The Elegant Gathering of White Snows

by Kris Radish

  First Cynthia lay on the floor, feeling the cool wood under her buttocks and on her bare arms and legs. She rotated her head at her neck and began moving—first one shoulder and then the next, then her elbows and lower arms and then her hands, her hips, her knees and legs, until she was dancing, dancing, while lying on the floor. Without willing it to happen, without knowing that she was actually doing it, Cynthia rose from the floor and opened her eyes.

  She saw for the first time in thirty years that she had grown into a woman and that she was a dancer. She was a dancer.

  While the morning simmered in its beginnings and while Carolyn rolled off her right hip, dressed, and prepared to walk herself to that dance studio, Sister Cynthia danced. She placed her hands on the mirrors and she looked into her own eyes and she glided across the floor and then back stepped, with the music, always with the music, until she saw herself from a distance and could not have recognized even her own eyes, her own smile.

  She danced while Carolyn kissed her husband good-bye and then dropped her son at orchestra practice and found a place to park in front of the recital hall building. She danced for an hour, and then another hour. Pools of sweat soaked through the silky costume material and then fell in wild drops onto the floor.

  Out in her car, Carolyn saw the first student crossing the grassy field that separated the recital hall from the engineering department. She knew the secret she shared with Cynthia had come to fruition, and with a sigh of contentment, she walked into the dance building.

  Even through the soundproof walls, she could hear the music. She stopped at the door, resting her head on her hand and her hand on the door for just a minute. Then she knocked. Before Sister Cynthia skidded over to the door, knowing full well who had come, she stopped and prayed. She offered a thank-you prayer to the God she loved and to the walkers, to the Wisconsin walkers.

  Then Cynthia opened the door, welcomed Carolyn into the music, and then both of them were dancing, dancing, dancing.

  New Woman Magazine, June 23, 1997

  Editor's note—For full story and accompanying sidebars, check New Woman website.

  FORGET TRADITION—WOMEN ARE

  DESIGNING “NEW” LIVES

  By Rebecca Monley

  The female customers in St. Mary's Bordeaux, a chic New York wine bar, were not talking about their promotions, the latest fashions from the West Side, who got married during the Christmas holidays, or where their stock portfolios were hovering last Friday night. The conversation was more serious than that. “Sex and the City” this was not. Definitely not.

  “I don't care if I ever get married,” said Tracy Brenks, a investment banker from Manhattan who is thirty-seven, has never been married, and says she's happy, fulfilled and unwilling to settle—for anything. “I like to give people who gasp when I say I don't care about getting married what I call The Three-Minute Test. Quick, in three minutes give me the names of three or four happily married couples. I rarely find anyone who can identify more than couple number one.”

  Brenks and her pals at St. Mary's may be onto something. The test is a killer, and Suzanne Hamlin, forty-one, a news writer for New Wisdom magazine and a regular at the bar's Friday “women only” nights, says she made a decision when she was in her twenties to stay single and be and do what she wants. Hamlin is also a mother who says the rules society laid out for everyone to follow centuries ago need not be followed.

  “How dare anyone tell me that I have to get married and live in a house in the suburbs and be and look like everyone else,” said Hamlin. “I have a full life, fabulous friends, a family and I have a career that keeps me abreast of what is happening all over the world. If everyone learned to be happy alone before they rush out to grab on to someone else, the world would be a very amazing place.”

  Brenks and Hamlin are not alone in their views about how to live life, but Dr. Lynn Evans, a clinical psychologist with the Women's Medical Center in Los Angeles, said being true to who you are is no easier now than it was when our mothers were watching June Cleaver prepare dinner for Ward, Wally and the Beave.

  “Even with all the strides we have taken as women and even with all the choices that are now available to women—that doesn't mean living how you want to live is going to be easy,” said Evans. “For example, it takes great courage for a married woman to divorce and decide to live her life as a lesbian, or for a single woman to decide to have a baby without a life partner, or for a woman to simply declare that she is staying single because she wants to stay single.”

  While Evans and other relationship experts, including Dr. Kathrine Harris, a psychiatrist and author of What Did You Say I Can't Do?, agree that times have changed, they also agree that society still outlines a fairly conventional lifestyle that has not altered much during the past few decades.

  “Women are living a variety of lifestyles throughout this country and the world, but that doesn't mean it's easy or simple,” said Harris. “It's damned hard to follow your heart, to wake up every morning and know that you are true to who you are, and not to tremble when you think of what you might face when you open your door.”

  But Harris said it's women like Corissa Sanchez, thirty-six, a secretary from Santa Fe, New Mexico, who are helping to shatter the rules and regulations of life that seem to have been authored in the Dark Ages. Sanchez, the mother of two, married twice, divorced twice, remained single for five years and is now in a long-term relationship with another woman. She said her family at first disowned her for divorcing, then again for being involved with a woman, but now they have changed their minds.

  “We don't all find out who we are the day we turn twenty-two or twenty-six,” said Sanchez, who also runs a domestic violence program, teaches homeless men how to read, and is attending graduate school. “I am not the same woman I was twenty years ago, and I won't be the same woman I am now in ten years, or even in a month.”

  —30—

  The Elegant Gathering: Susan

  There were times, just days ago, when I would stand in front of the mirror in the tiny bathroom just off the kitchen, push my hips against the side of the counter and look into my own eyes—wondering just who in the world I was looking at. Knowing in that same instant that somehow, somewhere along the road of my life I have lost myself. I have misplaced my soul, my heart, the entire direction of my being.

  Truth be told, I am so embarrassed and sad that I am pregnant and that I have let all those years of my life slip away that it would be so easy for me to run away and hide and never come back. Thankfully my friends have held me up and carried me across my own kitchen floor to these glorious days on the road. They have really saved me by giving me hope and unconditional love. Now, it's my turn, my turn to put my life back together.

  I really don't know what happened to me. I don't know why I married the wrong man, and then never had the courage to leave. I don't know why I picked up with another man just because he was good in bed. I could guess at all these answers, and in the end my decisions would all come back to me, and that is the only truth I know for sure. Whatever has happened to me has been my own doing.

  This baby that I had no business creating has brought me to this decision and the true test of what I really need to do with my life. Is it too late? Is it ever too late for any of us to start over and try again? My life is a question, or it has been a question, and the end to all of that feels so close. As close as anything I have ever held to my heart.

  Still there is no clear moment in my head after all these days of thinking and walking and talking that I know for sure where my heart scattered.

  I suppose now, now that I know about the world and about sorrow, about the fact that not all of us can control who and how we love, I suppose I could have known even then that I was marrying a man who would always be looking over his shoulder for something or someone better.

  God almighty, we were young. I was nineteen and John was barely twenty, and we were both desperate for something. We thought that must have b
een each other. We had been friends all through grade school and high school, and then into those first few years of college. Friends, but not close enough even then. “I just need you,” he told me over and over again. “Please, please marry me.”

  John never did say that he loved me but in my heart, my unwise and young and very tender heart, I had loved him for forever. So I said yes, and we literally got up from the floor of his apartment and walked downtown and got married. It took about twenty minutes. Then as quick as you can close a door or turn a page or change directions on a highway, the course of my own life was moved in a way that I could never have imagined all those years ago.

  The story is much simpler than it might seem now. Now that I have turned down a different road and then again onto this highway that has seemed like heaven to me this past week. It has been hard, especially this last day or so, to think that something like this, this walking and talking and these precious moments, was always there for the having . . . always right outside my door, and I never once thought to grab it up and run for the hills. But I have learned in these days to stop lingering on what could have been and to simply head for what I need now.

  What's whacked is that John did love me, and I'm sure in his own perverted way, he probably still does love me. Mostly because we are connected by our children, by the son and daughter who came so quickly I barely had time to stop and recall how they were conceived. Some of my friends laugh when I say that at least John was a good father. They laugh because he was in and out of our lives so much they can't imagine how it worked, and how my children ended up with college scholarships and goals in their lives.

  Some of that came from me, which is hard to believe and absolutely hilarious at this very minute. I just had this conversation with Sandy last night as we sat by the fire and watched the stars come out, one by one, popping into view like fireworks. Each one a bigger surprise than the next one.

  “That's the funny part,” Sandy said. “That your kids have survived all of this and are doing so well in school. I suppose it says something about John that he helps them and they have a relationship.”

  “Yeah, but then there is me.”

  “Well, think about it. Here you are, just a young woman really, pregnant, recently unemployed, a missing husband, and you are on the lam with a bunch of broads who could all be committed.”

  “It does sound pretty ridiculous, doesn't it?”

  “Well, my God, in some countries they would take you away, and we'd never see you again.”

  “I'd put up a hell of a fight.”

  “That's what you should have done years ago, honey.”

  “But I couldn't. I had those kids, and I always thought of that old joke when the minister asks the ninety-year-old couple why they are getting a divorce after all those years and the woman says, ‘We were waiting for the kids to die.'”

  “What about you, though? Didn't you have a right to something?”

  “Not then. But now they're grown, it's my turn. That's what I think. Now I can do something about the rest of my life. Before this, really, how strange this sounds, but I didn't want or need anything else.”

  Sandy turned away then because I know our lives have not been that dissimilar. I know that she has done some of the same things, and that she has been in her own holding pattern.

  “I tried,” I said softly, putting my hand across her warm back. “That's how I got pregnant. I tried to carve out some little piece of happiness. For me that obviously meant a piece of ass and look where that got me.”

  Sandy turned back toward me. Her eyes were soft and kind, and she pulled me against her shoulder.

  “People get pissed off when you talk about a baby as being an accident. But some babies are accidents, and I know you will have to deal with all of that in your own time and in your own inimitable ‘Susan' sort of way. But it wasn't wrong to find some comfort in his arms. People get so whacked out about sex. Sex can just be sex. People do it all the time. Half the women in the world who are screwing right now are for sure not doing it out of love.”

  “Next time, next time I'm going to pick someone with a bigger penis, though,” I said, smiling, waiting for her reaction.

  “Oh, that's my girl! How about two men at once? Or hey, how about two men, a dog, four chickens and I'll come too.”

  “You get the chickens and you are on.”

  It felt so wonderful to laugh, to make fun of our ridiculous predicaments, the troubles we have caused ourselves. I know I can't erase all those years behind me and really, I wouldn't want to. I could have made better choices, could have changed the course of my life a long time ago, but I didn't. And really, it wasn't all horrible.

  For a time, John and I did live like what half the world would consider a normal couple. We both continued to go to school, and I must have gotten pregnant about the third time we had sex. I stayed in school, and John actually worked three jobs so that we could both try and finish our degrees. But that's also how he discovered the power of his little penis. I'm certain he started fooling around when I was pregnant the first time, because the young girl he worked with at the restaurant started calling the house on a regular basis, constantly drove past our apartment, and left things like her underwear and bra in our car.

  That was just the beginning. Then the baby came, and John was crazy about Erin. He finished school and started working, and I have no idea about the others, how many there might have been because those were the years of kids and John anchoring his career track and me taking three years of night classes to become an RN.

  People drift apart all the time. We were so young when we married, and I cannot say that it was a ridiculous thing to marry a friend, to have two terrific children, to stay around month after month when the man I married traveled and screwed his way from one end of the country to the next. Most of the time it was enough for me to pull open the refrigerator and find food, to see my children sleeping in their beds at night, to know that someone would pay the light bill.

  One Christmas, maybe nine years ago, John staggered in way too late for him to even offer up an excuse about work or meetings or the guys from the club. Maybe it was because of the holidays, or maybe I was exhausted from that year's round of the flu and bronchitis, or maybe my part-time job at the nursing home had me thinking about all those old people who were dying in my arms week after week. But I waited up for him and without knowing it, we came to a crossroads in our relationship that night.

  I saw changes in John more clearly than ever before. He had filled out during those years. His wavy brown hair had been trimmed back, his eyes had deepened and darkened. His once thin face had filled in, and it was obvious that he had been spending time working out when he should have been selling computer programs. Some people might be shocked to think that I wanted to make love to him one last time, wanted to lie next to the father of my semi-abandoned children, the man who had all but deserted me and who had most likely slept with numerous other women.

  Believe me, he was surprised too when I met him at the door, slipped my hand through his arm, and asked him to come upstairs with me. His puzzled look was almost as entertaining as the sex that followed. Of course I made him shower off the scent of whomever he had been with the last few hours, and of course it was not easy for this almost middle-aged man to strike up his own fire after what he must have just gone through. But he put up a hell of a front.

  In the end, the last time I ever touched or made love to my husband was also the night I asked him to leave and never come back. I rolled off of him, swept a sheet off the top of the pile of bedcovers and then pulled my knees up to my chest. “John, I think you should just leave now. We can sort out everything else down the road a bit.”

  “What?” Astonished, he rose up on his elbows.

  “You're rarely here, you have girlfriends all over the place, the kids will be out of high school in a few years. Really, John, we should both get on with our separate lives.”

  “But, I . . . the kids
and . . .”

  “We don't have to get divorced, but I will need money right now. The deal is, you don't need us, John, you haven't really needed me for at least, what, seventeen years or so?”

  John slumped back, totally deflated, as if he had been stuck with a large pin. I couldn't even imagine what was going through his mind, because at that point I had absolutely no idea how his mind worked.

  “John,” I said quietly. “It doesn't have to be such a big deal. I'll just tell the kids we're separated, and things will pretty much go on the way they have been.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. What will you do?”

  “I'll do what I've been doing since the day I married you. I'll take care of the kids and the house and the bills. Then I'll go to work for a few hours, I'll get up and do the same thing all over again.”

  Unfortunately the getting on with my life never quite seemed to happen. John didn't really ever move out, but he hopped from one friend's house to the next and managed to spend some nights when he was in town on the living room couch. The kids didn't seem to care that we were sort of separated because they had never seen us together much anyway. As the rest of the world and the people around me headed in one direction or another, I pretty much stood right there treading water.

  One year quickly slipped into another, and there never seemed time enough for me to conceive what I wanted or where I should be or what would happen when the kids left for school, or just left. I barely looked at myself in the mirror, had absolutely no idea that anyone at all would find me attractive, and when Don slipped into my life and made a pass at me, I simply fell into his arms because it felt good to have someone touch me.