The Elegant Gathering of White Snows

by Kris Radish

  Jane returned to the living room to scoop up the newspaper articles. When she plopped back into the lawn chair, she put all the articles into a pile and then set them on her chest, right on top of her heart. She took a big gulp of beer and let her mind go back to Wisconsin again, like she had that morning at work. In the Texas night with the cold beer cuddled in her right hand and Wisconsin on her heart, Jane began to remember for the first time in many years. She smiled and closed her eyes, and nothing she saw was as horrible as she had pretended all this time.

  In her family kitchen, Jane is twenty again, her hands are on her hips and around her everything is familiar. The kitchen window has a crack in the bottom that her father has been going to fix for sixteen years; the long wooden table has scratches and lines and one big crack in it where her brother Jonathan stuck that big cleaver the night her parents went square dancing.

  The kitchen is also littered with her mother's “stuff”—coupons and boxes and stacks of newspapers that she will never read in her entire life. Loaves of bread wrapped in plastic with twist ties on the end are lined up against the back of the counter, and there is a little china dish filled with rings, bracelets and single earrings that have lost their partners. There are always dishes in the sink and a slab of meat is thawing on the counter for dinner.

  Jane cannot see herself, but she is beautiful. Her hair is down to her waist, and she has skin the color of the milky white sky, and those legs, so long and slender for a girl who is not really tall. It is fall, and there is a nip of winter in Wisconsin. The popular wardrobe style in 1979 is jeans and sweaters and for Jane, cowboy boots—always a pair of cowboy boots since she has been a girl and dreaming of horses and cowboys and the West. Oh the West, the mountains and deserts and horses and spaces. The West.

  “Mom, you can't stop me,” Jane shouts, and her mother raises her hands to her ears and is trying so hard not to shout back at her only daughter.

  “Janey, this is so foolish to throw something like this away, there's just a few months left. In spring, you will be done, can't you stay and finish?”

  “I hate it. I hate school and everyone there, and it's just too damned stupid.”

  “Please don't swear in here, Janey. Don't swear.”

  “Let's face it, Mother, you are the one who wanted to go to college, and you should go up there and finish and get the diploma, not me. I never wanted to go. You made me go.”

  Her mother cries then. She is a big woman, almost as wide as the space between the counter and the refrigerator, and Jane hates her for that and for every other thing she can possibly think of.

  “Look, it's not my fault you got married and had three kids and never leave the damned kitchen, and that you eat and are fat.”

  The level of Jane's cruelty astounds her mother, and she lifts her head from her hands to look at a daughter whom she no longer knows. Her heart has fallen into her stomach, and Jane's mother feels as if she is going to be sick.

  “Sweetheart, please don't do this. Please, oh please.”

  Jane hates her mother, even as she knows her hatred is misplaced. For this is the very mother who has always been here and helped her and loved her and encouraged her to do something, to see the world and to read and travel and to give herself a chance. The mother who has worked a night job at JC Penney for six years so she can help Jane with college tuition. The mother who comes home with ankles the size of grapefruits and then eats to make herself feel better for all the dreams she had that have evaporated.

  Jane can't stand it any longer. She can't stand her brothers who remind her of that damned high school, and her father who sits around drinking coffee and poking his finger into her waist, whom she hasn't seen touch or kiss her mother in, when was the last time anyway? Jane can't stand Wisconsin and the dumb-ass boyfriends who only try to screw her brains out and never listen to her stories about where she wants to go. She hates every single thing in her life except this idea, to get out, to just get out.

  For Jane, there isn't much thinking left to do after that. The bags have been in the car for weeks, since she dropped out of college and never told her mother and father, since she slept in that bed with Matt for six months to get the money from what she would have spent on the dorm room, since she called that guy at the ranch and said she would be there in early September. Her mother cannot move from the kitchen. Her feet are glued to the floor, and she knows in her heart that something horrible is happening, yet there isn't one thing she can do to stop it. She hears Jane run upstairs, she hears the drawers, she knows Jane is looking for money and the little box of jewelry. She's seen that brochure from the ranch under the stack of old T-shirts.

  Jane doesn't bother to say another word as she flies out of the house. She doesn't look back or wave either. Janey doesn't see that her mother is slowly falling to the floor and wrapping her arms around her own shoulders. She doesn't see her mother's heart breaking, and she is way too young to know about anguish and loss and suffering and dreams that can turn into nightmares.

  In those first few minutes driving away, never cranking back the mirror to look at the house or the river or that spot where she sat with her cousins, Jane only knows she is doing the right thing. She thinks about this all the way to Colorado, where she almost dies with delight the first time she sees the mountains—first as tiny dots against the horizon, and then as a growing vision of snow and light and darkness that leave her breathless and driving faster and faster as she approaches the sloping foothills until she realizes she is going 110 mph and the car hood is shaking. She stops thinking about those wonders when she sees that she has to live in a rat-infested cabin with no indoor plumbing, and that the ranch manager will never let her tend the horses, and that her job will always be to work in the kitchen.

  In a year, there is another ranch and all the men who have never noticed that it is no longer 1856 and that women can do whatever they want. Jane has managed to send home one postcard without a return address and when she leaves Colorado, she does not know that her mother is right behind her, looking for her only daughter, and she misses finding her by a single mile.

  Jane drives south to Arizona, where she waitresses and then works part-time at a drugstore because she blows her car engine, and she has no skills that will get her a job paying more than five dollars an hour. In Arizona there is a guy she thinks she loves, but then she doesn't and suddenly it has been five years since she has been in Wisconsin. One Christmas she calls her mother and says she is okay but not coming back, and someday she might call again and “No, I'm not telling you where I am.”

  In 1985 Jane gets up and looks around at the walls of her trailer. She looks in the mirror to find she's a young woman who still doesn't own a horse or live on a ranch, and she is so tired from working all the nowhere jobs and going nowhere. Once again, she puts all her things in the car and leaves. This time there is no one to argue with because she is alone in the trailer, and her few friends won't care. She drives away without calling in to say anything to anybody, with a total of $678 and a car that is as many years old as all the years it has been since she left Wisconsin.

  This time Jane lands in Texas because in the back of her mind, she identifies this state as a world filled with ranches and cowboys. In all this time, Janey does not let her heart soften. She doesn't know that her mother lost seventy-five pounds and that her father's heart is not so good but he will be okay if he retires early. She doesn't know that her mother also finished a master's degree and is now a counselor at the clinic in Prairie du Chien, where she helps nineteen-year-old girls, and some much younger, who want to run away.

  She doesn't know that her father has taken a cooking class and remodeled the kitchen. Her brothers are gone, and the house is big but Janey doesn't know that her parents will never sell it because they think she could come back and then what? What would she do if they weren't there?

  Jane isn't aware that her cousins Mary and Sharon pray for her and still cry when they talk about her, and then sa
y it isn't too late. Janey could come back and they would all be together. She doesn't know that even with all these changes, some things are still the same. Her uncles, all but Uncle Tommy who died that Halloween night three years ago, still come over and her father cooks and they have a few beers, but not like before.

  Once when Jane's brother Bill, the one who is the cop up there in Door County, called in some favors and found his sister's phone number at the small gas station that Janey was managing, he didn't know that Janey was just about ready to leave the little Texas town and move to Austin. So Bill missed her by fourteen hours. Then his wife had a baby, and he never tried to find his lost sister again. Never again.

  In Austin, things were better for Jane. She met more men, including Carlton, who wanted to marry her. Carlton hired her to manage his jewelry store, but Janey didn't love him, and she had always told herself that she would never settle. Sometime, she knew, she would fall deeply in love with a man as wild as all those miles and miles of open space she has seen. Maybe this man of her dreams would be a rancher, so she would finally get her horses and make love in the blooming sagebrush, not caring about anything but that specific moment and the way her entire body smoldered against the warm sand, and how she opened herself up—to this man and to the world beneath her.

  When Janey took the job at the tire store, the biggest franchise in the whole state, life definitely seemed to change direction for her. She was too busy at first to go out much, because the last business manager had failed to do things like record sales and check inventory. She met a few people, but no one she wanted to know better.

  Eventually her life took on a routine, and there were no more wild nights and crazy lovers and driving to a new town in the middle of the night. There was, in fact, absolutely nothing new, and Jane was holding herself in place as the rest of the world moved. Back in Wisconsin, her mother discovered yoga and took her father to France, where she made love to him right out in the open in the middle of the day on a grassy ledge near a long river with a name they could not pronounce.

  While her parents were making love in France, Janey was neatly and efficiently filing tire order forms into her newly organized system and thinking about how Greg always bothered her at work, and nothing else. Jane was thinking of nothing else.

  Then another year passed, and she met her lover Michael. The sex was just this side of marginal but Michael was mysterious, he wore cowboy boots, and he made her laugh and forget how mundane and simple her life had become. Then those articles just this week, those articles began appearing on her desk and Jane felt herself moving forward to a place that she could remember as being directly behind her.

  When Jane opened her eyes after all that remembering, she was no longer crying but thirsty as hell, really thirsty. She carried the beige plastic bucket into the kitchen and dumped out the warm water that had settled in the bottom. She filled up the bucket with cold tap water and then dumped every single ice cube on top of the last three beer bottles. Her memories had sparked something. She slipped into her bedroom and exchanged her sweatpants for her little red running shorts, then grabbed a pad of paper and went back outside.

  Jane was done traveling down memory lane. Now she was going to do something. She made herself a list because that was how she worked these days. When she finished writing, she cracked open another beer, and then she called the only real friend that she knew would help her. Katherine had been in her weight-lifting class, and the women had bonded over coffee and the major decision that weight lifting was not for them.

  “Katherine, I need some help.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Oh come on. It's Jane. You know, the geeky office manger with no life.”

  “Are you drinking? You never drink. Are you drinking?”

  “I'm having a few beers, that's all. But Katherine, something's happened to me.”

  “Jane, you are scaring me.”

  “Well, get ready for the rest of this then.”

  “What?”

  “I told you about those articles, right. You know, articles about those women walking in Wisconsin?”

  “Yes, isn't that something? What's that all about, do you think?”

  “That's where I'm from.”

  “Wisconsin?”

  “Yes, that's where my family is, and I haven't been back there in twenty years, twenty damn years, Katherine.”

  “Jane, do you want me to come over there?”

  “No, no. I just need a little help. Not much, just a little help.”

  Katherine said she would take care of the cat, who knows for how long, does it really matter? There wasn't much in the refrigerator, and the way Jane had everything organized at work, the place could run without her for a year and they probably wouldn't even notice that she was gone.

  Jane almost fainted when a really cute limo driver knocked on her door four hours later. He was late, but not late enough for Jane to catch the next plane to Chicago. She expected some old fart of a driver, not a hunky-looking guy who smiled when he saw her in those tight jeans and a blouse that was open three buttons down and showed the tops of her firm breasts.

  When the plane lifted off the runway, Jane never thought about the fact that she was pushing forty herself and had never even been on an airplane. She watched the lights of Austin glitter for a few minutes and then disappear into a thin layer of light clouds that seemed to float with her all the way to Chicago.

  Her first plan was to fly on to Madison, which was just a bit closer to Prairie du Chien than Milwaukee. But just after six A.M., while she was having a Bloody Mary in the O'Hare VIP lounge with the very pilot who had flown her plane, she decided to fly into Milwaukee and rent a car. That way, she could drive out to Wilkins County, which was really sort of on the way.

  Milwaukee was unrecognizable to Jane as the plane circled over Lake Michigan and passed all the city rooftops. She remembered it as an ugly, old city where nothing happened and where people never changed and always did the same old things day after day, year after year. Life seemed to be hopping in this city she hadn't seen for twenty years. In the airport terminal, where Janey had to whip out a blazer to keep warm, she was astonished to see camera crews racing all over the place. “It's the women walkers,” she said to herself. “They are bringing us all in here.”

  By ten A.M., when Jane had downed three cups of coffee and maneuvered her car out of the lot at the airport, it was already sixty degrees. She tossed her blazer into the backseat, checked her teeth in the mirror, and headed out of the airport.

  Not far from the terminal, less than two miles, Jane decided suddenly that going to find the women was ridiculous. She was certain they didn't want to be bothered, and even more certain that it would be fairly pointless to stand and watch them if she could even get close enough to see them.

  Instead she swung the car around right in front of a 7-Eleven and scooted back to I-94, the freeway that traveled north. The road that would take her home. Just to see. Just to say she was sorry.

  Jane smiled as familiar landmarks whizzed by her car. She set the cruise control at 70 mph and flipped on the radio. She started to sing because she was certain, after all these years, that she knew the way home. Thirty miles out of Milwaukee, where the subdivisions had given way to long fields and stands of trees that were as green as the hills along the Mississippi, Janey reached down and pulled off her silver-tipped cowboy boots, one at a time. She put them on the seat next to her and then she kept driving, barefoot and singing at the top of her lungs with the window down and those buttons on her blouse flapping against the top of her beating heart.

  Newsweek, June 12, 1989

  —Features Syndicate

  DEPRESSION—THE HIDDEN KILLER

  Janice Simmons was a little girl when it started. Days of mood swings and anger and sadness that seemed to zip by “under a dark, dark cloud.” The inner turmoil never went away. Janice is now a young woman, a woman who has survived three suicide attempts, a broken marriage, an
d institutionalization—finding out nearly twenty-four years later that she suffers from a severe form of depression. Medical professionals now say her depression is treatable and more common than the rest of the world can imagine.

  “If we knew then what we know now, many lives could have been saved and many women like Janice could have led much different lives,” said Dr. Bernard Calhoon with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “This depression is a disease, no one asks for it, but for years we have treated it like it's a form of leprosy.”

  Calhoon and other psychiatric specialists agree that the misunderstood illnesses of the mind are often hidden by men and women who try to deal with their problems alone because they don't think anyone will understand.

  “It's also no secret that people are fearful of someone with mental illness,” said Dr. Susan Ellis, with the New York Psychological Institute. “We can see a broken leg or cancer and we understand that, but when a person is depressed or on the brink of some horrible mental episode, we tend to treat that illness entirely differently.”

  It hasn't been that many years since anyone who had a mental problem was simply locked away at places with names like the Territorial Insane Asylum.

  “In many ways, society's means for dealing with mental illnesses of all forms have not changed much in the past fifty years,” said Ellis, who has conducted numerous studies with new drugs that are now giving hope to millions of people suffering from severe depression throughout the country. “We have the drugs, and now we need to open up the minds in the rest of the world.”

  Today, thanks to research, new drugs and public awareness campaigns, life for people with severe depression no longer has a bleak future.

  “There are still things to learn, but we have saved lives and there is hope,” said Calhoon. “People such as Janice Simmons can get their lives back, and that's a miracle of science.”