by Beth Kephart
House of Dance
Beth Kephart
For my father,
who took such good care
Contents
One
IN THE SUMMER my mother grew zinnias in her window…
Two
BY THE TIME I set off for the opposite end…
Three
I DIDN’T LEAVE GRANDDAD’S until the moon was brighter than…
Four
“HOW OLD,” I asked Granddad the next day, “is Riot?”
Five
THAT NIGHT rain was threatening. I yanked the screen door…
Six
GRANDDAD TRIPLE STACKED HIS BOOKS, and in peculiar places between…
Seven
ONCE I FOUND MYSELF SPYING on Mr. Paul and my…
Eight
SOMETHING YOU CAN RELY ON is Pastrami’s water ice. Cherry…
Nine
AFTERWARD, WHEN IT was getting past dusk and my mother…
Ten
THE VERY LAST TIME I saw my father, he was…
Eleven
THREE DAYS LATER, approaching Granddad’s, I heard voices that I…
Twelve
TWO MONTHS AFTER Leisha and I caught my mother making…
Thirteen
THE NEXT MORNING Mom was still not home. I’d knocked…
Fourteen
THERE IS A SECOND POSTER in the street lobby at…
Fifteen
THE CANDY-HAIRED dancer was Marissa. She studied the answers I’d…
Sixteen
HE ASKED ME TO walk across the floor, just a…
Seventeen
THE NEXT DAY started out hot and got much hotter.
Eighteen
TERESA MET ME at Granddad’s side door, her tattooed wrist…
Nineteen
A LONG TIME AGO, when I was eleven, there was…
Twenty
THINK OF MUSIC, Max was saying a few nights later,…
Twenty-one
“TELL ME,” I said to Granddad the next day,“about…
Twenty-two
THE WINDOWS WERE open at the House of Dance. I…
Twenty-three
“EVERY DAY’S FOR living in.” That was what Granddad had…
Twenty-four
THE NEXT DAY AT Granddad’s Teresa met me at the…
Twenty-five
“GO AHEAD,” I said, and Teresa began with color. Color…
Twenty-six
ON THE WAY-OPPOSITE end of the strip from where Granddad…
Twenty-seven
I DIDN’T GET TO GRANDDAD’S HOUSE until noon that day,…
Twenty-eight
NICK MET ME AT MY GRANDDAD’S back step, just as…
Twenty-nine
ONCE WHEN I WAS five-getting-close-to-six, my celebrity dad, my mom,…
Thirty
SOMETIMES YOU KNOW something’s wrong, and you tell yourself you’ll…
Thirty-one
WHEN YOU HAUL AWAY THE CLUTTER that cannot matter anymore,…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Beth Kephart
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
IN THE SUMMER my mother grew zinnias in her window boxes and let fireflies hum through our back door. She kept basil alive in ruby-colored glasses and potatoes sprouting tentacles on the sills. On her bedroom ceiling she’d pressed glow-in-the-dark dots into constellation patterns, so that the stars, as she put it, would always be near. Andromeda. Aquarius. The major and minor Ursas. Pisces. Creatures with wings or with horns.
When I was younger, I’d lie beside her, with all those stars pressing in like tattoos. I’d listen for the wind through the trees, or a finch with a song, or music from the Burkeman house next door. “Not a word, Rosie,” she would say. “Let the day be,” and my thoughts would float until they drifted toward something that was fixed and sure. My mother cleaned windows for Mr. Paul. She spent her days looking through other people’s worlds. In her own house, she said, she needed quiet to remember who she was.
“Not a word, Rosie. Not a single one.” You could get a lot of thinking done when you were with my mother. You could ask yourself a million questions.
I was nine and ten and eleven and twelve. My dad, who had left us years before for what he called a scratchy itch, had never made it home. He sent me twenty dollars every week. Proof, he wrote in his notebook-paper scribbles, that he loved me still. I kept the cash in a shoe box in the bottom of my closet, behind a crate of used-up toys. Proof, I’d have said, if he had asked me, that love cannot be bought.
I was thirteen, I was fourteen, I was fifteen. My mother still cleaned windows, still left the house every day in her stained overalls, her cantaloupe-colored rubber gloves, her denim visor. Except that now she and Mr. Paul were what she called partners, and her days were that much longer, and there were no more potatoes with octopus tentacles on the sill. Sometimes Mom didn’t get home until midnight. Sometimes she was, in the softest voice, singing. Sometimes she forgot that I was there at all, and that is why what happened happened. Because I had been put in charge of myself, and my grandfather was dying.
He didn’t live far; he never had. He’d always been where he was, on the other side of the train tracks, on the opposite end of town, at the final step of a twenty-minute walk. You’d go down to the end of my street. You’d turn. You’d walk beneath the big stone railroad bridge, where there was wetness no matter what the temperature was, something like stalactites daggering down. You’d get back out into the windswept air and go up the hill and turn left onto the street of shops: Whiz Bang, the balloons and party favors store; the deli named Pastrami’s; Sweet Loaves Bread; Mr. Harvey’s Once-Read Books; Bloomer’s Flowers; the hardware store that had become a discount drugstore that was now a sort of everything store, where the mannequins never changed the clothes they wore and the same rocking chair kept rocking.
It was all redbrick on either side, and above the ground-floor retail there were second-story rooms where people I never did see lived, hung their birdcages on curtain rods and umbrellas out their windows, left their happy birthday signs and colored streamers for months and months on end.
My grandfather lived at the edge of all that, in a house of six rooms and one attic, the first house past retail, he called it. When I was little, he would sit in a chair on his porch all summer, watching the cars and the bikes and the buses go by, reading his National Geographic magazines and expedition catalogs. My grandmother had died before I was born. I’d known him only as a man who said there had been places he might have gone, regrets that he’d got stuck with, times that had slipped away like sand. I’d known him only as my mother’s father until the summer he got sick. “Rosie,” my mom said, the night she told me, “he’s going to need you now.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“What you can, Rosie. Whatever you can.”
My mother had long, dark hair. It was her shield, her protection. She turned her face and I couldn’t see her eyes, and I could not for the life of me guess what it was she planned to do. “How sick, Mom?” I asked.
“Multiple myeloma, Rosie.”
“What does that mean?”
She sighed, and it was a very sad sound. She looked away from me. “That he’s tired. That he’d like to see you. That I need you to help him through this. Help me.”
My mother was an only child like I was an only child. I stared at her black, silky profile. “I bet he’d like to see you, too,” I said.
“Rosie,” she said.
And I was quiet. Because of course I knew that they had had their falling-out, that they hadn’t been speaking, not lately. Of course I knew. Still, he was d
ying. Still, she was letting their argument, or whatever it was, be bigger than the love she felt inside. That was how I saw it anyway.
Truth of it was that school had let out two weeks before, and I was still angling for a purpose. My best friend, Leisha, had gone off to the shore to play nanny to her cousins, who were three, four, and five and hot spikes of trouble. Nick Burkeman from next door was working at his father’s shop, lying under cars all day and staring at their bellies, even though what he loved most was the great outdoors, something his father called useless. Everyone else I knew had gotten some kind of gainful employment—at the pool or the mall or the movie theater—or was prepping for the SATs with a tutor who came to breakfast. “Your tutor eats breakfast at your house?” I’d said to Rocco, in May, in disbelief. “Yeah,” Rocco had answered, rolling his eyes. “Yeah. That’s right. He does. Barks vocab words at me when I’m buttering my toast.”
Before Granddad got sick, my mom had said that I could work with her and Mr. Paul, six dollars an hour, two mornings a week, the summer season. But their happiness together was the kind that made you feel banned, barred, and excluded, and besides, I couldn’t imagine cleaning other people’s windows, whisking things off their windowsills, altering the color of their sun. Besides all that, Mom didn’t mean it. She wanted, it was so obvious, to be alone with Mr. Paul and the sheets of glass. She had earned, she made it clear, that little smudge of joy. It didn’t matter to Mom that Mr. Paul was married. She’d been taken from, that was her thinking, and now it was her turn for taking.
My granddad was the kind of person you had to look for to find. He’d be in a room and you’d know it, but you’d have to think real hard to remember. He’d be across from you at the kitchen table, and you’d forget to offer him the salt. Granddad said that he preferred to listen, and it was as if he’d been God-engineered for that, his eyes big, blue, and round, his ears overlarge and tipped forward, his body short and wiry as an antenna. He had the most beautiful white hair I’d ever seen and hands that he held still upon his lap. He wore dark sweaters in the winter with khaki-colored pants and black socks, and in the summer he wore the very same pants and white, short-sleeved shirts, but no socks. He called these things his traveling duds, as if he were going somewhere. Patagonia, he’d say. The Sea of Cortés. Bhutan. The places in his dog-eared magazines.
The first day of that long summer changed everything for good. It was the end of June but not yet hot, the sky filled up with so many kinds of clouds, with blue behind the clouds, not gray. There was a breeze. Granddad had left his screen door unlatched, and so I went straight on through, out of the breeze and into his skinny yellow kitchen. Right there on the counter, first thing, were a swamp of bowls and a rusty can opener, a pileup of dish towels and a couple of old, rain-spotted magazines. The kitchen needed straightening up.
“Granddad?” I called. “Grand…dad?” I let the screen door close behind me and began walking down the long rubber runner on the linoleum kitchen floor and through to his dining room, which was also his living room, where almost every inch of wall was lined with shelves, and the shelves were not nearly enough. There were books on the floor beside newspapers, old coffee cups in stacks in corners, a couple of tossed-aside spoons, a crooked pile of baskets beside a TV that didn’t look capable of pictures or sound, the parts of something alongside the couch that, it suddenly occurred to me, were the pieces of the sort of record player I’d seen once in a movie. The only place the walls weren’t plastered over with shelves was this one long closet—floor to ceiling with two heavy paneled doors. I’d never seen that closet open. I didn’t want to think about what was inside.
Besides the dining-room table and its four mismatched chairs, there were two stuffed corduroy La-Z-Boys and a couch, brown cow–colored, and on the coffee table, which was low to the ground, there was a wicker basket from which Riot, Granddad’s Maine coon cat, ruled. She had the longest tail I’d ever seen on a cat and pointy espionage ears, and she was all possession, guarding Granddad, who was asleep on the couch. He’d folded one arm under his head, and his long, bare feet, thin, like my mother’s, but also callused, were twitching. His eyelids were rolled partway down over his eyes, and there was the tent of a magazine staked up on his stomach, the Trans-Siberian something. I sat down on a La-Z-Boy. Riot hissed and showed her fangs. She tried to stare me down. I waited for something to happen. I thought maybe the walls would come tumbling down.
“Did you see your grandfather today?” Mom asked me hours later, calling into my bedroom through the dark.
“Yeah,” I said. And that was all I said. I didn’t say that he hadn’t seen me.
The next day I didn’t get up until sometime after ten, long after my mother had left. I toasted my bread and I poured my juice and I washed the plate and the glass. Through the kitchen window I could see Mrs. Robertson hanging her sheets on the line, and her short white slips. I’d grown up knowing that square was the shape of all her underwear. That she gave Butterfingers for Halloween. That she’d lost her only son and her daughter was long gone. That she kept one light on in her basement always, grew monster-size tomatoes, and had a cat named Claw that had a single working eye, a scruffy tail, a belly so big we all called him fat as a statement of fact and not as some grand insult.
But mostly Mrs. Robertson was a mystery, and that was my thought of the hour: that maybe all of us are. That Granddad had been young before he’d been old. That Mom had been a daughter once, like me. That there were things on the verge of vanishing that I barely understood.
TWO
BY THE TIME I set off for the opposite end of town, the air in the railroad tunnel was all green steam, and there was a loose dog toddling about with his tongue rolled out, taking a frothy stroll. Sweet Loaves had propped open its front door with a stool, and where the green steam ended there was the smell of cinnamon sugar and risen dough, sesame seeds sizzled by an oven. It was past noon. A neon balloon had escaped Whiz Bang, and when I looked up to watch it on its way to nowhere, my ears caught the end of another country’s song. It had come from somewhere second story, and I waited, but there was no more. I waited; then I walked on. Stopped to study the window at Harvey’s Once Read, where Harvey had, as he always did, posted the week’s doggerel. He wrote up a new one every Monday, and each was as bad as the last, but he didn’t know it. Harvey loved authors and Harvey loved himself, and you couldn’t step inside his shop without saying some version of “I’m loving the new doggerel.”
At Pastrami’s you didn’t have to pretend. At Pastrami’s everything—big hanks of pink meat, sweating wedges of cheese, wide tumbles of tomatoes—was piled high, and down low, in front of the big backward-sloping cases, were the barrels of pickles that Mom once said had been floating on their backs forever. Mr. D’Imperio was a very large size. His eyes behind his glasses were three times magnified, so out of proportion to his face that once when I saw him in the street without his glasses on, I didn’t know who he was until I heard “Rosie” the way he says “Rosie,” with the longest O you ever heard, as if I were his favorite niece. Mr. D’Imperio made his sandwiches with a mustard so bittersweet that it was enough, sometimes, just to have a slab of black bread with a mustard spread, which he gave out for free, at least to me, when nobody was watching. That day I leaned into the door and the door chimes chimed. I took a number and waited my turn. I watched the pickles floating.
“I hope you like turkey,” I called out when I pushed through Granddad’s door.
“Rosie?” His voice was dim and far away. “Is that you?”
“Special delivery from Pastrami’s,” I said, trailing through and finding him where I’d left him the day before, the same pair of pants on, the same bare toes, the Trans-Siberian something flipped upright on his lap. I pulled his sandwich and pickle out of a bag. I pulled the same out for me. Riot gave me her I-do-not-trust-you eye, then settled back in for a snooze.
“How are you doing, Granddad?” I asked.
“I had this dream,
” he said, after a long, quiet time.
“What kind of dream?”
“Somewhere far away. Somewhere. And they were playing music.”
“Might not have been a dream,” I suggested, and I was about to say that I had heard something too, but he preferred his own conclusion.
“Oh, yes.” He was sure. “It was.” He struggled up, to a sitting position. He unwrapped the turkey sandwich. He looked at me. Studied the sandwich and raised it to his mouth but didn’t so much as taste it. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Miss Rosie?” finally he asked me.
“I needed some company,” I said, chomping at my own lunch, feeling around with my tongue for the mustard. Wishing he would chomp on his, because he was pants-loose thin.
“You did.” He eyed me suspiciously.
I swallowed. “It gets lonely in my house.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“Cleaning windows.”
He brought the sandwich to his mouth again, then lowered it onto his Trans-Siberian journey, untested. He looked around as if to study the state of his own windows, which, truth be told, were streaked with old rain and whitened, in certain places, by spiderwebs; he could have used some Mr. Paul. “Can’t say as there’s a lot of action here.”
“You’re here,” I said. “And so is Riot.”
“Riot”—Granddad nodded—“doesn’t stop talking.” He looked at the basket, where Riot was sleeping. Then he looked at me. “How have you been, Rosie?”
“Same as always,” I said.
“How old are you now?”
“Fifteen.”
“School out?”
“Until it starts again.”
“Did you ride your bike?”
“I walked.”
“You walked?”
And then we both sat while I ate in silence.
THREE
I DIDN’T LEAVE GRANDDAD’S until the moon was brighter than the sun. Along the redbrick strip the doors to first-floor shops were closed, the bargain tables dragged in for the night, the books at Mr. Harvey’s a little more faded than before. Any light and noise came from the floors above: the sizzle of hamburgers in a frying pan, the sound of TV news, the slamming of doors, someone fighting with a stubborn window. A dog was barking, and I remembered the afternoon’s mongrel. But mostly I was looking for the music that I’d heard, keeping my eyes on the second stories.