I did sign up, which meant I would just come and hang out with them at their make-believe Bible meetings and for that privilege, although it was never spoken out loud, I knew that I had to turn over the keys to whatever I had inside of my heart.
Oh shit, how I love these women! I have studied their faces, watched them open up and share their deepest secrets, held them as they sobbed into the banana bread, tried to understand the unique qualities that have brought us all together. As we wobble up this road, there isn't one of these women I wouldn't die for, or kill for. These women have become my oasis, and their lives, so different from my own, have turned my own life into a sweet secret that gives me a strength and happiness I have never had before.
C
HAPTER
F
OUR
I
F IT
'
S POSSIBLE
to not think and talk about everything in the entire universe, the group of women walking through a remote section of Wisconsin and wearing an assortment of clothing that appears to have been shanghaied from a St.Vincent de Paul delivery truck, has definitely not been told this startling fact.
Nor do they know that across the country, thousands of women are telling their husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers, would-be lovers, and just about anyone else who might irritate them in the next fifty seconds to fuck off. Virtually every daily newspaper in the free world has carried some story about the seven women who have seemingly thrown caution to the wind.
Even if they had a moment to stop and think about how their walk might affect the 52 percent of human beings who share the same anatomy, the women walking down Highway P have focused on issues that do affect all women. They have already spent an hour talking about labor pains, with another thirty-five minutes devoted to a discussion about how their men and children are getting along, and now as the sun is close to its peak they are so engrossed in a discussion about the joys of sex past age forty that they do not even notice the many cars passing them, slowing down and almost stopping when the drivers and passengers spot them.
One car does make J.J. pause in midsentence, because it is yellow and she loves yellow, as she is describing the day she crossed over from good sex to really great sex. J.J. has not noticed that the blue Toyota directly behind her belongs to her but is actually driven by her daughter Jess 99.9 percent of the time. When she hears Jess shout, “Hey, Ma,” she throws her hand over her mouth just as the word
orgasm
escapes from her extremely dry lips.
“Don't call me Ma, you know I hate that,” J.J. shouts back, as her daughter and three friends roll with her step by step. “What are you doing here?”
“Ma, you're all over the news, and Dad is back, and he brought all his stuff and hey, we think this is really cool what you're doing.”
“Cool? Who said you could take the car?”
“Come on, Ma, it's lunch break and we just had to get over here and tell you how cool this is.”
“Look, sweetheart, we're just walking, and it's not something for anyone else but us. Do you understand that?”
“No.”
“Well, it's just something we're doing, and someday I'll tell you all about it, but you really shouldn't be out here. Is everything okay at home?”
“Caitlin and I cleaned the house yesterday, and we made dinner and I broke up with Jason. He laughed when he heard what you were doing, so I told him to go to hell.”
Chris is now looking at J.J. and trying hard not to laugh. J.J. has walked over to her car window but the car and all the women are still moving. They are trying hard not to forget about all the sex stories they want to share once J.J.'s daughter leaves. Jess keeps talking. She is hanging out of the window, and her best friend Meggie is concentrating so hard on not running over anyone that she looks like she is sitting on something pointy.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot all the guys, you know everyone's husbands and everything. They all got together at Chris's house, and they were there for a long time, and they aren't talking to anyone at all because they have some kinda pact or something. They had so much fun, they're getting together Friday night at our house, and Caitlin and I are sleeping over at Pam's house.”
“You know, baby, I don't need to hear any of this right now. We were just having a great talk about sex and now we have to start over.”
“Mom!”
“Well, honey, seventeen-year-old girls aren't the only people who talk and think about sex.”
Inside the car the other three girls snickered, and Jess has put her head in her hands and is blushing.
“Listen,” J.J. tells Jess softly, “don't tell anyone you came out here, and try to find a way to let the others know that we really, really need to be left alone.”
“Mom . . .”
“This isn't about you or your father or anything in the whole world but us, just us. Hey, you know how you feel about the girls in the car with you?”
Jess lifts her head off of her arms, smiles at her mother and reaches her hand out of the car to touch J.J.'s face.
“You love those girls, don't you, baby?”
“Yes, they're my best friends, and we talk about everything and I just, well, I love them, yes, I love them, Mom.”
“See these women here?” J.J. says, sweeping her hand out in front of her chest. “You know all of them and you know that I love them and they are my friends and that I would do anything for them.”
“Mom,” Jess says, her voice shaking and hoarse. “Mom, don't you know that you were my first best friend? Don't you know that you taught me how to be a friend, how to stay a friend, how to keep a friend in my heart?”
“Oh, sweetie . . .”
“You're my hero and you are still my best friend, and I'm so proud of you. I know all about you and Dad and how hard things are for you, and that's why, well, that's why I know why you're here. I knew right away. I'm a woman now too, Mom.”
Tears the size of her silver loop earrings run down the side of J.J.'s face. Inside the car, all the girls are sobbing. Chris has stepped to J.J.'s side and put her arm around J.J.'s waist. They are all moving, next to the Toyota ever so slowly, but they have not stopped.
“Oh, baby, I love you so much. Will you do one thing for me, baby? Just one thing?”
“Oh, Ma,” Jess says, as she wipes her face on the side of her long-sleeved T-shirt. “Don't make me take Caitlin shopping.”
“Very funny, you little smart-ass. I want you to tell your father something.”
“I thought you said not to tell anyone.”
“This is a special case.”
“What?”
“Tell him we are going camping without a tent and tell him the washer is broke.”
“What?”
“He'll know what it means.”
“Does it have something to do with all that sex you're talking about? I mean the camping part because the washer really is shot.”
“You betcha, baby. Now get out of here before I get that cop to haul your rear ends back home.”
As the Toyota pulls away, Jess hangs her head out of the window until she can no longer see her mother and the other walkers. Her hair blows around her face, dancing first one way and then the other until there is a tangled mass of it, suspended over her face like a halo. J.J. is quiet, watching as the round face of her older daughter gets smaller and smaller and then dips out of sight behind a hill that looks like it is touching the tip of the sky.
“Are you all right?” Chris asks her, as the other women slow and turn their heads to wait for the answer.
“You know that's the best damn talk I've had with that girl in three years. I had no idea she felt that way.”
“She's told me,” said Susan.
“What?” J.J. is incredulous.
“Remember last month when you asked me to take her to Milwaukee? We stopped to eat on the way home, and she told me some of this but she asked me not to tell you, because she was embarrassed.”
“Were you drinking?”
“Just one beer at a truck stop.”
“Hey, I told you not to give her any beer.”
“Wow, you are so ungrateful. I unlock her heart for you and look what it gets me.”
The women laugh, and J.J. kisses Susan on the side of the face and grabs her hand and then Alice of all people shouts, “Sex! Girls, we were talking about sex. Let's stick to the subject here.”
But the mood has suddenly shifted to friendship, and the women are thinking about each other and about their own mothers. It is warm enough to go without coats and jackets, and Sandy has taken off her shirt, which is dangling from her waist just below the edges of her black jogging bra.
“Did your mothers have friends like us?” Gail asks.
“My mother had wonderful friends,” Sandy says without hesitation. “Back then women were together all the time because few of them worked outside the home. There always seemed to be someone at our house, and they would smoke and drink coffee and then like two minutes after five
P.M.
if anyone was there, or really if no one was there, my mother would start to mix up martinis and that would lead to the most interesting discussions.”
“Can you remember any of it?” Janice grabs for Sandy's hand. “My mother had like, no friends, and that's why I'm weird.”
“Oh, they talked about everything and really, I think they were all in love with each other. You know, they spent more time together than they ever did with their husbands.”
This stops everyone a little short, and the women begin to think of their grandmothers and their mothers and wonder, some of them for the first time, if such a thing were possible. Before anyone can say anything, Sandy launches into a philosophical discussion about how we learn behavior from our mothers, and that's why it has always been difficult for her to be totally devoted to a husband.
“You can't say you haven't given it a good try,” Susan states before she laughs at her own joke. “What was it, three husbands? I can hardly imagine after you've been married once even thinking about doing that again.”
“Shut up,” Sandy retorts, “you can bet your sweet ass I've learned my lesson. From now on, I'm sticking with the advice my mother gave me. Enough of this man shit.”
“What advice?” Alice whispers from the end of the line, still a little peeved that they are not talking about sex anymore.
“It wasn't really what she said, it was what she did. After my father died she moved in with her best friend.”
“Like roommates move in or like lovers move in?”
“I'm certain they were lovers, but their generation was too restrained to do more than act like two matronly old bags. Still, I could tell from the way they took care of each other, and the way they always looked into each other's eyes, that their relationship was more than that.”
“Wow,” said J.J. “So that taught you to be a lesbian or something?”
“No, darling, it taught me to be true to whatever it is that I am.”
Alice suggests that they stop for a break and everyone nods, lost in the thoughts of lessons they have learned from their mothers. They head for the back side of the hill and sprawl on a patch of short grass that has somehow managed to dry in the first few hours of warm sunlight.
“You know,” Chris says, speaking for every single one of them, “our mothers really were our first friends, and they really did teach us the value of that female-to-female relationship. Just think about it. What your own daughters see you doing is mostly how they're going to handle their own relationships.”
“Can't you see it now,” says Susan, rising up on her elbows. “We are creating an entire generation of hikers.”
Susan gets serious quickly and tells everyone a story about her own mother. In 1970 when she was a junior in high school—and her many friends were more important to her than the air she breathed, especially more important than her immediate family—Susan discovered her own mother's high school photo album tucked behind boxes in the hall closet. She looked at all the faded black-and-white pictures of her mother's friends, all women she had never seen.
“Mom, who are all these women?”
“Oh, Susan, those were all my friends in high school. We did everything together.”
“But I've never seen any of them. Where are they? What happened to them?”
Susan's mother moved onto the couch next to her, put her arm around her incredulous daughter's shoulders and smiled.
“Sweetheart, I have no idea whatever happened to most of them.”
“How could that be?”
“Here's what I know for sure, Susan. I know that if a woman has one good friend, one really good friend in her entire life—someone she can count on, someone she can trust who will be there when times are hard and horrible, even if she must take risks that could hurt her—if a woman has one friend like that, she is a really lucky woman.”
Susan can remember every detail of the conversation as if it has just happened. Her mother had worn blue slacks, and her hair was tied up in one of those old, red scarves that she liked to wear on Fridays while she would clean and bake. The radio would always be on in the kitchen, and the entire house, every little nook and cranny, would smell like fresh-baked bread.