The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (40 page)

The eight women continue to meet on a regular basis, share their hearts and lives, and have booked a suite of rooms in Tahiti next spring to celebrate the third anniversary of their walk. The women walkers who have daughters also talk constantly about the women's groups their own daughters have formed now in Nevada, Minnesota, London, at the Wilkins County High School and on every other Thursday in J.J.'s living room.

K
RIS
R
ADISH
is a nationally syndicated columnist, author, journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee. Her liberal political and humor columns appear in newspapers throughout the United States and she is the author of the true-crime book
Run, Bambi, Run
(Penguin Books). She is also the author of the psychology book
Birth Order Plus
(Adams Media) and her travel writing has appeared in magazines such as
Midwest Living, Better Homes and Gardens,
and
Islands.

Radish, a Livingston Awards finalist, has been a working journalist for thirty years and has taught communications courses at two major universities. She is now managing editor for twenty-three weekly newspapers. She has appeared on television programs in the United States and Canada, most recently on MSNBC's
Headliners and Legends,
and has received numerous writing awards.

Praise for

THE ELEGANT GATHERING
OF WHITE SNOWS

“A rallying cry for the empowerment of women, Radish's novel is also a celebration of the strong bond that exists between female friends.”
—
Booklist

“[Kris Radish's] characters help readers realize they are not alone in the world and their struggles have been or will be experienced by other women.”
—
Albuquerque Journal

“A message of hope, renewal, and the importance of female friendships.”
—
Duluth News-Tribune

“Kris Radish's idealism shines through in this tender and often funny story about eight Wisconsin women who, without provisions or a destination or any kind of plan, decide one day to leave their homes and walk, embarking on a journey that transforms them, their lives, their families, their communities and their country.”
—Mako Yoshikawa, bestselling author of
One Hundred and One Ways
and
Once Removed

“I wish I could buy a copy for every woman I've ever met. I am so in love with this book, the women's stories, and their relationships with each other.”
—Susan Wasson, Bookworks, Albuquerque, New Mexico

“A group of women, meeting informally for years, have shared secrets, joys, heartaches, losses, and pain. When one confesses she is pregnant and that the baby is not her husband's, the confession draws the women into a life-altering step that affirms the bonds of female friendship.”
—
Booknews
from The Poisoned Pen

“A story of friendship and empowerment.”
—
Library Journal

If you enjoyed Kris Radish's bestselling first novel,

THE ELEGANT GATHERING
OF WHITE SNOWS,

you won't want to miss her second wonderful novel,

DANCING NAKED AT THE
EDGE OF DAWN.

Look for it at your favorite bookseller's.
And read on for a special early look!

Dancing
Naked
at the
Edge of
Dawn

by Kris Radish

E
LIZABETH
'
S HOUSE
is an oasis of complete chaos. Nothing works or fits or matches. When you open the door to her life, her world, her kingdom—it looks at first glance as if someone ripped off the front window and took a handful of everything, threw it in the air and then turned and ran as fast as possible before it all hit the ground and splattered.

Even Elizabeth looks as if she has been thrown together in a hurry by a group of crazed orphans. Her reddish, blackish, brownish hair is streaked with somewhat awkward strands of gray the color of the sky following a tornado and it always lies in a tangled mass on top of her head. In the sixteen years I have known her I have never seen her unpin it but I have imagined what it must look like. Birds unnested. Swallows rising from the crown of her hair in astonishment for the first time since their birth. Airplanes having to find a new landing strip. Lost explorers surfacing for the first time in decades. Amelia Earhart pushing her own unkempt trusses from her head and announcing, “I told that drunk to make sure we had enough gas.”

This beautiful woman named Elizabeth has a wild kindness about her that attracts every woman in town and every man for a ten-thousand-mile radius. Women who get off of buses downtown with nothing but hope in their eyes have found their way to her doorstep. Once a car full of gypsies broke down in front of her house and before dinner they had a tent set up in her backyard and a hundred people stopped by for a juggling show. Last year I met a perfectly normal-looking man who was asking every person he met on the street, “Could you please tell me if Elizabeth Rapalla lives near here?” Her three sons, who never knew their three separate fathers, are allowed to dream and dance and live as if there are no rules. These boy-men never speed, are unfailingly polite, always seem to make the perfect choice and they treat their mother like the Queen that she is. They are scholars, athletes, gentle souls of the universe—and some of the finest young men I think I could ever know.

There are men in Bosnia and Cincinnati, and three that I know of in New York, who would kill and rob and steal just to be able to sit and look into Elizabeth's eyes for five minutes. She has not lived with a man or a woman since I have known her but there is no way to keep track of her lovers, the people who love her, the people who want to love her. She has a degree in economics and works as an administrator for a huge national nonprofit organization that gives money to quiet geniuses, poets who live in trailers, women who are researching a cure for breast cancer on a shoestring and at least one group of doctors who performs abortions for young girls and women who have been raped.

She also tells fortunes. Elizabeth can simply touch your hand, look into your eyes, place her fingers against the side of your pulsing temples and tell you why you turned left instead of right and to give that guy on the fourth floor a second chance. I have driven by her house at midnight, only to see her sitting right in the center of her front window holding the hand of the local bank president. A week later there was a priest sitting there and then a woman who was at least eighty years old was in the same spot just a day later. Men, women, teenagers—everyone, it seems, ends up sitting in Elizabeth's kitchen or pushing close to her around the old wooden table by her front window. She has a gift for reading the lines in our faces and hands that we refuse to see. It is a gift, and a gift that makes her so much extra money that she supports at least three unwed mothers I know of and countless other causes and people and places that think of her as the goddess that she is and will always be.

Today, she is my goddess. We have pushed aside plates and what looks like a dish of dog food, three cigars and some bright pink socks so we can sit at her kitchen table. I am helpless. A widow. A woman who is about to face a future that is almost as uncertain as the past she has just witnessed throbbing on her own sweat-saturated bedspread.

“Sweetheart,” Elizabeth says, pushing back strands of my tangled hair and lightly running her fingers across my cheek. “This is quite a day for you.”

“I just went home to find the files from the Brimley case and I heard this noise . . .”

Elizabeth listens intently. Her gorgeous eyes are focused on my own eyes, and she does not let go of them. I keep talking but a part of me holds her and our eyes are locked and there is no one else in the world but us and I cannot stop talking. Falling. I am falling and I think that if I talk, Elizabeth will hold me up and I will be just fine.

Finally, she stops me when I begin telling her about the lovely ankles of the woman who was on top of my husband. She finds the details unnecessary, and perhaps she is right, but I want to keep talking ever after I sit down because if I stop talking I will fall off of the chair and hit my head on the edge of the table and I will be in a coma for the rest of my life and who will finish raising my beautiful, almost-grown, sometimes smart-ass teenage daughter? Who will tend to the flighty and occasional needs of my son, who is cruising through life fairly estranged from his family?

“You look like shit. Should I slap you?”

This is what Elizabeth does. She says something that on a regular day would make most people say, “What the hell? Are you nuts, lady?” But on the day she chooses to say it, anything and everything she says sounds perfect. “Can I stick pins in your eyes?” “Certainly.” “If I get up and leave the room and come back with a whip, would it be okay if you let me flog you fifty-six times?” “Oh, sure.” “When I count to ten I want you to disrobe and to tell me sixteen good things about the way your body looks, as we are sitting in full view of ten thousand members of the United States Air Force.” “Sounds good to me.”

“Sure.”

That is what I say because a small, very small—about the size of a baby's buggar small—part of my mind knows that she knows this is exactly what I need.

Elizabeth slaps me. Hard. The sting of her hand against my face and the feel of her fingers, six rings and knuckles the size of marbles hitting the bone underneath make me cry. My tears start slowly and then build to a crescendo and all the time Elizabeth is simply sitting there as if she is waiting for a train to stop so she can get on. The very hand she has used to bring me back from my wanting to watch moments is now wrapped around my wrist. It is my anchor. I need an anchor. Any moment now I am about to become undone and float out to sea, where I will surely die while a gaggle of seagulls peck out my eyes. My body is at the table and I am standing against the refrigerator with my arms crossed against my breasts and I am going to watch myself fall into pieces and descend into a cavern of seemingly hopeless resignation.

Elizabeth wills me to fall with those huge eyes of hers. Her eyes are swimming in a sea of champagne, a liquid so golden that it defies description. Her head, wrapped in a frayed red bandanna, looks as if it is on fire, and I fall into her, hoping that both of us will sink together to the bottom of this cold, dark place where we can breathe water and kick against sand that has never seen human flesh. I cannot bear to be alone, and in the morning when I see the marks my fingers have left on her arm I will realize how desperate I have become in such a short period of time.

She does catch me, whispering in sonnets that come from a poetess I will soon come to love: