness.

  Boyce put a rocking chair for me right in front of the big window that looks into the backyard, and that's where I would sit and nurse the boys at night. When it was warm enough, I would open up the long window next to the wall and listen for the sounds of the night world to whirl around me. All those nights sitting in the chair, I felt as if I had been given something magical because it was always so quiet and calm. For those minutes I often felt great threads of peace and happiness running through my veins.

  That's where I also cried and wondered why in the hell I hadn't run off to some island with someone. I would rock and cry and rock and cry. Sometimes the tears would fall right onto the face of one of the babies, and he would blink and get this “What the hell was that?” look on his face. Then I would brush away my tears and turn my head a little bit so they wouldn't be upset by the aquatic break in their drinking routine.

  During those dark nights I tried to imagine myself not being myself. I would see me being single and living in some apartment building and driving off to work each day in a little sports car. Although try as I might, I could never think of what it was I would exactly be doing. It would be such a false picture of why and what I am that I just couldn't hold on to the idea very long.

  Even now, when it's one of those rare nights or days when I might be home alone, I pull that old chair over to the window and just sit there rocking, rocking, rocking. Sometimes I grab a pillow off the couch and I make believe one of the boys is a baby again. Is this ridiculous? It doesn't matter because those are the times when I know that my choices have been good ones. I think about what I might have traded to be someone else. Could I have given up a minute or an hour with a warm baby pushed against my breast? I don't think so. Not ever.

  Boyce and I have had our differences too, but come on, fighting over the purchase of a car or truck and where to go on summer vacation isn't my idea of a life-altering trauma. Boyce has always been a wonderful father, a fabulous lover, a friend to me through every little phase and question in my life, and I can't imagine that in this whole world there would have been another man like him for me.

  Sometimes he was actually too nice, suggesting about a million times that I should go to college and that we could afford it, and wouldn't I always wonder what else I could have accomplished?

  I would tell him, “I could do and be anything. I could do what you do or manage a restaurant or be a psychologist, but I want to be a homemaker and a wife.”

  I did run the PTA fund-raiser, learn how to rewire the washing machine, cart kids from one event to the next until I wore out three sets of tires, dance on our new wooden deck in my underwear when the kids were at camp for seven days in a row, make dinner for five almost every night of my life, know that when I shifted to the right side in bed, Boyce would roll right behind me, look forward to the sound of his car hitting the gravel five nights a week, stand at the bedroom window stark naked at midnight while Boyce brushed my hair and told me that he had just talked to Shawn about masturbation, listened for the sounds of the shower at 5:45 A.M. during track season, spray-painted all of Grandma's old wicker furniture dark green, baked cookies for all the neighbors every Valentine's Day, and smiled a million smiles upon hearing something as simple as the dishwasher kicking in after I finally figured out how to use the timer.

  Looking in this mirror lately while the walkers are out on t
he road seems to give me a flash of the past. I understand that something as simple as turning away from the walk has affirmed everything that I have done and everything that I am. I know I could have stayed with my friends, plodded on with them through all the miles that they have already racked up, but that's not where my heart feels comfortable. Leaving to me was as powerful as anything I could have done with all the rest of the days and nights of my life.

  To be true to them, to myself, to the very reasons why we all do whatever it is that we do—that's why I am here and about to hop into bed with Boyce. That is why tomorrow morning, I will make those women walker friends of mine lunch, why I will sit the boys down one at a time and talk to them about making certain any woman in their lives is a real woman and does whatever in the hell she wants to do.

  “Like your mother,” is what I will say. “Just like your own mother.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JUST AFTER DARK there always seems to be a line of light that laces itself across the bottom of the horizon. Gail is sitting in the big wicker chair, her arm extended, and she is tracing the line with her outstretched arm as if she is an artist. The women follow her hand from north to south, watching for the spaces that are blotted out by rolling hills and trees and a silo that juts out miles away like a tall building.

  “It's so beautiful out here,” she says. “Have you ever seen anything or really felt anything so peaceful?”

  The women have wandered outside of Jack and Audrey's Champshire Hills Bed and Breakfast for a glass of dark, red wine that Jack said will make their dinner settle gently into their stomachs, “like everything in there is being tucked into bed.” Jack and Audrey have closed down their inn to let the women have a night of peace and rest. They have been perfect hosts: serving dinner, not intruding, smiling gently, whispering occasionally about what a marvelous thing it is to get out and do something that you have always wanted to do.