Dance, Gladys, Dance
CASSIE STOCKS
NEWEST PRESS
COPYRIGHT © Cassie Stocks 2012
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Stocks, Cassie, 1966–
Dance, Gladys, dance / Cassie Stocks.
Also issued in electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-897126-76-9
I. Title.
PS8637.T618D35 2012 C813’.6 C2011-906882-6
Editor for the Board: Anne Nothof
Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design
Vintage crocheted doily © Elzbieta Sekowska / Shutterstock.com
Author photo: Terry Gasior
NeWest Press acknowledges the financial support of the Alberta Multimedia Development Fund and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We further acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
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No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 13 12
To all those who came before
and all those who will come after.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
She Needs The Room To Bake
CHAPTER TWO
A Taciturn Old Dame
CHAPTER THREE
Heavy
CHAPTER FOUR
The Dominant Oblique Direction
CHAPTER FIVE
The Gimlet Portraits
CHAPTER SIX
Wherein I Embark On Job Interviews
CHAPTER SEVEN
Perfectly Good Except For The Fact They No Longer Work
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Sex Store King
CHAPTER NINE
W-O-M-B-A-T
CHAPTER TEN
He’s A Toad
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Wooden Spoon Woman
CHAPTER TWELVE
An Unhealthy And Disgusting Habit
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He Looks Bad
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She Seems A Bit Lost
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Little Cardboard Pets
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Great If You Like That Sort Of Thing
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Like An Angel
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Foggy Mountain Breakdown
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Scared-Ass Rabbit
CHAPTER TWENTY
Rear Deltoid Development
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Go Fork Yourself
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
She Twitches Too
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Was it So Wrong?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Regular Tornado
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Damsel In Distress
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
What Do You Need A Career For?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
That Fancy Woman
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Something For The Pain
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It’s My Policy
CHAPTER THIRTY
Solidarity. Publicity. Protest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A Gnarled Root
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
She’s A Good Girl
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Damn Decent
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE
She Needs The Room To Bake
I had no point of navigation but I was hell-bent on finding my way to Ordinary. I didn’t know what I hoped to find on that voyage or, God forbid, at the end of it, but I knew there was nothing but bilge rats and bullshit on the course I’d been following.
I still awoke at night as if in midthought. That copy of Emerson’s Essays . . . did Norman keep it? I’d be compelled to run downstairs to the storage room and root through the boxes I brought back from Kentucky with me. First, though, I had to rouse Ginny to find the key. Ginny tolerated these wakings only twice, and then, griping about delusional roommates, she had a copy of the key made and hung it by the condo’s front door.
It’s a physical deficiency you feel in the middle of the night after a breakup. Oh shit, you lie there thinking. It’s not the books or the brassieres — I’ve left my thighs in his spare closet.
Along with my ex, Norman, and possibly some missing-inaction body parts, I’d abandoned my creative spirit in Kentucky too, left it disintegrating underneath a tree beside the Barren River (symbolically enough), buried alongside the last paintings I swore I would ever do.
Ginny had left the newspaper on the kitchen table folded open to the employment section, alongside a conspicuously placed red pen. I sat down at the table and wriggled in the chair. Ginny’s condo is the Shrine to Design: titanium white walls, ebony floors, leather furniture, and none of the clocks had numbers. I could never tell what time it was, not that I had anything to be late for. The two kitchen chairs were Bertoia Wire Chairs, sans cushions. The wire frame was incredibly uncomfortable and my butt would be dented like a reverse waffle when I stood up. If the other items in the room and I were featured in a certain Sesame Street game, I’d be one of the things that’s not like the others.
I unfolded the paper and turned past the help-wanted ads to the furniture-for-sale column. I’d be getting my own place again, someday. It didn’t cost anything to look and I wanted to feast my eyes on the cost of a nice flat-bottomed kitchen chair. Underneath the AMAZING queen mattress & box, cost over $1100, sell $495, there it was:
BEAUTIFUL old phonograph for sale. 78 record player.
Excellent condition. Gladys doesn’t dance anymore.
She needs the room to bake. Bring offer. Ph. 254-9885.
Now there was a woman grown earnest about life. It must be a joke. I picked up the portable phone and dialed the number. I didn’t need a phonograph. (Who does, really?) I wanted to see Gladys. I imagined a woman wearing a flowered housedress, her arms covered in flour, polkaing and shaking the floor while cookies turned black in the oven. But now Gladys had abandoned dancing and turned serious about her baking, perhaps trying for a blue ribbon at the neighbourhood fair. I wanted to look at this woman, to see if she looked broken. I wanted to see how she managed to give it up.
“Hello.” An old man’s voice spoke on the other end of the line. Gladys was probably busy baking pies.
“Hi. I was calling about your ad in the paper.”
“You’re an early riser; that’s good. I had people call at noon sounding like they just got out of bed. I didn’t even let them see it. Do you like to read?”
“Uh, yes.” What did that have to do with a record player? Perhaps Gladys had been driven to baking by her insane husband.
“Listen, could I come to see it?”
“Certainly. How about ten o’clock?”
I wrote the address down with the red pen, hung up the phone, and went back to flipping through the newspaper. It had been only two weeks since I returned to Winnipeg an
d moved in with Ginny, but she made it seem like I’d been lying about for months — decades even. I first met Ginny at the Paraskeva College of Art three years ago. She was excelling in Commercial Art. I was dropping out of Fine Art. I randomly circled help wanted ads and made big noises with the pages. See, Ginny? Flip. I’m trying to restart my life. Flip. Flip. Look at me go.
I’d returned to Manitoba to live as I believed a normal person lived. No more Frieda Zweig the Artist. Abstract depictment in exchange for appropriate deportment. Who was I going to be? I was more inclined towards inertia than upward mobility and didn’t like most people enough to devote my life to helping others less fortunate than myself. I’d work somewhere, I thought, watch TV in the evenings, and become wholly involved in the lives of non-existent people. I’d develop my own life of quiet desperation, as Emerson’s buddy Thoreau suggested the mass of men (and, presumably, women) led.
Ginny walked into the kitchen in her pyjamas. I too wore my PJs — a black Rolling Stones concert T-shirt and a pair of men’s long-underwear bottoms. Classic sleepwear. Ginny wore a peacock-blue satin slip and matching robe. The other kind of classic sleepwear. Immense yellow Velcro rollers clung to the sides of her head. We looked at each other silently for a moment; neither of us was the dreaded Happy in the Morning species of human. She smelled like cucumber face cream and vanilla fabric softener.
“You should get a haircut today,” she said. “You’re a wreck.”
“Good morning to you too. A wreck, huh? Plane wreck or bus wreck?” I circled another arbitrary ad.
“You know what they say — dress for success.” She poured herself a coffee from the completely intimidating automatic espresso machine, which, thankfully, she pre-programmed to perk at 7:45 each morning, and sat down at the table. “Your appearance indicates the level of work you’re qualified for.”
I eyed her head. “This from a 1950s alien queen? Where are you going to work? The mothership?”
“Volume,” she said. “The rollers lift the hair at the roots and give you volume. You can borrow them if you like.”
“I’m applying at a pancake house today. My chances would be better with flat, greasy hair, don’t you think?”
Ginny and I are oranges and apples, or peaches and broccoli. Hint: I’m the one that’s green and fibrous. She’s California classic, with bouncy blonde hair, blue eyes, a skinny little nose, and what they used to call bee-stung lips. Her lips get that way from collagen injections, which is slightly easier than sticking your face in a beehive, which I’m about as likely to do. My nose is bigger, my lips are smaller, and my eyes are brown like mud. However, Ginny envies my dimples, two craters in the middle of my cheeks that explode however slightly I smile. She can have them. They make people think I’m far friendlier than I am.
“I could make you a hair appointment with Angelico.” Ginny added three drops of skim milk to her coffee and stirred, clinking the spoon against the sides of her mug.
“Last time he made me look like a brunette Dolly Parton, only missing the boobs. I prefer the long lank look.” I added two sloshes of cream and three spoonfuls of sugar to my mug. I feel the same way about unsweetened espresso as I do about progressive jazz — it’s hopelessly unsophisticated not to like it, but no matter how I try, I can’t get my ears, or my tastebuds, around it.
“Oh, please, that was years ago. Big hair was back.”
“Back from where? Hell?” I shook my head. “I’m not going.” Who knew what hairstyle had emerged from the underworld by now?
She eyed my sleepwear with a slight pursing of her lips. “Are you going for interviews today? Do you want to borrow something to wear? I have a super new ecru linen suit that would fit you.”
“No — thanks,” I said. “Isn’t ecru a large bird? Never mind, that’s an emu.”
Ginny’s body type is champagne-advertisement model. All her artificially created bumps, or lack thereof, are in the right places. I, on the other hand, resemble an advertisement for a nature program — The Amazing Life of a Walking Stick Bug. I was born the way I am. My mother often told, probably still tells, but in Florida, so I don’t have to hear it as often, thank god, the story of how a four-year-old cousin, upon seeing me for the first time after my difficult birth, demanded they name me Arrow because I was long, skinny, and had a pointed head. My head rounded out after a few weeks but the long and skinny remains. Ginny’s swanky apparel hangs on me like I’m a scare-broccoli. I’m also prone to spilling drinks and dripping ketchup and I can’t afford to dry clean Ginny’s clothes.
She shrugged. “I’ve got to get ready for work. Three accounts to close. Maybe my team will actually bring their brains today instead of leaving them in their sock drawers or whatever the hell they did with them yesterday.” She wafted away down the hallway to the bathroom to play with her pots of beauty voodoo or to sneak a peak at the Cosmo magazines she hid, like pornography, underneath her perfectly rolled white towels.
Ginny called from the bathroom: “I have extra art supplies from work in the guestroom closet if you want to paint anything.”
“I told you I’m not painting anymore,” I shouted back. “I’m exchanging artistry for drudgery.”
“You,” yelled Ginny, “are completely asinine.”
Gee, thanks. Strike four on the confidence-o-meter at only eight-something-or-other in the morning.
Ginny stopped at the table and had the last swallow of her coffee before she left. The 1950s Alien Queen had been replaced by an immaculate Corporate Chatty Cathy — a dolly dressed in Ralph Lauren career wear for the Downtown Offices. Pull her string and she’ll say things like, “Let’s have a meeting,” “I’ll have a venti skim cappuccino,” and “Where the hell is my report?”
“What happened to your work?” I asked. In college, in Industrial Sculpture 207, Ginny discovered an aptitude for metalwork, creating sinuous forms of brushed aluminum. One of them stood on a white pedestal in the corner of her living room.
“I don’t have time anymore, the job keeps me going twelve hours a day,” she said. “But you have ten times more talent than any of the schmucks in the art department at work. I know what happened with Professor Gimlet in college and you’ve been having trouble with your work, but. . .”
I tapped the pen on the table. “It has nothing to do with Gimlet and I’m not having trouble with my work at all. I no longer have any work. Period.” I began to turn the pages of the paper again. “Have a good day at work with the schmucks.”
After Ginny left I took a piece of paper and made a list:
Five Steps to an Ordinary Life 1. Get a real job.
2. Stop seeing the world as a series of potential paintings.
3. Learn how to talk about the weather.
4. Do the things that normal people do.
5. Figure out what normal people actually do.
Then I got my waffle butt out of the chair, got dressed, and went outside, the piece of paper with Baking Gladys’ address safely in the front pocket of my jeans. It was the sort of rainy May afternoon that would make anyone with less ambition than Ginny want to lie in bed all day reading trashy novels, but I was inspired: Gladys would be the beginning of my normal people research.
The streets outside seemed washed of colour, a cityscape of black, white, and greys. There was a bright spot of colour on the bus, the yellow raincoat of the young girl seated across from me. A tiny violin case sat beside her, one end on the floor, the other resting against her knees. I settled into my seat and assumed the bus-riding countenance, slightly unfocused eyes, and an upright chin: I see nothing, but I know where I’m going.
I thought back to my not-terribly-illustrious musical career. I was six years old and couldn’t wait to start music lessons. My piano teacher was a formidable woman with black hair and a very straight back. She was a thousand years old and, it seemed, constantly pissed off at me. She hit my fingers with a ruler if I looked down at them while playing. Thwack. I tried to learn, but fear froze my mind. I’d lose
track of my fingers on the keyboard and stop in the middle of a piece, too afraid to look down. She would sit beside me and shake her head, ruler in hand. One day, when my mother pulled up to the house, I, in the back seat of our blue Pinto, clutching my Leila Fletcher Beginner’s Piano Book (Who was Leila anyhow? God, I hated her), burst into tears and refused to go in.
But little suburban girls must take classes and, after my piano failure, the empty spot in my life marked “extra-curricular activities” or “cultural edification” was filled with tap dancing classes. I approached my hours at Ms. Telford’s Academy of Dance with initial enthusiasm. Within a week, because I could never remember to keep my arms in a straight horizontal line as I turned in circles on the rehearsal floor, Ms. Telford threaded a broomstick through the sleeves of my cherished pink leotard. I practised with my arms hanging off a broomstick for the next month of classes. Frieda, the crucified tap dancer.
For recitals and competitions, they removed the broomstick, and I was transformed into a stiff mannequin in a short sequined dress with circles of rouge on its cheeks. Smile. Smile. Show your teeth. Keep your head up. Shuffle-Ball-Change. Whose idea of art were those rigid little dollies? I never placed in a competition and my mother grew tired of sponging stinko nervous vomit off my shiny dresses. No more tapping for me.
I wanted so badly to dance, to make music, but though I tried and cried with frustration, I could not follow what they were teaching me. I could not make the leap between the lessons I took and what I felt inside.
In time, I came to believe I was hopeless and just too damn stupid to learn what they were teaching me.
The bus stopped a block away from Morning Street. I stood and gave the little girl with the violin a smile. “Good luck,” I said. She turned away. Well-trained — don’t talk to strangers. I got off the bus, pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt, and walked through the drizzle looking at the houses. Judging from the size of most of the homes, the district had once been genteel, but no more. The sidewalks were cracked and littered, the houses, for the most part, unkempt. Porches sagged, and many of the windows were boarded up.
The address I took from my pocket led me to 1228 Morning Street, the only house besides the house next door that looked as though it had been painted in the last twenty years. 1228 was set back farther from the street than the other houses. The outside was painted Post-it Note yellow with white trim, and there was a big wraparound porch with large wooden columns.
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