Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (9 page)

Which she does, of course, the second I have this thought. The doctor looks startled to see me there.

“My, you moved in fairly quickly.”

“I came back for my purse and then I sat down and now I realize that I am almost too tired to drive.”

The good doctor looks away and addresses the other woman. She puts me on hold by raising her hand as if she is trying to direct traffic.

“Sydney, can you go wait in my office and get your usual beverage and I will be right with you?”

The woman rises, looks at me as if to say, “You thought I was the crazy one,” and disappears down the hall.

Dr. C stands in front of me, hands on hips, that hair hanging wildly behind her ears, and waits for me to say something. I have no clue.

“Doctor?” I ask.

“Meg, are you okay?”

“Maybe not.”

“Is there someone you can call?”

“I already called her once. Do you think she will come get me again?”

“Who is it?”

I tell her. Everyone knows Elizabeth. Maybe she has been lovers with Dr. C. Maybe she has been a patient. Maybe it's her wild and wide reputation.

“She will come.”

Dr. C moves forward. She touches me on the shoulder and tells me she is a bit worried.

“I just came back for the purse and then I sat down and then I started thinking and that woman walked in and I realized that people don't touch anymore, not enough. People don't touch just to say something like, ‘Hi, how are you,' because we are all worried about lawsuits, and then my mind realized that my body was exhausted and then—”

“Meggie, can you stop?”

“I have no idea, Doctor. I think I may be exhausted or having some kind of breakdown. What is wrong with me?”

“Nothing is wrong with you, sweetheart, but you are suffering, right now, right this instant, from something known as depression.”

“Wow.”

She laughs when I say “Wow,” and her laugh is so damn infectious, I begin laughing too.

“Meg, I think you need a break, but I need to go help my other patient now. Call Elizabeth. If she cannot come, then you must promise me that you will wait for fifty minutes until I am finished. Can you do that?”

“Yes. I think I can dial the phone, just don't ask me to do something like get up and drive a car.”

“Meggie, I have Elizabeth's number and your cell phone number. I will call you tonight and give you some instructions, and I want you to think about whether or not you would take some medication.”

“Really?”

“Maybe, not necessarily, but maybe.”

“Can I just drink a little bit?”

“Sometimes that makes it worse. Are you a good drunk or a bad drunk?”

“Life of the party, baby.”

“Maybe you shouldn't drink, unless you want to jump off Elizabeth's back porch, naked.”

Ha! I knew it. She's been to Elizabeth's house. I am already thinking that I will just sip some wine to keep me calm while I wait for her to call me. She pushes her hand into my shoulder, not hard, but very firmly.

“I know who you are and that you will do what you say you will. Call Elizabeth now. Drink if you must. Wait for my call.”

“What?”

I say this like a drunk would, slurring my words, and she pushes off from me and swims to her next patient. “Bye-bye, Doctor,” I think to myself, and then I sit for a few minutes.

I never just
sit.
It is something so rare that I must actually focus on sitting. I have no idea what will happen next. The patterns of my life are dissolving one by one and I am not certain what to hang on to. The thought of being alone has never occurred to me. Not once in all of the years I have been married. I am never alone. A-L-O-N-E. I silently roll the letters around inside of my mouth and wonder what it would feel like to say them out loud.

“I am alone in this office,” I say like the most quiet whisper in the world, so softly that tiny birds and small people and clouds with ears cannot even hear it. Someone could be sitting on my lap and they would not hear it.

I cannot say it again. The word has been lost. I do not even know what it looks like or remember what it felt like to say it two seconds ago. What is that all about? What is anything all about?

Minutes pass and I do not move. When I hear a voice rise in anger and then extinguish itself, I know I must get out of the room before the good doctor and Sydney tiptoe back into the waiting room and discover my secret.

Elizabeth is home. She says, “Of course I will come. Do not move. DO NOT MOVE.”

I do not tell her where this office is, but she gets here in twenty minutes. My goal now, besides not getting drunk and taking any antidepressants, is to find out how these two babes know each other. How hard could that be?

Elizabeth has on black tights, a denim shirt that is apparently posing as a dress, cowboy boots and a baseball hat. She is also smoking a cigar in a building that is, like every building in America, smoke free.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“We sound like a bunch of guys,” I tell her.

“That's a stretch,” she tells me as she lifts her shirt to expose her breasts.

“Jesus!” I scream.

“That perked you up.”

“You look pretty perky yourself.”

“Wanna roll?”

“Elizabeth?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“Please tell me it's all going to be okay.”

She comes over to touch me. Her hands on my face are a soft kiss at midnight, three bottles of French wine, a morning when I do not have to get out of bed, cardinals singing on my windowsill in spring, warm sheets in winter, clean sheets anytime, someone else cleaning the bathrooms, and everything grand and glorious that will definitely not be crossed off of my Life List once I actually make one.

“You have no idea who you are, how beautiful you are, where you are going—do you?”

“No.”

“Listen, sweetie, listen to this.”

“I'm listening. Really, I might be an inch away from nuts right now, but I am listening.”

“You couldn't be nuts if you tried. Still listening?”

“Yes, Elizabeth.”

“Everything is going to be okay.”

1967

Sister Aloysius has a fabulous trick that has worked so well on the bad boys that third- and fourth-graders line up in anticipation at recess to see who will be next. Her voice sounds like the voice of God, not that anyone at St. Monica's Grade School has ever heard the voice of God, but they know because Father Geparski told them it would be deep and strong and full of power, and if Father says it, then that's it—it's true. That's Sister Aloysius for sure, because her voice is deep and strong and full of power and she is always ready to whack someone upside the head.

Here is what she does. Every day it's almost always someone different, except you can pretty much count on the fact that John Blakeman, Stevie Black and Martin DeBuris will get whacked several times a day because they are such terrible sinners. Sister likes to back them into a corner or against a wall. A wall close to a good corner is like the best place of all. Everyone knows what she is going to do, but there is something about this nun that scares the living hell out of the entire world. She has a river of meanness that is so deep, there is no bottom. Her bottom does, however, edge out on the cliffs of Hell. That is one thing everyone at St. Monica's knows for sure—the cliffs of Hell.

Sister likes to sneak up. Everyone knows that too, but no one is ready. How can you be ready? Jesus was not even ready. He knew, but was He ready? Well, maybe He was ready, but we won't know for sure until we ask Him. So she sneaks up and grabs her daily pick by the collar. Everyone had a collar back then, and this was in the days when you could get whacked or punched or, as we know now, sexually abused, and it was okay because they were teaching us the Fear of God, so violence, well, that was okay. It was okay to be violent.

Sister grabbed them and then she always had a book in her right hand, a very hard and solid book, and she would smack them in the head. Right in the head. Honest. She would smack them in the head, and when they had their eyes closed and would place their hands on top of that now painful place, she would step on their feet. She wouldn't just step on their feet, she would STEP on their feet until an explosion of pain made these boys, and an occasional girl, forget about the awful ache in their heads and wonder if they would ever be able to walk again.

Meggie Callie knew about this and she walked on a tightrope every single day she attended St. Monica's. One false move at St. Monica's and you could be a dead duck or possibly crippled for the rest of your natural born life. Meggie had straight A's and her best friend's mother was the volunteer English writing coach, which usually meant the boys got help to prepare them for the rigors of high school and the girls wrote poems, but sometimes the girls did boy things, but not often enough. Hardly ever.

Meggie had no idea that Sister A had been listening to her talk on the playground, in the bathroom and everywhere else there was a place to hide and listen. What Sister heard Meggie Callie say was that she was going to college and she was not going to be a teacher or a nun or work at a grocery store. She heard Meggie Callie say that she was going to be a doctor or maybe an astronaut or someone who traveled, like an anthropologist, who could look at how people lived and study their habits and determine things that no one else knew.

Once Margaret Joan Callie even had the nerve to say that maybe she would run for some kind of government office so that she could change the world. She didn't want to be President, Meggie said one day behind the old bleachers, but she did want to be a politician who listened to people and who was there one day when someone decided to call, and the Senator would be right on the phone, saying, “Hey, how are ya?” Meggie also had the audacity to mention the fact that she wondered sometimes if there really was a God.

This was a horrible sin. It was the worst sin. Meggie was talking to Cynthia Ann Hanlon and she had questions about everything.

“Would God want us to be scared like this all the time?” Meggie asked her quiet friend.

“I don't know,” said Cynthia, who would later get pregnant in tenth grade and eventually end up married three times.

“Think about it,” urged Meggie. “We are afraid in church—I mean, what if the chapel veil slips off—we are afraid to not go to church, because we could be struck dead; we have a book of rules as long as this sidewalk, and if we don't memorize them then we are also going to rot in Hell.”

“I never thought about it. . . .”

“Well, does this sound like the kind of thing a kind and loving God wants us to do?”

Meggie didn't wait for an answer now because she was on one of her “things” and there was no stopping her, or the big ears of Sister A, who was trying hard not to reach out and slap this hussy of a girl upside the head.

“Sometimes when I am going to the bathroom I wonder if I am even doing that the right way, because it's rule this and rule that. No wonder people just sit in the pews and shut up, because there are new rules every week.”

Cynthia looked at her friend in amazement. She was more worried about Robert Fleischman's new pants than she was about this stuff. Who cared?

“We're just supposed to do it, you know?” Cynthia pointed out flatly. “Maybe they don't even know if we screw up. I mean, it's not like someone is watching.”

“That's what they want us to think. Remember when we studied about mind control and stuff like that in science?”

Cynthia looked around just to see if anyone really might be watching. She didn't want to listen anymore. She wanted to go find Bobby. He had on the greatest pants.

“Are you leaving?” Meggie asked.

“Yes,” Cynthia said, and she was gone.

This is when Sister A sprang into action. She was so furious that the hair under her veil was soaked and sweat dripped down the back of her neck. If there wasn't a commandment that said, Do Not Kill, she would have her hands around Margaret's meaty and evil little throat in a second.