Dance, Gladys, Dance

by Cassie Stocks

  One night, the left speaker gave a small sigh and quit. I didn’t attempt to see if it could be fixed. The music sounded as though it came from far away and I preferred it that way.

  It was a slow, quiet world at Mr. Hausselman’s: no ringing cellphones, loud music, dishwashers, blenders, hair dryers, or air conditioners. We seemed to click, Mr. H. (as I took to calling him) and I. We both liked our space and enjoyed each other’s company.

  Mr. H. worked for a zillion charities and went to the Downtown Art Centre to teach photography or help out nearly every day. I spent my days wandering about the house, watching the patterns of light and shadows on the walls, reading, or taking long walks or bus rides to nowhere. I developed such a peaceable melancholy that I had no energy to look for work. I wrote my parents and asked for a “loan” to get me through a month so I could enjoy the quiet. Mr. H.’s house was, I thought, the perfect place to begin my new, ordinary life.

  I lay on my bed one afternoon trying to envision myself as the woman in the conventional life, the woman with no desire to create. Where before I’d been struck dumb and motionless by a beautiful patch of sky, a swirl of water going down a drain, or the arch of an eyebrow, I would become blind to it all. I’d simply stop looking for beauty to capture and stop being captured by beauty. I’d find another way to get along. Ginny could teach me about shoe shopping.

  Anyhow, why, why bother with such a fucking feeble pursuit? Why use up so much for the return of so little? And why offer up what’s been sweated over and take the risk of having it disregarded, or rejected? No wonder so many artists are insane — you’d have to be crazy to keep doing it. Sanity ho! I’d find my way back. What did I have to lose besides a few glimpses of beauty in an otherwise ordinary world?

  I rolled onto my side and tried to ignore the colossal emptiness expanding in my chest.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I am swell.” I answered, then realized I hadn’t asked myself the question.

  I turned my head. In the old burgundy plush rocking chair sat an elderly woman I’d never met before. Her grey hair looked as though it had been chopped with a razor and hung in untidy chunks around her face. Her eyes were an almost scary bright blue; her cheekbones were high and handsome. She crossed her arms over her bosom, which was enveloped in a high-necked, long white dress with a blue and white polka-dotted apron over top. I could see bare toes peeking out from underneath the hem.

  “Hullo,” I said and sat up. I was not, at first, concerned with how this woman had come to be in my rocking chair, but with the fact that she’d interrupted my indefinite grieving. She smiled, nodded, and continued rocking.

  Seeing as this taciturn old dame with dubious fashion sense was in no hurry to introduce herself or explain her presence, I said, “I’m Frieda; this is my bedroom.”

  She looked around the room. “It’s nice.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “It’s a nice room.”

  “Well, I’m glad you like it. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m rocking.” She gave a little more emphasis to her next push-off. “See? Rocking.”

  “And you are?”

  “Gladys. I thought I’d give you a little time to settle in.”

  “Who?” An image of the classified ad that had led me to Mr. H.’s house flashed in my mind. Gladys doesn’t dance anymore. She needs the room to bake.

  “Gladys,” she repeated.

  “The Gladys?”

  She raised her eyebrows a little and continued rocking.

  “You can’t be the Gladys, you’re not baking. . . or dancing.”

  “No, right now I’m rocking.”

  “Oh,” I said. I closed my eyes, but I could still hear the squeaking of the chair. This was bad. I’d advanced from frustrated artist and college dropout to insane frustrated artist and college dropout. What to say? “Are you a ghost?” “How did you get here?” “Are you a flashback from those three hits of acid I did on the side of a mountain in Northern BC?” “Can you walk through walls?” But what came out of my mouth was, “Do you still dance?”

  She frowned and vanished. The chair still rocked slightly but she was gone. I gasped, stood, went to go downstairs, then sat back down. What would I say? Did you see a spirit from the great beyond go by? And if Gladys was a ghost, why visit me? What might she have to tell me? How to make a perfect pie crust? The steps to the foxtrot? How not to dress? I already had Ginny for that. Perhaps I’d nodded off in bed without realizing it and had just now woken up. It sounded as good as anything I could concoct on the spot. I was absolutely not going to add insanity to my list of flaws.

  Mr. H. called up the stairs. “Time to go for supper, Frieda.”

  “Be right down.” I shook my head, combed my hair, and took a last look around the room to make sure I was awake. Business as usual. I opened the wardrobe and looked inside. No one there. I put the copy of Crochet Magic magazine I bought as bribery for Miss Kesstle into my bag, started down the stairs, then came back into the room, got on my hands and knees, and peeked underneath the bed. Nothing but dust. Right. Here we go then, I told myself, it was just a nice nap. I wouldn’t say anything about Gladys. Telling other people your dreams really should be the eighth mortal sin: pride, envy, anger, sloth, covetousness, gluttony, lust, and behaving as though the dream you had last night was the new Hollywood blockbuster.

  Mr. H. waited by the door with his suit on. We walked out on the porch and he closed the door behind us.

  “You should lock it,” I said. “This neighbourhood isn’t as safe as it used to be.”

  “I haven’t locked this door in twenty years,” he said. “I’m not about to start now.”

  “You’ll be sorry if someone breaks in and makes off with all three sets of your encyclopedias.”

  “Big demand for them on the black market?” Mr. H. smiled and took my arm as we walked down the steps.

  “Sure, haven’t you heard? There’s something in the ink of encyclopedias produced before 1959 that gets you stoned.”

  “Smoke the pages, do they?” He started up the steps to Miss Kesstle’s.

  “It’s the new drug of choice.”

  The door to 1226 was locked, chained, and alarmed. A salesperson had gone through the neighbourhood last month and, as Mr. Hausselman put it, scared the bejeebers out of Miss Kesstle. She had the works installed: the Peace of Mind System Model 848 with all the bells and whistles. The alarm was so sensitive that Beethoven constantly set it off going in and out through his cat door. Miss Kesstle slept right through the noise and Mr. H. had to ask her for a spare key so he could go in on a regular basis and reset the system in the middle of the night.

  Miss Kesstle hadn’t been too happy about my addition to Sunday dinners, but as I hadn’t killed Mr. H. in his sleep yet, she’d warmed to me a little. Her house gave me the creeps. It was like the cavern of a very talented and bored spider. Every available surface was covered in elaborate doilies. Surfaces impractical for doilies were swathed in plastic.

  Mr. H. pushed his chair back after dinner. “That was truly egg salad, Miss Kesstle,” he said.

  I followed Miss Kesstle into the kitchen to help with the dishes. There were crocheted fruit baskets, potholders, and lacy curtains hung at the window above the sink. Even the dishcloth in my hand was crocheted. We waited for the sink to fill. Beethoven circled around her legs, purring and leaving white hairs poking out of her support hose like old man’s whiskers. I leaned down to pet him. He hissed silently at me. I stuck my tongue out at him and straightened. “Nice cat.”

  “He’s an angel,” said Miss Kesstle. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mr. Hausselman’s brain problem. I saw a documentary about it on the educational channel.”

  “His what?” I wondered if she’d been smoking the pages of her encyclopedias.

  “I’m not saying he’s insane. It must be an organic problem. That’s what the p
rogram said. It’s a physical thing. Organic. . . orgasmic? No, organic. You know.”

  I was going through extreme facial movements to keep myself from laughing — I bit my cheeks, wrinkled my nose, and grimaced.

  “Do you have gas?” she asked. “I have Pepto-Bismol if you need some.”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “I think that’s why his son never calls or visits him.” She put the glasses in the sink.

  “His son? Mr. Hausselman has kids?”

  “Just the one. Whitman. Strange name. Did you want to wash or dry? Mr. Hausselman probably meant to say Winston and it came out wrong. He’s a big muckety-muck in the movies in L.A.” Whitman. If I knew Mr. H., his son was probably named after his favourite poet, Mr. Walt Whitman. It was odd; in all our conversations he’d never mentioned a son. “I’ll dry.”

  “I can’t imagine how he manages at the deli,” said Miss Kesstle.

  “Who? At the deli. . .”

  “You have to say what you want at the deli. Like tonight. Mr. Hausselman said supper was egg salad, but it wasn’t; it was potato salad.”

  “He meant excellent,” I said.

  “Exactly. His brain confuses words. He calls everything by the wrong names.”

  I decided not to try to explain further. I agreed, “It’s a tragedy. But he does manage quite well.”

  “I admire him greatly,” she said and carried out dessert, blueberry pie, which Mr. H. later declared “arm-raising” (i.e., amazing). Miss Kesstle gave me a meaningful glance and politely agreed with him.

  After we got home, I said good night to Mr. H. and cautiously entered my room. There was no one there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Heavy

  When I was growing up, my family had stacks of yellow National Geographics in a bookshelf in the family room. I butchered them for elementary school reports, gluing photos of Mayan artefacts on loose-leaf pages, next to my pencilled words. When I was nine, looking for pictures of Spain for a social studies report, I came across a photo of Pablo Picasso’s painting of Dora Maar. She was like nothing I’d ever seen. I sat on the green linoleum floor (which my mother referred to as battleship linoleum because it lasts forever — as if that was a good thing), held the magazine open in my lap, and stared at the photo. I had no idea who Picasso was, but I knew that painting, that style, those colours, in my bones. Dora’s face was wrong; it was orange, with stripes of green and white. Her nose tilted over to one side, her eyes were too big, and her ear was a piece of macaroni. Shapes of colour formed her clothes: purple, black, blue, and the background just two flat panels of orange. She was as ugly as heck, but she was powerful. She looked like I felt.

  I began to make drawings of people’s faces from my mother’s Chatelaine magazines. I tried to draw what I felt from them instead of their outside appearance, as I thought Picasso had done with Dora Maar. Not so easy using women from shampoo ads. I had a little tin box with circles of watercolour paint and I tried to paint the portraits in colours like Picasso’s, but I couldn’t get them bright enough. The loose-leaf paper would begin to disintegrate, leaving rolled-up bits of pulp stuck to my brush.

  My mom mentioned my interest in art to our next-door neighbour, Mrs. Hernd, during coffee one day, and Mrs. Hernd invited me over to her house to paint with her. Mrs. Hernd was not at all my idea of a painter. Her grey-brown hair was frizzed up from the Toni perms my mom gave her at our kitchen table and she wore giant velour caftans everywhere, even out to the grocery store. She was even older than my mother was (not to mention rounder and plainer). She had a painting studio in her upstairs spare bedroom between the main bedroom and the bathroom. It had been her daughter’s bedroom before she moved away. The easels and paintings seemed out of place with the ruffled purple curtains on the window and the beige shag carpet covered with thick plastic runners.

  Mrs. Hernd taught me how to clean my brushes, how to be patient and not muddy an area by overworking it before it dried, and how to thin the paints and not use up great gobs of the supplies she had to ask her husband for money to buy — a husband who smoked cigars, but complained ad nauseam about the smell of the turpentine and oil paints. Mrs. Hernd and I would stand side by side in the little room and paint in silence, our hair flying in the breeze of the fan she kept running to cut down the smell. Mrs. Hernd’s favourite subjects were old buildings on the verge of collapse. I didn’t quite get it. “To each her own,” she would say, looking at the flamboyantly coloured faces I produced.

  I did family portraits, my mother and father with green hair and blue faces. My mother had them framed and hung them in the laundry room.

  The more I painted, the more I wanted to paint. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. My mind filled with pictures, ideas, and plans for my next great works.

  While I was painting, I was growing up — not perfectly, but inevitably. Painting gave me someone to be, an identity, bonus enough during my turbulent teen years, but I wanted more. Mrs. Hernd was lovely, but the thought of ending up like her sent me to the depths of teenage despond. I grew, I graduated from high school, and I waited for my big chance.

  It came when the local tavern booked the Bang Howdy Band for a week. The Bang Howdy Band traveled in a former school bus painted a chalky shade of blue with half the seats taken out to make room for the gear. They churned out covers of seventies hits and, one night, between sets, following a rousing rendition of “Smoke on the Water,” I hooked up with the blond bass player, Geordie Davies.

  Four nights into their booking, Geordie and I lay naked in the single bed in the Motel 88. I was wrapped in a scratchy grey blanket. Geordie lay uncovered beside me, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the ceiling.

  “Band pulls out tomorrow,” he said.

  “Oh? Where’re you off to?” I asked. I gently stroked his stomach, dipping my fingers in and out of the well of his belly button.

  “Edmonton. Do you want to come?” He continued staring at the ceiling.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I think I just did.”

  He laughed and rolled over facing me. “I’d miss this,” he said. He reached his arms around me and grabbed my ass with both hands.

  It was so romantic I nearly died.

  I didn’t tell my parents of my plans until the day I was going, frightened they might convince me to change my mind. Geor-die parked the band bus in the driveway. My red plaid suitcase of clothes and my paintbox sat packed and waiting on the floor beside my bed.

  Mom and Dad sat at the kitchen table. I took Geordie in and he awkwardly shook hands with them. I told them that I was leaving, gave them Geordie’s phone number in Vancouver, and explained that we wouldn’t be there because the band was on tour.

  My mother looked confused, torn between freaking out and not wanting to freak out in front of this long-haired man she might have to call her son-in-law.

  “Well,” said my father. “You’re an adult now, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. I hadn’t expected this quietness. I’d been counting on scenes and arguments like the three of us had been having for the last four years. I was counting on that anger to expel me from the house. I went to the bedroom to get my things. When I walked back into the kitchen, my mother was still sitting at the table, staring at the window above the sink. Her hands were wrapped around her coffee cup and I could see her fingers turning white and red with pressure.

  This was freedom. This was the great escape. I felt my chest collapsing. “I’ll call you when we get to the next booking.”

  She didn’t even turn to look at me. I picked up my things and walked down the hallway. My dad stood on the front steps. Geordie was in the driveway moving things around in the bus.

  “If we said you couldn’t go, would you stay?” asked my father at the door.

  I shook my head. He pressed some money into my hand and then grasped me in a half-hug and patted my back too hard.

  “Even artists have to eat, Frieda,” he said and turned away. I wasn’t wo
rried about money. I’d soon be a famous artist, sending Mom and Dad away on tropical vacations with the proceeds from my New York shows. Edmonton was a long way from New York and also in the wrong direction, but it was out. That was the first step, no matter the geographical point of the compass.

  I turned to wave at my father, but he’d already gone back inside and closed the door.

  “Heavy,” said Geordie, as we backed down the driveway.

  Now, here I sat, years later, at the desk in Mr. H.’s study with a pile of T-4s, scraps of calendars, and pink slips in front of me, working on my résumé — expanding and renaming jobs. I decided on “Retail Consultant” for the year I’d spent in Kentucky. Norman’s mother, Lady March, and I had done a lot of shopping together, so I used her name as a reference. If a potential employer did call, they’d be so confused by the aura, star sign, and past life information Lady March would give them they’d never notice if she didn’t mention me as an employee.

  The study was in the back of the house off the kitchen. The desk was a massive old oak teacher’s desk; built-in shelves held teetering stacks of books and a small stereo on which Mr. H. listened to symphonies while he wrote diatribes to the newspaper about the government’s lack of social conscience. There was also an armchair that matched the blue velvet couch in the living room but had a large hole in the seat. Topography maps in all textures and stunning jewel-tone colours covered the walls. Modern art with no effort at all.

  The maps dated back to Mr. H.’s job as a photogeologist with the provincial government, which he informed me involved analyzing aerial or orbital photographs for lithologic geological features. Whatever that meant. He’d retired at sixty-five. Thirty-five years at the same job.

  The old wooden office chair swiveled, rocked, and creaked wonderfully. I took a break and spun around for awhile, imagining I was that writer, Dorothy Parker, whose book Mr. H. had lent me.

  If I should labor through daylight and dark,

  Consecrate, valorous, serious, true,

  Then on the world I may blazon my mark;