by Kris Radish
Jane waltzes past me with a tiny Chihuahua in her arms and then comes back to tap me on the shoulder.
“Switch partners?” she asks as she gently places her dog, which has a tiny sombrero on its head and a little cape, into my arms. I am laughing so hard, I almost drop both of the dogs. Jane steadies me and we both put our faces together and laugh like we are the first two women in the world who have discovered such a sound. The dogs—mine's a cross between a small black dog and a large brown dog—lick our faces.
“I cannot believe we are doing this,” Jane tells me. “Will anyone believe we danced with dogs? I read lots of books and I've never heard of this.”
“There's probably a good reason for that,” I shout into her ear. “People would think you are nuts if you told them. Who the hell is going to believe this?”
“From what I hear of your auntie, this gig has her name written all over it.”
“She never had a dog.”
“They were probably terrified. You know, dogs communicate. The Mexican dogs probably sent the Chicago dogs a telegram and warned them. ‘Hey, watch out for the crazy woman who likes to put clothes on dogs.'”
The dancing seems endless. I dance with at least six dogs, five women, three men and more children than I can count. Finally, Tomas comes to find me and asks if I would like to walk to the tables by the beach. I say, “Yes, I'm dog tired,” laughing like the wildest dog on the block, and we hold hands and walk to the very same table where we shared our morning coffee.
There is a light mist blowing across the ocean. I can only see it because of the bouncing lights from the party and it makes me wonder what else I miss because I don't have the perfect light. The ocean is a gentle whisper, waves rolling in, the wind at rest, night standing guard over its allotted hours. Everything is lovely.
Tomas, it seems, remembers very little of my aunt. He was away for many years when his father met my aunt and it was not until after his mother died and because of the respect his father had for that relationship that his father told him the true nature of his relationship with Marcia.
“I knew,” Tomas admits to me. “I did not know when I was a young man and consumed with just myself, but as I grew older and understood the powers of love, I realized that this was more than a mere friendship.”
I want to know what he remembers and if he spent time alone with her and what she was like in this country.
Tomas remembers having a crush on Auntie Marcia when he was a teenager. She would sometimes be in Mexico when he had school breaks and although she was quite appropriate, she was also very much fun.
“She would sneak beer out of her little house for me and we would sit by the water, I will show you where, and we would drink and talk about everything from the stars to what my life would be like when I was a man.”
Her laugh. He remembers her laugh and pauses to tell me that there are many things about me that remind him of her.
“Me?”
“Oh, yes. You are fun and beautiful.”
It has been a very long time since anyone has said anything about me that didn't have something to do with work or my children. No man has ever called me beautiful that I can recall, and besides my small pack of female friends I cannot remember anyone focusing in on anything about me—mostly because there has never seemed to be anything remarkable about me.
I can only think to say, “That is lovely,” and ask him when he can take me to see her house—my house—the house.
Not tomorrow, but the next day. He imagines that I will need tomorrow to recover from the dancing dog evening and he has business. We finalize the plan, he rises, kisses my hand, and then we walk back up for the last round of dog dances and enough tequila to get us all barking. Tomas insists that we dance with a doggie to celebrate the event—which has never before happened twice in one year and to honor the very woman who is my reason for being in his arms.
He is sweet and kind and holds his cheek against mine, and I focus hard to let my mind stay there, just there, and to not wander to any other place or time or person. This is not as easy as it sounds for someone whose life has been ruled by a Palm Pilot and who has tried her whole life to stay on this side of the line. But I do it. I think of this simple moment and how fine Tomas's hands feel against mine and how wonderful it is to come this close to a man's beating heart and to know that the heart finds you beautiful.
I think of nothing then but the color of the dark sky with the lumeneros dancing against it and how my aunt must have done this exact same thing with Pancho and how I hope that I can come back again and again to this place and dance with the doggies. My feet move like middle-sized bricks against the sandy floor, I can surely feel the tequila and once when I close my eyes very tightly I can see myself and for just a second I think I just may be beautiful. I may be beautiful.
When we leave, I am the one who has to drive. Tomas walks us to the Jeep and offers to bring us home, but I know I can manage the Jeep and the girls, who are already a pile of giggles in the backseat, and when Tomas makes certain I am pointed in the proper direction he tells me he will pick me up the day after tomorrow at ten A.M. to see Aunt Marcia's Mexican home.
I put my hand on his face just before we leave and say one simple thank you. He smiles, with those damned white teeth blazing under the Mexican moon, and I drive home slowly—my passengers do not even notice we are moving—so that I can feel the night air brush against my face, memorize the color of the sky and smell the first blush of morning as it rushes up from behind the dark arms of night to claim its place in the divine rotation of life.
Tomas is a mixture of meditation and gladness when he comes to get me. I know enough of him already to realize that something must be roaming through his head, that he is hesitant, anxious, excited.
“Tomas,” I say as we head south, and not north, in the direction of his father's home and where I expected we would travel. “You are sad.”
His eyes are as big as the hound's that I could not lift off the ground a day ago at the dance. I suspect he has been crying. The sadness balancing on the edge of his heart is a weight that drifts over toward me.
“My father,” he tells me. “I think the time is coming fast. He will not go to the hospital. He wants to sit in the place he loves. We have brought in a nurse.”
“Tomas, I am so sorry.”
“It could be months, weeks, days, but it will be before the seasons change and . . .”
His words trail off. He wants to tell me something. Boldly, I reach over and bring his face toward mine.
“Can I tell you?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“I think he is relieved that you came, that he saw you, that you have the house and know about everything. I think it has helped him let go.”
Sweet Jesus God Shit.
Tomas pulls the Jeep to a stop right in the center of the highway, which doesn't matter because there is absolutely no traffic.
“Was it wrong to tell you?” he asks, moving one hand to his chest as if he is holding back something that is lodged very close to the edge of his skin.
“Oh, no, Tomas! It was right to tell me, it just—well, it needs to settle. One part of me thinks that I am now going to be responsible for a man's death and the other part of me is very happy that someone who is obviously very wonderful can die in peace.”
Tomas lets out a sigh.
“You know,” he tells me quietly like you would after all the bad news has been spoken out loud, “it is a relief for me to talk to you also. This is not something I can share with anyone and it is not good to grieve alone, I think, not good.”
“I think I can handle anything. Tell me what you need, Tomas. My world has flipped over about fifteen times the past few months. I am a mother, daughter, friend—I cannot think of anything that would be impossible for me to handle.”
“Well . . .” He laughs to help break the spell. “This is a bit much. Death and life and love and what might seem to many others as infidelity. I am
glad you have come into my life, Ms. Meg. But promise you will let me know if it is too much.”
“Okay,” I say, and then we drive and hold on to each other's hands, which I take as a simple sign of acceptance of this wonderful deal that we have just completed.
I have tried hard not to imagine what this house must look like. I have tried not to think of my aunt walking up this road and of her heart racing to think that Pancho would be waiting for her. I have tried not to imagine the scent of the sea at dusk at this very spot and the sight of birds dipping and swaying in the morning wind when they spy a place to land. I have tried not to imagine the bed, the chairs, what she kept on the windowsill. I have tried and failed miserably.
It is a simple, beautiful cottage. Small from the outside, with gardens that look as if they need little or no tending at all. This makes me laugh and I quickly explain to Tomas that Marcia hated to garden. She would rather be writing or reading or swimming naked in the surf. “I know,” he says, laughing too. “I watched her doing exactly that many, many times.”
Tomas goes first, walking slowly to let me take it all in, and then I get an idea, and immediately think that my aunt's spirit is already working its magic.
“Tomas, stop, please.”
“What?”
“Did you bring any food?”
“Enough for lunch, and I know there is more wine in the house and a few things that my father could not throw away.”
“I want to ask you something that may be difficult for you.”
“Anything, just ask, please.”
“Could you leave me here alone tonight? Just right here, go no farther, leave me the lunch and then come back in the morning?”
He thinks for a moment, smiles, then he raises his hand and asks, “You need this?”
“Very much so. Not just for her and your father, but for me. Just the moments for me to be in this space alone and see where it takes me.”
“Perfect,” he says, and with that one word I imagine all the thousands of women who have fallen in love very quickly with the first man who touched their hearts with the soft feather of a word like perfect.
He leaves me with a basket of food and directions on how to light the lamps and how to latch the door when I want to go to sleep. “Your aunt,” he adds, “she never locked a thing or closed a window, but I don't suppose this is news for you.”
When he leaves me there, I am suddenly astounded by what I am about to do. It makes me laugh at first but then the laugh catches in my throat and I have to fight back a sudden ripple of fear. It is that precious moment when I can go either way—laugh or cry—run with the wind or lie down and pray to God the storm does not eat me alive. Jesus. I am alone in Mexico in a place that is miles from what anyone would barely consider a town, but then I hear the tip of a wave pounding against the beach and I stop in my tracks to bend down and run some sand through my fingers.
“Her feet passed through these grains of sand,” I say aloud, and in the same moment file through the thousands of pages of letters and documents I have read as part of my work that proves, at least to me, how one person's first step can change the world for so many of the rest of us. I decide not to be scared. I decide to bury every single goddamn fear that I have right in this sand, and I really get into it.
I bury my fear of being at this spot alone.
I bury my schedules and my notebooks.
I bury cleaning the house and living with a man whom I have not loved in a long time.
I do not bury my sexual desire, which I must eventually pull up from under the sand, deep, way down there, far below anything I decide to bury.
I bury my deepest fears about my skills as a mother—especially my skills as a mother to a son whom I have all but lost.
I bury all the hundreds of things I did because someone else wanted me to.
I bury the sorrow in my mother's eyes that haunts me even now.
I bury that one day when I could have turned and run from my marriage, my job, any part of my life and I chose instead to stay.
Without noticing it, my hole in the sand is getting rather deep, and I pause, for just a second or two, to make certain I am truly alone. I kick off my shoes and I keep digging. I have not moved from the spot where I stood when Tomas drove off. I apparently must do this and I must do this now.
There is way too much to bury, I think suddenly. I could dig a hole to China and work my way through the jungle and back to the village. I could dig for days and nights and weeks and fill up this entire peninsula. Then there is the realization that on a windy day all my shit will come blowing out of the holes and float back to find me. Is any hole deep enough?
“Enough,” I tell myself as I stand and wipe the sand from my hands and knees and elbows. “That's one hell of a start.”
I leave my shoes right there and boldly move to the front of the house. The view is even more glorious than I thought it would be from my sand pile. Aunt Marcia has spared as many trees as possible and she has left the front of the beach alive with natural vegetation—ferns and rocks and large bushes. The low branches of all the trees close to the house are loaded with hanging chimes, clay figures and bits of cloth. Scattered throughout the yard are huge, brightly colored pots that are filled with flowers that look as if they are tended on a regular basis. Close to the beach there is a table and two chairs exactly like the table at the restaurant where I met Tomas—two days ago, but it seems like twenty years ago now. It is breathtakingly beautiful and everywhere I look I see the touch of my aunt's artistic hand.
The door to the house pushes open easily, there is not even a doorknob or lock. Inside, I set down the basket on a small table that sits in the middle of the only room I can see. The living room, kitchen, dining room—three rooms in one—is small, sparsely decorated but warm. There are rugs strewn about the wooden floor, and the walls in this room are white but streaked with the colors of the rainbow. It looks as if my aunt took all the brushes in her hand at once and ran through the room jumping here, sitting there, reaching toward the ceiling there. The effect is glorious and wild. There are small shelves with figurines, and oil lamps hanging from wrought-iron fixtures. Candles are everywhere, and at the far end of the room there is a fireplace with a mantel filled with beach stones, and a mixture of long and short pieces of driftwood are placed in no particular fashion under a chair, next to the window, across the window ledge. I am thinking that if Pancho built this house as a gift or a surprise, he knew my aunt like no one else ever knew my aunt. This house is hers everywhere I look.
To the right there is a tiny hall. There is no electricity here, but somehow Pancho has managed to bring water into the house. A bathroom. Tile floors. Plants, all about to perish, a mirror the size of Cincinnati covering the wall on the opposite side of the huge bathtub—and touches of Marcia everywhere, rocks and dried flowers and poems tacked to the edges of the sink. This must be exactly how he found it after she died. The fingerprints of her life are everywhere here.
There is one room left in this three-room house. Before I pass through the wide, doorless entryway to the bedroom, I stop and gather my energy into a tiny pile that I will use to help me get through the next few minutes. It is a good thing I have this energy, because when I take two steps forward I instantly lose my balance and my breath.
“Oh my God,” I say to myself and to any living thing within a mile from where I am standing. “Oh my God.”
I have never seen a more beautiful room. Pancho must have built this from the center of his heart, and my aunt surely decorated it from the center of hers. I drop to my knees in the doorway because the scent of my aunt lingers here and it is all so real I can feel her, I can feel her in this very room. I smell sage and patchouli and the wild roots of every season I have ever known. The bed, a huge antique wooden piece of furniture, is standing guard against the far left wall. Its massive headboard is carved with the figures of naked women. Oh, Auntie Marcia. There is no footboard and no sides and the bed is extremely
low to the ground and thus to the window. The entire wall facing the ocean is glass, and it is the only glass in this home, which looks as if it is normally simply shuttered closed if someone is not living inside of it.
There are photographs of Marcia and Pancho everywhere. Holding babies. Walking on a beach. Skipping stones in a river. Sitting with drinks in their hands. Two entire walls tell the stories of their life together. The very brief moments of their lives together. The tile floor is dusted with one large rug the color of a fall sunset, burnt orange with a tinge of red—the beast of summer unafraid to fight for one last day of the season. What draws my eyes are pegs against the far wall hung with what I can only assume are her clothes. I want to touch them and hold them to my face but I dare not do that yet. I imagine she wore little here in her isolated retreat, but I also imagine what she looked like standing guard over the ocean with her purple dress and her straw hat and nothing else between her and the world but all this beautiful space and time.
There are so few distractions in the room. The view, the bed, a wooden table with a now-empty vase and two water glasses. The simple elegance of the room tears at me. That someone could love another so much as to build a place like this, a room where whispers vanished into the walls, where lovemaking was a spontaneous extension of true affection, where the sounds of water could wash away the realities of what was waiting down the road—well, it makes me angry and envious and grateful, just to know that such a possibility exists.
It takes me a while to move, and when I do it is to the window, which I discover has a set of hinges at the bottom so it can be pushed open. This makes me laugh, because all the times I spent at her house in Chicago my aunt kept as many windows open as possible. It did not matter if it was summer or the middle of winter. Once, snow actually blew across the top of the sheets and in the morning we had to put a pile of it in the bathtub—but only after we dabbed our faces with it because it was “pure” and we would be too, she said, after this morning ceremony. She had to have air, and here, I imagine, she had to hear the waves and feel the touch of sea spray on her face as often as possible, and when she lay in bed watching the sky in Pancho's arms, she wanted it all. Every single thing—she wanted it all.
