Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (12 page)

The woman driving the Jeep is so stunningly beautiful and sure of herself, I can barely focus. When she showed up with her long legs and tanned skin and perfectly bent baseball hat in front of the resort at six
A.M.
just as the clouds on the ocean lifted and the sun began to filter through the trees by the swimming pool, I wanted to slap myself because I felt as if I were in a movie.

She is our guide-friend, local jungle expert and woman of the world. She has come to take us on an adventure to see the doggies and God knows what else. She is a friend of a friend of a friend of Elizabeth's, and the fact that she has beautiful blond hair, legs that are longer than the entire length of my body and this aura of confidence has me spinning. I want to be just like this woman when I grow up. I will have to take up weight lifting, grow out my hair, move to a foreign land—anything seems possible when I watch her move, anything.

“Welcome to my world,” she said as her way of introduction, and then she grabbed half of our bags in one arm and we were flying before I could close my mouth.

Linda, Elizabeth tells me as we walk toward the Jeep, is an archaeologist who came to Mexico to help unearth the unbelievably important ruins at Coba, an area of shallow lakes covered by decades of jungle growth that includes an amazing twenty thousand acres of an ancient civilization that we are about to enter as part of the doggie search. When the Mexican government cut off funding for major archaeological projects in sites such as Coba, Linda was unable to leave because she had fallen in love with the land, the lakes, the sky—apparently every ounce of the peninsula. Now she hires herself out as a guide, sometime digger, a friend to searching women as she waits for the skies to open so she can find more hidden treasures.

Call us “the Barking Females”—women in search of dogs. There are sleeping bags, a tent, bundles of water and food wrapped in tarps in the Jeep. I am certain that we will run into Thelma and Louise around the next hairpin turn and I pray to any living thing who will listen that I might not just be ready, but worthy as hell.

Miles and miles from the resort, where there were wonderful things like flush toilets and ice cubes and food prepared for you while you sat on the beach, we turn right and are instantly enveloped inside trees unlike any that I have ever seen. They are a tangled mass of green leaves and roots so thick that it becomes darker with each mile. Occasionally there is a break in the darkness and a slice of light pushes out in the dirt road where someone tried to claim a patch of ground. Because my Life List has been put on hold most of my dull life—okay, all of my life—I have never been to a place where people have to scratch the ground to clear a space to live. I have thought about those people from time to time, but to see a small hole in the horizon and scattered pieces of lumber, piles of garbage and a trail leading off to the next village—it changes everything.

I am an educated woman. I have studied and planned and read more books than the average person, but now I realize quickly that I have missed more than a world of experiences. Something harsh and angry rises up in me when I realize this true fact. It is one thing to live, but it is another thing to
really
live. Why have I been so afraid? Where did my wires get crossed?

We bounce along and I glance back to see Elizabeth lost in her own thoughts, and I suddenly remember the days in high school when I had such brilliant but silent dreams. I kept pages and pages of notes, most of which I wrote down during classes that I considered way too boring for my attention, and my notes were filled with a passion that seems to have gotten lost in all the days and nights of my life that have piled so high I have not been able to breathe.

Once, Mark Cotrel read my pages of notes. Mark was a pompous jackass of a boy who was blessed with a body and face that made girls do things that were terribly embarrassing. I adored Mark, loved him, wanted him and would wet myself if he so much as said “Hi” when he sat next to me in American history class. He often asked me what I was writing and I never would tell him. It was just “stuff.” Poems about climbing mountains and counting the seconds until graduation so I could leave and how I wanted to someday be driving down a jungle road in a Jeep with two women who could kick ass without even blinking.

Mark took my binder one day when I got up to go to the bathroom, and I was frantic after class because it was missing. When I stepped outside the room he was waiting for me.

“Here,” he said, eyes down, pushing the book into my hands.

“How the hell did you get this?” I seethed through my teeth, forgetting about his hair and teeth and beautiful shoulders.

“I took it. I'm sorry.”

I wanted to kill him. My rage was such a strong emotion that I was struck dumb. I was on the edge of a huge and dangerous tide that could have washed me into a place that I might still regret today. I felt violated, raped, exposed. I may as well have been standing in the hallway of my pathetic high school totally naked.

“I'm so sorry.”

“What?”

“It was wrong. I am so sorry.”

“That is my life in there,” I said.
“My
life, and it's private.”

“It's beautiful.”

He stunned me. It was a second slap in the face and again I could not speak.

“I write poetry too,” Mark said, “but I've never told anyone. People would laugh. What you write is beautiful.”

I could not take my eyes off of his face. I saw his lips moving but my mind was floating somewhere up there on the green ceiling in the hallway outside of the history room. He went on and on for a very long time. The last thing I remember him saying was that he would especially remember the poem about walking away from one place to another, unless I wanted him to forget it and then he would never even look at me again.

“Remember it,” I said when my voice came back, “and do something remarkable with your life, Mark.”

I never saw Mark after we graduated, but friends told me that he went to nursing school and now lives and works in San Francisco at a hospice for men and women dying of AIDS.

And me? I give lectures, watch my husband make love to other women, and it has taken me half my life to remember the verses from my own poem. But I remembered. I finally remembered.

Elizabeth must have been watching me think. Damn it. I can't get away with anything.

“What?” she shouts into my left ear.

“What would we do without the word
what?”
I think, because it seems as if I am always surrounded by that word.

“Thinking and remembering,” I throw back to her.

She nods and then shouts to Linda: “I need to pee.”

Linda whips her right index finger into the air and stops the Jeep right there in the middle of the highway.

“There you go,” she says. “We might as well all pee, because we have one hell of a ride in front of us.”

Okay, then.

I try and act like I know what I am doing. Linda jumps out, goes to the front of the Jeep and drops her drawers. Elizabeth takes the left side. Jane just sits in the Jeep. I went to college. I figure I can handle the right side just perfectly. This is why I never went on the camping trips with Katie's Girl Scout troop. What was I thinking? You can apparently go to the bathroom anywhere, at any time, with anyone you want to. If only I would have known this sooner I would have saved myself countless hours of time. Time that I spent needlessly looking for an indoor toilet facility. I cannot believe how my life is changing.

We are all back in the Jeep quicker than it would take three men to pull up their zippers. Jane decides to hold it—which has pretty much been the main theme in her life.

“Before we go, I want to know where we are going,” I say rather boldly.

“To see the doggies,” Elizabeth answers. “But that's going to take a few days.”

“We are driving right through the heart of the peninsula,” Linda tells us. “If you tried to walk left or right—well, it would take you pretty close to forever to get anywhere, but you'd die from thirst and there's a very good chance something might bite you that has a poisonous mouth.”

“You can't scare me,” I say. “I know where we are going, but
where are we going?”

Linda looks at me very closely. I'm not sure if she believes I have lost my mind, if I'm looking for a mall or want a chilled margarita.

“You have beautiful eyes,” she says.

“What?” There's that damn word again.

“There are specks of brown in there. I've never seen that with eyes so gray.”

“No one has noticed that in years,” I say. “Years.”

“No one has looked. Or you wouldn't let them.”

That's enough. I feel like I might blow apart. A woman like me can only take so much honesty in one day.

“Look, I'm having a nervous breakdown. Where are we staying tonight?”

“You are not having a nervous breakdown,” Elizabeth pipes in. “You just got jammed up, about—what?—twenty-six years ago, and it took something to pop you loose.”

Linda is looking at me like I'm supposed to say something, and I have a sudden urge to just laugh. So I do.

“Look,” I say, barely able to speak, I'm laughing so hard. “I'm in the jungle with a couple of goofballs looking for wild dogs while I caress my dead aunt's bracelet, because I flipped out and realized my life was a mess when I saw my husband making love to another woman, so is it too much to ask where we are going to stay—tonight?”

“Just down this road another forty-eight miles,” Linda says, through her own laugh. “It's a village where some Mayan friends of mine live and where someone might remember your aunt.”

“Really?”

“Your aunt was here more than once and she stayed for long stretches of time.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I think I know the main village where she lived and worked, and my friends in Tiapiacantio will help us.”

Elizabeth has her hand on my shoulder and I realize in that instant that the entire world must be filled with unsaid secrets that lie under trees and inside pockets and behind hidden doors. This is how men get away with having three wives and why bodies disappear and why there is a show on television called
Unsolved Mysteries.
My aunt is an unsolved mystery that is a double mystery because I did not know she was a mystery.

Auntie Marcia, oh, Auntie Marcia.

Linda cranks up the Jeep and we bounce down a road that has never seen the hard edge of a road grader or felt the backside of a bucket filled with hot tar. When I turn my head, I see that Jane and Elizabeth are holding hands. Jane always needs to hold on to someone. It is impossible to go more than 20 mph, but that is okay because my mind races with the possibilities my aunt and her mysterious life have given me. Was she part of some Mexican underground? Maybe she married someone down here and had a baby who is now a blond woman about five years younger than me.

“Imagine,” I want to shout to Elizabeth, “while I was charting numbers in the back room of a building that was painted beige from top to bottom and doing mundane things like folding towels and sweeping out the laundry room, my aunt may have been knitting together the fabric of a life that I cannot comprehend. Who was she? Who am I? Where in the hell are we going?”

I have been to California and to New York City and I have taken the train to Denver through the plains and into what seemed like the very sides of mountains that were at first small specks and then suddenly touched the edges of clouds. When the kids were in junior high school, Bob and I took them in the old Dodge van to Arizona, where we peered over the edge of the Grand Canyon—not too close, of course—and saw into the dark belly of an earth that seemed so deep and large that I was stunned down to the center of everything that I was. I wanted to walk down there really, really bad, and I let Bob talk me out of it.

“You could just spend a night at the hotel without me and I'll hike down and take the mules back up,” I'd pleaded with him like a little girl asking for another candy bar.

“You can't do that.”

“I have to do it,” I told him. “There's something down there that I have to see.”

Bob got scared when I said this. Come to think of it, he got scared when I said lots of things, and so he took what I said and made it seem like something else until I could not recognize it and I completely lost track of what I was saying or what I wanted or needed.

I have a memory of the moment when I caved in that defined everything about me for years and years after that. We had rented a room at a hotel on the edge of the park that had a small swimming pool and looked out across a field covered in sagebrush and spring flowers that were so beautiful, I wanted to eat them so that they would always be a part of me.

The kids were playing in the pool and Bob was standing in front of me with his arms crossed in a defiant male sort of way that reeked of the word
power,
and he was blocking my view of the desert. I wanted to tell him that the center of the earth was just a few miles away at the very bottom of the Grand Canyon and that I had to, simply had to, rush down there and put my ear to the ground—next to the raging waters of the Colorado River. I wanted for him to look into my eyes and to see that I knew something, like where the gold was buried or the cure for cancer or who really killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I wanted for him to see
me—
see me and then reach his arms around behind me and pull me into his chest so that I could bury my face against him and hear his beating heart, which would contain the last clue to what I was supposed to find at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.