Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  I met her the very first Sunday, or the first official Sunday that Eben presided as the new pastor. I’d got our two out of the nursery and stood with him at the door of the church, shaking hands with the congregation as they looked us over. I’d dressed the girls all in white, to make a good impression, in those angelic smocked things with the rosettes and puffed sleeves and gathered fronts that floated out over little bellies in search of grape juice, dirt, finger-paint.

  This nice woman, lean as Presbyterians always are, very weathered in the way of women who garden, came up and took my hand in hers. “Cile—may I call you that, dear?—I have two grandbabies just the age of your two, little boys they are, and a daughter-in-law who could use a nice friend like you. She’s a Dallas girl and hasn’t put down roots yet in our little city. Will you come for tea, well, nobody has tea anymore, do they, come for something Wednesday afternoon? I know Mary Virginia is free on Wednesdays. We’ll get the children together, and you two girls as well.”

  “Williams,” Eben had murmured to me as I shook the hand of the tanned woman in the straight gray silk.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Williams,” I said, “we’d love to come.” I hated being so obviously prompted; he did it all the time. Did he expect me to know every one of them the first Sunday? I imagined perhaps this woman I had never met before, with the name that had an echo of an earlier time in my life, might have preferred to introduce herself to me. Let me know what she’d like to be called. Surely she’d already planned the rest of her speech, hardly an invitation that had occurred to her on the spot. Maybe she wanted to say that her name was Lila Beth and before her marriage had been Jarvis, and can you imagine how much kidding she’d got, in Texas in those days, having LBJ as her monogram? She must have planned to say some of that at church, because she said it all when I did arrive for tea, and that was what she had after all, spiced tea in tall frosted glasses filled with crushed ice.

  I’d lost my own mother at eighteen, in one of those too quick and awful accidents—a flash-flood drowning—that replayed for years in my mind, leaving no chance to say the unsaid things, to get to know her, grown. When she was alive (and I remember most how alive she was), I’d had my mind, as kids do, on school. The spring she died, in fact, on Drew (Andy he was to me then). One day she’d been there, a beauty I thought I could never equal, and the next she’d been gone. I’d missed her steadily, but most fiercely after having babies of my own.

  Lila Beth’s house was not near ours, but in the old part of town where the streets were named for Texas’s founders, high on the bluffs adjoining City Park, above the meeting of the two rivers at Lovers Leap. Inside, her house aroused total awe in me with its stretch of Aubusson rug between George Something chairs, marquetry cabinets and bureau bookcases flanking one another and the mantel. Long-skirted end tables with tiny boxes and silver bud vases. So many things that children could wreak destruction on, it quite took my breath away. But when she produced lemonade in paper cups for them, saying lemonade didn’t stain the way fruit juices did, I could see we were going to get on fine.

  She thought my calling the girls short people was amusing, and at once began to refer to the four children in that way, watching unruffled as the two sets of toddlers took to each other like ducks to—the Gobi Desert?

  Mary Virginia turned out indeed to be a Dallas girl. Although it’s hard for anybody outside the frame of reference to understand, if you saw her in a restaurant or airport you’d say to yourself right off, Dallas girl. Glossy hair cut just right, a generally turned-out, put-together look. Wearing more different items than the rest of us possessed. A couple of rings, but casual, lapis and coral, plain gold circles in pierced ears, an expensive belt, the lightest of cotton sweaters edged in silk ribbon over a silk blouse over a cotton camisole, pale hose and espadrilles. Friendly but not too friendly, this brunette Dallas girl, sitting on the George Something sofa, dragged out by her mother-in-law to meet a preacher’s wife.

  I was scared of her, truth be told. Girls like that in school had always made me feel unpolished, lacking. My mother, Celia—even then, ten years ago, already forgotten by everyone else on earth but me—had never taken too well to what she called ladies. “Ladies are a pain in the neck. It’s hard to believe I’m descended from an unbroken line of them back to the Ark. Promise me no one will ever accuse you of being one,” she’d said. I doubted anyone had.

  Anyway, that afternoon, that Wednesday, I walked across Lila Beth’s elegant room, in my wraparound skirt, T-shirt and tennis shoes, and sat down by this Dallas girl I’d been invited over to meet, while together we watched my daughters, built like Tonka trucks, begin to beat up on her frail surprised little boys, who yelped exactly like puppies when you stepped on their tails.

  It didn’t seem the best start to a friendship.

  TO MY SURPRISE, not only did Mary Virginia not mind my rowdy girls punching up on her amenable boys, she welcomed it. A week later she called to invite us all to her house. “Me with boys?” she said on the phone. “Right there you know I’m going to make a fine mess of it. What do I know about boys, growing up with a sister? Boys don’t tell you one thing about themselves when you’re dating; you’re the last person they want to know anything. Husbands, you can double that. I always envied girls with brothers. They knew everything. What went on in their heads, never mind the bathroom stuff and all the unmentionable business.

  “When they handed me the first one in the hospital, I said, you must have made a mistake. The worst of it is that my husband was pleased as punch. He worships the memory of his dad—he was killed in that awful ice storm of ’78. He has this image of him as this big outdoor man in boots and Stetson, his face brown as an old briefcase. So now he has these boys and he expects them to be like that. Forget it, I tell him, it’s another world now. But I can’t stand it if he’s disappointed in them. So if, you know, playing with your girls—I don’t see how you even keep up with them—toughens them up, that would be the grandest thing in the world for me, Cile.”

  Her house, in the scenic part of Lake Shore off Lago Lake, had more rooms than I could count. One of those big rambling ranches with a lake view, and each room had its own bath, even the little boys’ rooms did, at their age, plus each had a big double closet and all kinds of features built in for when they were older. Everything was in these mossy colors, gray-green in one boy’s room, gray-blue in the other, and there was wall-to-wall carpet everywhere, acres of it, all looking as soft and clean as the day it was installed. In the living room there were love seats in bisque gray, brocade chairs in cream gray. The master bedroom was beige gray with a bed the size of a football field.

  There was a maid, white and Swedish, silent as her footfalls on the turf, who brought us Dr. Peppers outside in a fenced yard filled with trikes, scooters, push toys of every sort, plus rocking horses and racing cars that ran on small boys’ feet.

  It was March, the week of Wind Day, and there was a nice steady breeze blowing off the water. It made me think of kite flying and roller-skating, all those aimless, harmless occupations of grade school. I thought I might move in. The maid appeared with thick slices of hot banana-nut bread for us and oatmeal cookies for the children. I remember letting my breath out slowly, wondering if it would be rude to slip off and take a nap on the big beige-gray king-sized bed in that quiet and spotless, immense and private room.

  The fact was, I had to keep an eye on my watch; Eben was expecting me in an hour at the church, to greet and go eat with another pastor in the synod who’d helped him get the appointment at Grace Presbyterian.

  “Ruth and Martha are nice names,” Mary Virginia said to me. “Different. I mean I haven’t met one preschool female in this town who isn’t named either Sherrie Lynn or Lynn Cheryl. I mean it. Aren’t yours Bible names? I know they are; even Episcopalians read the Bible sometimes. Ruth is the one who goes with her mother-in-law to her country, ‘Whither thou goest, I will go,’ right? And Martha, that’s New Testament, Mary and Martha.”
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br />   “That’s right.” I gave her a big smile for knowing all that. Keeping to myself a very old secret, that while this was her assumption and, of course, had been Eben’s, too, my daughters’ names, to me, were those of dancers leaping free of gravity, names to grow into.

  “How about Trey and Jock?” I asked her, returning her interest. “Are they nicknames?”

  “Sort of. Trey is the third. He’s named for his daddy and granddaddy. Jock is named for Lila Beth’s daddy, the other granddaddy. Actually, Mr. Jarvis, who I didn’t know, was named Jochem, which I couldn’t do anything with. Nobody was ever going to say it right or spell it right. And my sister had already got our daddy’s name. So we decided on Jock. And Lila Beth likes that okay.” She looked doubtful, breaking bits off her banana-nut bread. “Your husband is Eben, is that right? That’s an unusual name.”

  “Eben Tait, the original one, was a Scot clergyman, way back. He’s a namesake.”

  “What do you call him, I mean his title? We say ‘rector,’ Episcopalians. I mean I know you never call them ‘reverend,’ that’s an adjective, but I don’t know if you say ‘preacher’ or ‘minister.’ ”

  “Probably Lila Beth knows more about that than I do.” I smiled at my slight disclaimer; I’d only been in the church five years then. “She probably knows more than Eben. But I say ‘pastor.’ ‘The whole congregation ministers; the pastor preaches’ is what they say. We say.”

  “Do you like it? Seems like it would make you nervous. Being a preach—oops, a pastor’s wife.”

  “I try not to think a lot about it.” I laughed. “What does your husband do?” My hope was that he’d be somebody Eben could like, so that we could be friends, the four of us. I was thinking that if I helped turn her placid boys into little hoods then maybe we would see a lot of them.

  She stopped to smooth the hair and hurt feelings of her smaller son, Jock. She wiped his blue eyes and set him back in his play car that my Martha was trying to push him out of. “He’s in agribusiness. Isn’t that the worst word in the world? The paper here is always talking about agribusiness. He says he’s a farmer; he likes that, calling himself a farmer. I can’t say I do. I don’t know why but rancher sounds a whole lot better. You know? I mean there’s as much oil found on people’s land in east Texas as in west Texas, but people don’t know that. They think oil, they think ranch. That’s Hollywood, I guess. If they’re going to do a farmer, they put him in a straw hat with a stick of grass in his mouth. You’d think people who had oil on their property could think of another name to call themselves.”

  “It sounds nice and private to me.”

  “Do you like this town?” She made a face, a Dallas girl face, which meant she closed her eyes and lifted her brows. “But then you just got here, didn’t you? I’ve been in Waco since we got married. Actually, before that I went to Baylor. That’s where we met. That’s been about a hundred years ago, and I can’t get used to it yet. It’s so antebellum that sometimes I think it’s antediluvian.” She looked pleased with herself for making a biblical reference to me. “It’s just so set on itself. I mean nobody in the whole place can mention Waco without reminding you that it has produced six Confederate generals and three Texas governors. And Dr. Pepper. I mean you don’t go to Atlanta and hear how they invented Coca-Cola, do you? Maybe you do; I haven’t been there. And cotton. Don’t forget cotton. How they supplied the whole Confederacy with cotton. ‘When Cotton was King, Waco was Queen.’ I can’t believe people still say that. And brag on how they had a suspension bridge before the Brooklyn Bridge, and the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi, south of Kansas City? Doesn’t that just slay you? Don’t you wonder what town up there is bragging it had the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi, north of Kansas City?” She shook her head as if amazed. “At least Dallas knows there’s other places on earth.”

  At that exact moment, Ruth barreled into my legs, spilling the Dr. Pepper all over my lap—my lap being my one good skirt, a pink lined linen, which I’d worn with my one decent blouse, also pink. No accidents are small in the lives of pastors’ wives. I would have snatched my daughter up on the spot and spanked her, except for the audience. I looked at my wristwatch, trying to decide whether or not I had time to go home before meeting Eben and the visiting clergyman. Trying to recall what, if anything, was hanging in my closet to wear if I did get there.

  “Come on, Cile,” Mary Virginia said. “I’ll fix you up. My fault for serving anything but water with four little kids around.”

  Leaving the redoubtable Swede with my terrorists and the boys named for grandfathers, she led me into her dressing room, where in two minutes flat she had me in a rose silk shirt and matching skirt with flapped pockets and a self-belt. About ten times as nice as what I’d arrived in. Her skirt, several inches longer on me, gave me a nice conservative look that Eben was sure to appreciate.

  “Lila Beth would never forgive me,” she said, “if I returned you to her church a mess. That place is her whole life. You know the house you’re in, the parsonage? It belonged to her family. When they died, she gave it outright to the church; it wasn’t touched when the tornado of ’53 tore down the town, and she thought it must have been spared for a purpose. Can you imagine?”

  I thanked Mary Virginia, gave her cherubic boys moist kisses on their placid cheeks, gathered up the pair of rowdy ruffians I’d come with, and headed for my new secondhand Pontiac. “My time next week,” I told her.

  IT TURNED OUT what Mary Virginia wanted was not really a new friend, but a weekly dose of rough-and-tumble for her boys.

  “You don’t do churchy things on Tuesdays, do you?” she’d asked at my house the next week. “What do Presbyterians have? Prayer meetings? Covered-dish suppers?” She’d waved a hand in the air vaguely, as if mainstream churches were beyond her with their confusing ways. Episcopalians were like that. I wondered if Lila Beth had minded dreadfully when her son went over to his wife’s church. Decided it had broken her heart.

  “Tuesdays are fine,” I said.

  “My mother and sister got me in this exercise class up in Dallas—they live up there, in the Park Cities part—and it’s practically hereditary, getting in. Someone practically has to die. It’s fabulous; I never miss it. It only takes me two hours door-to-door, less if I go early.” She’d got down on the polished floor of the parsonage and demonstrated an impossible posture, hands on the floor, chest up, chin out, one leg crossing the other in the back, then kicked toward the sky. “Amazing for the thighs,” she said, smoothing her cuffed, belted shorts, worn no doubt because the parsonage had ceiling fans but no air conditioning. “Then we have lunch and shop. It’s the only time I get to see them. It’s my one day in Dallas, and wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

  I told her that trading days was a wonderful idea. And after my initial disappointment at seeing I was not to be her new friend, I saw that it was. It meant no more worrying about what mine were going to do to hers. No more watching while my Tonka truckers tore blocks and push toys and moving vehicles from the hands of her mild-mannered boys. That would now be a problem for her all-purpose Swede.

  I knew having them here all on my own, the four of them, would be grand. Would be cake. Because I knew that she might have all the equipment of an amusement park on the patio of her enormous place, but that I knew the secret of short people: they loved to move.

  So once a week from that spring until the youngest of them, Martha and Jock, started kindergarten, I had Play School at the parsonage every Tuesday from seven-thirty in the morning to five-thirty in the evening. Then on Thursdays, I left mine at Mary Virginia’s from nine until seven, so that Eben and I could have some time alone before the weekend, which was always hectic and public.

  My days with the four children were wonderful days. The best of the best. The first thing I did was move everything out of the way, the bench sofa and cane-bottom chairs and the long trestle dining table. Then I put Arlo Guthrie on the turntable, the same record every time, and w
e all held hands in a circle and danced up and down over and over to “Ring Around the Rosy Rag.” It would have made sense to make a tape of it, but I had no player. Besides, it seemed part of the ceremony to get to the end, sagging and gasping, and then put the needle back at the start, with all of them giggling, and dance through it all over again.

  We developed little routines: a kick with the left foot here and a kick with the right there. Sometimes we kept our feet on the floor and bounced up and down, and once, when the music was just right for it, we dropped hands and turned all the way around, catching hands on the next note. They loved it. They never got tired of it. They probably—as is the way with babies of two and three—could have repeated it for the whole ten hours. But when we’d done it four times through, we stopped, all sat down on the floor, and had the first of zillions of tea parties. This one being cocoa, because it was still breakfast time for them. (In fact, the boys were often delivered in their robes and jamas—imagine small persons owning robes and piped pajamas, with buttons and belts all extant and in place!—with a change of clothes packed in their little campers’ backpacks.) I tried to see to it that every wild routine was followed by some refreshment that would have been impossible in their, the boys’, carpeted spotless universe.

  Sometimes we played our own version of tag, a sort of “thimble, thimble, who’s got the thimble.” For this one they stood with their hands behind their backs and their eyes closed, and I put something tiny in the palm of one of them. Then everybody ran around and tried to guess who it was. It was too silly and they all knew at once because of the closed tight fist and erupting shrieks, but there was always a lot of suspense while they waited to see who got it. And once in a while I fooled them and tucked a piece of bubble gum into every hand, and that was an irresistible joke causing them to laugh so hard they fell into a heap on the floor. Or we had musical chairs, lining up four little cane-bottoms that my children had with a small wooden table in those days.