KABOOM

by Brian Adams

  Number four: I got to wear my hoop skirt again. I hadn’t put it on since the reenactments were over for the season, and I’d grown super-fond of it ever since Kevin had made the hotness comment. Sadie’s reenactment friend, knowing how attached I had become, had actually gone and given it to me. It was now my absolute fave outfit.

  “How do you go to the bathroom in that thing?” Ashley asked. Not only had she done my hair but she had also shoehorned me into my hoop skirt and frock and slip and all of my assorted Civil War getup. “I don’t see how you’d even fit into the stall.”

  “I don’t go,” I said.

  “What do you mean you ‘don’t go’?”

  “I don’t go to the bathroom.”

  “How do you not go the bathroom? What if you have to pee?”

  “I stopped drinking three hours ago,” I said.

  “Oh my God, Cyndie, that’s just weird. You should wear one of those adult diaper thingies.”

  “I am not going on a date with Kevin wearing an effin diaper!”

  “It’s way better than pissing yourself!”

  “Stop! You’re making me laugh. And when I laugh I have to—”

  “Pee,” she cut in. “My point exactly! How are you going to possibly keep a straight face with people sashaying, promenading, and do-si-doeing around like a bunch of lunatics? I’m telling you, there’s going to be a puddle on the floor before you’re done, and it’s not going to be pretty.”

  “Thanks, Ash. Thanks a lot. That’s really helpful.”

  Of course, when Kevin came to pick me up I couldn’t fit into his car, which meant I had to start the whole shebang all over again. Ashley gave Kevin a quick reminder on how to put me back together.

  “I totally remember how to take it off,” Kevin said, grinning at me. “Isn’t that good enough?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Ashley asked. “I’d hate for the fire department to have to roar up mid-dance with the jaws of life and rescue you from the mess that Kevin’s made.”

  “Thanks for the offer,” I said, “but I think we’ll survive. Anyway, with Dad, Mrs. Yabonowitz, Sadie, and Mr. Cooper, I think I’ll have all the help I need.” I rolled my eyes.

  All I could think was: Thank God it wasn’t my first date! If it had been my first time out with Kevin and I had to share the dance floor with those four adults, I’m not sure I could have handled it. Dad was as nervous as a gawky teenager, and God only knows what was going through Auntie Sadie’s mind. Kevin thought the whole thing was hysterical. I just thought it was embarrassing.

  The dance was held in the old Grange Hall in the town next to ours. I don’t know what I was expecting but the sheer number of folks waltzing in was mind-numbing.

  “I thought this was, like, a little dance or something,” I said to Kevin as he began corkscrewing me back into my hoop. “I swear, there are more people here than fought in the actual Civil War!”

  It was a definite time warp—1863 and not a moment later.

  The guys were dazzling in their Civil War uniforms, both Blue and Gray. Polished buttons, waxed moustaches, feathers in their caps. There wasn’t a slacker in sight. Even Dad and Mr. Cooper looked pretty sweet. Of course, Kevin was the most dazzling of all.

  And the women. Oh my God! Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on these belles. There wasn’t a stitch out of line. Hoops galore. And the hair! Whew!

  Kevin preened one more time in his car’s side-view mirror and put on his cap. We were finally ready to make our grand entrance.

  “Does my hair look all right?” he asked.

  “Dashing!” I said. “To die for! How about mine?” I did a little twirl and an awkward curtsy.

  “Fine,” he replied. “Let’s go.”

  “‘Fine’?” I said. “‘Fine’? I come this close to bleeding to death and all I get is a ‘fine’?”

  Kevin gathered me in his arms (as much as he could given that my hoop stretched close to the Kentucky border), swung me around, and kissed me.

  “Fine is Civil War slang for ‘awesome’! Completely awesome!”

  Arm in arm, we entered the hall.

  After all the time it had taken me to hop in and out and then back into the hoop, the dance was already in full swing when we got there. The hall was huge and it was filled to the max. There was a stage with an old-time band strumming and plucking and sawing away: fiddle and guitar and mandolin and stand-up bass. Other than electric lights and the neon exit signs, we were back in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  There were three long lines of dancers running the length of the hall. Guys on one side, ladies on the other. Kevin and I walked in and immediately got swept into the closest line.

  Late as we were we were stuck at the end.

  The musicians had stopped playing and the caller stepped onto the stage. Civil War dance that it was, this was no ordinary dance caller. Lo and behold, it was Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. One of the greatest generals in American history! Calling our dances!

  “Who’s ready for the Virginia Reel, West Virginia style?” he shouted.

  The dancers exploded with rebel yells, hoots, and hollers.

  “Lead couple, raise your hands!”

  Kevin and I looked around while everybody else in our line stared at us.

  “Dang,” I whispered, “we’re the effin lead couple!”

  Timidly, we raised our hands.

  “We’re going to begin with a forward and a bow. Forward two and a three and a bow, backward six, and a stop right there.”

  I didn’t mind being the center of attention. In fact, I had kind of grown to like it. Leading the KABOOM meetings. Speaking at the Children’s Crusade. Standing up to Sadie and the principal. Who would have thought I’d enjoy having all eyes on me? But not now. Not here. Here, everyone seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Everyone except Kevin and me.

  To further complicate matters, my tightly wrapped braids made everything sound somewhat muffled and distant.

  “What?” I asked Kevin.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Kevin said.

  Somehow I managed to forward, curtsey, and stagger back in place.

  “Right elbows and then left elbows,” the general called. “Ready, swing! Around, two, three, four, five, six, and a left elbow. Back and a two and a three and a four, and then stop right there!”

  I consider myself pretty bright, but I’ve always had issues around right and left, as in which was which. Plus, I could hardly hear what the caller was calling. I gave Kevin my left elbow, he gave me his right, which somehow made us twist around so that I ended up on the guys’ side, and Kevin on the ladies’.

  “Two hands and we go clockwise,” General Lee called out.

  Clockwise! God help me! That was even worse than right and left. I lost valuable seconds trying to figure out which way the hands went, and in a Virginia reel, seconds were everything.

  “Ready, go. Two hands and circle four, five, six, seven, and eight.”

  The good news was that somehow I ended up back with the ladies.

  “Next comes a do-si-do with a right shoulder.”

  “Goodie!” I whispered to Kevin. “The do-si-do!”

  Kevin laughed.

  “Right shoulder, three, and four. And, then, stop right there.”

  Once again I was in the guys’ line. We had been dancing for all of one minute and I had already changed gender three times.

  “Left shoulder, see saw, back to back, and a back in place.”

  “See saw”? Had I heard that right? Was this a joke?

  “Head couple take two hands in an elongated position and you’re going to slide down the set for eight, and everybody claps. Slide and two and three and four, five and six and back the other way.”

  A hoop skirt is hard enough to walk in, let alone slide down the line, whatever the heck that meant. It took my total and complete concentration not to topple over. Form be damned. I just wanted to remain upright.
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  “Next the head couple will reel down the set. Right elbows with your own partner, left elbows with the opposite down the line. Left to the outside. Meet your own couple with the right. Always right to your own, left to the opposite. And keep going down the line. Slide back down the set and then we’re going to peel the banana.”

  “Reel down the set”? “Left to the opposite”? “Peel the banana”? Was he serious? I gave a tug at my braids to loosen them and free up my ears. I hadn’t a clue as to one word of what General Lee was saying.

  “Let’s go ahead and try this with the music.”

  Oh my God! I gave Kevin the “man the lifeboats—this ship is going down!” look.

  There are people who dance for fun and there are people who dance because they honestly believe they are God’s gift to the Virginia Reel. We were in the line with the latter. They seemed to take everything way too seriously.

  Try as I might, it was too late to bow, or even curtsy, out now.

  Every single step, I screwed up. If we were supposed to lead with the left, I went with the right. I moved forward instead of backward, counterclockwise instead of clockwise. There was not one single instance when I did the right thing. And Kevin, if you can believe it, was even worse than I was. I could at least keep time with the music, but he was totally dancing to the beat of a way-too-distant drummer.

  We swung instead of do-si-doed. We slid instead of circled. We see-sawed instead of peeled the banana. It was a total and complete disaster.

  I had never had so much fun in my life!

  “Let’s do it again!” I said to Kevin when the music stopped.

  “We better switch lines. These folks are ready to kill us!”

  By about the fifth time around we had gotten it halfway down so we only screwed up every other move. One of the older dancers, a guy in his seventies dressed like a colonel whom I vaguely remembered from one of the reenactments, went so far as to give me a wink and a nod.

  “Is he hitting on you?” Kevin asked, hand on his sword.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I only fall for privates.”

  After about an hour of Virginia reeling, just when I had finally figured out my right from my left, we took a break and headed to the back of the hall for a breather.

  “Oh my God,” Kevin said, grasping my arm.

  “What?”

  “Look! In the corner! It’s Abraham Lincoln.”

  Sure enough. There, drink in hand, was the president of the United States, at least the northern ones. Abraham Lincoln. In the flesh.

  He didn’t just look like Abraham Lincoln with his stovepipe hat, slumped shoulders, gnarly wrinkled face, and that mustache-less beard. He really was the president.

  Everybody else simply dressed the part. This guy really was the part. He was holding forth as if it were actually 1863, waxing eloquently about the Emancipation Proclamation, about the evils of slavery, about the ineptitude of the Union generals.

  “Bad news,” I whispered to Kevin.

  “I know,” Kevin said. “Someone’s going to shoot the president. We’ve got to tell him! We’ve got to warn him not to go to Ford’s Theatre!”

  “No, not that!” I tugged on Kevin’s sleeve. “Even worse!”

  “What could be worse than President Lincoln being assassinated?”

  “I have to pee!”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “I wish. You have to help me. You have to help me now.”

  “But I thought . . .”

  “Now!”

  As previously noted, getting me in and out of the hoop skirt required the skills of a Civil War surgeon and more hands than I had. And I didn’t have a second to lose. The Virginia Reel had rattled things up inside. I had to pee. Bad. Really bad.

  “You should have worn the diaper!” Kevin said.

  “Shut up. Come with me into the bathroom.”

  “No way! I’m not going into the women’s room. They’ll think I’m a pervert.”

  “I don’t care what people think! I have to pee!”

  “Then we’ll go the men’s room,” Kevin said.

  Desperate times called for desperate measures. Off we went into the men’s room.

  Kevin and I snuck into the farthest stall so he could help me out of the skirt. I was standing on the toilet with my hoop halfway off when who should come bursting in the bathroom but Abraham Lincoln. I could see him through the slit in the stall door.

  He rushed into the stall next to ours, unbuttoned his pants, grunted, farted loudly, and sat down to do his business.

  Just my luck. The only time in my life that I’m in the men’s room and the president of the United States has to take a dump!

  Then two other men came in. One of them was Robert E. Lee, the caller of the dances. The other one looked like a general, too. They perched themselves in front of the mirror and began re-waxing their moustaches, while Kevin and I held our breath in the stall.

  “You see who’s here?” Lee asked the other guy.

  “No. Who?”

  “That spaz girl who couldn’t dance worth shit. She’s the same one leading the anti–mountaintop removal charge. She goes to the high school. The one we saw on TV.”

  “Seriously? That little dweeb?”

  “The very one. She needs to mind her own goddamn business. Environmentalist!” General Lee frowned, spat into the sink, and continued waxing away.

  “You got that right!” the other officer nodded.

  “She’s a hot little thing though,” Lee continued.

  Needless to say, this conversation did not go down well with Kevin. As long as I could be free of the effin hoop and blissfully pee I was willing to turn the other cheek. After all, fame had its downside. But not so with Kevin. He was pissed. Really pissed.

  I had the hoop halfway off with my arms pinned to my side, unable to hold my nose from the presidential stench, when Kevin, desperate to defend my honor, flung open the stall door and came flying out.

  “How dare you!” he shouted, taking off his cap and flinging it to the floor. “Dissing my girl! Trashing my cause! I demand satisfaction!”

  The two generals were totally taken aback. They looked into the stall and there I was, dress halfway off, arms in the air, bladder about to burst.

  “What the hell?” General Lee said.

  Kevin took his sword out of his scabbard, flicked the general’s hat off of his head and stomped on it.

  “Son of a bitch!” Lee yelled, taking his sword out of his scabbard and waving it in the air.

  Holy Mother of a Mountaintop! They were going to have a sword fight! In the middle of the men’s room! Over me!

  Just as sword was about to clash with sword, Abraham Lincoln flew out of his stall, pants at his knees, toilet paper trailing from his shoes, still farting away.

  “The boy is right!” Lincoln shouted. “You are nothing but a lowlife and a scoundrel!” Holding a roll of toilet paper as a weapon, Lincoln whacked the sword out of General Lee’s hands and then tripped over a trash can, knocking open the bathroom door before falling flat on his ass, half in and half out of the bathroom.

  At that very moment with mayhem imminent, who should walk into the men’s room but Mr. Cooper, all decked out like a Union cavalry officer. And standing outside was Auntie Sadie in her nurse’s garb. I could even see Dad and Mrs. Yabonowitz peering in from around the corner.

  “Gentlemen!” Mr. Cooper roared. “And woman! Crisscross applesauce! How dare you interrupt this night of pleasure with your fisticuffs!” Coop helped President Lincoln to his feet. We all stared meekly at the floor. Twenty-five years teaching high school hooligans had certainly honed Mr. Cooper’s disciplinary skills. When Coop yelled, folks listened. Even outranked as he was by the President of the United States and General Robert E. Lee, Mr. Cooper was still the man.

  “Cyndie! Kevin!” Cooper lectured. “I expected better of you. And Mr. President, with all due respect . . .” Coop only glared at the two older Confederates.

/>   Presided over by the president himself, General Lee apologized to me, we all shook hands, the guys re-sheathed their testosterone and their swords, bowed, and saluted each other. Then we all marched out of the bathroom with all of the dignity we could muster.

  “Cyndie,” my father said, still waiting by the door. “This is Mrs. Yabonowitz. Mrs. Yabonowitz, my daughter Cyndie.”

  “Very nice to meet you,” I said, standing there in my underwear and holding my hoop skirt, my bladder ready to rupture.

  •

  “Well,” Kevin said. “It’s nice to know we have Lincoln on our side.”

  “Oh my God! The polar bears, the circus, Tammy’s Tasty Top, and now Lincoln!” I exclaimed. “Who would have thought?”

  We were on our way back home after the dance. After the incident in the men’s room we had managed to squeeze in a few more Virginia reels, and our last dance had been perfect. We had peeled the banana with the best of them. Hooray for us!

  During a break, one of the younger dancers had even snuck in with a boom box and managed to put on a rap reel. We got in a few awesome minutes of new-fangled grinding, though dirty dancing with a hoop skirt on was challenging at best. A handful of the old-timers even came out to strut their stuff. Before Robert E. Lee got too pissed we had scooted out the side door and headed for home.

  “Now it belongs to the ages,” I said.

  “Wasn’t that some dude’s line when Lincoln died?” Kevin asked.

  “Something like that, only I don’t think he was talking about dancing.”

  “Probably not,” Kevin agreed.

  “And Kev,” I cooed, “you were my knight in shining armor. Rescuing his damsel in distress!” I put my arms around him.

  “I thought I was your private in shining buttons,” Kevin said. “Anyway, it was probably a good thing that Coop walked in when he did. Assaulting Robert E. Lee in a bathroom, no matter how much of a jerk he might be, doesn’t play well in these parts.”

  “Was I really such a spaz?” I asked.

  “In the men’s room?” Kevin asked. “Well, standing on the toilet seat, stuck in your hoop, with your . . .”