Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (38 page)

“Bob,” I say.

“Hey.”

“Daddy, thanks for coming.”

Katie is clearly happy to see him, and I back off for a moment while they talk and I see him hand her some money, a phone card, and then kiss her on the lips in front of her friends. When she reaches up to wipe a tear from his eye, I think for just a second about all the years we shared, a thousand hugs, and this new kind of good-bye. I want to put my hand on the side of his face and feel a tear, but I don't. I can't. The moment passes quickly and leaves me almost giddy with embarrassment.

When we leave our daughter at the gate, I turn to hug him and he tells me he is going away for a month with a friend.

“I'll have my phone if you or Katie need anything. Shaun knows too.”

I don't ask him where he is going or who he is going with. It's his life; the place where ours now touches just got on the airplane.

“Have a terrific time,” I tell him as I squeeze his arm. “Terrific.”

Then he is gone and Katie is gone and I am alone. Alone.

Alone and totally comfortable. One foot in front of the other, turning my head to look at a man with attractive hair on the telephone, nodding to a woman struggling with a small baby, smiling at a stewardess. Alone. My daughter going off in one direction, my soon to be ex-husband disappearing into another woman's arms. Alone. Happy.

“I'm alone,” I end up singing to myself all the way back to Elizabeth's house. “I'm alone . . . a-l-o-n-e.” The song is familiar. I love how it feels at the back of my throat as I bring the words to life.

People in passing cars must hear me. They surely hear me at the stop signs once I get off the freeway. I don't care. They need to know that I'm alone. Everyone needs to know it and then see me singing so they know I am happy.

The happiness just doesn't seem to end. My attorney calls the following day to say the divorce will be final before the end of October, and Tomas calls right after that to tell me that his father is still half delirious and sitting up in the middle of the night, speaking in whole sentences.

“‘The wind in August will dance like fire when the night steals into our day,' he says or ‘I held you close and soft remembering that every moment was a balanced, generous gift of time.'” Tomas says he is writing down his father's phrases to use at his funeral, which he will not call a funeral but a celebration of life.

“But he may go on like this for days and weeks and months, in which case I may need several assistants, because what he is saying is absolutely beautiful, it's poetry,” he tells me.

“Maybe it's all the unspoken words he kept in his soul,” I say.

“What?”

“The unspoken words he kept in his soul.”

“My God,” he shouts.

“What?” I ask him, just like he asked me.

“That's the title of the book.”

“What is the title of the book?”

“The Unspoken Words He Kept in His Soul.”

“You're kidding.”

“Say them to yourself. They are as beautiful as the words my father is saying when he sits up without help and speaks as clearly as we are speaking right this moment.”

There you have it. My first book title in just seconds. Tomas makes me laugh and says that when I am ready for my break after I am settled, he will pick me up at the airport and shuttle me to my house by the ocean and to see my daughter.

“The way my father is going, he will still be alive.”

Maybe, I tell him, maybe.

And maybe I can change the world and make everything hurry. I cannot sit still. I have not been able to sit still. I want to run from point A to point B and then start all over again at a faster pace. Dr. C tells me this makes sense.

“It's like a thirsty horse that smells water in the desert,” she told me during our last session. “You've had a taste of who you are becoming and you want to drink until you fall over.”

Then she warns me. I hate this part. The warnings drive me crazy.

“We are all becoming every day, but people get hung up when they think that what we want today is going to be what we want tomorrow and the day after.”

“What do you mean?” I ask her, thinking that now that I had taken three giant steps forward I am close to where I am supposed to be.

She tells me a story to help me out. It is a story about carpeting, she says.

“Carpeting?”

“Listen, Margaret. Listening to yourself is what this story is all about.”

Once upon a time Dr. C's sister wanted carpeting. She knew that if she got carpeting, new carpeting for her house, that everything would be better. The sister had given up her job, a profession she adored, to stay home and raise her babies, and she loved that job too, but she was also miserable on many days, especially when the babies were taking naps and she could sit for five minutes and look out the window and remember how alive she felt when she was following her other passion.

“A few streets over, there was another woman who suffered from the same malaise,” Dr. C tells me. “This woman also had two babies and had once been an artist who painted for hours in a studio in the city. Her babies exhausted her and she could no longer paint.”

I start asking questions, interrupting as if I am a pre-schooler and can't wait for the end of the story.

“Were they good mothers?”

“Were their husbands kind?”

“Why didn't the men stay home?”

“Did she ever paint again?”

Dr. C finally leans over and puts her hand over my mouth.

“You are not listening, Meg. Do you want me to send you to your room?”

I finally shut up. The two unhappy women, who often drink beer together for lunch, walk to the park with the babies and then light candles and tell wild stories about what they did in college and how many lovers they had and who had the biggest penis. They tell these stories while the babies grow and begin to become friends too and then the two friends get this idea that if they could only get cranking on their house projects and get new carpeting, they will be happy. They know it as sure as they know that they could never trade the sweet morning touch from their daughters' tiny hands or their sons' feet warm against their bellies or the way they continue to check on the babies in the middle of the night every single time they get up to go to the bathroom or cannot sleep.

“They get the carpeting,” Dr. C tells me, leaving her hands close to my mouth just in case. “My sister gets the blue carpeting because she thinks it will warm up the house and keep her company. The artist goes for a soft beige, the color of her favorite canvases just before she puts her brush to the paint for the first time.”

They use the same carpet installers and they toast and celebrate as first one house and then the other is completed, and the carpeting is definitely magnificent. It stretches from room to room and it's as if they have started everything over again. New. Fresh and clear. The carpeting is everything they hoped it would be.

“But?”

Dr. C laughs. “Do you know that two months ago you would never have interrupted me. Now you sure are.”

I know I should feel as if I have been given a great compliment from a powerful and very astute woman but I need to know what happened. I almost fall off the chair from the needing.

“Well, it's not enough. One day, months later, they are sitting at the artist's table while the babies all nap in one great pile in the bedroom, and their hands stretch across the table until their fingers touch, and they both say at the same time, ‘It wasn't the carpeting.'”

It wasn't the carpeting.

I know what it is, and I finish the story, much to Dr. C's delight.

“It was the carpeting, but then the walls needed to be done, and your sister thought about what a fabulous vacation she could have taken for the price of the carpeting, and then there was another need and another want,” I almost shout out.

“Exactly. So?”

I want to know what happened to the artist and the sister, but I know she has another point to make. Damn this therapy. I just want to hear the story.

“Tell me,” I ask, back to being the student.

“The carpeting was okay, everything was okay. We change every day. Be open to change, Meg. Be open to what comes and goes and how the rhythm of your heart may change and move in many directions. Wherever it goes, it's okay. You are okay. Someday you might wake up and no longer want coffee with cream in it. What the hell. Don't let where you are hinder where you are going to be tomorrow.”

What the hell indeed.

She tells me eventually, weeks later, because I am driving her nuts, that the artist threw away her brushes and turned to throwing pots because she felt she wanted something larger, something she could feel and touch in a way she never felt from the painting. Dr. C's sister divorced, went back to school, got a degree in social work and is now working in the inner city with the people most of the rest of the world would rather ignore—the men and women who are HIV positive, the drug-addicted mothers, the men who lost control of their minds and lives and who refuse to take their medication. She lives in a tiny apartment by herself, and it does not have carpeting. Both women are happy. Well, that specific week they were happy.

There is not one piece of carpeting in my new apartment. That is what I am thinking after I hang up the phone and throw Tomas a kiss across all the miles that separate us.

My last night at Elizabeth's, she plans a meal and we cook together in the kitchen. I am happy, imagining the nights she will spend with me when she is in the city, and I tell her I have already begun to design a trap to lure her into buying or renting a home in my neighborhood.

“I have the money,” I say. “We could buy a place like the one I will be living in and start a little suburban commune.”

“I've already thought about that,” she admits.

“Really?”

“Yep. Still thinking. I don't need all this space, and you've given me the itch to make a few changes myself. How's that for switching roles?”

We wander back to her living room and I end up on the futon, where I thrashed uncontrollably and threw myself around just a few months ago.

“Did you think I was nuts?” I ask Elizabeth as she moves her legs to either side of mine so that our limbs are a tangled mass of ankles and knees and toes.

“Sure you were. Nothing made sense. You couldn't even remember how to turn on the car.”

“But was I crazy really?”

“I've always thought that people who fight their feelings, who don't give in to the sorrow or anger or love or lust, can never really experience any of those emotions.”

“Makes sense,” I say, sipping my tea. “A couple of examples?”

Elizabeth tells me that she had a dear friend who had a phobia about taking her clothes off. The woman had been touched inappropriately when she was a little girl by two different men and had never gotten over what that felt like. She had never properly grieved or mourned or gotten angry as hell about what had happened to her. This woman could not believe that anyone wanted to touch her because she was loved. Trust? It was a word that did not exist for her.

“She talked about her clothes constantly, would never shower in front of anyone on trips, had lovers disappear because she hated undressing in front of them. She did make love, but it was always with great fear, under a sheet, with the lights off. She was totally ruled by those two incidents her entire life.”

“Why didn't she get help?”

“I think any decent psychologist or counselor will tell you that you have to surrender to your fears and let them wash over you before you can get rid of them. My friend couldn't do that. Letting go of what happened was so terrifying, she chose to live with her sorrow and anger rather than give it up.”

“So you telling me I really was about to lose my mind was just me surrendering to my sorrow and anger at myself for what I gave up, what I didn't do, all the things that made me at least peer over the cliff for a while?”

Elizabeth is smiling and pushing her toes into my thigh. “Exactly.”

“What could have happened?”

“Well, look around. That's the easy question. How many unhappy women do you know?”

“Way too many, but I also know pretty many happy ones.”

“Like Jane now—almost—and Bianna?”

“Yes.”

“See, you have to surrender. Deal with what they had to deal with, wallow in it for a while, then get up and walk away. Gradually all the pieces that are still clinging to you fall away, vanish, disappear.”

She's right. My mind whisks through the women I know who are happy, and every single one of them has come through the eye of a storm, mostly whole, changed, moving forward. Skinned alive, some of them, and barely breathing, but they made it. They came out alive.

“If they don't surrender to their own form of madness, nothing changes, does it?”

“Exactly. That's why you see couples arguing in their cars and men and women having affairs and goofy-ass doctors handing out Prozac like it's candy to women who can't quite take their clothes off when they make love.”

“And what if I hadn't surrendered so quickly?”