Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (35 page)

“Take what you want from back there,” I say, moving my hands in small circles on his upper arms because I have to touch him. “Sometimes I think what we remember will not be so good, but that was part of it too. I'm going to eventually get to the place where I choose to remember things, like how I never had to shovel the driveway, how much Katie loved to sit on your lap when she was a baby and . . .”

I can't go on. My throat closes up, and he moves his hands to cover mine, and without saying anything he tells me he will try too.

We devise a workable plan. He gets the first week to go in and take what he wants. “Not much,” he says. He promises to call if he isn't sure about something he wants to take. I get the second week, and I will need every minute of the first to prepare the apartment, to what? Oh my God. My heart starts to move as if it has left me behind.

“Do you have any idea how much we have to do?” I wail.

This makes him laugh, and he touches me lightly on my arm again. A feather, his fingers not certain.

“Meg, all these years, one thing after another, you never thought you could do it. The babies, your degrees, the house, your father and aunt, Shaun pushing us away. You always questioned yourself, and look where you are right now, look what you have done.”

Who is this man? Where has he been? More important, where have I been?

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying you can do this, damn it, Meg. You can do anything. What do you want to do?”

This time I smile, and I put my head against his long arm even though I know it might make him uncomfortable. I do it because it is what I want, what I need.

“I guess I'm doing it.”

He does not move, and I freeze the moment because I know I am not done with my stuff, with his unfaithfulness, with how each of us lingered too long in a place that had grown stale and sad. I want to remember the way he didn't move when I put my head on his arm and how when I shifted my weight just a bit he held me, without moving his hands. I want to remember how he didn't argue about the terms and how he agreed to go first and how he maybe knew me better at the end than at the beginning, when we were so fresh and wild.

When I lift up my head, he turns to look out the window, avoiding a kiss I might have landed on his cheek. I have not been this close to him since the night we had dinner, and before that it must have been months and months, maybe a year since I'd even kissed him or touched him or stood close enough to see if he was wearing cologne. I see how the lines around his eyes have deepened and how the skin under his chin has softened and how his hairline is starting to creep toward the back of his head. I imagine the geranium woman moving her hands alongside of his face and I have to stop myself from telling him that I am glad he has someone, that I think he cannot be alone, that when Geranium leaves, he will quickly find another, because the silence and aloneness would eat him up. He will find that out himself. He will, someday, Bob will know what I now know standing here for the last time in the tired hands of what was once us.

I know too that when we open the door and Dapper Dan comes back in to see our signatures and to count up his commission, that something huge will have shifted. A curtain will drop and everyone will have turned to face a new direction. The seasons will have rotated and the walls in the hall will have mysteriously changed colors. There will be a band in the lobby and the sunset will be pink twenty-six days in a row. Nothing will ever be the same, and that is a wonderful reason to hear new music and let the sky skip across my heart in an entirely new direction.

Before I open the door, while Bob shuffles papers and checks the figures, I say one more thing.

“Bob, I'm not guessing. I'm doing it.”

“Oh,” he says, not sure for a second what I am talking about.

“I'm doing it,” I say one more time and the words become a tattoo, my mantra, the words that will flash in front of my eyes when my knees weaken and I might not be sure.

They become me.

I catch the phone a second before the recording clicks in. It is under a pile of towels, below the front steps and behind three sets of bookcases. The house has exploded, and the only things left standing are the walls. There are boxes everywhere. It's my week to recover what I desire to take to my next home, and there is Tomas on the phone. I hear his voice and everything stops.

“Beautiful lady, the doggies miss you.”

“Tomas, how are you? Is everything okay?”

He is generous and polite before he gets to the point. His father has slipped into a coma. The doctors promise nothing but weeks and days of waiting for his lungs to fill and his heart to stop. My own heart stops with this news. I reach to steady myself against the bare wall.

“He drifted in and out for days. He talked mostly of your aunt. He whispered and talked for hours and hours. I think that he was going over every precious moment of his life so that he could hold it all one more time before he moved through his ‘transition.'”

“His transition?” I ask, wondering how this nice man with the polite voice and the insight of angels has come to be in my life at such a rare and interesting time. Aunt Marcia would tell me it was because I finally “let myself open up.” She would be right; she always was.

He laughs and tells me that his father had a dream years ago where a group of men and women dressed in red robes appeared to him and told him that life never really stops and is endless but that we just move from position to position, from one universe and dimension to the next, kind of like a soft transition to a new place.

“Really?”

I say this, and I cannot even believe I am having this conversation with a man from Mexico who helped me dance with the dogs and discover a perfect place to catch a breeze from the jungle, where I came very close to dancing naked. Elizabeth and Bianna would be jealous as hell. I sit down on a box of books and I wonder. I wonder while he takes me through his father's ride from one life to the next, and for a while I leave my own life and levitate. While Tomas and his soft, sweet voice parade over, through and around me, I float above a house I soon won't own and a life that seems to be holding on to me and taking my flailing limbs for a ride, and I remember something vague, a dèjá vu feeling, and while Tomas tells me that the secret of life is really death, my story comes back to me.

Girl Scouts. Camping along the Wisconsin River in a year that I could never remember. Becky and Karen and Barb and Mary Jo and Char and Patty and Gail and all the girls I loved and who laughed at me and told me things that no one else could tell me. All the girls who made me feel as if I belonged to something. We are canoeing and camping and having an adventure that will carry us with this one story through all the years of what we know will be long and interesting and often entwined lives.

Our leader is a woman who never says never and who with great grace and style takes high school girls with hormone levels that cannot be measured by conventional methods out in public and sometimes into wilderness areas where anything can and does happen. This trip is a challenge of strength and wits and survival. It snows and rains. The tents fall in, huge metal poles that were designed by someone who never ever put up a tent bend and twist into a pile, and then we have to canoe through the largest rapids any of us has ever seen.

“Shit,” Patty says, standing on the edge of the river shivering like the rest of us. “Look at that bastard.”

Patty's father taught her to swear and she in turn taught us. It made us feel strong and tough. We all swore standing there, looking at the water roll over itself and then tumble back into waves of frantic abandon.

“Shit.”

“Holy shit.”

“Goddamn it.”

“Son of a bitch.”

We didn't have to ride the rapids, but we
had
to ride the rapids. Who would go first? Not me. Never me. Karen and Barb. They launched the canoe and paddled to the center of the river. We stood in a small group and cheered. They raised their paddles, screamed and shot through the rapids like straight arrows.

Gail tapped me on the arm and said, “Let's go.” The water was rough from the beginning and I doubted myself. I sat in the bow because Gail had more experience and because I was a wiener. I wanted to belong but I never took the first step, never took the first paddle and always did what I was told.

I remember water hitting me right away. Sparks of freezing wetness that stung when they flew into my face. It was seconds, maybe five, it was two slow fingers snapping and we hit the second row of boiling waves just inches short of where we should have, and the canoe went airborne.

This was defiantly a transition. I remember the sensation of flying and I let the paddle slip from my hands and I had the presence of mind to suck in a huge wad of air before Gail and I were under the water and being bumped and dragged by rocks that could only be described as small houses and everything floated away from me. There was a light, honest to God, and this small sensation that started in my chest and shoved against me until my lungs, my hands, my heart, my body disappeared and I was letting go so easily, so quickly without a fight, without reaching my hand for the sky. Then other hands reached for me, and just as if someone had slapped me with a long, hard plank, I was out of the water, coughing and back—another transition.

This is what I remember as Tomas tells me his father's story and the excitement of the journey that has now begun. While he talks about the hospital where he is staying and how the winds have kicked up and how the people in the village are still talking about the three American women who knew Marcia, I move my fingers up and down on the sides of the phone just as I would if I had been holding Tomas's hand. My eyes are closed and I ask him where he is standing while we talk.

“In my father's bedroom.”

“What can you see?”

“When I lean over I can look out into the ocean and from the window the garden in the back that is slowly preparing for a rest.”

“Tomas . . .”

“What, what is it?”

“My whole life is changing. Everything is new but it all feels comfortable, mostly comfortable.”

“Change, if I remember, it looks very good on you, beautiful lady.”

He's flirting and I love it but I am trying to tell him something beyond the attraction that has been building since we met. I want to tell him that I cannot come now. I cannot. I want to, it would be the kindest thing to do for him, for my aunt, for his father, but not for me. When the words come out I have to concentrate.

“Tomas, I cannot come now.”

He is silent. I think he must have dropped his head and he is now looking at his feet. He is disappointed.

“I'm sorry,” I say quietly.

“Listen, you,” he begins. “I wanted you to come for me. My father said and did what he needed to do. I will be fine. I understand. I do understand.”

“Tomas, I will come when I can stay for a while. I have to finish this part of my own transition.”

I keep him on the phone for a long time. I tell him how I had said yes my entire life and how it became a word without thought or emotion to me. In a strange way knowing that I can say no, that I can do what I need to do, what I have to do has become a huge gift to myself.

“I am smiling,” he tells me, and I am thinking that if I were there now, in his father's bedroom, I might lie down and ask Tomas to let me hold him. I do not need to be held just then but he does. “You sound good.”

“I am good, Tomas. I am.”

When we finally hang up I have a very hard time moving. Not going to Mexico just now, not rushing off to rescue Tomas and to touch my fingers to his father's face one more time is huge. Dr. C has helped me understand why I used to think it was easier to say yes. She has walked me through the social channels and past huge islands of disappointment and an isthmus of guilt. She has walked me backward for a while, showing me the movie of my life in reverse so that I can see exactly what happened and not what I simply think happened. She has also been pointing me toward a place of no apologies, a wide-open plain that barks out the days of my life so that I can take what I want and leave what I don't.

“It's your life, Meggie,” she has said over and over. “Not your mother's or your husband's or your children's or your employer's or the church's or the woman begging on the street. Yours, all yours.”