Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (5 page)

Three months after her birthday the mingled noises are especially loud, and in the middle of the pony dream Meggie's mother comes into the room but Meggie does not pull back the covers.

“Margaret, can I sleep with you?”

“My name is Meg.”

“Okay. Are you mad?”

“You have to tell me now.”

“Tell you what?”

“Why is he so angry, Mommie? You have to tell me.”

Meggie's mother wears tiny, black plastic glasses that always slide down onto the top of her nose. She is a wisp of a woman who barely weighs one hundred pounds and when she stands near Meggie's bed with her hands on her hips she could pass for her own child. Her hair is short, so short that when Meg reaches up to touch her and pull her onto the bed, there is nothing to hang on to and Meg ends up grabbing her mother's ears.

First her mother sits. She winds her fingers inside of Meg's, closes her eyes and tells Meg the truth.

“I want to go to college and your father wants me to stay home.”

Meg, who constantly dreams of Africa now and Cuba, where there are dancers who throw flames, and of travel with nothing but her pocketknife and a road map from her auntie, does not understand what her mother is saying.

“Just go. Is there something wrong with college?”

Meg does not see the tears right away but then she notices a wet line that runs down her mother's face, crosses at her chin and moves like a quiet river onto the top of her chest. Meg instinctively brings up the yellow sheet from the place where her worlds of beating drums and wild sunsets live, so she can wipe off her mother's face.

“Your father thinks that women, especially mothers, should stay home like his mother did.”

“Do other moms go to school?”

“Yes.”

“Mommie, can I go to college?”

When her mother turns to look at her, Meggie sees something that she has never seen before. Her mother is not soft and kind but suddenly hard and mean, she looks fierce and powerful. Meg holds her breath waiting for something terrible to happen.

“You
will
go to college. You will do and be whatever you want to be, if I have to sell everything we own. You will go to college, Margaret. This is about me and what your father thinks. It has nothing to do with you.”

Meg, who has a pocketknife, two brothers who have made her rough and wild and a spinster auntie who has shown her a tiny glimpse of the world, does not understand.

“Can't we both go, Mommie?”

“I can't. I give up. I can't. I can't choose. I just can't anymore.”

In the morning Meg wakes before her mother. Each morning now, she pushes her hand under the pillow to see if the knife is there. She just wants to feel it. When she turns she sees that her mother has the knife. She is turned away from Meggie and her feet have tangled in the sheets so they are halfway down the bed. The knife is lying at the edge of her open hand, just out of reach, and Meg cannot bring herself to lean over and grab it.

So she waits for a very long time until her mother wakes up and then Meg reaches for the knife quickly, as if it is a baby lying helpless in a burning building and she must save it. She is so anxious just to touch it again, to feel the weight of it against her fingers, to know that it is there, and for a moment nothing else exists. When her mother sees this she looks away quickly as if she has never seen or touched the knife herself. She looks past Meg and she focuses on the horizon, which isn't really there because there is a line of trees blocking the view just at the edge of the long sidewalk.

My daughter tells me she cannot choose and I have a memory so sudden and real that I place my hand against the side of my neck because I can feel my mother's breath there whispering, “I can't choose, baby, I can't.” Katie comes to me at Elizabeth's house a bundle of nerves and confusion and the moment I see my daughter march up to the front door my heart drops into the pit of my stomach and begins swimming for light, for shore, for a place to land and then hide quickly. I drop my hand and begin to head for the closest landing.

Katie is seventeen and even though I burned incense to the Eye Goddess while she was in my womb so that she would have her father's deep blue eyes, the goddesses laughed and gave her my gray eyes and a mass of blond curly hair to prove that I had absolutely no idea what I was asking for. She is beautiful, smart, independent and very pissed off at her mother. Her father has chosen not to tell her that he has been screwing around, and I am sitting on a fence that will impale me no matter which direction I fall. If I tell her the truth, she will at first not believe me and then hate both her father and me. If I lie, I will hate myself. Which way shall I fall?

I have been living at Elizabeth's for almost three weeks, sleeping on the futon, having Katie drop off clothes, trying to negotiate an emotional and physical path toward a place of peace that I cannot see or describe or even desire. I am depressed, confused and simply want to be—just be. Elizabeth has moved around me, touching me lightly, engaging me in conversations that try very hard to open doors that I want to lean against with the edge of a two-ton cement mixer. If I open the door—then what? I cannot bear to put my fingers on the handle and pull it open. I cannot.

She has been gracious and patient and has allowed me to limp in place, lick my wounds and to settle into a routine that has become disgustingly ordinary. Sleep, drink, barely eat, go to work, talk a little bit, cry and then start all over again. I have lost ten pounds very quickly and the bags under my eyes are in serious danger of taking over my entire face.

“Come on, baby,” Elizabeth whispers. “When was the last time you made a decision that was just for you? Think before you answer this one. Think.”

I cannot answer, because there is no answer, and I hate her for asking and love her for asking and all I can seem to do is cry and respond with a vague form of grunting that has replaced all my spoken words. I am so depressed, I have started wearing the same outfits to work two and then three days in a row, and now there is Katie launching herself at me from Elizabeth's front porch.

She wants me to come home. This is an option I never considered until she forms the words and then spits them, really spits them, into my face.

“How can you do this to
me
?” my daughter says.

Before I can respond, she explodes in a chorus of rage that would give the Mormon Tabernacle Choir an excuse to embrace Catholicism.

“One day my whole world changed. You run away from home—and isn't that supposed to be what I do?—and then I end up running back and forth, and all you can do is fucking
cry.
Get over it, Mom. What about my life? You are the mother—not me. What is wrong with you? Mom, stop it. Just fucking stop it.”

Her words fly into the surface of my skin like blades of hot steel. She needs me at home. Who will do this and who will do that, and while she crucifies me in Elizabeth's hall I remember how her brother once emotionally disappeared just as she now sees me disappearing. One day he was kissing me in the kitchen and the next he was spending the night at Andy's and then Josh's and then back at Andy's, leaving me cryptic messages on the answering machine, plotting a future that selfishly did not include me or anyone else who might have the same last name and then eagerly brushing off any criticism of his behavior with a sweep of his hand and the words, “Mom, get over it. I'm growing up.”

I want to grow up too. I want to grab my daughter by the arms and then slap her face like Elizabeth slapped me.

“You selfish hussy,” I would tell her. “Don't you see what I gave up for you? Don't you know your father screws around and that I am unhappy and am trying hard to figure out what to do to get happy? Don't you think it's a little selfish to want me there so you have warm muffins in the morning and someone to iron your dress before the prom?”

I don't tell her this, because Katie is breaking my heart with a series of sobs that could drown an entire army and I am consumed with an ocean of guilt the size of the
Titanic.
I cannot bear to see what I have done to her.

“What do you want, sweetie?”

“Come home, Mommie. Please come home.”

When Katie was a little girl and I was working at the University, she would call me the second she got home from school every day. Her voice was sweet and cool and so tiny I could feel it resting in the palm of my hand when she spoke. She called me “Mommie” then. For years and years she called me “Mommie,” and it always made my heart twist into the shape of wedding ribbons, pearls, cascading fireworks.

“Mommie, I'm home. When are you coming home, Mommie? I miss you, Mommie. Sometimes it's scary here alone.”

Katie is still sobbing when I pull her into my arms and whisper, “Oh, baby,” into her ear.

As I hold her I want to slice open my chest with something sharp and long and show her the dark shadows that have all but strangled me into an eternal coma. I want to tell her that I am so unhappy I want to lie down and never get up. I want to tell her that I am going to slip and fall and tremble and then fall down again before I learn how to walk but I cannot tell my baby those things. There is a huge part of her that is just that—still a baby, and she needs me and I am a mother.
I am a mother.

“Okay” is what I say instead. “I'll come home.”

These three words will prove to be terribly expensive and those words and what happens next will end up eating out all but the last inch of my heart, but I do it—so I think—for my baby.

Elizabeth is not home when I leave. I could not begin to tell her what I am doing, because I am obviously out of my mind and I would not be able to look her in the eye. Both her eyes. Her wise, beautiful eyes. She is out raising money to prevent George W. Bush from decapitating a woman's right to have an abortion while I gather up my clothes, the few books Katie brought me and no self-esteem because what little I have left is tucked in between my legs like the tail of a frightened dog. There will be hell to pay later and I will go into debt paying it. I will nearly end up in the poorhouse paying for it. I will sell pieces of my heart and the wind on my face and my left ovary and a night of the best sex I could ever have to pay for that hell.

When I turn quickly to leave Elizabeth's house, what I see is a rainbow. Colors from the edge of the hall through the kitchen and onto the ceiling that blend together in a wave of singular fineness. I know it is a mistake to leave before I close the door but there is this limitless battery in my head that tells me over and over, “This is what women do—they sacrifice.” And I back out of the door slowly because I don't really want to leave. I want to stay and bring Katie into a house that feels just like this, but instead I back out and Katie leads me to the car like a little puppy who will go anywhere with strangers who have cookies, and within six minutes I am right back where I started.

It is a foreign land, this house I have lived in for all these years. I know my way home blind but when we walk into the kitchen through the back door by the garage I feel my skin crawl with uneasiness and I see the basement door and remember the boxes and the climb up the steps to watch the sex in the bedroom and I fight an urge to run as if I am a recovering addict who has just spotted a large bottle of free gin. Katie knows none of this, and I step back into my old life. I am slipping on an old shoe, but there is something lodged in the tip of the toe.

I walk slowly past the stacks of magazines on the chair by the front door, my fingers trail across Katie's old jacket, my blue wool sweater, a photo of my son that tips to the left a good inch every time someone opens the front door, the worn edges on the corner by the stairs leading up
—there—
every inch of this house, my life, memorized.

“You okay?” Katie asks me as we shuttle my clothes upstairs and I pause at the entrance to the bedroom. My feet have decided to stop. There is no moving forward.

Katie has her father's height but everything else belongs to me. The color of her hair, the slant of her chin, the way she grabs her forearms when she is nervous, her weight and how her mind wraps around issues of complexity and then rips them apart with fangs as long as the drill bits on an oil rig. She is right down the middle on the right brain–left brain scale and when she pauses like this I know it is because she cannot decide if she should follow her heart or go work up a pie chart to see what to do next.