Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (28 page)

1983

Mrs. Jeske was in the living room. The bright red curtains, flaming segments of the rainbow that had stood guard for at least twenty years, were piled in a faded heap outside the open window.

Meggie saw her bobbing from box to box, the forbidden divorced woman on the block where she grew up, and impulsively walked up to the window.

“Hi, Mrs. J.”

“Margaret, darling, come in. Come around the back. I have shit piled to the sky against that front door.”

Mrs. J has been the street-, the block-, the subdivision-harlot for the past twenty-one years. In 1962, years before the unhappy husbands and wives of the world discovered they could divorce without immediately being sucked into the palm of Hell, Mrs. J was the talk of the town.

She kicked out her husband.

Meggie would never forget it. Past midnight in summer. July, maybe it was July. She hears the yelling much like she will hear the yelling in 1963 and for many years after that when the echoes of her parents' late-night arguments roll up the carpeted stairs and float under her closed bedroom door.

It was not the sound that drew Meggie to the window that summer night but the way the breeze would move across the windowsill and dart in to touch her face. But when she got to the window, what she heard made her forget about the gentle wind.

Every light was on in the Jeske house across the street. In the middle of a dark summer night with no stars and low clouds, the house looked like Christmas. Porch light blazing. Bedroom and living room lights on. There was a car in the driveway, parked, engine running, and the driver's door was flung open as if someone had forgotten something and had run into the house to find it.

And the yelling.

Meggie leaned out of her bedroom window farther than she ever had. She pushed her elbows against the sides of the window and stretched her neck so she could see what in the heck was going on.

“Wow,” she said quietly. “It's a fight.”

It was a fight and she wanted to run from the window to tell her parents, but she couldn't move. She tried moving, but she was stuck right there with her head and arms and chest hanging out of her bedroom window, waiting, just waiting.

The sounds coming from somewhere inside the Jeskes' house got louder, voices slamming over each other, someone yelling, then a collision of sound. She wondered where Jill and Stacey were hiding. Were they safe? Could they hear? Oh man, oh man, oh man.

Mr. Jeske came out of the house first. He had a box in one hand and a suitcase between his legs as he stopped by the door.

“You are a fucking whore,” he yelled.

Meggie could only imagine what that was. Something terrible. Something bad enough to make Mr. Jeske want to leave in his car past midnight and yell really loud so that the neighbors could hear what he was saying.

“Everyone will know. Everyone will know who you really are. I'll tell the world. Goddamn you. You whore.”

Meggie heard Mrs. Jeske yelling back, but she was too far into the house for Meg to make out a full sentence, just words, “Wait . . . sick . . . laugh . . . moving . . .” Nothing that made sense.

Meggie held her breath. Mr. Jeske was striding toward the car and Mrs. Jeske stood on the tiny concrete porch, throwing what? Clothes and books and his cigar box. It was too dark to see, but in the morning the lawn would be littered with so much stuff that the grass had disappeared. It looked like a tornado had touched down on just that tiny square spot split by a once-tidy sidewalk, now the scene of an incredible battle.

Before her parents woke or anyone in the neighborhood bothered to grab their newspaper off the front lawn, Meggie took a handful of garbage bags from the kitchen and slipped out the back door, around the side yard and across the street.

She packed socks and deodorant and tennis shoes and pants into the bags. It was an amazing adventure. An old belt. A packet of letters wrapped inside of a paper towel. Some screwdrivers. Meggie imagined that Mr. J's entire life was just lying there for the world to see the moment it woke up. Near the bushes along the front window she found a Rolex watch and a gold ring.

“Holy crap,” she whispered. “His wedding ring.”

Meggie didn't want to drop the ring in the bag. She looked around the yard, and then saw the tiny metal hanger below the front windowsill that cranked open the winter storm windows when it was time to put on the summer screens. She slipped the ring over the end and pushed it to the bottom. The ring disappeared like magic into the handle.

Meggie carried all the bags around to the back of the house and set them down near the garage door. She never told Mrs. J who picked up the yard, but she watched like a spy as men came and went, as Mr. J showed up and tried to break down the door, as a parade of not-so-nice neighbor kids egged the windows, left piles of dog poop in burning bags on the doorstep, as all the women in the subdivision stayed away and never invited Mrs. J to parties and meetings.

This is what Meggie remembers now as she walks to the back door more than twenty years later and climbs over boxes and chairs and finds Mrs. J, hands on hips, drinking wine in what's left of her bedroom at 11:05
A.M.
the day before Thanksgiving.

“Meggie, you sweet thing, how nice to see you.”

They hug, and without asking Mrs. J pours her a glass of wine and they sit, shoulder to shoulder against the bare wall, feet pointing toward the house where Meggie spied on her all those years ago.

“My mother didn't tell me you were moving,” Meggie says, glad to sit and talk to someone who she liked, no matter what her mother had told her. Mrs. J always gave her a ride when she saw her walking and laughed at her jokes and told her she was going to knock the socks off the world.

They rush past the “stuff”—Meggie's still-fresh marriage, graduate school, where Stacey and Jill are living—and then the leap, with the second glass of wine, into the present, which is a place Mrs. J has always loved to embrace.

“My mother didn't tell me you were moving.”

“Jesus, honey, your mother still thinks it's 1958 and that I should have stayed with a man who hit me, slept around and then got pissed when I started to sleep around.”

“So all those horrid rumors are true?”

Mrs. J laughs from a place wild and free. A place that makes Meg just a bit jealous.

“Hell, yes.”

“Remember the night he left?”

“Which time?”

“Summer, July . . . I think I was in first grade or something.”

“The night he came in the front door and Jack Blakely went out the back door?” Mrs. J laughs.

“You are so wicked, Mrs. J.”

“That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me, honey.”

They both sip their wine, and Meggie reaches back and remembers the garbage bags and the ring.

“Good God, did you ever find the ring?”

“What? What ring?”

Meg tells her the story. The soft breeze, the yelling, the garbage bags, and Mrs. J almost drops her wineglass into her lap.

“You did the garbage bags?”

“Yep. It was me.”

“My God. I had no idea. I had no idea. Do you know what that meant to me? It gave me a hint of hope that someone else knew me and my life and wanted to help. It was you? Wow. It was you.”

“The ring.”

“John's wedding ring?”

“Did you ever take it off the window?”

“Meggie, I thought it got sucked up in the power mower. I never found it.”

Meggie rises as if she has been shot, grabs Mrs. J by the hand and rushes with her over the top of the boxes and into the front yard.

The untrimmed bushes have taken over the front of the house. They have formed a protective fort around the windows.

Meggie goes right to the window, pushing past the tangled bushes and moving her hand without even looking to the edge of the handle. The ring is there, but it has molded itself between the handle and the window through many cold winters and hot summers. Meggie looks around, finds a rock that will fit in the palm of her hand and she pounds the ring until it comes loose.

“Here it is,” she exclaims, holding it up like a treasure.

“Sweet Jesus,” Mrs. J manages to say, laughing.

They sit on the doorstep then, not caring who will see them drinking wine and fondling an old wedding ring before noon. Meggie waves once to her mother, who spies them sitting there, and Meggie knows there will be hell to pay before she helps get the turkey into the oven.

“So, where are you going?” Meggie asks, tipping her glass toward the boxes and leaning in toward Mrs. J.

“I'm moving to Hawaii.”

“Serious?”

“Serious as death. I've been planning this for a long time. I have a job, a few friends over there, and I doubt if I'll ever come back.”

“Wow.”

Meggie is thinking how Bob would never let her go to Hawaii. She is thinking about how tied she suddenly feels to a life that seems to be telling her everything and never listening.

“All those years ago, the way people treated you, how did you manage to keep your sanity?”

Mrs. J puts her arm around Meggie, her fingers dropping gently against her shoulder, and Meggie leans in under the circle and stops breathing.

“I didn't care what people thought, honey. Everyone wanted to do what I did. Everyone wanted to live how I lived. No one had the courage to do it.”

“Really?”

“Of course really. Sweetheart, look at your own parents. They never were and they're still not happy. Mrs. Swobada is on medication, and half this block of finger-pointers is sleeping with someone they are not married to. There are so damn many lost dreams on this street, it's a frigging wonder anyone can get out of the driveway.”

“Am I blind?”

“We see what we want to see.”

“That makes me pretty blind.”

“Meg, why did you get married?”

Meggie wants to breathe again, but she cannot. There is a weight pushing against her chest that feels as if it is going to crush her lungs.

“I know what I am supposed to say,” she whispers. “But I can't say it. I can't.”

“Oh, sweetheart, listen to me. Please listen.”

Mrs. J puts her hands on Meggie's face and draws her within an inch of her own face. Meggie smells the sweet scent of wine and something strong and powerful, something that could push back a train.

“Anything is possible,” Mrs. J says. “Anything at all. You don't have to be like everyone else and you don't have to listen to anyone else and you can be your own person and live how you want to live. People will always try to say things about you when you do something like I did, because you make them think.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's frightening when someone else does something you know you should do and you cannot do it. Change scares the living hell out of people.”

“Like you kicking out your husband and staying in the house and getting a job?”

“That and moving away, saying no. Not marrying. Being alone. Everyone is so goddamn afraid of being alone. What they don't get is that we are alone no matter who we are with.”

Meggie starts crying without realizing it. Tears drip from her eyes and across her face and drop onto Mrs. J's fingers.

“Why are you crying, baby?”

“I'm scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“I think I've already made a ton of wrong decisions. I don't know if I can be like you.”

Mrs. J has pulled Meggie onto her lap and she is running her fingers through the hair that has fallen across her face.

“The world is a mess. It isn't easy to be different and to do what you feel is right for you, just you, and not for your mother or for the minister or for all the people who think they control our morality.”

Cars pass, someone waves, Meggie imagines her mother across the street peering from the side bedroom, and she wants to get up and go home but she cannot move.

“Was it hard?” Meggie asks.

“Oh yes. Imagine living how I did with all those eyes on me. I was always on display. But I think it would have been much harder to live the other way. I just couldn't do it anymore. I needed to be truthful.”

They talk about hopes and dreams and what it means to be a woman in a world where you have choices but the men are still in control. Meggie hears about how Mrs. J worked for so much less at the bank than the men who did the same job and how she had to fight to get Mr. J to help her pay for the girls' college and how even in a world where 50 percent of couples were eventually getting divorced, her community looked at her as if she had a disease they might catch if they got too close to her.

Meggie stays a long time. She hauls some boxes and gets the Hawaii address, and when she leaves, Mrs. J presses the gold ring, tarnished with years of weathered waiting, into her hand.

“Keep this and remember that you can always choose, you can always start over. You can always put the ring wherever you want to put it.”