Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (24 page)

I could not speak for hours after that visit and my mother put me to bed in the hotel room with aspirins and water and the wrong notion that I had eaten something terrible at lunch from the cafeteria that my father wanted us to eat at because it was so “damn cheap.” That is all I remember before I drifted off to sleep and saw the very hands and face of Edison working for hours and hours, with that huge eucalyptus tree outside of his window while the rest of the world was at a total standstill because he was in his zone, and I was—spellbound.

My aunt's room was just like Edison's Florida space. I worked my way from the dresser to her hair bands to the robes and hats on the wall. I let my fingers glide across the top of the bed and I bent down to feel the cool tiles and the soft fibers of the rug. There is something here for me. Something I need to remember or forge in my soul. I am definitely
spellbound
and I pray that the spell will last a very long time so I can figure out what in the hell to do next.

1976

The second floor of the Haight girls' dormitory has erupted into a somewhat spontaneous and terribly wild celebration. Amanda Jane McCafrey has just announced her engagement. Half the girls do not know Amanda. Half have never bothered to ask about the boyfriend. Half cannot be bothered to worry about an engagement announcement, and part of that half, at least three women—all members of the campus chapter of the National Organization for Women—are so disgusted they are sitting out on the top of the roof under the last rung of the fire escape and are smoking a joint.

The other half are swigging Mountain Dew laced with a fifth of vodka that one of the women on the fire escape gave them. Amanda has called her mother, six of her aunts, her cousin in Cincinnati, thirteen high school friends and the last guy she dated, who thankfully was not home.

Amanda is twenty years old and a sophomore majoring in education from a small city in southern Illinois. Her roommate and best friend is Margaret Joan Callie. Meg is suddenly in charge of her first wedding shower, which could not have come at a worse time. It's spring semester and she has five major finals, undecided plans for the summer and not even the slimmest prospect of a date, let alone an engagement ring. And every week she hears about it from her mother during their Thursday night phone calls.

“Have you met anyone yet?”

“Mom, I meet lots of people. I have tons of new friends.”

“I mean an m-a-l-e.” Her mother spells it out as if she was in the middle of some kind of contest.

“Mom, there's no one special.”

“I heard Judy Wharton is getting married on the Fourth of July.”

Meg longs to put her hand through the phone and wrap it very firmly around her mother's throat, but she is her mother's daughter.

“That's nice.”

“Yes, it is,” her mother answers slowly. “Yes, it is.”

The Haight dorm celebration may as well have a line drawn down the center of it, with Amanda's friends on one side of the line and the feminist circle and those who simply don't give a rat's ass on the other.

Meg has managed to scrounge up chips and popcorn and forty dollars to order pizza. On her way to the bathroom she gets a whiff of the marijuana smoke and edges past the bathroom door so she can see who is out on the roof.

“Hey,” she says as she sticks her head out of the open window.

“Hey,” the women say back. “Come on out.”

It's Anne, Maureen, Kaye, a woman who calls herself Brilliant, and Marci Dugan, who announced her intentions weeks ago to spend the rest of her life celibate because she was sick to death “of stupid-ass men.”

Meg looks at the roof gatherers, turns her head to hear another wave of laughter and doesn't hesitate again. She's tried marijuana before and sat in on a few of the radical discussions this group seems to have constantly, but tonight she's more interested in getting a break from talk about honeymoons and shopping for bridesmaid dresses.

“You defecting?” Marci asks.

“For a while. Jesus. Are they laughing enough?”

“We think it's funny, but also sad,” Maureen says.

They pass the joint to her and Meg suddenly wants to eat it. She thinks, for a tiny second, about wetting the end with her tongue and then swallowing it whole. “Maybe,” she thinks, “my entire body will go numb.”

“Sad,” Meg responds not as a question but just repeating the word, which is what she chooses to swallow instead of the dope.

“Yeah. Come on. She's, what—Christ—twenty or something and it's 1976, for God's sake. Who gives a flying fuck about engagements and weddings?” This from Marci.

“Well,” Meg starts out slowly because her lips are moist and hot from smoking, “She seems happy. . . .”

Groan.

“Shit, Meg, how can you go along with this patriarchal bullshit? The guy asks the girl. It's traditional, heterosexual bullshit. She gets a ring. It's bullshit. She'll probably wear some stupid-ass white dress and have a reception and end up in an apartment, quit school so she can put him through school, and then he'll get pissed off one night, slap her, and she'll be in that apartment working as a secretary while he goes off and fucks the world and gets a great job.”

“You don't know that,” Meg protests.

“Yes, we do.”

Meg is quiet. She takes another hit and pushes her head against the hard brick wall.

“Have her do the game,” Anne says.

They all look at her and Meg opens her eyes and smiles.

“Spin the bottle?” she asks.

They laugh.

“No,” Brilliant says. “It's the Five Second game.”

Meg's head is bouncing a little. Her knees have slid down so they can touch the roof floor and every part of her body suddenly feels soft and smooth.

“I'll play.”

“It's easy and rarely takes more than one second, really,” Anne explains.

Everyone thinks Anne has a crush on Brilliant and this is all Meg can think about. She wonders if they have kissed.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

“In five seconds, name three happily married couples.”

Meg is stunned. Her mind is clouded in smoke from a plant that was grown in a basement sixteen blocks away.

“Happily married couples?”

“Yep.”

“Shit.”

“Four seconds left.”

“Damn.”

“Three . . .”

“My grandparents.”

“Two.”

“Damn.”

“Anyone?”

“Shit.”

The women are quiet. There is a ribbon of kindness—even when they sound harsh—wrapped around them that they have extended to Meg with their silence. A hundred images have flashed like a fast slide show behind Meg's closed eyes. Parents. Arguing. Neighbors. Divorced. English teacher. Single. Aunt Marcia. Single.

“Wait . . .”

“Too late.”

“Who was it?”

“Some people from my parents' church.”

“How do you know they were happily married?”

“Well, they looked happy.”

“So do you.”

Meg opens her eyes to look at Kaye. Kaye the quiet one. The last one who speaks but obviously the one who sees the most.

“Wow,” she says into Kaye's face, just inches away. “Do you think I'm unhappy?”

Kaye touches Meg's arm and holds on to it as if she is trying to steady herself. “You haven't thought about it much but when you do you will realize you are unhappy.”

“Wow.”

“Is it because I'm not engaged?”

Everyone laughs. Kaye laughs too, but not very much. She knows something Meg doesn't know or doesn't want to know.

“Can you see through me?” Meg asks.

“I can see into you,” Kaye tells her.

Meg suddenly wants to talk all night. She wants to find out why these women are on the roof talking about women's rights and why the other women are inside worried about the color of dresses. Meg is in the midst of her first women's studies class and she gets to the class early every single day. The discussions and questions tantalize her, but she has yet to speak in class.

While everyone laughs and Anne goes out to steal back the food Meg has already stolen, another joint makes the rounds, and Meg cannot remember ever feeling more light or more free or more able to say things she would never dare to say to her roommate or anyone else she may have to see when the sun rises and the lights go back on again.

“Aren't you ever scared?” she asks all of them.

“Of what?”

“Missing whatever everyone else has. You know—a house and all that stuff.”

Brilliant puts her face into her hands and it is Kaye, again, who straightens the path.

“Are your parents happy, Meg?”

“No. They fight; my mother is miserable and has never done one thing she has wanted to do. But, this way of relating is what I see everywhere.”

“Exactly!” Brilliant shouts. “If you had a choice, would you choose what they have or a wild, wonderful, free relationship—or better yet, how about being and staying
alone
?”

Meg tries to move her lips but they are frozen in place. She is totally blasted, but in her mind the world and the answer is clear and straight. She has always felt alone except when her brother lived at home or when her Auntie Marcia came to find her.

“Being alone,” she manages to say, “isn't all it's cracked up to be.”

“It is if it's a
choice,”
Brilliant tells her.

Everyone is quiet. Meg looks around the circle. She sees that these women have already traveled to places she has barely imagined visiting. She is jealous and tells them just that.

“It's all I've known,” she says. “I've never had a real conversation with my father. My mother calls me and all she cares about is if I've found someone to marry. I feel like I'm supposed to do what they think I'm supposed to do but I don't think I've ever been happy or thought about the possibility.”

“Oh, baby,” Maureen croons. “Poor baby.”

Brilliant is pissed. Impatience and anger rise off her face like the heat from a summer sidewalk. Her anger feels old to Meg. Something deep that will take a long time to go away. She tells everyone it is hard for her not to slap Meg across the face and say, “Wake up, goddamn it, wake up.”

“I like you very much,” Brilliant tells her, leaning into their circle and touching Meg's leg. “You seem so smart. I bet you out-GPA everyone in this entire building, but I also think you are fucking stupid about the choices women have, and that part is hard for me.”

“Hey,” Marci interrupts. “Give her a chance. You've been flying like this a long time. Okay, Brilliant?”

Brilliant does not want to stop. She clearly wants to take Meg by the shoulders and whirl her around so that she can see what it is going to be like to be in her roommate's wedding now that she has been on the roof.

“Can you see?” Brilliant asks her.

Meg wishes that she would go blind. If she sees any more, she thinks, she may never be able to get up, breathe, live, swallow a drop of water.

She cannot answer, and Brilliant sees the uncertainty and vanishes back into the building in disgust.

“She's hard,” Marci leans in to tell Meg. “It's a lot, and she's, well, she's impatient because she wants it all now.”

Meg drifts back into the dorm, where she lingers near the bride's room, her room, and listens to a conversation that she cannot comprehend. Rings and the church hall and the honeymoon filter through her stoned façade, and she cannot bring herself to go back into the room.

Becky Smith captures her as she is about to leave and spins her into the room, where the bride-to-be asks her in front of everyone if she will please, please, please be her maid of honor.

Meg does everything she can not to be sick to her stomach. She looks into Amanda Jane's eyes through her haze of nausea, and through something new that she cannot name. Before she answers, she turns to see the backside of Brilliant's jeans and her long, dark hair. Then she turns to Amanda and she says, “Yes.” Then she says it one more time, “Yes,” and again, “Yes, I will,” and Brilliant is gone and she hears the roof window slam shut and someone needs another drink.