Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (41 page)

Which is exactly what Pat had. From her hospital room as she was prepped for surgery, she called her best friend and not her husband. When she woke from surgery, with rocks in her mouth and her entire body floating in narcotic ecstasy, she looked up to see her friend, standing guard over her wedding ring wrapped in a wad of Kleenex on the table, and a bright light shining above the door—which was really the bathroom light—but she decided that the light was her path to singlehood.

“The first call I made from the hospital room was to a divorce attorney,” she says, smiling. “Here,” she says, pushing her gift toward me, “I threw away the appendix, so this will have to do.”

Her gift is a Barbie doll–sized hospital kit that makes me laugh, which I am discovering from these terrific women is a fine and wonderful thing to do.

“It's lovely,” I tell her.

Elizabeth gets up then and comes over to hand me a piece of paper. It is a note from Katie.

“She knew we were doing this and she wrote this for you.”

I take one look at it and ask Elizabeth to read it for me.

     
“. . . Mom, my gift for you is myself, everything that I am becoming, the woman I am going to be. When you thought you were failing me—you were not. Without your help and encouragement, I would never have the courage to go to Mexico for six months or to work so hard for the grades that got me here. The divorce does not change anything about how I feel toward you or Dad. Sometimes people just fall out of love, and that is an important lesson as well. I just want you to be happy, Mom, just really happy, and to know that I am really excited about your new life and our new home. You are a wonderful mother, and I will always be your daughter. As I am a gift to you, you have always been a gift to me.

Love always,
Katie”

Oh, Katie.

“Thank you,” I tell her, throwing a kiss into the air that I hope will land right on her lips all those miles away in Mexico.

Lisa has a tale of great sadness. She is our domestic-violence statistic, and for her to simply voice her past is a leap of generosity that makes me reach out and take her hand halfway through her Reverse Bridal presentation. It is impossible to guess her age. Lines long and hard move to the very edge of her eye, where I always raise my eyeliner, out to the side of her face and down to a valley of red streaks that fan across her face. I think of a valley of tears. I think that she has been crying for such a long time that her face turned into a river. I think that compared to her story mine is a free lunch at a cheap restaurant.

“You think it cannot be happening. You think that it isn't happening when it does happen and that when it stops it is never going to happen again.”

Lisa speaks quietly, her voice rising in the middle of every sentence and then dipping to the edge of the last word as if she is trying to hold on to something she knows is slipping away. Everyone is looking at her, no one is moving, even the incense seems to be paying attention, and even though I suspect they have heard her story before, they have to listen. They have to hear it again.

“So much of what happened to me is classic domestic violence stuff,” she explains. “He was a professional who had a violent temper that was accelerated when he drank, and he drank pretty much all of the time.”

Lisa was embarrassed and lived in a place so surreal that she became adept at using makeup, forgiving; saying the limp in her right leg was from an old running injury, passing on family gatherings because of his workload, disappearing from any portion of her former world. Her life within three years became nothing more than a fearful attempt at survival and denial.

When I look again at Lisa, when I really look, I see that there is a tiny, soft spot in the center of her eye. I see that she has surrounded that soft view of the world with a hard line that must now and forever be the place she turns to for protection.

“I went to a terrific college and have half a master's degree. I have been to Europe and the Caribbean and I am well read and have a mind that can wrap itself around views of the world that are complicated and sophisticated and wild,” she tells me. “But I could not leave this man. I was just as sick as he was. Just as sick.”

There is something, there is always something, Lisa tells us, moving her eyes from face to face and then back to mine. For Lisa it was not one single act of violence. It was not a kick to the womb that killed her baby or a bullet aimed at her heart. It was a single streak of light that worked its way into her dining room window one night.

“I was just sitting there, and this odd light moved across the window, like the shadow of a ghost, and it fell across my arm—right over the top of my hand where there was a scar. . . .”

She hesitates, a memory rising like a ring of pain from her face, trapped for seconds, a minute, then two in a place that is dangerous to revisit. An old scar, long, horrific, terrifying.

“It was from him, from something that he threw at me, and I put my hand into the air to save my face, and my hand from finger to wrist sliced open, blood everywhere, him yelling that I was a stupid fucking bitch and I could not go back to the hospital, so I bandaged it myself.”

Lisa raises her hand and moves it from face to face. There is a jagged red scar that moves east and west and then back again. It is the kind of scar left by rough steel or broken glass. It will never go away.

“When the light hit my scar, it stopped moving and stayed right there, and I thought if I could save my face, if I could save that, then why could I not save my own life?”

Why not, Lisa? Why not?

“I got up from the chair and walked out of the house without one single thing, and I never went back.”

I am breathless. Worlds of sorrow and loss and dreams melted into piles of grief have settled in my heart, but Lisa touches me softly and places her package into my fingers, and that weight disappears.

“So you can always have that beam of light, Meg. Always.”

My new flashlight is red and will fit into the small pocket of my Levi's. It has one of those fabulous batteries that never runs out. I turn it on and flash it into everyone's eyes, and then I simply hug Lisa, because I am unable to speak.

My mother's gift comes before her words. It is a travel book filled with blank pages and a small beautifully framed photograph of my father. I look at her in wonder and she speaks softly but firmly about life and changes, and I look at her in astonishment.

“I loved your father, I really loved your father, and yet there were things that I hated about him too,” she explains. “It took me a long time to forgive him and myself for everything that went wrong and was hurtful in our lives, but at the bottom of it all was the fact that we did love each other. Times now are not like they were back then, and the gift you have is what the power of this day brings you.”

My mother talks too about the goodness of kind men's hearts. She tells me I will love again and that I should remain open to every chance, every touch of a man's hand. The light of passions, she says, is always brilliant. “Embrace your past, Margaret, just as you must embrace your future.”

The travel book, she explains, is for me to know that if love does not come to me, then I must go to it.

“Mom, that's beautiful. Thank you.”

Audre, who has jet-black hair and green eyes, tells me that the luck of her life has been the ability to finally know a good thing when she sees it. When I unwrap her gift, it is a compact pair of binoculars so that I might be able to find my own good things and then keep them.

“I have been married for twenty-one years to a man who was relentless in his pursuit of me,” she explains. “I had a series of tough relationships before I met Jim and was determined to stay single and be alone. But he would not give up, and one day he wrote me this terribly beautiful love note—and when I put it down, I looked up and into his eyes . . . and I decided I had not been looking at him at all.”

Audre tells me not to be afraid to love again and to look into the eyes of any man who might have a kind heart with an open heart myself.

“I'll be looking,” I promise her. “Thank you.”

Elizabeth, my wonderful Elizabeth, is next. She is sitting in front of me, smiling widely. In her hands she has nothing. Empty palms. Long lines of life.

“Do you know?” she asks me.

“I'm not sure. . . . What is it?”

“Honey, everything you have always needed has been right inside of you. You are strong and beautiful and wise. The world is yours. Continue to get to know yourself. Be brave. Don't back up. You have it all, baby. You do.”

“Elizabeth, I love you. Thank you.”

“When you are not sure, simply look into the mirror. You will see exactly what you need to see.”

Then Elizabeth finishes and I put the flashlight away and look up to see them all watching me, and I know that it is my turn to give them all something at this Reverse Bridal Shower.

I think that I can give them a promise.

“You have given me courage and hope and stories of your life that are precious and intimate,” I tell them, feeling about for the right thing to say, the right way to say it. “I cannot say that I am not afraid to sign the final papers and move into the next phase of my life alone, but I promise that I will do it with a full heart and with the knowledge that I am doing what is best and right for me
—me.”

They clap, but I am not finished.

“And soon—when I have filled my own space and I can feel my own life, my life, lifting me and holding me—we will have a party, all of us, we will have a party, and it will not have a damn thing to do with brides.”

The laughter carries us to our feet, and then the Reverse Bridal Shower shifts its tone toward celebration, and as women always do, we take care of each other and the food appears and we continue talking. Women. How wonderful they are. Sisters. Friends. Daughters. Women are so absolutely wonderful.

“Elizabeth . . .”

“Yes, baby?”

“Thanks.”

She surrounds me with her arms, arms so familiar to me now that I fold into her as if we have done this every day of our entire lives.

“It's what we do, Margaret. It's what women who love each other do.”

“It is,” I echo.

“We can do anything.”

Elizabeth. Oh, Elizabeth.

I get home close to three
A.M.
and I can see dawn peeking its head around the corner. The world is asleep and I may never be able to sleep again. I do not bother to see if anyone is watching me from the window next door. I do not care.

When I slip off my top and then my shorts and sandals, I think I hear music—something ancient and pure, the whisper of wind that catches my hair and helps me circle slowly on the deck overlooking my rock fortress.

Then I dance for a long time. Alone. Naked. And when dawn breaks across my roof, I can see the edges of tomorrow.

i will

dance naked

when i first

learn

to walk . . .

and there

will be

a rainbow of light

colors

to blind

the binding minds

the closed hearts

of the men and women

who said

“never”