The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  For almost forty years, Elyse has been my witness. The sister I never had. The sister I never particularly wanted. The only person in my life who knows about not only Mark and Daniel but the man before that and the one before that. Whenever I left a job or a boyfriend or moved into a new apartment, she was right there, but I guess I counted on her to have the same selective amnesia I had. Because when you’re young and going straight from one mistake to another, you want your friends to remember only the things you want them to remember. You want them to say, “Yes, he’s the first. The first one who really matters. All those other times were just for practice. Here, in this moment, is where your real life begins.”

  Elyse has never been especially good at this. Her memory’s a damn bear trap and it’s never let go of Daniel. How like her to bring him up now, on this day when I’m already half-drunk and half-upset.

  “I didn’t realize I was broken,” I say. “Or at least I didn’t realize that’s how you saw me.”

  “I don’t. You know I don’t. Okay . . . no talk of Daniel. At least not yet. But have you ever noticed how when you lose one thing, your mind kind of circles back to everything else you ever lost? You break up with a guy and boom, it’s like all the guys you ever broke up with suddenly pull in your driveway and get out of the same car. Or you walk into a funeral home and you remember every other time you’ve ever been there and the next thing you know, five funerals are going down at once. You start crying and you don’t even know why, and people say ‘What’s wrong?’ and you say ‘Nothing,’ but you still keep crying. So I’m just saying that losing Mark might be like losing Daniel all over again.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, although of course I do. Elyse likes to point out obvious things in a really surprised tone of voice, like she’s single-handedly broken some great new philosophical ground. It’s one of the things about her that is simultaneously annoying and endearing.

  I carry my plate over to the rubber dish rack in the sink. It was hard to find this dish rack. Apparently they don’t sell many of them anymore—I had to go to Walmart and Target and then Sears. But I never seem to dirty enough dishes to bother running the dishwasher. I use the same coffee mug, wineglass, plate, and three utensils over and over, washing them, letting them dry in the rack, and then picking them back up again for the next meal. It’s ludicrous. A kitchen this size really belongs on the set of a Food Network show. Or it should at least be in the home of a woman who does more than open a prepackaged salad and put a piece of tuna on the grill. My bed looks like it’s hardly been slept in. Just one corner turned back, and I carry the newspaper to the recycling bin the moment I finish the sudoku. Everything stays creepily clean because even though I barely leave an imprint, I feel too guilty to fire the maid. It’s like I think any minute the real owners of this house will be home and I’m going to have to get out fast.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Elyse says.

  “You didn’t,” I say. “But that dance studio . . . it was so tacky, Elyse. All silver and blue and sparkly and over-the-top. It was like you took everything that’s me and created the opposite. I think I’ve gone and done something stupid.”

  “Well, thank God,” Elyse says. “It’s about time.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THERE'S A PHOTOGRAPH of me and Elyse in my kitchen, above the desk where I stack my cookbooks, and after she and I say good night, I pour another glass of wine and wander over to look at it. It’s from our college years, the summer we spent in Europe.

  Our parents had bought us Eurail passes, the good kind with unlimited travel, and it didn’t take either of us long to figure out we hated the youth hostels with their hairy shower drains and Czech girls trying to steal our jeans. It was much better to sleep on the trains, so the nights when we couldn’t afford a hotel room we would just go down to the station around ten and climb on the first one that stopped. We were good at flirting with the conductors, and if the cars weren’t full, they sometimes upgraded us to a sleeper compartment. There were many mornings that summer that we would awaken with no idea where we were. Elyse would push aside the blinds and wait for the depot sign to appear. That’s how we went to Seville and Dresden, to Bern and Antwerp.

  It’s how we went to Florence too, and I pick up the picture that shows me and Elyse, standing in the Accademia, where they keep Michelangelo’s David. Elyse had been insistent that if fate had taken us to Florence, we may as well see him. She was an art major and had a somewhat old-fashioned idea of a European tour. She dragged me through an untold number of cathedrals and galleries and she repeatedly referred to an out-of-date, torn-up Fodor’s guidebook.

  The euro had not yet been invented, and we changed countries frequently, so the currency was always an issue. The side zipper pocket of my backpack held kronor and francs and guilders and pence, a jangling mass of European money that I would hand to shopkeepers to sort out and just hope that they were honest. The line to see David was long, so we decided to buy the special pass that lets you go in with small groups. This privilege cost something like a million lira, but who knew how much that was? It seemed like a gelato was a million lira, and so was a bottle of wine or a flight to London.

  But paying extra did mean we were shunted toward a much shorter line that wrapped around a little gift kiosk while the rest of the tourists glared. I wanted to rent headsets but Elyse said no, we didn’t need them, that I would understand everything if I just took a deep inhalation and let the art come inside me. It was August and by this point Elyse and I were really getting on each other’s nerves. I was tired of her lectures about observing and absorbing, and perfectly willing to pay a million more lira for some nice calm English voice to tell me what the hell I was looking at.

  “You’ll understand as much as you let yourself understand,” Elyse said, and I’d given her the finger while pretending to scratch my cheek. She was so sure, even then, that she would become an artist, which I guess she has, even though it’s hard to reconcile her hand-thrown Hopi pots with the grandeur of David. “My queer little bowls,” she calls them, stressing her southern accent on the word “queer,” but there’s pride in her voice too, the pride of someone who has never once wavered, who has always known precisely what she wants out of life.

  My dreams were vaguer, and thus easier to ignore. I told people I planned to go into business, and fervently hoped that they didn’t ask me what kind. Because I really had no idea what I meant by that statement, only that I knew I wanted to earn my own money. It was a strange ambition to have in the seventies, especially for a girl. Everyone else was about drugs, sex, and music; money was just something that we simultaneously disdained and counted on our parents to provide. But Elyse would laugh and ask whether someday, when she was a starving artist and I was a captain of industry, would I open up my big brass gates and let her in? And then she would add, “Thank God one of us is practical.”

  That day in the Accademia in Florence, I let Elyse talk me out of the headsets, just as I’ve let her talk me in and out of things our whole lives, and they finally admitted about ten of us past the velvet rope. As we entered the gallery, we all turned in unison to face down the hall toward the sunny rotunda where David was standing. He looked exactly how I expected him to look, only better. For a second I almost got what she’d been talking about.

  “He glows,” I said to Elyse, and she smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. “Some of them do.”

  The place was packed and, special group pass or not, we were going to have to work our way down slowly to the rotunda. At least there was plenty to look at and sometime in the middle of that European summer I had started to notice that what’s on the way to the famous stuff is often more interesting than whatever it was you originally thought you should see. The hall was lined with a series of statues called The Prisoners, big, heavy blocks of marble with wild half-carved men. They were thick-limbed and powerful but trappe
d within the blocks, their bodies writhing as they struggled to break free.

  “I wonder if the sculptor meant to leave them that way,” Elyse said.

  “We’d know if we’d gotten the headsets.”

  She consulted her guidebook. “ ‘The Prisoners,’ ” she read. “‘Sometimes called The Slaves. Michelangelo started this series when he was fifty-nine and worked on them until he was seventy.’ ” She snapped the book shut. “Shit, that’s eleven years. They must be as finished as he wanted them to be.”

  The last slave on the left bothered me the most. His arms were flexed in an obvious struggle to pull his head free from the marble. “It’s like the statues are making themselves,” Elyse said solemnly. The night before, as we’d traveled from Rome to Florence, she’d read to me how Michelangelo claimed he didn’t create David—that he’d found him sleeping in the marble, completely intact. That he’d simply picked up his chisel and carved away everything that wasn’t David. It’s a sweet thought, I guess, that some perfect man is already out there waiting and all we have to do is find him and brush off the dust, but Elyse had snorted when she finished reading and said, “Bullshit.”

  I looked at the dates on the brochure they’d handed us along with our tickets. Michelangelo finished David when he was a young man himself, not even thirty, and The Prisoners had come much later in his life. It was odd, I thought, that in the beginning he was looking for pure beauty already formed and in the end he was willing to let the art fight its own way out of the stone. The headsets probably would have explained it all.

  The crowd loosened up a bit as we passed through the gallery and got closer to the rotunda where David was waiting. We walked around the base of the statue a few times and then sat down on a bench. I haven’t been to Italy since, but I doubt you can walk right up to David now. They probably have ropes and Plexiglas and high-tech security. But on that summer day, Elyse and I just sat there, shockingly close, looking up at the veins in his arms, the rippled muscles across his shoulders. You could see his ribs and the slight indentation around his sternum, and the toes of his left foot were unfinished.

  “He’s subtle,” Elyse said. “What makes him human is that he’s not too smooth.”

  “I know,” I said. “In fact, the closer you get, the wonkier he seems. When you really stare at him, his hands are too big and his feet are too big. His whole head is too big.”

  “He looked perfectly proportional from the end of the hall,” Elyse said, rubbing the back of her neck. “Of course, art changes depending on where you’re standing.” So we stood up and walked out of the dome, linked arms, and began to approach David from different angles. There are paintings and statuary all around him in the Accademia. Wonderful things, I’m sure, and priceless, but none of the tourists seemed to look at any of them. David was the star.

  Elyse and I walked toward him from the north and east and south and west and finally ended up back on the same bench where we had started.

  “The man on the pedestal,” Elyse said softly.

  “He’s afraid of something,” I said.

  Elyse shook her head. “Not afraid, just wary. He’s looking at Goliath.”

  “His penis is kind of small,” I said. “Considering the rest of him.”

  “Well,” Elyse said slowly. “It’s not like it’s erect, is it?” We sat in silence, contemplating this. We were young then, and pretty. I’m not sure either of us had ever seen a penis that wasn’t erect.

  “Even so,” she finally said. “You’re right, it doesn’t look promising. And there’s something weird about his pubic hair.”

  “Way too perfect. Like it’s been brushed and styled with a blow-dryer.” We got the giggles and they rang through the dome.

  “I like The Prisoners better,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Elyse. “Me too.”

  “But you were right,” I admitted. “We really didn’t need the headsets.”

  As we were leaving, Elyse asked someone to take our picture. Just a quick snapshot with one of our cheap cameras. At some point through the years I had it blown up and framed, and it’s my all-time favorite photograph of us, which is why I keep it here in the kitchen, even though it’s faded to gold and gone a little fuzzy. It’s the image of two girls caught at the end of something, although of course we didn’t know that at the time. Elyse had handed the camera to some cute young guy in the crowd. An American student, like us, just one more boy who’d be going home at the end of the summer, just one more boy wandering through Paris and Amsterdam and Rome. When we asked if he spoke English, he’d dropped his headset down his neck and said, “A little bit. I’m from Pittsburgh.” Everyone laughed and of course we’d decided the next logical step was to find a café and a cheap bottle of wine. When he lifted the camera to his face, he told us to say “Parmesan.”

  Kind of funny. At least he was trying. Elyse and I exchanged one of our glances. Mine, I thought to her. This one is mine.

  In the picture Elyse and I are standing in the bright dome of the Accademia. We’re both wearing jeans and T-shirts. Our backpacks lie at our feet. Elyse must have just released her hair from its braid, because it’s expanded around her head like a low halo, and I’ve pushed my sunglasses back and am smiling broadly, so broadly that my eyes have squinted down to nothing. You can’t see much of David at all, there’s the irony, but Daniel’s shadow falls between us on the floor. He is crouched and bent with his arms all akimbo and his shadow looks like the passing of some great bird, an albatross or an eagle. It was the summer just before we both turned twenty. Before life began to chip away at us like a sculptor into marble, reducing us from endless unformed possibility into the women we would ultimately become.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HER NAME'S CAROLINA," the client coordinator says. “And get this. Her sisters are named Virginia and Georgia.”

  In a split second this woman’s whole life flashes before my eyes—a montage of stray dogs and trailer parks and high school equivalency tests. “Well,” I say, “it’s easier when there are siblings still alive.”

  The coordinator glances at me. “She’s only thirty-four.”

  “Jesus. Breast?”

  She nods and we both instinctively let our hands flutter across our own chests, in a gesture that’s part prayer and part self-exam. Breast cancer is usually one of the luckier ones—it involves a part of the body you can live without and is statistically quite survivable, if caught early. But they don’t always catch it early, especially in women who don’t go to the doctor unless they’re sick. Women who wait until they can feel the lump through their shirt before they make an appointment.

  “Kids?”

  “Twelve and fifteen.”

  “Husband?”

  “Not in this jurisdiction.”

  “I’m not sure I want this one, Teresa.”

  “No one does.” She hands me the folder. “Just go meet her. Give it a chance. She’s very . . . plucky.”

  For the first time in a year I walk down the hallway that leads to the patients’ rooms. I started volunteering here after Mark had his first heart attack and we moved to the gated community. He would have preferred I go on the board of the symphony or head a gala for the art museum. Something elegant and clean, but the doctor had told me that the walls of his heart were as thin as tissue paper and I’d headed straight to hospice that very afternoon. It was pure superstition. A search for some sort of talisman. Maybe I thought that if I faced death head-on every day, then it could never sneak up on me.

  I didn’t even try to explain this to Mark. He was angry all the time by then and he took my choice of hospice as a major rebellion, some attempt to humiliate him at the club with what he called my Jesus complex. He didn’t like the fact that I spent my afternoons cutting old people’s toenails and driving their spouses to Kmart, or the time I came home smelling of some poor woman’s postchemo vomit. “Why are
you wasting your time?” he’d ask me. “Anyone can wash hair and pick up pizza. You should be doing something that matters.”

  When I walk into the Dogwood Room—we name them after flowers—Carolina is propped against a wall of pillows with the TV remote in one hand and the bed control in the other. A lumpy red afghan is stretched across her knees and her hair is thin but neatly tucked behind her ears. Her expression is a little expectant, as if she were sitting in a plane on a runway.

  I introduce myself and she gives me a big crooked smile and says, “I just love this place.”

  Not the most typical reaction to finding yourself in hospice, but maybe this was what Teresa meant when she called Carolina plucky. Because the woman doesn’t seem that sick and certainly not confused. In fact, considering the age of her kids and her general condition, I’m surprised she elected to come in as early as she did, but she seems to be treating the place like a hotel. This may be the first time in her life she’s had a bed, a TV, and a toilet all to herself.

  I start toward the chair but she pats the bed with surprising vigor, so I sit down beside her. Or, more accurately, I lie down beside her, because the minute my butt hits the sloping mattress I roll flat on my back, looking up at the clouds painted on the ceiling.

  “Tell me all about yourself,” she says.

  I’ve never had a client ask me anything about my own life. I sneak a peek to my left. Carolina is also staring intently at the clouds, like they might start moving.

  “It’s more important that I understand what you need me to do,” I say. Apparently I’ve just agreed to be her volunteer. “I know you have kids. Do they need help with homework? Groceries brought in? Rides to soccer practice and things like that?”