Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  Her words fly into the surface of my skin like blades of hot steel. She needs me at home. Who will do this and who will do that, and while she crucifies me in Elizabeth's hall I remember how her brother once emotionally disappeared just as she now sees me disappearing. One day he was kissing me in the kitchen and the next he was spending the night at Andy's and then Josh's and then back at Andy's, leaving me cryptic messages on the answering machine, plotting a future that selfishly did not include me or anyone else who might have the same last name and then eagerly brushing off any criticism of his behavior with a sweep of his hand and the words, “Mom, get over it. I'm growing up.”

  I want to grow up too. I want to grab my daughter by the arms and then slap her face like Elizabeth slapped me.

  “You selfish hussy,” I would tell her. “Don't you see what I gave up for you? Don't you know your father screws around and that I am unhappy and am trying hard to figure out what to do to get happy? Don't you think it's a little selfish to want me there so you have warm muffins in the morning and someone to iron your dress before the prom?”

  I don't tell her this, because Katie is breaking my heart with a series of sobs that could drown an entire army and I am consumed with an ocean of guilt the size of the Titanic. I cannot bear to see what I have done to her.

  “What do you want, sweetie?”

  “Come home, Mommie. Please come home.”

  When Katie was a little girl and I was working at the University, she would call me the second she got home from school every day. Her voice was sweet and cool and so tiny I could feel it resting in the palm of my hand when she spoke. She called me “Mommie” then. For years and years she called me “Mommie,” and it always made my heart twist into the shape of wedding ribbons, pearls, cascading fireworks.

  “Mommie, I'm home. When are you coming home, Mommie? I miss you, Mommie. Sometimes it's scary here alone.”

  Katie is still sobbing when I pull her into my arms and whisper, “Oh, baby,” into her ear.

  As I hold her I want to slice open my chest with something sharp and long and show her the dark shadows that have all but strangled me into an eternal coma. I want to tell her that I am so unhappy I want to lie down and never get up. I want to tell her that I am going to slip and fall and tremble and then fall down again before I learn how to walk but I cannot tell my baby those things. There is a huge part of her that is just that—still a baby, and she needs me and I am a mother. I am a mother.

  “Okay” is what I say instead. “I'll come home.”

  These three words will prove to be terribly expensive and those words and what happens next will end up eating out all but the last inch of my heart, but I do it—so I think—for my baby.

  Elizabeth is not home when I leave. I could not begin to tell her what I am doing, because I am obviously out of my mind and I would not be able to look her in the eye. Both her eyes. Her wise, beautiful eyes. She is out raising money to prevent George W. Bush from decapitating a woman's right to have an abortion while I gather up my clothes, the few books Katie brought me and no self-esteem because what little I have left is tucked in between my legs like the tail of a frightened dog. There will be hell to pay later and I will go into debt paying it. I will nearly end up in the poorhouse paying for it. I will sell pieces of my heart and the wind on my face and my left ovary and a night of the best sex I could ever have to pay for that hell.

  When I turn quickly to leave Elizabeth's house, what I see is a rainbow. Colors from the edge of the hall through the kitchen and onto the ceiling that blend together in a wave of singular fineness. I know it is a mistake to leave before I close the door but there is this limitless battery in my head that tells me over and over, “This is what women do—they sacrifice.” And I back out of the door slowly because I don't really want to leave. I want to stay and bring Katie into a house that feels just like this, but instead I back out and Katie leads me to the car like a little puppy who will go anywhere with strangers who have cookies, and within six minutes I am right back where I started.

  It is a foreign land, this house I have lived in for all these years. I know my way home blind but when we walk into the kitchen through the back door by the garage I feel my skin crawl with uneasiness and I see the basement door and remember the boxes and the climb up the steps to watch the sex in the bedroom and I fight an urge to run as if I am a recovering addict who has just spotted a large bottle of free gin. Katie knows none of this, and I step back into my old life. I am slipping on an old shoe, but there is something lodged in the tip of the toe.

  I walk slowly past the stacks of magazines on the chair by the front door, my fingers trail across Katie's old jacket, my blue wool sweater, a photo of my son that tips to the left a good inch every time someone opens the front door, the worn edges on the corner by the stairs leading up—there—every inch of this house, my life, memorized.

  “You okay?” Katie asks me as we shuttle my clothes upstairs and I pause at the entrance to the bedroom. My feet have decided to stop. There is no moving forward.

  Katie has her father's height but everything else belongs to me. The color of her hair, the slant of her chin, the way she grabs her forearms when she is nervous, her weight and how her mind wraps around issues of complexity and then rips them apart with fangs as long as the drill bits on an oil rig. She is right down the middle on the right brain–left brain scale and when she pauses like this I know it is because she cannot decide if she should follow her heart or go work up a pie chart to see what to do next.

  “I'm fine,” I lie. “But . . .”

  I am stumbling big-time. What the hell is wrong with me? Katie is old enough. I am old enough. What is wrong? What is with this huge pause in everything I do and say and feel? Have I been doing this forever? Have I ever stopped to look?

  “Mom . . . ?”

  All the windows in my life are shut. I feel a wave of combustion that is building like small tsunamis. Air, light, air. The essentials have disappeared. Katie is not yet wise enough to see that something gigantic is amiss. That is the reason I cling to for returning to this hall, this life, to these unanswered questions.

  “I'm going to crash in your brother's room.”

  “Oh.”

  She thinks she gets it. She must think there was some huge fight that was patterned after the last Gulf War that rose up fast and then collapsed when someone ran to hide. That would be me.

  “Katie,” I boldly say. “There are things you need to know. I'm a mess.”

  “I got that part.”

  “Katie . . .”

  “Mom . . . ?”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “For what? Leaving?”

  “No. Not for leaving but for what might happen next.”

  Could I have suffered short-term memory loss in such a brief period of time? Everything is suddenly unfamiliar. It is as if I cannot remember simple things like how to walk to the phone or make a decision or express my inner feelings. Once, just after an old college friend had finished his PhD and was working as a clinical psychologist, one of his old classmates called him, stoned out of her mind. She was at a local gas station and could not remember how to get out of the car. My psychologist friend tried talking her out of the car.

  “Roll down the window first, sweetie. Get some air. Can you do that?”

  “Maybe. I'm not sure.”

  “Now gently pull up on that little button you see. Can you see it?”

  She couldn't remember how to pull or push or move. Dialing the phone had been a miracle. My friend got into his car, drove to the gas station and literally picked her up, put her in his car and took her home.

  That is me. I am stoned on myself. How in the hell am I going to get up off Shaun's bed, initiate a conversation with Bob, remember how to urinate?

  I am an assistant professor of social work at the University. I write grants and talk to famous people all over the world. I research legal cases for people who pay the University a great deal of money for my se
rvices. Once I testified in front of Congress and winked at Hillary Clinton. I can stand up in front of three hundred graduate students and tell them they are full of shit and that they will never get jobs because they don't know how to spell and cannot do basic research. I can make babies and direct political campaigns and run three miles without skipping a beat. I held my grandmother's hand to my own healthy breasts when she was dying of breast cancer and I have been to the funerals of friends, my favorite aunt and a neighbor man who blew me a kiss five minutes before he was hit by a car. I was once nearly raped in a parking garage and have a scar that runs down the inside of my left thigh from where I fell on the glass from my car window when I hurled a rock through it to get the attention of a cop who was breezing past drinking a can of Pepsi—I will never forget that can of Pepsi. All of this and more, so much more, and I cannot get off the goddamn bed.

  I think I need help. Elizabeth will be pissed even though she would also forgive me forever, so I lurch for the phone in Shaun's bedroom and I call Bianna. She is a funky spirit-guide woman who worked with me at the University for just a few weeks, felt the “repressed” energy of our academic world and took off so fast you'd have thought there was anthrax on every desk. Bianna now connects the living to the dead. Really. This woman has a master's degree in marketing and has worked for everyone from the Girl Scouts to the Harley-Davidson Company and she now runs a business aptly named “Rising from the Dead,” where she swears she can help people by reconnecting them to loved ones who have died.

  Bianna does have a gift. She's definitely intuitive. She hears the phone ring before someone dials her number. She can predict illness and weather and events like major traffic accidents, political disasters and a marriage and life that has fallen apart at the seams, the collar, the hem and the buttonholes.

  “I will come to you,” she announces as if she has been waiting for my call.

  “I think that would be a good idea, because I cannot get off the bed in my son's bedroom.”

  “Is this the son who no longer lives there?”

  “Yes?”

  “Then it is not his bedroom. This is a no-fault state, darling, half the bedroom is yours and half now belongs to your husband.”

  “Husband.”

  “You are still married, and very confused. Did you not see this coming?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Meg, you are a bit of an ass.”

  “An ass?”

  “Yes, and you have forgotten how to form your own sentences. Do you want me to bring Elizabeth?”

  “Elizabeth? No. Don't call Elizabeth. I was at her house for three weeks and I came back here ten minutes ago. She'll kill me.”

  “Well, this explains everything. Don't you get how messed up I am either?”

  “I cannot even drive a car. Are you kidding me?”

  Bianna, believe it or not, is more—what? More normal than Elizabeth. She is married to a man, childless, accepted by everyone from the local garden club to the sports boosters at the high school, who have her speak once a year at their breakfast meeting. She makes house calls. She has a small office downtown with a little hand-painted sign and people think of her the same way they think of the local dentist, the guys at the bakery and everyone in town who belongs to the PTA.

  Bianna drops the bomb just when I am thinking how she will save me.

  “You did not let me finish,” she says loudly.

  “What?”

  “I will come to you when you are ready to listen. You are not ready to listen.”

  “What?”

  “See.”

  “This is not the time for humor,” I say, raising my voice just a bit. “I will pay you. I need a house call.”

  “You need to think. You need to sit in that bedroom or go for a walk and think.”

  “Think? What the hell should I think about?”

  “What you want and how you ended up on a bed in your son's room, which is really not his bedroom, calling a psychic to make a house call when you are one of the most intelligent women I have ever met.”

  “Bianna . . . something, give me something.”

  The pause is terrifying. I am underwater and waiting for someone to pass me a thin line of air. Just a simple breath. That's all. Then I will be able to get out of the car by myself.

  “Meggie.” My name is a sentence. I hear it and my eyes cloud.

  “I never say this,” Bianna continues when I don't speak. “It goes against everything I believe in and know to be true. But you have to do this—and this is all you get from me until you are ready, and you will know when you are ready. You have to take a giant step backward.”

  “What?”

  “That's it. Backward. It's a terrible word. I never use it, but your case is extreme.”

  “I've gone backward instead of forward.”

  “You are too analytical. You have to go back before you can go forward. So get off the bed. Go look around. It will be raining in days.”

  She hangs up. That's it. I would say “Jesus Fucking Christ” but I hate those words, especially all in a row like that, and I am pretty sure Jesus is a woman who is too busy for this shit. Raining in days? Backward?

  “Get up,” I tell myself. “How hard can that be?”

  I have to trust someone and it may as well be Bianna and it's pretty obvious that I have no clue.

  My legs miraculously move and I shuffle around the bedroom that I should have made into an office three years ago. Should have? Shaun has left everything in his bedroom except his clothes, a radio and the book of poetry he read like a Bible. He spent the entire last year of high school in this room, at the houses of his friends Andy and Josh, and at school. Then he left. Angry, a loner, closing in on a life path that will fuel his need to understand how everything works and is connected. Where did I fail him? How did I fail him? Did he see me moving toward this terrible place of uncertainty? What secret did he never share?

  Katie interrupts me. Her presence awakens something mildly psychotic in me. If she weren't in my life, I would not be back in this bedroom. Would I have ever come back here? Damn it. Damn her.

  “What do you want?” I snarl.

  “Geez, Mom, I was just checking to see if you are okay.”

  I snap. Just like that. She freezes in place.

  “No, I am not fucking okay. Are you kidding me? Okay? How the hell can I be okay? Your father screws around with other women. I hate this house and my life and what I do every goddamn day. I'm a robot. I have no idea who I am. Not one little clue. I'm lost and confused as hell. Look at me, for crissakes, Katie. I'm standing in my son's old bedroom looking at pieces of a life that no longer exists. I am not fucking okay, do you get that? I AM NOT OKAY.”

  By the time I am finished I am screaming. Katie has been struck dumb. She is standing in front of me with her arms hanging at her sides as if they have been severed and any movement will make them fall off and drop to the floor. Her beautiful mouth is wedged open just an inch. Her eyes are as big as bike wheels. I can see her heart trying desperately to get outside of her body. It is thumping against her chest and her shirt is rising and falling, rising and falling each time her heart pounds to be released. Has she ever heard me scream like this? I think not, and I feel water spilling over the dam, but this is nothing. Nothing at all. The dam will break eventually, but I cannot go on. Katie has not moved and there are tears running down her face. I do what I always do, what every mother does, what I cannot stop myself from doing.

  “Baby, sweet baby. Come here.”

  Katie is in my arms and sobbing into my shoulder. Her weight against my chest is solid and warm. I say nothing. We cry together for a good five minutes and I let her go first. She pulls back just slightly and I wipe the tears from beneath her eyes with my fingers. Everything about her is familiar and soft. I know how her tears fall toward her chin and where they will land. I know she wants everything to be perfect and that she is desperate to get good grades so she can get into a college t
hat I will never be able to afford. I know how she sleeps with her left leg pulled up as high as it will go and an old pink stuffed kitten wrapped in her hand. I know she loves storms and hates the dark and that she's never had sex but is on the pill anyway because, well, just because. I know her. She is my baby, and what in the hell am I doing? What am I doing?

  She talks and the sound of her voice is a tranquilizer. Something to grab on to, something to swallow, a tonic to keep me on some kind of small but equal plateau.

  “Mom, do you remember the day I called you from school because I got my period for the first time and I was nuts and thought I would die or something?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “What I remember is running from English class to the health room and thinking that if I could not get you on the phone that I might die. Really. I was terrified and sick and there was no one else in the world that I thought could help me.”

  “Sweetie . . .”

  “When I heard your voice it felt as if your hand was moving inside of me, Mommie. Do you remember how I cried when we talked?”

  “Yes.” I close my eyes and I can see the red skirt I was wearing that day, the way my hand trembled as I was rising from my chair to reach for the car keys so I could go get her.

  “I cried because it was the first time I realized how much I loved you and how much you meant to me and I'm so sorry that I never told you.”

  My heart stops. I can feel it grind to a halt, and then brace for that second when you can choose to keep breathing or simply remain at ease forever.

  “It wasn't your period?”

  “Maybe just a little, but I'll never forget you being there when I called and coming for me and putting me on the couch and how we went to dinner and celebrated because I was a woman. Do you remember what you said that night?”