Dance, Gladys, Dance

by Cassie Stocks

  On the neighbouring porch, an old lady sat in a rocking chair with a motionless white cat on her lap. I smiled at her, but she didn’t turn her head. She was so still, such a picture of aged contentment, white-haired and wrinkly, that I thought she might be made of papier-mâché and been placed there as an art installation. I wondered that the day’s dampness didn’t bother her, cause her edges to curl and warp. I climbed the steps of 1228 and rang the bell, still looking over at the old lady. I was thinking of shouting at her when the door opened.

  “Hi, I’m Frieda. I called about your ad.”

  “Hello.” The man at the front door appeared to be in his eighties. He wore a slightly wrinkled white button-up shirt and practical canvas pants held up by a pair of frayed purple paisley suspenders. His hand, when I shook it, was soft. He’s a retired lawyer, I thought. No, professor. No, accountant.

  The woman next door leaned forward in her chair. The cat gave a cranky meow. “Good afternoon,” she yelled to the man.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Kesstle,” he said, inclining his head slightly.

  The lady looked right past me. Snotty old thing.

  “Will you be over for dinner on Sunday?” she shouted.

  “Of course, wouldn’t miss it,” he said.

  She leaned back in her chair and he gestured me through the door.

  “Miss Kesstle is getting almost as deaf as Beethoven,” he said as he closed the door behind us.

  “But can she play the piano?”

  “No, but Beethoven can,” he said.

  “So they say.” Did the old fellow think this was news?

  “It’s the cat.” He took my jacket and hung it on a hook, ignoring the water that dropped on the wooden floor. “Beethoven is the cat. White male cats with blue eyes are always deafer than doorknobs.”

  I smiled at the man. “And he plays piano, this cat?”

  “He doesn’t exactly play it. Just walks across the keys. Can’t hear the noise he’s making. Do you like experimental music? I don’t care for it myself.”

  “Ah, I can’t really say. I just moved back from Kentucky.”

  “Oh, yes, Kentucky,” he said nodding as though that completely explained my out-of-touch musical tastes. “So, did you want to see it?” He gestured down the hallway in front of us.

  “Yes, absolutely.” I followed behind him, looking for Gladys in the rooms we passed.

  He led me through a shabbily comfortable living room filled with overflowing bookcases, two velvet couches (one burgundy, the other blue), and a big old black vinyl recliner next to the fireplace with a side table stacked with newspapers. We went through the kitchen, in which there was, disappointingly, no Gladys. I sniffed the air but couldn’t discern any lingering scent of cinnamon buns or chocolate cake.

  Past the kitchen, we went up two flights of stairs in the back of the house. Framed black-and-white portrait photos covered the walls. I recognized one subject as the woman next door sitting on her porch. The picture made her look gentle and a little sad somehow.

  “Someone’s quite the photographer,” I said.

  “Thank you. I teach at the Downtown Art Centre. Are you interested in photography?”

  “No. I used to paint, though.”

  He was getting a little out of breath by the time we reached the top of the stairs, where I could see a bedroom with sloping ceilings, hardwood floors, and two large windows, one of which threw a leaf-dappled shadow in the centre of the floor. There was an old cast iron bed, a green desk, a wooden dresser with a round mirror, a plush rocker covered in burgundy, Early Victorian Whorehouse upholstery, and several other odd bits of furniture, including, in one corner, a phonograph.

  “Does it work?” I asked, walking over to it.

  “What?”

  He seemed quite normal for a deranged person. “The record player.”

  “Ah, the euphonious apparatus. Yes, quite well, if I remember correctly. I was going to move most of this stuff out, but I could leave it here. That is, if we decide we’re compatible.”

  Nuts. “I’ll give you, uh, twenty dollars,” I said.

  “I believe the ad said two hundred.”

  “Two hundred! You must be joking.”

  “I thought it was quite reasonable. Two hundred a month and —”

  “A month? Who’d buy a phonograph for a month?”

  “I haven’t looked at that thing for years,” he said. His eyebrows squinched up. “The room is for rent.”

  “But what about Gladys?”

  “Who?”

  “Gladys. She doesn’t dance, she needs the room to bake.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “There is no Gladys here.”

  “You didn’t put an ad in the paper for a phonograph for sale?” “No.”

  “Oh, shit. Sorry. Shoot. I thought I called a phone number for someone with a 78 record player for sale. I don’t really want a record player, of course, but Gladys. . . Maybe the paper got the numbers wrong or I misdialed.” I’d pissed away half the day for nothing. I leaned my head against the wall.

  “I’m sorry, dear, there must have been some kind of mix-up. Listen, you don’t look swell.” He patted my shoulder.

  “Mister, I don’t feel swell.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Taciturn Old Dame

  Not only had I not found a job, or even looked for one; apparently I couldn’t even use a telephone correctly. Telemarketing was out as a career choice.

  “Come downstairs and sit for a minute — you look like you could use a drink of something,” said the old man.

  In the kitchen, he took two glasses from the cupboard, left the room for a minute, and then came back and busied himself at the counter. I sat at the table, unable to believe Gladys would not appear and begin kneading bread, her feet planted solidly on the floor.

  The old cupboards had been painted white. A brightly striped plastic tablecloth covered the table. A calendar with a picture of Butchart Gardens hung on the wall, the squares surprisingly filled in with notes and appointments. He had more places to go in a week than I’d been in three months. Under the calendar was a small antique telephone table. All of the furniture was antique. When the old fellow died and his relatives had a garage sale, people would snatch this stuff up. I wouldn’t mind some of it myself.

  “They make a lot of cigarettes in Kentucky,” he said from the counter.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said, “but they sure smoke a lot of them there.”

  I waited for him to bring a glass of weak lemonade, or a cup of tea brewed from a twice-used tea bag. He approached the table with two tall iced glasses.

  “Here, a glass of Glornic always perks me up.”

  “Glornic?” It sounded like an old person’s tonic; I’d probably spend the evening on the toilet.

  “Gin, tonic, lemon, and a touch of grenadine. My wife Shirley used to drink it in the summertime.”

  He sat at the table and smiled. His round face creased like the craquelure on an antique portrait.

  I lifted the glass. “Thank you.”

  “So,” he asked, “why did you leave Kentucky?”

  “Messy breakup, all that, you know how it is.”

  “I’ve never had a breakup, but I have read about them. Doctor Zhivago. Madame Bovary.”

  Never had a messy breakup? Good God, what had this man been doing with his life?

  “What are you doing now?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Staying at a friend’s house, driving her insane with my slothfulness. I need to find a job, but I can’t seem to bring myself to do it.”

  “You should try and find work that’s fulfilling,” he said.

  Everyone’s a career counsellor. “Listen, Mr. . . .”

  “Hausselman.”

  “Mr. Hausselman, did you ever read Emerson’s Essays? The bit that goes, ‘Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity will explain nothing.’”

  “I may have.” He wav
ed the pitcher at me.

  I nodded and held out my glass. “Well, what if you’re not good at anything? Or what if it turned out that you were lousy at the only thing you ever wanted to do? Can working at 7-Eleven be a Genuine Action?” I swallowed my drink.

  “I suppose any work, if you approach it properly, could be a genuine action. I think that part comes from the inside.”

  I sighed, picked up the pitcher, and refilled my glass. Everyone said things that sounded good but were impossible to put into practice. I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling medallion in the kitchen, what a great old house. I leaned back farther to see if there was a medallion in the hallway too. Someone was standing in the hall. The chair tipped completely over. I was on the floor. Oh, shit. He’ll think I’m drunk. I think I am drunk. I probably should have eaten something today.

  “Don’t worry, it’s alright,” he said as he helped me up. “They don’t make chairs like they used to.”

  “This is a very old chair, Mr. . . .” I took his hand and he turned the chair back upright. I stood and looked down the hallway. There was no one there.

  “Hausselman,” he said. “Even in the old days, they didn’t make chairs like they used to. Here, sit back down.”

  I sat. “Cavemen used to sit on rocks,” I said.

  “Or on the ground perhaps.” He went back around to his chair and sat.

  “I wish I were a cavewoman,” I said.

  “Frieda, listen, regarding rent and your Genuine Action Problem.”

  “To Ralph the Rebel.” I raised my glass. It was empty.

  “Cheers,” said Mr. Hausselman. “I have a problem too: laughed-overs.”

  “Laughed-overs?”

  “Leftovers.”

  “Oh, right. Horrible things. Get green. Use up all your Tupperware. Hate ’em.”

  “So why don’t you move in here? Perhaps in return for helping me use up my laughed-overs, I could work out a reduction in rent until you get back on your feet.”

  “Where would I stay?”

  “The attic room I put in the paper. I’ve been advertising it for a few weeks, but the people so far seem a bit. . . dubious. Miss Kesstle thinks some psychopath will stab me in my sleep, but there are still nice, normal people in the world. Well, look at you, just between paths, hardly psychotic at all. It sounds like you could use a new place to stay.”

  He wasn’t kidding. “Why are you renting the room?” I asked.

  “Since my wife Shirley died, it’s been too quiet in this house.” He paused for a moment. “I thought by renting out a room for a reasonable price, I could help someone else out and have some company too.”

  I studied him. Becoming the kept woman of an eighty-year-old man with purple suspenders who thought I’d service his sexual needs in return for eating two-day-old shepherd’s pie was not in my plan for an ordinary life.

  “I’m a woman, right?”

  “A cavewoman.”

  “No, I’m a nineties woman.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  “I mean, we’d be friends, right?”

  “Hopefully, yes.”

  “I mean just friends,” I said.

  “Well, it would be difficult to be friends and enemies at the same time, wouldn’t it?” Mr. Hausselman frowned.

  This was ridiculous. He obviously had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Okay, there’s one thing I need to know. Do you subscribe to Cosmo magazine?”

  “No.”

  “All right then. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  Back at Ginny’s, I hung my damp hoodie on the back of a kitchen chair and went straight for the newspaper. I went through the classifieds looking for the phonograph ad. Page by page, then row by row, and ad by ad. When I realized I was looking at the Pets Give Away column, I gave up. It was as if the advertisement had never existed. But how could that be? Maybe Ginny came home for lunch and took a section of the paper back to the office at LG with her.

  I was waiting by the door when Ginny came in after work.

  “Did you come home for lunch today?” I asked.

  “No, why?” She slipped off her leather boots and wiped them with the cloth she kept in a basket in the entryway.

  “I’m missing a section of the newspaper, I think.”

  “How did your day go? Find anything?”

  “No. Well, yes. I found a place to stay. Maybe.”

  “Is something the matter with you?” Ginny looked up from where she was lining up her boots with the others in inspection file on the closet mat.

  “I’m fine,” I said, resisting the mad urge to reach over and whack the first boot to see if the others would topple like dominoes. “A little woozy from the Globnics — no, Glornics.”

  “The what? I thought you were going to find a job before you found a new apartment. I said you could stay here.”

  I leaned against the wall and twisted my hair around my fingers. “I had a few drinks with the man whose place I’m moving into, I think. But, I wasn’t looking for a place; I went for a record player. I ended up there by mistake. He seems nice, though, kind of grandpa-like, and the room’s only two hundred bucks a month. I’d be okay for awhile before my money runs out. I still have time to find work.”

  She hung up her coat, straightened the lapels, and swung the closet doors closed. “Frieda, why don’t you do something sensible for once? You know how you are about living with people. You don’t even know this man. He could be an axe murderer.”

  “No, I’m supposed to be the axe murderer. You should meet his neighbour, Miss Kesstle. The two of you would get along just fine.”

  “What?” Ginny held up her hand. “Okay, Frieda, never mind. Do as you like. If you want to move in with some stranger, go ahead.” She walked into the kitchen. I heard her sigh, then she walked back past me with my hoodie dangling from her hand like a rat she’d picked up by the tail.

  “It was wet when I came in,” I said. “And yes, I do want to.”

  “What?” She hung my jacket up, pushed her coats away from either side of it, and closed the closet door. “If you took better care of your clothes, they’d last longer.”

  “I buy my clothes already wrecked, so I don’t have to worry.”

  “You’re not still shopping second-hand, are you?” She wrinkled her nose. “I thought you’d outgrow that.”

  “Yes, I am and yes I do,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “I do want to move in with some stranger. Thanks for putting me up. I’ll start packing tonight.”

  Ginny sighed a lot as I packed and ran boxes up and down the stairs but was overall less annoying than I thought she’d be — a debt of gratitude I owed to her discovering the personal ads.

  “I thought they were all losers, but a woman in the accounting department is getting married next week to a lawyer she met through the personals,” she said.

  I was happy, not only that Ginny left me alone to go out on her whirlwind of dates, but that someone could actually find what they were looking for in the classifieds.

  Later that week, I moved in with Mr. Hausselman. I didn’t bring much — my CD player, my clothes, my books, and the art supplies Ginny had given me — but I left them boxed in the corner of my new bedroom. I thought I’d donate them to the Downtown Art Centre where Mr. Hausselman volunteered. Everything else I left in the storage room at Ginny’s condo. If this didn’t work out, I didn’t want to have to pack it all again.

  Mr. Hausselman made supper the first night. Breaded pork chops, creamed peas, and rice. It smelled delicious. It smelled like home. I sat at the table, hooked my feet over the rungs of the wooden chair, and tried remembering the terminology I’d memorized for number three on the Ordinary Life List: learn how to talk about the weather. Air mass, Altocumulus, Atmospheric Pressure. I wasn’t prepared for a sit-down-together dinner. I’d envisioned myself eating pizza alone in my room most nights. I forked a mouthful of food in. “My mom used to cook pork chops
like this,” I said.

  Mr. H. passed the rice. “It’s one of my very limited repertoire of dishes. Are your parents in Manitoba?”

  I swallowed. It was so nice to eat something I could pronounce. Not spanakopita or bruschetta primavera but pork chop. Pork. Chop. “No, they’re in Florida.”

  “Snowbirds?”

  “They migrated permanently about four years ago. My dad had an equipment dealership in Kindersley, Saskatchewan and a farm he’d inherited from Grandpa. He sold the land to an oil company and they retired and moved away.” Well, there went half of my conversational topics in one fell swoop.

  “Do you keep in touch with them?” he asked.

  “At holidays sometimes, but that’s about all. Mom sends pretty regular letters about which of her friends’ daughters have become nurses, or teachers, or who had a wonderful wedding, or a gorgeous baby. Pass the butter, please. Why are careers, babies, and weddings the only measures of success?”

  “Most parents want the best for their children; sometimes they just don’t know what that is.” He handed me the dish.

  Real butter. I was in heaven. “Thanks. But can you imagine some mother out for lunch with her friends saying, ‘My daughter is growing spiritually at an incredible rate,’ or ‘Suzy is really doing some soul-searching lately, we’re very proud of her’?”

  He tilted his head. “Some parents probably wish their children did more soul-searching. However, I think, right now, you need to do what you need to do. Don’t worry about other people.”

  “Thanks. And how much do you charge for your counseling services?”

  “Free — but I can’t be held responsible for any irrational happiness,” he said.

  “Heck of a deal.”

  I offered to buy the phonograph, but Mr. Hausselman refused. I travelled around the city on the bus and bought 78 records at second-hand shops: Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt, Edith Piaf, and Billie Holiday.