Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

  “Seth,” she says.

  There is a sound of thrashing inside the room.

  “Seth, wake up,” Suzanne says. “It’s already eleven.”

  “All right, all right,” he mumbles, “Give me ten minutes.”

  “Seth, it’s your party, you’ve got to get up.”

  “Leave me alone!” he shouts. Suzanne smiles, knowing that if she gets him angry enough, he’ll be too riled to sleep. It’s what she calls a mother’s secret.

  Now she pushes the door open, and the leak of sunlight engulfs her. Seth is splayed diagonally across the double bed, in his underwear, wrapped in a tangle of sheets and blankets.

  “Come on,” Suzanne says in a singsong voice. “It’s time to get up!”

  He sits up in bed quite suddenly and stares at her, furious. “Do you know how much sleep I got during finals week?” he asks.

  “How much?”

  “Maybe ten minutes. Can’t I make up for it now?”

  “Do you still want to?” Suzanne asks. Seth looks at her with the confused expression he often had as a child, when he would come into the kitchen in the morning, bleary-eyed, and slurp down the sweet milk in which he had drowned his cereal.

  “Happy party day,” she says, and walks out of the room.

  But when Suzanne gets downstairs, she finds that her quiet kitchen is suddenly ablaze with activity. The caterers have arrived—a crew of large, stubbornly bourgeois black women, all related to each other in obscure ways, who have recently been earning an impressive reputation in this part of Long Island. The women are dressed in various combinations of black-and-white polyester which look to Suzanne like military uniforms, and seem to indicate a complicated hierarchy. Suzanne’s mother, Pearl, has also arrived; she is now talking to a particularly large woman of middle age whose black hostess dress (without a strip of white) signals supreme authority. They are going over the hors d’oeuvres.

  “Curried lobster puffs, sausage rolls au gratin, sesame chicken wings, cheese-filled mini-croissants, Polynesian turkey meatballs, baked brie. Oh, and the chopped liver,” the woman says.

  “Yes,” Pearl says, “and tell me, Mrs. Ferguson, is the chopped liver in a shape, or what?”

  “It’s in the shape of a heart,” Mrs. Ferguson says.

  “A heart!” says Pearl.

  Mrs. Ferguson folds her arms. “What’s wrong with a heart?” she asks.

  “Oh, nothing, nothing,” Pearl says. “Why, look, here comes my daughter the hostess.”

  “Hello,” Suzanne says, grasping Mrs. Ferguson’s hand. “I’m glad to see my mother’s taken charge already. I hope things are going all right.”

  “Things are fine but you don’t have a pastry tube!” shouts a tiny old woman in a chef’s hat. “What you mean not having a pastry tube?”

  “No pastry tube!” Suzanne says. “Are you sure? I’ve just moved in and I don’t know what we have.”

  “I’ll have to send the girl back in the van,” the old woman says, shaking her head with annoyance. “We’ll be late because of this. Gloria!”

  A teenaged girl rushes over to consult with the old woman in the chef’s hat. In the meantime, all around Suzanne, other girls go to work—rolling up the sausages, filling the mini-croissants, icing the cake.

  Into the kitchen now strides Suzanne’s daughter, Lynnette, who is twenty-three and a secretary in Manhattan. She is not a person who can slip into rooms quietly, and so everyone has turned to notice her. With Lynnette is her best friend and roommate, John, a tall, emaciated young man with caved-in cheeks. “Hello, Mother,” Lynnette says. “I see we’re just in time to get in the way.”

  Lynnette is wearing a black dress which looks like several lace slips sewn together. She has a flower in her hair, a wild pink geranium, and her face is streaked with purple and blue make-up. If she weren’t so fat, Suzanne thinks, she would look half decent, but Suzanne knows that Lynnette has chosen the dress specifically because it most explicitly reveals the bulges of her abdomen and buttocks. John is also dressed outrageously, in a purple suit and flaming yellow bow tie.

  “Hello, Mrs. Kaplan,” he says, the way (Suzanne thinks) he always says hello to her—grudgingly, and with an undertone of hatred. Suzanne is sure resentful Lynnette has filled his head with stories about her—the wicked witch—and as recompense, she is excessively cordial whenever she sees John. “Hello,” she says, taking his hand. “I’m so happy to see you again. Just wait till you taste that baked brie, it’s fabulous.”

  Nearby two of the girls who are rolling sausage rolls have stopped their work and are staring at John and Lynnette. They keep staring until Mrs. Ferguson slaps them simultaneously on the backs of their necks and tells them to get back to work.

  “Suzanne!” Pearl whispers fiercely, grabbing her daughter’s hand from behind. “The chopped liver in a heart shape! Those shvartzeh caterers put the chopped liver in a heart shape!”

  Now, puffing, Bruce enters the kitchen. He is wearing knee-length Bermuda shorts, and his skin has reddened to the shade of his hair from the ordeal of mowing. “Everything under control?” he asks, and all the women—even Suzanne—instinctively back away from his sweating male presence, as if it might contaminate the food.

  Bruce looks around himself shyly, and wraps his arms around his stomach, as if he imagines he is naked in his own kitchen. “Maybe I should just get out of the way,” he says.

  “That might be a good idea,” Suzanne says. She feels a certain tenderness toward him right now, as if he were a lost child. And yet she knows that tenderness is simply another cover for her true feeling toward him—the feeling of disappointment. They met in the depression therapy group. Bruce’s wife had up and left him and their children to go off to California with a twenty-two-year-old auto mechanic. Suzanne and Bruce fed each other’s misery and self-pity for a time, and then, drunk one night, they made love on the spur of the moment. As Suzanne tells it, Bruce made her feel attractive, like a real woman, for the first time in twenty years, she all but stopped eating, and the next week they eloped to Las Vegas.

  In the corner of the kitchen, Lynnette watches her mother watch Bruce, and smirks. She actually thinks, I am smirking. Everything about the house, the caterers, the party, confirms her worst suspicions. She has no doubt but that her mother is very happy with all of it, that every petit-bourgeois value she has ascribed to Suzanne is pathetically, miserably accurate.

  Though she would never admit it, Lynnette has been looking forward to this party with real ferocity. She is a loudmouthed girl whom most people find unpleasant, and she would tell you in a minute how much she hates herself. Her loyalties to others, though few, are fierce. John, for instance: She likes him more than anyone she knows her own age. John is gay, and his parents, who live only a few miles from Suzanne, will hardly speak to him. She must remember that he has probably been hurt more by this world even than she has, and she looks to him sympathetically, as his friend. She hopes her look gives him strength.

  Lynnette’s other great loyalty is to her father. All through her childhood the two of them cultivated a relationship which almost consciously excluded Suzanne and Seth. She will always remember the trips to the park that she and Herb took after dinner, and how up until she was thirteen or so, and too big to fit, he would push her on the swing, higher and higher, until the sky seemed to tilt wildly, and she was flying. She was a heavy little girl, but that never seemed to deter him. He picked her up effortlessly as if he were a ballet dancer, and she his prima ballerina. “You’re my favorite partner,” he’d tell her as he pushed her on the swing. “Your favorite?” she’d say. “Better than Mommy?” “Yes, better than Mommy,” he’d say. “Someday we’ll dance under the stars.”

  Years later, he fulfilled that promise. He had just moved in with Selena, and there was so much love between them that they seemed to need Lynnette to soak up the excess. They took her to the ballet, to see Peter Martins and Suzanne Farrell, and afterward for a spontaneous ride on the Staten Is
land Ferry, and there, under starlight, Herb took his daughter in his arms and danced with her while Selena sat by and beamed. Their clumsy pas de deux had no musical accompaniment, but Lynnette didn’t care. She felt as if Herb’s new life with Selena was her new life, as if his optimism might actually prove contagious. That night the world had seemed endless in its possibilities.

  Of course, soon afterward, Herb and Selena broke up. Herb’s been seeing another woman recently, an architect named Miriam, but Lynnette knows the excitement isn’t there. Theirs is the moderate, efficient love of older people who have led complicated lives. Though she misses Selena, she makes every effort to be cordial to Miriam, and wants to be her friend. Above all else, she is determined not to be perceived as the jealous daughter.

  Lynnette looks at her mother, who is discussing something with Mrs. Ferguson. Their relationship has never been easy, but only recently has Lynnette figured out why Suzanne resents her so much. It is because Lynnette has managed to retain what Suzanne has irretrievably lost: She has managed to retain Herb’s love. Across from her Bruce stands in a corner, cowed by so much activity: small, plump, meek Bruce. Suzanne is watching Bruce as well. For a brief second, mother’s and daughter’s stares meet. In recent conversations, Lynnette has heard Suzanne refer to Herb still as her husband, and not even catch the slip.

  They are both thinking the same thing, Lynnette knows. They are both thinking what a handsome, protective, intelligent man Herb is. The only difference is that what Suzanne thinks with a pang of regret and terror, Lynnette thinks—smirkingly—with a taste of triumph.

  John—his purple suit turning a strange shade of mauve in the shadows—is flirting with one of the girls who will serve lunch.

  “What’s Irish and sits on your porch?” he asks, and the girl giggles, shrugging her shoulders.

  “Patio furniture,” John says. The girl, who is not more than sixteen, now starts to laugh uncontrollably. It’s clear she doesn’t want to be laughing; she keeps looking over her shoulder, to see if Mrs. Ferguson is watching her. And indeed, Mrs. Ferguson occasionally throws sidelong glances at the girl, though it’s obvious she doesn’t intend to do anything now. She is waiting until after the party, when she can punish in private.

  Now John is telling an obscene story about Michael Jackson and the baby tiger on his record cover. Suzanne listens with some distaste. She does not trust John for a second. And not because he is gay, either. That has nothing to do with it. What annoys Suzanne about John is his intolerance. She remembers the day he and Lynnette first met Bruce, and Bruce had the mistaken impression that John was Lynnette’s boyfriend. He took him outside after dinner and walked him around the garden and told John that he had a future with Bruce’s real estate firm, if he wanted one. It seemed like the proper thing to do. Suzanne blushes at the thought of Bruce’s naïveté, but when she remembers overhearing Lynnette and John laughing uncontrollably, and mocking her husband, her embarrassment turns to anger and impatience.

  Lynnette is going through the cereal drawer. “Mom?” she asks. “Does Seth eat anything but Sugar Pops these days?”

  “Corn Bran,” Suzanne says.

  “I’m now in the room, so please don’t talk about me in the third person,” Seth says. He is standing in the doorway, wearing his droopy bathrobe. “Yes,” he says. “It’s me.”

  Pearl puts down the paper graduation cap she is constructing, and rushes over to hug her grandson. “Sethela,” she says, “you’re so big now. A real graduation boy.” She kisses him.

  Over the heads of Lynnette, Suzanne, and Pearl, John and Seth—the tallest people in the room by five or six inches—nod to each other.

  “Seth,” Suzanne says, “you got a card from Concetta.” She hands him an envelope postmarked Jamaica. “Ex-maid,” Lynnette whispers to John.

  Seth smiles, and tears open the envelope. The card has a picture of a happy white-faced boy holding some flowers on it. He opens it, wrinkles his brow, and begins to read, silently moving his lips.

  Now he looks up, smiles, and reads aloud: “God Bless you on your birthday.” He looks again at the card, and begins to study the second line.

  The tiny woman in the chef’s hat is whispering furiously to Mrs. Ferguson. After nodding a few times, Mrs. Ferguson walks out of the kitchen, beckoning Suzanne to follow her. Suzanne goes, sheepish, expecting punishment.

  “She wants all of you out of the kitchen,” Mrs. Ferguson says. “Now.”

  “O.K.,” Suzanne says. She goes back into the kitchen. “Come on, kids,” she says. “The caterers have work to do.”

  Seth is on the fourth line of the card.

  All through his childhood, Seth was a problem. Suzanne and Herb chastised him—for laziness, for addiction to television, even for occasional outbursts of hyperactive violence, during which he might bounce on their bed until the bedboard broke. He was a difficult child, and to compensate for the impenetrable closeness shared by Herb and Lynnette, Suzanne contrived an affection for him which had less to do with maternal instinct than with a mournful thirst for justice. Over the years, this bond of weakness has taken on enormous strength. Suzanne loves this difficult child, for reasons she cannot, and would not, want to articulate. And up until he was fourteen, Seth loved her as much in return.

  But Suzanne was a coward. When Herb almost casually called Seth stupid, she said nothing. When Herb doled out punishment after Seth got bad grades, she said nothing. Suzanne never thought to have him tested for a learning disability because above all else, she feared annoying Herb. When Seth’s guidance counselor told Suzanne of his dyslexia—adding crisply that she was shocked at how long it had gone unnoticed—Suzanne burst into a fit of tears so violent that the nurse had to be called.

  Herb decided that Seth should go to boarding school. He had been told of a place in Vermont that specialized in cases such as his. Before he broke the news, he told Seth he could have anything he wanted, and the boy’s face immediately darkened with suspicion, for he was a child who often wanted things fiercely, and rarely got them. After a few seconds Seth muttered that he might like a television for the back of the car. When Herb told him about the boarding school, Seth’s mouth opened, and water screened his eyes. Suzanne had to leave the room.

  Seth went to boarding school. At first he cried all the time, and begged to go home, but after a few weeks he adjusted to his new life. Since then, he has worked consistently and diligently to overcome the learning disability. He has won the praise and affection of his teachers. And he has told Suzanne that the school has come to seem to him more of a home than any place he’s ever lived.

  It occurs to Suzanne, from time to time, that she has lost Seth. Not the way mothers are supposed to lose their children—by loving them too much or hurting them or both—but the way one might lose a safety pin or a set of keys. Simply by distraction, by neglect. She might find him again soon, just as accidentally. Their lives might change, and they might come to need each other again. As it stands, she doesn’t worry about it because she is nearly as impressed by Seth’s capacity for recovery as she is by her own.

  There has been some debate within the family as to what Herb and Suzanne should give Seth as his graduation gift. Herb wanted to buy him a car, but Suzanne doesn’t trust Seth’s driving. She thought of a stereo system. Then Herb learned from Lynnette that what Seth really wanted was a sewing machine. He had developed an interest in fashion design, Seth had told Lynnette, and was even thinking about taking some courses at Parson’s in the fall. When Herb told Suzanne, she said, “I give up.” She was really surprised to find out that Seth was confiding things in Lynnette instead of her. Bruce was also surprised, but for a different reason. “Well,” he said, “I suppose if that’s what he really wants, it’s all right.” But everyone is still a little anxious about the gift. It does not seem quite the right thing for a boy graduating from prep school (even though the model Herb chose is state-of-the-art, with computerized controls). And Suzanne wonders how Seth will react. Aft
er all, he has never said a word to her about clothes design, or Parson’s, or wanting a sewing machine. He has only spoken to Lynnette. How will he feel when he receives the present, and sees that his private ambitions have become part of a public gesture?

  The guests begin to arrive around two. There is no sign of the morning’s chaos; flowers have been placed strategically around the patio, and the youngest of the caterers’ girls are standing in clean white aprons, holding trays of hot hors d’oeuvres, at the four corners. The first guests to arrive are a couple named Barlow, who live about thirty feet away, but have nonetheless driven over. They greet Suzanne and Bruce warmly, smile, comment on the beautiful day, the beautiful wisteria, the beautiful pool. Suzanne accepts their gifts from Mrs. Barlow, while Bruce sternly shakes hands with Mr. Barlow.

  “He looks better in a suit,” John says to Lynnette. The two of them are sitting on the diving board of the pool, far enough away from the patio that they can comment on the guests without being overheard. “Some people do, you know. Look incredibly silly until they put on a suit. Your stepfather looks quite dapper now, actually. He looks like someone to be reckoned with.”

  Lynnette smiles, watching her mother crumple in deference to a second couple. “He’s worth a few good laughs,” she says. “Bruce can tell good jokes. Mannish ones.”

  John has twisted his legs one around the other, as if they were pieces of pipe cleaner. “I see there’s a kiddie table,” he says.

  “There is. For once, Seth won’t have to sit there.”

  “When I was a kid,” John says, “I hated kiddie tables. Sometimes I refused to eat at all if it meant sitting with babies.”

  “Well, don’t worry. Mom didn’t have us at the kiddie table, but close enough. We were supposed to eat at the young adult table, with some of my cousins and these people from Queens. But I switched the placecards. Now we’re sitting with Daddy and Miriam and Seth.”