Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

her hand, her fingers stiff from holding on, and the faint notion that she had been someplace far away and could never, ever get back home.
    The yelling never seemed to stop after that. Two nights would go by and then it would happen again. Her parents did not say anything about what happened after ten P.M. and her brothers, except for that first night of wall tapping, acted as if they had been struck deaf.
    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