Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  As we settle in with the family, who Linda tells us have never before had overnight guests and who have skin the color of the early-evening clouds, I cannot stop thinking about my aunt and what she was doing here and how she found this part of a country that was so far removed from the rest of her life. Beyond that, why did she want me to come here and what does my trembling heart need to learn beyond everything—every single thing?

  We are asleep just after dusk and I sway myself into sleep with Elizabeth on one side of me, Linda on another and Jane next to her, bodies scattered on mats around the dusty floor that must have seen the bottoms of many brown feet but never the swaying forms of four white women who sleep in shorts and T-shirts, with their eyes watching the last corner of light that disappears beyond the trees.

  The day I married Bob, it rained. It was not a gentle, welcome-to-married-life-which-will-be-absolutely-beautiful-and-like-page-37-in-Modern-Bride-magazine kind of rain. It was a hurricane rain. Wind swept off the fields, and the tops of the old pines touched the midsections of trees planted fifteen feet away. The sewers were clogged full of cardboard boxes, roots the size of bicycles and small animals—including the neighbors' white poodle, who probably yipped all the way down that dark ride to the bowels of our city.

  My mother wept when she woke on April 23, 1977, and saw clouds as dark as midnight instead of the bright blue heavens that she had imagined would produce streams of sunlight coming through the stained-glass windows at St. Agnes Church, where she would stand and watch me walk up the aisle and into a bride's magazine world that left me dazed and confused.

  I woke to her sobs early the morning of my wedding after a night of tormented dreams, which were of my unfinished dissertation and a feeling that I may be making the greatest mistake of my life.

  “Margaret,” she screamed from the living room. “Margaret.”

  Apparently the rain was my fault along with everything else that went wrong that day. Dresses were torn, the cake was late, my dad's brother—Drunken Eddie, as we called him—bashed his car into the head usher's new Chevrolet and it never stopped raining all day long, not even for five minutes.

  Later, years and years later, when I gave up, I remembered something from my wedding that I must have buried in a very deep spot. There is screaming in the car and my friend Susan is holding my hand and telling me everything is going to be okay, and closed streets and a mad dash by everyone when the car pulls up behind the church. I get out last and do it very slowly. The rain is pounding—there is no other way to describe it—and when I get to the door of the church, one hand there, the other dangling by my side, I realize that I am crying.

  The rain splashes against my face, mixes with my tears and onto the black raincoat that I found hanging in the basement from Girl Scout camp days, and I say, “Thank you” out loud to God or some saint or anyone who might have been responsible for letting me hide behind the walls of water.

  That is what I think about when I wake up in the middle of the night from my hammock in Mexico, because I hear rain pounding into the ground outside of the hut. If anyone else is awake, I do not know it, and the rain slows until the slice of sky I see from the open door lightens and the stars blink back on. I do not want to be thinking about the rain at my wedding, but I let my mind pause there for a moment and dip into the swell of what happened after I went into the church and dressed and walked up the aisle and then drove off again, still crying, into a rain that lasted four solid days.

  When I wake again, just after dawn, I shake my head to clear it of my midnight dreams. Before I have time to blink, Linda has us on our feet and we are back on the highway, which is really not a highway at all but a large path chopped between the trees.

  “How far to Quinchinita?” I want to know.

  “Maybe seventy-five miles, but I'm not sure about the road after that rain last night. Sometimes it's worse the closer we get to the ocean, where the storms blow in.”

  “Then what?” Jane asks.

  “Last night I asked about the man who knew your aunt, Meg, and I mentioned those damn dancing dogs, and I have an idea, not very clear but an idea, where we might find your doggies and any trace of your aunt. People in this village remember her.”

  “What do they remember?”

  “Mostly that your aunt was just here and that when she was here she brought medicine and that she laughed.”

  “That would be her,” Elizabeth says. “If I remember anything about your Aunt Marcia, it was that laugh.”

  I remember it too, almost as well as I remember my own laugh, and in a second, in the time it takes to say a name, I can pull the way she tilted her head and sucked air into her lungs fiercely and then let it blow through her throat and nose and mouth, I can pull that memory right out of my heart because I have carried it with me for my entire life. I think of it and my aunt with a kind of wild and free grace that tastes a bit like the dirt on the Mexico highway, and for so many years now it has been the only place I can touch that actually feels free. My aunt's stored laugh, tucked halfway between my stomach and my waist—like rolling thunder—always makes me feel free. The wild part, well, apparently I am working on that at this very moment. There are miles to go before I sleep and become Aunt Marcia-like wild—miles and miles.

  So we drive, and it is slow and then fast, and I do not focus on the fact that my back is killing me or that I would commit a crime for an ice-cold beer, which I have been promised if we ever get to the other side of the world.

  “Lots of beer, baby,” Elizabeth says, “and there will be rum to set the lining of your stomach on fire, and the views . . .”

  She closes her eyes when she talks about the views from small hills that are not blotted by condos and hotels and signs offering parasailing and men who cannot play the guitar singing next to a palm tree at midnight.

  “You have been there?” I ask.

  “Not this spot, but farther down the coast, and I imagine it as being almost the same.”

  “It is,” Linda says. “It's quiet and beautiful and if I could pick one reason why I stay in this country, it would be because of Quinchinita.”

  “Wow” is all I can think of saying, because it is hard for me to imagine anything more beautiful than the other side of the peninsula.

  We stop once to eat fruit and granola bars, and when I peer into the thick jungle I wonder how far I would have to walk before I actually saw another person. It took three hours to get here in an airplane and it is a million miles away from where I live.

  By four P.M. we have crossed some kind of imaginary line and we begin to see huts, a few live human beings, and Linda tells us that within ten miles we will be in the town. “Town,” she adds quickly, “meaning streets and a few businesses and stores and the most wonderful market you will ever see in your life, and yes, before you ask, there will be cold beer, and that is where we stop first.”

  Once when I was in high school I read a book about a young woman whose mother had died when she was a little girl. She had no real memories to hang on to: thoughts of what her mother must have been like, how she sat on her mother's lap, touched her hair, whispered in her ear and smelled her skin almost drove her insane. One day the girl fell into a deep sleep, no one could wake her, and in her dream her mother came to her and answered every question. The girl slept for days and when she woke up it was as if she had lived with her mother every day she had been alive. She knew everything she had always wanted to know.

  That story rode with me and I wondered if it was possible for me to close my eyes after this adventure and feel as if the missing answers to all my questions would be lined up on the bathroom sink the first morning after I returned home. Aunt Marcia tried to show me how life could be, how my life could have been, and I was trying hard to remember events, people, things she'd said were part of my lost set of life directions.

  My deep thoughts vanish as we breeze past a row of houses, maybe seven or eight, hardly enough to be called a congested block, and Linda pull
s the Jeep in front of a tiny store that looks as if it has been standing since the beginning of time. Small sticks for the sides, no windows; from what I could see from the highway, there are dirt floors, colorful hammocks woven in reds, greens, oranges, pinks and blues hanging outside of each door and then the one glorious item we had been looking for, waiting for, hoping for since we hit the dusty road two days ago—a small rusted sign in the shape of a beer bottle.

  “Is this what I think it is?” I ask, leaning forward.

  Linda smiles, pushes back her hair as if she were in a movie and says, “Get your ass out of the Jeep and drink.”

  The cold beer can not dislodge the thoughts of Aunt Marcia's lost lessons and I wonder if my auntie drank beer here, did she in front of this old building, did she know the shopkeeper, what did she want me to see as I stood in this hot Mexican sun?

  Jane interrupts my quiet drinking with a question.

  “You okay?” she asks as we lean against the back of the Jeep.

  “Thinking about my aunt, life, this trip.”

  “I can't stop thinking, either. I've been terrified of being alone all these months,” she says, quietly at first and then with her voice rising. “All these months I've felt that unless I was with someone that life was worthless. Being alone shouldn't feel like that.”

  My hand moves to her arm without thinking. I want her to know that I am listening, that I understand, that it's okay to tell me what is on the very top layer of her heart.

  She goes on a bit louder as if the first sips of beer have kick-started something that needed just a bit of oil.

  “I'm pissed off. Angry that I lingered so long in a place that now seems a bit disgusting to me.”

  “It's part of the process I think,” as I try to convince myself as well. “Maybe what Aunt Marcia was trying to tell me is that there are no ‘right' set of rules and directions and guidelines. Maybe it didn't matter if I came to Mexico now or twenty years ago. Maybe it's just right if your process of discovering that being alone is just a fine way to be took you over a few backroads.”

  Maybe.

  Maybe is what we decide to hold on to in our left hands as we drink our beer with our right hands and lean into each other and then into the rest of the day and the possibility that we may know exactly what we are talking about.

  When Katie was born, the very second, I felt as if something moved through my entire body. This sensation overwhelmed me. It was beyond the physical pain of having something the size of an enormous watermelon pass through a hole the size of a grapefruit. It was beyond the very real knowledge that a baby was moving from inside of me and out into a world that I was certain neither of them were ready for. It was a sensation that some powerful force was cleansing me with some kind of invisible potion so that my daughter could leave me and begin her own life.

  I felt a set of hands push down, gently, so gently, from inside of my head. If I could have focused, if anyone would have asked me during those moments and I had explained it like this, they may have never let me leave the hospital. But they did not ask, and with my eyes closed I reached up to take the hands and help them move through the inside of my body.

  There was someone very far away ordering me to push and incredible pressure that made it difficult for me to breathe centered just below my waist and this sweet sound of the hands moving like wind and my fingers gliding on top of them, touching silk and then rumbling past my throat and lingering around the edges of my heart, and me thinking just then that no matter where these hands swept, the scent and feel and taste of this baby would never leave me.

  When this force reached the very top of the curve of my stomach, just where I imagined the tips of the baby's feet might be resting, it stopped, and I did also. When I opened my eyes there was a mass of heads hovering below me and looking into that place of finesses, into me, into my vagina, where the round ball of my baby's head was jamming up the process, and I calmly said, “She's coming,” because at that moment I knew that the baby was a girl and who she was and that the hands were really there inside of me.

  She came then, screaming before anyone but me could hear her, and I felt the hands glide and pull and push the baby girl into place, and then my hands boldly stopped everything because I knew I would never, ever have another baby and I wanted to feel this last moment, the moment when pain shutters everything so tightly that there is room for nothing but the simple hope that you might live beyond that very moment. The moment when you can imagine the welcoming arms of death and when you can feel your bones stretching and the songs of birds flying to peck out your eyes and the roll of drums as objects draped in black come to seize what is left of your flesh.

  I held on to that moment for one and then two and then ten seconds and then I screamed from a place I had never been to before or since. I screamed and I felt the edges of something filled with fire and then I grabbed the top of the hands and I pushed them out of me behind the baby girl, and even then this force lingered in the room. Lingered because the baby had grown so quiet. Quiet, we quickly discovered, because she had been removed from my dark and safe uterus and thrown into the cold and rather bright world of the hospital delivery room. When I closed and then opened my eyes, whomever or whatever had entered the room was gone.

  Katie, some would say, came to me possessed. She was a kindred spirit filled with all intentions good and wonderful, because Katie was an independent gem from the moment she was born.

  She is always in my heart, but when she plows into my mind and sits there hour after hour, there is something she needs from me. I know this just as I know my need to drink water or to lie down when I can no longer stand. That is why I ask Linda to help me hunt for a phone right after we inhale our second beer.

  “A phone?” Elizabeth asks as if I said I needed to quickly rent Gone With the Wind or order a taco to go. I can tell she wants to argue, so I don't even bother to say anything. Sometimes she gets like this.

  “Whatever it is will have to wait, Meg. Are you crazy? Who do you want to call?”

  We are hanging on to the Jeep, and all I know is that I need to hear my daughter's voice and to know what she needs.

  “Katie,” I say. “She needs to ask me a question.”

  Before I can say another word, Linda hands me a cell phone. This is the first time I have seen it. She must keep it zipped up inside the white vest she never takes off.

  “I have a daughter,” she tells me, holding her hand against mine while she puts the phone inside of it. “I was in high school when she was born. She's twenty-two now. In graduate school. She's the only one who has this number. Call your daughter.”

  Has life always been like this? I want to ask someone this question, but it will only make me look more foolish than I already feel. I want to know how much I have been missing, how many things I could have had if only I had bothered to ask. What was the whole world doing while I folded socks, studied for anthropology exams and stared blankly out of the kitchen window? Where the hell have I been?

  Katie is not at home, but I call her own blessed and lovely cell phone, and when she answers, when I hear the sweet sound of her voice saying, “Hello,” and then lifting two hundred degrees when she hears me say, “It's your mother,” I start to cry.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “I'm fine, baby. What do you need?”

  “You.”

  “What?”

  “You forgot to leave any phone numbers and I was worried about you, Mom. I knew if I thought about you long enough that you would call me.”

  “Jesus,” I think. In a flash, a blink, my daughter has become my mother. Then I realize that I am no longer someone she knows very well. I have never left her like this. I have never traveled off in search of the source of my silver rings in the land where dogs dance and mysteries of the past are hidden under brightly colored blankets. I have always been around the corner or over at Grandma's house or in the library or out waiting in the car.

  “I'm in a small cit
y that is not on a map. It's on the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. Between Campeche and Celestun. We're looking for those dancing dogs I told you about.”

  “Mom, are you smoking dope? You know what that will do to you.”

  She is half joking and half serious, which gets me half concerned. If I find out she has volunteered to cook a meal or walk the dog, I'm flying home as soon as I can get back to the airport.

  “Not yet, it's too early. We're sticking with the Mexican beer until we find something better. I love you, Katie.”

  Jane whispers to me as I disconnect and hand the phone back to Linda. Jane tells me about the baby she lost. The baby lived for three months, she tells me while Elizabeth and Linda huddle near the front tires. Three months and then this sudden rush between her legs and wailing that seemed to come from a place so far away, which turned out to be her own voice.

  “That was it,” she says, even more softly. “No more babies, and he wouldn't adopt, and I kept padding through all those days and nights, wondering about motherhood.”

  She tells me that during the first days alone, in that nice house where some lights are never turned off, she dreamed her lost baby back to life for a while. Crawling, walking, talking, graduating from high school, coming in to sit and talk with her after a date or a game.

  “Some things you never get over,” Jane explains. “I accept that, but I wonder—now, more than ever—if I couldn't have filled up the empty space with someone else.”

  Wow, Jane. Wow.

  Linda brushes off my thank you with a wave of her hand and we manage to pull Elizabeth out of the shade, where she is conversing in her interesting version of the Spanish language with two men who both look terribly confused. Elizabeth could probably get elected mayor of this village in two weeks if we left her here alone. Me? I like to keep one hand on the Jeep at all times.

  Three hours later I find myself sitting at the edge of the ocean, fairly oblivious to anything that exists beyond what I can see when I turn my head from side to side, and what I see is enough. I am immersed in a world of blue—sky, water and roofs. The brightness has me cornered in a way that makes me think of nothing but what I see and I know this is a good thing for just a little while because what I need to think about is big stuff, really big stuff. I like to believe that I know what I am doing here on this beach, but if I move even an inch I can hear myself shift in the wind. My life is a question right now—one huge question.