Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  I can't stop now.

  “So you don't mind?”

  “That it took you almost fifty years to figure out who you wanted to be when you grew up?”

  “Katie . . . No, that I am getting a divorce.”

  “It's a pisser, but it's not like I need a mommie and daddie anymore. Dad will help me if I need it. He's just a little bit of a jerk. Besides, I won't even be around much longer.”

  “What?”

  “You have been gone.”

  She says it as if she is drawing out a journey on paper. Gone as in a very long journey that has finally come to an end.

  I remember. I suddenly remember. She's going to Mexico.

  “Katie.”

  Mexico.

  Something snaps. There can't be much left to unsnap. I completely forgot. Six months in Mexico before she starts college in early winter.

  Mexico.

  She gets it faster than I do. The house on the beach. Aunt Marcia. Some kind of cosmic, fairly bizarre moment has just passed the test of time, and my daughter falls into my arms as if a gentle wave has crashed against her back. She is crying so softly, it takes me a while to notice, and I rub my hands across her shoulders, remembering, the way mothers do, how tiny she was when she was a baby, white as snow, how I kissed her over and over, never quite believing that a part of me had made her.

  “Oh, Katie.” I cry myself into her right shoulder, the one I kissed the most when she nestled against my breasts and reached her hand toward my face to play with my hair. “Everything is changing. Everything. I don't want you to hate me or feel bad, I just don't think I could stand it now.”

  Katie pulls away. She holds me at arm's length and she moves her hand through my hair. Her fingers are a massage of total love.

  “Oh, Mommie,” she says, she calls me “Mommie” and I cannot stop my tears. “I have a terrific life. I do. It could have been easier, especially when I figured out that you were so unhappy, but hell, I've been wrapped up in my own stuff—you know, school and friends—and, well, I've actually felt bad that I couldn't help you more.”

  “I'm not sure what you mean.”

  “You know, like this, told you it was okay to leave him and let you know I wouldn't die if it happened.”

  Oh, Katie. Oh.

  “Your brother . . . was it all this stuff? Is that part of it?”

  “Mom, don't you know?”

  She can tell then by looking at me, my eyes as colorless as a February morning, that I have no clue.

  “Tell me. Please.”

  “Mom, Shaun's gay. You know, GAY.”

  I'm so relieved, I could fall to the floor. Katie must feel me slip a bit and she pushes against me.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “I thought it was because he knew I was living this lie, this here-we-are-all-one-big-happy-family bullshit and he hated me for it.”

  She laughs richly and again I hear Aunt Marcia's laughter in it. An echo of my eternity.

  “No, no, no. He thought Dad would kill him and he didn't want to bother you. He knew you were really unhappy but he just didn't know what to do about it. Oh, Mom, Shaun loves you so much. When you get through this, go to him. Everything will be fine.”

  I am torn between being pissed at being so stupid and wanting to hurl myself off the top of the steps near the couch. What did I miss? How could a world have passed in front of my eyes and how could I have missed something so damn important?

  “Hey, if it makes you feel better I never knew either. He really didn't figure it out until he left. There wasn't anyone to talk to, Mom, don't slap yourself about this.”

  “I tried so hard, you know, I did. I could feel him slipping through my fingers every day. It was terrible and I was, well, I was frozen.”

  Katie's hands move across my shoulders, pushing and rubbing, that comfortable push of hands, an instinctual feminine move that wants to knead a muscle and unknot a problem. She sees me smile and I tell her how I'm realizing touch is such an important part of everything we seem to do and she tells me to think about what I am saying.

  “You have always touched people, all the time,” she tells me, closing her eyes, perhaps to remember how old and far back this memory reaches. “It used to drive me nuts, and I would always back away from you, Mom.”

  “You didn't back, you jumped.”

  “But then one day I came home from track and you saw me limping, do you remember?”

  “Sure, last spring when your heel was sore.”

  “You made me sit down and your hands worked on my leg and foot and it was weird because it felt like you knew exactly where the pain was, and I realized at that very second that your touch was a very big part of who you are and that maybe you had some kind of special gift for it.”

  “Really?”

  “Haven't you thought about this, Mom? My God, you touch people all of the time!”

  We sway like that talking about my gay son, my hands, the direction a life takes often without a map or a break at a roadside stand. We sit on the porch for an hour and I rest my daughter's head in my lap and rock her on the old couch that I have trained to move like a soft recliner. The legs creak as if they are screaming for help and we laugh, but mostly I just want to feel her there and remember the moment when our lives passed from one point to the next. I want to let her long hair slip through my fingers forever like she used to touch the light silk on the top of her blanket when she was a little girl; I want to feel her heart there, under my fingertips, and imagine where she is headed and what she is going to do and how free she must feel knowing that she has my own heart in her hand and any other damn thing she wants and needs. I want to point her face into the late-afternoon sky, just like this, and show her how to put her hands on the horizon and claim a spot for herself—even if I'm not quite ready to stake a claim for myself and I'm terrified to do so.

  “One step at a time,” I whisper into her open eyes. “One step, do you hear?”

  “I hear, Mommie,” she tells me.

  I have never heard anything sweeter. Never.

  My attorney, Bridget, is a bulldog who has the face of a beautiful woman and hair that stands up so straight, it looks absolutely terrified. Doors open before she touches them. Opponents leap behind walls. This woman does not walk, she swaggers. She is terribly funky and intimidating, which I think is a very good look for an attorney, especially my attorney.

  Her receptionist is a man and her two assistants are young women, recent graduates is my guess, who look as if they could eat the hind legs off of any male who looks at them for more than five seconds and breathes in the wrong direction. These are the women I want in my court. These are the women I would want to help me if I ever have the good luck to be in a bar fight or in the middle of a jungle without water or a knife. Actually, they could probably arrange a bar fight for me or build a jungle within five or six seconds. When I sit across from Bridget I decide, just at that moment, never to leave her office. I'm moving in.

  “So, you're ready?”

  “Yes,” I manage to say with only a slight quiver in my voice.

  “I thought it would take you longer.”

  “Really?”

  “I'm impressed.”

  “You should be a counselor.”

  “I sort of am.”

  Bridget and I have met several times. She's given me the gory legal details. Prepared me for battle, but she doesn't expect a whimper from Bob. She does, however, expect that I'll be happy when the whole mess is over.

  Ms. Confident shuffles papers, lines a pile up for me to sign and then grabs my hand before I can begin this interesting task.

  “Are you sure?”

  I close my eyes once before I answer, and what I see is my Mexican house. I call it “Marcia's Palace.” I hear a warm wave break across Bridget's desk and feel that occasional breeze coming in just across the far edge of her spiked hair.

  “Damn sure,” I say.

  While I sign the sheets, she gets out a bottl
e of Scotch. It smells like a hard day's work when I raise it to my nose and then pass my tongue across its surface. Bitter. Scary. Certain. Lovely.

  “It feels like a first kiss,” I tell her, which makes her spit out her drink and swear.

  “Jesus! I hate to waste a drop of this. It's a hundred bucks a bottle, but that was worth it. Honey, you are ready.”

  Bridget is not just my attorney. She's my friend now. I am certain every woman who signs papers just like this feels that way, but she will always be my heroine. She'll get me the Palace. She'll help me keep my father's bonds, she'll shame Bob into realizing he makes more than enough to support himself while he helps Katie and Shaun through school. She'll get me half the money for the house. She is the queen.

  Everything is a honeymoon, until she asks me the next question.

  “Now what?”

  Without thinking, I push the glass toward her, and she fills it to the top. Damn it. Why did she have to do that? Now what indeed.

  “First I move.”

  “Then?”

  “Another week in Mexico.”

  “Then?”

  “A new job.”

  She doesn't say a word.

  I have no idea where any of that came from, but I write down the name of the Scotch before I leave and promise Bridget I will bring some to court in exactly 120 days, when I expect to be divorced, moved and very tanned from my recent trip to the sea.

  When I leave the building, I sit in the car for a very long time. I have no idea what to do next. None at all. I think of calling Elizabeth, who came to help me the last time this happened, but this time I wait. I remember how to drive, how to breathe, how to move my hand from where it is resting on my thigh to my face, but I don't know where to go. I have just signed a piece of paper that will change my life in a way that seemed impossible just months ago.

  I start laughing, and say, “Hi, I'm Meg. No, I'm not married. I'm single.”

  My laugh, a feeling of utter release tinged with just a small hint of panic, comforts me a bit. When I open my eyes, nothing has changed but nothing will ever be the same. The key fits into the long ignition hole. The car moves away from the curb and I am steering it. The car and I move forward. We are going someplace.

  The Scotch has moved into my veins and is pummeling the living hell out of my bloodstream. I think I could pick up the car and swing it over my head. Without realizing it, I am looking for FOR RENT signs. I drive to a section of the city where I suspect the wild women might live. The section of the city where there is diversity in neighborhoods and where you can see the shoreline of Lake Michigan from the top floor. The section of the city where women can hold hands with women and men with men and no one thinks twice. I pull over eight times and write down phone numbers.

  Driving back to my tidy suburb, I almost get lost. Everything seems unfamiliar to me, which is a terribly odd sensation. I decide to buy a bottle of the Scotch Bridget shared with me just so I can touch the label if I get frightened. But I don't get frightened.

  Parking the car is easy, but when I let myself in through the side door, the door I have used for years, I feel as if I am sneaking into a house and a place that is as foreign as speaking Latin or eating upside down. I am uncomfortable. A bit lost. Alone in a world that was once all I knew.

  “I don't belong here,” I tell myself, and then without realizing it I start packing. The boxes on the back porch fly into my hands and I make the first move. I take my old pottery vase off the counter by the phone in the kitchen, wrap it in a long piece of paper towel and set it in the center of the box. I have started something. There is no place to take my boxes just yet but I have some direction.

  “I know something,” I say, as I look around for something else to set next to the lonely vase. “I. Know. Something.”

  As I walk through the house with the box tucked under my arm, I don't bother to turn on the stereo or the television. The quiet house walks with me, patting my knees as I move upstairs just for a quick look to see what might like to lie next to the old vase, rubbing my shoulders when I tense up because of the silence, moving my hands through my hair when I want to be certain that someone or something is close.

  But I am alone. Gloriously alone and smiling as I open the door to what was once our bedroom. Ribbons of light from the bent shades pattern across the bed and land at the edge of the dresser. My eye lands on two framed photographs. Shaun in fifth grade, his hair a mess of curls, that goofy green shirt he wore almost every day and his father's half smile. The other photo is Katie that same year, in third grade. A little girl's face aglow with happiness, smiling as if she has it all figured out, teeth not yet straightened, one hand under her chin. My heart races. Such fabulous prizes from this part of my journey. How lucky I am. How goddamn lucky. I kiss the photos, holding them to my lips, their solid frames nudging me forward. Yes, it is definitely time to move forward.

  That is all I take from the room. I've already taken everything else I need. The box is very light when I go back downstairs, wonderfully, wonderfully light.

  Elizabeth comes to my front door and I want to run back inside and get her some candy. She is wearing an orange jogging bra under a white sleeveless T-shirt, a red bandanna, purple shorts and a red, white and blue pair of Birkenstocks, which I know for certain she picked up at a yard sale run by some paramilitary people.

  “Are you trick-or-treating or did you come to get me?”

  “Wiseass. You could look like this if you put a little energy into it. Get in the car.”

  Elizabeth could probably do stand-up comedy, run a hospital and juggle at the same time. My breath disappears every time I see her, and I have never had such a good friend, never ever, in my entire life. She has wanted to celebrate the signing and then the delivery of the divorce papers, but I have been too damn busy. Calling places to set up rental appointments, worrying about my mother, trying to reconnect with my son, helping Katie pack for Mexico, poring over bank books and digesting my supremely interesting phone call from Bob moments after the divorce papers were delivered to his office.

  “Meg, what the hell!”

  “Bob, you'll live.”

  “This is something. Jesus H. Christ. You could have warned me.”

  “How could I warn you? I have no idea where you live.”

  Silence. A very long chunk of silence.

  “You know where I work.”

  I get angry. Just a little angry. I need my energy for more important things, like getting on with my life. My voice is very loud when I respond.

  “Fuck you, Bob. One of us had to do this. It was long overdue. You are miserable, or you wouldn't be screwing some other woman on our bed in the middle of the day. So get over it.”

  There. That popped a wedge of restraint right out of me.

  He's thinking. Imagining what it would be like if everything stayed the same and he made believe he loved me and had a life that did not really exist. Then the next thought is what his life could be like if he just kept a few pieces of the old life—pieces like a relationship with his children and maybe, just maybe, a somewhat cordial relationship with their mother.

  He says: “I'm sorry.”

  Wow, Bob, wow.

  “This makes sense, Meg. It's just, could we maybe talk a little bit about some of this?”

  “Now?”

  “No, I can't do it now. Dinner? Can I meet you for dinner?”

  “If you buy.”

  He laughs, but I'm dead serious. I pick a place where they have an exquisite martini bar and salads designed by men and women who wear wings. He wants to do it that day while his feelings are fresh and I agree.

  Dinner starts out rough. He's edgy, scared, I think. Mr. Bob has been limping along, sleeping with the geranium, and maybe someone or several someones. He hasn't had a lengthy discussion with me in years and something thin and yet very solid is being pulled out from under his size 11 feet.

  I touch his hand after the second martini. He doesn't pull away. I te
ll him I loved him, and I did love him. I really did.

  “Bob, we should both be happy. I've never stopped long enough to even wonder what that might be like. I'm a frigging mess. Well, I was a frigging mess.”

  He tries to interrupt me, but I have to tell him some things right now before I get too boozy, before I move from that sincere place of alcohol-induced honesty to the “tell everything” phase that will have me saying things I will deeply regret in the morning. I so want him to know these things and remember them. I have to say them.

  “Bob, I loved it when you made coffee on Sunday mornings and left me a cup in the bathroom. I loved the way you taught the kids how to drive without yelling at them and how you took Shaun to college because I couldn't stop crying. So much of what we had was okay, you have to know that, Bob. So much of it was great, really great.”

  He cries, which is something I did not expect. He takes my other hand and tells me how he feels like an ass because he could never tell me I was beautiful and a wonderful mother. He apologizes for not buying me flowers the day I got my second master's degree. He tells me how it was just easier for him to back away and how it never even seemed like I missed him.

  “You are very beautiful, Margaret,” he tells me. “Smart and wise and kind, so damn kind. There isn't anyone else like you. I want you to be happy too, I do. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

  Oh, Bob. Oh, Bobby.

  We have a very long and wild dinner. We relive all the years we spent together, remembering the fights and the baby diapers stuck in the toilet and the way his mother tried to shame us into having another child and how he waited outside in the car while I finished my orals, so I wouldn't feel so alone. I had forgotten that. There are so many things we had both forgotten.

  “Bob,” I tell him after the wine and before the dessert and at the moment we realize we will have to take cabs, one back to the geranium's home and one to our little house in the suburbs. “Bob, we have to remember the good stuff. It might take a while because I haven't gone all the way through my horrid angry phase yet, but promise me that we'll remember the good stuff?”