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Excerpt from
The Elegant Gathering of White Snows: |
Chapter One |
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| Just a glass. Balanced for a moment as brief as a breath. Like a confused dancer
undecided about a direction here on the edge of the ancient yellow Formica counter. A speck of
light filters through the crystal etchings on this last, best glass, one of three remaining after
years and years of life following the goddamned wedding.
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| Susan watches the glass, her hand stretched out in a flat welcome, her stomach
moving in waves as the glass falls and Susan, always anticipating the next movement of
everything, moves with it.
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| "Shit!" She screams as the glass punches through the soft skin in the folds
of her fingers. "Shit! Shit! Shit!" The blood gushes, covering the spot where she used to wear a
ring and then down onto wrists that are as thin as the stem of the broken glass. Before a drop of
blood hits the floor, before Susan can raise her hand, before a thought can form, the women come running.
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| There is a concert of unrehearsed movement on the kitchen floor. Alice runs for the
dishcloth; Chris is on the floor cradling Susan in her arms; Sandy is looking to make certain the
good bottle of wine has not spilled. Joanne and Janice are crouched like frogs close by, their hands
dangling between their legs; Gail guards the small door between the kitchen and the living room, and
Mary is poised to grab more towels and maybe, if the cuts are deep enough, those big bandages she
knows Susan keeps on the shelf behind the kitchen sink.
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| "Is it deep?" Chris asks, extending her fingers around the tiny bloody
wrist where a red-colored stream begins moving over her own fingers.
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| Everyone waits. There is a silence that reaches toward Susan, who answers by pushing
herself into Chris's chest, bending her head so she can lie against her friend. Then there is the unspoken
gesture of Alice slipping the stained dishcloth into Chris's free hand, and Chris placing it around the
bloody wrist once and then twice like she is wrapping a holiday gift. |
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| "Hey," Susan stutters, a whimper visibly rising from her stomach through her chest and
toward any opening it can find. "I'm fucking pregnant, fucking, fucking pregnant." |
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| There it is, suddenly as plain as the long splinters of glass. Forget the blood,
forget the crystal glass, forget every damn thing. Everyone moves closer, except Sandy who reaches
for the bottle of wine, grabs the plastic cups off the side of the table and then sets them down
in a circle around the bottle of wine. |
| "Oh honey," Alice says, reaching without thinking to run her fingers, already bent
with arthritis, into the edges of Susan's incredibly short hair. "It's okay, sweetie, we're
here now, we're here." |
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| Susan weeps into Chris as if she is a giant Kleenex and although Chris has
never rocked her own babies, she rocks Susan. Back and forth, back and forth, while the other
women slide closer, reaching first for a glass of wine until the eight women are touching,
breathing, drinking, sitting in a mass that has quickly surrounded Susan and Chris.
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| "How pregnant?" asks Gail. |
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| "Just barely," whispers Susan. "I found out yesterday." |
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| "I take it this isn't the best news you ever had?" Chris already knows the answer. "Oh, you poor, poor girl." |
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| Everyone knows right away. They know without Susan saying a thing, without looking into anyone else's eyes,
without a single movement in the room. Susan knows they know. These women have seen the lining of her soul, the secrets of
her heart, the insides of her mistakes and faults. When they walked into her house thirty minutes ago under the pretense of
one of their charmed female gatherings and saw the circles under her darting eyes, saw her hair matted to one side, saw
the newspapers stacked on the living room table, saw only one car in the driveway, they knew. |
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| "It's not John's baby. Oh Christ, it's not John's baby." |
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| While it is impossible for the women to sit any closer to each other, they quickly try,
tucking under legs, clasping their plastic cups, scooting sideways, brushing shoulders and pushing their
rear ends just another inch closer to Susan and Chris.
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| "Does John know?" Mary asks quietly, knowing already that the one thing John is ever
in and out of is a hell of a lot of trouble, and definitely not a wife he most likely hasn't had sex
with in twenty years.
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| "I don't even know where John is," Susan answers. "A clinic in Milwaukee
knows, but that's it. John hasn't been here for a long time. He's gone, he's always gone,
he's always been gone." |
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| Now there are a thousand things to say and the women are restless,
tapping the plastic cups with nervous fingers, holding back questions, wanting to skip
over the obvious and find a solution, solve a problem, help their friend, a woman they
love. But they wait, because they know this has to happen slowly, and they want it to
be perfect and right and cautious, just a little bit cautious, because Susan has never
been like this, and it's important, so important. |
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| "Let's pull the glass out of that hand before we go any further,"
Alice says. "Here, just open your fingers, and let me clean this up." |
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| Alice, with her bent fingers, is the one who knows about babies born and
unborn, alive and dead, and when she touches Susan, picking the little shards of glass out
one at a time and dropping them into Janice's outstretched hand, she tries hard to think
only of that. "There now. We'll just put a few Band-Aids on those fingers, and I think
you'll be fine." |
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| The Band-Aids are passed over, more wine is poured, and Sandy and Mary quickly pick
up the remains of the glass and drop the pieces onto the shelf where Susan keeps her recipe
boxes and cookbooks. |
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| Susan shifts, turning to face the women who surround her, but Chris won't let go of
her and pushes in her legs to hold the tiny woman against the full frame of her body. The women talk
then, the same easy conversation they might have had in the living room, without a broken glass,
where Susan would have eventually told them in greater detail about the boyfriend who has been standing
in the wings for years, more--always more--about John, the missing husband, about the risks of a baby
when you are past forty and tired and angry and sad and don't want any more babies anyway. |
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| Another bottle of wine comes off the top of the counter, and this sad circle of friends
becomes lost in remembering and talking and simply being there together on Susan's kitchen floor. An hour
passes, and the voices rise and fall and rise and fall like a wave moving from one wall to the next
and then back again. |
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| The women talk about abortion, and they talk about what bastards half of the men they
have married and loved and slept with are and always will be. There is a chorus of sorrow that floats
from one woman to the next, and these women who have spent time together for years and shared their
loves and who have talked about lust and hate and crime and passion don't see that the early evening
has passed, and that there is a half moon rising outside of the high kitchen window. |
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| They talk with great sincerity and kindness about helping Susan and driving her to
the clinic and helping her to get that damn attorney to file the divorce papers and getting off the
fence with the jackass she's been screwing for twelve years. The women talk about these things mostly
without anger, but that rises from them too, in an unseen layer of life's tragedies and sorrows
that always seems to hover close. |
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| As the women talk, they don't see themselves as separate entities even though they are
each as different from one another as the proverbial fish is to the bicycle. They are grandmothers and
career women, housewives, a secretary. They are divorced, married, grieving, wildly happy, conservative,
liberal and a combination of every sad tale in the universe. But those differences are overshadowed
by the fact that they are all women and friends, and because they have shared their secrets and because
now they are lying on the floor in Susan's kitchen and they have made the world stand still. |
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| When their words begin to slide into each other after the fourth bottle of wine, Sandy
decides they must eat. No one rises from the floor though, and the time or the place doesn't seem to
matter. It becomes clear first to one and then to the next that they matter, just them, and nothing
else matters for these hours, not another person or thing or problem. |
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