by Kris Radish
Even Elizabeth looks as if she has been thrown together in a hurry by a group of crazed orphans. Her reddish, blackish, brownish hair is streaked with somewhat awkward strands of gray the color of the sky following a tornado and it always lies in a tangled mass on top of her head. In the sixteen years I have known her I have never seen her unpin it but I have imagined what it must look like. Birds unnested. Swallows rising from the crown of her hair in astonishment for the first time since their birth. Airplanes having to find a new landing strip. Lost explorers surfacing for the first time in decades. Amelia Earhart pushing her own unkempt trusses from her head and announcing, “I told that drunk to make sure we had enough gas.”
This beautiful woman named Elizabeth has a wild kindness about her that attracts every woman in town and every man for a ten-thousand-mile radius. Women who get off of buses downtown with nothing but hope in their eyes have found their way to her doorstep. Once a car full of gypsies broke down in front of her house and before dinner they had a tent set up in her backyard and a hundred people stopped by for a juggling show. Last year I met a perfectly normal-looking man who was asking every person he met on the street, “Could you please tell me if Elizabeth Rapalla lives near here?” Her three sons, who never knew their three separate fathers, are allowed to dream and dance and live as if there are no rules. These boy-men never speed, are unfailingly polite, always seem to make the perfect choice and they treat their mother like the Queen that she is. They are scholars, athletes, gentle souls of the universe—and some of the finest young men I think I could ever know.
There are men in Bosnia and Cincinnati, and three that I know of in New York, who would kill and rob and steal just to be able to sit and look into Elizabeth's eyes for five minutes. She has not lived with a man or a woman since I have known her but there is no way to keep track of her lovers, the people who love her, the people who want to love her. She has a degree in economics and works as an administrator for a huge national nonprofit organization that gives money to quiet geniuses, poets who live in trailers, women who are researching a cure for breast cancer on a shoestring and at least one group of doctors who performs abortions for young girls and women who have been raped.
She also tells fortunes. Elizabeth can simply touch your hand, look into your eyes, place her fingers against the side of your pulsing temples and tell you why you turned left instead of right and to give that guy on the fourth floor a second chance. I have driven by her house at midnight, only to see her sitting right in the center of her front window holding the hand of the local bank president. A week later there was a priest sitting there and then a woman who was at least eighty years old was in the same spot just a day later. Men, women, teenagers—everyone, it seems, ends up sitting in Elizabeth's kitchen or pushing close to her around the old wooden table by her front window. She has a gift for reading the lines in our faces and hands that we refuse to see. It is a gift, and a gift that makes her so much extra money that she supports at least three unwed mothers I know of and countless other causes and people and places that think of her as the goddess that she is and will always be.
Today, she is my goddess. We have pushed aside plates and what looks like a dish of dog food, three cigars and some bright pink socks so we can sit at her kitchen table. I am helpless. A widow. A woman who is about to face a future that is almost as uncertain as the past she has just witnessed throbbing on her own sweat-saturated bedspread.
“Sweetheart,” Elizabeth says, pushing back strands of my tangled hair and lightly running her fingers across my cheek. “This is quite a day for you.”
“I just went home to find the files from the Brimley case and I heard this noise . . .”
Elizabeth listens intently. Her gorgeous eyes are focused on my own eyes, and she does not let go of them. I keep talking but a part of me holds her and our eyes are locked and there is no one else in the world but us and I cannot stop talking. Falling. I am falling and I think that if I talk, Elizabeth will hold me up and I will be just fine.
Finally, she stops me when I begin telling her about the lovely ankles of the woman who was on top of my husband. She finds the details unnecessary, and perhaps she is right, but I want to keep talking ever after I sit down because if I stop talking I will fall off of the chair and hit my head on the edge of the table and I will be in a coma for the rest of my life and who will finish raising my beautiful, almost-grown, sometimes smart-ass teenage daughter? Who will tend to the flighty and occasional needs of my son, who is cruising through life fairly estranged from his family?
“You look like shit. Should I slap you?”
This is what Elizabeth does. She says something that on a regular day would make most people say, “What the hell? Are you nuts, lady?” But on the day she chooses to say it, anything and everything she says sounds perfect. “Can I stick pins in your eyes?” “Certainly.” “If I get up and leave the room and come back with a whip, would it be okay if you let me flog you fifty-six times?” “Oh, sure.” “When I count to ten I want you to disrobe and to tell me sixteen good things about the way your body looks, as we are sitting in full view of ten thousand members of the United States Air Force.” “Sounds good to me.”
“Sure.”
That is what I say because a small, very small—about the size of a baby's buggar small—part of my mind knows that she knows this is exactly what I need.
Elizabeth slaps me. Hard. The sting of her hand against my face and the feel of her fingers, six rings and knuckles the size of marbles hitting the bone underneath make me cry. My tears start slowly and then build to a crescendo and all the time Elizabeth is simply sitting there as if she is waiting for a train to stop so she can get on. The very hand she has used to bring me back from my wanting to watch moments is now wrapped around my wrist. It is my anchor. I need an anchor. Any moment now I am about to become undone and float out to sea, where I will surely die while a gaggle of seagulls peck out my eyes. My body is at the table and I am standing against the refrigerator with my arms crossed against my breasts and I am going to watch myself fall into pieces and descend into a cavern of seemingly hopeless resignation.
Elizabeth wills me to fall with those huge eyes of hers. Her eyes are swimming in a sea of champagne, a liquid so golden that it defies description. Her head, wrapped in a frayed red bandanna, looks as if it is on fire, and I fall into her, hoping that both of us will sink together to the bottom of this cold, dark place where we can breathe water and kick against sand that has never seen human flesh. I cannot bear to be alone, and in the morning when I see the marks my fingers have left on her arm I will realize how desperate I have become in such a short period of time.
She does catch me, whispering in sonnets that come from a poetess I will soon come to love:
“my heart
on pause
the electrifying truth
the reality
of my spare breath
beating its wings
against
my stilled soul . . .
waking slowly now
i can learn
to dance
naked
and swift
music
moving
like
the wild song of summer . . .
i will
dance naked
when i first
learn
to walk . . .”
Her own breath is a warm shower against my face and we have fallen to the floor and Elizabeth is finishing the poem, but I can no longer hear the words. We are swimming on the bottom of that sea and I have something bottled up so deep inside of me that I am terrified to let it go. The world would flood and thousands of people would die and there would be no space for walking and sitting and only water. This something bottled up in me is a solid block that is unmovable. It is lodged halfway between my chest and my throat and I know that it will take major surgery and thousands of plunges into the depths of this ocean to dislodge it from a place that has wra
pped its hands and feet and mouth around the core of who I am and what this thing has made me.
We rock on the floor until my sobs surrender. The well is not dry but it is tired, and Elizabeth begins whispering into the side of my face. Her words travel like tiny spiders into the web of my hair and then to my ears.
“Oh, sweetie, you have so many places to go, so much to learn, so many people to cradle in your own arms.”
She stops in between each proclamation, and I cannot move. It is only possible to listen and nothing else. Listen. I am not really alive. My flesh is warm and soft but my spirit, the heart of who I am and may someday become, is a frozen block of ice the size of Alabama. If I move my hand to the center of my chest, I feel the frozen walls of caverns as deep as forever. I am freezing. Cold as hell. Elizabeth goes on and I listen because I am searching for a warm spot, just a whiff of her breath on my face.
“This day is a gift,” Elizabeth tells me in that husky prophetess voice of hers. “You cannot see it that way now, Meg. It will take you a while—but not as long as it took you to get to this place. You will see mountains explode and birds fly without wings. In weeks you will see colors you never knew existed and the sides of buildings will call your name.”
Once, she shifts her hip against my back and I remember, with a touch of reality, that she once fell and broke her leg while she was parasailing in the Caribbean. She spoke of it only once. Never limps. Ignores the occasional pain that I imagine remains as sharp as a knife rubbing up against the inside of her bony spine. The hard floor does not stop her and I move as close against her as I can get and I never want her to stop talking. Her voice is a cradle and I want to be held and rocked and tucked into bed on the back of a soft white summer swan.
“Meggie, we don't have to talk of everything now, but I have to ask you one question. Just one more question.”
“Just one?”
“It's a big one.”
“I'm ready.”
“Why are you crying?”
Tucked away behind years of life that have stacked up and blocked out the sun and my old list of dreams and the way I used to take my checkered purple bedspread and fall asleep in the tall grass behind my grandma's old house in the country is a memory of what I really wanted. This memory flashes to the front of my mind and for a second it seems as fresh and young as it did when I was sixteen and the world stretched in front of me—endless and possible, wild, free and so forever. I want to tell Elizabeth this but I am afraid. I have been afraid for so long that I cannot utter a word. So afraid that years of my life have been frozen in a parade of sameness and routine.
She strokes the side of my face and pushes my hair behind my ears and she asks me again and then again, “Why are you crying? Why are you crying?”
“It's not because of Bob,” I say.
I move up onto my side so that we are facing each other and lying in parallel lines on a floor that has seen some of the most interesting feet ever created. Elizabeth is so wise that I imagine she knows what I need to say and do and feel, but she remains silent, and then I tell her what she already knows.
“It isn't about the watching or Bob or infidelity or marriage or any goddamn thing.”
Elizabeth smiles and touches my hair again. I am frightened, scared, terrified and exhausted at the mere thought of what lies ahead, and I want to crawl under the kitchen table and stay there for ten years. Elizabeth's visitors could drop me food and gently place glasses of milk and water at the edges of their chairs. Life would be simple—hard, but simple.
“More?” she asks, stretching her legs. “Tell me more and then we will move to a comfortable spot and you can talk or cry or yell or do anything you want all night long.”
“It's me,” I say slowly, holding each word in my mouth and then tossing them around with my tongue and lips before I let them go into Elizabeth's ears. “The crying is just for me and there are miles of rivers and lakes and oceans dammed up behind this pseudo-life that has claimed me. Miles and miles.”
“Ahh . . . ,” Elizabeth says, smiling as wide as a river herself. “And so it begins.”
“It begins, Elizabeth, and I have never been so terrified in my entire life. I am frightened and scared and I don't know how to begin. I don't know which foot to put forward or how to turn on the car or move my arm. How did I regress like this, Lizzie? How in the hell did this happen?”
She closes her eyes and pulls some Magic from her mind. I want to crawl inside that space behind her eyes and see how this works, but I am too scared for even that, too scared for anything.
“Everything is so simple. Now, from this moment on you will do what you have to do, what you must do, by remembering that we have just the present. Just now. You must settle into the idea of change and you can only do that one moment at a time. There is no grand plan except the one you create, and you have lost your sense of creation, oh beautiful Meggie. It is not that far of a reach to touch what you need, what you might remember, because here you are and there are hundreds and thousands of women who will never slide to the floor like this and surrender. Those women will cascade through one day after another with a simple wish of happiness that they will never be bold enough to find.”
“Elizabeth, I am so damn tired. I am so tired.”
“I know, sweetie, I know.”
Somehow we manage to get off the floor and she drags me into the living room that is such a delightful garden of books and flowers and rocks and sticks and stones that I feel a lightness soar through my weary bones. My tiredness is a weight that I have dragged with me for so long, it is hard to move. Elizabeth has a futon that flips out into a bed in three seconds and she tells me to stretch out, which I do without hesitation. I quickly sink into another world. A world where there are thick blankets colored in purple and red. A world that smells of patchouli and has glasses on every table and towels lying in plush piles near the bathtub. A world where the door is not locked and where people come and go and leave notes of love and passion on the kitchen table. A world where anyone who enters can say and feel and be and do whatever they want and where you can sit on the roof and read a book at midnight, wear shorts when it snows or plan your outdoor exercise routines for only the days when the weather is bad, because you like it that way.
A world of passion and light. That is what I crave. No schedules or routines that mix politely with the plans of the people in your life who have no consideration for what you need and want. A world where someone, just once, says, “What can I do for you?”
Elizabeth comes back with two martini glasses that are about the size of a Miami cruise ship. She orders me to drink and sets down a pitcher of liquid that I know will ignite the lining of my stomach and send me into a place of total confession and exotic boldness. Then she lies next to me and asks me what I thought about while she was gone.
“Someone saying just once, ‘What can I do for you?'”
“Oh, no, this is where you missed the boat and plane and the whole damn train. It's not them. It has nothing to do with them and everything to do with you.”
“What?”
Elizabeth sets down her glass and molds her hands around mine, which are glued to the stem of my own martini glass. She squeezes me so hard that I am terrified I will drop some of this liquid gold—some of my salvation, the ribbons of diamonds that I will use to ignite me so I can take some kind of step forward.
“We make our own choices every single moment. Happy or sad. Married or single. Alive or dead. Miserable or content. Successful or not successful. Your life choices have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. How dare you or anyone give away the power to be. Bob and Katie and Shaun don't make you happy. The frigging new car doesn't make you happy, or the house or the job or flying to Paris.”
I am listening but I need another sip. A large sip. She releases me and goes on.
“Bob was pretty happy today. Bravo for Bob. He did something that made him happy, something that he wanted to do. He took care of h
imself.”
“It sure looked that way.”
“When was the last time you did something that made you happy? When?”
How could I answer this? Women aren't supposed to be happy. We are supposed to save the world and then do the wash, fill out college applications for the kids, order grass seed and walk to the store in a snowstorm for more milk. We burned our frigging bras, saved a few whales and a fraction of the environment and then we did the damn ironing while the guys barbecued. Nothing seems to have changed in a hundred years. I can't even remember the last time I thought about the mere possibility of being happy.
“Jesus, Elizabeth . . .”
“Women have blown it big-time,” she answers for me. “You know now that you have to start over, don't you? You have to learn how to crawl and then walk and then run and then fly. What the hell were you thinking giving yourself away like that?”
She is angry, just a little angry, because Elizabeth never gets angry like most people get angry. Her skin flushes just a bit. She is an amazement, and I drink my martini, which tastes like Christmas—a touch of evergreen and mint, one snowflake and an olive laced with gold, incense and Santa's garter belt—and pour another one, and I suddenly feel more exhausted than I ever have in my entire life. I need to make sure my daughter, Katie, is safe and I have to call in to work and there is Bob, wild-ass Bob, and then the next fifty years of my life. Half of my life. I have half of my life to live. Oh my God.
“Half of my life,” I say out loud.
“What?”
“I have half of my life floating around out there waiting for me.”
Elizabeth doesn't say a word but I notice her eyes light up a notch and a breath of something wild leaves her chest. She listens and I ramble and ramble and sip and sip again and I see something, not very clearly, something like a ship so far away you wonder if it isn't the wine or the bend of the horizon or the past meeting the future right there where your eyes happen to be resting for that one second. I see a glimpse of something moving so slowly, I imagine I could catch it if I barely crawled, but I cannot bear yet to reach out and touch it or see it or understand what it is. Please pass a baby blanket.