The women felt dazed. Janice, J.J. and Susan looked at Lenny as if she had just told them they were all going to die of some terrible disease in thirty minutes. Alice coughed. Chris smiled, knowing exactly what Lenny was talking about. Sandy had not been able to take her eyes off Lenny since their conversation at the washing machine.
“Come on, women,” Chris said forcefully. “Didn't you think this would happen?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gail responded defensively.
Chris shifted forward and put her hands on either side of her empty plate. “When was the last time you heard of a group of women just getting up from something, a church meeting, or as in our case a drunken evening at the home of a friend, to start walking down a highway?”
The other women had not thought about their decision in quite this way. They had thought about dead babies and rape and heartaches and uncles who shoved their fingers in private places where they shouldn't have, but they had not thought about what their decision might mean to someone else.
“Well, shit,” Janice said, as if she had discovered a pile of gold. “This is only for us, it's our walk.”
“No, it's not.” Lenny spoke softly, moving her fingers around the edges of her plate. “Look at me. Apparently you have no idea how many women in the world would love to say, ‘Piss off,' and take off hiking.”
Sandy smiled, watching Lenny turn her head and lift her eyebrows and lean forward close to the center of the table, and then breathe. She watched Lenny breathe.
“But . . . ,” stammered Gail. “It still has to be about us. Don't you think? Don't you all think?”
Chris couldn't believe they had come this far in so few miles. While her friends debated the ins and outs of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and what would happen next, she could only remember how she saw them at first. Alice sad and old; J.J. mousy and equally as sad; Janice alternately quiet and startling, always second-guessing herself; Sandy, wild and bold, and crazy and ready for something, someone, anything new; Gail, always holding something back, afraid of losing something; Susan, in desperate need of a kick in the ass, so beautiful, so in need of a push in the direction that will honor who she truly is. And Mary, just wonderful, happy Mary who is content with the confines society has set, with tradition, with staying safe inside those boundaries.
“What the hell are you smiling about?” Sandy finally asked Chris.
“Look at us,” said Chris, moving her eyes across every face at the table. “It wasn't that long ago we were talking about Christmas cookies and what deal there was on lettuce at the grocery store and what the hell are we going to do about Monica Lewinsky?” She laughed mockingly at the ceiling. “How far we have come!”
“Oh God!” Susan suddenly pushed herself from the table, cupping a hand over her mouth and running toward the laundry tub behind the kitchen.
“Oh piss,” moaned Sandy. “It's the baby!”
Alice helped Susan while Sandy told Lenny about the pregnancy and the broken glass and them on the floor and then walking. The women, all of them, even Lenny, grew somber, thinking of things horrible and cruel.
Susan recovered quickly, determined not to let a brief puking session keep her from talking and claiming a spot where she could sleep before they began walking again. She has been pregnant before, so she knows she can eat again in a few hours and the food will stay where it belongs. “What a damn nuisance,” she told Alice, who was leaning over to wipe the corners of her mouth. “Alice, do you hate me for not wanting to have this baby?”
Alice really only hates the parts of herself that she has never been able to forgive, and although she could never in a million years consider having an abortion herself, she understands why Susan would not want to see this pregnancy through.
Alice dabbed softly around Susan's mouth and then rested her hands on Susan's soft face. “No, sweetie, no, I could never hate you. I can see this would be a mistake for you. A costly one, huh?”
Susan nodded and then rested against Alice, who looked as if she could be blown clear to Chicago on a windy day, but is in fact as solid as the whitewashed barn in Lenny's yard. Susan cried again, and the two women stood by the laundry tub, each of them thinking at the same moment how lucky they were to know each other, to be in Lenny's kitchen, to be walking through a season wild with possibilities.
Lenny's house was littered with beds—bunk beds in her son's room, two double beds in her daughter's room, the Grand Canyon bed in her own room, two couches, and a basement filled with an assortment of sleeping bags and cots and two very funky mattresses for the long-since-ended family gatherings that stopped abruptly the last time Jackson forgot to show up for Thanksgiving dinner.
Near midnight, everyone but Chris and Sandy went to lie down after dinner. Chris escaped to the kitchen to call Mary, Sandy followed Lenny from room to room, talking as if her mouth had been set on fire.
Mary knew Chris would call, and she picked up the phone before the first ring had sounded.
“Well?” Chris asked. “Are you home now?”
“Don't be an ass,” Mary said, half laughing. “Where are you?”
“We are at Lenny Sorensen's house. It's that old farm we always talked about—past where the road turns really quickly. Nice woman. Sandy is crazy about her. Lenny is a hog farmer and her husband, not surprisingly, is a prick.”
Mary laughed as loud and as clear as Chris has ever heard her laugh, and then she took charge. Also something new.
“I called everybody, all the husbands I could find anyway, and it was kind of a hoot,” she said. “Lots of stammering so I just cut them off and told them they would simply have to understand.”
Chris could clearly imagine her sitting in her kitchen, dishes on the counter, and her left foot rubbing the back of the thirteen-year-old black Labrador that refused to die.
“What did Boyce say?”
“Same ole same ole.”
“What's that, Mary, what does Boyce say?”
“He says he loves me and he's glad I'm home, and I think he's hoping we'll have wild sex tonight because he took a shower.”
“Well, honey, get off the phone.”
“No, wait,” Mary asked urgently. “Is everyone okay?”
“We are wonderful, just wonderful, except Susan threw up.”
“Listen,” Mary said quietly. “I'm going to follow you now and then, you know, I'll stick some food out there, whatever you need. Are you going to keep going?”
Chris told her yes, and that the food and water aren't necessary but she can do whatever she wants to do.
“Listen,” Mary continued. “I have this idea that I'll just sort of keep tabs on you and maybe try to keep the husbands at bay, but I don't think they are going to say anything to cops or reporters either.”
Chris knew her husband Alex wouldn't say anything. He'd be thinking, “Well, at least I have somewhat of a vague idea where Chris is today.”
“Mary, we'll be fine, what about you?”
“I'm thinking about things. Thinking about my wonderful women friends out there and me not out there. That's fine, I know that, but I still feel bad.”
“I think Boyce has a pretty good idea how to make you feel better.”
“Should I go screw his brains out?”
“You sound like Sandy now.”
“That was bound to happen sooner or later,” Mary told her. “You are all a terrible influence on me. Hey Chris, be careful. I think people are starting to go kinda ape about what you're all doing.”
Mary added that the radio was running a story about them and that her kids saw something on television. Chris, knowing all about these things, decided not to relay the information about media coverage to the others because her friends already had more than enough to keep their minds occupied.
Later, Chris roamed through the house and discovered everyone fast asleep except Sandy and Lenny, so engrossed in a conversation on Lenny's Grand Canyon bed that they didn't see her peek into the bedroom. She ended up on the couch in the living room.
She could hear them whispering in the dark, occasionally shifting their weight, and she wondered what it had been like for Lenny to live all these months alone in this house—waiting for the courage to change her life.
Chris smiled as she shifted her own weight, wondering in which century Lenny's couch was built, and then rubbed her aching calf muscles and her whole legs down to her ankles, which were slightly swollen. “I'm going to start working out when this is over. I feel like crap.”
Sleep was just a short step away and Chris fell into it, still smiling, thinking to herself that out of all of her life's adventures, this walk might take the blue ribbon. She thought of Mary and Boyce, panting by now like dogs, and then of Alex waiting once again and always for her to come home. “I am home, Alex,” she wanted to tell him. “I'm just down the road.”
In the morning, everyone woke up before daylight. Lenny had already fed the pigs and scraped the poop out of the three largest pens when she turned to see the women moving back and forth in the kitchen like silhouettes. She wondered how she would get along for the rest of the day, the rest of her life, without them.
“People,” Lenny told herself. “I need to get away from these damn animals and live with people, lots of people. People who can't stand the smell of bacon.” Then she laughed out loud, and the sound of her own cackle made her laugh even louder.
The women dressed and stretched and reconnected, with considerable complaining and exaggerated limping. Susan managed to keep down toast and cereal and to conclude that she could walk to Siberia.
By seven
A.M.
, before the reporters had even had their first cup of rotten coffee, the women were ready to leave. Their pockets were stuffed with aspirins and a few quarters for phone calls and pieces of fruit that Lenny made them take “just in case.”
“I can't believe you aren't worried about anything,” Lenny told them, with her shoulder pushed against the front door as she watched them lace their shoes and pull up their clean socks. “If I didn't need the money from the pigs, I'd just go with you right now.”
“We know,” Gail responded, touching Lenny on the arm. “I believe we'll see you again.”
Sandy left last, waiting until her friends were down the road a ways before she made her move. Before she could change her mind, she grabbed Lenny by the waist, pulled her close, wrapped her arms around her back through the center of Lenny's long, dark hair and kissed her.
Lenny was not startled by the softness of Sandy's lips, or the way she eased into her arms and moved her head sideways, by the movement of her own arms around Sandy's shoulders that came to rest in a perfect, solid line across her smooth neck.
When Sandy jumped off the step, rushing to catch up with the women, the sun was poking through the tall evergreen trees at the edge of Lenny's yard. She ran fast and hard and didn't turn when she heard Lenny holler, “Be careful, Sandy. See you.”
Associated Press, April 28, 2002
—Features Syndicate
Wilkins County, Wisconsin
WOMEN WALKERS CREATING MIRACLES
In a section of the county where miracles have always been associated with successful crop rotation, a wet spring, and a bumper crop of corn and wheat, there is a new kind of miracle unfolding.
Seven women who are expected to begin their third day of what local residents are calling “The Pilgrimage” have set this otherwise sedate county on its ear.
When the women left a study class sometime after ten
P.M.
three nights ago and began walking down a rural highway, only a handful of people, mostly the women's husbands, took immediate notice. Two days later the entire county, state, and nation are buzzing with stories about them.
“This spontaneous pilgrimage seems like one of those miracle kind of things that happens in places like Yugoslavia,” said Barton Kind, manager of the Clintonville grocery store. “Nobody around here has ever seen anything like this before.”
What people are seeing is a group of women who walk slowly, occasionally speak to each other, but not to anyone outside their group and appear to be in incredibly good spirits—walking. They are simply walking.
“Look at them,” said Selby Cannon, a housewife from Abonddale. “They're just walking along, happy as heck, and nobody can stop them. I tell you, what woman in her right mind would not join them for two cents?”
Rev. James McQuade, pastor of St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Granton, said the women could have had some kind of religious experience that prompted them to simply get up and begin walking.
“Such simultaneous fervor has happened before with people who are very spiritual, but I don't know all of these women well enough to know if they are spiritual and have strong feelings about their faith,” he said. McQuade said the word “miracle” meant many things to many people, and added that he could never speak for the women or suggest why they were walking.
“Every morning that I get up and my bad leg doesn't hurt, well, to me that's a miracle,” said McQuade. “We will never know why they are doing this until we get the chance to ask them, and perhaps it is best to leave them alone, to let them find whatever peace they may be looking for.”