Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (18 page)

In my dreams, I am naked and no one seems to notice and I put on clothes only when I am alone. I can hear what people are going to say before they say it and every night that I wish for a full moon, one appears and glides across the horizon left to right and then back again until the sun kicks it out of the sky.

Everything is real inside my dream, everything I want is right there within reach, and the first thing I think of when I roll out of the hut at two
A.M.
to use the bathroom is that I need to find out who makes the beer and where I can find it near Chicago or Minneapolis or Milwaukee. I will drive a great distance to buy this beer, and then I will take it to a beach when there is a full moon, and when I do, I will finally take Katie and Jane for the swim of their lives.

1973

It is a night of surprises. Margaret's brother Michael has graduated from college and his party, in the backyard, under the towering maple trees that were tiny buds when he was a baby, has slowed to a crawl. Three of his friends are sleeping on the floor of his old bedroom and everyone but one uncle, who is loud and loves to touch all the pretty ladies, and his silent wife, who smokes endlessly and picks at her nails, has left. It is past midnight and upstairs in her bedroom Meggie can hear the muffled sounds of her father and uncle talking and the women picking up glasses as they move in and out of the kitchen.

“Can I come in?” Michael asks her, pushing her bedroom door open just wide enough so she can see that he has two beers in each hand.

“Oh, please,” Meggie says through a laugh, and stretches out her hand for the beer she is usually forbidden to taste. “Will we get in trouble?”

“They'll be talking another hour and they think I'm passed out with the boys. Don't worry, baby, I'm twenty-one now, so I can corrupt anyone I want to. See?”

Michael, her brother with the gentle eyes and soft heart who rarely raises his voice above a whisper and who now has an engineering degree, pulls out a small bottle of whiskey and says, “Now I can celebrate with my favorite sister.”

“I'm your only sister, goofy.”

Meggie has tasted beer and wine and everything else her parents keep in the old ice chest behind the couch. She has had two cigarettes with her girlfriend Marcy and she has allowed Jeffrey Jablonski to slip his hands under her blouse, but Meggie is so terrified of her father's rules and her mother's enforcement of them that she has never broken them. Occasionally, she slips her foot just over the edge of the line and laughs into the wind for about fifteen seconds, but then she quickly goes right back to stand in the designated areas.

Michael tugs her out of bed and grabs her quilt off of the pillows and they circle it around themselves and sit with their backs against Meggie's bed. Then they begin their party.

“Will you get in trouble?” Meggie asks Michael as she takes a huge sip of the whiskey and washes it down with her beer.

“Oh, my baby, I am going to get in trouble, but it's not because of this.”

Meggie watches her brother move his long legs out so he can cross them at the ankles, and she cannot remember a time when she has not been able to count on him. When he left for college four years ago, just before she started high school, she was devastated and had to leave the house so she would not see the car when it turned the corner to take him away from her.

But those hundreds of miles did not make a difference and he called her and sent her photographs of his friends, and on long holiday weekends when their brother Grant was racing through town with his girlfriends, she and Michael would go to the movies and talk, just like this, about everything, or so Meggie thought.

“I'm in trouble, baby sister,” he says, dipping his head and slouching his long body into a tiny ball. He rises just a bit and adds, “But it's not totally bad trouble.”

Over the years they have talked about everything and when Meggie's girlfriends had crushes on handsome Michael, he was always gracious, and when Meggie talked about her dreams and about how she wanted so many things that her parents did not want, Michael would hold her against his chest while she cried and tried to figure out who she was and what she wanted to be when she grew up. “Oh, my Michael,” she would say over and over again, “Oh, my Michael.”

Meggie cannot imagine steady, wise, gentle Michael even knowing what trouble might feel or look or smell like. When she closes her eyes, she sees him with a long sword in one hand, his arm around her terribly slender waist and an olive branch tied up in his brown curly hair. He is her friend, her guardian, the one she has always gone to.

They are getting just a little tipsy and Michael says he has things he needs to tell her so he can practice telling their parents in the morning before he leaves.

“You're leaving?”

“Oh, yes, my Meggie, I am going far away.”

There is a hot knife burning a hole in the pit of Meggie's stomach, and she can barely speak. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Meggie,” he says gently. “Don't cry, baby. Please don't cry.”

“Tell me, Michael, just tell me. Get it over with. Just tell me.”

Michael wraps his arms around his little sister, holding her while he wipes her face with the edge of the blanket, and then he begins his story. Meggie cannot move. She is horrified and at the same time terribly happy. Michael's story is as old as he is and Meggie understands some of the pieces of his tale, because it is her story too.

Michael did not want to go to engineering school. He did not want to go to school at all. He did not want to spend four years studying something he never intended to practice. Michael wanted to travel and paint and lie on his back near the ocean so he could see what happens to the clouds when they pass across the sea and then bump up against a mass of solid earth. He wanted to have his own life and his own friends and he wanted to love who he wanted to love.

“I was in love with this woman,” Michael tells his sister, beginning to cry himself. “Oh, Meggie, I loved her so much. I will always love her.”

Meggie can't move. She is astounded, because she has never heard this story and she never knew. She never knew. Michael cries in her arms now as huge waves of tears, like the clouds he has never seen, roll through him.

“Tell me,” Meggie whispers gently into his ear, wiping his tears the way he has always wiped hers.

“She lived in my dorm and she was an artist and I loved her the first time I saw her. I love her now. I do.”

“What happened, Michael? Where is she?”

“She is black, Meggie, and when I told Mom, when I wanted to bring her home, when I said that I was in love with her, she told me I had to choose.”

“Mom said that?”

“Yes. She said I could have the woman I loved or the family I have known and loved forever, but I could never bring her home, and if I did they would never speak to me again.”

Meggie has to focus so she will not throw up. The beer and the whiskey have her head spinning and she is imagining what the conversation must have been like as Michael sat with his head in his hands and their mother broke his heart.

“Oh, Michael, I am so sorry.”

“It was my choice. It was the biggest mistake of my life and a mistake I will never make again.”

“Where is she, Michael? What happened?”

Michael's girlfriend, wise and beautiful, was used to the searing eyes of discrimination. She was used to the mothers and fathers of the world looking at her, seeing only one thing and dismissing her as other mothers and fathers and sons and daughters had done for more than a hundred years.

“She left me. When I got back from Thanksgiving break she knew what had happened without me ever saying a word. Oh, Meggie, don't ever let this happen to you.”

Michael cries then like Meggie imagines he has never cried before and she holds his head against her heart and runs her fingers through his beautiful hair and lets him cry out his anguish and his anger and his regret—his burning, horrid regret.

“Where is she, Michael? Why can't you get her back?”

“I don't deserve to have her back, baby. She is who I want to be. Strong and true and living a life that is honest. She finished school and moved to New York.”

“You could find her again, Michael. Go find her.”

Michael cries harder, imagining what his life could have been like with a beautiful and brilliant woman who wore her passion every moment of her life. He is ashamed, he tells his sister, so damned ashamed.

“Go to her,” young Meggie says.

“I have to find my passion first. I have to become a man, Meggie. I need to find my own life before I can dare to assume someone like that will even want to be in the same room with me.”

It is almost too much for Meggie. Meggie, who at seventeen dreams of love and romance as if it is all pouring out of a novel. She does not know the complicated entanglements of life. It will be a very long while before she understands the importance of passion as a grounding stone, a way of life, a place that you can never back away from.

“Someday, then, you can find her again,” Meggie tells him.

Michael desperately wants his sister to know that women and men with passion in their lives must not wait. He wants to grab Meggie by the shoulders and tell her to run from these last few years of her life in this town and with this family. He wants his sister to love and live wildly and to know that she can design every moment of her life and then live it exactly like that design she created. He wants to put her on a cloud and have her see what he has already seen.

But he can't. He knows that Meggie must find her own passion in her own time and in her own style, and his wish that night—the night before his leaving—is that he has planted a seed, a thought, a place for her to begin.

“There's more,” he says, sitting up and turning to face her. The quilt falls away from their shoulders and for a few seconds there is a silence that goes from warm to cold.

“Meggie, I joined the Peace Corps. I leave in the morning. Mom and Dad don't know, and I don't know when or if I will ever come back.”

Meggie cannot breathe. Something has clamped its hands around her throat, and she wants to scream and lie down and never get up. Michael. Her Michael. The rock in her life. The one she calls at midnight.

“Listen,” he tells her, knowing that she now thinks she cannot go on, that without him she cannot make it through the week.

“Where?” she manages to say.

“Tonga.”

Meggie can barely imagine it. Tonga. Tonga. Tonga. She can't even remember where it is.

“It's a place for me to start,” Michael explains. “I'll be doing engineering work, which I hate, but this is my choice and the place I want to be. And where it will take me is beyond anything I need to know tonight or tomorrow or the next day.”

Meggie wants to be glad for him. She wants to understand this huge change in his life.

“Michael, I know this is good. Will it make you happy?”

“It's already made me happy.”

“How will you tell them?”

Michael smiles. “I'm leaving them a note on the table and I'm running away.”

Meggie cannot believe it. “Really?”

“Yes, my bags are at my friend Mark's house. He's taking me to the airport in three hours, and I'm out of here.”

Meggie thinks for a second. “Isn't that kind of like being a coward?”

“I don't care. It's how I want to do it and it's what I need to do. By the time they get up, I'll be boarding the next airplane in Los Angeles.”

“Wow.”

Michael has other things to tell her. How to reach him, what she should do her senior year of high school, how she should act in the morning when all hell breaks loose, but Meggie has already slipped away. She cannot focus on anything but on the fact that something delicious and solid is leaving her life.

Meggie does not know that Michael has settled so deep inside of her heart that he could never, ever leave her. She did not know that long night that her brother would find his passion, not in Tonga, but in being true to the callings of his own beautiful heart. One day, years later, she will learn that his first great love was miles ahead of him and that when Michael finally caught up to her, she had passed her heart on to another man. Michael tried desperately to tell Meggie that every moment counts and that she should not waste even one of those moments. He sent her letters from Tonga, messages that he thought would help her glide to her own passion. When he moved to Seattle and began to paint and went back to school to become a grade school art teacher, she understood what was happening but she did not realize it also had something to do with her.