Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  There seemed to be only one place to go for an alfresco solo picnic, and I went there. To the Greatest Little Horseshoe Pits in Texas. This spread of pits, two dozen of them, taking up about the space of a miniature golf course, was stretched out along the Brazos in a low meandering park before it met the north fork of the Bosque, which ran below steep white chalk cliffs. There was not a soul in sight. Redwood tables were scattered under moss-hung live oaks, and gravel trails wide enough for cars ran along the shore. There were no boats on the river. It was as if everybody in north central Texas had decided that it wasn’t right to be out in public during churchtime on Easter Sunday.

  The area looked old enough to have been the home of tournaments back when blacksmiths hammered out iron shoes. The placid river too calm for Shorty and his trotlines.

  I used to bring the girls here once in a while, letting them run along the trails until they wore themselves out. This was the same land that rolled up toward West and the farm; it had the same rich soil, the same grassy pastures. What were we going to do, Drew and I, if we didn’t end up living at his grandparents’ place? So much of our hope was bound up with the life we’d planned to live together there.

  Pulling one of the benches out into the glare, I sat and sunned my legs, eating my pork with my fingers, moist and smoky, with a burnt crust and tangy-peppery sauce. I didn’t see how there could be two better barbeques than this anywhere.

  I knew why I’d instinctively picked this spot today: so I could look across the wide still water up the cliffs to Lovers Leap, a promontory all but lost in the thick foliage of spring. Just behind it, lay a vast wooded park which ran from the start of the bluffs down to the river bridge, its elegant acres once filled on Sundays with strolling sweethearts, family reunions, and church picnics. Abutting the park was an area of large homes, fine old places with rock fences and deep private lots, many with streams and footbridges, bordered paths, horse barns, tennis courts. One of these, a stone’s throw, or at least a horse’s canter, from Lovers Leap, was Lila Beth’s.

  The neighborhood, when I’d first seen it ten years ago, seemed a remnant of yesterday, with its streets named for old Texas families—Baker, Frost, Rice, Austin, Houston—and its grandeur. Its property values were yesterday’s back then, also, for times had changed and nobody went into the park after dark; teenage gangs terrorized certain sections, vagrants slept under trees. Many homeowners had sold; others pulled back and made fortresses of their homes. But Lila Beth had remained, swearing the only way she was going to leave was in a pine box.

  “Put a detention center in City Park, put in a reformatory, put in a halfway house, put in a detox center,” she’d said. “You can’t drive me out. This is my home.” Gesturing to indicate that every rock of the old place—in her lined walkways, her azalea gardens, her streambed—she’d put in place by hand.

  From the first time I’d walked into her house, that first Wednesday when she’d asked me over to meet her daughter-in-law, to get my babies together with her grandbabies, to make me some extended part not of the church family but of her own family, she’d been the nearest thing I’d had to a mother since I’d lost mine. Very different from Celia, I knew; a lady in a sense that my mother couldn’t abide. Reserved about the very matters that my mother was open, assertive, impassioned about. Talking with me only of those daily matters of my life, hers, the parish’s. Yet nonetheless, in that way some women have of opening their hearts while keeping their arms to themselves, she had embraced me when I came to town, and I was grateful still. It stung my eyes and tightened my chest to look across the flat river up the bluffs in the direction of her old rock home. How could she, out of all the rest, have turned against me?

  Being on this side of the river was a compromise with myself. I was not going to drive by Lila Beth’s to see who might have been invited in my place, yet I intended to commemorate that decade of Easter Sundays in some way.

  I’d gone by her house surreptitiously once, the Monday after Drew, then still Andy to me, had turned the corner of her dining room back into my life. I’d driven, that next day, up through the park, past the city’s faltering attempts to keep its public grounds in use, past a new senior citizens’ center, past a new playground for day care, past Miss Nellie’s Pretty Place, a wildflower preserve erected by a congressman for his mother, with a columned terrace above a fountain, designed for civic functions. All with not a soul in sight.

  I’d wanted one glimpse of Andy/Drew again, knowing that it was idiocy, that he wasn’t going to be at his mother’s house on a Monday morning. Just wanting to see where he’d been, drive by the curb where his fixed-up pickup had been parked. On some level I was tempting fate; gambling that if he was thinking the same thing, then we’d end up together in the park, falling into one another’s arms at Lovers Leap, like the teenagers we still were in memory. Making love, which we had never done, right there on the ground, a ground grown green and soft, no twigs, nettle, snakes, rocks, ticks; no rough patrolling gangs. A schoolgirl fantasy.

  What had happened actually was that the Firebird had had a flat. I’d got quite lost, driving first into one circular picnic area and then another, consulting my map, unable to tell even where I was, much less what old bridle path came out into the fine homes so close at hand. I was turning into another circle, straining to read a faded wood sign ten feet away, when I felt that awful thunk and the car twist in my hands. I looked around for help, and saw three black boys bending close together, smoking something, and, closer at hand, two middle-aged white men making out in the grass, completely oblivious to my car. The idea of getting out and approaching either group terrified me. As did having a flat in a location I couldn’t explain to anyone. What on earth had I been doing there? Even as I turned the car around against its will, I constructed an alibi: I’d been looking for Miss Nellie’s Pretty Place, to see if the wildflower trail was something my girls would enjoy. (At two and three years old?)

  Meanwhile, I headed back down the hill as best I could, descending the sharp turns, riding on a rim, until I got in sight of the senior citizens’ center. There, I pulled over to the curb, wiped my face, cursed myself, and set about to change the tire. I was putting a very uncertain jack under the back bumper when a black man and two teenage boys pulled up in a car and got out to help. He was a probation officer; they were his charges for the day. In return for community action hours, they had my flat changed in two minutes, and told me the spare was only going to last about six minutes more at best and I’d better get to a station. The man—small-world department—later turned out to be the daddy of Sugar and Baby Bledsoe. (I’d always thought he had his own ideas about what I’d been doing up in City Park on a Monday morning, but if so, he’d never mentioned it.)

  Later, after the Czech Fest, when Drew and I were lovers, he told me that the morning after that first Easter at his mother’s he’d been wild to see me and had driven to the parsonage, reasoning that, after all, it had once been his other grandparents’ house, and that he could just drop in on me and ask if everything was going all right. Say that his mother had sent him to check. Any problems with the roof after the last storm? How was the water pressure in the heat wave? But no one had been home when he knocked.

  I didn’t tell him about my foolish trip up through the park, headed for Lila Beth’s house. It scared me too much to think about how close we’d come to a lover’s leap ourselves. What if we had run into one another that day? Babies only toddlers; marriages as fresh as laundered diapers; ourselves still not yet who we were becoming but no longer who we’d been. We could have broken lots of hearts. It had been too close a call. A couple of calls too close.

  I’d forgotten to get a spoon for the pinto beans, so I ate them with my fingers, squinting into the sun, which was now directly overhead. I put the rest of my lunch in a trash can, then took a little stroll. Up the river from the horseshoe pits was China Spring; down the river, the city of Waco. I wiped my hands on my skirt. Getting myself here, looking up at t
he beautiful white limestone walls, was a way to keep from being there, in that fine old faded part of town where I was no longer welcome.

  Somewhere on that rock-lined hill with its meandering creeks at Lila Beth’s house were eggs dyed a decade ago, unfound by small people, eaten out of their shells by raccoons, the shells becoming part of the paths, the ground, finally the streambed. Somewhere on that hill were four young children we had left intact with their families, their little faces full of trust.

  If not a “Hallelujah Chorus,” it was at least some cause for rejoicing.

  I’D CALLED AHEAD, to see if I could come by to say thanks in person. “Miss Moore, are you receiving today?” I asked when Theo answered.

  “Come for lunch.”

  “I can’t wait. I’m ready to go all the way, try it with olives.”

  “It takes you a while to come around.” She sounded tickled.

  I stopped at the bookstore on Lago Lake Drive that carried all the Save the World gear the girls adored. I got them each something called a Reusable Lunch Bag, which looked just like a paper sack but was made of waterproof fabric. These I’d put back for their birthdays or maybe Earth Day. I got Theo a Recycling Center: three portable, scrubbable bags that slipped down onto a tubular plastic frame. To my untutored eye, it looked a lot like a triple-sectioned magazine rack. It set me back seventy bucks, a week’s groceries, but I was making a gesture. And that was small cost for what she’d done for me, using her best teacher-intimidation tactics on the bank. Although in truth I wasn’t much of a risk; if I defaulted they were in better shape than they’d been, plus the gross siding was going to be gone from the dark-hued exterior, which would up the chances of resale.

  At the door, Theo wrapped her plumpness around me, her flour-sack flowered dress of the day a lavender-with-green, her tiny heels bottle green.

  “Nothing like a prospect of becoming a stepmother yourself to make you show a little respect,” she said, taking my present.

  “You think that’s it? Not just me getting more decent in mid-life?”

  “I think that’s it. Next thing you’ll be calling me Mom.” She watched me warily, ready to dart off to the sandwich counter if I took offense.

  Had she wanted that? All this time? What an idea. What an idea that had never for one moment occurred to me, not in the twenty-plus years she’d been married to my daddy. I hadn’t called my own mother Mom; in fact, I’d thought of her in rather romantic terms as Celia for most of my recent life.

  “Then you’ll have to call me Miss Tait,” I said. “The SAT teacher.”

  That broke the tension and she swept me with her into the kitchen, where Shorty had a ruler out and some sinkers on the table. It was gusting outside, whirling dust devils whipping across dry yards and parking lots. I asked him was that why he was home, or was it just Monday? It seemed to me that fish weren’t going to notice low-visibility ground conditions.

  “Late in the year for a duster like this,” he grumbled. “Weather gets itself tied in its own tail. I remember the big dusters of ’56 and ’71, buried cotton crops right in the ground, buried cars, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face from Dallas to the Rio Grande valley. Streetlights stayed on twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Drew thinks if they lose the grasslands to the atom smasher the dust bowl will come back.”

  “He’s worrying himself about his bluestem to keep his mind off his momma, if you ask me. The government’s got no interest in uprooting the ground, they just want to tunnel under it. You tell your boyfriend they’ll just lease up what they need, dig in. Tell him that it’s like the periodontist telling me he was going to reposition my gums. They used to say ‘long in the tooth,’ now they say ‘reposition the gums.’ You tell him that the feds will just reposition the topsoil; leave him a little long in the sorghum.” He wheezed and wiped his eyes. “Coming right in here under the doors, see that?” He got out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

  “I stopped by the Greatest Little Horseshoe Pits yesterday. Nobody there.”

  “Used to throw a few there, when we first moved. Not lately. Horseshoes’ll come back, now we’ve got a president playing. Trouble was, too many flip-pitchers and not enough top-pitchers messed up the game. Too many people entering tournaments who thought averaging ten percent ringers qualified them against folks averaging eighty percent all their lives.”

  While Shorty ate his Garden of Eden, Theo and I attacked our Double Cream Cheese with Sliced Olives on White. She’d been pleased with the Recycling Center, which now sat conspicuously inside the back door, for handy separation of glass, aluminum and plastic.

  “Your hometown girl won her runoff for governor,” I said. “You did good. Congratulations.”

  “Congratulations to the great state of Texas. Now, if she can beat out that good old boy who’s pouring enough money into the campaign to build the Hubble telescope, we’ll really have something to celebrate.”

  “What’re her chances?”

  “I think if the people of Texas vote in a cowboy who is known to have ‘honey hunts’ on his ranch, by which I’m talking inviting your friends and clients to drop by and paw around in the mesquite for prostitutes, then we are not only not heading into the twenty-first century, we’re heading right back to the nineteenth. It’s pitiful.”

  I got out a glossy paperback with fiery red and yellow script that said Hot Words for the SAT. “I really came by,” I told her, “because I think my career is over before it got started. There’s no way I can teach this stuff. None of it makes sense to me. The definitions they give—I don’t know where they found them. Pocket Webster’s maybe. I looked in the Oxford, just to be sure I didn’t have amnesia of the vocabulary.” I handed her the paperback. “You know what I call proportions, this is to this as that is to that?”

  “Analogies.”

  “You cheated and looked.”

  “What about them?”

  “Just let me read you this. ‘Peripheral is to cardinal as loquacious is to laconic.’ I’m giving you the answer. You tell me how on earth tangential is to fundamental is the same as running off at the mouth is to can’t get a word out.”

  Theo waved a hand, as if to say this was nothing to fret over. “You’re working too hard at it, girl. Give it a quick glance; say ‘shallow is to deep’ and go on to the next one.”

  “Panoramic,” I said.

  “You’ve been hanging out in the halls at school.”

  “Panoramic is to excellent as awesome is to wow.”

  Shorty scrunched up his eyes. “No wonder we got dropouts hanging around on the streets and in the parks, this is what they learn in school.”

  “You want iced tea?” Theo asked me.

  “Please.”

  “I made a pie, on account of you were coming and your daddy is stuck here until the duster blows past.”

  Shorty waved a partially chewed half of his Garden of Eden at me. “It’s not the fish get dust in their eyes; it’s not the bait, either. It’s us don’t want to sit there polluting our lungs, coughing into a wet hanky.” He reached out and ran a finger down my cheek. “Fine as sand that stuff, coats everything.” He wiped his finger on his handkerchief, wiped his nose. “We got lines set out on the Brazos, too many folks crowding up the North Bosque, heavy traffic. If we ever get a little rain, we’ll have ourselves a catch. Saturday we weighed in with six hundred pounds; Sunday they all had lockjaw.”

  I couldn’t believe coconut pie on top of that sandwich, with meringue that was higher than the pie and almost too sweet to eat. Powdered sugar in it, Theo said, a little real vanilla.

  “Overdose,” I told her. “How can you go back and teach after a lunch like this?”

  “Fuel.”

  I took a second bite cautiously, deciding that three would induce coma.

  “I’ve got news,” Theo said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to be hug dancing with the gifted and talented next year.”

  “T
he Academy? That’s great. That must be a feather, to get to teach in the prep school within the high school. But, hey, don’t say ‘gifted and talented.’ There’s no test screening, no teachers picking the knowbots from the early primates. ‘Those who can take it can take it,’ right?”

  “You have been hanging out in the halls.”

  “My girls are counting on it.”

  “I thought I’d been passed over. Forgetting that it takes the administration months to get its act in place. They called me in this morning; handed me a letter. I was late to class. Going to have first-year students.”

  “Teach English as a second language?”

  “Just about the truth.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “You didn’t think much of my teaching.”

  “Come on, Miss Moore, let’s don’t plow that field again.”

  “I was trying to get a few general ideas in your head, but you were always making things complicated.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted. “I’d have to say that cardinal doesn’t actually mean ‘fundamental’; it means ‘on which something hinges.’ You have to get that idea of hinge, of the point at which something turns. Which has got zero, not one frazzling thing, to do with any possible definition of laconic. It’s a wonder I got out of high school.”

  “You weren’t the easiest student.”

  “You want me to say I’m sorry, Mom?”

  Theo blushed like a kid, gave Shorty’s arm a poke, filled her mouth with a hunk of gooey custard pie. “I wouldn’t mind that,” she mumbled.

  “The girls’ friends, the Bledsoes,” I said, to give us a chance to come up for air, “call the Academy pupils the nesters.”

  “Whatever they call them, the program is going to go. Not because of the parents who want their kids in it, but because of the parents who want the brainy foreign kids out of their kids’ classes. There’ve been a lot of mothers and daddies griping—what put the program on the boards in the first place—that the kids from the Pacific Rim were ruining the curve, acing all the tests and scores.” She stopped short, took off her glasses. “Hey, nesters, I get it. Prep school within the system. That’s good.” She made a mental note, I could see, the way teachers did. “The point is, kids can stay out and make all A’s again, they have that choice, or kids can apply and compete.”