by Mark Dunn
“I cannot believe you would do this here at the fair,” said Shirley to her husband Norman. “When we were all having so much fun. Why didn’t you wait until we got back home?”
“Because we can’t live the lie another minute,” said Patsy without much animation.
“We’ve been wanting to level with you two for some time,” said Norman.
“Would you like some more coffee?” asked the waitress. She wore a spiffy little felt hat that had the words “Mayflower Doughnut Restaurant” stitched on it.
John did not even wait until the waitress had left with her coffee pot to say that he and Shirley had already suspected the affair. They weren’t born yesterday, or in the Pleistocene epoch, for that matter.
Shirley nodded. Then she tightened her brow and said to her husband and her best friend, “I had hoped that your rocket car would come loose and the two of you would plummet to your deaths.”
The third conversation of the day took place between Shirley and John in the McKaycraft Lounge. The McKay Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made spring-action, chromium-plated metal furniture for porch, lawn, and solarium. Shirley and John sat on a glider and drank from bottles of Coca-Cola. Next to them a woman spoke to her friend in a muted voice about a woman she had met in the Kraft Mayonnaise Kitchen in the Foods Building, who had just the night before dipped her dress in the blood of John Dillinger as he lay dying on the sidewalk in front of the Biograph Theatre. “Everybody was dipping something into that puddle of blood,” said the woman with squeamish delight. “And the G-men were letting them do it. Like the ‘G’ in G-man stood for ‘Go right ahead and get your liquid souvenir.’”
Shirley held her handkerchief to her mouth as if she might throw up a little. Then she turned to John and said, “I didn’t see this coming. I knew all about the affair. I know you did, too. But I thought that it would either run its course or they would come to their senses. At the very worst, I thought they’d come to us asking for divorces. But this.” Shirley shook her head, her hands poised limply in the air.
A smartly dressed woman with fashionably large epaulettes and a disc hat that clung to the side of her head as if it were glued on came up and asked if Shirley and her “husband” would like to know about some of the features of the McKaycraft porch furniture.
John shook his head politely. “It’s very chic, though. Very moderne. And comfortable, too.”
“Take this brochure with you,” the woman said. “Thank you for visiting the lounge.”
After she moved away, John looked at Shirley and said, “You want to fuck each other?”
Shirley stared at John. It took a full fifteen seconds for her to reply, “I’m not attracted to you.”
“Really? Not even a little bit? I give a damned good foot massage. Dr. Scholl taught me.”
Shirley swallowed and then put her hand to her throat as if it were tightening up.
“Well, I thought I’d ask. We both seem to be in companionate marriages now.”
“Yours may be like that, John. Mine isn’t. I wasn’t brought up that way.”
“So what do we do now?” John pulled a chrome-plated ashtray stand over to his side of the glider and lit up.
Shirley shook her head wearily. Then she let her chin fall, the tears flowing freely.
“We should really just, you know, go somewhere and fuck,” said John “You and me. That’ll show ’em.”
Shirley stood up. She had forgotten that there was a purse in her lap, and when her lap disappeared, the purse tumbled to the floor and everything spilled out of it. She got down on her hands and knees and began scooping everything up. A woman came over to help and Shirley waved her away with her compact. John crouched down next to her.
“This is happening to me too, you know.”
“It all seems like one big joke to you.”
“It isn’t. I don’t know what to do, either.”
“I can’t find my lipstick.”
“Here it is.” John handed Shirley the lipstick, which had rolled under the glider.
“I can’t go back to the Blackstone. I can’t face him. The two of us alone in that hotel room. I just can’t do it.”
“Then let’s not go back. Let’s not meet them at the Midget Village. Let’s make them worry about us. Do they think of us? Have they thought of us at all?”
Shirley shook her head. John helped her to her feet. “Take me to Italy,” she said. “Then I want to go to Belgium. Norman says the Belgian village looks just like the one he visited during the war.”
John nodded.
“Did you know that Patsy wasn’t visiting her mother last year? Did you know she was here with Norman?”
John nodded.
“Were you never going to say anything to me?”
“What could I have said?”
Shirley brushed the dust from her hands. “This means the affair has been going on for over a year.”
“Maybe two.”
John took Shirley’s hand. He led her out of the McKaycraft Lounge.
The fourth conversation of the day took place on a bench in Midget Village. Nearby, two Little People—both middle-aged men—were shaking their tiny fists at one another over some small thing that one had allegedly done to assault the dignity of the other. It was of no large concern to Norman and Patsy, just slightly annoying.
Norman looked at his watch. It was nearly two thirty. Norman and Patsy’s spouses were supposed to have rejoined them at two. “I suppose they aren’t coming,” said Patsy.
“I suppose you’re right,” answered Norman.
Patsy sighed. “The colors were much brighter last year,” she said quietly. “They’re quite muted now. They almost seem to be fading.”
The two looked at one another, each knowing the same thing: that by this time next year there’d be no fair, and thus, no color left at all. And what then?
What then?
1935
PERSEVERINGLY TERPSICHOREAN IN WASHINGTON STATE
The two women hadn’t started out as friends. In fact, they weren’t even acquaintances in the beginning. But after a couple of days of polite nods and another three days of courteous verbal greetings, Mrs. McLatchy took the plunge and invited Mrs. Trestle to take the empty seat next to her in her box. It was positioned on the opposite end of the ballroom from the bandstand and the stage. Here one could see the full breadth of the competition area.
The Century Ballroom on the “Seattle-Tacoma Hi Way” was less than a year old but had already earned a name for itself not only for its size—it boasted an impressive twenty thousand feet of floor space—but for its strange design: it looked, upon first glance, like a Martian mausoleum, the subtlety of its Art Deco design origins getting somehow lost in architectural adventurism. This hadn’t stopped Guy Lombardo and his brothers from performing there a few weeks earlier and bringing over twenty-five hundred fans in out of the rain.
Mrs. Trestle lived in nearby Fife. Mrs. McLatchy came from Tacoma, a half-hour’s drive away. The distance didn’t discourage Mrs. McLatchy from attending the “Walkathon” (as the dance marathon’s promoters chose inexplicably to denominate it) just as often as Mrs. Trestle. Both women came twice a day with rigorous regularity—first for several hours in the morning and early afternoon, and then again for several more hours in the evening. In between their two daily visits, they dashed home to feed their respective pets and to read their respective mail, Mrs. Trestle to dust and mop and add the spic to the span of her little widow’s cottage, and Mrs. McLatchy to make sure that her maid was doing all of the above in addition to putting Johnson Wax wherever Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio told her to. Mrs. McLatchy was wealthy; Mrs. Trestle was not. This mattered not at all to the two sexagenarians, who became fast companions as the Walkathon plodded on, hour after hour, in the great Martian ballroom.
In the quiet mornings, when there wasn’t much to see, Mrs. Trestle brought her knitting. The dancers were much more subdued at this early hour and appeared t
o be saving their strength (what little of it there was) for the evening, when the ballroom boxes and grandstands would swell with those who came from as far away as Seattle to see what had been banned both there and in its companion metropolis, Tacoma. Arbiters of morality in both cities branded dance marathons cruel and indecent, and attractive to only the riff and raff of society.
The dance marathon attended by Mmes. McLatchy and Trestle in the Century Ballroom of Fife, Washington, was not so different from any other. Most of the spectators came to see the live drama of bedraggled human endurance—to take voyeuristic pleasure in witnessing hardship and peril from a safe distance, and to thank their lucky stars that it was not they out there on that punishing dance floor. It was a ghoulish thing. But this was not the reason that Mrs. McLatchy and Mrs. Trestle came. They came to cheer on their favorites.
Each woman had selected two couples early on for whom she would root—two so that if one dropped out or was purposefully eliminated from the competition, there would still be a couple left to pin her hopes on.
“47 and 93,” said Mrs. McLatchy, pointing out her favorites to Mrs. Trestle with one of the latter’s unemployed knitting needles. “And you?”
“Numbers 13 and 62.”
“Why those two?” asked Mrs. McLatchy, who did not like to knit, and so was in daily possession of crossword puzzles instead. As Mrs. Trestle considered the question, Mrs. McLatchy plucked up a crustless cucumber sandwich from the little picnic basket resting on the floor at her feet. There were crackers in there as well, and a little cool stainless steel tub of some sort of pâté that Mrs. Trestle couldn’t identify.
Finally, Mrs. Trestle replied: “I looked them all over on the first day. I can spot the professionals—the ones who make money from dancing. I don’t like it that they let the professionals in here. The specialty acts are always entertaining, but I know for a fact that many of these dancers are vaudevillians who are being paid on the side.”
Mrs. McLatchy, who did not know this, cocked her head in edified amazement.
“So I seek out the ones who look hungry, who look down on their luck. I study the clothes they wear. Are the girl’s dresses faded? Are the boy’s trousers tattered and torn? Is there a hollowness to their faces? Are their eyes sunken in their sockets, as if retreating from all the pain they’ve seen? I choose to put my faith in those who seem the most deserving.”
“Your two couples are quite young.”
Mrs. Trestle nodded. “They’re just babies.”
“Mine are older, as you can see. I’m looking for the two couples who seem to have the best chance of winning. It’s just like sizing up thoroughbreds in the enclosure before a race. Take Couple Number 38 over there, for example. I very nearly picked them. See how they’re moving like stiff corks bobbing in the water? They appear to be conserving their energy.”
Mrs. Trestle nodded. “You can tell that they’ve been in marathons before. But they don’t look very hungry.”
Mrs. Trestle didn’t like it that the crowds in the evening came to see blood. When the sun went down, the Walkathon became all but gladiatorial. On some nights there was the “sprint.” “One fall and they’re both out!” the emcee would bray into his microphone. On other nights, there was the “grind”: continuous dancing without the customary fifteen-minute rest period every hour. The couples danced on and on until one member of a partnership dropped from sheer exhaustion. And the unfortunate dancer need not even make full bodily contact with the floor to be disqualified, along with his companion; a single knee touching the floor was sufficient to send the pair home.
“I sometimes feel guilty watching it,” confessed Mrs. Trestle during a particularly long-lived “grind.” It was nearing the five hundredth hour of the marathon and there were still fifty-one couples remaining on the dance floor. No one seemed fatigued to the point of imminent danger but all seemed painfully, wearily beaten down—even more so than usual. “I feel that I shouldn’t be watching, that I ought to turn away. There is so much suffering inside this hall.”
“Now, my dear,” said Mrs. McLatchy, setting down her pencil and crossword puzzle, having been stymied by a four-letter “tool” containing the letter “z.” “They’d be dancing here day in and day out whether we’re present to watch them or not. And, darling, you know that I have a great deal of money and I take every opportunity that is given to me to add my coins to those generous silver showers. I’m sure that’s why many of these young people have entered this competition, my dear. To win the top prize, well, certainly—but also to take some money home with them even in defeat. And I speak for the professionals as well. Vaudeville is dead. Where else has a dancer to go? The radio? And Hollywood is such a terribly difficult place to make a—”
Suddenly, something caught Mrs. McLatchy’s eye. Something awful. One of her two couples, Number 93, was in the soup. The woman, whom Mrs. McLatchy had come to know familiarly by her given name, Velma, was slipping through the arms of her partner, Antonio. Velma had bright red hair with only the remnant of a Marcel wave. Her build was slight—as slight and willowy as Antonio’s was solid. Yet Antonio was having trouble keeping her aright. Velma had sunk into the deepest recesses of sleep at just the moment that Antonio’s strength had begun to fail him. Mrs. McLatchy rose quickly to her feet and began to shout, “Hold onto her, Antonio! Don’t let her fall! For God’s sake, don’t let her fall!”
Antonio let her fall.
Velma lay on the floor, still fast asleep. Antonio dropped to his knees and wept. Mrs. McLatchy and Mrs. Trestle knew their whole story by now. He worked at the sawmill—the one where the strike was taking place. They had two little girls. Once, early in the Walkathon, Velma’s mother had brought the girls to see their mother and father compete. But the chastened grandmother was strictly forbidden ever to bring them back.
Two days later, one of Mrs. Trestle’s two favorite couples was also eliminated: Couple Number 13. They were the losing pair in the heel-and-toe derby. Unlike Mrs. McLatchy’s Couple, Number 93, Jake and Angeline weren’t married. But they had planned to wed as soon as the marathon was over, as soon as they won the $1,750 cash prize. Mrs. Trestle had shared in their high hopes. The duo often danced over to visit her at the box. Mrs. Trestle knitted a sweater for Angeline. Angeline had two deep scars on her face that she never talked about. They seemed invisible to Jake, who sometimes kissed her right on the cicatrix tissue.
Jake got a charley horse. It brought him down like a crippled pony. There was a pile-up on the track where he fell. Someone kicked him in the head. An athletic shoe came down hard upon his right shin. Mrs. Trestle found it difficult to watch.
The emcee encouraged the crowd to throw money at Jake and Angeline as Jake was being carried away on a stretcher. Angeline stayed behind to collect all the coins. Mrs. Trestle asked if Mrs. McLatchy would send them a silver dollar. The heavy coin hit Angeline in the head, but she smiled when she saw it on the floor and blew the two women a grateful kiss. Then she shambled off, the show smile having been replaced by a look of deep, hopeless despondency. Mrs. McLatchy wondered aloud if there would ever be a marriage.
It was over eight hundred and fifty hours into the competition that Mrs. McLatchy’s second couple met defeat.
It was a terrible thing.
Stella of Couple Number 47 went “squirrelly” upon her cot. It was “Cot Night,” in which the dancers took their hourly rest periods upon cots that had been pulled out in full view of the audience. Mrs. Trestle had overheard someone, tongue loosened, no doubt, by too much beer, remark that the dancers’ only bodily function still left to the audience’s imagination was taking a shit. His companion had cynically replied that public shit-taking generally came after hour one thousand.
Stella began hallucinating. She was seeing the sky. A bird-congested sky. At first the sight of the imagined birds fascinated her. She stood upon her cot and pointed and stared and smiled. But as the sky turned black with them, she became frightened and began to scream. She wo
ke all of the other contestants, all thirty-one other couples still left in the competition. All watched the trainers and the nurses try to quiet squirrelly, screaming Stella. Her partner, Dermot, vaulted over the rope that separated the men’s public slumber quarters from the women’s, and hurried to her side. It was quite some time before she could be sedated by a doctor’s hypodermic; it took no time at all, though, for the contest managers to expel Couple Number 47 from the marathon.
Mrs. Trestle put her hands over her eyes while it was happening. “Poor, poor dear. Oh, poor dear.”
Mrs. McLatchy patted her friend on the knee. “The whole thing has become barbaric, Lydia. I’m not sure if I have it in me to come back tomorrow.”
“Is it also because your other favorite couple is now out of the competition?”
Mrs. McLatchy bridled. “No, my dear. I should certainly stay and root for your Number 62. But I just don’t know if I have the willpower. I agree with you that it’s become very hard to watch. You can take your hands down now, Lydia. The girl has been removed. All is quiet again. Have a Crackerjack.”
Mrs. Trestle pulled her hands from her eyes. She pushed the Crackerjack box away. “I would break a filling.”
The next morning Mrs. Trestle came and claimed her seat in the first row of the box she shared with Mrs. McLatchy. She took out her knitting and got to work. She waved at Gloria and Tom, the remaining couple on whom she had staked her hopes. They waved back. Gloria and Tom looked very tired. It had been a long night. It had been hard for them to sleep well during the rest breaks with so many eyes on them.
For over two hours Mrs. Trestle looked for her friend, having not quite believed it when Mrs. McLatchy said she might stop coming. Mrs. Trestle wondered if she should telephone her. Why should the two of them limit their friendship to only watching the Walkathon together?
The next day Mrs. Trestle did that very thing: She called Mrs. McLatchy. The maid who answered the telephone said that Mrs. McLatchy was unavailable and would call her back.