Read Online Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn by Kris Radish - Free Book Online

going to talk and everything stays in this room and there isn't one damn thing she hasn't heard, and I am free to say, do or be anything I want.
    “If only I knew” is what I say first.
    “You look like hell. Have you been sleeping?”
    Without even realizing it I start crying. “I look like hell because I feel like hell,” I weep. There is Kleenex and water and her hand reaching out to hold my arm—a steady beat against what I perceive as me swaying and about to go under.
    I cannot answer even one of her questions, so we begin even more slowly than I imagine she imagined, what with me being supposedly intelligent and all.
    I tell her where I was born and how my mother made such a huge deal out of me going to college that I could not stop going to college and that's why I have two master's degrees and three-fourths of a PhD and never really left the university. I even tell her about Jane and the bar and how I think I may be losing my mind. We waltz on and on like this for almost forty-five minutes, when I suddenly blurt out a fact that is apparently astonishing only to me.
    “I never did what I wanted to do.”
    What I expect is the good doctor to clap her hands together, prepare a bill and send me on my way, but she does not. Instead, she tells me a secret. She leans forward so that her face is two feet from mine and I can look right inside of her.
    “Twenty-three years ago, I got up one morning and knew I had to change my life. I had become an old woman at the age of thirty-seven. I was fat, drank vodka for breakfast, and I was working as a waitress at a restaurant.”
    I am just a bit astounded.
    Dr. Cassie tells me in rapid succession that she left her husband, went back to college, almost starved to death, had to ask for help from her parents, raised her daughter pretty much alone and spent eleven years—eleven years—getting her PhD in clinical psychology.
    I can only think to ask this: “Why that morning? Why not the week before or the following year?”
    Dr. C has probably told this story a hundred times. It apparently does not get easier to tell it, because I see a wave of sorrow move across her face as deep as her own soul as she does so.
    “That morning I hit my daughter,” she tells me, looking away, remembering the slap again, the soft skin of her baby against her hand, the look on the little girl's face, the instant realization of a horrific mistake. “I had never hit her before—never—and that morning I hit her so hard, I knocked a tooth loose.”
    I want to touch her and tell her that I know how she feels but I already get the point of the story and I have sensed her humanness from the moment I walked in the door. I know that her daughter was not harmed and that she never struck her again and that the slap propelled her to move away from who she had become to who she wanted to be. All those college years are finally coming in handy.
    It's my turn.
    “When you watched your husband making love to another woman, what was going on inside of you, Meggie?”
    “I think I left my body and was just, well, watching. I remember thinking that the woman was too beautiful to be with Bob and that she would probably not have an orgasm and I was worried that the bedspread looked tacky.”
    The doctor laughs and leans forward again, and I can feel her breath on my face.
    “What else?”
    “After that, I fell apart. After I left the room and was running through the yards.”
    “Why? What were you thinking then?”
    “When I started to run, everything changed. I felt something smash against my chest and I realized, well, you know.”
    “I don't know, Meggie—you have to say it. Can you say it?”
    It is a confession. I see that. The uttering of something so deep and dark that once it surfaces, you and the people around you may suffocate. To me it is horrible. Horrible to think that years of my life may have been a lie. To think that I may have missed the boat, the plane, the bus and anything else that