The Shortest Distance Between Two Women

by Kris Radish

  She wanted to cry from the center of her own uterus where the unspoken yearnings of female wanting leaned north towards her own heart. She wanted to cry from the empty nest that was part of her unfulfilled soul and scattered with nieces and nephews instead of her own children. She wanted to cry from the shared section of her life that knew exactly what it was like to sometimes feel trapped, alone and manipulated. She wanted to cry for her own years of silence, for sometimes surrendering without thought, for never asking the next question or daring to be bold enough to wear a ring in her own very lovely nose or to answer Samuel’s phone messages.

  But Emma could not reach far enough into the depths of her own well of hurt and loss and longing to cry for herself. Instead, she held on to Stephie and whispered so softly that it was impossible for her niece to hear, “Thank God my sister had this child.”

  So it was impossible for Emma to say no when Stephie wanted to get into this illegal club to listen to real poets and where the hostess—dressed in a floor-length denim jumper, pink tank top, blue stiletto heels and using a piece of thick brown rope for a hair ribbon—pushes their table against the wall so she can squeeze in more people.

  “Full house tonight because we’re supposed to have a special guest,” the hostess not so much speaks as coos.

  And then, alleluia, the show starts and all Emma can think of for the first few minutes is that she really could get arrested, and if Joy ever finds out where they are she will have a heart attack right on the spot and, if she survives, have yet another reason to hate her. But she also thinks if she can do this—what else might she be able to do?

  The show starts but Emma has a hard time watching anyone but Stephie. Stephie who seems to be in a trance as a succession of local poets stand up and read and act out their work on a stage that is nothing more than a space where four tables used to sit. The crowd is so well behaved that Emma can hear people breathing near the back door.

  These people seem to love the spoken word. The adjectives of life. The narcotic swell of language. The sweet verbiage of words. The honest rhyming of the rhythms of life. Emma can see their passion rising like a fine mist throughout the entire club.

  And because of this Emma suddenly sees her life as nothing but ground cover—one long stretch of green carpet that has covered her own adjectives—and she thinks it would be absolutely fabulous to be able to stand up in front of people who will listen as you share the secrets of your heart, your longings and desires, the source of your soul fire.

  She cannot stop thinking about what she would say if she was on the stage and suddenly filled with everything she seems to be lacking. And when the reclusive and brilliant poet Mary Oliver appears, as if by magic, and speaks briefly to the crowd about writing, about living life as if it were a poem itself—“Breathe in every moment,” she admonishes—Emma joins the astonished crowd as it finally loses control and goes absolutely wild.

  “Oh my God, Auntie Em, do you know who she is?” Stephie asks looking as if she has just seen a ghost walk right out of the brick wall. “She’s won a Pulitzer, she’s probably the greatest living poet … oh, how am I going to keep this to myself? How will I be able to walk to the car?

  “Auntie Emma, have you ever had one of those moments when you felt your heart move towards the clouds? Like life and everything in it made sense for just a little while, and that you knew something about yourself that you never knew before?”

  Oh, sweet innocent Stephie, who has a world waiting for her, places to go, people to meet, hearts to break, and more than a few hurdles to jump. Oh, gorgeous, lovable, and so absolutely wonderful Stephie, who has no idea how much trouble her aunt will be in if Joy finds out where they have been, or if Marty wants to see the reservation receipt, or someone else listens to the answering machine.

  Yes, Emma tells her niece. Yes, I have.

  But what she tells herself is that it has been so long, so damn long, that she’s suddenly absolutely terrified she may never feel that way again.

  Then Stephie does what so many teenagers do. She sweetly touches her auntie and then asks her a question. It is a question and an answer that will reverberate through their lives for a very long time.

  “Hey, would it be okay with you if I stayed the night at Kara’s house?”

  “Well, sure, I suppose,” Emma answers, surprised by this sudden shift from such an emotional discussion. “She’s the friend from math class?”

  “Yes. Thank you, Auntie Emma,” Stephie says, as she gets up quickly and plants a fast kiss on Emma’s head. “She’s coming in just a second to pick me up. I’ll see you tomorrow after school.”

  And Emma is abruptly left alone to try and figure out what has just happened as Stephie literally runs out of the bar. This, she suddenly realizes, is the very stuff her sister Joy must hate. This is the part of teenagerhood that also must have driven their mother crazy, because she had to go through it with four girls and not just one.

  Six hours later when Emma’s bedside phone blasts at three a.m., and Stephie’s hysterical voice on the other end of the phone slaps her awake, Emma quickly unearths even more compassion for her oldest sister and Marty.

  “Auntie Emma, I made a horrible mistake and I need help right away,” Stephie sobs, sounding terrified.

  “What happened? Where are you?” Emma asks frantically as her heart accelerates.

  “I’m at my parents’ house. The police are here. I had a party. One of the kids got really sick because he drank too much. Oh, please come now! Please! I am so sorry!”

  Emma has no time to be angry. That will come later when Emma has made Stephie and her friends clean every glass and tabletop and inch of flooring and carpet, when Stephie calls her parents who are still at the beach, and when every ounce of freedom that Stephie has enjoyed is taken from her life.

  First there is Emma racing to her sister Joy’s house and dealing with the police and several sets of parents, who thankfully are not angry at Emma, but their own horrid irresponsible teenagers. Then there is the phone call to the hospital where the boy is having his stomach pumped and where his father says he would sue the living hell out of Emma’s family—except that his son had a similar party last year so he understands.

  This is the easiest part of the night.

  The hardest part comes when the physical work is done. All the friends have been transported home to their own new lives of restricted hell. The house is as clean as it’s ever been, the sick boy is home and safe. At last the first light of day cascades into the front yard and it is finally just Emma and Stephie. And suddenly Emma cannot stand it any longer.

  “Do you have any idea how serious this is?” she says through clenched teeth. “That boy could have died, someone could have been hurt, the house was a shambles and you’ve totally destroyed any trust your parents and I have in you.”

  Stephie is in that cocky drunk state that allows her to say things she might never say when she is sober. Things that people think, but should never, ever say out loud.

  “Kids do this all the time. It’s part of living and growing up and stuff.” She shrugs.

  “What?” Emma stammers.

  “You know what, Auntie Em,” Stephie says, not as a question but as a statement of fact, “you wouldn’t know about stuff like this because you really don’t live. You hide out in those damn gardens of yours and you run around and take care of everyone else and get all involved with them, but you don’t live. Maybe you should try having your own damn party.”

  Emma takes in a breath that is so deep and long, Stephie almost falls over from waiting, and then Emma silently spins her niece around, puts her in the car, and takes her home.

  And that is where the truth of Stephie’s words settle against Emma’s wounded heart as she stands in her own tidy kitchen, watches the early morning sun wake up her gardens, and wonders how a sixteen-year-old can be so absolutely stupid and so wise at the same time.

  9

  THE NINTH QUESTION:

  Do
you ever wish that you were someone else?

  IT IS THE SIMPLE BEGINNING OF what could end up being a twelve-or fourteen-hour day of slave labor for Stephie in Emma’s gardens when the niece, who will be paying off her auntie for everything that has happened during the past week for the rest of her life, leans over the rapidly spreading spider flowers and asks Emma if she ever wishes she was someone else.

  Emma and Stephie have designed a kind of mild truce following the horrific drinking-party incident that has totally changed Stephie’s life. Orders from her furious parents have turned teenage Stephie back into a baby. No unmonitored anything. No cell phone. No computer except for school projects. Grounded until she turns fifty, or figures out a way to make amends, and apologizes every second for the rest of the year.

  And Emma, not certain if Stephie would even remember what she said to her, accepted Stephie’s sober apology, dealt with Joy on the phone, and had to apologize herself for not realizing what Stephie was up to. She’s talked to her own mother about the incident and they’ve agreed to let Joy decide who to share it with. Marty shook it off as typical teenage behavior, but at the far, far end of typical, and agreed that Stephie had taken advantage and crossed a fairly serious line. And with all of this on her plate Emma has been very successful at avoiding Stephie’s notion of “her own damn party.”

  “No wonder your mother was glad to get away from you for a week, Ms. Stephie,” Emma not-so-jokingly says from behind a tangle of weeds that are threatening to take over her yard.

  “Me?” Stephie feigns shock. “What’s wrong with me? I just made that one little mistake. I thought we decided days ago that everyone was crazy but us.”

  “That was before everything you put me through this week. I’ll be lucky if I even know who I am by the time you leave tomorrow night. Who’s got time to wish they were someone else?”

  “Is that a no then?”

  Periodically Emma has wished to be everyone but herself. A very long time ago she wanted to be her mother. That was before her father became ill. She remembers her yearning when she would watch her mother get dressed in a silky dress, or a pair of sleek pants, or a flowing skirt that was so absolutely beautiful Emma had to touch the fabric while her mother walked from the bedroom into the kitchen. Sometimes when her mother put on lipstick—because if you wore lipstick it did not matter what else you had on, you were cleared to go anywhere—Emma so wanted to be her, to be able to wear lipstick and to go anywhere that might be a place her sisters had not already been.

  When she got older there was a very short period of time, maybe two weeks, when she wanted to be just like her three big, and mostly annoying, older sisters. Debra, who during a sweet moment actually let Emma use her makeup and try on her nylons and who was kind enough to tell her that “yes, sister, you will get breasts just like mine someday.” Joy, who was always busy sneaking out of windows and hiding things in the bushes that were most likely discovered by their father, who near as Emma can recall never said a word, although occasionally Joy would ask Emma to help her. “Hold open the window, rugrat,” or “If you promise not to tell Mom you can have some of this beer” were two of Joy’s more endearing remarks that sometimes made Emma actually adore her. And even as a young girl Emma knew Erika was filled with quiet grace. She did not take to yelling like her other sisters, had a habit of flinging her long blonde hair over her shoulders that made her look like a runway model, and Emma tried to fling her own hair the exact same way until she was at least eighteen.

  After that in junior high there was not a young girl alive in Higgins, South Carolina, who did not want to be Bridget Cantina. Bridget, so it seemed, had been born wearing a training bra and things just got bigger from that point on. Ms. Cantina, who Emma found out later had breast reduction surgery in her junior year of college, went on to achieve even more local fame by marrying a man twenty-five years older than she was and then claiming, even now, to still be madly in love with him.

  The years following high school were beyond a wash in the female heroine department. When Emma tries to remember events from those years it is as if they have all been magically erased from her mind. She knows she surely didn’t want to be herself most of the time. Marty was suffering from empty-nest syndrome and phoned her at college daily and showed up unexpectedly so often that it was embarrassing.

  After that, in an honest moment, Emma might admit that she sometimes wanted to be one of the many girlfriends who called to tell her about an upcoming marriage or an old friend who announced that she had taken a job in Paris. Emma sometimes wanted to be her sister Erika who had the guts to move out of South Carolina and detach herself in a sort of loving yet distant way from the Gilford family madness, and now, just now, she thinks it would be wonderful to be Stephie Gilford and to have a semi-clean palette and rainbows of colors to choose from.

  Emma tells all of this to Stephie as they pull weeds and fertilize and Stephie grumbles about how hard it is to be a gardener until Emma stands up to ease her aching back and politely reminds her of all that has happened during the past week.

  No initial curfews.

  Lots of cooking time.

  Friends sleeping over three nights in a row with no questions asked.

  The poetry night at the illegal club.

  Shared secrets times twenty.

  No mother to snap at every word you said.

  None of the reunion planning Joy had threatened her with before she left.

  No blood relatives maiming her following the drunken party.

  The almost riot when they were going through the reunion storage shed in Marty’s backyard yesterday and Debra showed up.

  Before the evil Aunt Debra arrived, there were several hours of hard work and hilarious discovery as Emma and Stephie made believe they were cave explorers going into unknown territory for the first time.

  Stephie went in the dark and stinky shed first, brave young soul that she is, while Emma stood behind her with a notebook and pen to record what, if anything, might be of use for this year’s reunion. This after Emma looked through the quick notes she had taken from Marty’s answering machine message and decided she could at least do this one thing while she waited for salvation from Erika. Erika who has never, ever taken this long to figure out a problem or return a call.

  In the meantime the shed loomed and what a cave of bleakness it was.

  There were bags of paper plates—that needed to be counted.

  There were bags of tablecloths—that were moldy and needed to be tossed into the garbage.

  There were three bags of garbage that some dumbass should have tossed months ago when the last reunion ended.

  There were signs of squirrel and mice damage everywhere.

  There were two bags of what must have been lost-and-found clothes left at the reunion that Stephie and Emma decided to try on as a comic relief break.

  And this is when Debra stormed into the backyard with a baseball bat in her hand.

  “Whoever is in there get out right this minute,” Debra brayed in a voice three decibels below her normal range, as if that would scare anyone.

  Emma and Stephie froze. Their eyes were as big as four white Formica dinner plates and they not only looked ridiculous but it took every ounce of their energy not to start laughing. They both knew without speaking that if they started they would never stop.

  “Hi, Debra …” Emma almost gagged on her own words to keep from laughing.

  “What in the hell are you doing? Who is that? What are you doing here?”

  Debra sounded like a machine gun and Stephie quickly yanked off her hat and said, “It’s me, Stephie, and Auntie Emma, Aunt Debra. Who do you think would be back here?”

  And when they stepped out of the tacky metal garden-shed-turned-GFR-storage-shed, they both looked as if they were en route to a Halloween party or escapees from an institution that must have had a gigantic security lapse. Stephie wore a huge pair of men’s bib overalls, a pair of rubber boots, and a knit stocking c
ap that she had pulled down so far it was caught on her nose piercing. Emma had wrapped herself inside of an old 1960s Mexican-roadside blanket and had tied a tropical-inspired and extremely large dress around her waist as if it were a belt. To complete her lost-and-found outfit, Emma was balancing a bushel basket on her head and carrying a hose that was probably the only thing that was supposed to be in a gardening shed.

  Debra did not drop her bat but glared at Emma and Stephie as if she would take them both out in a heartbeat if they moved an inch in the wrong direction. Stephie, of course, did not know that Debra and Emma had already had words. Stephie did not know that Emma had been thinking for several days of finding her own bat and whacking her sister over the head. Stephie did not know that Debra had appointed herself overseer of everything Gilford, including the reunion storage shed.

  Emma now wanted to do anything but laugh. She wanted more than anything to be violent, if only she could. She wanted to make Debra disappear lest she ruin yet another lovely moment in her life.

  “What the heck are you two doing?” Debra demanded.

  “You wouldn’t know what we are doing because I am the one who always does this,” Emma answered, taking a step forward. “You’ve never even been in this shed except to throw bags inside of it and Stephie is helping me get ready for this year’s reunion so we know what we have and what we are supposed to order. All that stuff doesn’t just magically appear, you know.”

  “Why are you two dressed like that? You look foolish.”

  “It’s called fun, Debra,” Emma retorted. “Spontaneous fun while we are sweating and working and wondering if something is going to bite us while we sort through this mess.”

  “Does Joy know Stephie is here with you dressed up like, a … a whatever it is she is dressed up like?”