Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  “You can't scare me,” I say. “I know where we are going, but where are we going?”

  Linda looks at me very closely. I'm not sure if she believes I have lost my mind, if I'm looking for a mall or want a chilled margarita.

  “You have beautiful eyes,” she says.

  “What?” There's that damn word again.

  “There are specks of brown in there. I've never seen that with eyes so gray.”

  “No one has noticed that in years,” I say. “Years.”

  “No one has looked. Or you wouldn't let them.”

  That's enough. I feel like I might blow apart. A woman like me can only take so much honesty in one day.

  “Look, I'm having a nervous breakdown. Where are we staying tonight?”

  “You are not having a nervous breakdown,” Elizabeth pipes in. “You just got jammed up, about—what?—twenty-six years ago, and it took something to pop you loose.”

  Linda is looking at me like I'm supposed to say something, and I have a sudden urge to just laugh. So I do.

  “Look,” I say, barely able to speak, I'm laughing so hard. “I'm in the jungle with a couple of goofballs looking for wild dogs while I caress my dead aunt's bracelet, because I flipped out and realized my life was a mess when I saw my husband making love to another woman, so is it too much to ask where we are going to stay—tonight?”

  “Just down this road another forty-eight miles,” Linda says, through her own laugh. “It's a village where some Mayan friends of mine live and where someone might remember your aunt.”

  “Really?”

  “Your aunt was here more than once and she stayed for long stretches of time.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I think I know the main village where she lived and worked, and my friends in Tiapiacantio will help us.”

  Elizabeth has her hand on my shoulder and I realize in that instant that the entire world must be filled with unsaid secrets that lie under trees and inside pockets and behind hidden doors. This is how men get away with having three wives and why bodies disappear and why there is a show on television called Unsolved Mysteries. My aunt is an unsolved mystery that is a double mystery because I did not know she was a mystery.

  Auntie Marcia, oh, Auntie Marcia.

  Linda cranks up the Jeep and we bounce down a road that has never seen the hard edge of a road grader or felt the backside of a bucket filled with hot tar. When I turn my head, I see that Jane and Elizabeth are holding hands. Jane always needs to hold on to someone. It is impossible to go more than 20 mph, but that is okay because my mind races with the possibilities my aunt and her mysterious life have given me. Was she part of some Mexican underground? Maybe she married someone down here and had a baby who is now a blond woman about five years younger than me.

  “Imagine,” I want to shout to Elizabeth, “while I was charting numbers in the back room of a building that was painted beige from top to bottom and doing mundane things like folding towels and sweeping out the laundry room, my aunt may have been knitting together the fabric of a life that I cannot comprehend. Who was she? Who am I? Where in the hell are we going?”

  I have been to California and to New York City and I have taken the train to Denver through the plains and into what seemed like the very sides of mountains that were at first small specks and then suddenly touched the edges of clouds. When the kids were in junior high school, Bob and I took them in the old Dodge van to Arizona, where we peered over the edge of the Grand Canyon—not too close, of course—and saw into the dark belly of an earth that seemed so deep and large that I was stunned down to the center of everything that I was. I wanted to walk down there really, really bad, and I let Bob talk me out of it.

  “You could just spend a night at the hotel without me and I'll hike down and take the mules back up,” I'd pleaded with him like a little girl asking for another candy bar.

  “You can't do that.”

  “I have to do it,” I told him. “There's something down there that I have to see.”

  Bob got scared when I said this. Come to think of it, he got scared when I said lots of things, and so he took what I said and made it seem like something else until I could not recognize it and I completely lost track of what I was saying or what I wanted or needed.

  I have a memory of the moment when I caved in that defined everything about me for years and years after that. We had rented a room at a hotel on the edge of the park that had a small swimming pool and looked out across a field covered in sagebrush and spring flowers that were so beautiful, I wanted to eat them so that they would always be a part of me.

  The kids were playing in the pool and Bob was standing in front of me with his arms crossed in a defiant male sort of way that reeked of the word power, and he was blocking my view of the desert. I wanted to tell him that the center of the earth was just a few miles away at the very bottom of the Grand Canyon and that I had to, simply had to, rush down there and put my ear to the ground—next to the raging waters of the Colorado River. I wanted for him to look into my eyes and to see that I knew something, like where the gold was buried or the cure for cancer or who really killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I wanted for him to see me—see me and then reach his arms around behind me and pull me into his chest so that I could bury my face against him and hear his beating heart, which would contain the last clue to what I was supposed to find at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

  But Bob did not move. In the last corner of my mind, that turn before everything clouds over, I heard the kids screaming and splashing and playing Marco Polo for the fifteenth time in a row and I knew they were safe, and then I moved around the backside of Bob, grabbed the open bottle of wine that we had been drinking, said simply, “Okay, Bob, I won't go,” and I hiked out into that field.

  I did not go far, just over the rise, which stretched out for a very long time and which I made believe came to rest at the edge of the Canyon, which led to a huge drop-off. Then I began to cry.

  Something broke loose for just a while as I sat there—I felt as if I had lost something, that someone I had loved for a very long time had died and that I would never ever get over my loss. My tears moved into my stomach and through my chest, and when they emerged out of my eyes, it was a flood that tasted, I imagined, like the water that might have splashed up from the Colorado River—cold and harsh and free, so goddamned free.

  I never did drink the wine that day because I cried so long and so hard that it was impossible for me to pick up the bottle and move it to my lips. My grieving for that lost moment, for the chance to smell the inside of the world, never seemed to leave me. One hour passed and then another. My hands fumbled through the earth where I was sitting and I found small rocks that I put into the pockets of my shorts, rocks that I convinced myself had magically lifted themselves up from that place by the river that was roped off from my life. Rocks that had been where I wanted, desired, needed to go. I piled ten, twenty and then thirty of them into my pockets without thinking. Little Grand Canyons filled my shorts pockets until there was not another rock within reach, and then when I had cleared away all the space within arms' reach, I could no longer cry.

  The desert at dusk is a place that claimed a part of my heart. My wedge of sorrow must have taken several hours to put itself back in the place where it had been resting for so damned many years and I must have gone to that time-warp place where everything but your immediate emotions disappear. There were no kids and no canyon and no Bob and no loss of dreams. It was just those rocks and me and the desert air that filtered into my lungs with the ancient whispers of a people and a place and time that would never have said no to a walk to touch the heart of all that is.

  In the Midwest, where I live, the horizon is an unobtainable screen filtered by trees and low hills and cornfields and factories that were built before the inception of zoning regulations. On the Grand Canyon desert rim, there is no horizon. The world seems like the endless circle that it is, and when the stark colors of sand an
d darkening sky collide, I can imagine that people might drop dead with the pains of visual ecstasy. I had never seen anything like it and I accepted that sunset, that piece of the world where I could stand without anything blocking my horizon and see one side of the world touch the other, as my consolation prize for not being able to walk to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

  Bob never said a word that evening as I walked into the hotel room, kissed the kids and then emptied all of my rocks into one of those paper hotel glasses. I touched each rock, twirled it around in my fingers and then rolled each one of them up inside of one of Shaun's dirty T-shirts.

  My world and life have been filled with so many unspoken words that I think I should have choked to death on the high level of constipation. I can feel the tense moments that moved between Bob and myself as I passed behind him and into the bathroom. I can remember how I moved to the edge of the bed when he tried to wrap his arms around me that night on the saggy hotel bed and how I could not bear to sleep with the window closed. Instead, I slept with one rock in my hand that night and listened for rushing water and the cries of the voyagers and Anasazi women who were looking for the remains of their drowned men along the shores of the raging river. I thought about the choice I had made—and it had been my choice not to go in spite of the crushing forces of the world and all of the Bobs in it and I had no pity for myself. I was ashamed that I was lying in bed instead of climbing up the steep canyon path with a flashlight in my hand, exhausted but filled with the rush of what it must be like to touch the center of the world.

  Some part of myself that had risen up to see if it was safe to escape, to chase after a dream, to live how it wanted to live had crawled back down right inside of me, but only to a deeper place. I closed my eyes in that bed and saw myself as a real woman, a defined woman, as a woman of the world might see me, and I pulled the covers around my head in an embarrassed, hurried movement that I hoped would make me invisible.

  My own babies were burned to a crisp from the desert sun and sleeping with wide smiles on their faces, resting like angels with visions of their own wild desert dreams, which made my tears begin again. All those unspoken words and Bob rolling over toward the closet door and me sailing through the night sky to peer over the edge of the cliff that kept me from being in a place I needed to be so badly that my entire body—my entire life—ached.

  1970

  There are six boys dribbling balls on the basketball court in the gymnasium at Park Ridge Grade School, where everyone gathers on Saturday afternoons to hang out, flirt and see what free food the school recreation director will bring that day. Even the kids from the Catholic school and the Lutheran school come, because they don't have a gym to hang out in, and if they didn't come, there would only be about six teenagers hanging out at Park Ridge.

  It is the year before high school and on a Saturday in this town if you are thirteen or fourteen there is nothing to do but hang out, wish for the acne to recede as quickly as possible, babysit, cut the grass and talk about what life will be like tomorrow and the next day and the week everyone gets their driver's licenses. There is also endless talk about high school and all the frightening possibilities life holds once everyone walks out the door of this particularly horrendous grade school where boys and girls who look like grown men and women still eat lunch in the same cafeteria with first-graders who cannot tie their shoes, because there is no junior high in this small town.

  At least there is Saturday, when anyone can come hang out at the gym and where parents, for some insane reason, think that their adolescent children are safe. Thank heavens they do not know what Maura Bridget O'Hara (whose parents are about as Irish as the King and Queen of Spain) does behind the bleachers to any boy who is willing to drop his pants, and there is usually quite a waiting list. Maura is the only girl at this gym allowed to participate in any kind of sport, and what she does is not listed in the score box of any local newspaper.

  And really, it is only the boys who play ball.

  The girls, even in gym class, are still playing dodgeball and doing archery—“Cock your arrows, stand . . . stand . . . point, let fly”—because Title IX has not been written into law yet and the home economics classes are filled with girls whose mothers insist they learn to cook and sew and bake, because there are no other choices. The girls do not have many choices at all.

  Some of the girls, like Pam Wochinski, have tried to get the rules changed. Last November Pam walked right into the principal's office with her plans for girls' basketball and volleyball and track all written down, along with the names of parents who had volunteered to coach, and she got the same answer everyone else had ever gotten when they tried to include girls in sports. Mrs. Samuelson, who rode horses all over the world and competed with men, tried to get the rules changed, and they said, “No. That's just the way it is.”

  This answer did not satisfy Pam or Kaye Marie Smith or Meggie Callie. Meggie was not so much attracted to the athletic side of the aisle as Pam and Kaye, but she could not say no—a problem that would haunt her most of her life—when they asked her to help them.

  These two girls were born to do something with a ball besides draw it or kick it over to one of the guys. Pam and Kaye were strong and tall and they did not walk—they glided. Zena would have had her hands full with these two girl-women. Pam and Kaye could beat any boy at any playground game and they followed football and baseball and basketball teams from California to New York as if those duties were part of a religious commandment. Meggie had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.

  “Did you see Johnson last Friday night after he got pulled down near the forty yard line?” Pam would ask Kaye during the two-hundredth-plus sleepover at Meggie's house.

  “It was his,” Kaye moaned with pure anguish. “It was his, and what did he do?”

  “He's an ass,” Pam shouted. “They need a woman in there to call the plays, run the plays, take the ball over the line. Do you hear me, Johnson—OVER THE DAMN LINE.”

  Meggie liked these two girls even if she had no idea what they were talking about. They were spunky and did things that she wanted desperately to try but something was just not there—like coordination, self-determination and willpower. Why these two little Amazons even liked Meggie was beyond her, but then, she usually ended up being the brains of their Let's Play Ball group of athletic wannabes. She wrote down their plans and their pleadings and their proposals and then started all over again each time they got rejected.

  “Those idiots,” she spewed along with her two jock-like friends. “They had a chance to make history, and look what they did.”

  “No shit,” Pam said the last time their proposal for girls' sports got rejected. “I can't take much more of this.”

  These three girls and thousands of girls like them—girls like Patty Winset in Wisconsin, who could throw the football faster and harder and straighter than any boy in the entire state; and girls like Rebecca Johnson in Kansas, who had such a natural talent for soccer that one brave coach actually let her fill in when one of the boys was sick; and girls like Ann Pagonis in California, who could take a basketball and put it in a hoop that was so far away that grown men, former professional players and every boy who had seen Ann at neighborhood pickup games sighed with envy—these girls were in the trenches with Pam and Kaye and with nonathletic Meggie, the all-season team manager wannabe.

  For all the hundreds and thousands of girls who wanted to play and then walked away in defeat when someone said, “You can't,” there were just enough Kayes and Pams who could not walk away from the glorious feel of a ball rolling over their fingers in a perfect arc or the way the club or bat felt when they found its sweet spot and moved it like a song against another ball or the way they felt after a three-miler when their hamstrings wanted to roll over into their heel cups and their sweat-drenched shirts stung when they came back into the hall.

  All the girls who cried themselves to sleep because they could not play would have loved to watch Kaye an
d Pam and almost-Meggie that afternoon in the gym in that small town-city where the smell of testosterone often made grown women sick to their stomachs and girls who had the gift for the sporting life angry as hell.

  Meggie was a follower, she could admit that and she would have admitted it even back in 1970 when she stood at the edge of her grade school gym with Pam and Kaye—well, not so much with them as just a little behind them, when Pam told John Stevenson that the girls were going to play ball.

  Stevenson was the geography teacher who made a measly five bucks an hour to handle the gym on Saturdays, and that was just enough to help him with his car payment, and that's all he really cared about. John Stevenson also had a few gambling debts he didn't want his wife to know about, but how in the hell he was going to take care of that with the five bucks an hour remained a mystery to him even the day the guys from the inner city slit his car tires and pounded the living hell out of his trunk because he owed them $750. But back on October 1, 1970, his real problem was those three girls standing at the edge of the gym who looked as if they wanted to eat him for lunch.

  “Mr. Stevenson,” the tallest one said. “We want in on this game.”

  Mr. Stevenson laughed. The three girls took a step forward.

  “We said, Mr. Stevenson, we want in the game. We play. We know the game and it isn't fair that we have to just stand here while the boys play.”

  The other girl, the one in front, not Meggie, moved her foot back and forth as if she were drawing a line with her toe. She had eyes that were as black as coal, and Mr. Stevenson had always admired the way she could take a ball into her hands and turn it, spin it, place it anywhere she wanted to—even though he had never allowed her on the court. Sideline play. Strictly sideline play.

  “Girls, now, I think you can play, but the boys get the gym and you can—”

  The first girl cut him off.

  “What? We can stand here and serve drinks and clean the bathrooms and wipe up their sweat? It isn't fair. We want to play.”