Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (4 page)

I don’t see how we can go on like this, she’d muttered over her shoulder, as they climbed. He could barely hear her.

What? What did you say? he called, as she, always more nimble climbing than he, moved easily ahead.

I need more of my own life, she replied.

Your what? he said.

They’d stopped for breath. Admired the majestic view. She’d taken off her hat, shaken out her locks. Her back was still to him as they resumed.

I need to live alone, she said.

She felt him stop. She paused and was about to turn, and he, at the same moment, pushed her. It was a blow, but with the flat of his hand, against the small of her back. She scrambled to keep her footing on the narrow ledge. She might have fallen to her death. Steadying herself she turned to face him; he was staring at her as if she’d turned into his worst enemy.

She very carefully relieved herself of the backpack she was carrying, old and mauve and endearingly worn. She’d had it, she thought, even before she met him. And when she’d run off from the dorm to spend nights with him, she’d packed nightgown and toothbrush, jeans and a change of panties, in it. He’d told her she needn’t bring a nightgown. She had though, because the backpack felt ridiculously light and flat without the flannel nightgown as filler. Besides, he’d liked to peel the old-fashioned thing off her. He’d also liked to dive underneath it and rest his face between her thighs.

Ah, she thought. Placing the memory at her feet.

Do you realize, she said to him, that I have lived with you for nine years. That I have carried in my body two of your children. That I have cooked thousands of breakfasts and lunches and dinners for you. That I have sat up with you when you’ve been sick. That I have helped you care for your parents. That I have shared my body with you whenever you wanted it, whether I felt like it or not? Do you realize . . .

But he had already raised his hand to strike her again.

She was wearing a bright pink scarf around her neck. She began to take it off, very slowly. Another couple was coming up the path. The man chubby and talking loudly; the woman slender and a bit stooped. She seemed to be carrying the backpack for both of them, while the man carried a notebook into which he seemed to be making notations. He nearly fell as he passed them, and they hastened, both of them, to set him aright. She looked at her husband and wanted to smile; she thought this action would amuse them both. On his part the movement was simply reflex. His anger was unabated. She gazed into his face, a face she had seen go through innumerable changes. His face changed so much! In passion it was one way; in horror, another. In joy he became flushed as a boy. In grief, his features had seemed to dissolve and a grayness crept over him.

It wasn’t that she’d never seen him so angry. She’d never seen him so angry with her.

He was angry enough to kill.

The precipice to their right now seemed ominous. Far below they heard the sound of water dashing against rocks. She felt her kinship with all women who have, against their husband’s will, initiated divorce. Some made it; she knew. Thousands upon thousands, and, over time, millions upon millions, did not. She said a brief prayer for them.

Do you realize, she continued, the pink scarf now held loosely in both hands, that I have done all of those things, and more, with and for you. And yet, at the moment I tell you I must have time alone to be with myself, you strike out at me. Would you call this love?

Though she was crying, she talked through the tears as if they weren’t there. Her voice was calm, almost serene, though her heart was beating fast.

His face was like a storm moving in slow motion. It seemed to spread, the cloud that was his face, to cover all the space around them and then to blot out the sky. He was clenching his teeth and his hands were in fists.

She moved closer to the edge of the ledge that jutted out, creating a shallow overhang. She peered cautiously over the side.

Here, she said, pushing the scarf into his hands. You could strangle me and kick me over the edge. They wouldn’t find my body for months and then it wouldn’t surface near here. I’d be far downstream in no time. You’d be in the clear. I won’t, she said calmly, live in fear of you.

She watched his face coalesce once more into the face she knew. He seemed to come back into himself.

You bitch, he said.

Why, because I want to be on my own?

He flung down the scarf, turned, and fled back down the trail.

When she returned to the parking lot shortly afterward he and the trusty Dodge were gone. She had trail mix in her backpack, a bottle of water, and half a box of raisins, but no money, no credit card, no driver’s license. She was a hundred miles from home.

Her favorite Marlon Brando story came to her: He’d been on a talk show trying to endure it, she felt, and the host had asked him why he hadn’t made it to a particular Hollywood party. Marlon said he’d tried to make it but that as he was crossing the desert his car broke down. He found himself all alone in the middle of nowhere. What did you do? asked the host, breathlessly. Well, drawled Marlon, I got out of the car, climbed on top of it, lay down, and watched the stars.

There was no time to watch the stars; she had children to get home to. But Kate realized she need not panic. She walked confidently to the edge of the parking-lot exit and held out her thumb.

When she found herself at her own door hours later, she was relieved to see the Dodge parked in its usual place. All lights in the house were out. Picking up a stone from her pretty front garden, she wrapped her pink scarf around it and carefully broke one of the panes of glass in the door. No one stirred. She let herself into the house that already felt different; it was the house of those who would remain there, not the house of the one who would leave. She could hear her husband snoring. She lay under a blanket on the couch and within minutes, her head tilted at an awkward angle, her snores became a tired, rather despondent match for his. Toward morning she felt his heavy body on top of her. He ignored her resistance. Entered her body as if he owned it. She struggled silently and at last simply ceased. She lay beneath him thinking: There’s no return from this, no way we will ever come back together again. She tried to accept this clarity as a gift.

He apologized for shoving her on the trail. But never mentioned the rape. He joined a men’s group. He learned men like him allowed themselves to show only two of the so-called negative emotions, anger and fear. He’d felt them both, he said. Anger that she wanted to leave him; fear that he wouldn’t be able to cope. She’d gazed at him and felt a wave of sickness gathering in her heart. That she had, for years, given herself willingly to someone who would take what she did not wish to give; how had this happened? Within six months he’d become lovers with his secretary, who did everything Kate had done in the house, plus the work she did on her job. He seemed hardly ruffled, coping.

The women could tell she was feeling better; her smile was pensive, but there. As her body gave up the last of its bitter memories of her first marriage, she experienced a lightness that actually made it easier to remain seated the long hours necessary, in the boat. Now she was open, as well, to the full magic of the journey. The shocking depth of the blue sky above their heads, which they saw only in slivers; the cresting white of the waves that no longer unsettled her, but which she welcomed.
Kiss the waves!
the oarswomen advised. She feasted her eyes on the darting industry of the birds, the pale dusty colors of stones underfoot as they made camp each night; and she began to be present to the other women whom she had largely ignored.

One night around the campfire the women were talking about getting older, what they thought about it.

I can’t bear it, said Margery, bluntly. I don’t care if it’s the last bottle of hair dye in the world and a dragon is guarding it, I’m going to get it.

I used to feel that way, said Cheryl.

I never did, said Sue.

You’re kidding? they both said, looking at her. She was a small woman with green, thoughtful eyes. It was Sue who knew the names of plants and what their medicinal purposes might be. Sue who had said the yellow flower Kate had chewed was called desert thistleweed.

No, she said now, poking a stick into the fire and shifting on her rolled-up sleeping bag. I couldn’t imagine it, even as a child. That women should do anything to their hair. I thought it was fabulous, no matter what color it was. I just couldn’t fathom what was wrong with it.

She laughed.

What was wrong with it, said Margery, was that it started turning white!

Gray, said Cheryl. Gray had such terrible associations, I used to think. It was the color of blandness, dullness. Lifelessness. But then I began to notice stones and water, and gray skies, not to complain about but to appreciate. If you’ve ever lived through a drought you appreciate gray skies. Rain. Rain is gray, she said.

Her hair was long and silvery white; she wore it in a ponytail while they were on the boat; now it hung free and the moonlight rested lovingly on it. The beauty of it there in the canyon, where every boulder, tree, and bush held its natural color, could not be denied.

Kate laughed, and the women turned to her.

I always tell people I am too absentminded to remember to color my hair, she said, but the truth is, I am too vain.

The women waited for more.

Oh, I tried it for a while. And actually got to be fairly good at it. I was never of the color every strand every single month school. I was more of the color it every couple of months, who cares about trying to do it perfectly.

They laughed, partly at Kate’s animation. She’d been too sick to join in their talks before.

But then, she continued, I began to experience a feeling I hadn’t felt since high school, when I first began straightening my hair. I began to feel humiliated. It felt like I was abusing myself. Hiding something important that was not really at fault. Besides, I started to feel I was missing what was going on with me. The incredible change; it had to mean something. What did it mean? I wondered.

She leaned back on her sleeping bag, and looked around at the women in her circle. There were five of them. Another circle of four sat and sprawled around a smaller fire a few yards away. It felt luxurious to be out camping with a band of mature women, and Kate reveled in the intimacy engendered by their distance from everything and everyone they knew.

I used to straighten my hair, in the sixties, said Lauren. She had short, bright red hair that curled around her ears. It was long then,
very,
and I straightened it with an electric iron.
On an ironing board.
I was quite the contortionist.

The women laughed to think of the fads of youth.

Kate remembered sitting in the beauty shop, which never, in those days, seemed clean and bright enough, and watching the women undergo the torture of having their hair straightened with hot combs. It had not occurred to her to question this behavior at the time: What could be so wrong with our natural hair? And then of course, at college there had been chemical “relaxers.” Painless, unless the cosmetologist poured on too much, or mixed it too strong. She’d dreaded going to the shop, and never understood how other young girls enjoyed it. They seemed to suffer willingly, or, more likely, now that she thought of it, they had probably ignored the process. Choosing to focus on the results. She remembered all of them sitting listlessly, oblivious to self-danger, heads in magazines, waiting their turn.

Sometimes now she colored her hair, just for fun. But she never did it in the spirit of covering up her age. Her recognition of such an entrenched vanity eventually amused her.

I’m glad of the tucks and sucks too, said Margery. I’ve had both. And.

Tell us, said Sue.

And so it continued until bedtime. One story leading to another, no woman’s story more important than another’s. Every woman’s choices honored as her own.

The tenth night on the river she dreamed of her mother. Her body mangled by the car crash. Her head however completely unmarked, her eyes and face clear. When Kate looked down at her hands, she saw one of them was missing. The other was busy untangling what looked like a fishing net. They were sitting beside the ocean, and her mother gazed out upon it as she spoke:
It puzzled me that you did not understand,
she said.

But how could I understand?
Kate asked.
I was never told
anything.

The secret is, you do not have to be told,
said her mother, finishing the net, and now holding it with two whole hands, preparing to fling it into the sea.
We do not need a boat for this,
she added, anticipating Kate’s question.

Kate woke up and lay in her sleeping bag watching the dawn. She could hear the oarswomen readying their boats. Soon it would be time to pack up her gear and stuff it in the waterproof duffel folded neatly beside a nearby tree.

Her mother’s face, patient and wise, came back to her, as it had appeared in the dream. How beautiful her mother had been! A sunny brown, with thick black hair, compassionate but shrewdly intelligent eyes that missed very little, and a readiness to make and laugh at jokes that had endeared her to everyone who knew her. Kate’s father had adored her since they were both six years old.

Her hand had grown back, she fished without a boat. Why did she even need the net? thought Kate.

All day in the little dorie Kate thought about the dream. For that one enigmatic moment with her mother, she would have made the river journey. Though she had brought nothing to write on, she knew she must begin a story about a mother and a daughter. Borrowing a tiny Post-it pad from Avoa, who loved dreams, both having them herself and hearing and interpreting those of other people, she began.

It was a sultry summer day, the day we buried my mother. The night before, at the wake, I stood over her body and tried to peer straight into her brain. She was shrunken from the cancer she’d battled the last years of her life; her mouth was twisted from the suffering she had endured. The flowers arrayed around her coffin smelled heavy and wet. I felt desperate for fresh air. Why were you so dissatisfied with me? I asked her.