Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

  “You’re not getting me up at six,” Carola said, sticking out her tongue and with great deliberateness salting her meat.

  “I’ll run,” Jill said. “And Donna Lee will run. Donna Lee used to be a track star.”

  Donna Lee, surprised to be mentioned, paused in the midst of putting a forkful of stuffing into her mouth, blushed, and smiled. Everyone looked at the table.

  “Tomorrow morning, then,” Gretchen said. “Carola can decide if she wants to join us.”

  Now, in the late-afternoon sunlight, Jill, her face smudged, is climbing a tree. There are twigs in her clothes and in her hair, which hangs down to her waist. Donna Lee is watching her from behind her book, while on the porch Gretchen is watching Donna Lee. The porch is far enough away so that Gretchen can say to Leonard, “What is the story with that girl?”

  He shakes his head, and gazes absently at the line of maples bordering the lawn. He is disappointed because no one cares about his photograph. He showed it to Gretchen, and she brushed it off—glanced at it, said, “Neat,” and put it down next to her iced coffee.

  “I’m still puzzled,” Gretchen says. “She’s nice enough, I suppose, but she’s so withdrawn. It’s impossible to talk to her. She’s on her guard every second.”

  “She’s probably scared.”

  “Why?”

  “Coming into a strange family is scary,” Leonard says. “You feel like an intruder. Especially at a time like this.”

  Gretchen puts on her sunglasses and lies back in the chair. “Jill probably shouldn’t have brought her,” she says.

  “Young love,” Leonard murmurs.

  “What?”

  He turns, and Gretchen is staring straight at him.

  Carola, in the kitchen, notices through the window how suddenly Gretchen has turned her head, and is pleased to see her taken off her guard, particularly by Leonard. The kitchen is hot. Carola has cooked every meal so far; she feels in control, at ease, only in the kitchen. This is why she refuses when Donna Lee and Gretchen offer to help. She knows they’re only doing it to be polite, and she’d rather not have their help anyway. It has been her experience that people who try to help in the kitchen usually end up just milling around—getting in the way and nibbling at the food. Carola hates to have anyone touch the food before it’s served. Her father used to infuriate her by eating spoonfuls of jam right from the jar. He and Gretchen and Jill always came into the kitchen and disrupted everything just when dinner was ready. Gretchen picked the bacon out of the salad, Jill refused to eat what their mother had prepared and made herself a grilled-cheese sandwich. And then they all disappeared when the dishes had to be done—all but Carola. She would stay and help her mother dry.

  Outside the window, Gretchen and Leonard appear to have stopped talking for the moment. Jill has climbed down from the tree and is leaping about the yard, head back, flinging out her hair like a mane.

  “She is a child,” Carola says out loud, mostly to hear how it sounds, and breaks an egg into a bowl. As for Gretchen, she is simply selfish. Both of them all but abandoned the family these last years—especially when their mother got sick. Carola alone stuck around, stuck it out, sat day after day by the hospital bed when the cancer started to spread. She knows they resent her, out of guilt, but she also knows she did the right thing, no matter what Gretchen might say.

  Tonight, as usual, they will wolf down the dinner she has made them and thank her for it only in the most cursory way, if at all. Especially Donna Lee. Carola does not like that woman. Last night, when everyone else had carefully counted out the shrimp, to make sure that each person got the same amount, Donna Lee simply reached the spoon onto the platter and took a huge heap—at least twice as much as anyone else. And then halfway through the meal, embarrassed, she tried to shovel them back onto the platter when no one was looking.

  Leonard is rapping at the window, waving. Carola smiles at him. Her scalp itches from the steam, making her long to wash her hair. But she washes her hair too often, she has decided; it’s getting brittle. She takes all of her hair in her left hand and pulls until it hurts, then lets it spring back.

  Leonard walks into the kitchen. “What is she doing?” he asks Carola. He points out the window at Jill, who is galloping back and forth across the lawn, making wheezing noises.

  “She’s pretending to be a horse,” Carola says.

  Leonard looks at her, confused more by her nonchalance than by Jill’s strange cavorting.

  “She’s done it forever,” Carola says. “Since we were kids. She calls it playing horse.”

  “I see,” Leonard says. “Are there rules to the game?”

  “Oh, in Jill’s mind there’s probably a very complicated set of rules.”

  Leonard smiles, and returns to gazing out the window at Jill. In this strange house, Leonard is awed by the women who surround him—women who paint their fingernails, wear tiger-striped underwear, were once track stars. Women who run in circles pretending that they are horses.

  Leonard has never before been to the East Coast. The world of the East is different, he has decided. Because his own family is so close-knit, he is puzzled by Gretchen’s sisters, and wonders how they could have splintered and lost touch so easily. And he is puzzled by the landscape. He can cope with desert, and wild plains of brush, and yellow hills, but these green, green lawns and trees make him feel as if he were in some foreign land.

  “Can I see your photograph?” Carola asks, and Leonard turns, suddenly shaken out of his reverie, to see that she is staring at him.

  “Sure,” he says, and fishes in his back pocket. “Here it is.”

  He hands her the snapshot, and immediately her face seems to break. “Oh, I look horrible,” she says.

  “No, you don’t,” Leonard says, as he takes the picture back from her. “You look great. But something’s missing. When I took this picture, I saw something that didn’t have to do with any one of you. It had to do with all of you, really. I’m not good at explaining things. Whatever it was, it’s not in the picture.”

  “It’s not something that’s missing,” Carola says. “It’s what’s there. It’s me. I’m ugly in pictures. Also, my hair’s dirty; is there time for me to wash it before dinner?”

  “Look at her,” Leonard says, and gazes at Jill, who is still galloping across the yard.

  Jill is still running back and forth, neighing, her hair flying, when Leonard goes back out to the porch. “Perhaps she really thinks she is a horse,” he says to Gretchen, but she isn’t listening. Across the lawn, Donna Lee leans against the maple tree, reading, or pretending to read. In fact she is absorbed by the gargantuan image of her own eyeball, staring back at her, reflected in the left lens of her glasses. They always stare at her, Jill’s sisters. They scrutinize her, their faces full of curiosity and disapproval. The other day, Gretchen asked her what her parents did. “My mother’s a librarian,” Donna Lee said. “Oh, I see,” Gretchen said, and then—nothing. The long, horrible pause that comes when it is too early for a conversation to end, too late to keep it from starting.

  Donna Lee puts down her book and stands up, arching her back against the tree. Jill stops in the midst of a gallop and, laughing, falls against Donna Lee, her breath coming hard. Donna Lee can see Gretchen and Leonard on the porch trying not to stare. She still wakes up each morning convinced that Jill will have tired of her, be gone. The winter they met, Jill wore a green down jacket that she kept buttoned down to her knees, and Donna Lee used to tease her, telling her she looked like a giant Chiclet. She loves Jill.

  “I’m tired,” Jill says, pulling Donna Lee down to the ground with her. “I haven’t done that in ages. When I was a kid I could play horse for hours. I used to like to spin, too. I’d just twirl, like a top. Everyone thought I was nuts. But I liked the way everything blurred and only my own body stayed in focus.”

  Carola, in an upstairs window, looks down at them. She is standing in her father’s bedroom, the room he died in. It is a woman’s roo
m, with a pink satin comforter on the bed, a huge armoire in the corner, a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. Since she began to clean the room out, Carola has found medicines, a pile of spy novels, rubbing alcohol, and brandy. She had hoped to find some pornographic magazines, some sign of impropriety and decay. She had hoped to find something she could hold against him.

  Even now, two weeks after his death, the room smells of her father’s cigars and after-shave. It was different when her mother was dying. Her mother left no smell. She packed up everything before she went to the hospital, and when she died she was gone without a trace. Carola never saw the body—just a stripped mattress where an hour before her mother had lain, pale and thin, and asked for a copy of Vogue. Carola had been living at home for three months, and visited the hospital every day. Yet when her mother died, it was not in her arms, or even in her presence. She died alone, while Carola was out of the room. When she came back, Vogue in hand, there was the stripped mattress, the half-empty water glass. Her mother had died while Carola was sitting in the cafeteria, drinking her coffee and thumbing through Cosmopolitan. It had not seemed fair to Carola, and she wanted to call out to her mother to come back, if only to say a proper goodbye. She wanted to rage against this abandonment. After her mother’s death, there was no home to be responsible to anymore, and her father put the house on the market. She moved to New York, found an apartment and a job, but the life she has been leading does not seem real to her, and with perverse nostalgia she thinks back on the year of her mother’s dying as the happiest of her life.

  Carola does not like to remember these things. She moves to her father’s bureau. Every day, she has forced herself to open one drawer and sort through its contents. Today it is the bottom drawer, which contains things of Eleanor’s—some silk scarves, old photographs, jewels, and perfume bottles. Perhaps they are things her father could not bear to part with when Eleanor died. They remind Carola that her father loved Eleanor—perhaps more than he loved her mother, and while he was still married.

  Eleanor and Carola met only once before her father’s second marriage. That was when she was seventeen, and travelling in Europe; her father arranged for her to stay with Eleanor in Paris, where she was living for the year. Eleanor was divorced by then. She courted Carola that week—took her out to dinner, and to Montmartre late at night. Every time they ate, Carola tried to pay for her share, but Eleanor wouldn’t allow it. Before Carola left, Eleanor bought her an expensive orange silk scarf with streaks of brilliant blue. Back then, when she knew nothing, Carola idolized Eleanor. It was only years later that she was able to put the visit into a larger perspective.

  There is no need to save these things. The photographs are of no one Carola knows, and the scarves are garish; besides, whatever meaning they once had is buried with her father. She has a hard enough time with her own nostalgia; she does not have room for his as well. But, Carola decides, she will keep the jewelry and the perfume bottles. Someone might want them, or they can be sold at a garage sale.

  While Carola is going through the drawer, Gretchen and Leonard move upstairs to their room and make love. In the next room, Jill and Donna Lee are resting. Donna Lee’s arms are wrapped around Jill’s waist, her face buried in Jill’s stomach. She is snoring, and Jill—her eyes closed—is weaving her fingers through Donna Lee’s hair.

  They all sit down to dinner at eight o’clock. Gretchen is examining one of the perfume bottles Carola found, which Gretchen likes and has decided to keep. Leonard is telling everyone about some young men who hatched a plot to turn Marin County into a medieval fiefdom by setting up a laser gun on top of Mt. Tamalpais. They planned a strategic reorganization of society, re-creating a world of serfs and vassals, round tables and court ladies. When a friend got wind of the plot, the young men murdered him in his garage, and were exposed. It was all baffling, insane, yet Leonard sometimes longingly imag­ines what castles would look like perched on the rough, dry hills, shrouded in fog.

  “What I think is so funny,” Gretchen says, “is the idea of Marin County as a fiefdom. Can you imagine? I mean, you can’t tell the lord he’s invading your personal space when he comes around to make you his serf.” She laughs, and Carola stares at her. All through her girlhood, Gretchen had boyfriends; she would never give up one until she had found another. She had that kind of control.

  Carola is not eating the meal she spent most of the afternoon preparing. Instead, she has brought in from the kitchen a Styrofoam cup of tea and a bowl of tomato soup, which she now stabs at with her fork. (She has forgotten to put out spoons.) She has poured most of her tea out of the cup and into her water glass and shredded the top half of the cup, making a little pile of Styrofoam pieces on her plate.

  “Everyone thinks California is so weird,” Leonard is saying, rather defensively. “If you ask me, it’s the other way around. People are pretty strange out here. No one’s polite, everyone pushes and shoves. I think California’s fairly civilized, by and large.”

  No one says anything to this. Carola has captured everyone’s attention by making a boat from her Styrofoam cup and floating it in the soup. Now she is pushing the cup back and forth. The red soup crawls slowly up the sides.

  “I have a question for everyone,” Carola says. “What if you got stuck on a desert island and you only had one piece of paper and one pen? What would you do?”

  Sitting across the table, Gretchen puts her hand to her forehead and wonders how Carola has survived alone for so long. And now—right here, of all places—is she going to have a breakdown? She looks at Leonard, who will be no help to her; he never is in crises. And Jill will run away, as she always does.

  The Styrofoam cup has finally sunk. Carola is pathetic, Gretchen thinks. Sad. She could be pretty. Who but Carola would worry about being stuck on a desert island? If she would only take herself in hand and do something, half the problem would be solved right there. Gretchen wishes that she could sympathize with Carola, but instead she wants to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her.

  “I think,” Donna Lee says, “that I would only allow myself to write one sentence a week, and that in a very small hand. It would probably be a quite marvellous sentence, given that I’d have a week to think about it before writing it down.” It is the first thing she has said at dinner all week that was not required of her.

  Carola looks at Donna Lee and smiles. “It’s good to know that I’m not the only person in the world who thinks about this kind of thing. Thank you.”

  Jill drops her fork and falls into a sudden convulsion of laughter. Carola, looking at her, begins to laugh, too, and then Leonard and Gretchen, not because they understand what Jill is laughing at but because the laughter itself is contagious. Only Donna Lee doesn’t laugh. There is nothing left on her plate; adrift, she stares at Jill helplessly for direction.

  “I’m sorry,” Jill says. “I was just remembering that time when Mom was in a bad mood and Daddy put on one of her scarves and did a little imitation of her. He came up behind her and kind of growled and shook his hands. Even she started laughing, he looked so funny. I laugh every time I think of how he looked that day.”

  As soon as Jill starts to tell the story, everyone stops laughing. Another instance of her father’s cruelty, Carola is thinking—to mimic her mother’s sorrow, to make it so funny even she had to laugh. How could her mother have loved him so much? He had a lover and he made fun of his wife, yet she was devoted to him. In sickness, she insisted that he be with her, calling out for him in her sleep. He was always there, those last days. Toward the end, belief in responsibility was the only thing that he and Carola shared.

  The subject has switched now. Leonard is back on California, its joys and civilities. He’s a little drunk, and he waves his fist as he speaks. “Where I grew up,” he says, “family meant something. Connections meant something. My brothers and sisters and I always go home for Christmas, every year, and I call my mother every week. But your family! It’s terrible how split up you a
re, all of you so isolated from your father. There’s no shared ground, no homestead. It’s been lost.”

  “It never existed,” Carola says. “It never was in the first place.”

  “Oh, that’s not true,” Gretchen says. “There was lots of family feeling when we were growing up. You’ve just made yourself forget it.”

  “And you’ve made yourself forget all the nights of no one saying a word at dinner,” Carola says. “Of Mom and Dad fighting. You and Jill couldn’t wait to get away on your own.”

  “No institution,” Jill says, “has been more destructive to women than the nuclear family.”

  They all look at her, rather puzzled by this generalization.

  “What!” Leonard yells. “I’ll tell you, I have six sisters, and growing up the way they did they’re all better for it.”

  Jill smiles and shakes her head. “You miss my point,” she says. “It’s a means of exploitation. Since the sixteenth century, the nuclear family has fit in perfectly with the capitalist system and its whole exploitative program of gender roles. And nothing has caused more psychological damage to women. Fortunately, it’s breaking up now.”

  “How breaking up? What do you mean?” Gretchen asks.

  “I mean the divorce rate, the alternatives that women are finding.”

  Donna Lee looks at the table. Carola grips the edges of her chair. Her eyes are getting wide. “You’re one to talk,” she says, nearly inaudibly.

  “What?”

  “I said you’re one to talk,” Carola says again, slightly more loudly. She looks around, alarmed at having suddenly changed the tenor of the conversation. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just don’t see where you come off attacking the family.”