Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (11 page)

Preparing for an all but abandoned adventure was not easy, but I could not have picked two more wonderful traveling companions. Jane was so glad to be doing anything, to get a break from her job search, from trying to sell her house and from the dungeon of her marriage, she obeyed us like a trained bird. Elizabeth set the rules from the moment I asked her to go on the trip, and the more I thought about it the more I liked the rules.

“Sweetheart,” she said, leaning into me and pulling my face next to hers, “there are no rules.”

“Okay,” I stammered, because the idea of no rules had never entered even the outer edges of my mind. Not in the past twenty years anyway.

“And, this is very important.”

“What?”

“What happens to us, where we go, who we meet, anything at all—it stays with us.”

“We can't even tell the doctor?”

“We cannot even tell the doctor, unless you desperately need to say something that might save you from madness, and then it has to be in vague terms, like ‘I felt free,' or ‘I had the greatest orgasm of my life.'”

“Are we going to have orgasms?”

“God, I hope so,” Elizabeth said, laughing as if her throat were on fire.

Jane turned white during this part of the discussion, and I simply reached over to touch her hand. What happened to Jane? Did she miss the '70s? My. My. My.

“Do you have any idea how long it's been since I even said the word
orgasm
?” I asked Elizabeth.

“You are a disgrace to womanhood, darling,” Elizabeth said, more than half seriously. “Do you have an idea how important it is to talk about sex, have sex, and to simply say anything sexy as often as possible so the world will realize that it's women and not men who need sex?”

“This conversation could be endless,” I said, shuddering. “And we have to catch a plane.”

Which is what we did, and when I felt the rise of the wings and the grinding of the airplane tires being sucked into the bowels of the airplane as we started our journey, I asked Elizabeth to hold my hand and I felt, through her fingers, the long dark veins of my Auntie Marcia and the whisper of her promises and a long sigh sliding from inside of me that came from a place so deep and old and tired that I imagined it was a fairly large pit that was close to the very bottom of my heart.

Blue is a color, I realize the moment I wake up for the first time in my life in Mexico, that pulls at the inner circle of my soul, and the color of the water that I see from my bed is like no blue I have ever seen. It is aqua and navy and turquoise and it nails me to the center of my soft cotton sheets as if I am lying on a crucifix.

“Jesus,” I whisper to myself in a half-prayer, half-astonished kind of way. I do not want to wake Elizabeth and Jane, who I imagine are sleeping off the six shots of tequila we had at two
A.M.
when our bus finally found this isolated resort.

But Elizabeth is already gone and there is a note on her pillow. Jane does not look as if she has moved in thirty-four years.

     
Pee and then walk naked down the beach until you find me.

It has been so long since I have been naked or thought of taking my clothes off other than to change them. I am trying to remember if I even bother to strip when I shower.

“Surely she's joking,” I tell myself as I follow the instructions to pee, slip on my stretched-out bathing suit and pray to God Elizabeth has coffee, wherever in the hell she is sitting—hopefully not naked. One step at a time, please. Mexico today, naked in maybe—what?—three years or so.

I am so drunk with the blue and the morning light and from the sound of the waves and from the feel of the already warm sand against my pale skin that I am not at all startled to see Elizabeth sprawled in the sand with her breasts pointed toward the sky, and what looks like a piña colada in her right hand.

“You could get arrested for that,” I say.

“You are the one who is indecent,” she says without moving.

This is when I look around and realize that I am the only woman on the beach that has on a bathing suit.

“Where are we, sweetie, the Isle of Lesbos?”

“No. Look again.”

I see men, who are unfortunately wearing bathing suits, but they are very tiny and revealing bathing suits and on second glance I see that the women, nine out of ten of them anyway, have on bottoms.

“Oops.”

“You are overdressed—again.”

“Goddamn it, I so much wanted this to go smoothly and I want to be popular like all the other girls.”

Elizabeth laughs. It's that big-geese-flying-south laugh that makes me lunge for her glass so I can feel the same way, but instead I end up with a breast in my left hand.

“That makes up for the overdressing,” she says, sitting up on both elbows. “You
are
overdressed, you know.”

“Oh no.” My voice is a pitiful mix of sadness and terror.

“Not yet, but within a few days you just may want to take off your bathing suit. Americans are such assholes about their bodies. There isn't anything sexual about what is happening on this beach. Besides, it's about time you looked at yourself from the outside as well.”

“Will you be embarrassed if I just sit here with my suit on for a while?”

Elizabeth knows my self-esteem is in the crapper and that I half believe that she really might be embarrassed if I don't strip. In reality, she wouldn't care if I wore a frog to the beach or came down here and organized a Tupperware party. But I need so much reassurance that I cannot even joke about being naked on a beach in Mexico where the likelihood of me meeting someone that I know has about the same odds as me knowing in the next five minutes what and who I want to be when I grow up.

“Sit,” she commands, and I sink into the arms of the warm sand with extreme gratitude.

By noon I am already getting the hang of this cosmopolitan, non-American life. There are no other Americans at our small resort and there is a stated nonchalance to eating, walking, moving, whipping off tops and smoking and drinking that has me feeling a bit boozy before I even bother to sip the South of the Border booze. Elizabeth made all the plans for this trip and I suspect she has a hidden agenda that has me eventually sleeping with a man from France, his sister-in-law and two long-lost uncles. I very quickly fall into a rhythm of total and complete relaxation unlike anything I can ever remember. I become a virtual physical and emotional captive to my surroundings—the constant and glorious sun, the stunning blue, the way everything seems slower and gentler, that warmish, scented breeze that drifts across the beach from some island miles and miles offshore, the way the men run their eyes up and down my body and then boldly lock into my own eyes, the way I have already forgotten what brought me to this paradise in the first place. How quickly I have been seduced.

Jane finally sees the light of day just after one
P.M.
and wanders onto the beach like she is looking for something she lost. We say hello to her and she turns slowly to look at us, and she says, “Who the hell are you two?” We laugh and let her sink into the sand. She is hours behind us—hours and days and maybe years.

Elizabeth tells me I must go to a place where I can examine my Life List. “It's right there,” she says as we sit on the edge of the wharf, imagining what secrets lie buried out there in the miles of open sea, and then she pushes on the insides of my wrists with her warm fingers. “It's close to the skin now. I have already seen it travel down from your heart and past that tough bend in your elbow. It's very close to your fingertips.”

“Most people would think we are crazy if they heard this conversation,” I tell her. “But I think I know what you mean. Maybe we should just stay here for the rest of our lives, eating fruit and having your men bring us rum-laced drinks.”

“Don't get too comfortable. We're leaving in the morning.”

“What?” both Jane and I shout.

“We are off to find the dancing dogs in the morning, and that's why it's so important to work on that List today, and one other thing.”

My heart pounds just a little and for a second or two I put myself back in my real life and the sky goes dark and I have a very clear vision of the level of my unhappiness. There is Bob standing behind me with his arms crossed, a counter filled with dirty dishes, my daughter talking on the phone, a pile of terribly boring reports stacked to eye level on my desk and something so odd that I close my eyes to focus on it—a calendar that extends on forever, and every single day has something written on it. My life planned out by everyone but me.

Elizabeth holds my hand when I begin crying. She tells me that the color of my tears has changed and that she can tell these are now new tears.

“This is new anguish,” she says, tasting one of the tears. “Fresh salt. Now you tell me.”

It is perhaps remarkable to remember the moment when you wake up. It is perhaps remarkable to be able to step outside of your mind and body and see your flaws and missteps and yearnings. It is remarkable to be able to put your finger on your own pulse and to say that you suddenly understand that unhappiness is a choice and that everyone, even you, can change direction, or better yet, find direction at any moment in your life.

“I have to remember the color of everything, Elizabeth, don't I?”

“You can, but what is important, I think, is to remember that something remarkable happened and that something remarkable can happen at any moment for the rest of your life.”

Jane is taking silent notes. She has not moved but she is listening.

She is good, this Elizabeth, who wears a brightly patterned piece of Mexican cloth draped around her and tucked into the narrow of her breasts to keep it from slipping off. She is already stunningly beautiful because of the power over her own life that she has always seemed to possess. For the first time in weeks I want to hold her in my arms instead of having her hold me, but I am certain I am not ready to hold the weight of anyone by myself—not yet. I can hold a small part of Jane, but I cannot hold all of her either.

Jane has turned to watch me and her hand, slow at first, has moved to touch my leg. She has not seen me cry. I have been the weight to tie her down, and this is my moment. If she can learn from it and lean into me even more, that is fine, and the strength I get from simply knowing that I need this moment this time washes over both of us.

“Everything has to change, doesn't it, Elizabeth?” I say.

She is smiling, and I can see her eyes crinkle up when her sunglasses slip down just a bit.

“What do you think, sweetheart? Does everything have to change?”

“Here is that moment,” I say to myself, “that moment I will always remember not for what I see with my eyes but for what I know is the necessary ingredient for my survival.” I take the moment and I hold it cupped in my hands not so gently. My grip is firm and smooth and kind, but it is also solid—because I know. I think I really know.

“Everything has to change.”

When I say it, I see a brigade of dancing Mexican women twirling past me with their skirts flying. Dolphins leap from the sea. Little brown-skinned boys and girls laugh in unison. The sand sifts itself into dozens of castles. The sky twirls itself into the shape of clapping hands, and Elizabeth sails from the wharf and slides across the gentle waves of the ocean, totally naked while she jumps rope with the cloth that was once her dress.

Linda is driving a Jeep that is so old, portions of the back floor are missing, there is no tailgate, and if there ever was a top it was destroyed long before the Second World War. Elizabeth is in the back end, wearing a jogging bra—thank God—with one leg on one side of the largest hole and the other leg on the other side of the hole. Jane sits next to her, holding on to the roll bar with both hands, and her eyes are open so wide, I am certain they'll pop out. I am in the front seat with a bandanna wrapped around my head in do-rag style, hanging on to what there is of the dashboard while we fly down what appears to be the only main highway between here and Houston, Texas. We are in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula, in search of the wild dancing dogs, men and women who will yip and holler like the doggies without giving such action a second thought and any kind of memory scent my Auntie Marcia may have left in this hot, dusty and terribly exotic country.