Free Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn by Kris Radish Page A

phone, just don't ask me to do something like get up and drive a car.”
    “Meggie, I have Elizabeth's number and your cell phone number. I will call you tonight and give you some instructions, and I want you to think about whether or not you would take some medication.”
    “Really?”
    “Maybe, not necessarily, but maybe.”
    “Can I just drink a little bit?”
    “Sometimes that makes it worse. Are you a good drunk or a bad drunk?”
    “Life of the party, baby.”
    “Maybe you shouldn't drink, unless you want to jump off Elizabeth's back porch, naked.”
    Ha! I knew it. She's been to Elizabeth's house. I am already thinking that I will just sip some wine to keep me calm while I wait for her to call me. She pushes her hand into my shoulder, not hard, but very firmly.
    “I know who you are and that you will do what you say you will. Call Elizabeth now. Drink if you must. Wait for my call.”
    “What?”
    I say this like a drunk would, slurring my words, and she pushes off from me and swims to her next patient. “Bye-bye, Doctor,” I think to myself, and then I sit for a few minutes.
    I never just
sit.
It is something so rare that I must actually focus on sitting. I have no idea what will happen next. The patterns of my life are dissolving one by one and I am not certain what to hang on to. The thought of being alone has never occurred to me. Not once in all of the years I have been married. I am never alone. A-L-O-N-E. I silently roll the letters around inside of my mouth and wonder what it would feel like to say them out loud.
    “I am alone in this office,” I say like the most quiet whisper in the world, so softly that tiny birds and small people and clouds with ears cannot even hear it. Someone could be sitting on my lap and they would not hear it.
    I cannot say it again. The word has been lost. I do not even know what it looks like or remember what it felt like to say it two seconds ago. What is that all about? What is anything all about?
    Minutes pass and I do not move. When I hear a voice rise in anger and then extinguish itself, I know I must get out of the room before the good doctor and Sydney tiptoe back into the waiting room and discover my secret.
    Elizabeth is home. She says, “Of course I will come. Do not move. DO NOT MOVE.”
    I do not tell her where this office is, but she gets here in twenty minutes. My goal now, besides not getting drunk and taking any antidepressants, is to find out how these two babes know each other. How hard could that be?
    Elizabeth has on black tights, a denim shirt that is apparently posing as a dress, cowboy boots and a baseball hat. She is also smoking a cigar in a building that is, like every building in America, smoke free.
    “Hey.”
    “Hey.”
    “We sound like a bunch of guys,” I tell her.
    “That's a stretch,” she tells me as she lifts her shirt to expose her breasts.
    “Jesus!” I scream.
    “That perked you up.”
    “You look pretty perky yourself.”
    “Wanna roll?”
    “Elizabeth?”
    “Yeah, baby?”
    “Please tell me it's all going to be okay.”
    She comes over to touch me. Her hands on my face are a soft kiss at midnight, three bottles of French wine, a morning when I do not have to get out of bed, cardinals singing on my windowsill in spring, warm sheets in winter, clean sheets anytime, someone else cleaning the bathrooms, and everything grand and glorious that will definitely not be crossed off of my Life List once I actually make one.
    “You have no idea who you are, how beautiful you are, where you are going—do you?”
    “No.”
    “Listen, sweetie, listen to this.”
    “I'm listening. Really, I might be an inch away from nuts right now, but I am listening.”
    “You couldn't be nuts if you tried. Still listening?”
    “Yes, Elizabeth.”
    “Everything is going to be okay.”

 
     
     

     
     
    1967
     
    Sister Aloysius has a fabulous trick that has worked so well on the bad boys that third- and fourth-graders line up in