Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  He studied the view of cars going on about their driving, started on the second flameburger. “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Eben is giving me five thousand. I can use it for a year’s rent, or a down payment on a house. With the market depressed like it is, that should cover either.”

  “Five thousand? That’s it? Fifteen years of working for the church and him and he’s giving you five thousand? That’s less severance pay than our maids get.” He looked outraged, unbelieving.

  “Pastors don’t have money, you know that. That’s half of what he’s got left from his father. I have a little bit from my mother. That’s fair. He’s going to be supporting the girls.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes to stop them from getting the idea that they could cry. Smearing both milk shake and chili on my face: not a help.

  I had no idea what I’d tell my girls. Their fighting about cows suddenly seemed the warmest of responses. The kindest of acknowledgments that I was free to go off with someone special, to a farm we both loved. It was permission for me to have a future. The idea of having to tell them there’d been a change in plans, that I was leaving them so I could crash at my old teacher’s house and help her recycle Dr. Pepper cans and plastic detergent bottles made my heart sink. “I need to go,” I said. “I have to get back.”

  The twister had moved on, out to pasture or up the road. They always came from the west, dying when they met civilization; they were like wild animals in that regard.

  Drew wiped my eyes with a hickory-smoked paper napkin. “I didn’t want to tell you,” he said. “She dropped that on me, that Mary Virginia could probably force me to sell, and then, when I tried to talk about it, she closed up. We had our salads, and I couldn’t tell you if you asked me what was on that plate.” He kissed my eyes dry. Then pulled my hand down under the table so I could feel he was hard. The staff was busy in the kitchen. The football player and his girl were still leaning on their Bel Air. “We’ll work it out,” Drew said. “I love you.”

  “I think that’s a ’55,” I said.

  Getting out of the booth, leaving him with the peach fried pies, I located my car keys and waved good-bye. I could hardly see to walk across the floor; it didn’t help that George Strait, out of all the songs he knew, picked just then to sing “This Is Where the Cowboy Rides Away.”

  COW’S PARTY AT the farm seemed to be disappearing down a distant farm-to-market, the way an apparent puddle glints always just ahead on the interstate, a mirage dwindling just out of reach. Such was my vision of Martha, dimpling her cheeks against the soft hides of Holstein, Ruth calculating acres of waving grain, pitchers of fresh chilled milk waiting on the old tile counter, sweet Czech dough rising on the stove.

  While Drew rallied his resistance to all those trying to pull the land out from under him, what was I to do? I felt a rising panic, seeing my plans for a country home slipping away. When was I going to see my girls? Where? If I was thrown out of the church’s house, if the old homestead up the road was put on hold to me, where would I be? Where could they find me? I felt suddenly dispossessed, both of them and of a place to welcome them. I needed a halfway house, a stopping place, a shelter with walls, front door, deep shady yard, where they could come. A place they could hang their spare T-shirts and call ours.

  Eben’s cash was the one card I had to play; so I played it. I got a copy of a glossy real estate booklet, “The Homefinders’ Guide,” complete with photos, addresses, asking prices and salient information about available locations. Each listing the basics (bedrooms, baths, square footage), each tagged with a come-on comment. As it turned out, it was easy as pie to buy a house that a bank had paid its own note on for a couple of years.

  First of all, it was a revelation to find that every house in town was not a ranchstyle, because that was all you ever saw: luxury ranches, like Mary Virginia’s, authentic ranches, like the parsonage, ranchettes with carports, like those in Birdville, cutesy red-and-white barn decor ranches where doctors lived. Every house in town a low-slung, low-ceilinged ranch. Yet here on every page of the realtors’ guide were options from the past. A bungalow with shingled roof and dormer windows (“completely restored, must see to appreciate”); an all-brick Tudor (“nice older home, near hospital”); a Victorian two-story (“beautifully updated and maintained”); an arched and columned Greek Revival (“an antique lover’s delight, large rooms”); a Colonial with gallery porch (“lots of charm, formal dining”). What a wealth of choices!

  And, the amazing thing—somewhat analogous to connecting dots and seeing a figure appear on a page—was that when I’d circled all my choices on the city map, the locations were clustered within walking distance of one another. I’d found a neighborhood. One that, in ten years of living in Waco, I’d never set foot in. It was as far to the east of Heart of Texas Fairgrounds and the middle school and high school as we were to the west, about a mile. An older area, clearly, and one with no cross streets, no through streets, so that unless you were going home or to visit kin, there was no occasion to find yourself on its tree-lined streets. Trees large enough, and old enough, to have been worth the asking price of the houses alone.

  With a realtor at the wheel of her shiny son-of-Pinto red Ford Escort, I set out to look at all the treasures I’d marked. She was a nice lady of my general age with a shaved neck and wedge bangs, gold triangles weighing down her earlobes, and a snappy red tailored suit; and when she eyed my dilapidated Firebird and said, “Those muscle cars look like they’re speeding when they’re sitting at the curb,” I knew we were going to get on fine.

  I said it didn’t bother me at all if she lit up in her own car. My mind was on what I was going to find: afraid that my picks, without the cosmetic photography, would look like slumlord specials. Or else be buckling on their foundations after several decades of Waco weather, expanding, contracting, heating, freezing, being battered by hail and lashed by winds. Or that I’d find just that inimitable something that makes a neighborhood feel down, gone, depressed, the victim of generations of renters who move through homes with the disregard of squirrels in an attic.

  None of that turned out to be the case. I loved the streets. I loved the houses. I wanted to stop at every second one so the red lady could look it up to be sure it wasn’t also for sale.

  Urging her to park and have another smoke, I pried a little information about the area from her.

  “It went downhill for a few years after it became mixed,” she said, eyeing me to be sure we were speaking the same language. I nodded. I knew she meant blacks, blacks who had moved in at the same time the black and white school systems had merged.

  “Lots of folks had bought on spec, to rent out or sell quick, prices were high, everything was selling, real high. Then after the oil crash and then the stock crash, there was wholesale liquidation. People owned three or four, thought they’d make a killing, were glad just to get out from under the notes. The banks foreclosed but they were trying not to go belly-up themselves. Then, few years ago, families began to buy back in. Lower mortgage rates, lower asking prices, good solid homes, and by then the area was multicolored. You following me?”

  I was. The same thing had happened to the schools. A lot of panic when black faces first appeared in the halls and on the playing fields, but then, by the time the influx of scientists from the Pacific Rim had arrived, the mathematicians from India, and the postinflation waves from interior Mexico, plus islanders of all sorts—from Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, St. Croix, Puerto Rico, Britain, Manhattan—polyglot seemed the norm. Every school became a mini-UN, every class a geography lesson, every extracurricular activity a multicultural experience. Apparently the neighborhood had followed suit.

  It was clear by the time I was house shopping that the area was mixed and stable, well built and conveniently located, and generally pleased with itself. And it showed, in the well-tended yards and face-lifted homes.

  I almost bought “completely restored, must see to appreciate.” It had a claw-footed tub in the
bath, a nearly new roof, and the original front door, circa 1915. It had a small porch, the dormer windows, and a working fireplace, laid, for effect, with mesquite logs. (The central air was going full blast; it was already eighty-nine degrees outside.) The rooms were large and the ceilings high. The problem was there were only one-and-a-half bedrooms, one bath, a living room and an eat-in-kitchen, as the realtor in red called it. If the girls came for the weekend—and the closeness to their schools made it a lure in that way—where would I put them? Plus, if I was going to run my SAT study course from the house, and I’d have to, that would have to be quartered in the living room or the tiny bedroom. But I didn’t like the feel of that; it would have the aura of a counselor’s cubicle. (Houses of that vintage, which included the parsonage, all had apparently had nurseries.)

  It was only that fact, the small size, that made me take a look at the “beautifully updated and maintained” Victorian two-story. I didn’t like all the gingerbread trim in the photo, plus it was listed at $48,000, more than I could swing. But it was just around the corner from the bungalow, and we decided to walk, so I could get a feel for the area. Also so the realtor could have another cigarette without smelling up her car. I can’t say I fell in love with the place at first sight; it was, to be charitable, an eyesore from half a block away. Someone had added a lot of junky additional trim: latticework over the bay window, tacked-on boxes filled with plastic flowers, some scalloped Swedish-looking panels on the gabled roof. Plus the outside had been painted robin’s egg blue with pink trim. “No,” I said, “not possible.”

  But my guide had her keys out; she knew I was going to buy the house, probably by the strength of my protest.

  One of the problems was, being the only Victorian on the block, it stood out like a sore thumb. The other was the extra frosting on the already frosted cake, the extra gilding on the already gilded lily.

  “Picture it gray,” the lady in red said, her gold triangles swinging as she cased it up and down. “Maybe white? Look inside. It’s a find. One of a kind.”

  Inside had its own problem. Someone had walled up the fireplace and put a potbellied black stove four feet out in the living room. But apart from that, it was a dream. Ten-foot-high ceilings, hardwood floors rubbed smooth, wide stairs curving over a half bath, a generous dining room that could serve, with the proper table, as a work space for students, sunny, airy, grand, a kitchen with a gas stove that looked about the vintage of the house, 1885, and a bulky refrigerator not much younger, and behind that a storage area that had once been the “root room.” Upstairs, a full bath and two large bedrooms on one side of the stairs, plenty of room for the Taits and Bledsoes both and, over the kitchen, a third bedroom with an adjoining walk-in attic space. (This had a trapdoor and wall ladder down into the root room, like a secret passage.)

  “There’s a four-hundred-sixteen-dollar-a-month note you can assume,” the realtor said, confident, blowing smoke.

  “I can put four thousand down. Get rid of the potbelly and I’ll take it.”

  “Asking is forty-eight.”

  I looked out the bay window; what a room for reading comprehension. There was a Chinese tallow tree high as the house in the front yard. Definitely a redbird tree. “It’s been sitting empty,” I bargained.

  “A year.”

  “More like three.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “They shouldn’t have junked it up with the alpine-awful trim.”

  “Who knows? Sometimes that sells.”

  I studied the patent latch, the machine-made screws, the rim lock, all late nineteenth century. I knew that stuff because Drew made such a big deal about how the farmhouse, which was old enough to be the momma of this one, had hardware and trim that dated back before mass production: mortise locks, pointless screws, latches made by blacksmiths. It made me smile to think that this house built in 1885 was too modern, too new, for Drew’s taste. But the thing I liked about Victorians was their exuberance for what industrialization could do, their love affair with the steam-powered scroll saw, their finials, canopies, brackets, vergeboards: advertisements for the Machine Age.

  I restated my offer. “Four thousand down, get rid of the potbelly, let me assume the note. Tell the bank you found a sucker at last for the blue cuckoo clock.”

  “It might be possible.” She put on her shades, and we went at a trot to her Escort, where she used the car phone to get things primed back at the home office. While she drove, I drew a little map on the back of my “Homefinders’ Guide” so I wouldn’t get lost: Huckleberry to Mulberry to Blackberry to Hackberry. Then straight down Hackberry to the Heart of Texas Fairgrounds, the schools and Lake Shore.

  At the red lady’s office, I listed the parsonage as my present home; Shorty’s as my place of business; my income as $20,000 a year, invented on the spot; Theo and the bank that handled Eben’s money as financial references. It wasn’t solid enough to get a loan on a doghouse, but to pick up a note that the bank had been paying itself for a few years, it might float.

  After my guide got back in her Ford, off to show a nice place in the Oak Hurst area to a family of newcomers, I drove back to gingerbread heaven, down Hackberry to Blackberry to Mulberry to Huckleberry, just over a mile. I sat at the curb, car door open, looking at my new home, a structure not unlike the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel.” I was squinting, trying to picture it elephant gray, when a car squealed to a stop in the middle of the street, a beat-up, block-long metallic brown Olds, so rusted out it was hard to tell where real metal met its imitation, and so low to the ground (springs not even a nascent memory), its tail pipe dragged the street. A heap not even Drew would have been inclined to recycle.

  A couple of hoods got out, waved a thanks, and sidled over to where I was sitting. One had on a gaucho hat, shaved sideburns, red Nike solo flyers with laces loose, shorts, and a T-shirt that read BE A DICK: PLAY HARD. The other, whose dark hair was slicked back and rubber-banded, wore black hightops, black shorts, and a black T that said WISH YOU WERE HERE, with a wide arrow that pointed straight down to his crotch. A couple of winners. I would have been nervous, but it was daylight, and despite the tough outfits, these were kids. Maybe they’d been crashing in the vacant house.

  “How’s it going, Cile?” the one in the gaucho hat said.

  “You buying this place?” the one all in black asked, leaning on the car door.

  I wouldn’t have believed it, except that voices were like fingerprints, dead giveaways. It was Trey and Jock. Trey in the hat; Jock with the pigtail.

  After a moment of total shock, I leaped up and gave them hugs. “You guys? Is it really? My eyes say Quit your kidding, but my ears say Yes.”

  “It’s us.” Trey pulled off his wide-brimmed hat so I could see his red almost-Mohawk hairdo. “We hitched a ride after you when we saw you getting in your car. One of your GYN jocks told us you and the preacher had split. Like we didn’t have our own inside source. Like she was right, naturally, since nobody actually says anything to anybody ever at our house.”

  “No offense—but what’s with the punk outfits?”

  They looked proud of themselves. Jock said, “We turn the shirts inside out for class, not to freak out the pedagogues. They used to make kids wear their clothes right side out, then they were sorry. Now they leave us alone.”

  I gave them a grin. These cute boys. Who would have thought? “You know exactly what I’m trying to say. Your mom and dad don’t see you looking like this, I know they don’t.”

  Trey gazed at his red boots. “They don’t see what they don’t want to see. See, we come in and put on our tennis whites, wear them till we go to bed. Mom’s not up when we leave and she’s not around when we get back, Dad’s not there, all they ever see is at supper, or we’re going out, and we’ve got on our tennis whites. Wearing tennis gear you could rob a bank or snuff a herd of bluehairs and nobody who saw you would believe it. Not them, Officer, they had tennis rackets.”

  We wandered over to look
at the blue monster. I was remembering Drew’s description of his boys at home; it made me happy, how in control they were of their world. Maybe they always had been, bouncing up and down in my living room, getting grape-juice lips. I put my arms around them both, making a sandwich with me in the middle, and they didn’t pull away. They were both taller already of course, although not yet caught up to my girls.

  “What do you think?” I asked them.

  Trey dropped his gaucho hat on the sidewalk and went over to the bay window. “What early primate put up this jigsaw plywood?” He pulled at the latticework, loosened it, began to shake the flimsy window boxes with their plastic blooms.

  “I was thinking of painting it white—”

  “Naw,” Jock said. “White elephant.”

  “These old places”—Trey continued to pull on the loose trim—“were dark. Victorians were always dark. Somebody crudded it up. Hey,” he said, suddenly tugging harder. “I think, yeah, this is, you know what, this is siding. This whole blue stuff. I thought that, because the boards should be vertical. What this is is a Carpenter’s Gothic, and they had vertical boards. I think, if we can just—”

  “Wait.” Jock stopped him. “Odds.” He stuck out his hand for a slap, dressed all in black, with his outrageous shirt.

  “Odds,” Trey said.

  “Mustard. Dark mustard with plum trim.”

  “Good, bro.” Trey shut his eyes. “I’m gonna say rust, no, maroon, no, rust with cobalt trim.”