Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (8 page)

She makes me laugh again. Her polyester pants and long cotton blouse, her pinned-up hair that dangles out in strands from behind her ears and her row of gold rings, one on every single finger and thumb, are a miracle of comfortableness for me. “Talk,” she commands me. We are just going to talk and everything stays in this room and there isn't one damn thing she hasn't heard, and I am free to say, do or be anything I want.

“If only I knew” is what I say first.

“You look like hell. Have you been sleeping?”

Without even realizing it I start crying. “I look like hell because I feel like hell,” I weep. There is Kleenex and water and her hand reaching out to hold my arm—a steady beat against what I perceive as me swaying and about to go under.

I cannot answer even one of her questions, so we begin even more slowly than I imagine she imagined, what with me being supposedly intelligent and all.

I tell her where I was born and how my mother made such a huge deal out of me going to college that I could not stop going to college and that's why I have two master's degrees and three-fourths of a PhD and never really left the university. I even tell her about Jane and the bar and how I think I may be losing my mind. We waltz on and on like this for almost forty-five minutes, when I suddenly blurt out a fact that is apparently astonishing only to me.

“I never did what I wanted to do.”

What I expect is the good doctor to clap her hands together, prepare a bill and send me on my way, but she does not. Instead, she tells me a secret. She leans forward so that her face is two feet from mine and I can look right inside of her.

“Twenty-three years ago, I got up one morning and knew I had to change my life. I had become an old woman at the age of thirty-seven. I was fat, drank vodka for breakfast, and I was working as a waitress at a restaurant.”

I am just a bit astounded.

Dr. Cassie tells me in rapid succession that she left her husband, went back to college, almost starved to death, had to ask for help from her parents, raised her daughter pretty much alone and spent eleven years—eleven years—getting her PhD in clinical psychology.

I can only think to ask this: “Why that morning? Why not the week before or the following year?”

Dr. C has probably told this story a hundred times. It apparently does not get easier to tell it, because I see a wave of sorrow move across her face as deep as her own soul as she does so.

“That morning I hit my daughter,” she tells me, looking away, remembering the slap again, the soft skin of her baby against her hand, the look on the little girl's face, the instant realization of a horrific mistake. “I had never hit her before—never—and that morning I hit her so hard, I knocked a tooth loose.”

I want to touch her and tell her that I know how she feels but I already get the point of the story and I have sensed her humanness from the moment I walked in the door. I know that her daughter was not harmed and that she never struck her again and that the slap propelled her to move away from who she had become to who she wanted to be. All those college years are finally coming in handy.

It's my turn.

“When you watched your husband making love to another woman, what was going on inside of you, Meggie?”

“I think I left my body and was just, well, watching. I remember thinking that the woman was too beautiful to be with Bob and that she would probably not have an orgasm and I was worried that the bedspread looked tacky.”

The doctor laughs and leans forward again, and I can feel her breath on my face.

“What else?”

“After that, I fell apart. After I left the room and was running through the yards.”

“Why? What were you thinking then?”

“When I started to run, everything changed. I felt something smash against my chest and I realized, well, you know.”

“I don't know, Meggie—you have to say it. Can you say it?”

It is a confession. I see that. The uttering of something so deep and dark that once it surfaces, you and the people around you may suffocate. To me it is horrible. Horrible to think that years of my life may have been a lie. To think that I may have missed the boat, the plane, the bus and anything else that moves. My stomach lurches and I have to force it to stop six inches from the edge of my throat.

“I didn't care that he was fucking someone else.”

“What else?”

“I got excited.”

“Sexually excited?”

“A little bit, which in my case is really something.”

“What else?”

“You are relentless,” I tell her, looking to that same spot on the window where Dr. C focused when she told me about her daughter.

“Once you say these things, a long white sheet falls over them and they slowly disappear,” she tells me, so softly I can barely hear her speaking. “It doesn't mean it will get easier right away, but it's a start. You know it's the beginning.”

I want to begin something, but there is this strange sensation that if I begin something then something ends, and I am hanging on to everything so tightly that I can feel my fingers swelling. There are rope burns on the palms of my hands and there is a pool of blood right where I am sitting.

“Can you say it?”

“It's a couple of things and it's everything. I am running through the yard and it wasn't the sex thing, it was that I didn't care and that I had no idea where I was running to.”

“You were lost?”

“I've been lost for a very long time, and I just don't want to be lost anymore. I need to figure out how to be happy. I cannot remember the last time I was happy.”

The good doctor is smiling. When I finish talking, she moves back into her chair and begins tapping her fingers together again.

“There,” she says loudly. “You have had your slap and now you begin again.”

There is a wave as high as forever about to crash on top of me. Begin again. How in the hell do I begin again?

“How?” I whimper. “How do I do that?”

“Well, we just started. Now we get to work. There will be no more passiveness and waiting and there will be wondering, but you have to agree, right now, here, Meg, in the next second, to work with me and to remember what it felt like when you were floating around in that bedroom of yours. Can you do that?”

“It's not my bedroom anymore,” I remind her.

“I take it that is a yes?”

“Yes.”

There. That's it, then. We are out of time, which is mildly irritating but also a relief. During the next five minutes she asks me to make what she calls a “Life List.” “Write out your whole life, all the people in it, places, everything you can think of, put it all down on paper. Then you must look at each item, and this may take a while, and decide what goes and what stays.”

It's just on paper, she adds, so I can change my mind when I get to the real part. “The real part?” I ask.

“Yes, that's when you actually begin discarding things.”

All righty, then.

“Can I sit in the lobby until next week?” I ask her as we both rise to leave.

“There are already fifty-six people living in the lobby. All clients of mine. There's no room left, but if someone jumps out the window I will be sure to give you a call. You just never know when there might be an opening.”

I laugh but I also want to cry. Now I actually have to leave the building and get into the car again, and when I manage to do that, I steer myself over to Elizabeth's house, which is the only place I can think of where I might find safety, shelter and a glass of wine before noon. I am worried about the list, not to mention the next fifty or so years of my life. Worried as hell. And now, on top of everything else, I also worry about Jane.

Jane has entered my life like an out-of-control band saw. She needs constant attention, and oil in all the right places. I cannot wait to give her Dr. C's card. I cannot abandon her either. Suddenly, we are both swimming toward an unseen shore and I'm the one pulling the raft. Sweet Jesus. Poor me. Poor Jane.

Halfway to Elizabeth's, I realize that I have left my purse on the floor in Dr. C's office. Now what? This kind of thing has been happening to me since the day I watched Bob and the geranium woman. Maybe some kind of secret powder was released and I'm doomed to spend the rest of my life looking for things that I have lost. How ironic. Yesterday I forgot to turn off the iron, lost my car keys and could not remember if I parked in front of the building or behind the building. I am so distracted, I suddenly think, I should not even be driving a car.

My purse is sitting on a chair in the waiting room when I get there. It looks just a bit lonely, and when I go to pick it up I decide to sit in the chair for a while. Just sit. I could be in a dentist's office. Magazines are on the table. A photograph of geese flying over a long cornfield is tipped to one side above a long table by the door. I move my hand to the wall behind me, where I know there are several offices where psychologists listen and then listen some more, with their fingers tapping against the sides of their chairs, legs crossed, words rationed out like pieces of old bread to starving birds. I think of the piles of secrets and the damaged souls and hearts and minds that must have reached some interesting conclusions just beyond my fingertips.

“Touch the wall,” I wonder to myself, “and will I feel a beating heart, the swell of a heartache, the devastation of a lost love?” No one is in the office, so I get out of the chair and stand with my back against the wall. It does not matter to me that I am in this suite of offices and that someone could come in at any moment or that my own doctor could walk back and see me caressing the wall and have me committed. People do worse things than fondle a portion of a room.

I close my eyes and place my palms against the wall, fingers spread, and I listen through my skin for those beating secrets. I sense the rumbling announcement of an avalanche of emotion, but is it theirs or my own? The wall is moving into my hands, a slow cascade that seems to be pushing me out into the room. There is so much hidden in the fabric of walls. So much. Heartaches and healing hands. A secret sorrow released from its cage and into the arms of a kind and smart woman who will throw it out the door so it lands in the lobby, where it will be swept away after hours. But in the corners, some of the secrets linger and there are piles of transparent tears that cling to each other longer and harder than their former owners kept them melded to their souls.

I know also that the swirling mess of my life must be nothing compared to some of the tragic complications that have walked past my chair. Death. The loss of a child. Suicide. Incest. Rape. Lost love. Mental illness. My pain is a simple scratch compared to what I see when my hands are pressed to the wall.

“How easy to feel guilty,” I say out loud.

A woman comes into the waiting room. There are dark circles under her eyes and she cannot bring herself to say hi to me. She looks at the door that leads down to the offices and I think she must be deciding if she is going to stay or run back out the door she just came into.

“Hello,” I say. “How are you?”

She catches my eye for a second and I see the breath go out of her. Is she on medication? On the verge? Accustomed to coming into an empty room? Or maybe she can see through my skin and into my dungeon of terror. Maybe.

“Fine,” she responds, and I see that she decides to sit and stay. I think she will stay. This makes a sigh, wide and long, leave my own chest, and that mother spot in me, the spot that brought me back home, that keeps me weighted to a place that can no longer be ignored for the deep pit of its uncomfortableness, makes me want to reach out and take her hand. I am a toucher; there is no doubt about that. It has gotten me in trouble plenty of times with babies at the mall, young boys on the verge of adulthood—why is it no one wants to touch adolescent boys when that is the one thing, simple and true, that they so much desire?

Shaun was fourteen when I discovered this. My son was in one of his constant angry and selfish stages where speaking to someone who had the same last name took way too much energy. One day he kept bumping into me. We'd be in the kitchen and he'd brush against my arm. We passed in the hall and he reached out to grab my hand. After about fifteen encounters like this, I lunged at him as he ran to catch a ride downtown with his father. I pulled him into my chest and he fell against me in a movement that can only be called surrender. My fingers waltzed through his hair and I felt his sweet breath against my neck. He let his arms glide across my back and for ten seconds he was my boy again. Then the car horn beeped and he was gone.

We never talked about that, but it happened again and I started going into his room at night and he let me massage his hand, and once I dared to sing him a song from the days when he was a boy.

This did not last long. Shaun bounced into a darker phase after this and pulled so far away from me and everyone else he knew that I have not seen him come back since. I know he will. He will drift and move closer and pull away again, and then one day he will show up and find me and maybe he will tell me what it is that he has buried so far away from his own heart. It is something I count on, otherwise I may go blind with worry. I want my son back. Someday.

My waiting room companion shifts abruptly to the left and makes me realize I am still in my psychologist's office. It takes me a second to remember why, and pulling that thought into focus exhausts me. It simply exhausts me. I cannot remember ever being this tired. When I think about it, my feet and hands and face and bones and blood and skin—every piece of me that I can touch and feel and visualize—aches. Wouldn't it be funny to be lying on the floor when Dr. C comes into the waiting room for this woman?