Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  Blue is a color, I realize the moment I wake up for the first time in my life in Mexico, that pulls at the inner circle of my soul, and the color of the water that I see from my bed is like no blue I have ever seen. It is aqua and navy and turquoise and it nails me to the center of my soft cotton sheets as if I am lying on a crucifix.

  “Jesus,” I whisper to myself in a half-prayer, half-astonished kind of way. I do not want to wake Elizabeth and Jane, who I imagine are sleeping off the six shots of tequila we had at two A.M. when our bus finally found this isolated resort.

  But Elizabeth is already gone and there is a note on her pillow. Jane does not look as if she has moved in thirty-four years.

  Pee and then walk naked down the beach until you find me.

  It has been so long since I have been naked or thought of taking my clothes off other than to change them. I am trying to remember if I even bother to strip when I shower.

  “Surely she's joking,” I tell myself as I follow the instructions to pee, slip on my stretched-out bathing suit and pray to God Elizabeth has coffee, wherever in the hell she is sitting—hopefully not naked. One step at a time, please. Mexico today, naked in maybe—what?—three years or so.

  I am so drunk with the blue and the morning light and from the sound of the waves and from the feel of the already warm sand against my pale skin that I am not at all startled to see Elizabeth sprawled in the sand with her breasts pointed toward the sky, and what looks like a piña colada in her right hand.

  “You could get arrested for that,” I say.

  “You are the one who is indecent,” she says without moving.

  This is when I look around and realize that I am the only woman on the beach that has on a bathing suit.

  “Where are we, sweetie, the Isle of Lesbos?”

  “No. Look again.”

  I see men, who are unfortunately wearing bathing suits, but they are very tiny and revealing bathing suits and on second glance I see that the women, nine out of ten of them anyway, have on bottoms.

  “Oops.”

  “You are overdressed—again.”

  “Goddamn it, I so much wanted this to go smoothly and I want to be popular like all the other girls.”

  Elizabeth laughs. It's that big-geese-flying-south laugh that makes me lunge for her glass so I can feel the same way, but instead I end up with a breast in my left hand.

  “That makes up for the overdressing,” she says, sitting up on both elbows. “You are overdressed, you know.”

  “Oh no.” My voice is a pitiful mix of sadness and terror.

  “Not yet, but within a few days you just may want to take off your bathing suit. Americans are such assholes about their bodies. There isn't anything sexual about what is happening on this beach. Besides, it's about time you looked at yourself from the outside as well.”

  “Will you be embarrassed if I just sit here with my suit on for a while?”

  Elizabeth knows my self-esteem is in the crapper and that I half believe that she really might be embarrassed if I don't strip. In reality, she wouldn't care if I wore a frog to the beach or came down here and organized a Tupperware party. But I need so much reassurance that I cannot even joke about being naked on a beach in Mexico where the likelihood of me meeting someone that I know has about the same odds as me knowing in the next five minutes what and who I want to be when I grow up.

  “Sit,” she commands, and I sink into the arms of the warm sand with extreme gratitude.

  By noon I am already getting the hang of this cosmopolitan, non-American life. There are no other Americans at our small resort and there is a stated nonchalance to eating, walking, moving, whipping off tops and smoking and drinking that has me feeling a bit boozy before I even bother to sip the South of the Border booze. Elizabeth made all the plans for this trip and I suspect she has a hidden agenda that has me eventually sleeping with a man from France, his sister-in-law and two long-lost uncles. I very quickly fall into a rhythm of total and complete relaxation unlike anything I can ever remember. I become a virtual physical and emotional captive to my surroundings—the constant and glorious sun, the stunning blue, the way everything seems slower and gentler, that warmish, scented breeze that drifts across the beach from some island miles and miles offshore, the way the men run their eyes up and down my body and then boldly lock into my own eyes, the way I have already forgotten what brought me to this paradise in the first place. How quickly I have been seduced.

  Jane finally sees the light of day just after one P.M. and wanders onto the beach like she is looking for something she lost. We say hello to her and she turns slowly to look at us, and she says, “Who the hell are you two?” We laugh and let her sink into the sand. She is hours behind us—hours and days and maybe years.

  Elizabeth tells me I must go to a place where I can examine my Life List. “It's right there,” she says as we sit on the edge of the wharf, imagining what secrets lie buried out there in the miles of open sea, and then she pushes on the insides of my wrists with her warm fingers. “It's close to the skin now. I have already seen it travel down from your heart and past that tough bend in your elbow. It's very close to your fingertips.”

  “Most people would think we are crazy if they heard this conversation,” I tell her. “But I think I know what you mean. Maybe we should just stay here for the rest of our lives, eating fruit and having your men bring us rum-laced drinks.”

  “Don't get too comfortable. We're leaving in the morning.”

  “What?” both Jane and I shout.

  “We are off to find the dancing dogs in the morning, and that's why it's so important to work on that List today, and one other thing.”

  My heart pounds just a little and for a second or two I put myself back in my real life and the sky goes dark and I have a very clear vision of the level of my unhappiness. There is Bob standing behind me with his arms crossed, a counter filled with dirty dishes, my daughter talking on the phone, a pile of terribly boring reports stacked to eye level on my desk and something so odd that I close my eyes to focus on it—a calendar that extends on forever, and every single day has something written on it. My life planned out by everyone but me.

  Elizabeth holds my hand when I begin crying. She tells me that the color of my tears has changed and that she can tell these are now new tears.

  “This is new anguish,” she says, tasting one of the tears. “Fresh salt. Now you tell me.”

  It is perhaps remarkable to remember the moment when you wake up. It is perhaps remarkable to be able to step outside of your mind and body and see your flaws and missteps and yearnings. It is remarkable to be able to put your finger on your own pulse and to say that you suddenly understand that unhappiness is a choice and that everyone, even you, can change direction, or better yet, find direction at any moment in your life.

  “I have to remember the color of everything, Elizabeth, don't I?”

  “You can, but what is important, I think, is to remember that something remarkable happened and that something remarkable can happen at any moment for the rest of your life.”

  Jane is taking silent notes. She has not moved but she is listening.

  She is good, this Elizabeth, who wears a brightly patterned piece of Mexican cloth draped around her and tucked into the narrow of her breasts to keep it from slipping off. She is already stunningly beautiful because of the power over her own life that she has always seemed to possess. For the first time in weeks I want to hold her in my arms instead of having her hold me, but I am certain I am not ready to hold the weight of anyone by myself—not yet. I can hold a small part of Jane, but I cannot hold all of her either.

  Jane has turned to watch me and her hand, slow at first, has moved to touch my leg. She has not seen me cry. I have been the weight to tie her down, and this is my moment. If she can learn from it and lean into me even more, that is fine, and the strength I get from simply knowing that I need this moment this time washes over both of us.

  “Everything has to
change, doesn't it, Elizabeth?” I say.

  She is smiling, and I can see her eyes crinkle up when her sunglasses slip down just a bit.

  “What do you think, sweetheart? Does everything have to change?”

  “Here is that moment,” I say to myself, “that moment I will always remember not for what I see with my eyes but for what I know is the necessary ingredient for my survival.” I take the moment and I hold it cupped in my hands not so gently. My grip is firm and smooth and kind, but it is also solid—because I know. I think I really know.

  “Everything has to change.”

  When I say it, I see a brigade of dancing Mexican women twirling past me with their skirts flying. Dolphins leap from the sea. Little brown-skinned boys and girls laugh in unison. The sand sifts itself into dozens of castles. The sky twirls itself into the shape of clapping hands, and Elizabeth sails from the wharf and slides across the gentle waves of the ocean, totally naked while she jumps rope with the cloth that was once her dress.

  Linda is driving a Jeep that is so old, portions of the back floor are missing, there is no tailgate, and if there ever was a top it was destroyed long before the Second World War. Elizabeth is in the back end, wearing a jogging bra—thank God—with one leg on one side of the largest hole and the other leg on the other side of the hole. Jane sits next to her, holding on to the roll bar with both hands, and her eyes are open so wide, I am certain they'll pop out. I am in the front seat with a bandanna wrapped around my head in do-rag style, hanging on to what there is of the dashboard while we fly down what appears to be the only main highway between here and Houston, Texas. We are in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula, in search of the wild dancing dogs, men and women who will yip and holler like the doggies without giving such action a second thought and any kind of memory scent my Auntie Marcia may have left in this hot, dusty and terribly exotic country.

  The woman driving the Jeep is so stunningly beautiful and sure of herself, I can barely focus. When she showed up with her long legs and tanned skin and perfectly bent baseball hat in front of the resort at six A.M. just as the clouds on the ocean lifted and the sun began to filter through the trees by the swimming pool, I wanted to slap myself because I felt as if I were in a movie.

  She is our guide-friend, local jungle expert and woman of the world. She has come to take us on an adventure to see the doggies and God knows what else. She is a friend of a friend of a friend of Elizabeth's, and the fact that she has beautiful blond hair, legs that are longer than the entire length of my body and this aura of confidence has me spinning. I want to be just like this woman when I grow up. I will have to take up weight lifting, grow out my hair, move to a foreign land—anything seems possible when I watch her move, anything.

  “Welcome to my world,” she said as her way of introduction, and then she grabbed half of our bags in one arm and we were flying before I could close my mouth.

  Linda, Elizabeth tells me as we walk toward the Jeep, is an archaeologist who came to Mexico to help unearth the unbelievably important ruins at Coba, an area of shallow lakes covered by decades of jungle growth that includes an amazing twenty thousand acres of an ancient civilization that we are about to enter as part of the doggie search. When the Mexican government cut off funding for major archaeological projects in sites such as Coba, Linda was unable to leave because she had fallen in love with the land, the lakes, the sky—apparently every ounce of the peninsula. Now she hires herself out as a guide, sometime digger, a friend to searching women as she waits for the skies to open so she can find more hidden treasures.

  Call us “the Barking Females”—women in search of dogs. There are sleeping bags, a tent, bundles of water and food wrapped in tarps in the Jeep. I am certain that we will run into Thelma and Louise around the next hairpin turn and I pray to any living thing who will listen that I might not just be ready, but worthy as hell.

  Miles and miles from the resort, where there were wonderful things like flush toilets and ice cubes and food prepared for you while you sat on the beach, we turn right and are instantly enveloped inside trees unlike any that I have ever seen. They are a tangled mass of green leaves and roots so thick that it becomes darker with each mile. Occasionally there is a break in the darkness and a slice of light pushes out in the dirt road where someone tried to claim a patch of ground. Because my Life List has been put on hold most of my dull life—okay, all of my life—I have never been to a place where people have to scratch the ground to clear a space to live. I have thought about those people from time to time, but to see a small hole in the horizon and scattered pieces of lumber, piles of garbage and a trail leading off to the next village—it changes everything.

  I am an educated woman. I have studied and planned and read more books than the average person, but now I realize quickly that I have missed more than a world of experiences. Something harsh and angry rises up in me when I realize this true fact. It is one thing to live, but it is another thing to really live. Why have I been so afraid? Where did my wires get crossed?

  We bounce along and I glance back to see Elizabeth lost in her own thoughts, and I suddenly remember the days in high school when I had such brilliant but silent dreams. I kept pages and pages of notes, most of which I wrote down during classes that I considered way too boring for my attention, and my notes were filled with a passion that seems to have gotten lost in all the days and nights of my life that have piled so high I have not been able to breathe.

  Once, Mark Cotrel read my pages of notes. Mark was a pompous jackass of a boy who was blessed with a body and face that made girls do things that were terribly embarrassing. I adored Mark, loved him, wanted him and would wet myself if he so much as said “Hi” when he sat next to me in American history class. He often asked me what I was writing and I never would tell him. It was just “stuff.” Poems about climbing mountains and counting the seconds until graduation so I could leave and how I wanted to someday be driving down a jungle road in a Jeep with two women who could kick ass without even blinking.

  Mark took my binder one day when I got up to go to the bathroom, and I was frantic after class because it was missing. When I stepped outside the room he was waiting for me.

  “Here,” he said, eyes down, pushing the book into my hands.

  “How the hell did you get this?” I seethed through my teeth, forgetting about his hair and teeth and beautiful shoulders.

  “I took it. I'm sorry.”

  I wanted to kill him. My rage was such a strong emotion that I was struck dumb. I was on the edge of a huge and dangerous tide that could have washed me into a place that I might still regret today. I felt violated, raped, exposed. I may as well have been standing in the hallway of my pathetic high school totally naked.

  “I'm so sorry.”

  “What?”

  “It was wrong. I am so sorry.”

  “That is my life in there,” I said. “My life, and it's private.”

  “It's beautiful.”

  He stunned me. It was a second slap in the face and again I could not speak.

  “I write poetry too,” Mark said, “but I've never told anyone. People would laugh. What you write is beautiful.”

  I could not take my eyes off of his face. I saw his lips moving but my mind was floating somewhere up there on the green ceiling in the hallway outside of the history room. He went on and on for a very long time. The last thing I remember him saying was that he would especially remember the poem about walking away from one place to another, unless I wanted him to forget it and then he would never even look at me again.

  “Remember it,” I said when my voice came back, “and do something remarkable with your life, Mark.”

  I never saw Mark after we graduated, but friends told me that he went to nursing school and now lives and works in San Francisco at a hospice for men and women dying of AIDS.

  And me? I give lectures, watch my husband make love to other women, and it has taken me half my life to remember the verses from my own poem. But
I remembered. I finally remembered.

  Elizabeth must have been watching me think. Damn it. I can't get away with anything.

  “What?” she shouts into my left ear.

  “What would we do without the word what?” I think, because it seems as if I am always surrounded by that word.

  “Thinking and remembering,” I throw back to her.

  She nods and then shouts to Linda: “I need to pee.”

  Linda whips her right index finger into the air and stops the Jeep right there in the middle of the highway.

  “There you go,” she says. “We might as well all pee, because we have one hell of a ride in front of us.”

  Okay, then.

  I try and act like I know what I am doing. Linda jumps out, goes to the front of the Jeep and drops her drawers. Elizabeth takes the left side. Jane just sits in the Jeep. I went to college. I figure I can handle the right side just perfectly. This is why I never went on the camping trips with Katie's Girl Scout troop. What was I thinking? You can apparently go to the bathroom anywhere, at any time, with anyone you want to. If only I would have known this sooner I would have saved myself countless hours of time. Time that I spent needlessly looking for an indoor toilet facility. I cannot believe how my life is changing.

  We are all back in the Jeep quicker than it would take three men to pull up their zippers. Jane decides to hold it—which has pretty much been the main theme in her life.

  “Before we go, I want to know where we are going,” I say rather boldly.

  “To see the doggies,” Elizabeth answers. “But that's going to take a few days.”

  “We are driving right through the heart of the peninsula,” Linda tells us. “If you tried to walk left or right—well, it would take you pretty close to forever to get anywhere, but you'd die from thirst and there's a very good chance something might bite you that has a poisonous mouth.”