by Kris Radish
My second husband, Peter, turned out to be a hell of a lot better human being than I deserved. He was crazy in love with me, excited about being a father, and he actually had a college degree, which meant he could get a real job and support us. I loved him too, in a goofy sort of way, and to this day our time together remains one of the best memories in my life. We moved into a small apartment in Madison, and he took a job at the engineering firm where he still works today. He threw himself into fatherhood and domestic life as if his trip to California had been nothing more than a sad mistake.
My mother helped with Damien, and although I gave birth to Joshua a month before graduation, I somehow managed to get a diploma and a degree in social work, which had been a passion of mine since I did the Helping Hands badge in Girl Scouts. When I walked through the graduation line not far from the steps of the state capitol where I had started my California hippie adventure, my life seemed a paradox to me.
After that I tried really hard to do what everyone thought I was supposed to do. Peter worked and I stayed home and shit, I really tried hard to make everyone happy and to be a good mother and follow all the rules but I was so goddamned miserable I made the rest of the people around me miserable too. What was it? Why couldn't I be happy? I had no idea. I just knew that what I was doing, the kind of routine and stifling life that I was leading, the lies that had begun to spill from my mouth, all of those things were killing me. I had fallen into the deep, dark hole of tradition, of social norm. Taking care of children and punching the time clock and paying the bills had turned me into the very person I had railed against becoming for the first twenty years of my life. I had stopped thinking. I had stopped listening to the inner voices in my soul that were crying for me to be who I really was—a wild, free, nontraditional woman.
This realization made my decision to leave seem natural and normal. This time when I left I didn't disappear in the dark. I took the boys to my mother's house and told her that I had to leave again for a while. She put the boys down for a nap, and then took me into her bedroom and made me lie down on the bed. She held me for the longest time without saying anything. Then she started to talk.
“If you don't go, if you don't leave now, you will regret it for the rest of your life, like I have regretted it,” she told me as I stopped breathing, stopped crying, stopped the beating of my own wild heart.
“As much as I love you and as much as I love your father, I should have never lived like this either,” she told me. “We fall into these patterns of traditional behavior because they are comfortable and because so many people are counting on us and because a tiny part of us is scared we may not make it. There are so many things I never finished, so many places I never saw, so many things I turned my back on.”
I was astounded. As much as I thought I knew my mother, knew who she was and what she was made of, I had absolutely no idea.
“Like what, Mom?”
“Sandra, you are very much like me. Your heart, the shape of your soul, the way you can get lost in the world . . . oh Lord, you are truly my daughter.”
“Mom . . . ?”
She hugged me hard again. “That woman I told you about, the one that I was with when I met your father. Do you remember that story?”
“Yes.”
“I've never stopped loving her, Sandra. Never ever stopped loving her.”
I wasn't sure then exactly what that meant or had to do with my leaving but within moments, I shuttled out the door and drove to Milwaukee. I checked into a no-name hotel and found a job with the county in about fifteen seconds. I came back right away for the boys. Peter had sensed my restlessness for months and was ready for me to be who I needed to be. I settled into an apartment on the funky east side of Milwaukee. It was the first time in my life that I was really alone and really away from my mother.
Our lives settled into a routine then, one that gave me no time to think. I worked and took care of the boys, and then went back to work the next day and did it all over again. When Joshua was six, Peter asked for a divorce and he wanted custody of the boys. By then I had come to realize the joys and sacrifices that gave me title to the word mother, and I was devastated to think that I might lose the boys. But Joshua wanted to be with his daddy.
I could have died then. I could have taken some pills or flung myself off the top of my apartment building. But Peter, bless his goddamned little heart, saved me. He figured out that I could transfer to the Madison County office, he helped me buy a condo; eventually we worked out an arrangement that ended up not being much different from life in Milwaukee. Through all of this, I kept my life in a constant holding pattern—never daring to feel, never daring to try again, never wanting to listen to what my mother had been trying to tell me for the past thirty years.
By 1982, the boys were well on their way to being grown, and my life in Madison had settled into a fairly secure routine. Peter had drifted into another relationship, and I was very happy for him. Although I had bedded and dated numerous men, there was absolutely nothing serious in my life except my work and my sons. Then I met Sarah.
Sarah Jorgenson was a Madison civil rights attorney. She first contacted me about a woman in town who was in desperate need of help. I agreed to meet her one afternoon, the temperature just cold enough to require a jacket. Perhaps that should have alerted my inner senses to the possibilities that lurked just ahead of me. Sarah rose when I walked into the coffee shop, recognizing me from a photo that had recently been in the newspaper about my work on a state legislative committee. She slipped lightly through a crowd of college students and grasped my hand as if we had known each other our entire lives. I had never, ever seen anyone so beautiful.
Physically, Sarah was a wisp of a woman who wore her black hair pulled tight to the sides and then long in the back. For someone with such naturally dark hair, it was shocking to see eyes as blue as a summer sky and skin just about the color of the wheat that grew less than a mile outside Madison. What I loved about her from that first second was the way she moved. She was sure of herself, confident of everyone around her, certain that what she knew and felt and touched were real and true.
I was thirty-three that year, and Sarah was a year older. Unlike me, she had never married, unless you can count her extreme devotion to her profession. She had never given birth to a child, never spent years trying to find herself. Until I met Sarah, I had never been certain of anything in my life, yet when I looked into her eyes and she touched my hand that very first time, I was never more sure of anything.
Sarah and I did not become lovers right away. It was not anything that I ever expected to have happen. But when it did, on a summer night after a wild day in court, it seemed as natural as breathing. Sarah had called me as a witness in an abuse case, and she did a marvelous job of making the suspect look as guilty as if he had committed the crime right there in the courtroom.
We had become nearly inseparable, Sarah and I. Working on cases, eating out, sharing books, calling each other twelve times a day, solving the social ills of the world one sad person at a time. It had never entered my mind that I was already in love with Sarah. My sons were busy preparing for adulthood, and I was overly involved in my own professional world.
The evening following Sarah's wonderful performance in court, we celebrated our one small victory over a quick dinner and a not-so-quick few bottles of wine. I was lying on the couch, playing with her hair as she sat on the floor and looked through a stack of legal files. Sarah never stopped working. The stereo was on, it was my favorite time of day—when light faded as the entire world dipped into the arms of the night and shadows began to form outside the window. Just then, Sarah placed her hands on the side of the couch, lifted herself off the floor and bent over to kiss me.
She offered a long kiss, and I remember thinking that if I could, I would swallow her right inside of myself. No one had ever tried to kiss me like that, I had never let anyone kiss me like that. Her hair swept against the side of my arm, and I raised my
hands to her face. I followed the pull of her arm, and by full nightfall we ended up in a tangled mass of legs and clothes and skin and fingers dancing lightly everywhere between the sheets on my old wooden bed.
If I could have chosen a moment to die, it would have been right there with Sarah. Sarah with her legs wrapped around my hips, her mouth moving from one breast to the next, her fingers sliding everywhere at once, and everything about her soft and warm. The countless times when I had let others touch me and hold me and rock me into orgasm had never moved me like this. For the first time in my life, I cried while I made love.
I kept on crying, tears of unspeakable joy because Sarah and I were barely clothed or apart for more than a few hours following that evening, later that night, the following morning on the bed, on the floor, in the shower. We spent three entire days together, never left my apartment, called out for food and talked and touched in a marathon that I wanted to last the rest of my life.
It didn't take me long to realize that Sarah was the first person I had really loved, and the intense longing and lust that captivated every single fiber of my being made me weep for joy and in realization of all that I had missed with all the others that had come before her. Sarah, I was wise enough to realize, could have been either a man or woman, but Sarah, the woman, came into my life just then, and she loved me in a way I know for certain that no one had ever loved me before. I was suddenly alive and sure and so incredibly happy I could barely breathe. I also came to know that a woman's love for another woman is what made our relationship move me, center me, bring me home. I had always been attracted to women but I had ignored what could have been permanent feelings because, in spite of my Bohemian mother, I was so programmed to the social standards of society that I refused to listen to my own heart.
Sarah moved in with me right away, sold her own condo, packed up every single thing she had bothered to accumulate in between her legal cases and personal causes, and from the beginning our relationship was no secret. My mother knew, the boys knew, Peter knew, pretty much the entire world knew, and they all seemed just as happy about us as we did. To say that my life was suddenly perfect then would be as true as anything. I was floating, and for the first time since I was a little girl, there were no questions in my heart.
During those years with Sarah, I had a friend who—before she finally found the right medication—lived her life in total fear that any second something brutal and tragic was going to happen to her. She would get into the car with me and say, “Sandy, we could be hit by the next car that drives through here,” or “What if this is the last time we'll ever see each other?” Even with Sarah in my life, I continued to be a “live for the moment” kind of woman, and I thought how sad for my friend that she couldn't enjoy a simple moment without worrying. If only I could have known how true this friend's fears were.
Although my life was far from horrible and most of my mistakes and sorrows were caused by no one but myself, I never dreamed after I met Sarah that I would ever be unhappy again. I never dreamed that after eleven magical years with her, my entire life would come to a dead end and that I would have to start all over again.
Sarah and I were on our way to a gourmet tea store to get our monthy stash of our favorite drinks—what we called “our medicine.” We were lucky enough to have sustained that lustful, physical, “gotta-have-you” part of our relationship, and we were holding hands that day in May. I really don't remember most of what happened next and for that I will always be grateful, but what they told me later, just after Sarah's fingers slipped through mine and they pulled her out of the car already dead, was that a drunk driver barreled into us at 50 mph, smashing directly into Sarah's door and killing her instantly.
In the accident, I suffered broken windshield glass embedded in my face, up and down my arms, and one large hunk that totally changed my hairline. My left leg was broken, one rib punched a hole in my lung, and the only thing that saved my left hand was the fact that it had been holding Sarah's hand when we were hit.
It took me days to wake up from that mess, to my mother, slipping softly from her chair and with tears streaming down her face, putting her beautiful long hands on my lips and telling me that Sarah had been killed. “Oh baby,” she said as her own tears dripped onto my face and ran down my neck. “I'm so sorry, so sorry.”
Sorrow consumed me in much the same way that Sarah's love had. Her memorial service was held in my hospital room, and I kept her ashes in an urn that sat on the air conditioner by my bed. I wanted to die, I willed myself to die, I cursed everyone and everything that tried to keep my spirit in the land of the living. I refused to believe for weeks and weeks that Sarah was not going to come through the hospital door and slip under the sheets with me and place her lips against that one private spot at the corner of my eye.
My recovery was slow and incredibly painful. My mother took me home and let me wallow in my misery for one and then two months. When I could walk again, after the last of my plastic surgeries, when it was time to either move forward or simply stop living, my mother took me on a long drive into the country. She stopped at a spot where we could look out over the Fox River and miles of rolling hills in Frank Lloyd Wright country. She placed her hand on my arm, and then slowly took a long silver chain from around her neck. She had worn this chain ever since I can remember.
“Betsy gave me this.”
“You've always worn this chain, Mom, but I had no idea it was from Betsy.”
“Put it on.”
“It's yours.”
“I don't need it anymore, sweetheart. You wear it.”
“Mom?”
“Sarah won't come back, you know that, but she gave you so much, she's still here. You'll always love her, you'll always have her love inside of you, and you have to realize that you'll never get over this. The rest of your life, every moment that you breathe, you will remember her.”
The chain in my hand was warm from my mother's neck, and I moved it from one hand to the next, not daring to put it on. I knew I had to decide right then what I was going to do. I held the chain up to the light and saw little places where all the years of wearing had caused the metal to become as thin as fine thread.
“How do you ever feel good again, Mom? It feels all the time like a knife is moving up and down inside my stomach and cutting right through my heart. I was just so happy for the first time in my life.”
“Remembering helps. You think of something wonderful that Sarah did, the way she touched you, the way you felt as if you could tell her anything and it would be okay. It's true too, what they say about time. It helps. The ache will never leave, and I know it's hard to imagine now but you will love again. You will do that because she taught you how to love.”
“Whatever happened to Betsy? Did you ever see her again?”
My mother looked out the car window then, away from me for the first time in weeks. She pushed her fingers through her hair and then let her hands drop slowly into her lap, forming a perfect circle, the fingertips touching.
“No, I never saw her again.”
I took the chain then and set it on the top of her fingers. It slid down into the palm of her hand where it came to rest, where her fingers closed over it just as she closed her eyes.
“Oh Christ, Mother, all those years when I was trying to find something, someone and then it finally happens and then it's gone. You keep this chain. You've already given me way more than I deserve. I know Sarah is still here, and I have you, and it's time I kick myself in the ass and get on with living.”
Mother looked into my eyes, and a veil of sadness moved across her face. It was a visible pain that made her entire body shudder.
“It won't happen like that. It will hurt you for a long, long time. I can't tell you how many times a day I think of your father, how little things like the way you tip your head make me see him all over again. There's Betsy too, such a long time ago for me, but she's in my heart, always in my heart.”
I was only kidding
myself that day with the idea that I could simply say my life was going to move forward, and I could live and be happy again without Sarah. I eventually moved back into my house in Madison, though every single thing that I saw and touched brought my love for her right back to life again. As much as I already admired my mother, my feelings for her took on a whole new level of respect. She had truly loved my father and Betsy both, lost them both, and somehow managed to find love again. By God, she was a heroine to me.
Eventually my body healed, leaving me with a few kinky scars and some aches and pains that kick in every time the wind shifts. The progress of my heart has been an entirely different matter. While I gradually inched my way back to the gnarly wild person I have always been, it has been close to impossible for me to open myself up from the inside out again.
Two years after Sarah's death, I had a quick and quiet affair with a man from my office. The thought of another woman, loving me and touching me like Sarah, had seemed unimaginable, but after my passionate love for Sarah, it was obvious that a man would never be able to satisfy me again. It was the last time a man ever touched me.
Those who keep track of me will want to know about my third marriage, which often pops up when people look at me and try to imagine all this kinky sex I supposedly had. Three years after Sarah's death, I married my dear friend Robert, an old man really, whom I had befriended twenty years earlier when he was one of my clients at Walworth County Social Services. Robert was a sweet man who never married before our nuptials, when he was seventy-one years old. When we met, Robert wanted to make certain that his few material assets went to someone who had cared about him, and I was the only person he could think of who had been a significant part of his life. He also didn't want to die as a single man because he said his mother would be pissed off when he saw her again in what he called heaven.
Robert had come into my life following a fall that took out his left hip. While I transitioned him from the hospital to a nursing home, we talked about his life as an English teacher, his lost dreams of writing the great American novel, and how sad he was that he never had any children. He had a brilliant mind, a kind heart, and he wanted to leave his money to help me put the boys through college. I could not say no when he asked me to marry him. It was his last wish.