Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (21 page)

Can there possibly be more? I can no longer hold myself back and I go to Pancho, kneel at his feet and place my arms around his waist. “I am so sorry,” I sob.

“But, my dear girl, I was never sorry. I never wasted one second of time that I was with her. We danced and sang and we made love on every beach on this entire peninsula. I miss her every second that I breathe, but soon I will be with her again.”

When I walk Pancho to his room and he leans against me, I realize that soon means very soon. There is nothing left to him but bones and air, and I think that his heart must be taking up most of his entire body. He is a feather, and as I walk him to the edge of his bed and lift his feet and place a blanket over his legs, he asks me to sit for just a moment.

What he gives me next is the world. The deed to the small house that Tomas will show me, a package of letters, old photographs—not the ones by his bedside—and a silver bracelet laced with turquoise that he said was a sign of their love.

“You must always wear this when you are in Mexico,” he tells me, folding it into my hands. “If you can, you should wear it all the time. It would match the beautiful silver bracelet you are constantly playing with.”

“Is it that obvious?” I ask him.

“Yes, dear, it is time for you to choose to be happy. Can you do that?”

“I am trying, I am trying very hard.”

I may never see this man again. Maybe in a week Tomas will call me and I will hear cracking over the wires and he will let me know that his father has died. Maybe I will fly back and stay at the little house while they scatter the ashes. Maybe Tomas will kiss me by the ocean and we will hold hands like his father and my aunt did.

For now I can only say “Thank you” through a stream of tears, which spatters my purple skirt. This reminds me to ask a most important question.

“Why the purple skirt, and where are those damn dancing dogs?”

He laughs, but then stops because the simple action appears to bring him to the edge of terrible pain. He waits a few moments and then begins speaking again.

“Marcia said you were born to wear purple but that you had spent your life clinging to yellow. Tonight, when you meet Tomas, you must also take your friends. It is the night of the dancing dogs. You will see.”

When I leave this gracious man, I kiss him gently on the lips and I slip the bracelet on my left wrist, just above the narrow bones, where I will always be able to feel it pressing against my skin. I tuck the precious key to my new Mexican house into my purse next to the papers that will surely change many things about my life. It is impossible now to even think of what most of this means. It is impossible to imagine that I have a piece of this intoxicating land in my pocket. One step at a time. That's what Auntie Marcia would have said. That's what she did say. If only I had listened.

When I bend down one last time, Pancho smiles, and I can think to say only one thing. “When you see her,” I say, “please tell Auntie Marcia that I am finally listening.”

Who would have thought that the possibility of discovering dancing dogs would be so intoxicating? Who knew such things existed? Who knew that the way I think and live and how I consider the world could change so drastically in twenty-four hours?

The girls are a buzz of activity in our small hacienda. We have discussed everything from the new house, which we hope to see sometime in the next three days before we drive back through the jungle; the great love affair between Aunt Marcia and Pancho, and my date with Tomas—which I continue to explain is not a date at all. Life, love, the perils and perks of dating someone in a foreign country, the foundation to help Mexican women—and most important at this very moment—what does one wear to the dancing dogs show?

Skirts, of course, and a white blouse looped with the colors of the rainbow. Mexican sandals and silver bracelets, whispers of the early-night air, a flower above the left ear, a happy heart and the all important, open and willing thoughts. No excessive baggage allowed.

“You are quiet,” Elizabeth tells me as we pause outside of the hut to drink a beer and settle our thoughts. “Where is your mind?”

“It's almost too much. My aunt and the way she lived and what she must have sacrificed to love him.”

Elizabeth does not hesitate. Clearly what she says next is something she does not have to think about but something she embraces and knows as the truth.

“You're wrong. She didn't sacrifice anything. She had exactly what she wanted.”

“Do you think so?”

“Your aunt and I are very similar. We know what we want and then we go to that place.”

“But the possibility of a life with someone you love. A life that doesn't seem quite—what? I don't know—quite whole.”

Elizabeth sets her beer down and shifts in her chair so that she is no longer facing the water but looking directly at me. She could almost be angry.

“You have read too many
Good Housekeeping
magazines, darling. There is great joy in sometimes being alone. Being alone and loving someone is not a horrific choice. It's a wonderful choice. Have you actually thought about how you have lived for the past ten or so years? You've been alone but you just haven't been able to enjoy it.”

I'm a bit stunned. I have never imagined my life as being one of aloneness. The job. Marriage. Kids. Family obligations. Surely I have never been alone.

“How often did you feel alone?” Elizabeth asks.

“I never thought about it,” I reply honestly. “There were always too many people around.”

We both laugh at that thought, but she goes on to explain the difference between being alone and loneliness. Being alone, she thinks, does not mean you are automatically lonely.

“Did you feel lonely when all those people were around you?”

Just when I think I am finished crying and hours after I have held the hands of a man who is dying and days after I have unlocked some long-held passions and notions and thoughts so that I took them into my heart without actually claiming them as my own, there is yet something else to address.

Elizabeth reaches out to take my hand and then raises my face with her other hand so that I must look into her eyes.

“I was terribly lonely,” I admit. “It wasn't so bad when the kids were small, because they needed me, but the moment high school started it was as if there had been a mass exodus from my life. And Bob—Bob was never really part of anything except for the first few years we were married. He would come to the soccer games and we wouldn't even talk. He dropped Shaun off at practice but he never really did anything. Do you know what I mean?”

Elizabeth doesn't reply. She wants me to see this myself, to circle around and around until I spot the perfect angle and come in for the kill myself, unaided, with my head held high.

“I was terribly lonely.”

“Tell me, say it to me again. Tell me one story.”

I suddenly want to apologize to Elizabeth. I feel as if I am one thing after another, the gift of confusion that keeps on giving, and that since the night I called to have her rescue me from Kmart, it has been a nonstop crisis.

“We should be drinking beer and just enjoying these moments,” I say. “I'm feeling bad. This is like constant therapy.”

“Listen, it's all coming fast to you now. It would be one thing if you were not here and if you had not watched your husband making love and if you had not discovered the secrets your Auntie Marcia had been holding for you. But you have all those things now and you're not backing away. This is important stuff and you give me so much, Meg, your friendship is a treasure to me. Watching you discover who you are, where you are going is really a gift to me.”

“Okay, Elizabeth, I've still got that Catholic guilt thing going on,” I say as if I have been discovered eating a candy bar in the church vestibule. “What do you want?”

“Tell me a story of loneliness. Tell me one right now, and then we'll finish this beer. And the rest of the night, which may become endless, we will savor the joy of what we have.”

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of moments of loneliness to pick from. A flood of memories that have me paralyzed, frozen in place, despondent. I reach in and pick a quiet moment where the world of others is swirling around me and where my own world has all but disappeared. It is very early in the morning. Fall. School has started again and the smell of exhaustion already hangs like invisible cotton in every room of the house. When I wake, suddenly, at 4:15
A.M.,
I realize that Bob has not come home or maybe he left early. Maybe I will never know. I often sleep alone.

I slip out of bed and bundle myself inside the frayed blue terry robe that I drop next to the bed each night. I dare not look in the mirror and I have no idea why I am awake. Shaun, who I check first, has fallen asleep fully clothed with a math book on his pillow. I quietly cover him up with the Notre Dame blanket that he has been sleeping with since second grade. I want so desperately to touch him on his arms and neck and face. I want to whisper into his ear that I love him and that I want him to come back to me. I cannot do this. If he saw me standing there, if he knew that I had touched my lips to his, I think that something would change. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it would make everything better. My son does not move or turn when I run my fingers over the pages of his math book where I suspect his fingers were resting before he fell asleep.

Katie is a dream. I could lie next to her and hold her and she would move against me and call me “Mommie.” I do kiss her, my lips brushing the skin of an angel, and I can see her eyes moving back and forth under her pale eyelids. She must be dreaming of wild horses and middle school boys who might some day grow tall enough to bend down and kiss her. This girl still sleeps in pink sheets and I can see the faint hint of her blossoming breasts underneath the cotton blankets and a part of me wants to hold her down in this exact position so that she will never change or grow or move and so that I can always tiptoe into this room and watch her sleep.

Downstairs it is dark. The hall light has died again and I have to feel my way down the steps, where my foot bumps into Bob's briefcase. Home and then gone again. I cannot even bother to think where he might be. I can't even bother to care.

It is the kitchen that throws me over the edge. I see that someone has made a pizza and that Katie has had another bowl of cereal. There are socks on the floor, a note to sign for a field trip to the theater and on the counter—and table and on the floor—there is not one single sign of my life. Not one thing. The dishes were Bob's mother's. There are no letters from old friends stacked next to the phone. The old table was a hand-me-down gift from a distant cousin. My mother picked out the kitchen wallpaper. There's no note tacked up on the refrigerator reminding me to show up for a book club or a walk with the dogs. It is as if I do not exist in my own home, and I am gripped by such a sudden and painful feeling of loneliness that I drop to the floor and hold the socks against my face and cry. This is not my world, but theirs. Their plans and friends and food and clothes. Where they need to be and where they are going. I am a kiss on the cheek and the ride to school. I am the one who waves good-bye and fills the refrigerator and waits. I am the one who waits.

“I cried for a very long time, Elizabeth. The house was filled with my two kids and their lives and by then it was essentially a place for Bob to store his things and I felt like a stranger, as if I were a guest who didn't know anything about the people I was visiting except their names and what they liked to put on top of their ice cream,” I tell her. “I was not alone but I was terribly lonely.”

“Do you see the difference?”

“I see the difference. I understand.”

“Your aunt was occasionally lonely. She loved this man. Fiercely. Her love was powerful and true. But she also realized that she knew him in ways that few men and women ever know their lovers. Everything we have and know and feel is a choice, Meg. We always have a choice.”

“Maybe it would not have worked in the traditional way,” I suggest. “Maybe it was what it was, and maybe, like Pancho said, it was every second that they treasured because the seconds were so rare.”

“Ah, Meggie, you are getting it. Most people live in a place of past and future. They lose this moment because they are worried about what happened ten years ago or where they might be with this lover when the children are gone. But when they do that, they lose the now. Jane knows. Ask her. She's finding out the same things you are.”