Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

  I looked around the classroom; the walls were papered with crayon drawings of cars and rabbits, the world seen by children. Nina’s are remote, fine landscapes done with Magic Markers. No purple suns with faces. No abrupt, sinister self-portraits. In the course of a year Nina suffered a violent and quick puberty, sprouted breasts larger than mine, grew tufts of hair under her arms. The little girls who were her friends shunned her. Most afternoons now she stands in the corner of the playground, her hair held back by barrettes, her forehead gleaming. Recently, Mrs. Tompkins tells me, a few girls with glasses and large vocabularies have taken to clustering around Nina at recess. They sit in the broken bark beneath the slide and listen to Nina as one might listen to a prophet. Her small eyes, exaggerated by her own glasses, must seem to them expressive of martyred beauty.

  “Perhaps you should send her to a psychiatrist,” Mrs. Tompkins suggested. She is a good teacher, better than most of her colleagues. “This could turn into a serious problem,” she said.

  “I’ll consider it,” I answered, but I was lying. I don’t have the money. And besides, I know psychiatry; it takes things away. I don’t think I could bear to see what would be left of Nina once she’d been purged of this fantasy.

  Today Nina sits in the corner of the recreation room. She is quiet, but I know her eyes are taking account of everything. The woman with the elephant-shaped earrings is talking to one of the patients about poetry qua poetry.

  “You know,” I say to her afterward, “it’s amazing that a man like Alden can write poems. He was a computer programmer. All our married life he never read a book.”

  “His work has real power,” the teacher says. “It reminds me of Michelangelo’s Bound Slaves. Its artistry is heightened by its rawness.”

  She hands me a sheet of mimeographed paper—some examples of the group’s work. “We all need a vehicle for self-expression,” she says.

  Later, sitting on the sun porch with Alden, I read through the poems. They are full of expletives and filthy remarks—the kind of remarks my brother used to make when he was hot for some girl at school. I am embarrassed. Nina, curled in an unused wheelchair, is reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” for the seventeenth time. We should go home soon, but I’m wary of the new car. I don’t trust its brakes. When I bought it, I tested the seatbelts over and over again.

  “Dinner?” Alden asks. Each simple word, I remember, is a labor for him. We must be patient.

  “Soon,” I say.

  “Dinner. It’s all—” He struggles to find the word; his brow is red, and the one seeing eye stares at the opposite wall.

  “Crap,” he says. He keeps looking at the wall. His eyes are expressionless. Once again, he breathes.

  Nearby, someone’s screaming, but we’re used to that.

  A year ago today. The day was normal. I took my son, Charles, to the dentist’s. I bought a leg of lamb to freeze. There was a sale on paper towels. Early in the evening, on our way to a restaurant, Alden drove the car through a fence, and over an embankment. I remember, will always remember, the way his body fell almost gracefully through the windshield, how the glass shattered around him in a thousand glittering pieces. Earlier, during the argument, he had said that seatbelts do more harm than good, and I had buckled myself in as an act of vengeance. This is the only reason I’m around to talk about it.

  I suffered a ruptured spleen in the accident, and twenty-two broken bones. Alden lost half his vision, much of his mobility, and the English language. After a week in intensive care they took him to his hospital and left me to mine. In the course of the six months, three weeks, and five days I spent there, eight women passed in and out of the bed across from me. The first was a tiny, elderly lady who spoke in hushed tones and kept the curtain drawn between us. Sometimes children were snuck in to visit her; they would stick their heads around the curtain rod and gaze at me, until a hand pulled them back and a voice loudly whispered, “Sorry!” I was heavily sedated; everything seemed to be there one minute, gone the next. After the old woman left, another took her place. Somewhere in the course of those months a Texan mother arrived who was undergoing chemotherapy, who spent her days putting on make-up, over and over again, until, by dusk, her face was the color of bruises.

  My hospital. What can you say about a place to which you become addicted? That you hate it, yet at the same time, that you need it. For weeks after my release I begged to be readmitted. I would wake crying, helplessly, in the night, convinced that the world had stopped, and I had been left behind, the only survivor. I’d call the ward I had lived on. “You’ll be all right, dear,” the nurses told me. “You don’t have to come back, and besides, we’ve kicked you out.” I wanted cups of Jell-O. I wanted there to be a light in the hall at night. I wanted to be told that six months hadn’t gone by, that it had all been, as it seemed, a single, endless moment.

  To compensate, I started to spend as much time as I could at Alden’s hospital. The head nurse suggested that if I was going to be there all day, I might as well do something productive. They badly needed volunteers on the sixth floor, the floor of the severely retarded, the unrecoverable ones. I agreed to go in the afternoons, imagining story corner with cute three-year-olds and seventy-year-olds. The woman I worked with most closely had been pregnant three times in the course of a year. Her partner was a pale-skinned young man who drooled constantly and could not keep his head up. Of course she had abortions. None of the administrators were willing to solicit funds for birth control because that would have meant admitting there was a need for birth control. We couldn’t keep the couple from copulating. They hid in the bushes and in the broom closet. They were obsessive about their lovemaking, and went to great lengths to find each other. When we locked them in separate rooms, they pawed the doors and screamed.

  The final pregnancy was the worst because the woman insisted that she wanted to keep the baby, and legally she had every right. Nora, my supervisor—a crusty, ancient nurse—had no sympathy, insisted that the woman didn’t even know what being pregnant meant. In the third month, sure enough, the woman started to scream and wouldn’t be calmed. Something was moving inside her, something she was afraid would try to kill her. The lover was no help. Just as easily as he’d begun with her, he’d forgotten her, and taken up with a Down syndrome dwarf who got transferred from Sonoma.

  The woman agreed to the third abortion. Because it was so late in the pregnancy, the procedure was painful and complicated. Nora shook her head and said, “What’s the world coming to?” Then she returned to her work.

  I admire women who shake their heads and say, “What’s the world coming to?” Because of them, I hope, it will always stop just short of getting there.

  Lately, in my own little ways, I, too, have been keeping the earth in orbit. Today, for instance, I take Alden out to the car and let him sit in the driver’s seat, which he enjoys. The hot vinyl burns his thighs. I calm him. I sit in the passenger seat, strapped in, while he slowly turns the wheel. He stares through the windshield at the other cars in the parking lot, imagining, perhaps, an endless landscape unfolding before him as he drives.

  Visiting hours end. I take Alden in from the parking lot, kiss him goodbye. He shares a room these days with a young man named Joe, a Vietnam veteran prone to motorcycle accidents. Because of skin-grafting, Joe’s face is six or seven different colors—beiges and taupes, mostly—but he can speak, and has recently regained the ability to smile. “Hey, pretty lady,” he says as we walk in. “It’s good to see a pretty lady around here.”

  Nina is sitting in the chair by the window, reading. She is sulky as we say goodbye to Alden, sulky as we walk out to the car. I suppose I should expect moodiness—some response to what she’s seen this last year. We go to pick up Charles, who is sixteen and spends most of his time in the Olde Computer Shoppe—a scarlet, plum-shaped building which serves as a reminder of what the fifties thought the future would look like. Charles is a computer prodigy, a certified genius, nothing special in our circu
it-fed community. He has some sort of deal going with the owner of the Computer Shoppe which he doesn’t like to talk about. It involves that magical stuff called software. He uses the Shoppe’s terminal and in exchange gives the owner a cut of his profits, which are bounteous. Checks arrive for him every day—from Puerto Rico, from Texas, from New York. He puts the money in a private bank account. He says that in a year he will have enough saved to put himself through college—a fact I can’t help but appreciate.

  The other day I asked him to please explain in English what it is that he does. He was sitting in my kitchen with Stuart Beckman, a fat boy with the kind of wispy mustache that indicates a willful refusal to begin shaving. Stuart is the dungeon master in the elaborate medieval wargames Charles’s friends conduct on Tuesday nights. Charles is Galadrian, a lowly elfin-warrior with minimal experience points. “Well,” Charles said, “let’s just say it’s a step toward the great computer age when we won’t need dungeon masters. A machine will create for us a whole world into which we can be transported. We’ll live inside the machine—for a day, a year, our whole lives—and we’ll live the adventures the machine creates for us. We’re at the forefront of a major breakthrough—artificial imagination. The possibilities, needless to say, are endless.”

  “You’ve invented that?” I asked, suddenly swelling with Mother Goddess pride.

  “The project is embryonic, of course,” Charles said. “But we’re getting there. Give it fifty years. Who knows?”

  Charles is angry as we drive home. He sifts furiously through an enormous roll of green print-out paper. As it unravels, the paper flies in Nina’s hair, but she is oblivious to it. Her face is pressed against the window so hard that her nose and lips have flattened out.

  I consider starting up a conversation, but as we pull into the driveway I, too, feel the need for silence. Our house is dark and unwelcoming tonight, as if it is suspicious of us. As soon as we are in the door, Charles disappears into his room, and the world of his mind. Nina sits at the kitchen table with me until she has finished her book. It is the last in the Narnia series, and as she closes it, her face takes on the disappointed look of someone who was hoping something would never end. Last month she entered the local library’s Read-a-Thon. Neighbors agreed to give several dollars to UNICEF for every book she read, not realizing that she would read fifty-nine.

  It is hard for me to look at her. She is sullen, and she is not pretty. My mother used to say it’s one thing to look ugly, another to act it. Still, it must be difficult to be betrayed by your own body. The cells divide, the hormones explode; Nina had no control over the timing, much less the effects. The first time she menstruated she cried not out of fear but because she was worried she had contracted that disease which causes children to age prematurely. We’d seen pictures of them—wizened, hoary four-year-olds, their skin loose and wrinkled, their teeth already rotten. I assured her that she had no such disease, that she was merely being precocious, as usual. In a few years, I told her, her friends would catch up.

  She stands awkwardly now, as if she wants to maintain a distance even from herself. Ugliness really is a betrayal. Suddenly she can trust nothing on earth; her body is no longer a part of her, but her enemy.

  “Daddy was glad to see you today, Nina,” I say.

  “Good.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  She still does not look at me. “No,” she says. “Nothing.”

  Later in the evening, my mother calls to tell me about her new cordless electric telephone. “I can walk all around the house with it,” she says. “Now, for instance, I’m in the kitchen, but I’m on my way to the bathroom.” Mother believes in Christmas newsletters, and the forces of fate. Tonight she is telling me about Mr. Garvey, a local politician and neighbor who was recently arrested. No one knows the details of the scandal; Mother heard somewhere that the boys involved were young, younger than Charles. “His wife just goes on, does her gardening as if nothing happened,” she tells me. “Of course, we don’t say anything. What could we say? She knows we avoid mentioning it. Her house is as clean as ever. I even saw him the other day. He was wearing a sable sweater just like your father’s. He told me he was relaxing for the first time in his life, playing golf, gardening. She looks ill, if you ask me. When I was your age I would have wondered how a woman could survive something like that, but now it doesn’t surprise me to see her make do. Still, it’s shocking. He always seemed like such a family man.”

  “She must have known,” I say. “It’s probably been a secret between them for years.”

  “I don’t call secrets any basis for a marriage,” Mother says. “Not in her case. Not in yours, either.”

  Lately she’s been convinced that there’s some awful secret between Alden and me. I told her that we’d had a fight the night of the accident, but I didn’t tell her why. Not because the truth was too monumentally terrible. The subject of our fight was trivial. Embarrassingly trivial. We were going out to dinner. I wanted to go to a Chinese place. Alden wanted to try an Italian health food restaurant that a friend of his at work had told him about. Our family has always fought a tremendous amount about restaurants. Several times, when the four of us were piled in the car, Alden would pull off the road. “I will not drive with this chaos,” he’d say. The debates over where to eat usually ended in tears, and abrupt returns home. The children ran screaming to their rooms. We ended up eating tunafish.

  Mother is convinced I’m having an affair. “Alden’s still a man,” she says to me. “With a man’s needs.”

  We have been talking so long that the earpiece of the phone is sticking to my ear. “Mother,” I say, “please don’t worry. I’m hardly in shape for it.”

  She doesn’t laugh. “I look at Mrs. Garvey, and I’m moved,” she says. “Such strength of character. You should take it as a lesson. Before I hang up, I want to tell you about something I read, if you don’t mind.”

  My mother loves to offer information, and has raised me in the tradition. We constantly repeat movie plots, offer authoritative statistics from television news specials. “What did you read, Mother?” I ask.

  “There is a man who is studying the Holocaust,” she says. “He makes a graph. One axis is fulfillment/despair, and the other is success/failure. That means that there are four groups of people—those who are fulfilled by success, whom we can understand, and those who are despairing even though they’re successful, like so many people we know, and those who are despairing because they’re failures. Then there’s the fourth group—the people who are fulfilled by failure, who don’t need hope to live. Do you know who those people are?”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Those people,” my mother says, “are the ones who survived.”

  There is a long, intentional silence.

  “I thought you should know,” she says, “that I am now standing outside, on the back porch. I can go as far as seven hundred feet from the house.”

  Recently I’ve been thinking often about something terrible I did when I was a child—something which neither I nor Mother has ever really gotten over. I did it when I was six years old. One day at school my older sister, Mary Elise, asked me to tell Mother that she was going to a friend’s house for the afternoon to play with some new Barbie dolls. I was mad at Mother that day, and jealous of Mary Elise. When I got home, Mother was feeding the cat, and without even saying hello (she was mad at me for some reason, too) she ordered me to take out the garbage. I was filled with rage, both at her and my sister, whom I was convinced she favored. And then I came up with an awful idea. “Mother,” I said, “I have something to tell you.” She turned around. Her distracted face suddenly focused on me. I realized I had no choice but to finish what I’d started. “Mary Elise died today,” I said. “She fell off the jungle gym and split her head open.”

  At first she just looked at me, her mouth open. Then her eyes—I remember this distinctly—went in two different directions. For a brief moment, the tenuousness of ev
erything—the house, my life, the universe—became known to me, and I had a glimpse of how easily the fragile network could be exploded.

  Mother started shaking me. She was making noises but she couldn’t speak. The minute I said the dreaded words I started to cry; I couldn’t find a voice to tell her the truth. She kept shaking me. Finally I managed to gasp, “I’m lying, I’m lying. It’s not true.” She stopped shaking me, and hoisted me up into the air. I closed my eyes and held my breath, imagining she might hurl me down against the floor. “You monster,” she whispered. “You little bastard,” she whispered between clenched teeth. Her face was twisted, her eyes glistening. She hugged me very fiercely and then she threw me onto her lap and started to spank me. “You monster, you monster,” she screamed between sobs. “Never scare me like that again, never scare me like that again.”

  By the time Mary Elise got home, we were composed. Mother had made me swear I’d never tell her what had happened, and I never have. We had an understanding, from then on, or perhaps we had a secret. It has bound us together, so that now we are much closer to each other than either of us is to Mary Elise, who married a lawyer and moved to Hawaii.

  The reason I cannot forget this episode is because I have seen, for the second time, how easily apocalypse can happen. That look in Alden’s eyes, the moment before the accident, was a look I’d seen before.

  I hear you’re from another planet,” I say to Nina after we finish dinner.