Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (25 page)

Vickie Burnette has not stopped talking since 8:02
A.M.,
when I saw her clock in and waltz on over to her desk, plug in her headset, set down her gigantic cup of Starbucks and act as if she was going to do a full day's work.

Since I have returned from Mexico, even the smallest of things piss me off. I want Vickie to answer my calls, write down a message, copy my papers, act somewhat professional and especially tell me if someone named Tomas calls me. I must be nuts. It has taken me eight years to realize that I have missed everything from the last six University President's conference planning sessions to a call alerting me that my credit card was overdrawn, and just recently a notice from my attorney reminding me that I have an appointment on Friday to discuss what Ms. Vickie finally remembers to tell me is “some kind of new divorce thing where it's cheapo and fast because everyone gets along.”

“Are you getting divorced?” she asks me just after she admits, without hesitation, that the message is a week old and the appointment is for this afternoon.

“What the hell, Vickie,” I shout, but it's not really a shout like other people might shout. It's more of a loud form of talking, which I suppose would be a shout.

Vickie almost drops her coffee and stares at me as if I have just confessed to six murders and sleeping with a Republican.

“Wow,” she shouts back. “This little trip to Mexico has unleashed some old toxins. Divorce. Late for work. Checking up on the secretary. Now shouting. I suppose if I tell you a man named Tomas left a call on the answering machine, you would want to know about it right away.”

It's best not to speak. That is what I decide. A machine gun could pop out of my mouth. Spear guns. A hand-to-mouth grenade. Vickie does not move and neither do I. She has her hair tied up and moves her hand very slowly to make certain that the back of her head has not fallen apart. I do not have to check. The back of my head has exploded. I have been home from Mexico for four long weeks and I cannot seem to focus on anything but basic movements, making certain I take in enough nourishment and that the one child of mine who still speaks to me is fed and clothed and not doing anything illegal.

The days and nights since I left Mexico have branded me a changed woman. I know as soon as I really wake up that I will see more than Vickie, who is actually assertive and regular and mostly okay when she remembers to do her job, for the truth of who and what they are. Now everything is a bit cloudy. Just a bit. Everything seems the same and I recognize nothing. Damn it. Just damn it.

My office, my work, the dreaded moments I spend driving back to my home each night have all combined to make me feel worthless, undestined, depressed. Dr. C has moved me forward about half an inch during the three sessions we've had since my return and what I do find is that now I am impatient and long for the sound of the ocean hitting the sand on my beach
—my beach.
When I say those words, my mouth turns up in a smile and I leave Ms. Vickie in the dust of her own words to go to my office to stare at the photos I took the day I left the beach house.

I did not sleep that night. For hours I moved through the tiny cottage looking at everything, opening the kitchen drawers, picking up each book, rising to look at the door each time I heard a chime clang against the side of a tree or a wave drop hard against the sand. Every new noise made me look up as if someone were knocking at the door, as if there was an invisible person trying hard to get my attention.

In the kitchen I found a book of notes my aunt had kept. They looked at first as if they were random thoughts that she had written at odd moments, beginning with the day she moved into the “cottage,” as she called it.

     
“Tuesday—June 8—The noise of the workmen is driving me mad. Last night I slept on a blanket on the beach. Sky on fire. Midnight—the crossing of the turtles.”

     
“July 12—P. arrives. The world circles in. Every second—tomorrow does not exist.”

     
“August 5—Bedroom done. Quiet storm last night. I will never leave.”

     
“August 10—Trip to the clinic. Desperate for miracles. Five young girls all pregnant. Exhausted. I want to lie down. Lie down.”

Tons of notes like this, and I find the wine from Tomas's lunch basket and go to the beach, fanning through the pages, absorbing every word and then making believe that I know everything there is to know about the cottage and my aunt and the years she spent pacing this spot where the sea meets land. There are pages of notes that need translation
—“Damn it. Birds in the kitchen. Juan did it again.”
And I imagine somewhere that there is someone who could tell me a story, that story, any story about what it all means. But I cannot wait. I drink the wine, every drop of it myself, and I make up stories as I fry in the sun and turn occasionally to see if the cottage is still standing and I am really sitting in such a paradise. When I lie still and close my eyes, my aunt and her friends, her lover, they all come to life and I see them running through the pages I have just read and they are as real as my own skin lying on sand that has been touched by their very feet.

I walk the beach a good mile one way and see not one person, not one house, then I turn around and walk the same distance. Light is fading by then and half a mile from the cottage I see a break in the stand of trees. Piles of stones, placed in a long oval circle with dried flowers scattered about its center, protected from the wind, huddled in piles several inches thick. I bend down and smell them—a rich scent of orange sweetness that makes my limbs weak with delight. I barely fit inside the circle, but when I get inside of it, the smell, the heat from the sun-warmed rocks and an occasional breeze from the jungle all combine to make me feel as if I am being cradled by the very arms of Earth herself. Then I laugh.

I laugh long and hard and I push my face against the flowers and drop them on my head and across my legs, and I know that this is exactly what my aunt did in this spot and this is why she built it. She built it so she could just be here and do this. Feel the rivers of jungle air washing over her. Feel the scent of the flowers moving into her hair, under her skin, in and out of her fingers. Feel the rhythms of the waves circling in to land at her feet. Be silent and touch her self, her soul, her own rushing waves. Feel. Just feel.

There is no secret note hidden under a rock or buried under the flowers and there doesn't need to be. Being in the circle made me happy—the wine helped too—and that was the message. “Staying in the circle,” I remember saying to myself, “that's going to be the hard part.” and centering myself on that occasional breeze from the jungle I need to wrap around me and hold me and keep me centered. It is the feeling of being inside my aunt's beach cocoon that I seal into my heart and take with me when I finally get up, brush the flowers from my skin and step back outside the circle.

I spent that night wrapped up in a blanket, sitting on the beach. I could not bring myself to sleep in my aunt and her lover's bed and as I dozed with my face dusted in sand, I wondered how long it would take me to make the house my own, wondered also if I could possibly keep it, spend months there, in my own circle of laughter, just as my aunt did and keep the light tilted just the way she had seen it on her life.

I wondered if I would have the courage to actually file for divorce, to move out or ask him to move out, to . . . what else? That entire night, all those hours, my life paraded in front of me and I was the lone spectator and the theme of the parade—“Margaret's Missed Life” was much longer than I had expected. In spite of the circle of laughter, I was totally missing the point.

I know this now, sitting in my office with two of the rocks stolen from that beach resting on my desk. I know it and pray to God that it isn't too late to do something about it.

If I had a sister I wonder if we would be as opposite as my mother and her sister were. My mother's new condo kitchen, where I am standing and where Dr. C has strongly suggested that I visit, is totally humorless. There are no dishes in the sink, no tipped-over wineglasses on the counter, the garbage is empty, there are fresh flowers on the table and not one aging note is tacked up on the refrigerator. My mother has just made us tea and we are moving onto the porch to have what she calls “a little chat.”

I watch her pour the tea and wipe up what she spills on the white Corian counter with the edge of an exquisite cotton cloth, and my heart fans out just to see that. I always knew that my mother loved me and that she struggled with many things. I knew that she had piled her dreams into a paper bag and thrown them out the back door—well, actually she'd placed them gently into the bottom of the stainless-steel can under the sink, but throw them away she did. We talked, my mother and I, but we rarely shared. If I were younger, I might rage and ask her why. If I did not know that she loved me and that she had tried to move her corner of the world for me at least once, I might be angry, but somewhere along the road leading up to this moment I decided to embrace her, just embrace her, even if that meant holding her at a slight distance while I did it.

“So,” she says as a way to kick-start whatever it is she thinks I need to say, and as she says it and turns her head, I notice that the lines along her eyes match mine and that she has developed a nervous twitch above the left line of her lip. I wonder in those few seconds as she sets down her cup and looks out across the courtyard if she misses my father. Could she miss my father?

“Mom,” I say suddenly, changing the direction of a conversation I had totally planned. “Do you miss Daddy?”

She pauses, closes her eyes and says without looking at me, “No one has ever asked me that question.”

Oh, Mom. Oh, Mom.

When she turns, I see little emotion in her eyes. No tears.

“I'll tell you, Margaret, because I know you have come to tell me some things that are hard. I may be old but I am not stupid. You have been unhappy most of your life.”

Oh, Mom. I am the one who starts to cry.

“A part of me was glad when your father died, which is a horrid thing to say. But it is true. A part of me will also grieve and ache for the familiarness that grew between us, for knowing what time he would come home, for being able to fix his dinner just the way he liked it . . . for many, many things.”

“But—”

“Let me finish and then you can talk.”

My mother turns to face me and it is all I can do to sit still and not sweep her off her feet and hold her like a baby.

“We should have had this conversation twenty years ago. I'm sorry for that, Margaret.”

“But—”

“No,” she says louder. “Let me say this.

“I made mistakes. I could never stand up to him, never step out of the role someone else had designed for me, and because I couldn't, I did not have the courage to let you create your own role and place in life. Me not going to college and putting up with his temper and allowing him to dictate . . . well, I will hate myself until I die for that.”

She has stunned me into silence. The tea will never do it. I'll need Irish whiskey. I cannot move.

“But the terrible irony is that I loved him, honey,” she says. “I thought of leaving, but I couldn't imagine myself without him. Do you know that he used to sing to me?”

“What?” I manage to squeak out.

“Your father sang to me. Not a lot, just once in a while, but it was enough.”

“Mom . . .”

“But I wonder, I will always wonder, what my life could have been. He was a jackass. He was a goddamn jackass.”

She still does not cry and I know she must have had this conversation with herself a hundred times, maybe a thousand times.

“That's it,” she says, moving her hands off my knees. “I don't need you to say anything now, except what you came to say. We'll see how that goes.”

Before I share my glad tidings, I tell her I must go to the bathroom first and I ask if there is whiskey for the tea. My mother laughs and says that part of me has always reminded her of my father and her sister. “God, how you two loved each other,” she says with pure pleasure of my relationship with Aunt Marcia.

While she gets the whiskey I stand in the bathroom without turning on the light, without actually using the toilet, and I feel like a fool. I feel as if everyone in the entire world has known some huge secret about life and I am, once again, the last to know. It is hard not to hate myself. Not to waltz over the edge of that place where you want to slap your own face in disgust and embarrassment. I am so goddamned stupid, I never even imagined having the conversation I have just had with my mother.