by Beth Kephart
“No,” I said, “I don’t.”
“She’d roll back the carpet right about where you are and jitterbug the shine off the floor. She’d fox-trot in circles, with the moon as her man. She’d dial up her music loud.”
“Sounds like something,” I said.
“She could make the porcelains and the paintings tremble. She could dance. Oh, Aideen could dance.”
“Red was her color,” I said.
He nodded. “You get an A plus, Rosie.”
“And you were her very best man.”
“I was privileged, Rosie. Despite everything, she liked me. She’d had her other chances, don’t you think she didn’t. But she stuck around for me.”
“You’re a likable guy,” I said.
“I’m an ordinary guy.”
“You’re better than fireworks.”
“You’re a top-drawer liar.” His voice was weary.
“I’m putting all the albums In Trust,” I told him after he didn’t say much more.
“I always took you for a smart one,” he answered.
“I’m putting the albums In Trust, even if they all sound like Sammy Davis Jr., even if not one of them, not even one, is nearly as good as Usher.”
“Faster or slower. More or less. They’ve got the Sammy Davis style. Besides,” he said, “usher is a verb.”
“It’s also a noun.”
“Let’s call it versatile.”
He had used up most of his voice. There were dots of sweat in the creases on his brow.
“I think you could use a nap,” I said.
“I’m getting too tired not to be tired,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I came to him, and I settled his pillow. I sat back down to watch him sleep. He closed his eyes and sighed and turned. I listened for the music, then, from far, far down the street. I tried to find my mother in my mind: in a house somewhere, in her overalls, listening to the squeaks of rags on glass. Did she ever think of her growing-up music? Did she ever remember the old-time songs or the feel of the moon on her face?
TWELVE
TWO MONTHS AFTER Leisha and I caught my mother making out with Mr. Paul, Leisha, Nick, Rocco, and I went to the theater in the next town over to see a new James Bond movie. It was Christmastime and bitter cold outside, and we’d gotten a ride from Rocco’s mom, who drove a bright-turquoise Pontiac Sunbird from the Jurassic era. Rocco sat up front. Nick sat in back, between Leisha and me, and the window on my side was broken, rolled halfway down and not budging. There were flakes of snow in the wind blowing through. The wind itself was brutal.
I was shivering, and Rocco and Leisha were laughing. Nick, though, didn’t laugh, not much, just put his arm around me and pulled me close. “For warmth’s sake,” he said, and I shiver-nodded yes and leaned against him, leaned in hard, wanting the drive never to end. I knew about throb, is what I’m trying to say, before I found the House of Dance.
But now, coming and going to Granddad’s, sitting and waiting at Granddad’s, bending and bundling and boxing at Granddad’s, I was always on the hunt for something bigger than the work before me, bigger than the facts of Granddad’s sickness and my mom’s absence. A leaf would pinch itself off a tree and flick and glide in the breeze, and that was something good. Or a butterfly would come from nowhere, skidding in. Or a spider would reach a sidewalk curb and step up, his eight legs a sudden mess, and I would think how funny it was to see a spider dance. How bigger than life itself.
I started studying the steam rising from the asphalt. I was aware of the clouds blotting out the stars at night and the stars coming right back. I was thinking about living and dying, and secrets, and the shadows being cast by trees, and I was standing beneath awnings on the street where Granddad lived, looking up and watching dancers dance, in the long, wide window bands. Those thin arms rising, those hips in a swivel, those hands reaching, that music coming from, and going to, places far away.
The dance was alive. That was what I knew. The dance was something whole. The dance was hope, and hope was what I needed most of all the summer my granddad died. Hope was what I began to put In Trust, above all other things. Hope, which comes in all the brightest colors.
THIRTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING Mom was still not home. I’d knocked on her bedroom door, and no one had answered. I’d opened the door and found her pillow undisturbed. She was gone and had been gone since the day before, and it was morning, and she hadn’t even called. I looked out her bedroom window, and I could hear her in my head: Not a word, Rosie.
Later, down on the kitchen table, I found the note she’d left. “Be good,” it said, and I thought: Be good? Be good! When you call Mr. Paul’s to fix a date for your cleaning, it is Mrs. Paul with whom you speak. Mrs. Paul, who has two young kids, the father of whom is Mr. Paul. Mrs. Paul, who shares a house with Mr. Paul. “Mom,” I said out loud, “come home.” As if talking were taking some kind of action.
In the house the windows were streaked gray with old rain. Cobwebs hung from the ceilings like old-lady lace, and there wasn’t the slightest bit of gleam. There were loose nails and weaknesses in the floor, places that would crack beneath almost any weight. The house was long and thin, with a front room, followed by a dining room, and over to the right of that a kitchen, and only in the front room were there what you might call interesting things: a spinning wheel, a slouched half couch, two bright cotton beanbag chairs. An old Humpty Dumpty sat against one wall, and inside a cabinet of curious things were a shark’s tooth, the polished skull of a pine marten, a leather box from Granada, a found clay face from ancient El Salvador, fossilized fish scales, an egg-shaped kaleidoscope, and two impossibly tiny finch skulls, one still with a fringe of feathers at its beak, all these courtesy of my father’s endless travels.
Upstairs there are just two rooms, and in between these rooms there is a bathroom that is a gross-out shade of pink. The people before us liked navy blue. They chose it for the carpets and the trim. Even some of the doors are the American flag version of blue. The only room in the house that isn’t scorched by blue is the kitchen, which my mother painted yellow. Did it one year to the day after my father had left for good, which approximates the time she started the windowsill farm of basil and potatoes. Maybe if my mom hadn’t gotten so caught up with Mr. Paul, she’d have painted the rest of the house. She’d have made it all as ripe as fruit and put some music on.
She’d have been home, cratering her own pillow.
She’d have been with me, because I’d have been enough, because I alone would not be such a tiring, lonesome thing.
It was the eighth morning of July and finally felt like summer. I pushed all the windows open and the back door too, so the fireflies wouldn’t forget me. Granddad had told me, before I’d left the day before, to give myself the next day off. “Teresa is coming, isn’t she?” I’d said, and he’d said there were some things she needed extra time to do. I didn’t ask him what they were.
So it was early, and then it was ten, then noon, and for a while I watched Mrs. Robertson pinning her husband’s black socks to the line, but not her underwear, and then I called Nick Burkeman’s house, even though I knew he wouldn’t be home. “He’s at his father’s shop,” his mother told me when she picked up on her side; there was a TV on loud in the background. “All day?” I asked. “Until six,” she said, hurrying me off. I remembered what Nick had once said about his mom: She’d have preferred a TV family. It was what he’d said one night, when we were out on his roof, testing his hypothesis that chirper birds don’t fly at night. We could hear beneath us the fake TV laugh. We could hear Nick’s mom talking back to the show. It was dark, but I could see him blushing. “Let’s find an owl,” I’d said, “and let’s forget it.”
I could have read, I could have knocked away cobwebs, scrubbed out a sink, written a letter I’d never mail to my lousy cash-peeling excuse of a father, but I had been thinking about living and dying, and time was running out. I yanked at the knob on the navy-blue close
t door and pulled the door across the navy-blue napped carpet. I shoved aside the crate of little-girl toys and dug in, at last, to my shoe box of cash.
You cannot buy a man who is dying a single meaningful thing. You can only give him back the life he loved, and wake up his memories.
FOURTEEN
THERE IS A SECOND POSTER in the street lobby at the House of Dance that promises a lesson for free; it hangs there easy enough for the whole world to see. “Take the First One on Us,” the words say, over a picture of a slick-haired man and a fish-netted woman all meshed up together.
At two o’clock that very same afternoon I was studying that poster, wearing my best white camisole and my shortest lime green skirt and dangling, from one hand, the high-heeled sandals I had stolen from my mother. I was standing in that lobby, daring myself to take the steps up and up past the brownish-reddish walls and the photographs and the mirrors that would force me into doing the math on myself: my hair, which isn’t as black as my mother’s; my skin, which isn’t as pale; and my eyes, which I had decided by then had come direct from Granddad, by way of my mom.
You could say this idea I’d had was crazy—not sensible, not smart—but I’d made up my mind and come this far, and now I took a first step up, and then another, paused at the first landing, took the next step up. At the end of the stairs was another glass door that wouldn’t be budged without the say-so of a buzzer, and when I got there and hit the black box, it spluttered an answer. I pulled the handle of the door, and I was in.
If Leisha could see me now.
If Nick could.
If only my mother.
It was the colors of a foreign place—yellows, but not bright yellows, oranges mixed with twigs of brown, greens not like new greens but like rubbed-out, used-up ones. There was a couch, and there was a reception desk, and beyond that there were two ways to go: straight down the hall to the dance floor, or to the left, which led to rooms, a hall, a closet, and more dance floor. I could see, from where I stood, the blur-sway of dancing, mirrors on any wall that wasn’t windowed, fabric, and breeze.
No one bothered to question me, so I watched: the zigzags of arms and fingers and necks and feet, the bursting-out bloom of a peony on a wrist, the frostinglike swirl of a purple hem, all swooshing by. I could hear talk, but it was just pieces of talk. I could, when I really worked at it, make out phrases: “Back rock, hold. Back rock, hold. Everything straight above your sensor.” I had no clue what a sensor was. It wasn’t a word used in health class.
Now someone was laughing. Now someone stopped laughing. Now the music was swiped away and replaced with a song that was rising and then falling. The song was made of strings, and fisting up through the strings was piano. “One TWO three. One TWO three,” the voice was saying above it. “And not looking at me. And not dropping your shoulders. High on the TWOOOO, and three, and one, and again, this is the waltz. You are the queen. Aristocratic.” The queen, I thought, has a sensor.
Nothing was being stopped for my sake. No one was asking my name. I walked the length of the hall, past a board of names, toward the mirrored walls. I crept closer to the wooden floor, the peony wrist, the elbow hinge, the voice that belonged to the black-haired man, who was all in black—his shoes, his pants, his shirt, each strand of his hair. He was the man I had seen through the window, the man on the poster, and he was stepping back, stepping sideways, stepping forward, turning, turning his partner under his arm, starting again. “TWO, three, and one,” he said, and when he said the “TWO,” his eyebrows went up and when he said the “three,” they fell, but he couldn’t have been speaking to his partner with his eyes because her face was pressed away from his. I hadn’t seen this one in the window before. She had bleached white-blond hair razored just above her ears. If I’d climbed all those steps thinking dance was romance, I had another lesson coming.
“Give me your hands,” the man said, though he already had them. “More pressure. Yes. There it is. Heels first and feet parallel. You know this, Teenie. It’s in your muscle memory.” He had a square face and a big-screen smile. “Dancing isn’t torture,” he said.
“It isn’t right,” she said, finally standing up straight and glaring up at him, then stomping off.
“Closer than it was and getting there,” he said.
“I should have it by now.”
“It takes time.”
“The competition’s in two weeks.”
“Everything you need to know you know,” he said. “You have to trust the music now. You have to trust your partner. Me, Teenie. You have to trust me.” He stepped into the miniature room where the music machine was. When he reappeared, more music was playing. He bowed toward her. She came to him. He smiled. She didn’t. They began. They whirled. They disappeared from my view, and now it was the woman with the peony on her wrist whom I watched, the doll-sized blonde whose eyelashes were fat, black feathers above her gray eyes. Her partner looked nothing like dance except in the face, which beamed a kind of glory. The hair he had was pulled back into a floppy ponytail, and he wore a faded pink-and-yellow shirt. They were standing in front of one wall of mirrors, and she was doing all the talking.
“Don’t pull on me,” she was saying. “And don’t push. This is only rumba walking. I need room, but I also need tension…Knees,” she said, “and hips. Small steps. Straight legs. Use the inside of your foot. This is what I want. And not that. This.” They stepped back and faced each other, and she began to count, “Slow quickquick slow quickquick slow,” until he stepped forward and she stepped back and then to the side, and then something else happened, and they broke apart and she walked, like a pony on a tether.
I felt the air in the room change before I understood how it could have, a blast of heat through the conditioned cool. When I turned to see, I understood that the mirrored wall had split, revealing a panel that turned out to be a door. Through the door came the heat of the day and also a cloud of smoke and also, at last, that red-haired dancer. She was so much smaller than I’d taken her to be, even stacked on dangerous shoes. She could have been twenty or thirty, or Hungarian or Polish, or anything else that I wasn’t, and I knew her, and she didn’t know me, and I shrugged and said nothing.
Her eyes weren’t a color I knew—flecks of blue, flecks of green, flecks of gray, something tropical. She looked at the woman with the peony on her wrist, then came in my direction, bringing the heat of the day, the smell of that smoke.
“Are you here for a lesson?” she wanted to know.
I shrugged, then nodded yes.
“Who’s your instructor?” She said her s like a z. She both z-ed and purred her “instructor.”
“I saw the sign,” I said. “Downstairs. ‘First One on Us.’”
“You’re looking then to begin? You’re a beginner?” I couldn’t make myself say one way or the other. I looked into her bright-bird eyes and forced myself to smile.
Now she was dancer-walking on her skyscraper heels back down the hall. Now I was turning to follow, my mother’s stolen sandals clanking against each other, my sneakers blowing air out of their side holes. Handing me an old clipboard she’d pulled from the reception desk, she told me to sit and fill in blanks, as if I’d traveled all this way in search of a doctor, in search of a cure.
“You answer these questions,” she said, “and I’ll book you.”
Well, this is crazy, I thought. But I sat down and obeyed her, because what she had said was true. I was looking to begin.
FIFTEEN
THE CANDY-HAIRED dancer was Marissa. She studied the answers I’d scribbled onto the clipboard page and asked if I had the afternoon open.
I said, “Somewhat.”
She said, “Two hours, and there’s a lesson block free.”
I said that would work with my schedule.
The phone behind the check-in desk rang. She answered. I settled into the leather sofa. Crossed my legs, tugged at my skirt, took a good, long look at my mother’s shoes, undid the straps, put the sandal
s on, kicked my sneakers under the couch, and glanced at the clock. Two hours are like a lifetime when you’re waiting for your very first ballroom dance lesson. But then again, there is so much to see.
The other dance students were coming up the steps, buzzing through the door, sitting down on the other end of the couch, and starting to change their shoes, because everyone who came to the House carried a drawstring pouch of special dancing shoes. Even the men had their own leather Cubans, shoes, from what I could tell, that were too tight at the toes and too high in the heels with the thinnest leather soles. I twined my legs to cover my feet, but my borrowed sandals were certifiable proof that I was a first timer.
The students came in twos and ones. Most of the twos were what Marissa called the wedding couples. “How is our wedding couple?” she would greet them. “How many weeks is it now till the matrimony?” When one of the brides-to-be brought not a bag but a box, Marissa came from behind her desk to see. “Perfect,” she said, taking the box of wedding shoes in her hands and peeling back the tissue paper. “Oh. Perfect.” Then to the almost groom: “You like?” He was short and stout with a grizzly beard. He nodded and shrugged at the same time.
The singles were women, mostly, and mostly older than my mom. There was one Marissa greeted as Eleanor, who wore a see-through blouse and a short stretch skirt and a pair of red lace leggings. Eleanor talked a million miles a minute—to Marissa, when Marissa was listening, to me when the phone rang—and she answered her own questions too. “Is this your first time? It must be your first time. Do you have a favorite dance? How could you? It’s your first time. You’ve come to the right place, then, let me tell you, because Max, the owner, you know Max with the black hair? He won the U.S. National Professional American Nine Dance championship, and not only that, once he took the mambo at Florida. You ever see Max on TV? On one of those public television stations? You ever see him in the newspapers? Max, I’m telling you, is famous.” I nodded, as if I expected nothing less. Eleanor wouldn’t take her eyes off my shoes.