by Bill Heavey
Then one day, in a fit of righteous self-examination, I decided the time had come to face my fear. I looked up “dancing—instruction” in the Yellow Pages.
At the Arthur Murray studio, a receptionist greets me and introduces me to Miss Sherry Harris, who will be my instructor for my free, private evaluation session. Miss Harris (everyone at Arthur Murray is referred to as miss or mister) is a lively, attractive woman in her early twenties with her hair pinned up in an elaborate comb. She leads me into a small room and shuts the door. My hands are sweating and the cockeyed smile I get when I’m scared pastes itself across my face.
I am alone with a pretty woman in a small room with a big mirror. She puts her arms around me. She puts my right hand on her back and takes my other hand.
“With your hand right on a woman’s shoulder blade like this,” she says, “you can really control her.”
I nod, trying to say, “Yes, I see.” What comes out is one word. “Ah-lum.”
“Women want you to take control out there,” she says. “Remember, the man is supposed to be the one in charge. There is no equality of the sexes on the dance floor.”
“Ah-lum.”
We quickly go through the basic steps of the fox trot, the waltz, and the hustle. As we move toward and away from each other in the hustle, Miss Harris says, “You have to tell me what’s going on with your hands, with the tension in your arms. I won’t know how to respond if you just have nude alarms.”
Nude alarms? I gauge the distance to the door. If I make my move now, I can get there before she quotes me rates for an all-over massage.
Then it dawns on me. She didn’t say “nude alarms,” she said “noodle arms.”
By the end of the lesson, my anxiety has been halved, and we are both making jokes about my fear. Two realizations have calmed me: that I am in empathetic hands and that the great thing about dancing school is they don’t expect you to know how to dance. You need only be able to count to three (sometimes four) and maintain some minimal neural connection between brain and foot. The hardest part is getting up the courage to walk through the door.
Miss Harris, soon to be all of twenty-two, quickly becomes my lifeline in the sea of dance. I begin to look forward to my private weekly lessons and forty minutes of her undivided attention. She seems to sense how vulnerable a new student is, what it is for me to entrust her with my halting box step and my damp hands.
I begin to crave her approval, her giddy, infectious laugh. I try to catch her eye as I leave, but already she has locked her smile on to the next student. I walk to my car alone in the starry night.
Another night, I ask her about the different views men and women have of dancing. “Women tend to see dancing as a way of acquiring grace and poise,” she reflects. “Their job is to follow, so a lot of women will just get up and wing it. Men won’t.”
“Okay,” I respond, “but what exactly is it about dancing that’s so scary to guys like me?”
“It’s because there’s nothing out there but your body. And every part of it has got to move.”
Ah-lum.
Over the next six weeks, in private lessons, group classes, and Friday night “parties,” I learn the basic steps of the waltz, fox trot, swing, hustle, and rumba. At every session, as soon as I sense that there is someone there more scared and unsure than myself, I am at ease. The worst night is at a class in which all the others are old hands, men and women whose bodies know by rote things of which I have no inkling.
The end of my six-lesson package coincides with an Arthur Murray festival, and one event is a night out at a bar with dancing, located inside a Holiday Inn. I arrive after everyone else, having overshot the place and cruised for half an hour trying to find it.
Miss Harris approaches, flushed from the dance floor. “It’s that time,” she says, taking my hand. We make our way up and start doing the hustle to a Huey Lewis song. I know only three variations on the basic step—back pass, underarm turn, and sweetheart—and keep repeating them, like a traveler who knows only three phrases in a foreign language and must make them mean everything.
I try not to look out at the tables to see who’s watching. It is one thing to chip away at your dancing in the safety of the studio, quite another to strut your stuff among the smoothies on a public dance floor.
I sit one out, then dance two in a row—a swing and another hustle—with a woman from Brazil. She dances a very dignified hustle, as if an accident of time has propelled her from some more courtly epoch into the fleshpots of modern America.
Then I dance another with Miss Harris. She is moving with more energy than I have ever felt in a dance partner: She is smiling, radiant, responding with every atom in her body, singing along off-key and not caring who hears. It starts to rub off on me. There are moments when it begins to feel effortless, when I forget to be afraid, when I cease to be her student and become her partner. I can feel that she is dancing for joy.
And for a moment, so am I.
Two months later I am at my cousin’s wedding. A seven-piece band is playing “New York, New York,” and a friend is urging me to dance. I am remembering that one moment at the Holiday Inn, but my body has its own memories: of a counselor’s hand on my arm, of the sound of furniture being pushed back in living rooms, of a grave young girl with downcast eyes. The body’s memory is stronger.
“Ah, you go ahead,” I say. “I think I’m gonna sit this one out.”
BIRTH, DEATH, AND DOVES
One by one, the vehicles pull up on the long grass under the shade trees by a clubhouse that no one has been inside of for years. Tailgates fall open. Boys, buckets, dogs, men, and shotgun cases spill out. It’s 91 degrees on the first Saturday in September and the stands of corn and sunflowers out in the fields look to be melting in the heat mirage. But the men are smiling. The hunting year has begun. We are fifteen minutes into legal shooting on the opening day of dove season in the tidewater country of Virginia.
In this part of the world—just up the road from where a historic marker commemorates the harvest in 1611 of the first successful tobacco crop in North America—the dove opener is a sacred thing. Only birth, death, or serious illness could keep a man out of the corn today. And some guys won’t even stop for that. One fellow with a beeper next to the bird knife on his belt is shoving boxes of No. 8’s into a shooting bag and saying, “Dropped her at the hospital on the way here. She’s not due for a couple of days, but the other two kids were both early. I just hope the birds start flying before this damn thing goes off. You see me tearing out of here, you know I got the call.”
When a truck with a man who can barely see over the wheel pulls up, all conversation stops. “How you makin’ it, Abie?” each man calls to the wizened little fellow with the hearing aid as he walks slowly past.
Abe is eighty-two years old and has been hunting this farm since the days the tractors had long ears and four legs. He lost his wife last winter and it just about undid him. Abe just bobs his head once, gives a general wave, and walks over to shake hands with a man known as the Colonel, who is similarly aged. Abe hasn’t seen his friend since the funeral. His jaw works for a moment before the words come out.
“Brung my old Winchester Model 12,” Abe says at last, patting a gun whose barrel and stock have been together so long they’ve faded almost to a single nameless color. “Bought it fifty years ago for a hunnert-and-a-half. A world of money in those days.”
The Colonel puts a warm hand on Abe’s shoulder. “Well, I’m glad you the one bought it, Abie. ’Cause I know damn well nobody ever killed any birds with it.”
Abe smiles. This is an encrypted message, the way two men who’ve known each other for fifty years exchange affection. The Colonel is saying, I’m glad you’re here; I’m sorry for your loss; I’ve been worried about you.
But the dove opener doesn’t just belong to the past. Char
lie Parrish, all of nine and grinning from ear to ear, is here with his father and grandfather, who take turns bragging on him. Charlie’s dad, Woody, tells how the boy killed his first deer two years ago his very first time out. They were walking along a creek when Charlie saw a doe sneaking behind them.
“I didn’t even see her,” says his dad. “And he threw up that little Green Wing Special twenty-gauge and just folded her. I said, ‘Son, I hope you don’t think deer huntin’s gonna be this easy all the time.’”
Charlie just beams. His grandfather, not to be outdone, tells about how the teacher was grilling the class about various national holidays. “She asked if anybody knew what we celebrate on Labor Day,” says Harry Knight. “And ole Charlie liked to fall out of his seat waving his hand. ‘I know Labor Day! That’s when rockfish season starts!’” Harry laughs and ruffles the boy’s hair. Charlie is all of sixty-five pounds of pure boy. And he’s got the blood in him.
Finally, we caravan up and head out into the fields. Abe and the Colonel are dropped off in spots that befit their status. They’ve earned the right to locations that provide shade from the withering heat as well as prime opportunities to pick off birds that cross from the trees into the corn and sunflowers. Younger men are placed nearby to watch over them and retrieve their birds.
The rest of us spread out at least fifty yards apart in the sunflowers and sit on folding stools to wait. It doesn’t take long before I hear the distant pop of guns and calls of “Birrrrd!” which means a dove is coming your way. Not yet accustomed to being shot at, most of the doves are coming so low you have to drop to one knee to get a safe upward angle or forgo the shot altogether. I shoot behind one that’s right overhead but changing direction with each snap of its wings. It flies past and is neatly dropped by the father-to-be.
“You shootin’ over your head today, son,” I hear Harry call to the man approvingly. “Got to,” replies the fellow. “That’s where the birds are at.”
Soon the birds are coming in from all directions, and I’m wired, scanning the sky as nervously as a fighter pilot in enemy territory. One of my foam earplugs won’t stay put, so I tear a business card in half, suck on it until it’s pulpy, and jam it in my ear. It’s the best use I’ve ever gotten out of that particular piece of paper. In two hours, there are four doves and thirty-one shells at my feet. Suddenly, the father-to-be bolts wordlessly from his stand at a dead run.
“Well, I guess we know where he’s goin’,” someone calls. No birds fly for a while. The sunflower stalks clatter in the hot wind. The downturned faces of the flowers look like every girl who never got asked to dance.
At four o’clock, with just an hour of legal shooting left, I see Abe standing at the edge of the field and beckoning me with one hand raised over his head. I rush over, afraid the heat has gotten to him. It turns out he’s looking after me, instead of the other way around.
“You getting any birds over there?” he asks.
“Yessir, some.”
“Well, I got my limit. You come shoot in here for a while. They flying thick as thieves. Sit on my bucket. One a these boys gonna drive me back to the shade.”
With that he turns and moves away. In forty-five minutes, I’ve downed six more birds and shot an entire box of shells. Mostly I’m shooting holes in the air. But a couple of times, my body takes over, bypassing my head. I see the bird, mount the gun, and roll a dove out of the sky in a single motion. It’s a sweet, addictive feeling, something that’ll keep you coming out even on days when you don’t see a single bird.
At five fifteen, we’re all back under the trees by the clubhouse.
“You get your limit?” Abe asks me.
“Just about,” I tell him. “And I sure enjoyed it.”
“I tell you what,” he says, lowering his voice and putting a hand on my shoulder. “Gettin’ old’s hell on a man. But the boys do put me in a nice stand when dove season rolls around.”
He turns and walks back to his truck, raising his hand silently to acknowledge the goodbyes from the assembled. His tires hiss on the long grass as he pulls out.
TRUCE AND CONSEQUENCES
My father is coming over to help me put in a new disposal in my condo. Actually, I’m helping him. His mechanical gene passed over his only son without even looking down, winging its way toward some future generation. I’ve made my peace with this. At thirty-nine, I’m content to pull out from a self-service gas station without having had to threaten the pump with my ice scraper.
When my father rings, I hurry down to the front door of my building. There he is, in corduroy pants with all the tread worn off the knees and a shirt I outgrew in tenth grade, carrying enough stuff to service a locomotive. He has brought enormous pipe wrenches, screwdrivers that look like bullfighter’s lances, a set of metric and standard socket wrenches, a rust-scaled twenty-five-foot plumber’s snake coiled tightly and tied off with rope in a paper bag. He has brought fresh plumber’s putty, new electrical tape, a six-battery flashlight that was old when I was a kid, strange bits of old motors we can cannibalize if need be.
He sees me shaking my head at all this stuff but is undeterred. “Never know what might come in handy,” he says brightly. “Yep,” I answer. Heck, if we can’t do the disposal, we can always put a turbocharger on the dishwasher.
We carry it all up. He hasn’t been here since he helped me paint when I moved in, four years ago. The truth is, I’m often not sure how to talk to my father. But this time it will be easy. We have a job to do.
In minutes he has taken over the whole enterprise, lying on his back under the sink at an uncomfortable angle and squinting up into the machinery. And suddenly, like an iceberg rolling over, I am once again twelve years old, watching him fix things and feeling as if my brain is turning into Hamburger Helper.
“Listen,” I tell him suddenly, surprising myself with my own boldness. “This is how it’s always been. You do the work and I hand you the tools and I don’t learn anything. Why don’t you sorta look at it and show me what to do?”
The question hangs in the air between us. It seems so straightforward to me, but it glances off him. He doesn’t come out from under the sink right away. “I gotta find out how it unhooks first,” he says. But he detaches the old one fairly quickly and when he finally comes out, I see my chance and move in under the sink. Only I have to come out again because we haven’t even read the directions about putting the new one in.
As a child, I identified so strongly with my mother that for a few years I thought my father was just a long-term houseguest with spanking privileges. She and I are bookish, introverted worriers, the kind of people who go through life expecting to be decapitated in air crashes and knowing it’s just a question of when. My father is a gotta-be-a-pony-under-all-this-crap optimist who has never had a sleepless night in his life. His literary tastes run the gamut from military history to military mystery, including all of Tom Clancy. For a number of years, he routinely invited people he’d just met standing at a bar or in the grocery store home for dinner. Finally, my mother told him if he ever did it again, she’d throw out his old newspapers. That threw a scare into him.
Like most fathers and sons, we fought. But there was no rhythm to it, no cooling-off period between rounds. It was a cold war lasting from the onset of my adolescence until I went off to college in 1973, the same year we pulled our troops out of Vietnam. I hated him. He was a former navy fighter pilot, a fifth-generation military man with an Irish temper and a belief that all the problems of the world—including an overprotected, mopey son who never saw anything through to completion—could be cured by the application of discipline. If discipline didn’t work, it was only because you hadn’t used enough of it.
My parents were divided over how to deal with my sister and me. My mother was the only child in an aristocratic southern family, the idol of her parents, the kind of daughter who was so naturall
y good she needed no correction. My sister and I were cut from different cloth. Olivia was only sixteen months older than I, resented the intrusion, and began referring to me as Mean Ol’ Billy before I learned to crawl. She and I fought, too. We both played Mother off against Dad as best we could, but it only went so far.
I got the worst of it from him because my sister had the good sense to claim the high ground of being totally uncontrollable, while my rebellion was interspersed with moments of tractability. Also, I was the main event, the boy. I am firmly convinced that all families require redemption of some sort, and it was osmotically communicated to me (no language was needed) that I was to do the heavy lifting in the Great Expectations department. I especially dreaded report cards, when he would look at the C’s and shake his head. “I don’t get it,” he’d say ruefully. “If I had your brains, I’d be setting the world on fire.” To which I wanted to answer, “If I had yours, I’d move out,” but didn’t. In fact, I didn’t say a word. How could you win against someone who would have been a better version of you than you were?
At a time when an eighth grader’s social status was measured in the fraction of an inch of hair spilling over his ears or kissing his shirt collar, my father would (on Saturdays when my mother was out) march me down to the barbershop and triumphantly tell the man with the scissors, “Just leave him enough to comb.” I would close my eyes, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
Without even thinking about it, I froze him out of my life with even less mercy, volunteering nothing, speaking only when spoken to, my one communiqué for an entire dinner eventually reduced to a sarcasm-drenched “May I be excused now? I have homework.” I lay awake at night imagining him being transferred by the gas company he worked for to an oil rig in the North Sea. But it didn’t happen, and soon all that remained was the contest of wills, a reflex so conditioned that if he’d told me I should try smoking dope, I’d have been on the next bus to Utah to become a Mormon missionary. I learned how to use silence like a knife. It became a standing joke among my friends that if they called and didn’t get me, it was no use asking when I would be home. Nobody at home would know.