Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  Linda has deposited us at a cottage just north of the city, and from what I can see in the first five minutes, I know this is what the entrance to Heaven must look like. Everything is simple and clean, and Elizabeth, who claims to never have been here before, seems speechless with happiness for a good five minutes, which is a very long time for her. Jane is quiet, looking everywhere, exploring her temporary landscape like someone who has just had her sight restored.

  Linda barely stopped the Jeep before she whirled back in the direction from which we'd come, shouting that she was off to find the dogs and that Angelica would take care of us. Angelica finds us with our bags in our hands, staring out at the endless sea as if we are waiting for a lost lover to walk right out of the water. When she speaks we are all startled.

  “¡Ay, mujeres bonitas! ¡Bienvenido a Fiesta Harbor!”

  I say “Hello” because fake Spanish is worse than anything I can think of during that moment and I can barely order a beer in the native tongue. But Elizabeth launches into a conversation that Angelica must be able to understand, because she answers back.

  She asks her about the resort where we are staying first in Spanish and then as an aside to me in English. Elizabeth tells me the piece of land and small rental business have been in Angelica's family for a very long time.

  We are both dying to know if Angelica knows Linda.

  A frequent visitor when she comes to this part of the peninsula, Elizabeth relates in Spanish.

  And what about the mysterious Pancho who is somehow tied to my dead aunt and may be the internal director of the Mexican mafia?

  Apparently everyone knows this man and my aunt; I am tugging at the edge of Elizabeth's blouse. And she finally asks.

  “¿Conoce usted a la Americana que se llama Marcia?”

  Angelica's face suddenly moves in a wide and beautiful smile. Before she says, “Que mujer mas bonita,” I know that she has seen and met Aunt Marcia and I want to know, but Elizabeth is already stumbling over her Spanish as if she has on shoes two sizes too big.

  “¡Basta! Tendra la informacion mas tarde. Ahorita trate de gozar.”

  Elizabeth has said enough. Damn. Elizabeth explains that this way of speaking is simply part of the respectful Mexican culture. You don't say what someone else is supposed to say, and my mind jumps to two places at once. Either something horrible and sinister happened to my Aunt Marcia and her glorious companions or the story is not tragic but beautiful and quiet.

  I stand by like an overanxious American as Elizabeth finishes her conversation with Angelica, but Elizabeth tells me everything when she is finished and then Angelica walks us to our sleeping quarters and tells us her son will come to find us so that we can share dinner with Angelica and her family.

  Simple. Everything seems simple.

  “Elizabeth,” I say as I throw my bag on the sandy floor and take her hand. “Elizabeth, this quiet is light and perfect and I feel so far away.”

  “So far away from what, sweetheart?”

  “Everything.”

  “What does everything mean to you right now, this second, while you are looking out at an ocean of possibility?”

  “Everything hard and routine and things, everything that I don't want to do.”

  “What don't you want to do?”

  “Every single thing I ever did before this moment, before right now, before here . . .”

  Elizabeth smiles, but she sees me hesitate.

  “. . . What I want to keep are my kids, some parts of my work, and a few simple routines.”

  “And?”

  “Maybe I don't really miss anything. Maybe I am just a maybe.”

  “Maybe is okay, Meg. It's okay to just be a maybe right now. Maybe you will want to go back and embrace your life. Maybe not. How long did it take you to get here?”

  “Don't make me say it.”

  “Well, Jesus, Meg, you don't have to build the entire tower in one day. Let it happen. Let it happen how it will happen.”

  The next few hours prove to me that I have forgotten the simple joys of doing just that. Just letting it happen. Elizabeth and Jane decide to walk, and I just want to sit and stare out at the water. The overwhelming tiredness that I felt in Dr. C's office has not totally left me, and that coupled with the trip and the weight of the world that keeps shifting its spot from shoulder to shoulder makes me want to lie down for a very long time. When I find my place in the sand, it feels like the warm part of Heaven. I cover my eyes with my bandanna, spread my legs, push my arms out to form the universal angel and, before I can take another breath, fall asleep.

  I wake up with a grumbling volcano-like semi-empty stomach and to the dark eyes of a little boy who is pushing my shoulder and saying, “¡Mujer! ¡Levantese! Venga y conya mi madre ha prepardo la cena.” This, I think, means get up and eat or his mom will kick my butt.

  It takes me a minute to remember where I am and then another minute to realize I have fried my face and legs and arms in the Mexican sun. I want to jump in the ocean and have the salty water sting me back to consciousness, but dinner is waiting, and my stomach cannot wait.

  We feast on rice, beans and tacos, while Elizabeth carries on a conversation—well, sort of a conversation—with Angelica and her family. I imagine she is ordering geese and asking them about their sex lives when she really wants to know about the winter weather and how they manage to prepare food in a kitchen the size of her bathroom closet.

  We decide not to worry about Linda. “I'm pretty certain she can take care of herself,” Jane laughs, and when it gets dark outside I convince her and Elizabeth to go for a swim with me, because my lobster-red skin is screaming so loud, I cannot bear to listen to it any longer. There is a torch outside of our hut, which we light and take with us to push into the sand at the edge of the water. It should not surprise me that Elizabeth wants to swim naked and insists that we join her.

  “What about the family?” Jane asks.

  “They won't watch. The people here are very respectful.”

  “Well, shouldn't we be?”

  “I am not swimming nude to offend them, Jane. It's part of who I am. I'm certain they won't look. Meggie, my gray-eyed beauty, when was the last time you went skinny-dipping?”

  Have I ever gone skinny-dipping?

  “Well?” she asks as she slips out of her shirt and shorts and stands with one foot in the sand and the other in the water.

  “I'm thinking. . . . There was a night in Chicago, but there has to be a time after that.”

  “Was there?”

  “Well, when I was a little girl, Aunt Marcia used to take me swimming at her friend's cottage in northern Wisconsin, and she said that if we swam naked during a full moon and exposed our breasts to the evening sky that we would have good luck until we swam under the full moon again.”

  “Really? How wonderful.”

  “She also told me that if I swam under a full moon I would become a virgin again, which I thought was cool and I actually believed that lovely story for a number of years. It was sort of like money in the bank, even though I never did anything about it.”

  Elizabeth hollers with glee at that story and I tell her how I tried to carry on the ceremony with my own daughter, but just like everything else significant in my life, I got to the edge of the water and then chickened out.

  “It's never too late,” she tells me as she backs into the water and then falls over as if she were a tree hacked off by a wicked chain saw.

  “Why,” I wonder to myself as I stand there alone, “is something like this so damned hard for me? Why is a seemingly simple act, something that could be beautiful and gracious and new and lively—why is it so hard?”

  Jane tells us she doesn't even know how to swim, and laughs at the idea of taking anything off—even her shoes. “You are way ahead of me, Elizabeth,” she says, sitting at the water's edge, fully clothed and with her tennis shoes on. “I'm just going to look at the water. You two do whatever you want to. I'm going to float on t
he beach.”

  I enter the water with my swimming suit zipped and tucked and totally on. The one with the flowered bottoms and black top that seemed perfect for a mother with two teenagers just a few years ago and now seems just a bit on the conservative side. Elizabeth and I bounce very close to shore and then I slide all the way under the water and then pop up through a delicious spray of waves. Simply delicious.

  I lie back then so that the waves can carry me right into the beach, and I let go and make myself feel as if I am the ocean—moving in a patterned direction yet free enough to curl and shift if the wind touches me in the right spot. Then I ride the wave into shore and go back out and ride another wave back in. I cannot take off my bathing suit, not yet. Maybe on the next trip or at the end of summer or in a year, but not yet. I already feel too naked, even in the darkness.

  Elizabeth has propped herself up on the beach next to Jane and she is watching me. When I catch a glimpse of her, I see her white teeth flashing and I think that this is one of the most intimate moments of my life. Me flying through the waves, and two women who would fling themselves in front of a train for me, women who have shared moments of personal anguish and who love me, truly love me, watching me surf through a moment that can only be described as totally fabulously wonderful.

  I cry then, and my tears mingle with the waves and the moon, a sliver of golden lightness that smiles at us over the horizon. When I lie next to Elizabeth in the sand, there is absolutely no need for me to say thank you, because she knows. She knows.

  “You know, Elizabeth,” I finally say. “I wanted to go skinny-dipping all those years ago. I stood there on the edge of Silver Lake with Katie's hand in mine and my other hand on the towel and I worried about everything. What would people think, what if someone saw me—”

  She cuts me off.

  “They'd be lucky. We grew up, Meggie, thinking that nakedness was wrong. We were supposed to be chaste and only the boys could go down to the strip joints and watch women take off their clothes. You were formed by the voices you heard all your life. In many ways you didn't have a choice and in many ways the people uttering what you heard had no choice. You really didn't have a choice.”

  “How about you?” I ask her, imagining that she was raised by hippies—or wolves in some cave just inside of the city before the stop signs gave way to deep forests and long rivers.

  Her story is similar to others I have heard from my university friends and educated women who stepped out-of-bounds and never ever thought of going back inside those heavy lines. Strict parents. Way-strict parents who demanded and pushed and pulled, so that their daughters decided to try to be and do everything that seemed evil and horrid, because they needed to try—just try.

  “I just became comfortable with who I was and how I wanted to live my life,” Elizabeth tells me. “It's not for everyone, but it works for me.”

  Jane goes next. Large Christian family. The burdens of religion. Guards at the door day and night, and always wondering what it might be like to fly and then pass over the top of her real life and see what she looked like from a new angle.

  “I'm getting ready to get my pilot's license,” she says. “Meg and I will take off our bathing suits as soon as I can get my entire body into the water, so no one can see me.”

  We talk and laugh for a long time, lying in the sand practicing “being naked,” until I hear the shriek of the Jeep brakes and Linda's wild voice calling our names.

  “Down here,” Elizabeth yells.

  “You—” Linda starts, but the sight of us cuts her off.

  “Did you swim?” she asks, standing above us with her hands on her hips.

  “Yes.” I answer. “It's wonderful.”

  Without hesitating, she announces that she has fabulous news and that she is going to swim too. Her words get cut off as she whips off her blouse and vest and pants . . . “Hot . . . damn . . . found him . . . wait till you hear . . . exhausted . . . hot . . .” And then she is in the water, her white ass waving to us and me plunging in one more time to get the sand off my own white ass, which is still covered by a bathing suit.

  “Little by little,” I tell myself.

  Linda swims for a long time. Elizabeth stays down by the beach to watch her, and I walk back to the hut to grab some beer from the cooler our hosts have graciously left for us and then I rejoin them at the edge of the water, where Linda launches into her daylong adventure with such gusto, we could be filming a Miller Lite commercial that features middle-aged women who leave Chicago to find themselves after years of bad relationships and hard times.

  “I found him,” she tells us. “Pancho Gonzales Quintana is a very old man and he thought I was you,” she says, putting her hand on my arm. “He said he has been waiting a long time and that your aunt said you could come when you were much younger but you never came. His story and your aunt's story . . . they are remarkable.”

  “Tell me,” I beg. “Tell me.”

  Linda laughs at the very moment she is taking a sip of her beer, and wisps of foam fly into the air like an out-of-control water fountain.

  “He said you will know what to wear and that he will recognize your eyes because your auntie told him about your eyes and the power of your heart.”

  “They must know something I do not know,” I say, looking off into the dark that now hovers where the moon had danced just a short while ago.

  “Forget her heart,” Elizabeth says. “What about the dancing dogs?”

  “I'm pretty sure we will see the dancing dogs, especially if Pancho knows it is you. Do you know what to wear, Meg?”

  “Yes, but we need to find it.”

  My three friends look at me as if they have never seen me before and want quite suddenly to know my first name, where I live, anything about me.

  “A purple skirt,” I tell them. “I need to wear a purple skirt.”

  “Can we find one?” Elizabeth asks, never even bothering to find out why it has to be a purple skirt.

  “We can find anything. Are you kidding me? I found Pancho, don't you think I can get a purple skirt?”

  I think that Linda can do anything. Anything at all. And that locating a purple skirt may very well be the easiest part of her day.

  I sleep that night wrapped in blankets the color of the rainbow, with the sound of the waves rolling up the sand, slipping into my hair and then my eyes and face. My dreams are filled with wild beer-induced messages from the ancient spirits who wandered these beaches long before the feet of white women touched down on them.

  In my dreams, I am naked and no one seems to notice and I put on clothes only when I am alone. I can hear what people are going to say before they say it and every night that I wish for a full moon, one appears and glides across the horizon left to right and then back again until the sun kicks it out of the sky.

  Everything is real inside my dream, everything I want is right there within reach, and the first thing I think of when I roll out of the hut at two A.M. to use the bathroom is that I need to find out who makes the beer and where I can find it near Chicago or Minneapolis or Milwaukee. I will drive a great distance to buy this beer, and then I will take it to a beach when there is a full moon, and when I do, I will finally take Katie and Jane for the swim of their lives.

  1973

  It is a night of surprises. Margaret's brother Michael has graduated from college and his party, in the backyard, under the towering maple trees that were tiny buds when he was a baby, has slowed to a crawl. Three of his friends are sleeping on the floor of his old bedroom and everyone but one uncle, who is loud and loves to touch all the pretty ladies, and his silent wife, who smokes endlessly and picks at her nails, has left. It is past midnight and upstairs in her bedroom Meggie can hear the muffled sounds of her father and uncle talking and the women picking up glasses as they move in and out of the kitchen.

  “Can I come in?” Michael asks her, pushing her bedroom door open just wide enough so she can see that he has two beers in each hand.
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br />   “Oh, please,” Meggie says through a laugh, and stretches out her hand for the beer she is usually forbidden to taste. “Will we get in trouble?”

  “They'll be talking another hour and they think I'm passed out with the boys. Don't worry, baby, I'm twenty-one now, so I can corrupt anyone I want to. See?”

  Michael, her brother with the gentle eyes and soft heart who rarely raises his voice above a whisper and who now has an engineering degree, pulls out a small bottle of whiskey and says, “Now I can celebrate with my favorite sister.”

  “I'm your only sister, goofy.”

  Meggie has tasted beer and wine and everything else her parents keep in the old ice chest behind the couch. She has had two cigarettes with her girlfriend Marcy and she has allowed Jeffrey Jablonski to slip his hands under her blouse, but Meggie is so terrified of her father's rules and her mother's enforcement of them that she has never broken them. Occasionally, she slips her foot just over the edge of the line and laughs into the wind for about fifteen seconds, but then she quickly goes right back to stand in the designated areas.

  Michael tugs her out of bed and grabs her quilt off of the pillows and they circle it around themselves and sit with their backs against Meggie's bed. Then they begin their party.

  “Will you get in trouble?” Meggie asks Michael as she takes a huge sip of the whiskey and washes it down with her beer.

  “Oh, my baby, I am going to get in trouble, but it's not because of this.”

  Meggie watches her brother move his long legs out so he can cross them at the ankles, and she cannot remember a time when she has not been able to count on him. When he left for college four years ago, just before she started high school, she was devastated and had to leave the house so she would not see the car when it turned the corner to take him away from her.