Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  Mr. Stevenson was not ready for what happened next. That Meggie girl stepped back and every girl who had ever come to the gym all the months he had been recreation supervisor stepped in a line next to those two girls. They all had balls and they all began bouncing them. Someone remembered years later that there were twelve girls—almost every teenage girl in town under the age of sixteen.

  The boys took a step back. Some of them whistled, and Kaye, who was clearly the leader, looked at Jake Gilbert, the star of the eighth-grade team, in the eye until she bore a hole in his face and he looked away. Jake stopped whistling and the gym grew silent.

  “Girls, it's not in the rules.”

  “Write new rules!” one of the girls yelled.

  “Yeah,” another girl shouted. “Write new rules.”

  The boys and Mr. Stevenson took another step backward and the girls did not move. But they did begin to chant, “New rules, new rules, new rules,” very softly and politely while they dribbled those damn balls.

  Mr. Stevenson felt a long bead of sweat begin to roll down his rather large back, past his shoulders and into the smooth crack of his ass, which showed every time he got up from the gym floor. He wasn't scared, but he was something close to it.

  “Girls . . . ,” he tried to say.

  The girls did not want to listen. They bounced their balls and they chanted “New rules” over and over again, and then something remarkable happened for just one moment. One small, beautiful moment that changed so many lives. No one will ever really know how many lives were changed by the sound and sight of that ball moving off that one girl's fingers in the grade school gym, where there were rules—so many rules.

  Kaye suddenly moved forward and the floor cleared. She moved across the gym floor like a dancer. She moved the ball between her legs and behind her back and over her head without missing one single step. She went from one side of the gym to the other without ever stepping out of bounds, and the music she moved to was the bounce, bounce, bounce of the balls of all her girlfriends.

  No one moved. The boys stood frozen in place and Mr. Stevenson continued to sweat at such a profound rate that his wife would end up throwing out his clothes—and eventually him when she found out about his gambling habit.

  No boy had ever moved the ball like this. No one had ever seen anything like this magic moment, and for one minute and then another not a single breath of air was sucked into any set of lungs in that gym. No one breathed. No one could breathe.

  Meggie watched too. She wanted to be Kaye, strong and sure and true, but she was too terrified. She wanted to hold something in her hand that was magic and toss it into the air and then catch it again. She wanted everyone in the gym to see her as she really was and not as the girl who always took notes and stood to the side. She wanted to be . . . something . . . but she just could not do it.

  Kaye was a dancer and a poetess and the greatest female athlete who ever existed. She played ball that day for the girls who were never allowed to run and who watched with a hunger in their hearts that made them physically sick. She was beautiful and lean and strong and no one could stop her. She jumped and caught her own ball and then she took her ball from the edge of the court and threw it in a perfect arc and put it in a hoop that some people standing close to her could not even see.

  She was an athletic goddess. The Queen of the court. And what she did changed everything—and nothing.

  Mr. Stevenson went wild. He had never even seen one of his own boys play like that, and he was pissed as hell. His own daughter, who would grow to be six feet two inches tall and who possessed the ability to play in the professional leagues, would never touch a ball when she heard about what happened that day in the gym. She never spoke to her father after her mother finally kicked him out, but her own daughters are now on full-ride scholarships at major universities and they sign autographs after every game. His daughter heard the story about that day in the gym when a little girl learned she could take a ball and turn it into a glass slipper, and now her own daughters wear the slippers very proudly.

  Meggie saw it coming, and she moved behind the bleachers close to the door. Mr. Stevenson called the security guard, who came down to the gym with his big feet and a voice that could make a train stop and informed every single girl she would be suspended for a week if she did not leave.

  They would not leave. They bounced their balls.

  “Call,” Kaye said, with her ball bouncing the loudest. “Call.”

  The security guard looked at the girls, and he could not call. He thought of his sister, who played tennis against the garage door for twelve hours one day but who could never be on a team, and he could not call. But he did step forward.

  “You are right,” he told the girls, and Mr. Stevenson dropped his jaw into the top of his blue-striped boxer shorts. “It isn't fair.”

  The security guard did a very brave thing, which came back to him so many times in so many wonderful ways after that moment that he wondered if an angel had not moved into his body.

  He let them play.

  The guard ordered the boys to watch, and for thirty minutes he let the girls play while he stood with his arms folded under the north basket.

  Mr. Stevenson stood there too, and he memorized each one of the girls and he filed a report with the office, which mysteriously disappeared the next night when the security guard had access to the files.

  Meggie stood back. She always stood back, and although she could feel the round hardness of the ball in her hand and the sweat that poured into her face as she came down the line, she could not move.

  Nothing changed and everything changed because of that afternoon. It would be years before girls moved into the arena with the boys and were guaranteed equal time, but surely, even to this day, not equal pay. Kaye and Pam were too old to play ball in college, but they joined local leagues and saw the sports world change because of what they did that afternoon, and they both remain as coaches of two highly successful high school girls' teams, and their own children—both boys and girls—treat the world and everyone in it with the same feelings of grace and respect.

  Meggie turned to leave the gym that afternoon when the boys got the gym back after Pam and Kaye left together with their arms wrapped around each other, and she walked right into three of the biggest asshole boys in the entire county.

  “What a joke,” they sneered at her as she turned to walk in the opposite direction. “Girls will never be able to play with the boys.”

  Meggie stopped. She was not scared, but a tiny part and then a larger part of her believed them, because her world was full of men who crossed their arms and stood at the door so that the women and girls could not leave to go out into the garage and get their balls.

  Down in a place that was so new and so frightened, there was a voice that had not yet learned how to speak. Her mouth opened just a bit and the voice went dead. Meggie could feel her throat scratch and then she swallowed hard and that feeling, that sensation that you are about to choke unless you do something—anything—vanished.

  Meggie began to run then, and she never heard another word the three boys said, but the echoes of their laughter filled her soul so tightly that she felt as if someone or something had wrapped itself around her neck and was trying desperately to wrestle her to the ground.

  I think I hear the doggies, but they are so far away that I am certain there are hours and hours yet to drive.

  It must be close to dawn, and I am swaying in a hammock that has been wrapped with colors so bold and brave, I am wishing they will sink into my skin and color me, tattoo my white flesh, so that when I awaken I will be someone entirely new. Someone who will not mind that there are no doors and windows and that below me on the floor a family of seven or maybe eight sleeps on mats and wears clothes that I probably gave away nine years ago. There are suddenly no borders around the edges of my life, and for the first time since I was a little girl I actually decide to think about that and to wonder if I want the edg
es or I do not want the edges to keep me locked secure in a place that is routine and familiar.

  There are thousands of miles between me and my real life—or maybe my old life. Miles that have feathered themselves into my mind in such a way now that it would be difficult for me to remember the size of the kitchen sink, how many steps there are on the front walk, the color of the bedroom walls that I stared at for all those long years. The familiar parts of my life suddenly do not seem to matter. Swaying in this hammock, sharing the simple and single thread of air that moves through the open windows and doors with people who cannot communicate with me in words, seems essential to everything that I am and will be—if I could only know why. If I could only grab on to a moment just like this and hold it in a place that might give me direction for what is next and then next after that.

  What this change in life has done is to separate everything. My life back there is back there. I do not have to focus on the probability that I may run into Bob in the hall or that he may find me in the kitchen at two A.M. drinking white wine while I look out into the night. My daughter is off running through her own bushes, pretending that everything is fine because it's much easier to deal with your last year of adolescence—or any year, for that matter—if you can focus on just yourself. Work is just work—they might not even know I am gone, because a good deal of what I do is research where I am locked away in libraries and talking to people on the telephone who I will never see or touch. So I have this space of time to focus on a horizon that is not visible but which is calling to me in a manner so seductive that I feel a bit boozy.

  And Jane. In a strange, almost inexplicable way, Jane has given me this sweet level of hope and encouragement, because she herself is so desperate for help, for one kind word. I admire her simplistic reasonings. She decided to stay in Illinois, find a job, sell her house and create a life she has never had but has always wanted—she just has no clue how to do that.

  We drove almost all day over roads that were littered with holes and rocks the size of basketballs. Sometimes we drove so slowly that Elizabeth and I jumped from the car and walked, while Linda drove in gears so unimaginably low that we could cling to the back end as we leapt over rainwashed craters.

  “Fucking shit,” Linda said more than once and pretty close to a million times. This woman had a way with words.

  “When was the last time you drove this road?” I asked her.

  “Two weeks ago. Brought in a doctor when a woman needed help with a breech baby.”

  “How did they call you?”

  She showed me, once we got there. A small, older-than-forever radio, which looked vaguely like the one my grandpa used on the back porch in Michigan when he was trying to contact someone from Russia or Amsterdam or one town over or from a place he dreamed about when he had had way too much whiskey.

  Jane kept looking from me to Elizabeth and back again with eyes that seemed to get larger as the day progressed. When we asked her, she said only, “I'm good.” She said it softly but surely and then she would grow silent and look off as if she were watching something that was totally visible to her and totally invisible to us. “Thinking,” she would add. And we let her do that. We did.

  And Linda? Where the hell did this woman come from? The simple and strong elegance of her physical beauty alarmed me. I couldn't imagine anyone in the world or their right mind not wanting to make love to this woman, and I had never even wanted to do more than hold the hands of my girlfriends as we walked up the hill toward the local bar. I asked her fourteen thousand questions.

  Do you have a lover?

  Several.

  Men or women?

  Are you propositioning me, Meg?

  My heart flutters. No. Just asking . . . I want to say “but.” There is no way in hell I can say what I want to after that but. “One step at a time,” I tell myself. Jesus, Meg. But what I want to say is “I want to lie down next to you and put my lips on that spot right there on your forehead and then have you run your fingers up and down my arms, and feel what it is like to have a woman who takes my breath away kiss me.” But . . . I do not say that. “One step at a time,” I tell myself. Jesus.

  It's my background, I say, lying while Elizabeth pokes me from behind so hard with her left hand that I could almost cry.

  Mae West, Linda says.

  I know Mae West, and I laugh.

  Mae West, I finally say, did not want to exclude 50 percent of the population, so she slept with everyone, anyone, lots of men and women.

  But. I push my question. Is there someone?

  There is always someone, Linda says. At the moment it is another archaeologist, who flies in and out of this country inside of a plane so small, I could hold it in my hand, and he is kind and fun, so damn much fun. But, she adds—raising her voice just a bit so that I know something serious is coming—there is also always just me, and that is most important.

  Just you? I question her but I am really questioning myself and she reaches over to touch my hand and then says, Just me, and I let it ride inside of me, tuck it away so that I can bring it out later when I am alone and can think about what that might really mean to a woman like me who does not even urinate alone half of the time. I have been alone so rarely during the past twenty-five years, I cannot even bring to mind one stretch of time when there was not a child, a husband, a mother, some relative or neighbor or someone from work propped up in my life. My head could explode simply trying to remember all the faces.

  Our conversation has made Elizabeth very happy. She is laughing and pounding her knees and of course I think she and Linda have slept together and have been lovers, but these days I think that of everyone. I think that the pilot slept with the baggage woman and I think that the bus driver slept with the woman at the front desk and then it dawns on me that I have not had decent sex in so long that I think the birds are mating and that every creature in the world is ready to copulate. My hormones must be off the chart after all these years of languishing in hibernation while apparently the entire world carried on in glorious sexual delight. And Linda reeked of sexiness, something I may be trying to catch, hoping to catch, and what a beautiful disease it might prove to be.

  What do I know when I am done with my interview? Not much and everything and I hear a tiny door, about the size of a simple matchbook cover, spring open. Possibilities. There are so many possibilities? What have I been thinking? Have I been thinking?

  There are pauses in these hours to do that—think, about sex, life and being alone and which direction I am really headed toward but there is also the following of the basic commandments. Commandments such as—Thou Shalt Find a Road Where Gas Is Available—and Who Shall Let Us Spend the Night? And How Will We Get There?

  As these questions pound through my mind, it suddenly dawns on me that I trust this woman-driver-sexy-thing Linda more than I have ever trusted anyone, except Elizabeth, who has ushered me into this place, and oh, yes, my Auntie Marcia, who I continue to think is the reason we are here—I am here. I am here. Right here in the heart of a Mayan village where nothing seems familiar and where everything is simple and pure and basic.

  Linda showed us everything in this little—what?—village, settlement, place of several huts—where families have carved out spaces for their no-door-or-window homes and put in a pump and turned their few animals loose and then began the tedious and eternal task of making a living. A living for them does not go beyond the basic elements of food and shelter and apparently being able to reach over on this tiny, cold, earthen floor to make certain that there is someone next to you.

  Tourist is not a word I would call myself, but that is what I am, and it embarrasses me more than watching my husband make love, which is really, when I pause to think about it, not embarrassing at all. So I choose to call myself a “visitor.” Someone just peeking in through the cracks, invited, of course, who will not be obtrusive or take photos of someone while they are indisposed.

  Linda has instructed me to just be. Lik
e I know what that is. Do not offer them anything, she says. Be gracious. Just be. The educator in me parades out to the center of the ravaged highway as if it were the Fourth of July.

  “Have they been inoculated?”

  “Yes. Your aunt took care of that.”

  “What?”

  “Later,” Elizabeth bellows from the backseat.

  Jane continues to look startled and slightly amazed by the fact that she is even with us. “No one, no one who has ever touched my world even knows I am here,” she tells us proudly. She dips into our conversations as if she is not even listening to where they are going.

  “School?” I ask Linda.

  “Some of them travel to Quinchinita. They have no need for school.”

  “Quinchinita?” I ask.

  “Next stop.”

  “Water?”

  “A well, but it's not safe by our standards. It's the only source of water for this entire village.”

  My mind is a machine gun. Their lives. Marriage? Death? Where did they get the tennis shoes? Who the hell gives them candy? Who built this road? What did they wear before we showed up with our T-shirts and hand-me-down dresses? Tell me—tell me everything.

  Linda tries, but we reach the village before everything can be answered, and suddenly my hands are moving across the back of a dog that is crawling with fleas and ticks and has tits the size of golf balls and I am standing in a yard where a pig is the family pet and this dog, which I have touched for ten minutes, is considered wild and ugly.

  Oh, Meg. Oh.

  Oh a hundred thousand times over, and oh when Linda passes me water from her bottle and puts her finger to her lips, and oh when Elizabeth disappears, just walks off with people who come to greet her as if she were their favorite sister and Jane goes along. How about that? Jane goes along.

  It is easy to forget why I have come. It is easy to get lost in watching and letting my mind hang its hat in this place that seems simple and at the same time mysteriously complicated.