by Rich Wallace
There are two CD players, one on either side of the counter in front of the window, with a flat soundboard between them—knobs and lights and a stick for mixing the songs from the two CDs. She turns a couple of switches and leans over the microphone.
“Dawn and Ronny are in the house,” she announces. “Brothers and sisters, let’s crank it up.”
She slips in something by a girl group and turns up the volume, then starts going through the CDs. There’s a lot of classical stuff, of course, since this is the ballet hall. But there are about a dozen contemporary rock/dance-mix CDs and some greatest-hits collections: the Stones, Madonna, R.E.M.
“We’ll be all right,” she says. “We’ll rock.”
I catch on real fast and work the CD player on the right. You get the track ready to go, then start it just as the left one is finishing. Dawn works the stick and does some smooth transitions. Before long there are at least thirty people dancing.
There’s a lot of bumping around in the close quarters of a DJ booth, leaning over to pop out a disk, working the mix stick, reaching for CD cases, an intentional elbow to the bicep. We take turns drinking from a bottle of Sprite; I cap the bottle and shake it between sips, slowly releasing the carbon dioxide to make it flat.
“Quirky,” she says.
“Tastes better,” I say.
“Whatever.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I say. I burp too much if it hasn’t been defizzed.
I reach in close when I hand the bottle to her. We dance in place. She lights a filtered Camel.
Ramon brings over a predictable CD. Dawn looks at it, pronounces it danceable. He leans into the booth, talking to her, making her laugh. He’s smooth, he’s polite, but you can tell he’s thinking they’ll be gittin’ jiggy wit it later. Poet, my ass. She gives me a sly smile when he leaves.
There’s a certain intimacy in her cigarette smoke, how she doesn’t bother to turn her head but lets the barely visible stream envelop me. The pursing of her lips to release the smoke, the touching of her tongue to her teeth. The night goes on. We sip from a bottle of sneaked-in beer. I have to remind myself continually not to stare at that pocket of skin between her breasts, though her outfit is shouting at me to do so. It’s saying Look, look closer. Don’t even blink; it’ll disappear.
The place starts clearing out after midnight, but we go on until one. We straighten up a little, turn off the equipment.
“We rocked,” she says. “This is a permanent gig unless the DJ shows tomorrow.” She bumps my thigh with her butt. “Let’s go.”
We head for the dorm and she’s giddy and talkative and she puts her hand on my shoulder. We stand outside and laugh a little, teasing, joking about how sanitized the Institution feels. I am drained of energy, but I won’t be able to sleep. There is no supervision in the dorm; she could stay in my room. But I’m very patient. I’ll wait until tomorrow. I’ve been waiting all my life.
I brush my teeth, cup water in my hands, and rinse. I pull my shirt over my head and press it against my face. A T-shirt is the best absorber of scents: her smoke, your sweat, and something else entirely, something spicy, something definite and permanent from Dawn. Something tangible to take to bed with me. Almost like sleeping with her.
I have a hard time concentrating during the Wednesday-morning poetry sessions, glancing over at Dawn, thinking about tonight. I blow off lunch and go down to the tiny pharmacy at Bellinger Plaza near the amphitheater for breath mints and condoms.
We break into pairs in the afternoon to try collaborative poems. I’m with Molly, the Canadian. She has developed a hopeless attraction to Julio, a deadpan wit from New Mexico with bushy black hair, three earrings, and large teeth. I confess that I’m hung up on Dawn (but I’m pretty confident about where that’s leading). We decide on an ambiguous crush poem, one that could work in any combination of genders.
I let Molly do most of the work. She is self-deprecating and sweet, and aware of the great odds against her. Our group is ten females to four guys; the dance group is even more decidedly feminine. Only the musicians have a more or less equal ratio, so this is a terrific place to be a guy.
I take a long run in late afternoon, stopping to stare at the lake and feel the blood pumping through my muscles. I take a hot, lengthy shower and stay quiet at dinner. I wave to Dawn but stay cool. Then I return to my room to read.
I wait until after nine-thirty to walk to the dance hall, hoping to create anticipation on her part. The place is much fuller tonight; the word must have gotten around. But there’s a guy in the DJ booth, and he’s older than any of us.
So we won’t be in there tonight, but it’s just as well. I’d rather dance with her out here. I’d rather be able to break away early. She looks incredible. Dark halter top, short denim skirt, leather sandals, a choker of Navajo beads.
She finds me right away, touching my wrist. “How was your run?” she asks.
“Great,” I say. “Invigorating.” I say this suggestively. I can’t help it. She is coy enough not to react yet.
“Where’ve you been?” she asks.
“Hanging out,” I say. I jut my chin toward the DJ booth. “The professional showed up, huh?”
She shakes her head in faux disappointment. “Too bad,” she says. “We kicked ass.”
“Definitely. We should see what else we’d be good at,” I say, trying to sound a bit like Ramon.
She nods slowly but stares out at the dancers.
“We should get out there,” I say, meaning the dance floor.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll be back.”
She walks off toward the bathroom. I notice Molly talking to Julio, laughing on the other side of the room. And Ramon is dancing tight with Tanya, the ballerina he tried to seduce on the basketball court.
Dawn is gone a long time. I stick my head outside and find her smoking on the steps.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
“You all right?”
“Yeah. Just needed a smoke.” She crushes it in the dirt and gets up to join me. We go in and start dancing. I guess she’s okay.
The dancing feels awkward at first, and she’s looking around instead of at me. But she loosens up after a couple of songs, and soon we’re laughing and bumping and working up a sweat.
We leave at midnight and head for the lake. The grounds are dark and quiet, and the sky is a mass of stars between the treetops.
“Great night,” she says, taking my hand. “Look at the Dipper. It’s so huge.”
We take a seat on a dock, the water lapping all around us, smelling cool and deep and weedy.
“I could stay here all night,” she says, closing her eyes and inhaling.
“Yeah.” This seems to be working, so I say, “I’d love to see the crack of dawn,” which is so damn clever I can’t believe I said it. I guess she didn’t hear me.
We’re quiet for a few minutes. When she speaks it’s just above a whisper. “I try to kill a whole night when I can, just letting it wash over me. Not trying to think or even move much. We forget that there’s two sides to the day.”
“We can stay up,” I say. “We can lie on this dock until dawn comes.”
This time she gives me what people refer to as a sidelong glance. There’s a slight little twitch at the corner of her mouth while she ponders whether that was Freudian or intentional. That could be a smile starting, so I push it further and say, “Or I do.”
The twitch becomes a full-fledged sneer, and she turns away with a single word: “Asshole.”
She sits forward now, staring at the lake, then fumbles in her pocket for a cigarette. She smokes it sort of disdainfully, if you can picture that. When the smoke is over, she stands up. “We’d better get back.”
My God, I’m a shithead.
Thursday is painful. I don’t even remember the sessions. I don’t participate except when I’m called on.
I say screw dinner and walk over to Bellinger Plaza, getting a turkey-and-what-looks-
like-seaweed sandwich on yuppie bread made of cornhusks and acorn chips. I have no appetite anyway. Needless to say, Dawn avoided me. Needless to say, this entire week has been an embarrassment.
I walk for three hours, making loops around the perimeter of the Institution. When I’m tired enough, I walk past the dance hall, which is not crowded but is still pumping out music.
Tomorrow this will be over. Saturday I’ll take two buses. Sunday night I’ll be back on Main Street. Monday I’ll begin training for the fall.
I am not an artist. Muscle can beat art. Muscle can rip through a painting and shatter a sculpture and splash through a reflection in the moonlight.
Muscle kicks ass. It means something.
Friday in class Molly reads “our” poem aloud:
Unstraightened hair
Pulled back but bushy
Piled high
Glossy
Strands unwinding
Reaching
Dark
Rich and black
Unstraightened
Unreachable
Unrequited
Unreal
The class applauds. We applaud for all the poems.
Dawn says, “Don’t forget the slam tonight, everybody. Three minutes apiece before the dance. Tell everybody from the other groups about it.”
I feel a little better. Class is over. I walk out alone.
“You coming tonight?” she says from behind me.
I turn. “Sure.”
She nods, hesitates, walks back inside. “See you there.”
It goes well. Dawn is great. Molly, too. I do two quick poems. I start with “Waiting for You in the Produce Aisle,” which I figure will get a laugh.
Jenny, Jenny, Jenny
I would spend a penny
for every second in your arms …
not to exceed twenty-five dollars.
That’s the whole poem. It gets a decent reaction. I follow it with “The Hour Before.” I close my eyes halfway through, stop trying to perform. I just say it, slow and steady, and I feel it again. The way I felt when I wrote it.
I will fail again
If not this time, then another
And the failure will propel me
And I’ll triumph once again.
That is a poem that is too personal to share, too preachy and unrefined. But I’ve given it two audiences this week. Maybe that will help me revise it.
The dance is wild, a release and a celebration for most. I stay to the side, still wounded. Dawn comes up to me later, unraveled and perspiring. She stands there. I stand there. We stand there.
“A bit of advice,” she finally says, “since you seem like a decent guy.” She’s not exactly looking at me, just kind of beyond me toward the dancers. “You could have had me.” This is straight talk—no blushed whispering for her. “It would have taken another night or two, and it would have been my choice, not yours. But it would have happened if you’d let it. It would have happened.”
The next morning I pack my gym bag and hustle downstairs for my ride into Jamestown. Mrs. Henderson shakes my hand and tells me again how wonderful it was to have me. Ramon is packed and waiting. He shakes my hand, says I must come see him during Carnival.
Dawn is there, too. She comes over and gently smacks my arm.
I nod for a few seconds, thinking what to say. Sorry seems stupid, so I say thanks instead.
“Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”
“I’m glad I was here,” I say. “It’s been something.”
The van pulls in. I pick up my bag. I look back at Dawn. I move forward.
I’ll spend today on buses; I’ll spend tomorrow resting. Tomorrow night I’ll go for a long, long run. Through town. Out of town. In the dark, in the cool, in the night.
I’ll run so far that the night will wash over me.
I’ll run so far I’ll reach daylight.
Thanksgiving
“You need to go get Devin,” my father said to me Wednesday morning. “I’m working; your mom’s busy. Take the car. You know how to get there.”
“There” is Kutztown University, where my brother was a twenty-one-year-old freshman. The big blowup that had been brewing ever since he became a teenager had finally happened midway through his senior year of high school. He left in a hurry, and we barely heard from him for two years. He got arrested a few times, but nothing major. Came home last January, got his GED while working at Kmart, and seemed to be enjoying college.
I had a half day of school, which I could have blown off, but I went anyway and then headed out toward Kutztown after getting a chicken sandwich at McDonald’s. The weather was cold but clear, no sign of what was to come.
It’s an easy two-hour ride down, mostly on smaller rural highways. I blasted tapes and played out some races in my head and figured I’d be home in time to hang out with Kevin and Tony that night.
Devin’s dorm room smelled smoky and he wasn’t ready to go. I sat on his unmade bed while he threw some things in a duffel bag.
“Heard you got like fifth in the state or something?” he said.
“Third, actually.” I’d been leading the state cross-country championship with a quarter mile to go but couldn’t quite hold on. I’ll get ’em in the spring.
He tied his hair in a ponytail and picked up a paperback novel from his desk. He stared at the book a few seconds, then put it and a second one in the duffel bag. Then he asked me to stand up and he reached under his mattress and took out a little Ziploc bag of pot.
“You better drive,” he said as we walked across the campus. “I’ve got a bit of a buzz.”
We ran when we reached the parking lot because it had started to rain. We got in and I popped out the tape. It was country music, and I didn’t want Devin to see it. But he did.
“What the hell is that?” he said, and he laughed. He fiddled with the radio and found the college station.
I drove out the gate and stopped at a traffic light. “So how’s the dick been treating you?” Devin said.
I looked down at my crotch and then looked at him sideways.
“I mean Dad,” he said. “He busting your chops?”
“He leaves me alone pretty much.”
“The last hurrah.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He’s out of there as soon as you graduate.”
“You think?”
“Definitely. They’ve been counting the days.”
Maybe that’s true. Maybe not. Devin’s been saying I should move down here with him when school gets out, but I don’t expect to be going to Kutztown. I’ve been getting some interest from Division I schools ever since the state meet. The good ones like Northeastern and Pitt back off in a hurry when they hear my grade point average, but my coach is saying I’ll get at least a partial ride somewhere.
“Mom making a turkey tomorrow?” he asked.
“Far as I know.”
We worked our way out of farm country and through Allentown, and by the time we reached Route 33 it was raining pretty hard and the wind was blowing like a bastard.
“Mom will be better off without him,” Devin was saying. “He just brings everything down.”
Hard to imagine the house without my father in it, but Devin had a point. There hadn’t been a lot of jocularity the past few years. But hell, it’s the only family we got.
The wipers weren’t great, so I had to scrunch down a bit to see under the streaks. I put the lights on even though it shouldn’t have been dark for another hour. Devin had his eyes shut. We’d lost the Kutztown station miles before, so I put in a Beatles tape I’d been listening to a lot. “Good shit,” Devin said.
Route 33 ended and the car slid a bit on the on-ramp to Route 80, but I kept it on the road. The streaks on the windshield were turning to ice and the wipers were making sort of a pick-pock sound. And then we were sliding worse, the road a sudden sheet of black ice.
“Better brake!” Devin said. “There’s something up ahead.”
“Keep the wheel straight,” he said, reaching over, but we were starting to spin and we were definitely going to crash.
“Hold on,” I said, and things seemed to slow down in my head. And I watched the distance between us and the pileup grow smaller, bracing for the crash, feeling the car move in a sickening shimmy I couldn’t stop.
The front passenger side collided sideways into a silver Buick and our car spun around, coming to a stop facing west, the direction we’d just come. “Get out!” Devin said, unbuckling his seat belt and shoving my arm.
“Get out?”
“I can’t open my door. Next vehicle hits us head-on. Get out!”
I scrambled out and Devin followed. Seconds later a pickup truck did just what Devin said it would do, and we watched from the shoulder as our father’s red Escort got accordioned.
The sleet was pounding our heads. Devin was in a T-shirt. He tried lighting a cigarette but couldn’t.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Jesus.” Devin grabbed my arm and we started walking along the shoulder, slipping as we went. “You all right?” he asked.
“I think so. Yeah. Are you?”
“Yeah. Look at this shit.” At least a dozen cars and pickups were spread out over about sixty yards in front of us, some of them tipped over, all of them crumpled. We could hear sirens in the distance, but no cops or ambulances were on the scene yet. We passed a car lying on its roof, with two guys bent over talking loud to the driver, who was stuck inside. A woman was standing next to her SUV, which was crunched against the barrier that separated the eastbound lanes from the westbound. She was holding a little girl in her arms, and another young girl was standing next to them shivering. The one standing had some cuts on her face and her ear was bleeding, and all three of them were crying.
Devin went over to them. “Everybody all right?” he said.
“I think so,” the woman said, kind of trembly. “I couldn’t stop. It was so icy.”
“I know,” Devin said. “Come on. There’s an exit up ahead.” He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and put it by the girl’s bleeding ear. “Hold that there,” he said. “Not too tight.” He turned to the mother. “Give me the little one,” he said. “Come with us.”