by Jo Barney
“Money,” Madge guessed, raising a glass. “Right?”
She knew her friends didn’t believe her when she denied it. How could she explain the feelings of safety and wholeness she felt with him, in his home, in his hands. “He’s a nice man,” she answered.
“I’d like that,” Lou murmured. ”Good for you,” and Jackie was off the hook. She had decided not to worry about Fred for a couple of days, and when she got home, she found him in his pajamas, three days in his pajamas, his bed a smelly heap, his pajamas stiff with shit. His eyes brimmed as he told her that Ron had dropped by, got really angry, said he’d be calling her. “Mother, I’m sorry,” he said.
That’s when she had hired the caretakers. Mrs. Schnitzer came in at seven a.m. Bella Blue took over from four until twelve. Jackie made sure she was home every night, and most of the days, once she decided she wouldn’t go crazy in this house now bristling with oxygen tanks, elevated toilets, bars on every slant and step, and a white plastic seat in the shower.
“Come sleep with me,” Fred begged, and she would climb onto the narrow hospital bed and curl in on him. And her hands would hold him until he throbbed and sighed.
She and Fred and the caretakers maintained for a while, some days full of laughter, others darkly silent, Fred beyond weeping now. One night he dropped off to sleep at seven-thirty, his tape running on and on until she had pushed the machine’s button to silence it, and then she and Bella Blue leaned back in the big chairs in the den glad for the chance not think about diapers and pills. Jackie had gotten to like Bella, after she got over being intimidated by the earring in her eyebrow, and Bella was describing her brother’s addiction to performance art, demonstrating in the middle of the Persian rug his facial gyrations and body jerks as a cactus, when Ron and another man came through the door, waving a flight of papers. The fact that Jackie had removed her jeans so that she could sit crisscross applesauce during the performance did not help, as he took in the scene and said, “For this I’m paying $4000 a month?” threw the Medicare papers at Jackie, and stormed out. But not before the stranger pulled out a digital camera and snapped it at her and at Bella, who stayed in character, tall and unmoving as a cactus, and was, like Jackie, a little drunk.
Three days later, Fred was disappeared, like the Argentinians Jackie’d read about in Newsweek. Gone with scarcely a trace.
* * *
Didn’t mean I wasn’t taking care of Fred, that I didn’t care about him, that I don’t still care for him. She turns off from Umatilla and heads into Washington, glancing, as the car sways onto the next state highway, at the gold-ringed hand lying on its tanned leg. She grips hard in the ten-to-two position on the wheel.
They stop at a motel on the outskirts of Spokane. Two rooms. And eat a silent burger at Evelyn’s Roadside. It is as if Xavier knows what she has been thinking. Has entered into a prayerful state. Can no longer see her. She falls into bed exhausted and dreams little hopeful dreams.
By the time they roll into St. Rose’s Ranch the next afternoon, Jackie is tired and cranky. Xavier has slept as the car wound its way through the mountains and down through the trees that got squattier as the slopes dried up and became high desert. A hundred miles of heat mirages have preceded them. Her lips are chapped from licking them. Her back aches. Passion for the gently snoring body next to her has taken a back seat to her need for water. She purposely drives over several deep potholes to wake the body up. The gravelly ranch road leads to a cluster of cabins, a large log house, and island of green, and a break from the orange sky. As the car stops, Xavier opens his eyes. “We’re here already?” he says, and Jackie bites her sore lip and tries to smile.
A man, wearing jeans and a soiled T-shirt, walks towards them and holds his arms open to Xavier. “Nigel, Jackie,” Xavier says, and Jackie receives a handshake and her bag is taken from her as she is led to her little wooden cabin. A gray rocking chair on the porch wavers under their footsteps. The door is not locked. Inside, alone, Jackie recognizes the brown blankets and white pillows, the small table with its reading light, the brass crucifix hanging over the kneeling bench. A rag rug at the side of the bed softens the earnest piety of the room just as it did years before on her first visit. As she had then, she comes to this place at the end of a marriage. She lies down on the rough blanket and closes her eyes. She tries to imagine what it would be like to be at peace, no churnings, no stomach-twisting memories, no needs and strivings to meet them. She allows herself to drift off.
“God, I thought you were dead.” A voice yanks her out of her nap. “Get your suit on. The river is waiting for us.”
For a moment, Jackie wonders if she is dead, and then the churnings and strivings return, her stomach knots up in its familiar fashion, and she knows she’s not. She opens her eyes and sees Xavier at her door, a towel draped around his neck.
Each day has its schedule: mass, breakfast, chores, two hours of contemplation and silence, lunch, two hours for recreation which means swimming or a lively, disorganized game of softball, a 4:00 prayer session, then dinner and music in the chapel. Each evening ends with a quiet walk back to their cabins, Xavier touching her arm as he talks about the book he is reading or a thought he has had during the quiet time.
At first, the silent hours find Jackie lying on her bed reading one of the novels she has brought along, or massaging her hands, or trying a few yoga positions to take the kinks out of her still-sore lower back. She naps, and once she tries out the kneeler, but she is empty of prayer, her mind darting about like the hummingbird outside her door, snatching at bits of thoughts. On the third day, she finds the notepad in the bureau drawer where she has finally unloaded her suitcase. It occurs to her that she needs to corral these thoughts, get them in some sort of order. Leaning back on her pillow, the headboard creaking a little as she gets herself comfortable, she puts pen to paper and the first words that surface surprise her. “I Am A Strong Woman.”
Well, I am, really, if you don’t count my swollen knuckles. Her legs, only a little scaly, are as firm as they were when she played girls’ basketball in college. She can still wear strappy tops without camouflaging her upper arms, thanks to the use she has put them to for forty years. Her breasts, suspended at the moment in a taupe lace bra, if not perky, are nicely rounded. She touches her neck, reluctantly fingers the ropey skin has begun to droop below her chin. She’s always had a strong chin, a little like a man. Comely, Fred said. Her hair is strong too, white at the temples, a wiry black cap curling above her forehead, thicker than it had ever been as a young woman. She runs her tongue over her solid molars and winces little as she remembers her first sight of Fred’s teeth in the glass next to his sink.
Is that what strong means? The pen moves again. “I was a good mother. Am,” she corrects, thinking of Sally and Madison back at home. And I was a strong, uncomplaining wife to two men during the times they needed me most. She hasn’t thought about Mitch for a long time, how she had supported the three of them for the two years they lived in the steel Quonset hut and he finished graduate school. She had braided hair and sewed smocks for three little girls while he struggled to find a comfortable niche in the bureaucracy of the school system he had joined and didn’t have the courage to leave. She tried not to flinch when he told her he didn’t love her, even as her heart burst one last time with an explosion of love for him. Of course, she figured out later that the cause of the blast was not love but anger, and she got most everything she wanted in the settlement, including their new Chevy.
Maybe strong means brave. Jackie crosses that out. I am a risk taker, she writes. Not necessarily brave. Probably stupid. Maybe Sally gets it from me, a genetic thing, she thinks, remembering their last conversation. Jackie recalls trying to stand on the seat of her two-wheeler and breaking her arm. And the night she skied under a full moon with five boys, crouching low to the ground, icy flicks of snow slamming into her face, she finally rolling to the bottom and into a ski rack, giving herself a concussion. And basking in her bu
ddies’ wide-eyed in admiration as the ambulance doors shut. And the night she accepted the dare of a drinking buddy during a moment of college senioritis and leaped from a second story window of the sorority house onto a rhododendron and into a car waiting for her at the curb. When she limped in the next morning, she was met with the secret handshake and a vow of secrecy from several of her closest sisters who thanked her for the excitement she had brought to the waning weeks of their college life.
However, the broken ankle gave her away, and she spent a few weeks in a cast grounded by the alum advisor to the first floor guest room. Much later, before Mitch left, she roofed their house, roped to the car parked on the street, the neighbors gasping below her and dodging the flying shingles.
As she gets older, though, her risks have become less physical, more emotional. During the time she was divorced, a time she now understands may have been the high point of her life, she went to clubs, the tallest woman in the room, meeting eyes for the thrill of it. She licked body parts she hadn’t known existed. Was licked likewise. She stalked a man or two like the old days in college. She certainly took a risk touching Fred the way she had. This trip with Xavier is a risk. She writes that down, too.
The cowbell clangs, signaling lunch. After the dim quiet of her room, the sunlight stuns her for a moment and then she spots Xavier a few steps in front of her. He smiles, looking beatific as he always does after Silence. She can’t talk to him at lunch because Fay Zanetti, an ex-nun from Idaho, slides in between them at the table. She says she is fascinated that Jackie, a person like Jackie, she means, is taking a retreat. Her questions flutter here and there and Jackie swats them off with I guesses and I’m not sure’s until she gets tired of the inquisition and begins her own.
“Why did you leave the nummery?” she asks. After a moment, Fay lifts her plate and walks outside.
“Your order,” Xavier says. “Why did you leave your order? Nunnery, or as you would have it nummery, is a bit out of date.“ His eyes crinkle at her as he adds, “Let’s go for a hike.”
They head out toward the gray mountains, today garnished with white poofs of irresponsible cloudlets. A lizard crosses the trail and slinks into the sagebrush. The wildflowers are nearly gone by now, the hot summer having settled in, but wisps of blue and yellow still flash at them as they walk by.
Finally! Jackie thinks.
Xavier takes her hand. “I’m worried about you. You’ve been through so much shit, and it’s still going on, will go on.” They continue up the trail, fingers entwined, Jackie’s breath coming in swoops that leave her empty in between. Altitude, probably. Or anticipation.
“Despite your…” and he glances at her body as tall as his, “physicality, you are really a fragile person. I’m not sure how you keep going, this continual stress…” He stops and faces her. “Jackie, I’ve been praying for you, for some sort of resolution that will allow you to finally be yourself.”
Jackie believes she can feel his breath on her face. She wonders if he will kiss her. She tries to inhale without gasping, to be ready. He looks at her as if he is expecting something from her.
“Thank you,” she says, and lowers her eyes, waiting.
He releases her hand and lays an arm over her shoulder. They turn and try to synchronize their steps. She considers wrapping her own arm around Xavier’s waist, but then the trail suddenly erupts into shale, and it is all she can do to keep herself upright as they flail through it, reaching out for handholds at the edge of the path.
“Have to go slow here,” he says.
“Yes.” Jackie answers, and they clutch their ways from rock to rock for the next sixty feet.
The shaley patch gives her time to collect herself. Xavier says he is praying for her, not for her. Talk about a slippery slopes—this was indeed a risk-taking situation.
“Do you ever take risks, Xavier?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I suppose so, depending on what kind of risk you’re talking about. I’m not a physical person, never have been. I‘ve had my moments of taking risks with my thinking. I don’t like what my church expects, and doesn’t expect, of women. I guess that’s risky. Is that what you mean?”
No, it isn’t what she means. And she is beginning to feel a flare of resentment that he thinks of her as fragile. Just because she‘s in a mess, that makes her fragile? So does a life of tranquility and three prayer sessions a day make one invincible?
“A person can be in trouble and still be strong, Xavier,” she says, and she surges ahead despite having to breathe through her mouth.
They don’t talk much after that, and on the way back, she slides down the shale on her seat despite his warnings that she might not be able to stop.
That evening she walks back from vespers with Fay who confesses that an affair with a priest has unloosed them both from the fold and that she will be married to him in two weeks. This retreat is intended to reorganize her understanding of how God feels about sex. She, herself, is tired of feeling guilty about it. She wants to get on with her life.
That night Jackie opens her notebook and lists the ways she can get on with her life. The first is to forget Xavier. She can’t think of a second. After twenty years of enjoying the fizz of risk her priest offers, she is beginning to see that that’s all it is—fizz.
She needs something more. Jackie slips off the bed and kneels at the wooden bench. “Help me figure out what that is,” she says to the pine wall in front of her. A cool blanket of quiet falls over her and she doesn’t disturb it until a cramp in her left knee forces her to stand. Out on the porch, she eases herself into the old rocker and closes her eyes.
And have you figured it out, Jackie?
I so want to know that you discovered in that old rocker the secret to your next life and are getting on with it. You are a brave, exciting woman, and I have loved taking risks with you, from the sidelines, of course. You make me laugh and wonder at the possibilities waiting us, if we just reach out to them. M
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sunday Morning: Choppy Seas
Jackie
“Shit.” The pages are scattered all over the bed, the last one hovering on her chest. Madge always thought she knew it all, the way she’d psychoanalyze everything everyone said so that a person sometimes didn’t want to say anything, but of course, Jackie always did, which got her into hot water more than once. Like, why did she talk about Xavier the last time the group got together? And the painter before that, along with the body worker. She could have kept them all a secret. No, she couldn’t have. She isn’t good at secrets. Hadn’t few months ago she spilled the beans about her son-in-law divorcing her in an email to these friends and a couple more beans? About the retreat?
Even about the Gameboy? She flips back to the part about being strong, a risk taker. She is glad Madge saw her that way because Jackie is getting a glimmer of herself like that, too, especially when she remembers her last night in Montana. That’s what she’ll tell them about tonight, in the candlelight.
Time for a walk to the beach store. She’ll need wine to finish her story. They all will.
Jackie zips up her parka and heads out to get the candles for whatever Lou has planned for the evening. Their four sets of footprints from Friday are gone, of course, wiped out by the tides, as is the trail the three of them left behind the next morning. A barefooted man and his dog saunter ahead of her leaving a new path to follow, wavelets already softening the edges of their steps.
The old footsteps are not so easily erased, in Jackie’s memory at least. She follows the ocean-puddled trail of man and dog and finds herself walking past the access path to the store. It doesn’t matter. Candles aren’t important right now. Threads are, getting free of them, and she wants to keep on thinking about them for a while, about how she and Xavier have gotten unsnagged, a break that left another hole in the fabric of her life, but a mendable one.
* * *
The days in Montana had been peaceful, or as peaceful as they could be for
Jackie. She read and walked and talked with Xavier and wrote in a journal she had begun to keep. She liked the way his hand touched hers when they hiked, the way he looked at her when he said goodnight. But she began to notice that being with Xavier so much allowed her to examine their relationship, what it meant. He was a friend, of course, and she had often wished for even more, but vague dissatisfaction, annoyance, resentment, actually, was beginning to darken her view of him. It felt like the disappointment that sometimes comes at the end of a party. Or, she thought, in the last days of a marriage.
To test these feelings, she listed the things she didn’t like about him, the way he always thought he had the right answer, his righteous voice when he gave it, strained, emerging from somewhere high behind his nose, the rise of his eyebrows that let her know she had just said something dumb. By the fifth day, during quiet time, she had decided that she had to stop fantasizing about him, to face the facts, to accept that he would never love her and that she probably didn’t love him as she once thought she did. She wrote all this in her journal and knew it was true. Writing those words made her feel as if she was beginning to morph into a new Jackie. No longer would she anguish over a man, she wrote, even a holy one. Especially a holy one, she amended.
Pleased with herself, she had gone out onto the porch, eased herself into the old rocker, and closed her eyes. Which is why she was caught unawares when she opened them at the sound of the evening’s last cowbell and found Xavier standing on the path. She threw an arm over her nightgowned chest and said, “What?”
“I shouldn’t be here,” he answered.
“Right,” she said. Shit. Isn’t this always the way, she thought. You make up your mind and then…Jackie waited, trying to breathe.
He lowered himself onto the wooden steps at her feet and dropped his head into his hands. “I’m so screwed up.” He looked smaller, slumped below her like that. A little pathetic, in fact. All the men in her life had presented themselves as somehow overwhelmed. Even the painter with his tattoos and his fumed eyelids. Even Mitch, cowering under the barber’s sheet. Especially Fred, savoring his last ounce of testosterone. If she were religious, she might have thought of herself as a Madonna for these guys, offering an inside track to the place where prayers were answered.