Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (23 page)

“Tomas, I am so sorry.”

“It could be months, weeks, days, but it will be before the seasons change and . . .”

His words trail off. He wants to tell me something. Boldly, I reach over and bring his face toward mine.

“Can I tell you?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I think he is relieved that you came, that he saw you, that you have the house and know about everything. I think it has helped him let go.”

Sweet Jesus God Shit.

Tomas pulls the Jeep to a stop right in the center of the highway, which doesn't matter because there is absolutely no traffic.

“Was it wrong to tell you?” he asks, moving one hand to his chest as if he is holding back something that is lodged very close to the edge of his skin.

“Oh, no, Tomas! It was right to tell me, it just—well, it needs to settle. One part of me thinks that I am now going to be responsible for a man's death and the other part of me is very happy that someone who is obviously very wonderful can die in peace.”

Tomas lets out a sigh.

“You know,” he tells me quietly like you would after all the bad news has been spoken out loud, “it is a relief for me to talk to you also. This is not something I can share with anyone and it is not good to grieve alone, I think, not good.”

“I think I can handle anything. Tell me what you need, Tomas. My world has flipped over about fifteen times the past few months. I am a mother, daughter, friend—I cannot think of anything that would be impossible for me to handle.”

“Well . . .” He laughs to help break the spell. “This is a bit much. Death and life and love and what might seem to many others as infidelity. I am glad you have come into my life, Ms. Meg. But promise you will let me know if it is too much.”

“Okay,” I say, and then we drive and hold on to each other's hands, which I take as a simple sign of acceptance of this wonderful deal that we have just completed.

I have tried hard not to imagine what this house must look like. I have tried not to think of my aunt walking up this road and of her heart racing to think that Pancho would be waiting for her. I have tried not to imagine the scent of the sea at dusk at this very spot and the sight of birds dipping and swaying in the morning wind when they spy a place to land. I have tried not to imagine the bed, the chairs, what she kept on the windowsill. I have tried and failed miserably.

It is a simple, beautiful cottage. Small from the outside, with gardens that look as if they need little or no tending at all. This makes me laugh and I quickly explain to Tomas that Marcia hated to garden. She would rather be writing or reading or swimming naked in the surf. “I know,” he says, laughing too. “I watched her doing exactly that many, many times.”

Tomas goes first, walking slowly to let me take it all in, and then I get an idea, and immediately think that my aunt's spirit is already working its magic.

“Tomas, stop, please.”

“What?”

“Did you bring any food?”

“Enough for lunch, and I know there is more wine in the house and a few things that my father could not throw away.”

“I want to ask you something that may be difficult for you.”

“Anything, just ask, please.”

“Could you leave me here alone tonight? Just right here, go no farther, leave me the lunch and then come back in the morning?”

He thinks for a moment, smiles, then he raises his hand and asks, “You need this?”

“Very much so. Not just for her and your father, but for me. Just the moments for me to be in this space alone and see where it takes me.”

“Perfect,” he says, and with that one word I imagine all the thousands of women who have fallen in love very quickly with the first man who touched their hearts with the soft feather of a word like
perfect.

He leaves me with a basket of food and directions on how to light the lamps and how to latch the door when I want to go to sleep. “Your aunt,” he adds, “she never locked a thing or closed a window, but I don't suppose this is news for you.”

When he leaves me there, I am suddenly astounded by what I am about to do. It makes me laugh at first but then the laugh catches in my throat and I have to fight back a sudden ripple of fear. It is that precious moment when I can go either way—laugh or cry—run with the wind or lie down and pray to God the storm does not eat me alive. Jesus. I am alone in Mexico in a place that is miles from what anyone would barely consider a town, but then I hear the tip of a wave pounding against the beach and I stop in my tracks to bend down and run some sand through my fingers.

“Her feet passed through these grains of sand,” I say aloud, and in the same moment file through the thousands of pages of letters and documents I have read as part of my work that proves, at least to me, how one person's first step can change the world for so many of the rest of us. I decide not to be scared. I decide to bury every single goddamn fear that I have right in this sand, and I really get into it.

I bury my fear of being at this spot alone.

I bury my schedules and my notebooks.

I bury cleaning the house and living with a man whom I have not loved in a long time.

I do not bury my sexual desire, which I must eventually pull up from under the sand, deep, way down there, far below anything I decide to bury.

I bury my deepest fears about my skills as a mother—especially my skills as a mother to a son whom I have all but lost.

I bury all the hundreds of things I did because someone else wanted me to.

I bury the sorrow in my mother's eyes that haunts me even now.

I bury that one day when I could have turned and run from my marriage, my job, any part of my life and I chose instead to stay.

Without noticing it, my hole in the sand is getting rather deep, and I pause, for just a second or two, to make certain I am truly alone. I kick off my shoes and I keep digging. I have not moved from the spot where I stood when Tomas drove off. I apparently must do this and I must do this now.

There is way too much to bury, I think suddenly. I could dig a hole to China and work my way through the jungle and back to the village. I could dig for days and nights and weeks and fill up this entire peninsula. Then there is the realization that on a windy day all my shit will come blowing out of the holes and float back to find me. Is any hole deep enough?

“Enough,” I tell myself as I stand and wipe the sand from my hands and knees and elbows. “That's one hell of a start.”

I leave my shoes right there and boldly move to the front of the house. The view is even more glorious than I thought it would be from my sand pile. Aunt Marcia has spared as many trees as possible and she has left the front of the beach alive with natural vegetation—ferns and rocks and large bushes. The low branches of all the trees close to the house are loaded with hanging chimes, clay figures and bits of cloth. Scattered throughout the yard are huge, brightly colored pots that are filled with flowers that look as if they are tended on a regular basis. Close to the beach there is a table and two chairs exactly like the table at the restaurant where I met Tomas—two days ago, but it seems like twenty years ago now. It is breathtakingly beautiful and everywhere I look I see the touch of my aunt's artistic hand.

The door to the house pushes open easily, there is not even a doorknob or lock. Inside, I set down the basket on a small table that sits in the middle of the only room I can see. The living room, kitchen, dining room—three rooms in one—is small, sparsely decorated but warm. There are rugs strewn about the wooden floor, and the walls in this room are white but streaked with the colors of the rainbow. It looks as if my aunt took all the brushes in her hand at once and ran through the room jumping here, sitting there, reaching toward the ceiling there. The effect is glorious and wild. There are small shelves with figurines, and oil lamps hanging from wrought-iron fixtures. Candles are everywhere, and at the far end of the room there is a fireplace with a mantel filled with beach stones, and a mixture of long and short pieces of driftwood are placed in no particular fashion under a chair, next to the window, across the window ledge. I am thinking that if Pancho built this house as a gift or a surprise, he knew my aunt like no one else ever knew my aunt. This house is hers everywhere I look.

To the right there is a tiny hall. There is no electricity here, but somehow Pancho has managed to bring water into the house. A bathroom. Tile floors. Plants, all about to perish, a mirror the size of Cincinnati covering the wall on the opposite side of the huge bathtub—and touches of Marcia everywhere, rocks and dried flowers and poems tacked to the edges of the sink. This must be exactly how he found it after she died. The fingerprints of her life are everywhere here.

There is one room left in this three-room house. Before I pass through the wide, doorless entryway to the bedroom, I stop and gather my energy into a tiny pile that I will use to help me get through the next few minutes. It is a good thing I have this energy, because when I take two steps forward I instantly lose my balance and my breath.

“Oh my God,” I say to myself and to any living thing within a mile from where I am standing. “Oh my God.”

I have never seen a more beautiful room. Pancho must have built this from the center of his heart, and my aunt surely decorated it from the center of hers. I drop to my knees in the doorway because the scent of my aunt lingers here and it is all so real I can feel her, I can feel her in this very room. I smell sage and patchouli and the wild roots of every season I have ever known. The bed, a huge antique wooden piece of furniture, is standing guard against the far left wall. Its massive headboard is carved with the figures of naked women. Oh, Auntie Marcia. There is no footboard and no sides and the bed is extremely low to the ground and thus to the window. The entire wall facing the ocean is glass, and it is the only glass in this home, which looks as if it is normally simply shuttered closed if someone is not living inside of it.

There are photographs of Marcia and Pancho everywhere. Holding babies. Walking on a beach. Skipping stones in a river. Sitting with drinks in their hands. Two entire walls tell the stories of their life together. The very brief moments of their lives together. The tile floor is dusted with one large rug the color of a fall sunset, burnt orange with a tinge of red—the beast of summer unafraid to fight for one last day of the season. What draws my eyes are pegs against the far wall hung with what I can only assume are her clothes. I want to touch them and hold them to my face but I dare not do that yet. I imagine she wore little here in her isolated retreat, but I also imagine what she looked like standing guard over the ocean with her purple dress and her straw hat and nothing else between her and the world but all this beautiful space and time.

There are so few distractions in the room. The view, the bed, a wooden table with a now-empty vase and two water glasses. The simple elegance of the room tears at me. That someone could love another so much as to build a place like this, a room where whispers vanished into the walls, where lovemaking was a spontaneous extension of true affection, where the sounds of water could wash away the realities of what was waiting down the road—well, it makes me angry and envious and grateful, just to know that such a possibility exists.

It takes me a while to move, and when I do it is to the window, which I discover has a set of hinges at the bottom so it can be pushed open. This makes me laugh, because all the times I spent at her house in Chicago my aunt kept as many windows open as possible. It did not matter if it was summer or the middle of winter. Once, snow actually blew across the top of the sheets and in the morning we had to put a pile of it in the bathtub—but only after we dabbed our faces with it because it was “pure” and we would be too, she said, after this morning ceremony. She had to have air, and here, I imagine, she had to hear the waves and feel the touch of sea spray on her face as often as possible, and when she lay in bed watching the sky in Pancho's arms, she wanted it all. Every single thing—she wanted it all.

I move, just a few inches, and am tunneled back many years ago. When I was in eighth grade my parents took us to Florida during Easter break, because everyone from the Midwest goes to Florida during Easter break. I remember pieces of the trip—many, many arguments and my mother locking the keys in the trunk at a wayside and the fierce intensity of the sun, but what I remember more than anything is a visit to Thomas Edison's home.

When I close my eyes, there in front of the sea and fingering through the last days of my aunt's life, I feel just as I did the day I walked through Edison's home and his workshop. Sarasota. As a budding sociologist I was astounded to learn during the orientation that every single thing we were about to see was left exactly how it was when the inventor was alive. “The day he died,” I remember telling myself, “this room looked just like this.” For the rest of the tour I was spellbound.
Spellbound—
to be lost in a world that captures every part of you.
Spellbound—
to be transported back to a time and place where everything you see and feel and touch belongs to another world and dimension, and for moments, brief moments, you are allowed inside of that world.
Spellbound—
to see the test tubes and beakers and the old rags and pieces of tubing that Edison used when he worked and to sneak over when the tour guide is preoccupied with his own voice so that you can touch the edge of a glass and know what was inside of his heart the last time, any time, every time he touched that glass.
Spellbound—
to be so close to greatness and wonder that you cannot think to breathe or move beyond that precious moment when you touched the hand of a genius.