by Kris Radish
The four women speak quietly, outlining what has happened and what needs to happen next. All are professionals who normally operate in a vision of protocol and now the women stretch that protocol miles from their office and hospital doors, over mountains, through rivers and across the very lake that a woman just threw herself into hoping that she would sink to the bottom, be sucked through a drainpipe and into the Shawassee River, then out into Lake Huron where she would drop to the bottom and be lost forever as close to Buffalo as possible.
The woman’s physical injuries, as reported to them by her friends, appear minor. Scrapes, a possible sprained ankle from a major flip over a downed and very waterlogged tree and, most important, an admission from the woman that she has not taken her anti-depressants for three days.
The women do not judge, they do not hesitate, but they immediately appoint Connie as the Marauding Mother in charge, which is definitely not a problem for Connie.
The four Marauding Mothers come together with a plan in less than five minutes and are quickly guided to their patient by the guard who then stands back and lets the professionals take over.
Following a fast physical injury assessment, a handful of Band-Aids, the removal of wet clothes, a move to the patient’s warm trailer and her eager agreement to crawl into her sleeping bag, Connie nods twice to her fellow Marauders and they slip from the trailer and stand guard outside the door. They will stand there all night, the following day, and for a month if that is what is needed.
Connie doesn’t talk at first. Instead, she sits on the bed and slips her hands under the woman’s neck so that her head is resting on Connie’s legs.
“Tell me,” Connie says, rubbing the side of the woman’s face, moving her hands to massage the tight muscles in the back of her head. “It’s fine now, really, talk to me.”
The woman, a medium-sized kindhearted mother of three from a city not far from the very Buffalo she wanted to see from the bottom of the lake, mingles her tale with a deluge of tears that do not stop for the next 35 minutes. Connie runs her fingers from the wet edges of the woman’s eyes, down her cheeks and back again, without hesitation, as she listens to a story she has heard all too often before.
She’s tired and lonely.
The side effects of her medication have buried her libido, her slim waistline, her ambitions for a second career.
Once, maybe just this once, she wanted to be away from the confines of a medication that set her free in some ways but held her captive in so many others.
She felt safe at the festival and then, before she could turn back, before she could retreat into a world that would remain clouded but as sane as she might ever know, it was too late. Just too goddamned late.
“I thought if I could just float away that so many people would be happy and not have to worry about me anymore,” she tells Connie as she curls against her, weeping. “One tiny part of me watched what I was doing, it was as if I was split into two pieces and one piece was watching from the banks of the lake as I went further and further, but the water felt so good and so I ran faster, and then I fell and I guess someone saw me go under.”
Going under, Connie thinks as she listens. Another woman going under. Another woman seduced by the softness of the sea, the waves of life on the other side, the destructive forces of a world that assumes a position and expects you to sit the exact same way it does.
Connie rocks the woman like a baby and cries with her as a friend. Connie Franklin Nixon lifts the weight of a woman’s world into her own arms as she moves the woman—someone who could be any woman—back and forth, shifting and sifting her burdens of life from one side to the next.
“I know, I know,” Connie whispers into the woman’s hair as she bends over her.
“I’m so sorry for all of this mess,” the woman sobs back.
“Don’t be sorry, honey, it is what it is.”
And the woman cries until her own lake is empty and, when Connie asks her if she will take her medicine now, if she will promise to take it every day for the rest of her life, the woman answers, “Yes, I will.” And Connie rolls her over, tucks the sleeping bag up around her shoulders, hands her a glass of water, one magic blue pill, and then leans over to kiss her in the soft tender spot just below her left eye.
Outside Connie makes certain there will be someone with the woman throughout the night, and every second of every day of the week, and then she reports back to the Marauders.
The Marauding Mothers are restless then. They need to decompress and the physical therapist invites them into her trailer where she warms coffee, spreads out crackers and cookies, and agrees with Connie and the surgeon that what happened this evening will not be passed on to the woman’s home territory, the life she left behind, the already thick file that can now be accessed by everyone in the world because there are so few sacred ground rules left, so few moments of privacy, such little compassion for the bent and broken.
“It happens here sometimes like this,” the guide says, her tiny fingers barely able to touch around the coffee cup. “Women feel so safe here, so warmed by the energy that is around them, that they feel as if they can sustain themselves without the armor they have to wear every other day of their lives.”
“Wouldn’t it be something,” the surgeon muses, “if it was really like that, if we could create this kind of funky vacuum where this woman could just float free and not worry? And all the pressures of the real world were not so magnified?”
“It’s like that here in many ways,” Connie shares. “This is my first time here but I can’t remember a place or time when I have ever felt more free, more safe, more relaxed.”
“Well, aren’t you the dildo lady?” The guide laughs. “That would make anyone relaxed and at ease, for crying out loud.”
“Yes,” Connie laughs back. “But I’m so busy making everyone else a satisfied customer that I can’t use the products myself.”
The women dip into a conversation bordered by sex and lust and love. It is just one more link in Connie’s seemingly unending chain of physical love that started with the unexpected discovery of her daughter’s box in the garage. The Marauders hold nothing back. Camouflaged by the last hours of darkness, and with a simple battery-powered light, they play a sophisticated game of Spin the Bottle. They share their sexual pains and joys as if they have known each other for an eternity.
There is a story of lost love, a tale of one woman finding that it really was another woman she loved, Connie’s buried passions, and the common curse of middle age—a long marriage tethered by familiarity, responsibility, and the unnerving idea that lust is something for the children to inherit.
The women laugh, they withhold nothing, and their stories wage like a friendly war as they tackle the menaces of menopause, the miracle of masturbation, and the wonderment of the very bold conversation they are sharing as the caffeine rips through them like a long blade of excellent fire.
“This,” Connie says as she notices a feather of light bending over the far side of the lake, “is exactly what I was talking about, what, three hours ago.”
The women smile because they know too.
“This entire night is a gift,” the surgeon agrees. “In a week I’ll be back yanking out gall bladders and keeping an insane schedule that includes ferrying the kids to day camp, office hours, and a husband who still doesn’t get this shared-chores idea, and I’ll lean back into this night as if it were a Christmas gift that I have wanted my entire life.”
The guide, who in her real life is a stockbroker and a member of the community symphony orchestra, tells them that she has been to the Lakeside Festival for 12 years in a row and that she takes dozens of photographs of the women she meets and strings them together each year into a collage that she keeps right above her computer. She says that she uses the collage as a reminder that she is not alone, that the women who touch her life for this one week each year keep her sane the rest of the year, and that without this female tonic she might go mad.
“It just gives me hope,” she tells the Marauders. “It lets me know that my thoughts and ideas about openness and tolerance and lifestyles are not insane. And I never feel lonely or abandoned or like a freak because I think that all people—not just women—should be who they are, who they know they are in their hearts and souls.”
The women raise their coffee cups after that and they cannot stop. Their stories flow like the underground river that could have pulled the drowning woman to Buffalo. The physical therapist talks about the woman sitting on a rock at the far corner of the hiking trail that circles the entire lake who was totally naked and unafraid to expose her double mastectomy for the first time since she had had the operation five years ago.
“She told me that she had stopped everything significant and meaningful in her life because her body had changed so much,” the therapist tells them. “She said she’d been a dark ball of cancer, a dead end on the highway of her own life even though she has been in remission since the operation, and then 18 women had hiked past her, stopped to say hello, and no one even batted an eye when they saw that she was breastless.”
Breastless.
Depressed.
Suicidal.
Alone.
Divorced.
Married.
A lesbian.
An abandoned heart.
An unclaimed soul.
A woman with excessive sexual desires.
A woman with marginal sexual desires.
It didn’t matter. Hardly anything mattered except the common threads of the bonds that women can share and celebrate openly and without hesitation at a festival. A festival where a woman could throw herself into a shallow lake, hoping for a quick traverse to the muddy bottom of another lake hundreds of miles away, and experience a resurrection in the arms of a group called the Marauding Mothers who will look the woman in the eye unblinkingly for eight hours straight, and act as if she is sane and lovely without hesitation or judgment.
And Connie Franklin Nixon was thinking that maybe it really was her list of dreams that brought her to this spot, to these lovely moments, to a place where she had to erase “…people who are not like you” from her list because suddenly the common, miraculous denominators of all lives were sitting all around her.
Then the sun would not be stopped.
The guard pulls them from the trailer 3.1 hours into a conversation that would be remembered for years. Pulls them from the trailer with one more cup of steaming fresh coffee and an exchange of phone numbers and email addresses, and after Connie had agreed to do the follow-up assessment with the drowning woman twice a day for the rest of the week.
The guard pulls them from the trailer as most of the camp still sleeps, except an armful of women who know when to rise early and look at the sky, blazing like the furnace of hell which they know is really the archway into another day of heaven.
An archway that finds the Marauding Mothers starting a Friday they will remember for the rest of their lives with a display of feminine majesty that includes the cry of a loon, the ricochet of waves across an eager lake, blissful morning coolness and the soft heartbeat of thousands of women who are drowning together in a place that they wish with all of their hearts, souls, minds, bodies, and spirits that they will never have to leave.
Never.
14. Maybe sex. Something meaningless. Just sex. A man’s hand on my face, my breast. Not caring what happens next. Over and over again. Sex. I can’t even believe I just wrote this. It’s a HUGE dream. Sex. My list. SEX. This one is a big maybe. But I wrote it down. I can’t even believe I knew how to spell it.
The night before the festival ends is a crashing wave of reality that most women refuse to accept.
Bags are packed. Coolers are emptied. Women won’t put out their campfires. A good three hundred of them are swimming at midnight. A group of food freaks, including three internationally renowned chefs, have cooked up a feast with seven days of leftovers. There is a pool of coffee, beer, wine, and soda, and the last three bottles of vodka in all of southern Michigan are stashed at the edge of the lake. World-famous singers, women who would be mobbed to death anywhere else, are wading in the water, hugging women who are just like them but who are not famous and cannot sing a single note. This night, if the Lakeside Women’s Festival women were in charge of the world, would never end.
Diva’s remaining products, about three dozen of them, are lying like dying twigs in the near-empty trailer. The tables have been stacked. The signs, folded and then folded again, look like lost babies on an international flight as they rest in the empty abyss of the van. Meredith has disappeared into the arms, the tent, the heart, the life of a brassy firefighter from New Jersey who sings in a rock band on the weekends, writes children’s books, and has an eight-year-old son. Sara is one of the swimmers. She’s also made a name for herself this past week as the wild and wonderful and open young thing from Diva’s who put on a lovely red-studded dildo harness over her clothes and boldly demonstrated how to use it during a last-minute sexual power workshop that was attended by a whopping 328 women.
And Connie…
Connie is alone. She is sitting in the large stand of pine trees less than a block off the trail leading to the beach where the other women are swimming, eating, talking and postponing unnecessary reality as long as possible. She has the last bottle of Diva-purchased wine tucked against her right leg, a heart that is as light as winter’s first snowflake, and a yawning desire to soak in the scents and scene of these last hours of her remarkable past week as long as possible.
The women, the freedom, the fun, the laughter, the openness, the scenery, the food, and even the hours and hours of work, which were some of the most positive and powerful moments of Connie’s life have already nested inside of her soul, a new and very permanent part of every breath she takes.
Thoughts of leaving Lakeside in the morning, driving back to New York, and what might happen following that, are left to drift like a slow-lifting kite towards a sky that is filling with the promise of a northern light show and a half moon after a week-long festival.
It happens to be Sunday, which is as cosmic to Connie as her very presence in a place that has turned into a working wonderland for her, and close to the hour when Connie used to sit in her bedroom rocking chair and work on her list of dreams.
Connie laughs out loud, takes a sip of wine, and focuses on her list. The list that she left buried under her tidy cotton underwear in her travel bag back at Jessica’s when she packed in what seemed like 12 minutes for a camping trip to Michigan, but that she has memorized. She thinks of this camping trip with two virtually unknown women who quickly became friends, comrades, and sisters.
Sara, with her hippie hair and face and clothes emerges with an embraceable heart and a knack for relating to customers and keeping the books that has Connie and Meredith whispering about her potential future as a Diva employee, or possibly the head of some new training division. Meredith, with her brassy mouth and strident views of sexuality, reveals herself as a kindhearted Diva Sister who is an organizational whiz, an extreme risk-taker, and someone you can count on when everyone else has turned you down or packed up early to leave town.
Me, Connie wonders; what do they think about me? A grandma nurse who can be bamboozled into selling sex toys first in Manhattan, of all places, and then who agrees to throw herself into a van that is pulling a trailer halfway across the country?
A woman who had a hell of a good time. A really good time, and who does not want it to end.
“Should it end?” Connie whispers off the edge of her wineglass. “Does it have to end?”
Connie’s questions hover close to her as she imagines what she would write on her list now. This Sunday. This moment when she has passed through some kind of invisible barrier of change. Right here on the edge of the lake, when the sounds of her several hundred new friends roll up through the thick bed of pine needles and right into her heart. Just as the summer stars begin to danc
e, and the dry red wine seems to cascade through her veins, Connie tells herself to be honest, to be as open as the women who laid open their hearts and lives to her during the week, across a table filled with sexual devices that proved to be a wonderful bridge.
Be honest, Connie Franklin Nixon.
And the first thing she thinks about is sex. Not making love. Just sex. Hot #14. The very idea of sex. Sex and more sex rides itself to the top of her Lakeside Sunday list as if it were the queen of the world, the madam of everything, the keeper of secret gems and hidden treasures. And Connie tells herself that it’s about time. It’s about damn time, Connie.
Her hands drop, and she balances her glass of wine firmly on her left knee, and her other hand digs into the earth at a place where Connie tells herself she has started over. Started over from a well-chosen path, from a place of sometimes-regret, from a spot on earth that was a familiar road, a predictable journey, a hand-drawn map that needed a major overhaul, a wise choice once that was destined for rediscovery, a life that had turned a corner and forgot to look over a shoulder.
Not going back is fine.
Not going back but occasionally visiting might be best.
Not going back but remembering so you don’t see the same view twice.
Not going back so you can turn a new page, write a new chapter, develop an entire new list.
Not going back so you stretch and grow and see yourself in a light that you never knew existed.
Not going back so that you can fly. Fly.
The wine, now that the bottle is nearly empty, is the medication of the Goddess of Lakeside Fun and Connie wants to kiss this goddess on the lips as she kicks off her tennis shoes and runs her feet through the pine needles and the earth that is rich and fragrant with a patch of heat from a long summer week. Heat from wanting. Heat from needing. Heat from waiting too goddamned long.
Not going back. Never back to the abandonment of youth, of married life, of sex by design, of limping towards a tryst that was over before it began, of assuming the position and expecting to be taken care of, of waiting for a second player to ride onto the scene and create magic as if it was impossible for that to happen when a table was set for one, when the real world never waited, when it was possible to be the rider in charge of destiny.