by Beth Kephart
Then chair by chair we rose, up a very wide curve, stopping at every interval until all the new customers were on board. I could see my mom easily at first, and then she started to grow small, and with every lift upward I felt the breeze grow stronger. Then Dad and I in our chair were at the very highest point, tipping back and forth, as if we were just about to fall. The knuckles of my hands were white. I had that get-sick feeling in my gut. I begged my dad to let me off. “Rosie, don’t be silly,” he said. “The fun’s about to start.”
Right after that, as if he had magic powers, the last customer climbed on board, and we were whipping down around the very wide curve, then rising up and up, toward the moon. It felt as if my chin had fallen down around my toes, as if my stomach were all liquid. I was screaming, but everyone was screaming, and my dad said—yelled it loud, so I could hear him—” See that, Rosie. We’re having an adventure.” He put his arm around me, and I pressed up against him close and never for a second took my hands off the bars, and then, slam, when we were one metal chair away from the wheel’s highest spot, the whole thing stopped its turning with a jolt. I thought at first that some lucky kid was climbing off, another customer climbing on. But then nothing happened, and we stayed stuck, and the moon was close and the salt breeze blew, and the sound of everybody’s screaming changed from funny into scared. “Dad?” I said. “Dad?” But even he couldn’t make the big wheel move.
I knew for sure that we were going to fall, going to smash against the ground like bugs getting smashed against a windshield. “We’re going to fall, we’re going to fall,” I told my dad, but he said, “Technical glitch, Rosie. No problem. Happens all the time.” He kept his one arm around me steady, and with his free hand he pointed to the ground where my mother stood, her white sundress all lit up by boardwalk lights. Her eyes were on nothing but us. She didn’t move one inch. She was standing there, steadfast. And my dad said, “Nothing’s going to happen, see? Your mom wouldn’t let us fall.” Soon the wheel was going again. Soon I was back down on the ground.
That night when I got home from Granddad’s, Mom was there and Mr. Paul wasn’t, and something was wrong, it was clear. She was sitting in the living room with the lights turned off, as if I were hours late for a dinner she’d promised, as if she’d been a real mother all summer long. “Mom?” I said when I found her sitting there in the street-lamp dark, when I realized she was alone.
“Rosie?” she said.
“Mom?”
“I’m leaving Mr. Paul,” she said. And despite the knot that was my heart, I sat down then to listen.
THIRTY
SOMETIMES YOU KNOW something’s wrong, and you tell yourself you’ll never do that wrong, and then it happens: You take the first wrong step and then the next, and you’re all of a sudden guilty of everything you never thought you could be guilty of. Nothing that you ever do will erase the thing you’ve done, and since you can’t turn back, you don’t turn back; you just keep doing wrong. “It was too easy,” my mother said that night. “He made it easy. He was there when no one else was.”
We kept the lights off in the living room. I sat across from her in the rocking chair she had bought when she learned she was pregnant with me. She stayed where she had been, tucked into the corner of the beat-up couch beside the hutch of curious things. She had opened the windows; a single firefly had flown in. Turned itself on and off between us as Mom talked and I tried to listen. The TV volume was up loud at the Burkemans’ next door. There was the usual number of cars for that hour, spilling headlight juice into the room and then trailing off. When the cars went by, I could see my mother’s face. When they drove on past, they drained her eyes.
She said that at first Mr. Paul made her feel safe. “Like I had a purpose,” she said. She explained that it had felt like an adventure early on, going in and out of people’s houses, making things clean, revising the perspective. It was like a Mr. Marinari project, the way she told it—taking in each window-cleaning customer’s view, getting a feel for the way the world closed in on other people, the way it opened out. “We had so much to talk about.” My mother sighed. “We shared so many secrets. Nobody knew all the things that we knew about the lives of perfect strangers.” She was struggling to put her facts in order. “When you’re window washing, you’re working side by side,” she said. “Or you’re working face-to-face, across the same pane of glass. You’re this close, Rosie,” she said, and if I couldn’t see her hands just then, I could imagine, sure enough, that they were kissing-inches apart.
“It just all seemed so…inevitable,” she went on, shaking her head slowly as a spill of headlight yellow flooded the room. “Like there was nothing anyone could do. Soul mates, Rosie. Do you know what I mean?” I didn’t answer; she wasn’t really asking. I was watching the firefly go from dark to light to dark, its light more neon green than yellow, as if it were powered by a battery pack.
“I thought he didn’t love her,” she said.
“Love who?” I asked, though I knew full well, because the meanest part of me wanted her to have to say it.
“He promised he didn’t love her.”
The firefly sailed to the farthest corner of the room and stuck. Went on and off like a lantern hanging there in a storm.
“He said he’d marry me. Said he’d change the business name. Call it Mr. and Mrs. Paul.”
The firefly lit yellow-green again, and then its light went silent. Come on, firefly, I thought. Come on. Give us some light. I wasn’t looking at my mother, for if I did, I’d know for sure that she was crying.
“He isn’t going to.” She sighed. “He never was. He loves his wife. He always did; every minute the guy still loved his wife.”
“Mr. Paul is a crud head,” I said. Because she’d stopped talking and because he was.
“Rosie.”
“Plus he’s bald.”
There was the light of the firefly again, nudging the ceiling, hunting for sky. I watched that thing. I waited. I tried to imagine what she might say next, and then I realized that she was laughing. A broken, wheezing, miserable laugh, as if laughing for her had become a foreign language. As if her lungs didn’t work.
“You’re funny, Rosie,” she said at last.
“Well, he is,” I said. The firefly had gone dark again. Something fake hysterical was going down on the Burkemans’ TV. I tilted my weight in the rocking chair and rode it back and forth. “You ever look at him?”
“Did I ever look at Mr. Paul?” she said, her voice still crackling, incredulous, dry and wet at the same time, old as the world is old and also squeaking new.
“Did you ever see him, I meant. There’s a difference.”
“How’d you get so smart?” she asked, after a long stretch of silence.
“Mr. Marinari,” I said. “School project.”
The rocking chair creaked. A car went by. Another burst of canned ha-has let loose from the sitcom next door, and I thought of Nick upstairs in that house with his earphones on, trying not to hear the noise below. I got a glimpse of my mother, her eyes wet and wide, her neck pale and bony, her hands up in her hair. The skin was smudged beneath her eyes. She had no lipstick on. She was forgiven, maybe, or not forgiven, but either way, she was just as pretty as she had ever been. Either way, and I couldn’t help it, I would always love my mom.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“Now?” She sniffed.
“Without the bald one.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Start over. I guess. Find a better way to be necessary.” The firefly I’d thought was gone was hanging now, as if on a string, right above her narrow shoulder. She couldn’t see it, but I could. A beacon, Mr. Marinari would have called it. I called it, to myself, a sign.
“I can think of lots of ways,” I said.
“What kind of ways?”
“At Granddad’s, for example. There’s stuff to do.”
Her silence.
“He’s a bit under the weather,” I pressed.
“Worse than before,” she said. She knew.
“Getting so. He sleeps in a bed with railings. There are machines.”
“Oh. Rosie.”
“You’re his daughter,” I said.
“I’ve been lousy,” she said. “In every direction. Do you think he’d want to see me still? Does he ever talk about me?”
“You should ask him,” I said. “Yourself.”
She thought a long time, two passing cars’ worth, enough time for the firefly to whoosh off and vanish. “What do you do when you’re there all day?” she finally wanted to know.
“I sit around. I talk to Teresa. I put his things In Trust.”
“In trust?”
“It’s a category.”
“Oh.”
“It’s his story.”
“I see.”
“It’s who Granddad is. What he’s loved. His choices.”
“Sounds like some sort of expedition.”
“Sort of. Like today,” I said, “I found a doll. He said it was the original Rosie. He told me things. I listened.” Suddenly the noise from the TV at the Burkemans’ snapped off, making a truer kind of nighttime silence, deepening the darkness. Suddenly the vanished firefly was back, so close I could have taken its glow in my hand and held it there while I weighed what I might tell.
What questions I might ask.
What ways there are of starting over.
“I’m throwing a party for Granddad,” I finally said. “And I could use some help.”
THIRTY-ONE
WHEN YOU HAUL AWAY THE CLUTTER that cannot matter anymore, you change the size and shape of things, the possibilities. I made decisions on the D.L. I tossed away all the Toss. I bought special boxes at the everything store for all that was In Trust: the travel books, the floating feather, the best-loved novels, the decks of photographs I’d someday spend long hours steaming apart, the parts of the dresses my granddad had set aside to remind him of Aideen. I slipped in the letters and the postcards, the stash of coins and recipe cards, the original Rosie, a sweater my granddad had said he’d worn on the day that I was born. I tucked in every bit of black, round vinyl, every faded record cover, all the parts of the Sansui. My mother came in her old gray Volvo to help me take things home, parked at the curb and put her blinkers on while Teresa and I stacked the boxes into the trunk, then into the long backseat, finally on the floor of the passenger’s side, and I didn’t even try to hide my tears, and Teresa said it was okay that I was crying. Mom too. Then Mom came back, and she walked through the door of the house she’d long called home, calling for her father. She went to sit with Granddad then, while I dried my face and took the last steps for what would happen next. She sat, and they talked a very long time, beyond and past regrets.
Pastrami’s was doing sandwiches on the house, and Mr. D’Imperio himself was coming for the show, bringing his entire corporation along, bringing a vat of fruited ice. Whiz Bang was bouqueting balloons in gleamed-up colors. Jimmy Vee and his dad were doing up a cake; “Sweet Dreams,” the icing said. And Annie Pearl in the end brought down the house with any flower that blooms in ruby red, because ruby red is the color of July, which is the color of passion, which is the color of a life being lived. Ruby red is the heart, and ruby red was the color of my borrowed shoes, the color of the dress that Miss Marie had sewn for me. Ruby red bloomed everywhere. It was July 31.
They closed the House of Dance that night; there was no light in those wide window frames. They came down the street, my friends the dancers did, walking the dancer’s walk, carrying their clothes before them in plastic bags, their pouches of makeup, their suede-soled dancing shoes. Max was there, of course, and Marissa too, and Annette and Eleanor and Peter and Teenie and Julia and also William, Marissa’s William, who had come in from New York. Nick was already at the house when the dancers arrived, had taken off from JB’s like a boyfriend would, to help Teresa set up for the show. They’d moved Granddad’s bed and machines against one wall. They’d steered the wheelchair with the tasseled cushion out front and center. They’d put a chair for Mom beside the wheelchair for Granddad, and Granddad was ready; Teresa had made sure. His hair was that much longer than when the summer had started and more gloriously white than before. His ears were large and his eyes were blue, and he didn’t have to say that he loved me, not one time, because I absolutely knew.
Upstairs, meanwhile, the air was electric. The second room to the left, the largest room, had been transformed, by my mom, into a dressing area, with three rectangular mirrors propped against one wall and a little folding screen separating the women from the men. It was fishnet hose and silken bathrobes, on the women’s side, Danskins and sweats, tubes of vermilion, carmine, emerald, cobalt, cerulean, pink; cheeky crayons and skinny pencils and blushes and clips. It was color, brilliant color, from every corner of the world. Strands of stray ribbon snaked across the floor, fugitive rhinestones. Annette was buffing her shoes.
But it was Marissa I couldn’t stop looking at, her candy-red hair in a magnificent sheen, her lashes long and extravagant, her eyes made tropical by all the paints that she’d put on. She held one hand beneath Julia’s chin and with her free hand worked that canvas, making the girl glorious, bold. When she had done her work there, she called for me, stretched two long, graceful hands toward my hair to sweep it from my face.
“Some of it loose,” she said. “Some of it pinned up. Yes? Something pretty here?” She pressed a rhinestone barrette to a place above my ear, then walked me to the mirrors my mom had bought that very afternoon at the everything store, because she was helping, because she knew. “Beauty, yes? You see it? Yes?”
“I see you beside me,” I said.
She kissed me on the cheek; I kissed her, too. I wound my way back down Granddad’s steps, toward the room in which we’d spent our summer, the room that had been stripped down to make way, at last, for an adventure. In the front hall, in the darkness, some of the dancers had gathered to rehearse. Ghostly, ethereal, they spooled in and out, tracing the rumba of Cuba, the samba of Brazil, the tango of Argentine cowboys, holding themselves open to invisible hands, preparing to take my grandfather to the places he might have gone, the places he’d been dreaming of, in honor of Aideen. But for the whisk of shoes across the floor there was no sound. But for a beckoning stomp, a slow skimming of feet, there was nothing but the waiting to begin. What light there was fell from the moon outside, bright and high, touching close to heaven.
There were fifteen minutes until the show began. There were ten. I stepped from the hall back into the kitchen, where Pastrami’s sandwiches were on metal trays, where the fruited ice basked in a cooler. I peeked out into the living room, where my granddad sat, with my mom beside him, with Teresa and Mr. D. and Harvey all close, with Miss Marie and Annie Pearl and Jimmy Vee right there too, with Riot in her basket, perfectly preened, with Nick as near as Nick had to be, as he would be all the rest of that summer. The bouquets of balloons were sandbagged to the floor. The flowers were in vases everywhere. There were five minutes until the show was scheduled to begin, and then there were two, and then Max was floating down the stairs, his black hair shellacked, his black shoes on, his hand reaching out for mine.
“Are you ready?” he asked me.
I nodded. “I am.”
“Step forward then,” he said. “And let it happen.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This time I begin with my husband, Bill, who surprised me one birthday with the gift of dance—ten shared ballroom lessons that endeared us both to the rise and fall, the quickquick, the learning to lead and to follow. At the immaculate Dancesport Academy in Ardmore, ten lessons became so many more and our teachers became our friends—Scott Lazarov, Stephanie Risser, Aideen O’Malley, John Vilardo, John Larson, Jean Paulovich, and Josephina Luczak. I am amazed by you all, I am grateful for what you’ve shared. Thank you.
HarperCollins continues to be the most extraordinary, most intelligent, most welcome and welcoming ho
me. Laura Geringer, Jill Santopolo, Lindsey Alexander: You are rare in your commitment to the finest-wrought tales, in your kindness to authors, and in your vision. I am so lucky to have found you. Thank you to the copyeditors, Renée Cafiero and Pearl Hanig. Thank you to Carla Weise for the art. Thank you to Cindy Tamasi and Nettie Hartsock for spreading the word. Thank you to Jennie Nash for the tube of red lipstick. Thank you to Yvonne Marceau for the seeds.
Amy Rennert, my agent: Well. Who’d have thought it, all those years ago? Who’d have imagined that we’d be here? You are a cherished friend.
House of Dance was written during a time of tremendous personal loss. I miss my mother more than I can say; I wish that she were here, to read this story. I am awed by my father, who carries forward gracefully, planting gardens and taking care. I see, in goldfinch and hawk, how the soul lives on. Finally, as always and of course, I am grateful to my son, Jeremy, who finds the perfect words, who is wise beyond his years, and who has given me song in times of stillness, a surge of joy in moments of seeming emptiness.
Every story is a blessing, and in this life I am so richly blessed
About the Author
Beth Kephart is the author of UNDERCOVER. She was nominated for the National Book Award for her book A SLANT OF SUN. Her writing has been anthologized many times and has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Baltimore Sun. In 2005 she won the Speakeasy Prize in poetry. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family. You can visit her online at www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com.