The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (20 page)

Claudia laughed so hard she thought she might tip backward, and the laughing made her wonder when she had ever had so much fun. “You might know better than you think, Sue.”

“Not a hell of a lot, really,” she finally said. “Will you get fired or something?”

“It could go either way, you know. They could shit-can me in about ten minutes or they could turn this into something big and make me part of it. What do you think?”

Sue looked at her, really looked at Claudia and saw how extraordinarily beautiful she was. In her eyes, Sue saw for a moment, just a speck of the woman she had once been, and this remembering moved her to do something that was extraordinary.

Claudia poked her own toes into the dirt and remembered that Chris Boyer was up on the highway someplace striding through the afternoon in pretty much the same way she had stormed through life. Her usually certain mind was mired in confusion, and it was only Sue's arm, dragging her from the toes of her feet, that made her realize she was moving forward.

Sue pushed her way through the crowd, side-stepped around a police car and one of those big plastic orange water jugs, whispered something into the ear of the policeman who was standing with his arms resting on the hood of his car and then took Claudia by the hand and started walking down the highway.

Claudia matched her steps and turned around once to see the ugly Chevrolet glide to a stop right where she had been standing while she talked with Sue. Try as she might, Claudia just didn't have the heart to wave good-bye to Swine Man.

PROM COURT MEMBER SETS RECORD

—30—

The Elegant Gathering: Mary

There's a wedding photo of Boyce and me hanging on the wall that is just next to the closet in our bedroom. I swear to God, I look at that picture about ten times a day and every single time I see my wedding gown, and Boyce in a tuxedo, I could just about faint.

Lots of women find it highly ridiculous that someone can fall in love in high school, stay married, and then stay in love. Well, I have to admit right off the bat that it is unusual and that makes me a bit strange myself. But, I'm the one who has screwed up the statistics about young marriage and women who only sleep with one man, and although I admit I've never been 100 percent certain that I don't have a screw loose myself, I do know it's all damn right to be happy.

Oh cripes, I have to say that I have never felt so torn in my entire life as I did the other night when I left my friends out there on the highway. But I have never been one to steer away from what I feel in my heart and because those woman are real friends, really, the best friends I have ever had in my life, I know that they understand me and that leaving them like that will be okay.

I suppose many people would call me loony for walking away from something that looks like it's turning into an adventure of a lifetime, but I think it's just as loony to have to apologize for being happy with something so simple.

So I'm the one who has never been raped or divorced or had an affair with my brother-in-law's uncle's cousin, although he did try, but he probably just did it because I looked so happy. I'm Mary Jean Michlienski Valkeen, the ex–prom queen who married the guy down the street, had three kids, honest-to-God sold Tupperware, candles, and then those expensive baskets and went on to attain possible great fame as the woman who took food to the women walkers but left them before they could turn around twice.

Although really, I'm not all that simple and even though I didn't go to college or do drugs in the '60s and sleep with the entire football team or fall in love, well, physical love anyway, with someone of the same sex, that doesn't mean that I'm really that much different than everyone else out there. And I know that I'm not alone either.

When I got home the other night after Boyce picked me up at the truck stop, I went in to kiss the boys and then checked the house over quick. Then, while Boyce flopped back into bed, mumbling, “What in the hell was that all about?” I slipped into the bathroom and spent such a long time looking at myself in the mirror that my feet fell asleep and my hands are still stiff because of how I was leaning up against the side of the vanity.

What I saw in that mirror wasn't startling because I have been watching myself push toward my forty-eighth year for the forty-seven years in front of that. It's not like I woke up one morning and saw that my hips had spread, and the muscles in the sides of my breasts had taken a nosedive, and the lines around my mouth had suddenly turned into relatives of the Grand Canyon. I have seen this body of mine changing now for quite a long time. So I ran my fingers over the lines around my eyes and around my flabby chin and over those little hairs down there that seem to grow into monsters overnight. I looked and I looked at the gray hairs that never seem to quite make it when Denise does my roots, and when I looked way, way back inside of my eyes, I saw how I started to be and never diverted from that path even though I had more than one chance.

In the beginning, I am sitting in the high school halls knowing with all my heart that whoever I am going to marry is inside of the building with me at just the same moment. It is a sure feeling, as sure as love itself or knowing the sun will be right up there again the next morning.

Jackie, with her long hair and dark face, is standing over me and I am telling her the secrets of my soul. “He's here,” I tell her, leaning so the weight of my own body and my words can be supported by the metal locker. “I'm not sure yet who it is but I know he's here.”

“Come on, Mary, that just sounds so, well, it sounds pretty stupid. You've got your whole life ahead of you and everything, and marriage, well, it sounds silly thinking of it now.”

“I don't care,” I respond with equal certainty. “I know this is what I'm meant to do and so what difference does it make?”

“Don't you want to go places and don't you just get sick of always having to make sure that you have a boyfriend?”

I'm thinking down there on the floor. Thinking of Mike, and Scott, and Jim, and this boy named Shawn who transferred in from another school last fall, and how he picked me to be his girlfriend first and how that's all that mattered.

“It's not the need so much,” I try hard to explain to her. “It's more like what if I miss the one that I'm supposed to marry.”

“Oh shit,” said Jackie, swearing with a bit of a flair because we were just in the process of thinking it was cool to swear. “That sounds even more stupid.”

Then I'm stuck. Trying to think of a way to tell someone that I've known since the time I was a little girl what my life was going to be like. Jackie is ready to take on the world and has been accepted to the University of Wisconsin, where she plans on living in a house with males and females. She wants to be an anthropologist and has not worn a bra since the first day of second semester. In her mind, she is a woman who knows what she wants and I am a fairly useless hunk of female parts because I'm “much simpler.” How can I make her understand something so foreign? How can I tell her that it's okay for some of us to do just the exact opposite of what she wants to do?

“Look, I've tried to think like you but it's like trying to get Mr. Hobsin to change the style of clothes that he wears. My God, he's worn the same shirt every Tuesday since we were freshmen. You know what you want and really, I know what I want. I would think for a liberated mind that would be enough.”

“Don't you wonder what you might miss?” Jackie asks, with her hands moving up and down as if they are the wings of a bird. “Like how could you think that you could sleep with just one guy and know all about sex? What about seeing the world? What about anything? You know I just don't get this whole thing about you.”

Jackie's eyes are bulging while she talks, and I am at a loss to explain myself to her anymore. So I give up. I just sit on the floor and raise my shoulders up about two inches, and there is a little wall of silence that builds higher and higher between us. Finally Jackie says, “Oh brother,” and then turns to walk down the hall.

I can't quite get up. My mind is storming around inside of my head, and I am at a loss to think of another way to relate my seventeen-year-old feelings to someone who thinks I'm as dumb as a toad. So I agree with Jackie and try to think how it must seem to someone like her to even want to know someone like me.

“Addicted to my dreams,” I say out loud, forming the words and then running them over my lips so slowly I can almost feel the consonants sticking to the insides of my gums. “I'm addicted to my dreams.”

Not many years later when I heard that Jackie had indeed tried every single thing she had ever talked about and was now living on some island with a bunch of people who were studying some kind of dried-up old bugs who maybe, maybe not, had some medical use, I laughed out loud at a very inappropriate moment.

Boyce was just about to do the magical number to me and his little penis was not happy when I laughed so loud the entire moment fell apart.

“Honey, what's this all about?” he groaned as I continued to laugh as if I'd been struck by the funniest damn thing I had ever heard.

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

“What is it?” He rose up on one elbow, massaging my right breast, hopeful I'm sure, that he could get back to where he had just been.

“Well, I was thinking about high school and Jackie and how I always thought I was addicted to my own dreams and how really, she was too, maybe everybody was.”

“Oh,” he sighed, rolling over and placing the pillow on top of his head. “Is this the ‘What I did and didn't do' crap all over again?”

“It's not crap,” I said, running my fingers over his cute little rear end. “It's just that they also picked on me because I wanted to marry you and they were just as set on doing what they wanted to do.”

Boyce and I had conversations like this on and off for a good twenty years or more, but most of them didn't end up with me becoming hysterical. Although there had been times when I really was hysterical and continued to think that something might be wrong with me because I didn't want to do what most of the other women in my generation were doing.

“Addicted to dreams, huh?” Boyce rolled over, flinging his leg across my hips so we were lying side by side, connected in almost every possible manner. “Do women ever stop going on like this?”

Well, I suppose now that women never stop going on about things that are important because of what we are made of and how we feel, and I can honestly say that leaving the women walkers might have been one of those great defining moments for me. In many ways it would have been so much easier for me to stay with them. After all, they are my friends and I know all these things about each one of them, and I know how important it is for them to do this. Honest to God, yesterday when I took them some food I was thinking that I might actually run into a trail of tears and blood and guts, all the other garbage of life they are hopefully leaving on the side of the road.

Now what I would like to leave on the side of the road is how I have always felt like I had to explain myself to everyone, especially women, who might think it's nuts not to want more than what they have always had. So, really, the simple act of me coming back home is my big statement, not that I expect to ever really have to stop explaining who I am. It's just that I don't give a damn as much anymore.

You see, I did find Boyce before I had even left high school, except I was wrong about him being in the same high school. He lived about a half a mile away from me and attended a private Catholic school near Kenosha, and I ran him off the road one night while I was driving home from cheerleading practice. I don't care what anyone else says, that's a pretty cool way to meet your future husband.

He was running along the highway and I could tell from a few blocks away that he was cute. When I got close, something made me swerve—I have no idea what, ha, maybe it was Cupid! He jumped into the ditch. When I leapt from the car, which by the way kept on going without me and ended up in the same ditch, I saw that he really was gorgeous and although I didn't quite know that he was “the one” at that exact moment, I had a pretty good idea.

The rest is all pretty predictable. We married when he was a sophomore in college. I worked full-time to help him through college and then graduate school. We had three boys; I worked at a bunch of part-time jobs and took my role as mother-wife-homemaker seriously. I never slept with another man, and unless Boyce is a lying dog, we've both been faithful and happy since the day we were married.