Dancing on the Edge

by Han Nolan

  We all worked in that strange silence for almost an hour, digging and carrying and setting down, and digging some more. It felt as if we were still waiting for the storm, still tense, holding our breath. Then Grandaddy Opal jumped up and shouted, “Found them, by golly!”

  We all looked up from our digging posts to see what he held above his head. It looked like three mashed boxes of typing paper held together with a piece of rope.

  Then Gigi said, “His manuscripts! The original manuscripts. What are you doing with them?”

  “He gave ’em to me, that’s what,” Grandaddy Opal said. He hopped off the house pile and marched back to his garage, hugging Dane’s manuscripts in his arms. Then he flopped down in one of the rockers someone had carried over and had himself a heart attack.

  Chapter 12

  I HAD TO RIDE in the van with Gigi and Mr. Eugene Wadell. We were the first ones behind the ambulance. Then came Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole, and behind them Miss Emmaline Wilson.

  Gigi kept real quiet in the van. She sat in the passenger seat next to Mr. Wadell and stared out the window. I didn’t see her blink even once. Mr. Wadell told her everything would be all right, and I wondered how he knew.

  Grandaddy Opal arrived at the emergency room a good fifteen minutes before us, and a nurse said doctors were already with him. We waited in the crowded waiting room. Gigi stood at the desk filling out forms, Mr. Wadell had taken orders for sodas and was popping money into the vending machine, and Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey were standing in a corner real close to each other talking sweet. I stood at the window and looked out at all the cars in the parking lot. I tried to keep my mind on the cars, on the lady carrying flowers hurrying toward the building. I watched a bald-headed man leaving the hospital looking as if he, too, had once carried flowers to someone he loved and now looking lost without them to carry back out again. I tried to think about them, wonder about them, but my mind kept taking me back to my own troubles. What had happened? Why hadn’t Mama and Dane come back? Why did Grandaddy Opal have a heart attack? What had I done? Would he die? Where would he go if he did die? Would he see Mama? What had I done wrong?

  Maybe it was my will. Maybe my will wasn’t strong enough. Maybe it was like what Gigi had said to me once back when she caught me with her Ouija board. She had grabbed it away from me and told me not to go getting into her stuff and calling on the dead without knowing what I was doing. Then she hid the Ouija board away. Is that what I had done? Had I called up the dead and messed it up somehow?

  Maybe I had wanted Dane and Mama back so much that I willed them to try to come before they were ready. Maybe my will was strong enough to call on the tornado but not strong enough for Dane and Mama to return in one piece. Or maybe it was my dancing. The dancing started everyone fighting, got Grandaddy Opal upset, stirred things up. I shouldn’t have danced; it confused things, confused Mama and Dane.

  I heard Miss Emmaline Wilson behind me. “Why don’t you come sit by me, angel?”

  I turned around. She was sitting on a couch and patting the seat beside her.

  I hesitated. Maybe it was her holding on to me down there in that basement, blocking me so Dane and Mama couldn’t even see me there. Maybe it was me loving her voice and her protecting me, loving the soft way her body pressed against mine.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said, same as Mr. Wadell.

  What would I do without Grandaddy Opal?

  “Don’t you worry, he’ll be all right,” Miss Emmaline said, as if I’d asked the question out loud. “That man rides his bicycle miles every day. Why, my house is more than five miles from his, and he rides to there and back and still has energy to turn cartwheels. He’ll be all right, you’ll see. We just have to wait through this bad time, that’s all.”

  I lifted my head, startled. “Dane used to say that,” I said.

  “Dane?”

  I nodded. “Dane used to say, ‘I just got to wait through this bad time. Just wait it out, and things will be all right.’”

  Miss Emmaline Wilson patted the seat beside her again. “That’s right, angel, we’ll wait through the bad times together. Come on and sit down beside me.”

  I sat down and let her take my hand in hers. I didn’t know how cold my hand was until she took it and massaged it. I didn’t know the joints ached.

  I pretended she wasn’t holding it. I pretended I wasn’t there. That’s what I should have done in the basement. I should have ignored everything but the storm. We all should have. We weren’t concentrating. That was the answer. I needed to wait until Dane gave me a sign that it was all right to be with Miss Emmaline. But then maybe her saying we had to wait through the bad times was the sign. Maybe.

  I remembered how I used to hear Dane pacing in his cave and talking to himself. He’d say the same thing about waiting through the bad times, and I’d hear him tearing up his papers, whatever he had been working on. Once even, I thought I heard him crying.

  I shifted closer to Miss Emmaline and she put her arm around my shoulders. I could smell her sweet perfume, like lily flowers. I closed my eyes and pretended Mama was holding me. It was probably all right if I thought it was Mama. If things had worked out right, if I had done it right, it would have been her holding me just that way, and Dane would be pacing the hospital floor waiting for news of his daddy and saying we just got to wait through this bad time. Mama and Dane, Dane and Mama, where were they? What’s going to happen to Grandaddy Opal—and me?

  Mr. Eugene Wadell came over with our drinks and handed them to us.

  “I think if we could get together in a circle and focus on Mr. McCloy’s heart and circulatory system—I mean, if we could just visualize healing . . .” Mr. Wadell’s voice trailed off and he looked around for Gigi.

  “Prayer, you mean,” said Miss Emmaline.

  “Uh—” Mr. Wadell pulled open his can of Sprite and took a sip.

  Gigi came up behind him. “No,” she said. “It’s more like a séance where you visualize the person you’re trying to contact, only this time we’ll be contacting Opal’s heart and telling it to start beating again.” She looked at Mr. Wadell. “But I don’t think Opal would want . . .”

  Miss Emmaline stood, pulling me up with her. “Honey, if it ain’t beating by now, he’s long dead.”

  Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole heard her and rushed over to us. “He’s dead?” they both said, looking at all our faces for the answer.

  The doctor answered them. He had come up behind us, looking tired and grizzled as if he had been on duty for days. He sighed with his words when he spoke. “Mr. McCloy’s fine.”

  “Praise the Lord,” said Miss Emmaline.

  The doctor turned to her and spoke as if it were just the two of them standing there.

  “It was a mild attack, but of course we’ll keep him here a few days for observation. If you want to see him, check at the information station and they’ll give you his room number.” Then he bowed to her and left.

  Grandaddy Opal was awake when we came into his room. He had an IV needle stuck in his hand and an oxygen tube running into his nose. He looked pale, and even his hair looked sick, all matted down against his head and face, but his eyes were open and alert.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, lifting his free hand off the bed a little.

  I hurried to his side. I wanted to be in front of the others and not pushed out of the way. I wanted to see him. Gigi stood on his other side and didn’t say anything.

  I touched his arm, and he took my hand. His hand was cold like mine, and shaking; his hands were always shaking. He told me once it was because he drank too much cola, but Gigi said he had nerve problems. Was that why he’d had a heart attack?

  “Miracle.” Grandaddy Opal’s voice was hoarse. He removed the oxygen tube from his nose and coughed, then replaced it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Hooey! We’re all okay, ain’t we?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, sure we are. It ain’t like
you had anything to do with it. Now,” he looked at the others, “how long am I supposed to stay in this here hoosegow?”

  “Just a few days, I think,” Miss Emmaline said. Gigi stayed quiet and studied the IV needle going into Grandaddy Opal’s hand.

  “And then what? Have you thought about where we’re all going to stay? Y’all been talking it over?”

  “We’re heading home in the morning,” Uncle Toole said, squeezing Aunt Casey with his arm around her shoulder. “Once we’re sure you’re okay and all, I mean.”

  “Opal, you can stay with me for a while,” Miss Emmaline said. Uncle Toole let out a hoot. She ignored him. “Miracle and Gigi, too.”

  “Miracle isn’t staying with you or him,” Gigi said, stirring herself and backing away from the bed. “All this behind-my-back doings with the dancing lessons. No, we’ll go stay with Mrs. Hewlett, that way I can be close by for my Other Realms meetings. And if she doesn’t have room in her home, we’ll stay at her gift shop.” Gigi twisted around to look for Mr. Wadell. He was standing by the door drinking down his Sprite and staring out into the hallway.

  Then Grandaddy Opal said to me, “Girlie, run on and get me a Coke, my mouth is desert dry.”

  I lifted the unopened Coke can I held in my other hand. “You can have mine,” I said.

  “Nah, I want one of them.” His eyes shifted to the doorway and Mr. Wadell’s can of Sprite. “Get me one of them.”

  I looked around at everyone, then back to Grandaddy Opal. “But will they let you . . .”

  “I don’t care what they’ll let me do or not. Get me one of them danged sodas!”

  Gigi handed me some money, and I handed her my Coke and ran out of the room. I knew when I got back everything would be decided. I feared Gigi and I would end up staying with Mr. Eugene Wadell, and I had the sneaking suspicion that he lived with his ninety-year-old mama who still helped him get dressed every morning. He always wore his pants belted way up over his jiggly waist and his shirt looked like his mama tucked him in real good every day before he stepped out the door. Besides that, I didn’t trust him. Even though Grandaddy Opal seemed to be okay, I wasn’t so sure he could predict the future. I had the feeling everything was not going to turn out all right the way he said it would.

  Aunt Casey once said the channeling and mystic vibrations he was always feeling were phony baloney, and I agreed. She said Mr. Wadell just hung around Gigi to pick up her secrets. “He thinks she’s got a bag of tricks stored away somewhere and he wants at it,” she said. “Wait till he finds out she’s for real.”

  Then Uncle Toole had said, “No, wait till Gigi finds out he’s a phony, then we’ll see the gunpowder fly.”

  I dropped the money in the soda machine and pressed the Sprite button. On the way back, I imagined what it would be like to live with Miss Emmaline all the time. I pictured her living in a broom-swept house, with everything in its proper place and all her furniture stuffed fat with feathers. I pictured her singing while she cooked, the rich-smelling sauces and gravies bubbling and dancing merrily in their pots.

  It was real quiet when I got back to the room. Everyone turned to look at me. I brushed past them and set Grandaddy Opal’s soda on his bedside table. He looked at it as if it were arsenic. When I turned around, Aunt Casey was there holding her hands out to me. She had just put on a fresh coat of red lipstick, red for fire and rage, and she was smiling at me with such a funny smile, a fake, distorted smile, it scared me. I backed away from her.

  “Well now,” she said, her voice pitched high and strange, “what do you think about staying with your aunt Casey, girl? Won’t that be a hoot? Why, it’ll be just like a slumber party.”

  Aunt Casey kept smiling and Uncle Toole joined her, wrapping his arm back around her shoulder like he was thinking of having it glued there.

  “You, me, and Gigi?” I asked.

  Gigi and Grandaddy Opal exchanged a look, and I knew I was going alone. I nodded my head. I understood. They knew it was all my fault.

  Chapter 13

  I SAID GOOD-BYE to Grandaddy Opal the next afternoon. He was sitting up in his hospital bed looking more like himself without the tube running up his nose. Miss Emmaline sat in a chair next to him.

  “Hey, girl,” he said, “I ain’t contagious, come up close where I can see you.”

  I inched closer and leaned against his bed, touching the blanket right near his hand.

  “You got Etain with you?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know I could take her with me.”

  “’Course you can. You think I’m going to ride her? Now you have Casey and Toole stop by the garage and pick her up, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Miss Emmaline stood up and patted my shoulder. “You’ll come see us, won’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  Grandaddy Opal tapped his hand on the bedside rail. “Hey, it ain’t permanent. Once I get me a new house built, we’ll be back together again, same as always.”

  Gigi said almost the same thing when I said goodbye to her.

  I met her back at Grandaddy Opal’s place. She was in the garage picking up the bits and pieces that were hers.

  “This will just be for a few weeks,” she had said. “Just till things get settled. Here’s Mrs. Hewlett’s number in case you need anything, and you have the gift shop number, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, you make sure you come see me often and wear your purple. You make sure you wear your purple. I’ll send you some money and you go shopping and get yourself some new things. I’ll make sure to send you extra for your birthday. My gift—all this stuff’s ruined.” She waved her hand at our belongings stacked in wet piles in the garage.

  I turned my head and searched the piles, thinking I’d see her gift crushed and wet and wrapped in Mrs. Hewlett’s trademark angels wrapping paper—an idea suggested by the late Mr. Hewlett through Gigi. I saw Dane’s bathrobe instead, and as soon as Gigi had said her final good-byes, I ran over to the pile of wet clothes, pulled out the robe, and wore it shivering in the back of Uncle Toole’s pickup all the way to Alabama.

  The last time I’d been in Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey’s house had been about two months before Dane melted. It had been Uncle Toole’s birthday and we were having a pig roast in their backyard with all of Uncle Toole’s mover buddies. Dane had stayed in the house with Gigi and some of the other women who were cooking the butter beans and collards and other vegetables. He claimed he no longer ate pig and sat in a chair in the corner writing stuff down in the notepad he carried with him whenever he left the house. Gigi told him it wasn’t the pig keeping him in the house but the company. She said he had always just naturally preferred the company of women. He slammed down his notepad and said if she wanted to know the truth, he preferred no company at all, especially hers. Then he stormed out of the house and sat in the van in one-hundred-degree heat and refused to come back in the house.

  Nothing had changed in Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey’s house since that last visit. The stale odor of cigarettes still permeated the house—the curtains, the carpets, the furniture, the clothes, even the dishes. My first glass of water brought it all back. Everything tasted like ash.

  The living room and dining room were still jammed with Uncle Toole’s junk, stuff people moving out of their homes no longer wanted. They gave him broken fans and heaters, and toasters and televisions. Chairs with their backs broken off and sofas with the stuffing popping out like newly sprouting bolls of cotton were all heaped together, waiting for repair. I saw the familiar pile of shoes—Aunt Casey’s same old high heels in silver and gold and shiny black and white, and Uncle Toole’s same old work boots, all of them clumped together just outside the hall closet. The only thing different at all was the mess on the kitchen table. It used to be cluttered with old newspapers and the Confederate mugs and dishes and miniature cannons Uncle Toole had collected. These had been moved to the countertops to make room for Aunt Casey’s p
sychology course work. Now the table was covered with books and papers, a typewriter, and a giant overflowing Confederate ashtray.

  They gave me Aunt Casey’s wig room for a bedroom. She kept all her sewing and cutting supplies on a long table that looked just like the one at the back of my old dance studio—the one at the church with the thirty-two-cup coffee pot on it. She kept her wigs on plastic heads that lined the shelves across from the broken-backed couch that became my bed. The wig heads had no faces, just indentations where the eyes should be and a mound where the nose was supposed to be and no mouth at all. At night those heads stared at me, watched me sleeping, whispered nightmares into my ears. I didn’t sleep much anymore. I figured it was only for a few weeks. I could go without sleep for a few weeks. But those weeks turned into months and I was still struggling to sleep, still in Alabama, still living with Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole.

  In school, I got in trouble for erasing my name off the blackboard. The English teacher had put our names in groups up on the board. I was in the Wednesday group. On Wednesday, my group had to read their short stories to the class. I didn’t like seeing my name up there, separate from me. I didn’t like going home knowing that my name was still there on the blackboard, and I feared returning to school in the morning and finding my name gone. I erased my name. I took it back. The English teacher put it back up. I erased it again, and he sent a note home to Aunt Casey.

  Aunt Casey was too busy. She worked all day at her beauty salon and went to college three nights a week. When she was home she was either arguing with Uncle Toole or in my room sewing on her wigs. I couldn’t bother her.

  I gave the note to Uncle Toole. Ever since the tornado, he spent his free nights lying on his bed watching TV and looking like some kind of vice dispenser. He always had a beer resting on his chest and a spare cigarette in his belly button for when he stubbed out the one hanging in his mouth into the empty beer can resting in the pit of his arm. He could spend hours smoking and drinking and pushing on the TV set’s remote control buttons.