Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (4 page)

“Elizabeth, I am so damn tired. I am so tired.”

“I know, sweetie, I know.”

Somehow we manage to get off the floor and she drags me into the living room that is such a delightful garden of books and flowers and rocks and sticks and stones that I feel a lightness soar through my weary bones. My tiredness is a weight that I have dragged with me for so long, it is hard to move. Elizabeth has a futon that flips out into a bed in three seconds and she tells me to stretch out, which I do without hesitation. I quickly sink into another world. A world where there are thick blankets colored in purple and red. A world that smells of patchouli and has glasses on every table and towels lying in plush piles near the bathtub. A world where the door is not locked and where people come and go and leave notes of love and passion on the kitchen table. A world where anyone who enters can say and feel and be and do whatever they want and where you can sit on the roof and read a book at midnight, wear shorts when it snows or plan your outdoor exercise routines for only the days when the weather is bad, because you like it that way.

A world of passion and light. That is what I crave. No schedules or routines that mix politely with the plans of the people in your life who have no consideration for what you need and want. A world where someone, just once, says, “What can I do for you?”

Elizabeth comes back with two martini glasses that are about the size of a Miami cruise ship. She orders me to drink and sets down a pitcher of liquid that I know will ignite the lining of my stomach and send me into a place of total confession and exotic boldness. Then she lies next to me and asks me what I thought about while she was gone.

“Someone saying just once, ‘What can I do for you?'”

“Oh, no, this is where you missed the boat and plane and the whole damn train. It's not them. It has nothing to do with them and everything to do with you.”

“What?”

Elizabeth sets down her glass and molds her hands around mine, which are glued to the stem of my own martini glass. She squeezes me so hard that I am terrified I will drop some of this liquid gold—some of my salvation, the ribbons of diamonds that I will use to ignite me so I can take some kind of step forward.

“We make our own choices every single moment. Happy or sad. Married or single. Alive or dead. Miserable or content. Successful or not successful. Your life choices have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. How dare you or anyone give away the power to be. Bob and Katie and Shaun don't make you happy. The frigging new car doesn't make you happy, or the house or the job or flying to Paris.”

I am listening but I need another sip. A large sip. She releases me and goes on.

“Bob was pretty happy today. Bravo for Bob. He did something that made him happy, something that he wanted to do. He took care of himself.”

“It sure looked that way.”

“When was the last time you did something that made you happy? When?”

How could I answer this? Women aren't supposed to be happy. We are supposed to save the world and then do the wash, fill out college applications for the kids, order grass seed and walk to the store in a snowstorm for more milk. We burned our frigging bras, saved a few whales and a fraction of the environment and then we did the damn ironing while the guys barbecued. Nothing seems to have changed in a hundred years. I can't even remember the last time I thought about the mere possibility of being happy.

“Jesus, Elizabeth . . .”

“Women have blown it big-time,” she answers for me. “You know now that you have to start over, don't you? You have to learn how to crawl and then walk and then run and then fly. What the hell were you thinking giving yourself away like that?”

She is angry, just a little angry, because Elizabeth never gets angry like most people get angry. Her skin flushes just a bit. She is an amazement, and I drink my martini, which tastes like Christmas—a touch of evergreen and mint, one snowflake and an olive laced with gold, incense and Santa's garter belt—and pour another one, and I suddenly feel more exhausted than I ever have in my entire life. I need to make sure my daughter, Katie, is safe and I have to call in to work and there is Bob, wild-ass Bob, and then the next fifty years of my life. Half of my life. I have half of my life to live. Oh my God.

“Half of my life,” I say out loud.

“What?”

“I have half of my life floating around out there waiting for me.”

Elizabeth doesn't say a word but I notice her eyes light up a notch and a breath of something wild leaves her chest. She listens and I ramble and ramble and sip and sip again and I see something, not very clearly, something like a ship so far away you wonder if it isn't the wine or the bend of the horizon or the past meeting the future right there where your eyes happen to be resting for that one second. I see a glimpse of something moving so slowly, I imagine I could catch it if I barely crawled, but I cannot bear yet to reach out and touch it or see it or understand what it is. Please pass a baby blanket.

“You are starting,” she says, like a professor nodding to a class of freshmen. “Crashes, wrong turns, be prepared. But also be ready for dancing.”

“What?”

“Naked dancing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The shit is about to hit the fan, Meg darling. Lives are changing as we speak. When you leave this house, as you must eventually, everything you know will have changed. Bob. The kids. Your job. Your role in life. All of this because of your watching. It can be a glorious relief. Wonderment. Naked dancing at midnight with flames of fire or at the break of dawn when the air is fresh and hard.”

I am feeling woozy with the vodka but I almost get it. I put one hand on Elizabeth's thigh so that I can steady myself, and then I imagine me dancing naked—C-section scars, fifteen extra pounds around my middle, veins popping out like adolescent acne, dips and curves replaced by a melting pot of middle age, hair gray at the roots, scars from elbow to chin—and I am not quite sure if I should laugh or cry.

Elizabeth looks over at me and sees my eyes crinkle with deep thought, notices the questions lying right there, and she tells me to imagine it anyway. “Just imagine it.”

I do.

The light is perfect and there are miles of red desert cliffs. All of my nails are painted to match the ribbons of a summer sunset and are perfectly filed. My hair has been bleached by the sun and hangs in perfect curls down the center of my back. My skin is the color of whole wheat bread. It is the glorious moment before day surrenders—hands in the air, clouds drifting fast—into the dark eyes of night. I take off my shorts, shirt and sandals. This act does not bother me. It does not matter if anyone sees me. I do not care. The music drifts in on the edges of the night air, musty, wild, scented with the smell of sage from the desert. It is never loud, and surely I am the only woman in the world who hears it. I hear it and I begin to dance. I dance for five, ten, fifteen then twenty minutes. I dance until it is as dark as it will ever be and the sky is littered with stars, and when I finally stop and look up, a crowd of ten thousand men and women begin clapping and the sound rumbles in my ears like an explosion in my own head.

“Dancing naked at the edge of dawn, Elizabeth. I can imagine it, but can I do it? Can I?”

My hands are in hers. She has moved to face me. I may never sleep or eat or walk again.

“Drink up, sweetie. Drink up. You are going dancing.”

1963

The noise is a raging wave of mingled voices that wakes Margaret from a dream where ponies are dancing and she is talking to the sky. Her father's voice is the loudest. It is a deep siren that is laced with the words
No
and
Never.
She has heard the voices like this since the day she turned seven just three months ago. The house had been filled with her aunts and uncles, cousins running from room to room, a tub of beer on the back porch and her brothers swinging from the trees and stealing the birthday balloons so they could fill them with water and drop them onto the front sidewalk.

Her Auntie Marcia was the last to leave and was also Margaret's favorite person in the entire world. Her present that year from Aunt Marcia was a pocketknife, because “Girls need them too,” and Margaret slipped it from the small white box and held it to her chest as if it were a piece of gold. She never put it down and when her auntie asked if she would walk her to the car she kept the knife in her right hand and noticed her auntie smile when they held hands and touched the knife together.

“The world is yours, honeybunch,” Auntie Marcia told her before she jumped—Auntie Marcia always jumped, never simply sat—into her small red car. “You are seven now and next year I want you to tell me all the places you will travel to when you are a grown woman. Start a list tonight and then next year we will go for a ride in my red car together and you will tell me.”

That night Margaret decided she would have everyone start calling her “Meg,” because she now had a pocketknife and because she was seven years old, and then she started her list. Her parents were woozy with the beer and the shots of whiskey Grandpa Frank had poured, and as she was writing down the word
Africa
the noise started.

Meg put down her number 2 pencil and she listened. Her parents were in the kitchen and it was hard to hear and it was an unusual sound. No one yelled much, except the boys, around her house and she had never, ever heard her mother raise her voice like she did that night. She stopped writing after the letter
i
because the sound scared her. Her fingers found the cool edge of the red Swiss Army knife that was under her pillow and she touched it like she used to touch her blankie and the doll her mother threw away two years ago.

“No,” her father yelled. “Goddamn it. No!”

Her mother cried then and Meg wanted so very much to pull open the longest blade of her knife and walk down the steps and into the kitchen and tell her father to stop yelling, but she was scared. Really scared. She pulled open the blade in the dark, memorizing how she had to touch the long blades first and then the tiny scissors, and she sat there wishing the yelling would stop and that she could finish writing the word
Africa
and that her auntie would pull up in her cool car and jump onto the porch and run up the steps and save her.

She heard her brothers get out of bed and open their bedroom door. They tapped on her wall and she moved just an inch to tap back. It was their signal, their secret code. She tapped two times which was the signal for A-OK and then she waited.

Two doors slammed and then everything was quiet, but Meg did not put the knife away. She waited again, heard Grant shift in the top bunk, and she desperately wanted to finish writing. She was thinking of Africa more than the loud voices and she was imagining a line of tents and hats shaped like domes. It was hot and men with skin the color of her brown shoes walked with rifles and there was the scent of smoke everywhere. Night was falling and from the flap of her safari tent she could see a round sun, huge, huge in the sky like the one she saw in
National Geographic
the last time she went to the dentist. Meg imagined herself riding elephants and resting behind a bush as a lion raced to feed off a dead zebra.

Her mother moved like a lion in that African jungle. She quietly opened the door and looked startled to see her birthday girl in bed, a knife in one hand and a pencil in the other.

“Honey . . . ?” her mother asked in one word that was at once a question and a way to find out if she had heard.

Meg did not speak. She closed her knife, put down the pencil and opened the covers so her mother could climb in beside her. They never spoke but her mother pushed Meggie into a ball and curled around her and within minutes was asleep. Meg could feel her breath against the back of her neck and in the morning she would smell like the beer that seemed to pour from her mother's lungs and tangle in her hair. She would also wake with the knife in her hand, her fingers stiff from holding on, and the faint notion that she had been someplace far away and could never, ever get back home.

The yelling never seemed to stop after that. Two nights would go by and then it would happen again. Her parents did not say anything about what happened after ten
P.M.
and her brothers, except for that first night of wall tapping, acted as if they had been struck deaf.