Have I been attracted to other men? God yes. I have at least imagined myself with ten men that I can name just off the top of my head and at least ten more who have come on to me and whispered in my ear and slammed me against the side of a few walls—mostly when I was a bit younger. But like I tell Boyce, if sex with someone else is any better than what I'm already getting, then it would kill me anyway.
Once about five years ago, I did let another man kiss me. I have no idea why this guy was so smitten with me, but then again it could have been the tequila we were drinking at Boyce's summer office party. I think the man's name was Greg or Craig, and he was some consultant they had brought in to help with a big renovation project that was going on in the office, and, hey, I was the prom queen once—and almost twice—so maybe I looked pretty damn hot that summer.
My life hasn't been perfect. Honestly, there have been a few times when I have wondered about my interesting choices. Who doesn't have nights when they sit up long after the house is quiet, looking out into the darkness and wondering if the path they have chosen is the right one.
The nights that were the worst for me were right after one of the boys had been born, not so much the first one, because I had no clue about what I was about to get into and I was pretty young, but later, that's when I wondered the most.
We have a couple of acres of land that is now filled up with everything from forts and piles of junk and a couple of old cars to grass and weeds that we have never bothered to trim or prune. But when Shawn and Jake were babies, there was nothing out there but hours of darkness.
Boyce put a rocking chair for me right in front of the big window that looks into the backyard, and that's where I would sit and nurse the boys at night. When it was warm enough, I would open up the long window next to the wall and listen for the sounds of the night world to whirl around me. All those nights sitting in the chair, I felt as if I had been given something magical because it was always so quiet and calm. For those minutes I often felt great threads of peace and happiness running through my veins.
That's where I also cried and wondered why in the hell I hadn't run off to some island with someone. I would rock and cry and rock and cry. Sometimes the tears would fall right onto the face of one of the babies, and he would blink and get this “What the hell was that?” look on his face. Then I would brush away my tears and turn my head a little bit so they wouldn't be upset by the aquatic break in their drinking routine.
During those dark nights I tried to imagine myself not being myself. I would see me being single and living in some apartment building and driving off to work each day in a little sports car. Although try as I might, I could never think of what it was I would exactly be doing. It would be such a false picture of why and what I am that I just couldn't hold on to the idea very long.
Even now, when it's one of those rare nights or days when I might be home alone, I pull that old chair over to the window and just sit there rocking, rocking, rocking. Sometimes I grab a pillow off the couch and I make believe one of the boys is a baby again. Is this ridiculous? It doesn't matter because those are the times when I know that my choices have been good ones. I think about what I might have traded to be someone else. Could I have given up a minute or an hour with a warm baby pushed against my breast? I don't think so. Not ever.
Boyce and I have had our differences too, but come on, fighting over the purchase of a car or truck and where to go on summer vacation isn't my idea of a life-altering trauma. Boyce has always been a wonderful father, a fabulous lover, a friend to me through every little phase and question in my life, and I can't imagine that in this whole world there would have been another man like him for me.
Sometimes he was actually too nice, suggesting about a million times that I should go to college and that we could afford it, and wouldn't I always wonder what else I could have accomplished?
I would tell him, “I could do and be anything. I could do what you do or manage a restaurant or be a psychologist, but I want to be a homemaker and a wife.”
I did run the PTA fund-raiser, learn how to rewire the washing machine, cart kids from one event to the next until I wore out three sets of tires, dance on our new wooden deck in my underwear when the kids were at camp for seven days in a row, make dinner for five almost every night of my life, know that when I shifted to the right side in bed, Boyce would roll right behind me, look forward to the sound of his car hitting the gravel five nights a week, stand at the bedroom window stark naked at midnight while Boyce brushed my hair and told me that he had just talked to Shawn about masturbation, listened for the sounds of the shower at 5:45
A.M.
during track season, spray-painted all of Grandma's old wicker furniture dark green, baked cookies for all the neighbors every Valentine's Day, and smiled a million smiles upon hearing something as simple as the dishwasher kicking in after I finally figured out how to use the timer.
Looking in this mirror lately while the walkers are out on the road seems to give me a flash of the past. I understand that something as simple as turning away from the walk has affirmed everything that I have done and everything that I am. I know I could have stayed with my friends, plodded on with them through all the miles that they have already racked up, but that's not where my heart feels comfortable. Leaving to me was as powerful as anything I could have done with all the rest of the days and nights of my life.
To be true to them, to myself, to the very reasons why we all do whatever it is that we do—that's why I am here and about to hop into bed with Boyce. That is why tomorrow morning, I will make those women walker friends of mine lunch, why I will sit the boys down one at a time and talk to them about making certain any woman in their lives is a real woman and does whatever in the hell she wants to do.
“Like your mother,” is what I will say. “Just like your own mother.”
C
HAPTER
S
EVEN
J
UST AFTER DARK
there always seems to be a line of light that laces itself across the bottom of the horizon. Gail is sitting in the big wicker chair, her arm extended, and she is tracing the line with her outstretched arm as if she is an artist. The women follow her hand from north to south, watching for the spaces that are blotted out by rolling hills and trees and a silo that juts out miles away like a tall building.
“It's so beautiful out here,” she says. “Have you ever seen anything or really felt anything so peaceful?”
The women have wandered outside of Jack and Audrey's Champshire Hills Bed and Breakfast for a glass of dark, red wine that Jack said will make their dinner settle gently into their stomachs, “like everything in there is being tucked into bed.” Jack and Audrey have closed down their inn to let the women have a night of peace and rest. They have been perfect hosts: serving dinner, not intruding, smiling gently, whispering occasionally about what a marvelous thing it is to get out and do something that you have always wanted to do.
“Jack and I left everything behind in Chicago to own and operate our own bed-and-breakfast,” Audrey told the women. “We both worked there, we were so busy that one time we didn't even see each other for eight days.”
The couple move together in the kitchen like dancers. She pushes, he pulls, he cuts. She stirs and taste-tests. He shakes the spices. It is clear that they have found their own magic inside of this old farmhouse, which once housed a thriving brood of German immigrants who danced and sang and ate and drank until they dropped to the floor in this same kitchen.
“Once a week,” Jack tells them proudly, “we spend an entire day in bed. We read and talk, we work on the books, and we plan what we are going to do the following week.” Then he blushes. “You know there are lots of things that can happen when a man and woman stay in bed all day.”
The women are fairly astounded by Jack and Audrey's generosity, and Janice keeps tapping her fingers against something wooden to make certain that they have not all been struck dead by a cattle truck and ended up in a glorious limbo.
There is a long wooden couch that has been stacked with deep cushions, a wicker chair where Gail sits, a long bench with a backrest that is curved to fit perfectly between shoulder blades. Although it is cool in the dusk, the women have pushed themselves hip to hip with blankets on their laps; their feet are covered in wool slippers that Audrey says she washes specially for all the guests so they can enjoy being out on the porch.
Everyone sighs and sips and shifts in their seats. Somewhere far away, a dog barks and then another dog answers. The quiet of the place and the moment is astonishing, and Janice turns her head slowly to look from one of her friends to the next. She can feel her heart beating under all the layers of clothes and the blankets, and she knows that she has never felt more alive, more sane, more happy than this moment with her friends.
“I have something, right now, I really want to tell you about,” Janice announces, moving her gaze to the dark sky. “I've never told anyone this story, but here, sitting with all of you and thinking about where we are and what we have done and what's happened to each of us, has reminded me of something that happened before, a miracle really. Just like this, and it also seemed like a miracle to me.”
Janice's friends know about Janice and her struggles, about her quest to still her mind and to erase all the thoughts that created a world filled with shadows, dark hands, images bent against the frame of her liquid mind. They know how remarkable it is that Janice is with them, that she has raised a family, that she has come out on the other side of that liquid world with a smile on her face.
“This is really a beautiful story for once,” she says. “Stay with me on this, it's got a tough start. But the ending is exactly like this time right now, right this very moment.”
Janice begins her story in 1981 when she is wandering the streets of Oak Park near Chicago. Her babies are at home with her mother-in-law, who thinks Janice has gone on a shopping trip to the city. The truth is, Janice is only a few miles from her house. She is looking for a place to stop the car near the train so she can throw herself on the tracks. Janice wants to die. She can no longer stand to live with all those voices inside of her mind, who shout in her ears, “Kill yourself. You are worthless. Throw yourself on the train tracks, Janice.” Too many overwhelming voices and faces, and she knows the medicine doesn't work, and she is afraid of what she might do to the babies or to Paul but not afraid of what she might do to herself.
Janice finds a parking spot about six blocks from the train station. She hopes for a big roaring train coming by within the hour and gives herself enough time to park and walk to the tracks.
The smell of withered leaves and the trees blinking shades of red remind Janice that it is fall. Fall means walking to the river and wool sweaters and leaving the window open at night so she could snuggle under the heavy blankets. She remembers that before the babies when she had to stop taking the medicine, she loved fall.
Two blocks into her walk with her head bowed and a look of agony on her face, Janice stumbles into a man who has stepped outside of a small store, a name she can't even remember, to shake out a red-and-black-checked rug. He waves the rug up and down like a grandmother on a spring-cleaning frenzy. Somehow she steps wrong and the man shakes the rug into her, almost knocking her over.
With a pronounced lisp he tells Janice he is sorry at least seven times before Janice can bring herself to look into his eyes. Miraculously he sees into her—where she is headed and why.
“Please,” he entreats, stepping back so he doesn't frighten her. “Please, come in for just a minute.”
Janice doesn't want to go in, but this man is like a magnet. He has on a green apron and there is a rich, sweet smell emanating from him. Without saying a word, Janice follows him up the three concrete steps and into his store. She does not notice that he flips around the OPEN sign so it says CLOSED. He shuts the door and slips the latch over the handle.
The tea store is a world unlike any Janice has ever seen, smelled or touched. Inside the door, caught in a web of spicy scents, beautiful glass containers, and walls covered with colored gauze sheets, she cannot seem to move. To her left is an antique stove that is glowing with heat, and Janice is astounded to think the kind man has built an actual fire inside of the store. A copper teapot whistles lightly and fills the air near her with the scents of cinnamon and nutmeg. The store is no bigger than her own living room but Janice thinks it would take her years to see everything that the man has displayed and hung and placed perfectly on rows and rows of shelves that are made of old barn wood.
Six tables form the heart of the tea shop, and each small table is painted a different color—bright yellow, pink, orange, turquoise, black, red—all bold and brilliant with not one chair matching. The tables are set with a variety of teacups and teapots that astound Janice with their shapes and colors. “Works of art,” she thinks to herself as her eyes pass over a hand-formed clay pot, one made of stainless steel in the shape of a man's hat, and another made from clear glass and poised with a handle bent in a graceful S and a spout long and straight, pointing directly at her. The cups are mismatched sets that somehow seem to blend into a gathering of fine and attractive settings. A short, bright blue cup littered with daisies, a clear thick-rimmed glass that looks more like a delicate beer glass, one petite cup that would fit perfectly in the hand of a Barbie doll, another a delicately molded cushion of clay that seems to float on the edge of a wide white saucer—all so beautiful, all so perfect. Janice feels as if she has been invited to a private and very intimate banquet.