Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (39 page)

“Well, let's see, this morning you'd be doing Bob's wash and then calling me to go to lunch and then you'd be sitting home alone with your feet propped up by your old desk the same way you propped them up for the past ten years almost every Saturday night while you were waiting for one of the kids or Bob to come back home.”

“I was waiting.”

“Yes, you were.”

We talk for hours, which is what women do. Talk even though they have talked for days and weeks and years before. I hold Elizabeth's hand and thank her and let her know every twenty seconds that I would fling myself off a bridge for her. She knows this already, but women do this too. They tell each other. Always and over and over, because these things are so nice to hear and so wonderful to say. She wants to know what I am going to do tomorrow, the first day alone in my new home with my new life backed up against me and ready to climb over my back and right off the top of me.

“I can't tell you.”

She laughs. That golden, deep sound that makes me close my eyes and think that those Catholics or Lutherans or Mormons have no idea what Heaven is like until they all have heard Elizabeth laugh.

“You can't tell me?” She sits up. Fakes looking astounded. Holds her hands to her chest.

“No, but I'll show you when you come over for my first real dinner in my new home on Sunday.”

“That's better.”

“But I have one more thing to tell you that I haven't shared with anyone.”

She sits up fast. The hands go down. She's terribly quiet. I haven't spoken this out loud yet. I cannot wait to hear what it will sound like.

“I'm going to quit my position at the University. I am still working out the details, quietly, because they'll have someone in my chair before I leave the room if I'm not careful, and I have to figure out a few more things first, but it won't be long. I am going to leave.”

“What? What the hell are you going to do?”

This is so much fun, I want to string it out for a while, but Elizabeth grabs my hands and holds them so tightly that I cannot breathe.

“Tell me before I pop you,” she threatens.

“Ready?”

The hands clamp me harder.

“I'm going to go back to school to become a massage therapist. I'll open my own studio down where I live, offer funky services, walk to work, eventually maybe have a studio where I live.”

“It's perfect, my God, it's perfect.”

Then she turns over my hands and runs her fingers up and down my veins and across my palms and reminds me how I have always been a toucher.

“I know.”

I say “I know” so many times that Elizabeth puts her hand over my mouth and I kiss her fingers, all the while thinking that within a few months I will be able to rub the soreness and sadness out of her fingers, anyone's fingers, the limbs of the entire exhausted world.

The truck from the garden store is waiting for me in the driveway.

“Damn it,” I shout to myself, angry because I do not understand the tempo of driving life in the city. I'm shouting. I never shout—well, almost never.

I park behind the big red truck because the street is packed with cars, as I imagine it will be the entire time I live here. The two men are thumping on the hood of the truck.

“Hey,” the big one yells. “Where do you want this stuff?”

I stop yelling. Right then. I stop.

“How long have you been here?” I ask as I look up into the big guy's face.

He steps back. Most people, I already know, are so elated when anyone in the city actually shows up to do what they say they are going to do, they pretty much bend over, but I paid for this shit. That's what I'm thinking. These guys are working for me.

“Five minutes,” he answers.

“That's worth a six-pack in the backyard when we are done. Let's go. Follow me.”

The rocks cost me almost as much as my living room furniture. The two men from the garden store are pissed. No one orders quite this many rocks, but I tell them right away that besides the beer there is a tip if they can shut up and just haul the rocks.

“Just haul them,” I plead. “See how beautiful they are.”

I say this as I am rubbing one against my face, and then I hold it out to them as if I have just turned one loaf of bread into twelve.

“Okay, lady,” they finally say, looking just a bit frightened.

I know they want to know what in the hell I am going to do with them, but it's my secret, my rocks, my life. I'm guessing they have helped haul stones for backyard ponds and sidewalks, but the flat, river-bottom kind of rocks that we are moving from the truck to the backyard are absolutely beautiful. They will not touch water from a lake, river or sea or be stepped on. They will not.

I work for about fifteen minutes with them and then it dawns on me that I am paying them and they can probably haul rocks alone. I have not even bothered to look inside of my apartment.

The key to my house is as warm as my skin. It has been tucked in my shorts pocket, and when I take it out, I press it against my face and it brings back a memory of my first apartment. College. Sophomore year. A studio so small that I had to sleep in the closet when I lost the coin toss and my friend Lynn got the far side of the only other room we shared besides the bathroom. It was one of the most remarkable and wonderful years of my life. A first taste of freedom that slipped away from me way too fast.

My tennis shoes come off easily and I leave them by the front door, and then in a moment that I can only describe as pre-Christmas-like excitement, I close my eyes and step inside.

Wow, Meg. Wow.

The apartment is beautiful. I am dead. I think I am dead, and turn immediately to look in the small mirror that Terry has hung by the door. I bend over and see that I am alive and here, standing in front of a mirror in a room that is filled with bright throw rugs, and lamps, and a couch that is whispering, “Meg, Meg, come lie on me.” The living room and kitchen are works of art.

While I walk through the kitchen, which is the color of a summer morning sky—blue, yellow towels, red thingamabobs on the counter—I wonder why I never thought to make my space so lovely. Why did I never think to hang something like that there, place a table at that angle, put a photo so low on the wall like that?

Somehow this decorator woman figured out who I was in our few brief meetings, and when I move into the bedroom, my bedroom, where untold tales and adventures (how I hope!) will unfold, I cannot move. A brass bed and nightstands, bedside lights lined with bright beads, a gold and burgundy and green bedspread that rocks against the dark walls, candles everywhere. I imagine my “things,” the photographs and few mementos that I chose to take from my last life, in the places where they will eventually lie the second I look at the dresser top and walk into the bathroom.

“It's perfect,” I tell myself. “Totally perfect.”

Katie's bedroom hasn't been touched and that makes me laugh. That is also perfect. She will need to design her own space and I'll help her pick out her dresser and chair when she gets back.

On a small table, placed in a spot that seems almost strange but then suddenly perfect because it is where I can set a coffee cup, my gloves, a book, before I go outside, Terry has placed a note.

     
Meg,

     
I know that you will fill this space with your favorite thirteen coffee cups—you like the one from the spa in Rhinelander the best—the silly school photographs of the kids—your three diplomas—your “stuff,” as you like to call it. Before you hang or place anything, I want you to think about how you will live in this space. Feel it for a while. This is your house and it will become your home the very first night you sleep here. In the refrigerator you will find a $50 bottle of champagne—but you must drink it alone. Tonight, when you have unloaded your few boxes, sit where you will always end up sitting and drink the entire bottle. I admire you for changing your life, for finding who you are. My commission for this job covers only my expenses. Elizabeth told me that you are going to massage school. I want a massage a month for as long as you can stand me.

You rock, baby. Now live—just live.
Terry

I feel as if I have won the lottery. Since the watching I have met the most extraordinary women. Women who are bold and beautiful and brilliant. Women who have seen the dark edges around my eyes and who have reached out to put a hand right there, below my eye, in that deep spot of wanting. Women who would cross borders at midnight for me, walk on coals, give me the last sip of the best wine, hold me when I cry, be there at the end of every goddamn phone line—wonderful, glorious women.

Terry. Oh, Terry.

I have her note in my hands when I go back outside and then rush back in to get the beer and some tip money. The boys are almost done and they have put all the stones, two huge piles, right where I asked them to, against the deck that comes off my living room. This makes me very happy and will save me hours of work. I set down the money and put the beer on top of it.

“When you are done,” I tell them, “I have to haul boxes.”

Which is exactly what I do next while I wait, not so patiently, for them to leave. The car is packed, but it doesn't take me long. There is half a pickup load left in Elizabeth's garage, but that's tomorrow's chore. This day—I have the stones.

They are almost too perfect, flat and soft. When I touch them, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, I imagine what my finished product will look like, and it helps me to keep going. What I also have to imagine is the length of my body, curled just a bit at the knees. First I lie at the edge of the deck and then place a stone just beyond my head and another at the end of my foot.

Within an hour I realize I may have underestimated the time needed to complete this terribly important job, but I am dauntless. I see that there are two lights at the edge of the porch roof. I will work all night if I have to. And it's hotter than Hell. I strip off my shirt, go inside for a beer, then another one, and work placing the stones one on top of the other for two, three and then four hours.

By four
P.M.
I am further than I thought I would be. The stones are beautiful, solid, a ring of life that is becoming my fortress. Every stone tells me something. I wonder where it came from, who touched it first, how many years it bounced along the bottom of a river. Some of the stones are so beautiful, flecked with gold and green and blue, that I kiss them, and each rock holds a part of my story, my life—up until this moment.

I think about my parents, my brothers, my Auntie Marcia. While I put the rocks in place, winding them in a long oval, I try and remember as much of my life as I can. My first period, a kiss, the night I made love with a long-legged boy from Florida on a beach, the dancing dogs, the sounds of my babies waking up while I stood and watched.

I remember the pain of childbirth and my wedding and my father's funeral. I am sailing and running and crying and laughing with every rock that I place, and then I am finished.

Meg, oh, Meg. Wow.

The circle is waist high. It curves perfectly. I love it.

It is just getting dark on this summer Saturday evening. The sky, blinded by the lights from the city, is still the champion, and while I walk to the car to retrieve two large plastic bags, I feel like everything I see is twinkling, whispering hello, saying, “Welcome back, Margaret.” I am trying to imagine feeling happier and I can't.

I set the bags down outside of the rocks and go inside to wash my face and to grab the bottle of champagne. I linger too. My apartment is dazzling, absolutely dazzling, and I am in love.

Back outside, the rocks look as if they are glowing. This makes me laugh out loud. First I walk around the edge and run my hand over all the stones, a thankful caress. The bags untie easily and flower petals spill out before I get a chance to line the inside of my fortress. Rose petals fall everywhere when I tip first one bag and then the other into the center of the rocks. Flakes of yellow and red and white. It's snowing for just a few minutes, and the scent is overpowering, wild, beautiful.

Getting inside of the rocks is easy. I take the bottle with me and slide down so that I can lie with my legs stretched out. The flowers are soft and silky against my legs, hands and arms.

I pop the bottle right away. There is no fancy glass, just the joyous sound of an expensive bottle of champagne breaking itself free, an exotic and sensual explosion that streams down my legs and drops into the flowers.

The wine is fabulous. I think I may never use a glass again. I think there are many things that I may never use or do again. I drink for a while and settle my ears into the new city sounds that will eventually become familiar to me. Beyond the lights and buildings and light poles, I can make out a few stars, fighting furiously to be seen beyond the soaring city.

“I see you,” I tell the stars, and then I say the same thing out loud to myself. “I see you, Meg. I see you.”

When I set down the bottle and curl around myself, a tiny breeze moves in between the holes I have left in several places in my rock house. My mind floats back to my Mexican jungle when an occasional breeze woke me up, showed me the way home, helped me stand with my feet at the edge of the ocean, the edge of the world, the edge of my life and see who I could be, wanted to be, had to be.