Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (15 page)

It's my background, I say, lying while Elizabeth pokes me from behind so hard with her left hand that I could almost cry.

Mae West, Linda says.

I know Mae West, and I laugh.

Mae West, I finally say, did not want to exclude 50 percent of the population, so she slept with everyone, anyone, lots of men and women.

But. I push my question. Is there someone?

There is always someone, Linda says. At the moment it is another archaeologist, who flies in and out of this country inside of a plane so small, I could hold it in my hand, and he is kind and fun, so damn much fun. But, she adds—raising her voice just a bit so that I know something serious is coming—there is also always just me, and that is most important.

Just you? I question her but I am really questioning myself and she reaches over to touch my hand and then says, Just me, and I let it ride inside of me, tuck it away so that I can bring it out later when I am alone and can think about what that might really mean to a woman like me who does not even urinate alone half of the time. I have been alone so rarely during the past twenty-five years, I cannot even bring to mind one stretch of time when there was not a child, a husband, a mother, some relative or neighbor or someone from work propped up in my life. My head could explode simply trying to remember all the faces.

Our conversation has made Elizabeth very happy. She is laughing and pounding her knees and of course I think she and Linda have slept together and have been lovers, but these days I think that of everyone. I think that the pilot slept with the baggage woman and I think that the bus driver slept with the woman at the front desk and then it dawns on me that I have not had decent sex in so long that I think the birds are mating and that every creature in the world is ready to copulate. My hormones must be off the chart after all these years of languishing in hibernation while apparently the entire world carried on in glorious sexual delight. And Linda reeked of sexiness, something I may be trying to catch, hoping to catch, and what a beautiful disease it might prove to be.

What do I know when I am done with my interview? Not much and everything and I hear a tiny door, about the size of a simple matchbook cover, spring open. Possibilities. There are so many possibilities? What have I been thinking? Have I been thinking?

There are pauses in these hours to do that—think, about sex, life and being alone and which direction I am really headed toward but there is also the following of the basic commandments. Commandments such as—Thou Shalt Find a Road Where Gas Is Available—and Who Shall Let Us Spend the Night? And How Will We Get There?

As these questions pound through my mind, it suddenly dawns on me that I trust this woman-driver-sexy-thing Linda more than I have ever trusted anyone, except Elizabeth, who has ushered me into this place, and oh, yes, my Auntie Marcia, who I continue to think is the reason we are here—I am here. I am here. Right here in the heart of a Mayan village where nothing seems familiar and where everything is simple and pure and basic.

Linda showed us everything in this little—what?—village, settlement, place of several huts—where families have carved out spaces for their no-door-or-window homes and put in a pump and turned their few animals loose and then began the tedious and eternal task of making a living. A living for them does not go beyond the basic elements of food and shelter and apparently being able to reach over on this tiny, cold, earthen floor to make certain that there is someone next to you.

Tourist
is not a word I would call myself, but that is what I am, and it embarrasses me more than watching my husband make love, which is really, when I pause to think about it, not embarrassing at all. So I choose to call myself a “visitor.” Someone just peeking in through the cracks, invited, of course, who will not be obtrusive or take photos of someone while they are indisposed.

Linda has instructed me to just be. Like I know what that is. Do not offer them anything, she says. Be gracious. Just be. The educator in me parades out to the center of the ravaged highway as if it were the Fourth of July.

“Have they been inoculated?”

“Yes. Your aunt took care of that.”

“What?”

“Later,” Elizabeth bellows from the backseat.

Jane continues to look startled and slightly amazed by the fact that she is even with us. “No one, no one who has ever touched my world even knows I am here,” she tells us proudly. She dips into our conversations as if she is not even listening to where they are going.

“School?” I ask Linda.

“Some of them travel to Quinchinita. They have no need for school.”

“Quinchinita?” I ask.

“Next stop.”

“Water?”

“A well, but it's not safe by our standards. It's the only source of water for this entire village.”

My mind is a machine gun. Their lives. Marriage? Death? Where did they get the tennis shoes? Who the hell gives them candy? Who built this road? What did they wear before we showed up with our T-shirts and hand-me-down dresses? Tell me—tell me everything.

Linda tries, but we reach the village before everything can be answered, and suddenly my hands are moving across the back of a dog that is crawling with fleas and ticks and has tits the size of golf balls and I am standing in a yard where a pig is the family pet and this dog, which I have touched for ten minutes, is considered wild and ugly.

Oh, Meg. Oh.

Oh a hundred thousand times over, and oh when Linda passes me water from her bottle and puts her finger to her lips, and oh when Elizabeth disappears, just walks off with people who come to greet her as if she were their favorite sister and Jane goes along. How about that? Jane goes along.

It is easy to forget why I have come. It is easy to get lost in watching and letting my mind hang its hat in this place that seems simple and at the same time mysteriously complicated.

As we settle in with the family, who Linda tells us have never before had overnight guests and who have skin the color of the early-evening clouds, I cannot stop thinking about my aunt and what she was doing here and how she found this part of a country that was so far removed from the rest of her life. Beyond that, why did she want me to come here and what does my trembling heart need to learn beyond everything—every single thing?

We are asleep just after dusk and I sway myself into sleep with Elizabeth on one side of me, Linda on another and Jane next to her, bodies scattered on mats around the dusty floor that must have seen the bottoms of many brown feet but never the swaying forms of four white women who sleep in shorts and T-shirts, with their eyes watching the last corner of light that disappears beyond the trees.

The day I married Bob, it rained. It was not a gentle, welcome-to-married-life-which-will-be-absolutely-beautiful-and-like-page-37-in
-Modern-Bride-
magazine kind of rain. It was a hurricane rain. Wind swept off the fields, and the tops of the old pines touched the midsections of trees planted fifteen feet away. The sewers were clogged full of cardboard boxes, roots the size of bicycles and small animals—including the neighbors' white poodle, who probably yipped all the way down that dark ride to the bowels of our city.

My mother wept when she woke on April 23, 1977, and saw clouds as dark as midnight instead of the bright blue heavens that she had imagined would produce streams of sunlight coming through the stained-glass windows at St. Agnes Church, where she would stand and watch me walk up the aisle and into a bride's magazine world that left me dazed and confused.

I woke to her sobs early the morning of my wedding after a night of tormented dreams, which were of my unfinished dissertation and a feeling that I may be making the greatest mistake of my life.

“Margaret,” she screamed from the living room. “Margaret.”

Apparently the rain was my fault along with everything else that went wrong that day. Dresses were torn, the cake was late, my dad's brother—Drunken Eddie, as we called him—bashed his car into the head usher's new Chevrolet and it never stopped raining all day long, not even for five minutes.

Later, years and years later, when I gave up, I remembered something from my wedding that I must have buried in a very deep spot. There is screaming in the car and my friend Susan is holding my hand and telling me everything is going to be okay, and closed streets and a mad dash by everyone when the car pulls up behind the church. I get out last and do it very slowly. The rain is pounding—there is no other way to describe it—and when I get to the door of the church, one hand there, the other dangling by my side, I realize that I am crying.

The rain splashes against my face, mixes with my tears and onto the black raincoat that I found hanging in the basement from Girl Scout camp days, and I say, “Thank you” out loud to God or some saint or anyone who might have been responsible for letting me hide behind the walls of water.

That is what I think about when I wake up in the middle of the night from my hammock in Mexico, because I hear rain pounding into the ground outside of the hut. If anyone else is awake, I do not know it, and the rain slows until the slice of sky I see from the open door lightens and the stars blink back on. I do not want to be thinking about the rain at my wedding, but I let my mind pause there for a moment and dip into the swell of what happened after I went into the church and dressed and walked up the aisle and then drove off again, still crying, into a rain that lasted four solid days.

When I wake again, just after dawn, I shake my head to clear it of my midnight dreams. Before I have time to blink, Linda has us on our feet and we are back on the highway, which is really not a highway at all but a large path chopped between the trees.

“How far to Quinchinita?” I want to know.

“Maybe seventy-five miles, but I'm not sure about the road after that rain last night. Sometimes it's worse the closer we get to the ocean, where the storms blow in.”

“Then what?” Jane asks.

“Last night I asked about the man who knew your aunt, Meg, and I mentioned those damn dancing dogs, and I have an idea, not very clear but an idea, where we might find your doggies and any trace of your aunt. People in this village remember her.”

“What do they remember?”

“Mostly that your aunt was just here and that when she was here she brought medicine and that she laughed.”

“That would be her,” Elizabeth says. “If I remember anything about your Aunt Marcia, it was that laugh.”

I remember it too, almost as well as I remember my own laugh, and in a second, in the time it takes to say a name, I can pull the way she tilted her head and sucked air into her lungs fiercely and then let it blow through her throat and nose and mouth, I can pull that memory right out of my heart because I have carried it with me for my entire life. I think of it and my aunt with a kind of wild and free grace that tastes a bit like the dirt on the Mexico highway, and for so many years now it has been the only place I can touch that actually feels free. My aunt's stored laugh, tucked halfway between my stomach and my waist—like rolling thunder—always makes me feel free. The wild part, well, apparently I am working on that at this very moment. There are miles to go before I sleep and become Aunt Marcia-like wild—miles and miles.

So we drive, and it is slow and then fast, and I do not focus on the fact that my back is killing me or that I would commit a crime for an ice-cold beer, which I have been promised if we ever get to the other side of the world.

“Lots of beer, baby,” Elizabeth says, “and there will be rum to set the lining of your stomach on fire, and the
views . . .”

She closes her eyes when she talks about the views from small hills that are not blotted by condos and hotels and signs offering parasailing and men who cannot play the guitar singing next to a palm tree at midnight.

“You have been there?” I ask.

“Not this spot, but farther down the coast, and I imagine it as being almost the same.”

“It is,” Linda says. “It's quiet and beautiful and if I could pick one reason why I stay in this country, it would be because of Quinchinita.”

“Wow” is all I can think of saying, because it is hard for me to imagine anything more beautiful than the other side of the peninsula.

We stop once to eat fruit and granola bars, and when I peer into the thick jungle I wonder how far I would have to walk before I actually saw another person. It took three hours to get here in an airplane and it is a million miles away from where I live.

By four
P.M.
we have crossed some kind of imaginary line and we begin to see huts, a few live human beings, and Linda tells us that within ten miles we will be in the town. “Town,” she adds quickly, “meaning streets and a few businesses and stores and the most wonderful market you will ever see in your life, and yes, before you ask, there will be cold beer, and that is where we stop first.”

Once when I was in high school I read a book about a young woman whose mother had died when she was a little girl. She had no real memories to hang on to: thoughts of what her mother must have been like, how she sat on her mother's lap, touched her hair, whispered in her ear and smelled her skin almost drove her insane. One day the girl fell into a deep sleep, no one could wake her, and in her dream her mother came to her and answered every question. The girl slept for days and when she woke up it was as if she had lived with her mother every day she had been alive. She knew everything she had always wanted to know.