Silent Retreats (8 page)

In a second Rhonda began to cry also.

"I almost had Marie there," the woman said to Kelly. "She was near. Did you feel it? She was with us in this barn. She passed through here. She passed through us." She looked around. "Marie. Please talk to your friends, to Kelly and . . ." She was stumped.

"Rhonda," the girls said in unison.

"Kelly and Rhonda are here to talk to you, Marie."

Silence. A long way off a private plane was swooping in to land at the West Ridge airfield. I listened to the river, the trees' rustle. I could hear a bird steadily cooing in a tree out there somewhere, peaceful sound, made me feel better. I think I had expected something violent to happen any moment—a barn door to fly open wildly, a ghoul to appear, the old woman's head to do a three-sixty, her eyes to light up like the devil.

"Ladies," the woman said, "this room is full of ghosts—restless souls from this land all around, souls from all ages. There are Indians here and old settlers, pioneers—children and farmers whose bones are buried in this ground. We have made a hole in the firmament and they are crowding to it. Can you sense that they are with us?"

The girls didn't answer.

"Karen? Karen, have you come to speak to us? Will you join our circle? No," she said in just a moment, quietly, "it's Marie who comes near. Marie! Will you speak to your friends? Karen? Are you there, my dear?" The woman's eyes were closed in fierce concentration.

"Karen?" Kelly said quietly into the black.

"What's that?" the woman whispered. "Did you hear that?" She thought Kelly was a spirit talking.

Kelly looked at her. "It was me," she said. Kelly clearly conveyed impatience. This seemed to deflate the woman completely.

"Ladies," she said after a moment, "these are girls who have died very young. Maybe to you your age doesn't seem real young. I believe that they are not yet ready to talk. They are still very sad, I think. There is the sign that they are not happy on the other side. They will be, but they have died young and they aren't happy yet. I'm sorry." She broke hands with Rhonda and Kelly and leaned forward and blew out the candles.

"Or else," she said, "something's distracting you ladies and keeping us from fully communicating."

Abruptly Rhonda went out the door. I suddenly realized where she might be going. Kelly followed me out but ran by me very fast, disappeared on the lane ahead. She wanted to stop Rhonda. I was having a hard time believing Rhonda was really going where it looked like she was. At one point I came around a bend in the path, and could see that Kelly had caught up to her. The two of them were talking, Rhonda waving her arms—she was pretty upset. Kelly had her hands on Rhonda's shoulders—trying to talk sense, it looked like. Then in a moment Rhonda was coming back toward me, and
Kelly
was heading on back toward the car parked in the corn.

"What's going on?" I asked when Rhonda was close enough.

"Kelly's gone bushwhacking," she said. "She's going to get a ride home for her and Ghost-woman." Not knowing I knew what I knew, she lied for my benefit: "I guess Kelly knows those people or something." She looked at me to see if it was going to fly. I let it. "Anyway, I've got Kelly's keys, in case there's a problem," she said. Now she was running back toward the barn with me right behind her. "Give me your keys," she said to me, "so Kelly can get back out here in your car. Then we can go dancing and she can go to West Ridge."

"I don't get this," I said.

"Hang in there," she said.

The windows on Kelly's car had misted up in the night air. The woman was standing next to it. The moon was just up, red and looming low in the east. "The car broke," Rhonda said.

"It what?" the woman said.

"Kelly says it won't start. But you wait here—Kelly's going to get you to the train on time. Him and me . . ." Rhonda indicated me. "We're going to hide from the people in the other car, then stay and guard Kelly's car until Kelly gets back. How's that?"

"You mean she's gone to—er—interrupt those kids parked back yonder?" the woman said.

"Yeah. So you can get to the train. Give these to Kelly," Rhonda said, handing my car keys to the woman.

"Well, what are those kids going to think of me and Kelly out here alone?" she said as the Starfire headlights glanced high off the side of the barn and changed the shadows.

We were retreating into the standing corn. "What are you worried about?" Rhonda shouted. "You've got a whole bag of money."

Later we were near the swimming hole, in a stand of oaks, sycamores, and river willows. Rhonda was munching on a pickle. There were hedge apples on the ground, and I lobbed a few into the river. Maybe she seemed a little shorter than I imagined she was. I'd never stood near her before.

"Pretty strange evening," I said.

She didn't answer. After a while, though, she turned and stood there looking at me. "We paid her seventy bucks." She kept looking at me. I did my best not to react.

The moon was up brighter now, and it gave enough light for me to see the rope I thought I remembered being there, attached high in a sycamore, for swinging out over the water. The night was muggy and hot. Rhonda said nothing.

"Try to tell me what was going on back there."

"You mean Ghost-woman? Just something completely insane," she said. "Kelly gets these great ideas. Kelly's mom knew this nurse up in Champaign who does this stuff—reads palms, all that. I forgot this was the night. That's why I messed you over. Forgot."

"Oh. I thought I was the front man. So you could get out of the house."

She said nothing to that. She was sitting on the riverbank. I sat down next to her.

"My mom's having an affair with the local veterinarian." She looked downriver into the dark. "Jesus. I'm coming apart," she said. She was quiet for a minute. "I feel so sorry for Dad. I can't think about it," she said. Then she was crying, her head down on her arms, which were resting on her knees.

I sat next to her. I couldn't think of a thing to tell her.

"I thought we might reach Karen," she said after a while. "I really loved her. She was my best friend. My best friend. I'm definitely coming apart."

There was nothing to say. I ate a pickle and regretted it. I rolled a couple of hedge apples down the bank into the water. Finally I stood up and kicked my shoes off, dropped my wallet on the ground next to them. I tested the rope to see if the limb would hold me.

"What if Karen had talked tonight?" I said. "What would she say?"

"Don't tease me. It was a nutty idea. Karen would talk to me if she could. You're going to bust your ass swinging on that thing. I'll tell you what, that woman was a complete fake." After a while she said, "Didn't you think so?" She didn't move. "Kelly says a medium like this one helped her contact her father."

"Kelly wishes," I said. I swung out over the river, a warm wind in my ears. "One thing I know is that Karen and Marie aren't sad. You are, but they aren't." I grabbed a hedge apple, and I swung out over the river, dropping it straight down. It was hard to tell how far above the water I was. I told Rhonda, "There's not anything to say, is why they didn't talk. They died, and that's all."

Her head was down. "I just don't believe your friends can die like that," she said. "Not your friends." By now it seemed to me like she'd been crying off and on for hours.

"It's a real pretty night, you know it? You ought to try to relax."

"Ha. Relax," she said.

I swung out again and again on the rope. I realized it would have been better if she could have been left to herself. "Lucky I'm here to keep you company," I said. At the far point of the arch, I could see all the way to the iron bridge. Out there, the moon broke through the trees, and I could see the movement of the water downstream. Sometimes I could hear a carp break the surface.

"I didn't want to go dancing anyway," I said. When I swung, I could hear the rope grating on the big limb high above. At one point while I was far out on the rope, I heard Rhonda slip into the water. I swung back to the bank, took a run and swung far out again, trying to spot her in the inky black be low. I could hear her swimming.

"It's nice and cool," she said.

At the far point this time I let go of the rope and dropped. En route to the water, in a moment when I was anticipating splashing hard into the Black River, in a turning and falling motion in the dark, I happened to glimpse Rhonda's clothes in a little moonlit pile on the riverbank.

Even though she'd been with the company a couple of years, Martha seemed to emerge from nowhere, talking to me a lot, leaning over the desk at work, asking questions. She was very thin and tall—the bones in her legs long, her arms long and luxurious in how they hung at her side. Visually, she reminded me of an airline stewardess, only less metallic. Her eyes were wide and deep, harbors of secrets, deeper than the deep blue sea. Somewhere down in that well of blue, you knew, was her precious little girlhood, her past, and her grown-up, secret, rambling sense of womanhood, currently preoccupied by "liberation." Her laugh was quick and strong; she moved forward, or she waited, standing back a little too far—the eye contact always held a shade too long, the laugh a little too appreciative. Had she always behaved this way and I was only just noticing?

Anyway, I began to get the picture.

"Why don't you join the Chiefs?" my wife had asked about that time, during dinner one evening when one of the silences had lingered longer than usual. "It'll bring you and Scotty closer. Take your mind off work."

"What do I have to do?" I asked her. I felt another increment of my minimal leisure about to evaporate.

"Just be with him. What you do is, you make a vest with him, a vest for each of you. Sew them yourselves—you two boys, no help from Mom. That's the rule. And you go camping a lot. He's growing up. You have to be with him more. He loves you. He needs your example."

So I joined the Chiefs, to Scott's delight, and received in the mail days later patterns for father- and son-sized vests. There were no directions at all on
how
to sew the infernal things, but there was a notice enclosed that the first Chiefs outing, a camping trip to the Blue Ridge, would be two weeks from that very day.

"They don't allow drinking on these trips either," my wife advised me one afternoon. "It's another rule." She was repotting some coleus and her favorite weeping fig and a lot of flowers I'd never bothered to learn the names of.

"It's for the boys, after all," she said.

"Where are all these rules written down?" I asked her.

And while all this was going on, I suddenly realized there were a few things that I'd been meaning to explain to Martha, this lady at the office, if there were only time. She was just back from Houston, having served as squad leader or something at the women's convention—International Women's Year, remember? When she got back she was talking about having actually shaken the hand of Gloria Steinem.

"A real preternatural experience, right, Martha?" one of the mail clerks joked.

"Laugh it up, Anthony," she said to him. "It's a hell of a revolution you're missing." And she toasted him with her coffee cup and all the guys in the office laughed, circling the coffee pot, fingering the donuts, elbowing each other and interjecting last night's scores.

Martha kept going. She said she guessed that in the end it was the most really fantastic and relevant and meaningful event she'd ever been part of, something to change a person's life—all those girls down there caucusing and going out to dinner and drinking in their rooms and storming Houston's string of male strip joints and shouting "Bullshit" at Phyllis Schlafly while she was delivering a dissenting report; and everyone was taking sides on important mainstream issues like lesbianism and so on.

What I wanted to try to explain to her, if I could only get the chance, was that, well, Martha, let's face it, a convention on five million dollars borrowed from the government, held down in some bastion of male domination and capitalistic boyish fun like Houston, with all the accoutrements of conventions, such as soporific speeches by quasi-representatives from endless significant minority elements and "keynotes" from people with "clout"—well, Martha, I hate to tell you but that ain't no way to have a revolution.

I wanted to explain to her that Freud was exactly right when he alleged that anatomy is destiny. (Where would we be without our anatomies, right? Ho, ho.) I wanted to explain to her that the government wouldn't have given the girls money for the convention if it thought for a second that they might be serious about someday making the men secretaries and the women boss. I wanted to tell her that her big binge on the ERA was a waste of time and breath because, as we learned in the cases of equal opportunity and civil rights legislation, change on paper ain't change, Martha.

But the point I really wanted to make to Martha was that the women's movement was a chic, elitist, fad-laden, bejargoned, prepackaged media event and not a movement at all, and you could tell that by all the designer T-shirts and cutesy, campy ass-wagging that was going on in the suburbs in the name of equal rights for women. The radicals at the head of it, I wanted to tell her, were probably pretty serious, but let's face it, it was fun in the sun for the others, professionals and wives of professionals who were able to line up a babysitter while they went out to "network" or "get involved" or "demonstrate."

And here's a question for you, Martha: what's the women's movement to some lady who drives a school bus and takes in ironing and slumps through the housework and bathing the kids, can't stay home and be a mom because she has to work, so the kids watch television and get fat and flunk school and do dope; she endures hubby's flying tackle at bedtime if hubby still wants to tackle her, but she can't much pay the bills and can't continue to live without digging the credit hole deeper, and she worries all the time and that makes her ugly—what's the women's movement to a woman like that, eh, Martha, with your big ideas? And how many of those women flew down to Houston and got to shake Gloria's hand? Martha and I, we had a lot to discuss.