by Kris Radish
“You're kidding!” Chris hated not to know something. “Where the hell was I?”
“Not looking.”
“So what's the plan? How are you going to make this work?”
“Perfectly. I'm going to make this work perfectly, and I'm going to do anything, whatever it takes in my world to make something happen. I've been so fucking lonely and needy and wanting and desirous.”
“All those other women in your life?”
“Just helping me fill in the blanks. I care about them all. I do. But I need someone who grabs my heart, makes me bend over with wanting, who can look into my soul and see who I am and what forms the craters of my life. It also helps if this woman happens to have breasts that call out my name and an ass that looks as if it was made to fit the contours of my hands.”
The instantaneous laughter is a bullet, ricocheting from one woman to the next. Susan alters the mood when she begins talking about the abortion and knowing there are hundreds of couples who would raise the baby, but the pregnancy would kill her, it would just kill her.
“I just can't have this baby. Physically and mentally. I'm old and tired and I need to start over. Right now. Not in a few months. I have to do it now.”
“Susan. We'll rent a big van and all go with you, honey,” said Janice. “This is your decision, and I think it's the right one. This is your life, your body, and by God, we're going to help you make it all work. Would you like us to beat the shit out of the baby's father?”
Susan told them it was a waste of perfectly good energy to want to kill someone so weak and helpless. She suggested more beer, and when they discovered that the beer was gone, the women moved to the wine, which they knew would prove to be a costly mistake in the morning, yet they forged on recklessly. Wonderful Mary had included brand-new wineglasses and bags of snacks, and if it were not for the blazing fire and the fact that they were not on Susan's floor, the women could have been anywhere, anywhere at all.
Within an hour, Alice crawled into her sleeping bag and then Susan joined her. Chris and Janice talked for another hour about collaborating on a magazine article about depression, and Janice agreed that if she shared her story, if she talked personally on a level that would expose her years of hell and heartache, maybe someone else might be spared even a day of the same misery.
“It's not the same if you don't use your real name, but sometimes people can't handle that. You'd have to ask Paul and the girls how they feel,” said Chris. “You'd have to be sure.”
“They would want me to do what I could to help someone else, that's what I think,” Janice said. “They would also know that whatever I do, it's my decision, a choice for me.”
Janice thought for a moment, added that her mother would know that with survival comes a kind of debt, a debt that needs to be repaid. “It's a cosmic thing. I've made it, and if I can help someone else make it, then something good, even something better, will come right back to me. Is that too goofy?”
“Look out, here comes the old sixties cosmic justice theory that has never been proven wrong by me. Even when I tell someone to fuck off, I usually get the same thing back. You'd think I would learn.”
“It's tough to balance how you feel inside sometimes with doing what you think needs to be done.”
“Well, I haven't killed anyone yet, and I've wanted to do that about six hundred times, so I guess I'm more in control than I think.”
As the night wore on Sandy, Gail and J.J. lingered the longest by the fire. They tossed log after log into the flames, sitting in the silence, watching the wood burn itself out until another log brought it back to life. The three women sat close, wrapped their arms around each other, held hands, waited in the cold while they took turns shuffling off to nature's bathroom in the trees.
“It's not so bad to love women, is it?” Sandy asked, rhetorically.
“I've never felt bad about all the pain and suffering we end up going through because of all the other good stuff,” said J.J. “To be totally accepted and loved and to know someone will be there for you no matter what happens is an absolutely perfect feeling.”
“I think we all have the potential of loving a woman like you do, Sandy,” Gail said, turning to look Sandy in the eyes. “Maybe this next generation of women who have been even more free with their affections and emotions than we have, maybe they will even be more honest.”
Sandy rolled onto her left hip and pushed her legs out in front of her, thinking the whole time how fine it felt to be talking about her favorite subject. “Women can find such comfort in each other, it's a shame all this sexual bullshit even got started. Some of the times when I was the saddest in my life, all I wanted was to just have someone hold me. Usually I didn't want that someone to be a man, because he was usually the reason why I was so goddamned sad to begin with. Not that I was perfect or anything, but women are so much less self-centered and more open and caring and sensitive. What was I thinking?”
J.J. reminisced. “But remember before we started telling people to eat shit, remember how people laughed about things like how we could go to the bathroom in front of each other and sleep in the same bed and how we always seemed to know how the other woman felt, remember how it really changed how we treated each other?” She smiled and stared at the fire. “My God, is there anything better than lying in bed with a friend and talking and feeling her warm legs next to yours and just knowing from the center of your being that you are safe and loved. That the world could spin away and those feelings of closeness and safety would not change?”
The conversation eventually drifted away into the mechanics of male and female personalities. The stars eventually shifted, and the sky grew light where it touched the horizon.
“What's that?” Gail asked. “Is all that light from the city?”
“It's the entire world, thousands and thousands of people looking for us with flashlights,” Sandy declared.
The women laughed, and Gail rose up to make certain that everyone who was sleeping was covered up. She threw two more logs on the fire and stood in the growing light, looking like a strong and brilliant light herself.
“You know we are the only ones who have been looking for ourselves,” she said, her voice a small echo above the snapping wood. “I suppose we'll look back on this and say we could have done this sooner and saved ourselves years of anguish over all our problems. But really, it's like love or sex, or knowing anything . . . it just can't happen until the stars are lined up properly and everything.”
“You mean like three months ago or last year, we could never have done this, but a week ago, that was the perfect time?” asked J.J.
“Yeah,” said Gail, shrugging against the wind that cut into her back. “Yeah, it was just the right time.”
“But you know maybe now we can make anytime the right time,” suggested Sandy. “Even me, the ballsy bitch. It's been hard these last few years for me to do what I knew I needed to do, but now I feel strong and healed and ready to reclaim everything I let slip away.”
“She'll be ready, too,” said Gail, pointing in the direction of Lenny's house. “The stars are going to be lined up just perfectly for the rest of our lives.”
J.J. jumped up. She smiled and patted Sandy on the shoulder. “Hell, if those stars aren't lined up just the way we like 'em, we'll shove the little bastards right where we think they should go.”
The women rolled into their own sleeping bags, tucked their jackets under their heads for pillows and watched the fire dance and dance, until their eyes closed and there was the simple hum of quiet bodies, even breaths and the embers burning slowly into the earth.
In the last few hours before dawn, the women walkers didn't feel the whisper of another wind roll over them. They didn't know in those sleepy hours that their hearts beat in unison, and that when one of them sighed, the rest of them felt a reciprocal push of air. They didn't know that their breaths mingled with the breaths of millions of women, and that their souls would be entwined in those whis
pers forever.
Associated Press, May 2, 2002
Wilkins County, Wisconsin
Alert—Changing Status
OFFICIALS HOBBLING PROTECTION FOR
WOMEN WALKERS
The seven women who have been trudging through this scenic portion of America's dairy land while causing a national uproar had better get moving.
County officials have decided that they can no longer keep back huge crowds gathering each morning at a roadblock to show support for the walkers.
Ironically, a group of men have filed a request with the county clerk's office here asking for the county highways and roads to be reopened immediately.
“These women are out there walking around like queens, and it's not right to keep the rest of the world from using the roads,” said Bruce Guilden, a spokesman for the group of men. “It's time for everyone to go home.”
Women across the country and throughout the world seem to identify with the walkers and have gathered to form similar walks, as well as showing support for the Wisconsin walkers. Those women initiated their pilgrimage one week ago, but have not disclosed the exact reason for taking to the road on foot.
Sheriff Barnes Holden said if it was up to him, he'd let the women walk indefinitely, but he's been ordered to remove roadblocks that have kept back everyone except local residents.
“There will be hell to pay at my own house because of this,” said Barnes. “Anyone who doesn't understand this just needs to go talk to their wife, or sister, or just about any woman they happen to meet on the street.”
When the barricades do come down, one thing is certain: the women walkers will forever have changed the history of this rural community. If women across the world are to be believed, they've also ignited more than a few hearts.
“Women give strength and love to everything they see and touch,” said Victoria Bramling, a Detroit woman who flew to Wisconsin to offer support for the seven walkers. “These women have said to all of us that it's right to follow your heart, and we all owe them so much for that.”
—-30—
The Women Walker Effect: Cynthia
Cynthia kept her eyes closed for the longest time. Although the small room was dark, she wasn't ready for what she might see. For what she wanted to see, for the picture of herself that might appear in front of her and change everything.
She had double-locked the door of this borrowed room, sneaking softly up the back steps of the university building in the English department that she had been told would be virtually abandoned at this time of day. At 4:15 A.M. Cynthia had slipped from her own room, past all the closed doors and out into a morning that still held a touch of winter. Unaccustomed to being out so early, Cynthia was immediately enthralled with the quiet of that hour. She walked, almost ran, down the sidewalk and began the thirteen-block journey to the university.
In the time it took her to do that, Cynthia saw only one car, a dark green taxi, and not another human being. “Oh,” she said to herself. “There are so many colors out here, it looks like a rainbow.”
Cynthia noticed every single thing she saw on her quick journey. She saw the way the early shadows played tricks on her eyes and lingered just long enough to make her wonder if it was late or early winter, or fall. She noticed a man sitting in the last house on the left side of the highway, drinking what she supposed was a cup of coffee. He was all alone, looking out into his dark backyard.
There were no animals about, no other people walking, just the quiet sounds of her feet moving quickly, like the practiced steps of an early-morning jogger. When Cynthia got to the large building, the second building on that side of campus, she walked to the back door. She had to walk through a dimly lighted path that was almost buried by a thick grove of evergreen trees. She never thought of the danger that might be there and would have been astonished if someone lurking there had jumped her. Cynthia never thought anything bad could happen to her.
The back door was propped open with a wad of yellow notepaper. Cynthia smiled to think of her friend rolling up the paper from her own thick tablet and sticking it in the door, way past midnight, past the time when the night janitors and the security guard would be there.
This is the friend who had been her second secret. A woman who worked at the university and who had simply stopped her once in passing to ask about the time, and then followed her from one place to the next until she would sit and share something to drink with her. Cynthia had never had a friend like this before, had never dared to let someone become so close to her. It took two years for Cynthia to tell her friend, Carolyn, her real secret. One afternoon when the two of them sat for hours on a bench, they talked and talked, and that's when she knew that her friend would not harm her or laugh or look away if she shared the secret.
Less than a week ago, Carolyn had asked Cynthia if she had seen the articles in the newspaper about the women walking in Wisconsin. Cynthia had not heard about those women.
However, she did reveal to Carolyn, “I'm from Wisconsin. There were twelve kids in my family, and my mother, I can remember only how tired she was all of the time.”
“Twelve children,” said Carolyn, trying hard not to swear because she had promised Cynthia that she would not do that. “Your mother had twelve children?”
“Well, really she had sixteen children, but she lost two others through miscarriages and two died just after birth. Imagine that, after all that work.”
“Imagine it!” said her friend. “Some of us find the thought of all those children and no birth control and a woman who, well, we just find it disgusting.”
“Oh,” Cynthia said, amused by Carolyn's outlook. “I suppose it was a different world, even though that wasn't so long ago.”
“Cynthia, were you the baby, the last girl?”
“I was born when my mother was forty-seven years old. Imagine that now,” Cynthia shared, nodding as she spoke.
“Cynthia, how old are you now?”
“I'm thirty-nine years old, and my mother would be eighty-six now, but she's been dead for a long time.”
“Well, shit,” Carolyn said to herself, “of course, she's dead. Judas Priest, what in the hell were they all thinking!” Carolyn, a clinical psychologist and part-time professor, desperately wanted to take Cynthia to her apartment and treat her to a long hot bath in a gallon of lavender essence. She wanted to take her to a salon and then shopping, and she hoped and prayed that she could do that someday. For now, just a few words, a few well-planned words, would have to do.
So the women sat on the bench out near the university library, and Carolyn told Cynthia about the walkers in Wisconsin. Carolyn had a feeling that Cynthia could well understand a woman or a man in search of something miraculous and wonderful, and she was right.
Cynthia turned her head, and then she asked to see the newspaper articles. While Cynthia read, Carolyn closed her eyes and let her mind wander to her favorite beach where she could picture her new friend lying in the sun. Carolyn finally turned and touched Cynthia lightly on the arm, and when Cynthia smiled and her eyes lit up, Carolyn wanted to jump off the chair and yell something like, “Holy shit, she's alive!”
“What do you think of this, Carolyn. You're a woman of the world and smart, and this is your field, psychology, isn't it?”
“It's a great story, Cynthia, a beautiful story really. I'm thinking that these women all had something to forget or work out, that they are great friends, and they are out there walking with nothing to bother them or nothing to be in charge of except each other. I'm thinking that some powerful communication, healing, problem solving and just some beautiful togetherness must be going on.”
“Oh,” said Cynthia, sounding to Carolyn like a little girl who really doesn't quite understand what's being explained to her.
Carolyn in all her worldliness, with her bountiful practice and research and teaching appointment, had never met anyone like Cynthia. Most of her clients were women, most of them career women sick with guilt and moth
ers who lacked the desire to have sex or do anything except sleep when they had five extra minutes, along with a large number of middle-aged women who needed someone to say, “Hey, it's okay to fly to Bermuda and leave your husband and change jobs and hack off your hair.” Many of her clients were also women who loved women but who had no idea how to embrace their emerging lesbian identities. Never, ever before in her twenty-one years of clinical practice had Carolyn met a semi-cloistered Catholic nun who appeared to be walking through life like a half-hearted zombie.
It took about fourteen seconds for Carolyn to become completely enchanted with Cynthia. Although Cynthia wore extremely traditional dark skirts and white blouses, there was really no way to tell that she was a nun and that she spent half her day praying in that convent not far from campus and the other half working at the monastery bakery. What she saw immediately with her trained eye and with the kind heart that had taken her into a profession where she could help and heal, was the soul of a woman who had yet to learn how to live.
For months Carolyn had pursued a relationship with Cynthia. She had come to look forward to their chance meetings, which she actually planned with great effort once she figured out Cynthia's routine. She quickly became captivated by her new friend's sincerity, by her devotion, by the simplicity that marked every hour of her day. Inside of her own hectic heart, Carolyn was also smart enough to know that she could learn many, many things from Sister Cynthia that were not obvious on the surface.