Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  I leave the apartment last, lock the beautiful wooden door with a key. It is my key, and when I slip it into my pocket it feels as if there is a warm, inviting hand on my thigh.

  1997

  The parade of students and professors and office staff coming and going out of Carol Kimbal's office had been endless for weeks. Kimbal, as she loved to be called by her students, was heading west. Destination Unknown. Leaving. Packing up her twenty-three years' worth of books and photographs and handing out her collection of coffee mugs like Christmas gifts from the goddess of the literary world—which is exactly what Dr. Carol Kimbal was and would always be to hundreds of lovesick, drooling admirers.

  Faculty members were beyond astounded when Kimbal, who had penned such literary works of genius while employed at the University as Women Raging—A Historic Look at the Feminine Genius and Dumping Testosterone, which was a funky coffee table book penned and photographed with the notion that women should never ever actually live with men, was leaving.

  Her books, five and counting, brought Kimbal more than national respect and notoriety and interest, they threw her into feminist circles with the likes of Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda and made scads of money for the University Press and a bit for Kimbal herself.

  The words Kimbal is leaving spread throughout the campus as if a plague had erupted in the main cafeteria. The Chicago Tribune ran a full-page story about her in its Sunday magazine. Students actually wept in front of her door, and her department chairman offered her an outrageous sum if she would stay, just stay, on campus. No teaching, just a place for her to write, to remain a part of the University, to be, be The Dr. Kimbal of the University of Chicago.

  Kimbal would not budge. “It's time to move to new arenas,” she told the Tribune reporter. “Chicago is in my heart, always will be, but I don't think a woman has to pick something—or someone, for that matter—and stick with it the rest of her life. My God, the world is full of promise and places and people and experiences that are dying to be explored.”

  Kimbal, it seems, was living her life exactly how she preached it in her classes, which were a witty combination of inspired writing techniques, studying the classics and empowering women and men, if they could stand the sexism, to go to places personally and professionally with their writing and lives that they had never imagined.

  Private with her personal life, Kimbal had not disclosed her next destination. Rumors throughout Chicagoland had her breaking up with a female lover, sleeping with the male chancellor, moving to Paris, living in a teepee in Colorado and changing her name and moving to Boise, Idaho.

  None of the rumors were true, as Assistant Professor Meg Callie Richardson discovered when she walked past Kimbal's office, found Kimbal alone, slipped inside and closed the door.

  “Margaret,” Kimbal said, smiling, shuffling through a stack of papers and pausing to greet someone she had always considered a friend.

  Meg sits in the wide chair next to the window. She wants to say good-bye, wants to know something, wants also one of the coffee cups she hears are being passed out as “I know Kimbal” souvenirs.

  “I came by for a cup and a final good-bye.”

  “That's nice, but you don't have to say good-bye. I'm not dying. We're professional colleagues and I've always admired your work, how you interact with students and this boorish faculty. I like you, Meg.”

  Meg is astounded. Her sociology papers have been shared with all the faculty members and she's won a few minor awards herself, but she's never imagined someone like Kimbal taking notice.

  “Listen . . .” Kimbal gets up to lock the door and moves a chair over to sit next to Meg. “Can you talk a bit?”

  “I think I can squeeze you in, Carol,” she says, laughing.

  They talk at first about the University, and Meg can quickly see that Kimbal just wants to have a normal conversation. No admirers. No “Please don't go”s. Just a lovely, long conversation.

  Meg gives it to her. She leans in toward the window and stretches her legs up, pushes her shoes off, takes a cup of coffee from the pot on the desk and they talk. They talk about salaries and Chicago politics and how feminism has taken it in the chops and how the younger women, their students, have given them great hope with their wild ideas and their carrying the torch and believing they can make a difference. They waltz through an update on Meg's kids, and she shares the story about the loss of her son, who Kimbal promises will eventually find his way back home.

  “Are you tired, Carol?”

  Carol smiles and puts a hand on Meg's foot.

  “Exhausted. I am totally exhausted.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Meg, I have some things to say to you, and I'm going to tell you where I'm going. I know you won't say a word.”

  Meg holds her breath. She's read the books and listened to the lectures and had dinner in the conference rooms with other published professors and the great Kimbal. She had no idea, not a clue, that Dr. Carol Kimbal knew she was more than alive and simply breathing to stay that way.

  “I'm a good girl,” Meg tells her. “No one would believe I was sitting in here anyway, talking so openly to the campus goddess.”

  “That's what I want to talk with you about, but I also want to tell you what I'm going to do.”

  Meg leans forward now, pushing against the back of the chair with her arms because she wants to get closer. Kimbal dresses as if it is still 1963. She wears cotton skirts and long silver earrings and scarves that are as bold as the words she writes. She has huge blue eyes and skin that has kept its place for fifty-three years, and Meg thinks that she is beautiful. Beautiful because the energy she has given to her work and what comes from her is fine and wise and full of something that Meg can only see as pure.

  They talk for almost two hours. There are knocks on the door and the phone rings, but they go unanswered. The story is as remarkable as Kimbal herself, and Meg whispers to herself that she wants to remember every word, every moment.

  “A long time ago, I had a baby,” Carol tells her. “It's true what you hear about me now,” she explains, laughing for the first and last time in the conversation. “I live with a woman, she is my lover and partner, but before that, long before that, when I was a girl really, I had a baby that I gave away.”

  Carol stops for a moment. She reaches behind her to pull out a bottle of Scotch from her almost empty desk drawer. Without asking, she pours a glass for herself and one for Meg. The whiskey moves from lips to throat, burning out any hesitation. Meg cannot ask her enough questions and Dr. K needs to talk.

  “I don't really care what people say about me,” she explains, “but this one thing, this lost son, it's been a deep and horrible ache throughout my entire life.”

  Horrible, Meg discovers, because Dr. Carol Kimbal was raped when she was seventeen by an uncle. Every story, every word of what women like Dr. Kimbal have fought against spilled out in a story that made Meg ask for more Scotch before the story was finished. “Jesus,” Meg thinks. “Jesus.”

  Her parents sent her away. She had the baby and was made to give him up and then come back and act as if she had been on a vacation.

  “It has been the one horrid lie of my life. My partner helped me find him. I found my son.”

  The professor closes her eyes and Meg reaches out to touch her hand. Meg wonders how many times her friend has talked about her loss like this. She knows about lost sons and as she holds Carol she cries too for the loss of her own boy, a man now, who ran away and whom she will one day find again also. She has to. She has to find her son.

  “You are going to live near your son, aren't you?” Meg asks.

  Kimbal nods.

  “There's more.”

  “Of course there is,” Meg adds, which makes them both laugh.

  “You won't believe it.”

  “After this? Are you kidding? You could tell me you are going to be a stripper and I wouldn't think it was unusual.”

  Kimbal is moving to Nort
hern California to open a restaurant in wine country with her partner and her son.

  “Wow.”

  Wow indeed, Kimball tells her. She'll write, she has to write, but she'll also wait on tables, clean the bathrooms, do some marketing, and she'll drink wine every afternoon.

  So different, Meg thinks, so different from the world of academia and lectures and writing up a syllabus that you will never follow anyway.

  “You are surprised.”

  “Yep, I lied.”

  This part is for you, Kimbal tells her. Listen now, Meg, listen. And Dr. Carol tells her another story.

  “You know that I admire your work, but you are terribly unhappy. Everything about you, the way you walk and dress and how many hours you put in here when you don't really need to be here—it's very telling.”

  Meg wants another drink but she knows she'll never be able to drive home if she has one. What the hell, she thinks, what the hell, but she cannot speak.

  “I would have come to find you, Meg, if you hadn't come in to see me. You have to know that you don't have to do this.”

  “This?”

  “Yes, this. This work, this kind of life. You can do anything, be anyone. I get so pissed off at the world because it tells us to get a job and then keep it for fifty years. There is no fucking rule, Meg, that says we can't open up restaurants or find our heart or leave the men or women we live with. None of it has to be.”

  “None of it,” Meg repeats, as if she is in a trance.

  They both have another drink anyway. Carol is on a roll. Meg wants to be on a roll, she does. She wants to absorb every word and then be able to reach inside herself and touch them when she needs to remember, when she needs to be honest, finally be honest.

  “Tell me right now, if you could pick something else to do, what would it be?”

  Meg does not hesitate. The words come right out of her in a place where she has been storing words and uncashed gift certificates and dreams of which she has never been able to speak.

  “A massage therapist.”

  Dr. Carol Kimbal sloshes back another drink and laughs.

  “Oh, Meg, I knew it. I knew something was there that you were thinking about that you have wanted to try to do. I knew it, and that's perfect for you, perfect.”

  Carol takes Meg's hands, which are strong and hard and made for touching, and she pushes them together. “It's hard, Meg, at first it's a little hard even if you are brave and wild like me.”

  Meg cannot even finish a sentence. It's the booze, but it's also the wanting, a small seed of wanting that has now been given its first dose of sunlight and will never be happy until it gets more, all it wants, all it needs.

  “You have to decide that. You do. Think about it, let it come to a place in your heart that keeps you up at night and makes it impossible for you to concentrate and makes you want to dance.”

  Meg tells her she sees now why women fall to their knees in front of her office and why her classes have huge waiting lists and why people buy her books and why the entire University is in a state of mourning.

  “I just put it out there,” Kimbal says, dismissing the idea of her greatness, of others thinking she is some sort of prophetic goddess. “Anyone can go to the same place. You can go to the same place, Margaret.”

  They talk until they both pass back to the clear side of drunkenness. Meg asks her about the restaurant and promises to visit when she is on a break from her massage patients, and just before she manages to wobble to the door and toward the cafeteria coffee, she promises that she will call Kimbal the minute she starts to dance spontaneously.

  “I'll call,” she promises. “I will.”

  When she leaves, Dr. Carol Kimbal leaves the door open and watches her friend weave her way past the front office and out the door.

  “Hurry up, baby,” she whispers, throwing a kiss after Margaret. “Hurry up.”

  The furniture comes when I am at the garden center. I know when it is supposed to arrive, but there is a huge sale at a wonderful boutique I have discovered, along with coffee shops, and terrific restaurants, and a park where I will once again play tennis, and bars where I have only seen women and other bars where there are men dressed as women and women dressed as men and couples of every shape and size. I have a hard time shopping for my apartment because I cannot stop window-shopping all the faces in my new neighborhood.

  After several weeks of work, and some very interesting bills, Terry tells me it is now safe for me to come open the door into my new world, because the apartment, her portion anyway, is finished. My boxes of clothes and books and the few mementos that I have saved from the past will be delivered from Elizabeth's garage tomorrow. I am anxious. Ready. Excited. Disbelieving.

  Katie has been gone three days and it feels as if she has been gone forever. When I push my hand against my chest, I can feel an ache that travels right through me and comes out the other side. It has been just over a month since the house sold, since the attorney wrangled us a fabulous deal and I signed a series of papers that will change everything from my marital status to my last name. My sweet daughter left in a blur of excitement and I was delighted to find her father waiting at the ticket counter when I went with her and three other students to check in at the airport.

  “Bob,” I say.

  “Hey.”

  “Daddy, thanks for coming.”

  Katie is clearly happy to see him, and I back off for a moment while they talk and I see him hand her some money, a phone card, and then kiss her on the lips in front of her friends. When she reaches up to wipe a tear from his eye, I think for just a second about all the years we shared, a thousand hugs, and this new kind of good-bye. I want to put my hand on the side of his face and feel a tear, but I don't. I can't. The moment passes quickly and leaves me almost giddy with embarrassment.

  When we leave our daughter at the gate, I turn to hug him and he tells me he is going away for a month with a friend.

  “I'll have my phone if you or Katie need anything. Shaun knows too.”

  I don't ask him where he is going or who he is going with. It's his life; the place where ours now touches just got on the airplane.

  “Have a terrific time,” I tell him as I squeeze his arm. “Terrific.”

  Then he is gone and Katie is gone and I am alone. Alone.

  Alone and totally comfortable. One foot in front of the other, turning my head to look at a man with attractive hair on the telephone, nodding to a woman struggling with a small baby, smiling at a stewardess. Alone. My daughter going off in one direction, my soon to be ex-husband disappearing into another woman's arms. Alone. Happy.

  “I'm alone,” I end up singing to myself all the way back to Elizabeth's house. “I'm alone . . . a-l-o-n-e.” The song is familiar. I love how it feels at the back of my throat as I bring the words to life.

  People in passing cars must hear me. They surely hear me at the stop signs once I get off the freeway. I don't care. They need to know that I'm alone. Everyone needs to know it and then see me singing so they know I am happy.

  The happiness just doesn't seem to end. My attorney calls the following day to say the divorce will be final before the end of October, and Tomas calls right after that to tell me that his father is still half delirious and sitting up in the middle of the night, speaking in whole sentences.

  “‘The wind in August will dance like fire when the night steals into our day,' he says or ‘I held you close and soft remembering that every moment was a balanced, generous gift of time.'” Tomas says he is writing down his father's phrases to use at his funeral, which he will not call a funeral but a celebration of life.

  “But he may go on like this for days and weeks and months, in which case I may need several assistants, because what he is saying is absolutely beautiful, it's poetry,” he tells me.

  “Maybe it's all the unspoken words he kept in his soul,” I say.

  “What?”

  “The unspoken words he kept in his soul.”

&n
bsp; “My God,” he shouts.

  “What?” I ask him, just like he asked me.

  “That's the title of the book.”

  “What is the title of the book?”

  “The Unspoken Words He Kept in His Soul.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “Say them to yourself. They are as beautiful as the words my father is saying when he sits up without help and speaks as clearly as we are speaking right this moment.”

  There you have it. My first book title in just seconds. Tomas makes me laugh and says that when I am ready for my break after I am settled, he will pick me up at the airport and shuttle me to my house by the ocean and to see my daughter.

  “The way my father is going, he will still be alive.”

  Maybe, I tell him, maybe.

  And maybe I can change the world and make everything hurry. I cannot sit still. I have not been able to sit still. I want to run from point A to point B and then start all over again at a faster pace. Dr. C tells me this makes sense.

  “It's like a thirsty horse that smells water in the desert,” she told me during our last session. “You've had a taste of who you are becoming and you want to drink until you fall over.”

  Then she warns me. I hate this part. The warnings drive me crazy.

  “We are all becoming every day, but people get hung up when they think that what we want today is going to be what we want tomorrow and the day after.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask her, thinking that now that I had taken three giant steps forward I am close to where I am supposed to be.

  She tells me a story to help me out. It is a story about carpeting, she says.

  “Carpeting?”

  “Listen, Margaret. Listening to yourself is what this story is all about.”

  Once upon a time Dr. C's sister wanted carpeting. She knew that if she got carpeting, new carpeting for her house, that everything would be better. The sister had given up her job, a profession she adored, to stay home and raise her babies, and she loved that job too, but she was also miserable on many days, especially when the babies were taking naps and she could sit for five minutes and look out the window and remember how alive she felt when she was following her other passion.