Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

by Kris Radish

  “A few streets over, there was another woman who suffered from the same malaise,” Dr. C tells me. “This woman also had two babies and had once been an artist who painted for hours in a studio in the city. Her babies exhausted her and she could no longer paint.”

  I start asking questions, interrupting as if I am a pre-schooler and can't wait for the end of the story.

  “Were they good mothers?”

  “Were their husbands kind?”

  “Why didn't the men stay home?”

  “Did she ever paint again?”

  Dr. C finally leans over and puts her hand over my mouth.

  “You are not listening, Meg. Do you want me to send you to your room?”

  I finally shut up. The two unhappy women, who often drink beer together for lunch, walk to the park with the babies and then light candles and tell wild stories about what they did in college and how many lovers they had and who had the biggest penis. They tell these stories while the babies grow and begin to become friends too and then the two friends get this idea that if they could only get cranking on their house projects and get new carpeting, they will be happy. They know it as sure as they know that they could never trade the sweet morning touch from their daughters' tiny hands or their sons' feet warm against their bellies or the way they continue to check on the babies in the middle of the night every single time they get up to go to the bathroom or cannot sleep.

  “They get the carpeting,” Dr. C tells me, leaving her hands close to my mouth just in case. “My sister gets the blue carpeting because she thinks it will warm up the house and keep her company. The artist goes for a soft beige, the color of her favorite canvases just before she puts her brush to the paint for the first time.”

  They use the same carpet installers and they toast and celebrate as first one house and then the other is completed, and the carpeting is definitely magnificent. It stretches from room to room and it's as if they have started everything over again. New. Fresh and clear. The carpeting is everything they hoped it would be.

  “But?”

  Dr. C laughs. “Do you know that two months ago you would never have interrupted me. Now you sure are.”

  I know I should feel as if I have been given a great compliment from a powerful and very astute woman but I need to know what happened. I almost fall off the chair from the needing.

  “Well, it's not enough. One day, months later, they are sitting at the artist's table while the babies all nap in one great pile in the bedroom, and their hands stretch across the table until their fingers touch, and they both say at the same time, ‘It wasn't the carpeting.'”

  It wasn't the carpeting.

  I know what it is, and I finish the story, much to Dr. C's delight.

  “It was the carpeting, but then the walls needed to be done, and your sister thought about what a fabulous vacation she could have taken for the price of the carpeting, and then there was another need and another want,” I almost shout out.

  “Exactly. So?”

  I want to know what happened to the artist and the sister, but I know she has another point to make. Damn this therapy. I just want to hear the story.

  “Tell me,” I ask, back to being the student.

  “The carpeting was okay, everything was okay. We change every day. Be open to change, Meg. Be open to what comes and goes and how the rhythm of your heart may change and move in many directions. Wherever it goes, it's okay. You are okay. Someday you might wake up and no longer want coffee with cream in it. What the hell. Don't let where you are hinder where you are going to be tomorrow.”

  What the hell indeed.

  She tells me eventually, weeks later, because I am driving her nuts, that the artist threw away her brushes and turned to throwing pots because she felt she wanted something larger, something she could feel and touch in a way she never felt from the painting. Dr. C's sister divorced, went back to school, got a degree in social work and is now working in the inner city with the people most of the rest of the world would rather ignore—the men and women who are HIV positive, the drug-addicted mothers, the men who lost control of their minds and lives and who refuse to take their medication. She lives in a tiny apartment by herself, and it does not have carpeting. Both women are happy. Well, that specific week they were happy.

  There is not one piece of carpeting in my new apartment. That is what I am thinking after I hang up the phone and throw Tomas a kiss across all the miles that separate us.

  My last night at Elizabeth's, she plans a meal and we cook together in the kitchen. I am happy, imagining the nights she will spend with me when she is in the city, and I tell her I have already begun to design a trap to lure her into buying or renting a home in my neighborhood.

  “I have the money,” I say. “We could buy a place like the one I will be living in and start a little suburban commune.”

  “I've already thought about that,” she admits.

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Still thinking. I don't need all this space, and you've given me the itch to make a few changes myself. How's that for switching roles?”

  We wander back to her living room and I end up on the futon, where I thrashed uncontrollably and threw myself around just a few months ago.

  “Did you think I was nuts?” I ask Elizabeth as she moves her legs to either side of mine so that our limbs are a tangled mass of ankles and knees and toes.

  “Sure you were. Nothing made sense. You couldn't even remember how to turn on the car.”

  “But was I crazy really?”

  “I've always thought that people who fight their feelings, who don't give in to the sorrow or anger or love or lust, can never really experience any of those emotions.”

  “Makes sense,” I say, sipping my tea. “A couple of examples?”

  Elizabeth tells me that she had a dear friend who had a phobia about taking her clothes off. The woman had been touched inappropriately when she was a little girl by two different men and had never gotten over what that felt like. She had never properly grieved or mourned or gotten angry as hell about what had happened to her. This woman could not believe that anyone wanted to touch her because she was loved. Trust? It was a word that did not exist for her.

  “She talked about her clothes constantly, would never shower in front of anyone on trips, had lovers disappear because she hated undressing in front of them. She did make love, but it was always with great fear, under a sheet, with the lights off. She was totally ruled by those two incidents her entire life.”

  “Why didn't she get help?”

  “I think any decent psychologist or counselor will tell you that you have to surrender to your fears and let them wash over you before you can get rid of them. My friend couldn't do that. Letting go of what happened was so terrifying, she chose to live with her sorrow and anger rather than give it up.”

  “So you telling me I really was about to lose my mind was just me surrendering to my sorrow and anger at myself for what I gave up, what I didn't do, all the things that made me at least peer over the cliff for a while?”

  Elizabeth is smiling and pushing her toes into my thigh. “Exactly.”

  “What could have happened?”

  “Well, look around. That's the easy question. How many unhappy women do you know?”

  “Way too many, but I also know pretty many happy ones.”

  “Like Jane now—almost—and Bianna?”

  “Yes.”

  “See, you have to surrender. Deal with what they had to deal with, wallow in it for a while, then get up and walk away. Gradually all the pieces that are still clinging to you fall away, vanish, disappear.”

  She's right. My mind whisks through the women I know who are happy, and every single one of them has come through the eye of a storm, mostly whole, changed, moving forward. Skinned alive, some of them, and barely breathing, but they made it. They came out alive.

  “If they don't surrender to their own form of madness, nothing changes, does it?”

&n
bsp; “Exactly. That's why you see couples arguing in their cars and men and women having affairs and goofy-ass doctors handing out Prozac like it's candy to women who can't quite take their clothes off when they make love.”

  “And what if I hadn't surrendered so quickly?”

  “Well, let's see, this morning you'd be doing Bob's wash and then calling me to go to lunch and then you'd be sitting home alone with your feet propped up by your old desk the same way you propped them up for the past ten years almost every Saturday night while you were waiting for one of the kids or Bob to come back home.”

  “I was waiting.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  We talk for hours, which is what women do. Talk even though they have talked for days and weeks and years before. I hold Elizabeth's hand and thank her and let her know every twenty seconds that I would fling myself off a bridge for her. She knows this already, but women do this too. They tell each other. Always and over and over, because these things are so nice to hear and so wonderful to say. She wants to know what I am going to do tomorrow, the first day alone in my new home with my new life backed up against me and ready to climb over my back and right off the top of me.

  “I can't tell you.”

  She laughs. That golden, deep sound that makes me close my eyes and think that those Catholics or Lutherans or Mormons have no idea what Heaven is like until they all have heard Elizabeth laugh.

  “You can't tell me?” She sits up. Fakes looking astounded. Holds her hands to her chest.

  “No, but I'll show you when you come over for my first real dinner in my new home on Sunday.”

  “That's better.”

  “But I have one more thing to tell you that I haven't shared with anyone.”

  She sits up fast. The hands go down. She's terribly quiet. I haven't spoken this out loud yet. I cannot wait to hear what it will sound like.

  “I'm going to quit my position at the University. I am still working out the details, quietly, because they'll have someone in my chair before I leave the room if I'm not careful, and I have to figure out a few more things first, but it won't be long. I am going to leave.”

  “What? What the hell are you going to do?”

  This is so much fun, I want to string it out for a while, but Elizabeth grabs my hands and holds them so tightly that I cannot breathe.

  “Tell me before I pop you,” she threatens.

  “Ready?”

  The hands clamp me harder.

  “I'm going to go back to school to become a massage therapist. I'll open my own studio down where I live, offer funky services, walk to work, eventually maybe have a studio where I live.”

  “It's perfect, my God, it's perfect.”

  Then she turns over my hands and runs her fingers up and down my veins and across my palms and reminds me how I have always been a toucher.

  “I know.”

  I say “I know” so many times that Elizabeth puts her hand over my mouth and I kiss her fingers, all the while thinking that within a few months I will be able to rub the soreness and sadness out of her fingers, anyone's fingers, the limbs of the entire exhausted world.

  The truck from the garden store is waiting for me in the driveway.

  “Damn it,” I shout to myself, angry because I do not understand the tempo of driving life in the city. I'm shouting. I never shout—well, almost never.

  I park behind the big red truck because the street is packed with cars, as I imagine it will be the entire time I live here. The two men are thumping on the hood of the truck.

  “Hey,” the big one yells. “Where do you want this stuff?”

  I stop yelling. Right then. I stop.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask as I look up into the big guy's face.

  He steps back. Most people, I already know, are so elated when anyone in the city actually shows up to do what they say they are going to do, they pretty much bend over, but I paid for this shit. That's what I'm thinking. These guys are working for me.

  “Five minutes,” he answers.

  “That's worth a six-pack in the backyard when we are done. Let's go. Follow me.”

  The rocks cost me almost as much as my living room furniture. The two men from the garden store are pissed. No one orders quite this many rocks, but I tell them right away that besides the beer there is a tip if they can shut up and just haul the rocks.

  “Just haul them,” I plead. “See how beautiful they are.”

  I say this as I am rubbing one against my face, and then I hold it out to them as if I have just turned one loaf of bread into twelve.

  “Okay, lady,” they finally say, looking just a bit frightened.

  I know they want to know what in the hell I am going to do with them, but it's my secret, my rocks, my life. I'm guessing they have helped haul stones for backyard ponds and sidewalks, but the flat, river-bottom kind of rocks that we are moving from the truck to the backyard are absolutely beautiful. They will not touch water from a lake, river or sea or be stepped on. They will not.

  I work for about fifteen minutes with them and then it dawns on me that I am paying them and they can probably haul rocks alone. I have not even bothered to look inside of my apartment.

  The key to my house is as warm as my skin. It has been tucked in my shorts pocket, and when I take it out, I press it against my face and it brings back a memory of my first apartment. College. Sophomore year. A studio so small that I had to sleep in the closet when I lost the coin toss and my friend Lynn got the far side of the only other room we shared besides the bathroom. It was one of the most remarkable and wonderful years of my life. A first taste of freedom that slipped away from me way too fast.

  My tennis shoes come off easily and I leave them by the front door, and then in a moment that I can only describe as pre-Christmas-like excitement, I close my eyes and step inside.

  Wow, Meg. Wow.

  The apartment is beautiful. I am dead. I think I am dead, and turn immediately to look in the small mirror that Terry has hung by the door. I bend over and see that I am alive and here, standing in front of a mirror in a room that is filled with bright throw rugs, and lamps, and a couch that is whispering, “Meg, Meg, come lie on me.” The living room and kitchen are works of art.

  While I walk through the kitchen, which is the color of a summer morning sky—blue, yellow towels, red thingamabobs on the counter—I wonder why I never thought to make my space so lovely. Why did I never think to hang something like that there, place a table at that angle, put a photo so low on the wall like that?

  Somehow this decorator woman figured out who I was in our few brief meetings, and when I move into the bedroom, my bedroom, where untold tales and adventures (how I hope!) will unfold, I cannot move. A brass bed and nightstands, bedside lights lined with bright beads, a gold and burgundy and green bedspread that rocks against the dark walls, candles everywhere. I imagine my “things,” the photographs and few mementos that I chose to take from my last life, in the places where they will eventually lie the second I look at the dresser top and walk into the bathroom.

  “It's perfect,” I tell myself. “Totally perfect.”

  Katie's bedroom hasn't been touched and that makes me laugh. That is also perfect. She will need to design her own space and I'll help her pick out her dresser and chair when she gets back.

  On a small table, placed in a spot that seems almost strange but then suddenly perfect because it is where I can set a coffee cup, my gloves, a book, before I go outside, Terry has placed a note.

  Meg,

  I know that you will fill this space with your favorite thirteen coffee cups—you like the one from the spa in Rhinelander the best—the silly school photographs of the kids—your three diplomas—your “stuff,” as you like to call it. Before you hang or place anything, I want you to think about how you will live in this space. Feel it for a while. This is your house and it will become your home the very first night you sleep here. In the refrigerator you will find a $50 bottle of ch
ampagne—but you must drink it alone. Tonight, when you have unloaded your few boxes, sit where you will always end up sitting and drink the entire bottle. I admire you for changing your life, for finding who you are. My commission for this job covers only my expenses. Elizabeth told me that you are going to massage school. I want a massage a month for as long as you can stand me.

  You rock, baby. Now live—just live.

  Terry

  I feel as if I have won the lottery. Since the watching I have met the most extraordinary women. Women who are bold and beautiful and brilliant. Women who have seen the dark edges around my eyes and who have reached out to put a hand right there, below my eye, in that deep spot of wanting. Women who would cross borders at midnight for me, walk on coals, give me the last sip of the best wine, hold me when I cry, be there at the end of every goddamn phone line—wonderful, glorious women.

  Terry. Oh, Terry.

  I have her note in my hands when I go back outside and then rush back in to get the beer and some tip money. The boys are almost done and they have put all the stones, two huge piles, right where I asked them to, against the deck that comes off my living room. This makes me very happy and will save me hours of work. I set down the money and put the beer on top of it.

  “When you are done,” I tell them, “I have to haul boxes.”

  Which is exactly what I do next while I wait, not so patiently, for them to leave. The car is packed, but it doesn't take me long. There is half a pickup load left in Elizabeth's garage, but that's tomorrow's chore. This day—I have the stones.

  They are almost too perfect, flat and soft. When I touch them, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, I imagine what my finished product will look like, and it helps me to keep going. What I also have to imagine is the length of my body, curled just a bit at the knees. First I lie at the edge of the deck and then place a stone just beyond my head and another at the end of my foot.