Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (33 page)

“This,” she says, moving her hand, palm up, across the table, sweeping it from one side of the little table to the other. “Everything. If I didn't have the boys, I'd be gone.”

“Gone where?”

Vandy starts to cry. Meg wants to catch the tears and let them fill up her hands like a slow fountain, but she sits there, not moving, not knowing what to say.

She cries, and Meg touches her hand and wonders what to say next. She wants to cry too. She wants to put her head on top of Vandy's hand and ask her to put her in the car so she can run away too.

“Vandy . . .”

Meg wants to say, “Take them with you and run.” She wants to, for those few minutes, put Vandy in the backseat under a blanket, go get the boys out of school and drive them all to the airport. She wants to pack up their house and put it inside of a long trailer and send it to them wherever they go, wherever they end up.

“Is it your husband?”

“He's just a part. Throw him on top of the pile and it falls over.”

Meg pulls at the plastic lid of her coffee. She feels as if someone has punched her in the stomach. She knows she should reach across the table and hold Vandy's hand.

“Before this, Vandy, who were you?”

Vandy smiles.

“God, she's beautiful,” Meg thinks. “I never noticed her smile.”

“No one asks me about myself. I'm Ben and Brian's mother. Brad's wife.”

“So?”

“I was a singer.”

Meg cannot keep her mouth from dropping open. “Really?”

Vandy keeps smiling. “I traveled all over the country singing at hotels, fronted several rock stars. Slept with Van Morrison, and well . . .”

Meg cannot speak. But she has to ask.

“You're not making this up?”

“Look it up. Vanessa Satterfield. I've done a dozen records.”

“I don't know what to say. Do you miss it? Is that part of it?”

“Not at all. I just hate this kind of life. Everything is predictable. Nothing changes. I was done singing, singing that way anyhow. I'll get a studio when I move, take students, but I won't come close to being and doing what I did before.”

Meg feels the sides of her black slacks, the ones she wears every Tuesday and most Fridays, and she wants to tell Vandy to run and keep running, but the words stick someplace low, someplace far down inside of her.

“Hey, you look pained, Meg. Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she lies. “I wish I could tell you what to do.”

Meg takes another sip, the coffee's not hot now and she holds it in her mouth, wanting the bitterness of it to hold her right there and not let her say anything she doesn't want to say.

“How about you, Meg? Are you happy?”

The coffee bumps past her throat and lands in her stomach as if it is full of lead. The color goes out of her face, and Vandy tries to get up but Meg grabs her hand to keep her in her seat.

“Meg?”

“Sorry, I . . . What happened to all of us, Vandy? What happened?”

Vandy smiles again and Meg can see her moving across a stage, hair flying, rows of men screaming, sweat dripping from the edges of her face and down the front of her very low-cut shirt.

“That's what I'm trying to figure out. I wanted this life, I really did, but it wasn't supposed to be this damn
serious.
All these patterns of sameness are driving me nuts. I'm going crazy living like this, and I don't want my boys to think that this is what it's supposed to be like.”

“So what can you do?”

“I was hoping you'd tell me.”

“Vandy . . .”

Vandy puts up her hands to catch Meg's hands before they begin to wave in the wind.

“Stop,” Meg tells her.

“I'm a mess, I know that, I'm unhappy, I know that, but I also know I can't kick-start anyone else's stuff. I didn't mean to do that. I'm sorry.”

Meg can't speak. She's had terrific intellectual discussions at work for years, shared stories about her own kids, walked into buildings where every single person but her had a PhD, and she has no idea what to say to the woman sitting across from her except something she has always heard. Something that has been whispered in her ear so many times it's written on her brain cells. Something she never asked to hear herself.

“Maybe it will get easier,” she says.

The smile comes again. Larger and with a bit of help from a laugh. Gentle, not like the songs Meg imagines Vandy used to sing.

“You sound like my mother.”

“Really? Well, I guess I don't know what else to say.”

Vandy cries all over again. Meg feels like an ass.

“No one knows what to say; it's okay,” Vandy weeps into her napkin.

The silence after that is embarrassing.

“It's that I know there's more and I'm very angry at myself for letting it get this far, you know?”

Meg might know if she stopped herself for three minutes and checked into the Dreamer's Way Hotel and lay down without a television or a book in her hand or a phone to answer or a meeting to attend. She might.

She tries hard to be the teacher that she is for just a moment. “Direction,” she tells herself. “Give her direction.”

“Two choices, it seems,” she manages to say.

“Oh, really?”

“Go or stay.”

“I've already decided, you know.”

Meg can't be angry, because she feels like a loser. A shit. Useless to womankind, to any female, to this one beautiful tattered soul who needs her right this second. Goddamn it. She could be looking into a mirror. She could be a singer. She could be anything.

“You have?”

“Not really, but I can't stay. I'm just trying to decide if I should take the boys and leave a note or take the boys and not leave a note or take just two boys, the little ones—my babies—and leave a very long note.”

Now Meg smiles, which is exactly what Vandy wanted her to do.

“Maybe I'd go,” Meg says suddenly.

Vandy laughs. “You?”

“Maybe.”

“Never. I bet you still bake.”

Meg gulps. She imagines there is still frosting on her left pants leg.

“I just can't make believe anymore. I have to go back to California. Find my place. Show the boys there is more. Let them wake up on a beach and have no clue about what happens tomorrow.”

“Is this wrong?” Meg asks, flying her hand through the air to mean her life, all of her life, every single moment of it.

“Oh, not at all. I just don't fit in. I'm one of those rough-ride girls. I like to be hungry and not know what's happening next. My gawd, Meg, if someone of color drives past my house, people still jump into the ditch. How do we do this? How?”

Meg thinks that she has not had a conversation like this since college, the early years when she talked on rooftops and smoked dope in the closet and everything seemed possible, everything.

“Vandy, go. I'll do what I can to pave the way after you leave.”

Vandy looks at her as if Meg has just sat down in front of her with a cucumber on her head and she has never seen her before in her life.

“Meg . . . I don't care what people think. That's part of the problem here. I don't give a shit. Tell them I'm a hooker, a lesbian, an ax murderer. What matters is that I am showing my boys a side of life that I can't find here or . . .”

“Or what?”

“Don't want to find because it's probably here anyway.”

When Vandy drops her off back at her car, all Meg can think of is cupcakes. She wonders if she put them back in the refrigerator or left them on the counter, and then for a second she thinks about driving to work the back way through a neighborhood that has made her uncomfortable and where a man was shot in the head while he waited in a parked car a week ago.

The second passes in a snap and she forgets to look in the mirror to see which way Vandy turns, never realizing until the following morning that Vandy parked her car in the handicapped zone, went into school, got her boys and headed west before Meg had turned into the parking lot behind the University.

But that night when she drifted to the couch, when Bob was late again, when she realized that she had let something important and wonderful slip away, she walked to the west window, the long window that always looked as if it had been the carpenter's afterthought, and pressed her fingers against the cold pane of glass.

“Good luck, Vandy,” she said. “Good luck.”

And something new started. A thought that placed itself inside of Meg and waited. How it waited.

The first four people who looked at the house found me sobbing in the bathroom just off the kitchen. I had tried to leave before the realtor came by, but the phone rang, I saw it was my mother and I took the call. There I was, trapped in the “blue bathroom conveniently located off the kitchen” when the Donaldsons, John and Jacob (possibly brothers, probably not), and Gretchen and Tom peeked in to see me crying on the toilet with my head in my hands—lid down, thank God.

I waved politely, pointed to the phone, and they moved on, kind, house-searching souls that they appeared to be.

“Mom,” I whispered as I overheard a very lovely discussion about the cabinets that could be refinished “before the holidays,” “did you find out?”

“Just come over,” she told me.

Before I can answer, I hear the real estate agent say, “She
loves
this house.
Hates
to leave. She's been like this for weeks.”

“Mom, tell me.”

“It's fine, honey. Just come over for a while. I want to talk with you anyway. I'll tell you when you get here.”

This has happened to me before. It will probably happen again.

When Shaun was five he tried to fly off the top of the swing set one afternoon. I watched him do this. I went to the door to check on him just before I was going to jog to the basement and throw in some wash. It was a Saturday. I could describe every single piece of the entire day—clouds wafting in long rows, Mrs. Sorensen's sheets playing tag with the juniper trees, Shaun screaming with Dustin as they raced across the bars and under the slide and into the sandbox. Then a single instant when the world pierced my heart.

Shaun bragging and me leaning to press my nose against the screen door.

“I can. I can.”

“Can what?” I whispered, watching, breathing just a bit faster.

He climbs to the top of the slide and pulls himself across the bar before I can move my hand from the metal hinge on the door to slide it open. I push through the screen, not waiting for it to pop free, and shards of steel cut into my hands, leaving bloody trails like tiny etchings in my white skin. But this I see later.

What I see first is Shaun slipping.

Slipping.

He can but he can't.

When he rolls over the thin metal ledge above the slide, everything stops. My heart. My ears. My legs. The world. The whole world.

“Shaun . . . ,” I scream.

I know I scream, because I can hear it, and I cannot get there. I cannot catch him or save him. I cannot.

He rolls like a rubber string trying to move back into itself. Arms moving against his side, chin tucked so it touches his chest, hair dipping into the wind, wild and free. When he hits the earth, I feel as if it is me. My heart drops, a shaft of pain digs into my chest, I think it is me who has hit the ground.

There is a swift cry. Air leaving lungs, and me right there, knees in the sand, my hand on his heart, listening, and then screaming for Dustin to run to the phone. “Run,” I scream. “Call 911. Go, Dustin!”

Shaun's eyes flicker open. He smiles.

“Mom, did you see me fly?”

“Don't move, baby. Do not even blink.”

I hold his legs down, my fingers touching the blunt edge of his spine, and I wish for angels to land at my feet and touch him. I want a miracle, and I want it now. Shaun wants to move his hands. I tell him in a voice he has never heard before and will never hear again that he can only breathe. Nothing else.

His eyes are my eyes. Gray locks of steel that vanish into a bright blue when the light is perfect. He says nothing, but he is listening. He is not moving.