by Kris Radish
“Listen,” she told them as she threw her packages on the kitchen table. “Follow me from room to room and I'll tell you what I want you to take.”
As it turned out, what she wanted to donate was pretty much everything. The furniture was good for nothing, the books, dishes and knickknacks were now meaningless to Mitzie, and she sure as hell wasn't going to need or use anything that was in the garage. She ended up leaving all the furniture in her bedroom, just in case George came back before his next detox. She also kept a small box of letters and photographs of the kids, a dresser that was her mother's, a set of tall beer glasses that she had always loved, a big oak mirror that her uncle Paul had given to her as a wedding gift and a stack of old coins.
While the men hauled tables and boxes and lamps through the house, Mitzie carefully emptied out the kitchen cabinets and made herself a little keepsake box that included several pieces of ratty Tupperware, her grandma's worn wooden spoon set, two old spice canisters, and a few odds and ends that had always made her happy when she cooked meals for the family who had all but disappeared during the last twenty years.
By 8:30 P.M., the men had packed up her entire home, another lifetime really, into their truck. Mitzie stood by the kitchen door, hands on her hips, and could barely believe that the house was almost empty.
“You're done already?”
“The house isn't that big, ma'am,” answered the wiry short guy.
Before the truck had backed out of the driveway, Mitzie had mixed herself up a gin and tonic and called Karen. She asked Karen to come over right away and to pick up a pizza she'd just ordered from Malivika's.
Mitzie should have been ready to catch the pizza when Karen opened the door and got her first look at the new Mitzie. She'd already forgotten that she now had red hair and real clothes and a new face. Karen stopped dead still on the concrete step when she saw her friend and dropped the pizza, right side up, thank heavens. Mitzie could only smile.
“What's happening?” Karen made it only a few steps into the house. Mitzie retrieved the pizza.
“It's those walkers.”
“What walkers?”
“You know, those women in Wisconsin who are out there walking.”
She offered Karen a napkin. “Come in, I'm starving. Here, put the pizza on the table. Do you want some gin?”
“Gin?”
“It's good for you.”
“Fine. Put a lot in my glass.” Karen kept looking at the empty rooms as she sank down into one of the best chairs left in the house.
“Karen, I'm leaving Havre. You'd better drink up and I'll pour you another one.”
Finally Karen was able to focus on her friend without her mouth hanging open.
“Mitzie, you look absolutely wonderful. Is this what you used to look like or something?”
“Oh sweetie, I don't think I ever looked this good before. This is what I look like now, and the way I'm feeling, I think that I'm only going to get better.”
“I guess the gin helps with that, because I'm feeling better myself.”
Karen raised her glass to Mitzie and smiled, thinking about how much she loved her friend. “Tell me, Mitzie, tell me about the walkers and you and what in the world is going on around here.”
Mitzie told Karen about George and that she had decided not to divorce him because he would probably be dead anyway within a year or so. She showed her the check that was in her purse, and mostly for one hour and then another, she told her about the women walkers and how they had inspired her to stop living in a dead zone.
“I can't save George anymore,” Mitzie said, swishing her glass around in little circles. “I guess I never could. He's gone and he's been gone for a long time and frankly, I don't think he deserved me all these years. Not that I was smart or anything to even stick with him, but I never had the courage to do anything else.”
Karen wrapped her fingers around her glass, one of the beer mugs since everything else was packed, and she couldn't stop looking at Mitzie.
“You know, Karen, staying with George was really the easy thing to do all these years. I knew a long time ago that nothing would come of all my trying to help him but it was just simpler, much simpler to plod along.”
This was a rare night in Havre when the wind had decided to take a break. Mitzie left the kitchen window open just a crack all day and even though the night was as chilly as winter in most of the rest of the world, she couldn't bring herself to shut it. Tonight Mitzie wanted to feel as much of everything as she could.
“Aren't you scared?” Karen gulped down the rest of her drink.
“Oh, gosh, no, I'm excited as hell, but I'm embarrassed and ashamed for not having been a better role model for my daughter.”
“She's turned out just fine, Mitzie. She knew that you loved her, and you've always been there for her.”
“Maybe but I could have been more.”
Mitzie hoped she would have the time to set things straight. As she walked Karen through what was left of her house and fished around until she found her a key to the back door, she asked her only friend in the world to keep an eye on it and to come back and collect what was left of Mitzie's things and keep them in her basement.
When the two women returned to the kitchen, Mitzie ran her finger down the lines she had written on the yellow pad of paper until she came to the very last word.
“That's it,” she said, throwing her ice cubes down the sink and setting the glass back into the freezer.
Karen stood by the table, and as much as she wanted to cry, she couldn't bring herself to do it because Mitzie looked so happy. And quite foxy too.
“Mitzie, I'll miss you, miss the lights on in the kitchen and the sound of those God-awful slippers, and those days when we just drove around the hills.”
It had been years since Mitzie had held anyone for more than a second or felt what it was like to have someone put their arms around her, and when she hugged her friend Karen under the kitchen light, she wanted to cry too.
“Karen, I'm going to send a ticket real soon for you to come and spend some time with me because I'll miss you too, honey. Will you come? Will you come visit me?”
“Of course I'll come, Mitzie,” Karen whispered into her friend's ear. “Where you going? You never told me.”
Mitzie pulled back from Karen just far enough so she could look into her eyes, but not far enough so they would let go of each other. Then she sucked in a huge dose of the cool kitchen air and smiled at the thought of a long, winding highway.
“I'm going to California, sweetie, I'm finally going to California.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
Court Files
June 23, 1969
Divorce Proceedings—Third Circuit Court
Sandra Jean Brims Plohinski and Dean John Plohinski
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Court Files
December 14, 1973
Divorce Proceedings—Third Circuit Court
Sandra Jean Plohinski Barnes and Peter Stephen Barnes
Wilkins County News
County Courthouse Records
January 15 to February 15, 1989
Sandra Jean Plohinski Barnes Balenga and Robert Balenga
The Elegant Gathering: Sandy
People always want to know about the sex part.
“Sandy,” they ask me, just a little breathless as if they are about to come themselves, “what do two women do in bed?”
My usual response: “What the hell kind of question is that?” You would think that a woman of the world such as myself, married three times, mother of two, a flaming liberal with an axe and about forty-nine other things to grind, would not take offense when someone dares to ask me what I actually do when I make love with a person of the same sex. Is this so hard to figure out? Isn't there a movie they can rent or some magical part of their imagination they can tap in to to answer this astounding question?
I suspect people are curious about same-sex relation
ships because they have either imagined it themselves or tried it more than a few times and need a little expert advice. But I am definitely not an expert at relationships—physical, emotional, or spiritual.
Actually, I've done such a piss-poor job of figuring out who it is that I am that I find it surprising anyone in the entire world would actually consider for more than ten seconds anything that I have to say. The sex question is a curiosity thing, I suppose; people look at me and try to imagine me without my clothes on, which is really something to see, believe me, in some kind of sexually exotic position with another woman. I am certain they would be disappointed to realize the simplistic beauty of making love with another woman is not as complicated as they might think. It is soft and giving and glorious—an act as natural as breathing.
Walking out here in the country, in the sunshine and this unbelievable weather with these fabulous women—is putting everything in perspective. All these hours of solitude and talking and sharing is not unlike walking naked and knowing that no one is going to laugh or say anything foolish when they see you so exposed, see you for exactly who and what you are.
For me, Sandy Plohinski Barnes Balenga, clarifying moments have come few and far between. It took me so long to figure out who I really am, that it was almost too late to do anything about it. Now, this very moment, as the world has narrowed and all of us can focus on just ourselves, these intimate encounters, the closeness of whatever it is we want to talk about and share, it feels amazingly wonderful to be alive and to just be me.
Beyond this group of women who have looked inside of my heart and soul, the other people who think they know me, who would say that I am brazen and sex-crazed and wild and the kind of woman who would try, and probably has tried, anything—those people, they only know half of the story. My life has been and continues to be a wild ride into the unknown. I have filled up one half of myself with enough heartaches to choke a horse, I have tried desperately to be someone I am not, and somehow in all this craziness I have come to be exactly where I belong. I will be the first to admit the journey has not been picture perfect.
This whole thing about sexuality and liberation has been so blown out of proportion, it's very hard to remember back when the world really was not so damn crazy. I was so happy when that sex study was released by a group of female doctors and psychologists, beginning of 1999 I think, that talked about how most of the world is really in deep shit when it comes to having satisfying sex. The book was a kind of in-your-face updated version of Seymour Fisher's The Female Orgasm that was published in 1973. Well, what a shock! But not to me—because while it's rumored that I have had physical relationships with half of the free world the sex itself was almost never why I rolled into all those sets of interlocking arms and legs.
My story is really not so different from those of many of the other fifty-three-year-old women who seem to be wandering around the continent in a daze. I came from a wonderful open-minded family. My mother was a liberated Bohemian who could have gone either way sexually but married my father, whom she adored, instead of running off to a wildly liberal life in New York with the rest of her friends, who were writing poetry and sleeping with each other. My mother was college-educated and graduated from the University of Chicago, which was more than a miracle for a woman of the 1930s, and she has always been the most important person in my life. It really has nothing to do with the fact that she now lives with another woman but it's because she is sincere, kind, brilliant, and has never stopped loving me.
My own children, two grown men now, have managed to sail through life with complete ease. The older boy, Damien, has no memory of his father, Dean, who simply disappeared from our lives and has not acknowledged his son's existence in almost three decades. My younger son, Joshua, chose to live with his father, something that almost broke my heart, but he remains as much a part of my life as his older brother. Somehow—probably because my mother was always there to help me, and my sons act more like her than me—they have chosen to ignore my faults, my exotic and erratic behavior, my inability to stay with any partner for longer than, well, in some instances a night or two. I consider it a mark of success that they accept me no matter what I do, and for that I am proud of whatever part I had in making them so open-minded and accepting. I believe such traits are anchors of the soul.
My mother, Claire, was incredibly open with me, partly because I was an only child and she raised me to be more like a friend than a daughter, but also because she truly believed that is how children should be raised. She told me everything, and I do mean everything, about her life. My mother slept with three men before she married my father, sluttish behavior to say the least in the 1940s. She smoked marijuana in her college dormitory and anywhere else she could, and she believed, even from an early age, that it was fine for women to love each other. When she met my father, she had already had an affair with a married woman, Betsy. However, with her sexual liberalism still intact, she bumped into my father, a banker of all things, in the lobby of a shoe store and that fateful meeting ended anything wild and crazy for her—except raising me, of course.
Imagine how pissed off she was when I got pregnant about fifteen seconds before high school graduation. Oh Christ, I was so stupid, and I chose the most idiotic male in the world to help create my first child. I wasn't in love with him, but I felt like it was time to see what sex was all about. Dean, who had been professing his love to me repeatedly for three years, happened to be handy. I could have done anything, had an abortion, not married him, run off to Cincinnati, but in another fairly stupid move we got married, moved to Kansas, where he had already been accepted into Kansas State University, and tried hard for about three months to act like this was how life was supposed to be.
I left him when Damien was less than a year old, and moved back in with my parents. My mother loved that, my father wanted to kill Dean, and I just wanted to enroll in one of Wisconsin's universities and get in on some of the college action myself. I was not a very nice person after that for quite a long time. I was swept up into the '60s life as if I had been lit on fire. I discovered birth control, cheap drugs and a liberated lifestyle that allowed me to remain in a daze for a good four years. While the rest of the world tried to explain away their sinful behavior by saying they were trying to find themselves, I didn't much give a rat's ass about that. I was just having a great time.
While Damien was learning how to walk and talk and count, I was spreading my legs and watching ceiling fans in every dormitory, frat house, backseat and front yard in Madison, Wisconsin. I owe my mother so much for not only being patient during those years, but for giving Damien the same foundation of love and support that she gave to me. My first choice for finding myself seemed to be giving myself away—and I thank the Goddesses every day that my mother was there. It wasn't until years later, when Damien was a young man and I had come back to the land of the living, he told me he was almost eight years old before he realized that I was actually his mother instead of Grandma.
In the summer when I was twenty years old, I slipped out of the house one night and didn't come back for four months. I had managed to reach my senior year in college—and following a particularly ugly demonstration on the steps of the Wisconsin state capitol building—I met up with a group of six hippies who were headed for California and invited me to join them.
We left at dawn, because someone in the group supposedly had received a message from a supreme being that we would have good luck if we left just as the sun rose over Lake Mendota. That gave me just enough time to slip into my room, grab my diaphragm, three T-shirts, a jacket and $50. I never bothered to say good-bye to my baby, never walked into his room to see him curled around his blankets and the big teddy bear that was always with him when he slept. I never ran my fingers across his forehead and put my lips to his before I walked off into the night with my hippie consorts.
In Vernal, Utah, I did manage to write my mother a note and tell her that I was headed to California and would
be back before school started. One July morning from a dirty wayside in Montana, I sat and scribbled a postcard to her and this is the only clear, solid, retained memory I have from those months on the road. I'm certain that we must have been someplace close to Havre when I scribbled around the edges of that ratty postcard. Perpetually stoned and horny, I straddled a long bench, looked at a rolling set of hills that were most likely the Bear Paw mountains and wrote, “Mom . . . the sky is my pillow . . . my heart stretches so far . . . I can feel you . . . caressing my son, my heart, these souls of my life . . . I'll be back . . . the journey is the destination.”
Thirty-six years later, that postcard is still taped to my refrigerator. A glimpse of it stalls me every time I look at it, and I think about wasted moments, about the necessity of self-discovery, about making certain that all the lights in my own heart and life stay tuned to the proper frequency. I meandered many miles those summer months. I tripped through Haight-Ashbury with the rest of the world, sat on a San Francisco hillside and watched sailboats parading out to sea. I fell in love at least fifteen or sixteen times. Sometimes the entire experience seems like a mirage.
I did come home at the end of summer, but I didn't come home alone. I brought along a new husband and I was expecting another baby. How ironic that a young woman who rebelled against every tradition invented by our society would end up embracing motherhood and marriage—the backbones of what our male-dominated society designed to keep women in check.
If my mother had been the kind to say, “I told you so,” I'm sure she would have told me that I had really screwed up royally. But she didn't, and not a day has gone by during the past thirty years when I have not thanked the She-God I have come to worship in thanksgiving for allowing me the good fortune of being hauled from Claire's fine womb.