Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

“Tell me about your family, Wayne,” Mrs. Campbell says that night, as they drive toward town. They are going to see an Esther Williams movie at the local revival house: an underwater musical, populated by mermaids, underwater Rockettes.

  “My father was a lawyer,” Wayne says. “He had an office in Queens, with a neon sign. I think he’s probably the only lawyer in the world who had a neon sign. Anyway, he died when I was ten. My mother never remarried. She lives in Queens. Her great claim to fame is that when she was twenty-two she went on ‘The $64,000 Question.’ Her category was mystery novels. She made it to sixteen thousand before she got tripped up.”

  “When I was about ten, I wanted you to go on ‘Jeopardy,’ ” Neil says to his mother. “You really should have, you know. You would have won.”

  “You certainly loved ‘Jeopardy,’ ” Mrs. Campbell says. “You used to watch it during dinner. Wayne, does your mother work?”

  “No,” he says. “She lives off investments.”

  “You’re both only children,” Mrs. Campbell says. Neil wonders if she is ruminating on the possible connection between that coincidence and their “alternative life style.”

  The movie theater is nearly empty. Neil sits between Wayne and his mother. There are pillows on the floor at the front of the theater, and a cat is prowling over them. It casts a monstrous shadow every now and then on the screen, disturbing the sedative effect of water ballet. Like a teenager, Neil cautiously reaches his arm around Wayne’s shoulder. Wayne takes his hand immediately. Next to them, Neil’s mother breathes in, out, in, out. Neil timorously moves his other arm and lifts it behind his mother’s neck. He does not look at her, but he can tell from her breathing that she senses what he is doing. Slowly, carefully, he lets his hand drop on her shoulder; it twitches spasmodically, and he jumps, as if he had received an electric shock. His mother’s quiet breathing is broken by a gasp; even Wayne notices. A sudden brightness on the screen illuminates the panic in her eyes, Neil’s arm frozen above her, about to fall again. Slowly, he lowers his arm until his fingertips touch her skin, the fabric of her dress. He has gone too far to go back now; they are all too far.

  Wayne and Mrs. Campbell sink into their seats, but Neil remains stiff, holding up his arms, which rest on nothing. The movie ends, and they go on sitting just like that.

  “I’m old,” Mrs. Campbell says later, as they drive back home. “I remember when those films were new. Your father and I went to one on our first date. I loved them, because I could pretend that those women underwater were flying—they were so graceful. They really took advantage of Technicolor in those days. Color was something to appreciate. You can’t know what it was like to see a color movie for the first time, after years of black-and-white. It’s like trying to explain the surprise of snow to an East Coaster. Very little is new anymore, I fear.”

  Neil would like to tell her about his own nostalgia, but how can he explain that all of it revolves around her? The idea of her life before he was born pleases him. “Tell Wayne how you used to look like Esther Williams,” he asks her.

  She blushes. “I was told I looked like Esther Williams, but really more like Gene Tierney,” she says. “Not beautiful, but interesting. I like to think I had a certain magnetism.”

  “You still do,” Wayne says, and instantly recognizes the wrongness of his comment. Silence and a nervous laugh indicate that he has not yet mastered the family vocabulary.

  When they get home, the night is once again full of the sound of crickets. Mrs. Campbell picks up a flashlight and calls the dogs. “Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny,” she shouts, and the dogs amble from their various corners. She pushes them out the door to the back yard and follows them. Neil follows her. Wayne follows Neil, but hovers on the porch. Neil walks behind her as she tramps through the garden. She holds out her flashlight, and snails slide from behind bushes, from under rocks, to where she stands. When the snails become visible, she crushes them underfoot. They make a wet, cracking noise, like eggs being broken.

  “Nights like this,” she says, “I think of children without pants on, in hot South American countries. I have nightmares about tanks rolling down our street.”

  “The weather’s never like this in New York,” Neil says. “When it’s hot, it’s humid and sticky. You don’t want to go outdoors.”

  “I could never live anywhere else but here. I think I’d die. I’m too used to the climate.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “No, I mean it,” she says. “I have adjusted too well to the weather.”

  The dogs bark and howl by the fence. “A cat, I suspect,” she says. She aims her flashlight at a rock, and more snails emerge—uncountable numbers, too stupid to have learned not to trust light.

  “I know what you were doing at the movie,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I know what you were doing.”

  “What? I put my arm around you.”

  “I’m sorry, Neil,” she says. “I can only take so much. Just so much.”

  “What do you mean?” he says. “I was only trying to show affection.”

  “Oh, affection—I know about affection.”

  He looks up at the porch, sees Wayne moving toward the door, trying not to listen.

  “What do you mean?” Neil says to her.

  She puts down the flashlight and wraps her arms around herself. “I remember when you were a little boy,” she says. “I remember, and I have to stop remembering. I wanted you to grow up happy. And I’m very tolerant, very understanding. But I can only take so much.”

  His heart seems to have risen into his throat. “Mother,” he says, “I think you know my life isn’t your fault. But for God’s sake, don’t say that your life is my fault.”

  “It’s not a question of fault,” she says. She extracts a Kleenex from her pocket and blows her nose. “I’m sorry, Neil. I guess I’m just an old woman with too much on her mind and not enough to do.” She laughs halfheartedly. “Don’t worry. Don’t say anything,” she says. “Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny, time for bed!”

  He watches her as she walks toward the porch, silent and regal. There is the pad of feet, the clinking of dog tags as the dogs run for the house.

  He was twelve the first time she saw him march in a parade. He played the tuba, and as his elementary-school band lumbered down the streets of their then small town she stood on the sidelines and waved. Afterward, she had taken him out for ice cream. He spilled some on his red uniform, and she swiped at it with a napkin. She had been there for him that day, as well as years later, at that more memorable parade; she had been there for him every day.

  Somewhere over Iowa, a week later, Neil remembers this scene, remembers other days, when he would find her sitting in the dark, crying. She had to take time out of her own private sorrow to appease his anxiety. “It was part of it,” she told him later. “Part of being a mother.”

  “The scariest thing in the world is the thought that you could unknowingly ruin someone’s life,” Neil tells Wayne. “Or even change someone’s life. I hate the thought of having such control. I’d make a rotten mother.”

  “You’re crazy,” Wayne says. “You have this great mother, and all you do is complain. I know people whose mothers have disowned them.”

  “Guilt goes with the territory,” Neil says.

  “Why?” Wayne asks, perfectly seriously.

  Neil doesn’t answer. He lies back in his seat, closes his eyes, imagines he grew up in a house in the mountains of Colorado, surrounded by snow—endless white snow on hills. No flat places, and no trees; just white hills. Every time he has flown away, she has come into his mind, usually sitting alone in the dark, smoking. Today she is outside at dusk, skimming leaves from the pool.

  “I want to get a dog,” Neil says.

  Wayne laughs. “In the city? It’d suffocate.”

  The hum of the airplane is druglike, dazing. “I want to stay with you a long time,” Neil says.

  “I know.” Imperceptibly, Wayne
takes his hand.

  “It’s very hot there in the summer, too. You know, I’m not thinking about my mother now.”

  “It’s O.K.”

  For a moment, Neil wonders what the stewardess or the old woman on the way to the bathroom will think, but then he laughs and relaxes.

  Later, the plane makes a slow circle over New York City, and on it two men hold hands, eyes closed, and breathe in unison.

  Counting Months

  Mrs. Harrington was sitting in the oncology department waiting room and thinking about chicken when the realization came over her. It was like a fist knocking the wind out of her, making her need to gasp and whoop air. Suddenly the waiting room was sucking up and churning; the nurses, the magazine racks, the other patients turning over and over again like laundry in a washer. Faces grew huge, then shrank back away from her until they were unrecogniz­able. Dimly she felt the magazine she had been reading slip out of her hand and onto the floor.

  Then it was over.

  “Ma’am?” the woman next to her was asking. “Ma’am, are you all right?” she was asking, holding up the magazine Mrs. Harrington had dropped. It was Family Circle. “You dropped this,” the woman said.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Harrington. She took the magazine. She walked over to the fish tank and dropped herself onto a soft bench. The fish tank was built into a wall that separated two waiting rooms and could be looked into from either side. Pregnant guppies, their egg sacs visible through translucent skin, were swimming in circles against the silhouette of a face, vastly distorted, that peered in from the other waiting room. One angelfish remained still, near the bottom, near the plastic diver in the corner.

  Mrs. Harrington’s breath was fogging the fish tank.

  The thought had come to her the way the carrier of a plague comes to an innocent town. She was reading a Shake ’n’ Bake ad, thinking about the chicken waiting to be cooked in the refrigerator at home, and whether she would broil it; she was tense. She began to consider the date, December 17th: Who was born on December 17th? Did anything historic happen on December 17th?

  Then, through some untraceable process, that date—December 17th—infected her with all the horror of memory and death. For today was the day she was supposed to be dead by.

  Mrs. Harrington?” she heard the head nurse call.

  “Yes,” she said. She got up and moved toward the long hallway along which the doctors kept their secret offices, their examination rooms. She moved with a new fear of the instruments she could glimpse through slightly open doors.

  It was an intern who had told her, “Six months.”

  Then Dr. Sanchez had stood in front of her with his greater experience and said, “That’s youthful hubris. Of course, we can’t date these things. We’re going to do everything we can for you, Anna. We’re going to do everything humanly possible. You could live a long time, a full life.”

  But she had marked the date on a mental calendar: six months. December 17th would be six months. And so it was. And here she was, still alive, having almost forgotten she was to die.

  She undressed quickly, put on the white paper examination gown, lay down on the cold table. Everything is the same, she told herself. Broil the chicken. Chicken for dinner. The Lauranses’ party tonight. Everything is the same.

  Then the horror swept through her again. Six months ago she had been planning to be dead by this day. Her children on their way to a new home. But it had been a long time.

  Things dragged on. Radiation therapy, soon chemotherapy, all legitimate means of postponement. She lost quite a bit of hair, but a helpful lady at the radiation therapy center directed her to a hairdresser who specialized in such cases as hers, could cut around the loss and make it imperceptible. Things dragged on. She made dinner for her children.

  She went to one meeting of a therapy group, and they told her to scream out her aggression and to beat a pillow with a hammer. She didn’t go back.

  “Hello, Anna,” Dr. Sanchez said, coming in, sitting at the opposite end of the table. He smelled of crushed cigars, leather. “How’re things?”

  He obviously didn’t remember. December 17th.

  “Fine,” she said.

  As if she didn’t notice, he began to feel around her thighs for lumps.

  “The kids?” he said.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “You’ve been feeling all right, I hear,” he said.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “And you aren’t finding the results of the radiation too trying?”

  “No, not bad.”

  “Well, I’ve got to be honest with you, when you start the chemotherapy in January, you’re not going to feel so hot. You’ll probably lose quite a bit of weight, and more hair. Feel like you have a bad flu for a while.”

  “I could stand to lose a few pounds,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  “Well, what’s this?” said Dr. Sanchez, his hand closing around a new lump.

  “You know, they come and go,” said Mrs. Harrington, turning over. “That one on my back is pretty much gone now.”

  “Um-hum,” said Dr. Sanchez, pressing between her buttocks. “And have you had any pain from the one that was pressing on the kidney?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good, very good.”

  He went on in silence. Every now and then he gave grunts of approval, but Mrs. Harrington had long since realized that rather than indicating some improvement in her condition, these noises simply signified that the disease was following the course he had mapped out for it. She lay there. It no longer embarrassed her, because he knew every inch of her body. Though there were certain things she had to be sure of before she went. She always made sure she was clean everywhere.

  “Well,” Dr. Sanchez said, pulling off his plastic gloves and throwing them into a repository, “you seem to be doing fine, Anna.”

  Fine. What did that mean? That the disease was fine, or her?

  “I guess I just keep on, don’t I?” she said.

  “Seriously, Anna, I think it’s marvellous the way you’re handling this thing. I’ve had patients who’ve just given up to depression. A lot of them end up in hospitals. But you keep up an active life. Still on the PTA? Still entering cooking contests? I’ll never forget those terrific brownies you brought. The nurses were talking about them for a week.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. He didn’t know. No more than the woman hitting the pillow with the hammer. All these months she had been so “active,” she suddenly knew for a lie. You had to lie to live through death, or else you die through what’s left of your life.

  As she got dressed she wondered if she’d ever be able to sleep again, or if it would be as it was at the beginning, when she would go to sleep in fear of never waking up, and wake up unsure if she were really alive.

  Lying there, terrified, in her flannel nightgown, the mouthpiece firmly in place (to prevent teeth-grinding), her eyes searching the ceiling for familiar cracks, her hands pinching what flesh they could find, as if pain could prove life.

  It had taken her many months to learn to fall asleep easily again.

  She was one with the people in the lobby now. She had been aloof from them before. One she knew, Libby, a phone operator. She waved from across the waiting room. Then there was the man with the bandage around his head. A younger woman, probably a daughter, always had to bring him. She noticed an older man with a goiter on his neck, or something that looked like a goiter, in the corner, looking at a fish.

  “Good night,” she said to the nurses, tying her scarf around her head. Paper Santa Clauses were pasted to the walls; a tiny tree gleamed dully in a corner. Outside the waiting room, the hospital corridors extended dim and yellow all the way to the revolving door. Mrs. Harrington pushed at the glass, and the first gusts of wind rose up, seeping in from outside. She pushed the glass away, emerging, thankfully, outside, and the cold, heavy wind seemed to bruise her alive again, brushing away the coat of exhaustion that had gathered on he
r eyelids while she was inside. It was cold, very cold. Her small heels crushed frozen puddles underfoot, so that they fragmented into tiny crystal mirrors. Rain drizzled down. California winter. She smoothed her scarf under her chin and walked briskly toward her car, a tall, thick woman, a genteel yacht in a harbor.

  The car was cold. She turned on the heat and the radio. The familiar voice of the local newscaster droned into the upholstered interior, permeated it like the thick, unnatural heat. Rain clicked against the roof. Slowly she was escaping the hospital, merging into regular traffic. She saw the stores lit up, late-afternoon shoppers rushing home to dinner. She wanted to be one of them, to push a cart down the aisles of a supermarket again. She pulled into the Lucky parking lot.

  In the supermarket the air was cool and fresh, smelled of peat and wet sod and lettuce. Small, high voices chirped through the public address system:

  Our cheeks are red and rosy,

  and comfy cozy are we;

  We’re snuggled up together

  like birds of a feather should be.

  Mrs. Harrington was amazed by the variety of brightly colored foods and packages, as if she had never noticed them before. She felt among the apples until she found one hard enough to indicate freshness; she examined lettuce heads. She bought SpaghettiOs for her youngest son, gravy mix, Sugar Pops. A young family pushed a cart past her, exuberant, the baby propped happily in the little seat at the top of the shopping cart, his bottom on red plastic and his tiny legs extending through the metal slats. She was forgetting.

  An old woman stood ahead of her in the nine-items-or-less line. She was wearing a man’s torn peacoat. She bought a bag of hard candy with seventy-eight cents in pennies, then moved out the electric doors. “We get some weird ones,” the checkout boy told Mrs. Harrington. He had red hair and bad acne and reminded her of her oldest son.

  Back in the car, she told herself, “Try to forget. Things aren’t any different than they were yesterday. You were happy yesterday. You weren’t thinking about it yesterday. You’re not any different.” But she was. The difference was growing inside her, through the lymph nodes, exploring her body.