Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  “Really?”

  I say this, and I cannot even believe I am having this conversation with a man from Mexico who helped me dance with the dogs and discover a perfect place to catch a breeze from the jungle, where I came very close to dancing naked. Elizabeth and Bianna would be jealous as hell. I sit down on a box of books and I wonder. I wonder while he takes me through his father's ride from one life to the next, and for a while I leave my own life and levitate. While Tomas and his soft, sweet voice parade over, through and around me, I float above a house I soon won't own and a life that seems to be holding on to me and taking my flailing limbs for a ride, and I remember something vague, a dèjá vu feeling, and while Tomas tells me that the secret of life is really death, my story comes back to me.

  Girl Scouts. Camping along the Wisconsin River in a year that I could never remember. Becky and Karen and Barb and Mary Jo and Char and Patty and Gail and all the girls I loved and who laughed at me and told me things that no one else could tell me. All the girls who made me feel as if I belonged to something. We are canoeing and camping and having an adventure that will carry us with this one story through all the years of what we know will be long and interesting and often entwined lives.

  Our leader is a woman who never says never and who with great grace and style takes high school girls with hormone levels that cannot be measured by conventional methods out in public and sometimes into wilderness areas where anything can and does happen. This trip is a challenge of strength and wits and survival. It snows and rains. The tents fall in, huge metal poles that were designed by someone who never ever put up a tent bend and twist into a pile, and then we have to canoe through the largest rapids any of us has ever seen.

  “Shit,” Patty says, standing on the edge of the river shivering like the rest of us. “Look at that bastard.”

  Patty's father taught her to swear and she in turn taught us. It made us feel strong and tough. We all swore standing there, looking at the water roll over itself and then tumble back into waves of frantic abandon.

  “Shit.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  We didn't have to ride the rapids, but we had to ride the rapids. Who would go first? Not me. Never me. Karen and Barb. They launched the canoe and paddled to the center of the river. We stood in a small group and cheered. They raised their paddles, screamed and shot through the rapids like straight arrows.

  Gail tapped me on the arm and said, “Let's go.” The water was rough from the beginning and I doubted myself. I sat in the bow because Gail had more experience and because I was a wiener. I wanted to belong but I never took the first step, never took the first paddle and always did what I was told.

  I remember water hitting me right away. Sparks of freezing wetness that stung when they flew into my face. It was seconds, maybe five, it was two slow fingers snapping and we hit the second row of boiling waves just inches short of where we should have, and the canoe went airborne.

  This was defiantly a transition. I remember the sensation of flying and I let the paddle slip from my hands and I had the presence of mind to suck in a huge wad of air before Gail and I were under the water and being bumped and dragged by rocks that could only be described as small houses and everything floated away from me. There was a light, honest to God, and this small sensation that started in my chest and shoved against me until my lungs, my hands, my heart, my body disappeared and I was letting go so easily, so quickly without a fight, without reaching my hand for the sky. Then other hands reached for me, and just as if someone had slapped me with a long, hard plank, I was out of the water, coughing and back—another transition.

  This is what I remember as Tomas tells me his father's story and the excitement of the journey that has now begun. While he talks about the hospital where he is staying and how the winds have kicked up and how the people in the village are still talking about the three American women who knew Marcia, I move my fingers up and down on the sides of the phone just as I would if I had been holding Tomas's hand. My eyes are closed and I ask him where he is standing while we talk.

  “In my father's bedroom.”

  “What can you see?”

  “When I lean over I can look out into the ocean and from the window the garden in the back that is slowly preparing for a rest.”

  “Tomas . . .”

  “What, what is it?”

  “My whole life is changing. Everything is new but it all feels comfortable, mostly comfortable.”

  “Change, if I remember, it looks very good on you, beautiful lady.”

  He's flirting and I love it but I am trying to tell him something beyond the attraction that has been building since we met. I want to tell him that I cannot come now. I cannot. I want to, it would be the kindest thing to do for him, for my aunt, for his father, but not for me. When the words come out I have to concentrate.

  “Tomas, I cannot come now.”

  He is silent. I think he must have dropped his head and he is now looking at his feet. He is disappointed.

  “I'm sorry,” I say quietly.

  “Listen, you,” he begins. “I wanted you to come for me. My father said and did what he needed to do. I will be fine. I understand. I do understand.”

  “Tomas, I will come when I can stay for a while. I have to finish this part of my own transition.”

  I keep him on the phone for a long time. I tell him how I had said yes my entire life and how it became a word without thought or emotion to me. In a strange way knowing that I can say no, that I can do what I need to do, what I have to do has become a huge gift to myself.

  “I am smiling,” he tells me, and I am thinking that if I were there now, in his father's bedroom, I might lie down and ask Tomas to let me hold him. I do not need to be held just then but he does. “You sound good.”

  “I am good, Tomas. I am.”

  When we finally hang up I have a very hard time moving. Not going to Mexico just now, not rushing off to rescue Tomas and to touch my fingers to his father's face one more time is huge. Dr. C has helped me understand why I used to think it was easier to say yes. She has walked me through the social channels and past huge islands of disappointment and an isthmus of guilt. She has walked me backward for a while, showing me the movie of my life in reverse so that I can see exactly what happened and not what I simply think happened. She has also been pointing me toward a place of no apologies, a wide-open plain that barks out the days of my life so that I can take what I want and leave what I don't.

  “It's your life, Meggie,” she has said over and over. “Not your mother's or your husband's or your children's or your employer's or the church's or the woman begging on the street. Yours, all yours.”

  She is right and I know it now more than ever, but that does not keep me from crying throughout the rest of my afternoon before my mother and two of her friends and my wonderful neighbors come to help me finish boxing up this finished portion of my life.

  Bob has taken some furniture, nothing from the kitchen, lots of tools, and I find missing holes in some of the walls where he has taken one photograph, a picture Shaun drew in kindergarten, a family photograph. I reach out and touch all the empty spaces, moving my fingers in a perfect square where one memory had been and then another.

  There is a soft echo in the house that seems to grow louder and louder as rooms empty and boxes fill and the pile I have started by the back door grows deep and long.

  “Shit,” I say out loud. “Where did all this shit come from?”

  I have a hard time moving my detailed operation from the living room and kitchen and into the bedrooms. Those spaces remain intimate segments of my life in this house, I explain to the refrigerator while I take a break with a beer on the kitchen counter. I want to have the house organized in piles before the gang shows up to help me with the final destruction of 2357 South Calvin Street. I also want part of the day alone to pick through the pieces without the heavy breath of a dau
ghter or mother or friend on my neck saying, “Oh, don't you want that?”

  I am finding that I want very little, hardly anything at all. I'm beginning to wonder who picked out the couch and the green chairs and that ugly metal bookcase. What was I thinking? I want to really start over is what I think as I look around at all my “stuff” that has the breath and life and fingerprints of someone else, someone who is gone, someone who has changed clothes and had plastic surgery.

  Before I finish the first beer and while I am sitting on top of the counter, I call St. Vincent de Paul, not the real guy but the people who own the store, and ask them how they feel about lots of furniture and dishes and garden hoses. They feel just great, and we make a deal that they will come over tomorrow morning at nine A.M. and take my green chairs, and boxes of paring knives and empty flower vases, so that families and single women and men starting over from one end of Chicagoland to the other can get cranking on their new lives too.

  I do pretty well until I get upstairs and realize that Bob has taken so little from the bedroom. His clothes are gone, the tiny wooden jewelry case Katie gave him last Christmas, shoes, the books that he always kept on top of the short dresser by the window—and nothing else. I know I don't want the bedspread, which should probably just be burned, or the bed or the dressers that I think we may have purchased from St. Vinnie's the first time around. I make a note on my directions sheet to just take the clothes, and then I back out of the door, making certain I do not touch anything. I turn to go into Katie's room next but then I turn back and close the bedroom door. I don't want to look. I can't. Maybe I'm not as close to my new defined self as I think I am, but even a woman who has been through several transitions in one week—well, even she has limits. I give myself permission for this and the permission feels perfect. I will never open that door again. Such power.

  I discover that Katie has already packed. When? Yesterday when I was at work? Last night with her father? She's been gone all day organizing materials at school for her trip and she's been staying with me at Elizabeth's while her father moves and the painters ravage my new apartment. She has left me a note on top of her dresser. I am weak in the knees and have to sit down when I read it.

  Mom, I thought you might want to be alone and I kind of wanted to be alone to pack my room also. Let's keep the futon. I remember when you got it for my birthday and it still makes me happy. If we can afford it, maybe I could get a new chair and dresser for your new house. The boxes on the left go—the ones on the right stay and my things for Mexico are at Jaime's house. I'm flying, Mom, and I know you are too. I want you to remember that this is best for me and it's best for you. I had to bag up my own memories—and just so you know, I've decided to leave the bad ones in the closet. Do not open the door. I'll know if you do. I love you, Mommie. Katie

  I make it to the bed before I really begin to miss her. Katie's empty pillow smells like Happy. That is the only perfume she will wear, and I bury my head in the pillow and rock myself as if I am holding her. My baby. My girl. My woman.

  Oh, Katie. Oh.

  I cry not for what we are losing but for what we have gained. Would I have known my daughter like this if I had stayed? Would she have reached out to hold my hand and then all of me on the porch? Would I ever have given her the chance to do something for me? To pack her own clothes, make her own way, write me a mature note that I will never destroy?

  Any mother's world, I know, is riddled with doubt and anticipation and questioning and failure. I will always feel as if I have failed Shaun, even if and when we reconcile. It is a slight cross to bear, one that can be set down when the time is right. And Katie, who is as wise and wonderful and stubborn and beautiful as anyone I have ever known, has turned into a Magical gift that overshadows every shouting match and missed curfew and wrecked bumper and flying shoe.

  I want to know, as the snot drips off my nose, if this is how it is. Do mothers just get to know who their daughters are the day before they leave? Do we hold them and feed them and listen and walk them to the bus and then simply turn them loose? Do we?

  It was my Aunt Marcia who turned me loose after the feeding frenzy, driving me hours away from home to college, because she said my mother couldn't bear to do it. What do I remember about that? Thinking, I suppose, that my mother didn't care, that she had to stay home and cook for my father, that they would turn my bedroom into a den the second I left. Did I miss it? Did I miss my own mother lying on the bed and crying as she watched the taillights flicker and then vanish as we turned the corner? Did I think that she simply carried on and never missed the way I always banged the door shut and never closed the kitchen cupboards and forgot to change my sheets? Did I think she didn't miss coming in at night when she thought I was sleeping, not to touch me, but to push back my hair, she always touched my hair.

  Oh, Mom.

  Oh, Mommie.

  That is who finds me with my head under Katie's pillow, stretched out like a wailing widow.

  “Relapse?” she says, which makes me laugh and is exactly what I need.

  The yoga queen is standing in the doorway wearing a pair of bike shorts, a NOW T-shirt with flowers on it and running shoes. I like this woman.

  She reads Katie's note, bends down to kiss me and to run her fingers through my hair, just as I remember, and I catch her hand, hold it to my lips, kiss her fingers, and I say, “I love you, Mom.”

  Before she answers, she looks at me. Not just at me but into me. Hard, past my gray eyes lightened by all the crying and into a place way beyond that. She's thinking, remembering something, and she tells me she loves me too.

  “I know, Mom. I know you love me and always did. I know now.”

  I know, Mom.

  Elizabeth and her friend Terry go with me to check out the apartment when the painters call to say they are finished. Terry is an interior decorator who helped us pick out the colors and who has this great idea for what I am supposed to buy—“simple, modern”—to fill up the rooms that will surround my new life. A decorator is a luxury I decide to embrace, a gift to myself, something I would never have considered a year ago.

  We open the doors slowly and that smell of new paint fills my head before we step inside. The polished wooden floors glisten and we take off our shoes and enter as if we are walking into some wonderful holy place.

  “Well, it is holy!” Elizabeth says loudly. “I don't even want to imagine what might be happening in this space during the coming year. The possibilities have me shaking, just shaking.”

  “Elizabeth, drama becomes you.”

  The rooms are absolutely glorious. I did not want to have one wall of white anywhere. The living room is red. The bedroom is purple, green halls, kitchen as blue as the ocean off my Mexican home, just as I wanted it, and even though I have always hated yellow, that is what I wanted in my bathroom, and Katie picked black for hers and that's what she got.

  Terry is clearly smitten with the place. I have decided to do something more lavish than I ever have in my life. I am giving her money to buy me new furniture and set up most of the apartment. This was my mother's idea. She reminded me that I have a job, that I need to iron out that part of my life, get my daughter off to Mexico, go to Mexico, settle my papers . . . well, clearly I have no time to shop for a bed or rugs for the floor or carrots for the refrigerator.

  “Work,” Elizabeth says, as the three of us sit in the middle of my floor making a list of what Terry will be allowed to buy. “Have you gotten to that part yet?”

  I swallow hard. Damn Elizabeth. She knows that will be next. She knows I have burned both ends of that professional wire right to the middle. She knows that if I can travel this far I can finish the trip.

  “A little, Elizabeth,” I lie, because I have been thinking about it as much as possible in between packing and crying and drinking beer at kitchen counters.

  Terry wants to talk about fabrics, which is about as much fun for me as poking a stick in my eye and taking a driving test. She's a sweetheart,
who I instantly claimed as a friend when Elizabeth introduced us. She wears big earrings and has refused to give up her brightly colored tights and big shirts from the '90s. She also has a tattoo snaking up her neck and into her hair, which is something I have never, ever seen on an interior decorator—or any other human being, for that matter. This woman should decorate everyone's home.

  “I want it to look funky and not, well, I don't know how to say this . . . ,” I say.

  Elizabeth does, of course.

  “She's starting over. It's a bold move. Let's go with the wild colors we already have plastered all over the walls. Nothing extravagant, because I don't think you'd spend a ton of money on ‘stuff,' would you?”

  I'm smiling. Nope, I wouldn't. Terry writes it all down and then races off to measure things that I would never in a million years think to measure.

  “The job?” Elizabeth reminds me.

  “I have a few ideas. Can you let me rest on it and then we'll talk when I get in here? I think I've reached my limit this month on big life changes.”

  Elizabeth laughs.

  “You are just starting. Once you see how glorious change is, you won't be able to stop yourself.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  Terry bounces back into the room just after Elizabeth tells me that on Friday night, before one single thing can be moved into the apartment, we must have a spiritual cleansing of the space. She instructs me to invite women who know my heart, who honor me, who love me.

  “Give me a list and I'll call them. It will be the first party here, one of the best, and it will signal the beginning of your life in a space that is yours, all yours and free of any clutter that might have occupied it before.”

  What if I said no?

  Elizabeth dismisses that with a wave of her hand that makes Terry laugh. She knows no one says no to Elizabeth. There's absolutely no reason to say no.