What I am thinking about mostly is Bruce. I know he is with the kids, and that last night he crawled into our bed and buried his face in my pillow to smell where my head has touched. That is just how he is, and how he thinks. When I imagine him lying there with one foot out of the covers as if it is too hot, I get an ache in my chest that makes me want to take a deep breath. This ache is love. My God, I love Bruce so much, like I have never loved anyone before.
I wish my mother could be walking with us now. She could limp along, and we would all help her get beyond whatever it is that has never allowed her to let herself fall, just fall, so someone else can catch her. She is living all alone in an apartment with a bunch of other old sour women, and when I fix this thing with Bruce, I hope he will help me go get her and bring her back here so she can live with us. I am fairly determined that she will not die with a puckered face, and that she will be able to rock the kids by the window before they are too big to sit on her lap.
Alice thinks we could walk forever if we put our minds to it. I can hear her up there muttering, “Walk, walk, walk,” under her breath, like a broken record. She has the kindest face I have ever seen and when I look at her, because she is older, I think that my mother could have the same expression if she would only let herself. Alice has her own row to hoe, and we know about her sad life, but these last few days I have seen a transformation in her where the lines in her face have loosened up and her eyes seem to glimmer. She even steps lightly as if there are mounds of air and light under her old tennis shoes.
Walking forever wouldn't be my choice, but I know we will continue to do so for a while because we are still not there yet. When we get there, I think we will all know at once. I'm really not ready yet. I have all these good things to think about and lots of plans to form in my mind. I could be really honest now, which is my goal anyway, and tell you how I am planning and thinking and aching to make love with Bruce. That is what really keeps me moving every second of the day.
I think when we do make love, the sex, the emotion, every single touch will be like nothing else I have ever felt because of what I will be able to admit to him, and mostly to myself, about how it is fine to love someone so much, so damned much. I am dreaming of lying down with him in a field like the one just beyond the big house we saw late yesterday. When I saw this field, my heart pounded. I saw a big tree where I would spread a blanket and bring him down to my breast and kiss him. I would kiss Bruce everywhere and come up for a breath now and again, only to whisper, “I'm sorry” and then, “I love you.”
Bruce will laugh at me, and he will cup his hands around my face. He will forgive me like he already has one hundred times, and when he looks in my eyes, clear inside of me, I know he will see finally that I do love him with all of my heart and that I will never make him leave again. We'll strip naked and roll clear to hell and back right through every field in Wisconsin.
I told everyone what I was thinking about, and this morning I am getting winks from my sweet friends. I wink back and smile too, and then I am back to Bruce and it seems that the farther I walk, the less I can remember about the bad things and my years of mistakes. Then I know why Alice says we could walk forever, only I am hoping it won't be that long. I have already been to forever, and I want to stay in this place of power and hope—pushing forward, my arms full, my heart flying in a direction that can only be called happiness.
C
HAPTER
S
IX
T
ABOR
'
S POND WASN
'
T MUCH
more than a puddle. It ran from one edge of a clearing—a massive low spot—to the other, and when spring was at its peak, so was the pond. Geese flying south through Illinois often stopped for a drink or a nibble of corn, but rarely, for unless it was a terribly wet spring, the pond would all but disappear.
Janice jumped for joy when she saw the speck of water from the highway. She loved water. Loved to touch it, see it, take off her shoes and run into it. Most of her life, Janice had fought what she considered to be primal urges to strip naked and hop into water wherever she happened to be. Her singular heroine was Katharine Hepburn, who swam in the permanently freezing Atlantic Ocean almost every morning of her life.
“Come on!” Janice yelped as she veered from the highway toward the pond. “Oh, water, water!” her pals heard her yell as she disappeared from sight into the low land.
“Holy shit,” said Sandy. “Did anyone else know about this?”
“At least she still has her clothes on,” Susan answered. “I've known Janice longer than any of you, and I tell you this is one of the most interesting attractions I have ever seen in my life.”
“Attractions?” asked J.J., plodding down the hill with the rest of the women.
“Yeah. Attractions,” continued Susan. “Janice and water. She's nuts about it. Growing up, she would jump into the river or any of the lakes around here or something like this dumpy old pond at the drop of a hat. I'm sure her children were all conceived in water.”
“Oh baby,” Chris said sexily. “Now you're talkin'.”
“Once,” continued Susan, “when we were still in high school, she actually cut a hole in the ice down on Ranker's Beach so she could get in the water.”
“You're kidding?” said Gail. “This woman has it bad.” Gail shook her head.
“You don't know the half of it,” Susan sighed, then laughed as she sauntered down the hill.
Beyond the pond was an old farm that looked as if it had been abandoned for years. Every single one of the women looked over the decrepit farm buildings, as if wondering with one mind who had once lived in this place. They could see bent clothesline poles, weeded-over flower beds that ran in a circle out from the side of the house, and strips of colored cloth that had been hung on top of old wooden bird feeders.
The women knew when they saw those things that a sister had once lived there, a woman of the wilds who loved her place, who loved to watch those birdhouse streamers dancing in the wind, who probably walked through the long, rolling grass in the yard holding the hands of her children and wondered what could possibly be happening beyond the small territory of her own life.
As they followed Janice from the edge of the highway to the lip of the shallow pond, they questioned why the farm windows were boarded up and wondered out loud what had happened to the woman who must have lived here.
“What do you think?” Chris asked first, already forming a story in her mind about the hardship and rigors of living on a farm.
“Oh,” Alice said quietly. “You know, Chris, life on a farm. The Depression. Young sons killed under falling wagons . . .”
“Stop,” shouted Chris, putting her hands over her ears. “Jesus.”
“It's all true.” Alice continued anyway as the women moved to a clump of trees that kissed the edge of the water. “We each have our little tragedies, but you know women back then had tons of hardships and years of loss. Whoever lived on this piece of land, heavens, just think about it and the stories my own mother and grandmother told me.”
Alice told stories, and there was a whisper of early afternoon wind that blew across the empty fields, and the sounds of toes dipping in and dipping out of the water. The disgusting echoes of cars roaring past on the highway sounded as if a convoy was stalking the women walkers.
Janice took off her pants and waded into the water just far enough so it lapped around her thighs. She stood with her hands on her hips, her head tipped back, trying with all of her being not to slide under the water and swim into its friendly blackness.
“This is ecstasy,” Janice told herself, edging just a bit farther into the shallow blackness of the pond. Her toes plowed through the mud, and the tips of her fingers caressed the top of the water. It was physically and mentally impossible for her to think of anything else but the water and her place in it.
“Let's just enjoy this time here now,” Alice said. “Look at Janice. I think she's heading for nirvana.”
Alice looked around from one woman to the next, wanting to say, “That's fine, isn't it?” The women looked into her eyes, needing to see that Alice wasn't sad anymore and that whatever they felt about her life's journey was as fine as the day that was ticking away around them.
And Alice knew, from a glance at these girlfriends who had spared her years of anguish, that life could begin again in a flash, in a second, before a heart beats twice.
“It's time now,” Alice told herself, pushing her hand to her own beating heart. “Time now to watch the horizon for something new.”
In a world where every nuance, where a shift of the hand or a turn of the head, can mean something so significant that it can alter a whole life, the women might appear nonchalant to at least 49 percent of the world. But their unspoken words bound them together as if they had learned to communicate in a secret language, the one shared by many women over many years, in many lands.
Alice unexpectedly stripped off her pants, smiling as if she had been caught doing something she absolutely loved doing but knew was incredibly wrong. The other women watched her with something akin to awe because they knew that Alice had lived most of her life in quiet acceptance.
Before Alice could finish pulling down her brown polyester slacks, the others followed suit: J.J., Chris, Sandy, Gail and Susan were fumbling with their zippers and buttons and metal hooks as if they had just been propositioned by a sex goddess for middle-aged women. There were no second thoughts about stretch marks and rolling layers of skin and veins that glittered in the sunlight. If it had been a month later, when the sun would turn the pond into a hot mud hole, the women would have stripped naked and pounced into the pond like dolphins.
The water was cold at first but then an electrifying numbness worked its way up their ankles and into the large bones of their legs with a kind of pain that made them all feel glad to be alive.
“Shit, it's cold!” yelled Sandy. “But it feels kinda good in a sick sort of way.”
“Hey Janice,” said J.J., “doesn't this make you want to pee?”
“All the time, but who cares? The only time I really feel beautiful and thin is when I'm in water. It makes me feel free.”
“I know what you mean,” said Gail, making small circles with her hands on the surface of the water. “When I swim, I just love to lie on my back and watch the sky. It always makes me feel as if I could stretch out my hands and become a part of the atmosphere that was designed for feathers, birds, sailing leaves.”
“That's it,” said Janice, watching as her friends glided around her, smiling. “You know, some people eat, some read, some drink, some—excuse me Susan, some screw around. Me? I can just fill up the wading pool and be happy as hell.”
“Do you and Paul have a water bed?” Chris asked.
“But of course.”
“You should move to a lake, Janice,” Gail suggested.
“Can't afford the property taxes, sugar,” Janice mused. “I just put in one of those create-your-own-environment tapes of crashing waves, and then I make believe I'm sitting on some island or at the edge of my favorite lake in northern Wisconsin.”
An hour passed as the women stood in the water, turning their heads toward each other and shifting their conversation from water to walking and then back again to their families and all the people who might be wondering what in the hell they were doing standing in a pond half naked during the middle of the day.
When the cold water did finally make half of them want to go to the bathroom, the women left the pond one by one and dried off their legs in the sun before they put their clothes back on.
“Alice, do you think it was easier to bear things back then?” Susan asked, motioning her head toward the old farmhouse. “I mean, women had babies and kept on working in the field and then made dinner and got up and did the same thing all over again the next day. As bad as it was, it seems to me that was about as good as it was going to get.”
“Maybe things were simpler back then,” Alice said, resting her hands on her knees and bending into her words. “People found joy in simple ways, you know, like this, like putting their feet in the water and by having conversations that were meaningful and by being thankful that somehow they had managed to make it through another day.”
Susan shrugged, and her eyes reverted to the sagging fence in front of the farmhouse. “I feel like an ass to be whining about being pregnant and having a failed marriage and never being able to bring myself to do anything about it.”
Alice patted her arm. “Sometimes it takes a long, long time to figure out how to be happy. Seems to me that it might never be too late, though.”
“Alice, do you think you'll be happy again?” Susan suddenly asked.
This question brings all the whispering women to silence and everyone looks at Alice as though they want to scoop her up and carry her to a rocking chair. Alice herself isn't sure what to say so she is quiet, but only for a moment.
“I'm tired of not being happy, really tired. You know, just walking out here like this makes me realize I have missed a lifetime of moving, relationships, experiences, of doing, of being happy,” Alice says, looking out across the tops of the trees and into the afternoon sky that is as blue as one of Janice's oceans. “I think it's okay to be sad, to hurt and to miss and to even hate, hate isn't that horrible if it makes you do something that might change what made you hate. But really, a woman shouldn't be my age and not have stripped half naked and jumped into a pond in springtime.”