Dance, Gladys, Dance

by Cassie Stocks

  I went upstairs and got dressed in men’s Levi jeans and a white T-shirt. No use in setting Ginny off on a fashion lecture. Once I got downstairs, I lost my common sense. I’d recently scored a 1940s black velvet swing jacket from the second-hand store that I hadn’t worn yet and I’d polished my army boots yesterday. Both the jacket and boots called out to be worn.

  I checked the mail before I left. There was a letter from my mother that I put in my pocket to read on the bus.

  The cross-hatched metal floor rumbled under my feet and the letter vibrated in my hand.

  Dear Frieda,

  I wanted to call, but it’s a weekday and you know how your father is about long-distance charges. Just wondering how you’re settling in and if you’ve found work yet. Mrs. Conroy from the condo down the street — you remember her, she’s the one with that yappy little dog she insists on bringing everywhere, last week she brought it to the Sheppards’ place for our Rummoli game. We’re playing for nickels now and when Mr. Sheppard lost forty cents he yelled, and the damn thing peed all over the Sheppard’s carpet. It was quite funny actually, though I’m glad it wasn’t at our place. I hope I haven’t prejudiced you against her opinion by her yapping, peeing dog because she actually has quite good business sense, she worked for Mary Kay for years and even got a pink Cadillac, anyhow, I was talking to her about you the other day she says that real estate is the way to go. It only takes twelve weeks and you can be a realtor. Some of them make excellent money. So, anyhow, just a suggestion. I did look up the number for the Manitoba Real Estate Association, it’s Toll Free: 1-800-267-6019.

  Your father and I miss you.

  Love, Mom

  I sighed, looked down at my feet, and promptly forgot all about real estate. There’s something mesmerizing about freshly polished footwear. I nearly missed my stop near The Zone while admiring my shiny boots. I disembarked and walked half a block.

  Ginny sat at a table waiting for me. The first words out of her mouth were, “Where did you get that jacket?”

  “It’s classic,” I said, avoiding the “where” issue.

  “You look like a monkey.”

  I held out my arms. “They’re three-quarter-length sleeves. I could get some gloves.”

  “Gloves and army boots. God help me.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a look.”

  “It’s not a look. It’s a spectacle.”

  The waiter brought me my hamburger, or rather, my End Zone Deluxe on a Bun, and Ginny her salad. What was the point of eating salad in a restaurant? I could eat lettuce at home and manage to tear it into small enough pieces to pick up with a fork, which is something no restaurant has ever seemed to master.

  “So, it looks like I’m a shoo-in for the promotion,” Ginny said. “Mr. Swanget, the president, nodded at me this morning on his way out the door.” She took a bite of her salad.

  “And. . .”

  “And nothing. The nod is an important part of non-verbal business communication. Besides, I’m going to get it. If they lateral me again, well, they just won’t. I’ve substantially raised the adnorm for two of our major print publications, brought in the last three major customers, and I developed the communications plan for GLF which significantly increased the BDI of the product and won a CASSIE. The only other person who’s even in the running is Craig and he’s nothing but a marketing puke, a total wombat.”

  “What language are you speaking Ginny? And put your fork down before you impale someone. Is a wombat Craig’s totem animal?”

  “W-O-M-B-A-T, Frieda, Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time. Where have you been?”

  “Some other planet, I think.”

  Ginny put down her fork, caught the waiter, and ordered another Perrier. “So how did your interviews go?”

  “Well, speaking of non-verbal business communication, the lady in my interview did this.” I raised my eyebrows and jiggled my head. “What does that mean?”

  “Do it again.” Ginny watched closely. “It means ‘You’re not making any sense and you’re hurting my head.’”

  “Great.”

  “So, how are things between you and the old fellow?” Ginny asked. “Is he keeping his hands to himself?”

  “Actually, no. Mr. H. and I have decided to take our relationship to an advanced level of eroticism.”

  “What!”

  “Close your mouth, Ginny. I can see your lettuce.”

  “Has he changed his will?”

  “I’m not concerned with that, it’s purely sexual.”

  “You are weird, Frieda.”

  “I’m kidding. I’ve taken a vow of celibacy. I’m joining The Order of the Sisters of Absolute Anarchy, or maybe I’ll become a realtor.”

  “Now that’s funny,” said Ginny.

  “What?”

  “You a realtor? Give me a break.”

  The waiter left our bill; Ginny looked around, then slid the unused dessert fork into the pocket of her blazer.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What?” She stared blankly at me.

  “You just put a fork in your pocket. Are you going after Craig?”

  “It’s just a fork. They have hundreds of them. Let’s go. I’ll pay.”

  I said goodbye and wished her luck at work. What was up with the fork? I feared for Craig or maybe for Ginny.

  I decided to walk five blocks over to the Art Centre and drop in on Mr. H. It’s amazing how a city can change in the space of a few blocks. Ginny’s highbrow world almost never collided with the downbeat way of life that existed just around the corner.

  The Downtown Art Centre was located in an old government building from the seventies. It had been leased by the Winnipeg Society for the Arts, a group of socially responsible people who believed art and music should be available to all, regardless of race, income, or degree of social distress. Mr. H. had been teaching photography there for three years. He’d moved all of his equipment out of the house and built a darkroom in the basement of the Centre. The building radiated colour from a block away. Kids from the local school had painted murals on the outside walls, but the DayGlo daisies and misshapen super-heroes in Technicolor couldn’t quite camouflage the starkness of the building’s former government existence. It looked like a Capitalist Suit having a bad acid trip.

  I pushed open the doors. Long corridors dimly lit with fluorescent lights led off in two directions. I heard muffled singing and a piano. The hallway walls were covered with paintings and collages. I stopped in front of them. Some were very good; there was some real talent. My hands clenched and unclenched at my sides. I wandered down the hallway looking into the rooms.

  A gigantic loom surrounded by smaller looms stood in the middle of the first space. A woman occupied each loom and the shuttles went back and forth in soft rhythm accompanying the murmurs of their voices. Many seemed to be immigrants, in various forms of headgear and ethnic dress. Several small children played near the door with a pile of wool scraps. They looked up without pausing as I passed.

  Some of the doors were closed with handwritten signs on them. Watercolour Painting. Tuesdays. 1–4 p.m. Candle-Making. Fridays. 7–9 p.m.

  The singing grew louder. Near the end of the hall, there was a room with an old upright piano in the centre. The sign on the door read “Hootenanny Glee Club.” The singers lined up in three rows beside the piano. The front row consisted of a old man in a grubby purple down-filled vest, a woman in her twenties with long blonde hair and a tiny baby in a striped snuggly strapped to her chest, an older lady in a dress and proper heels, a young man in a security guard uniform, and a young Goth girl wearing a black velvet gown with lace ruffles at the neck and sleeves. The dress ended at her knees and was met by the tops of her black combat boots. They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” It was a bit shaky, but in tune. I stood and listened. When they finished the woman on the piano turned. “Come in,” she said.

  “Oh. No. I was just listening.”

  “Are you sure? We can always use an
other voice.”

  “No, really. I’m looking for Mr. Hausselman’s photography class.”

  “Down the next hall to your left, third door on the right. If he’s not there, he’s probably in the darkroom downstairs, beside the furnace room.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled at the group. “Nice singing.”

  Mr. Hausselman sat at a big wooden desk at the front of the classroom, looking through a stack of photos. The rest of the desks were empty.

  “Frieda! Come in, pull up a chair. I’m having a look at the photos the class turned in. What do you think of our Centre?”

  “It’s neat. I stopped and listened to the singing down the hall for a minute. Where’d you get all the looms and stuff?”

  “Donated, or paid for by fundraising. The students have a sale of their works once a year and the proceeds go back into the foundation. The corporate and government cash funding has slowed down, but the provincial government lets us use the building for next to nothing and pays the utilities, so I guess we can’t complain.” He handed me a stack of pictures. “Look at these photos, there’s some arm-raising work in here.”

  He was right; the quality was stunning and disturbing. There were photos of the interior of what looked like a crackhouse. The walls of the rooms appeared slanted as though falling down around the occupants. The photos told stories by the contents of an overflowing garbage can in the corner of a rundown kitchen, a wallet with its contents spewed out on the floor of a bathroom with cracked linoleum, a bare foot hanging over the edge of an exposed mattress.

  “A sixteen-year-old girl took those. She’s a sort of street kid, I think. Doesn’t show up for weeks at a time. But she always seems to make her way back again. If you listened to the singers you probably saw her. She stopped in before going into singing class this afternoon. She’s a spooky-looking young woman, black hair, white face.”

  “The Goth. She sings too?”

  “Sings, paints, dances, takes photos, she does everything when she turns up. And she’s good at it all. I have quite the soft spot for her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Girl. I don’t know her last name. Some of them get skittish if I ask questions. I try to always have cookies or something for them to eat during the class. I’m not sure if they come for the class or for the Fudgee-Os.”

  “What’s her first name?”

  “That’s her given name. Girl. She had a brother too. Guess what they named him.”

  “No way.”

  “Boy,” said Mr. H. “I don’t know what they’d have done if they had another.”

  “Let’s not think about it,” I said.

  “Why don’t you come and hang around some?” Mr. H. put his papers into a desk drawer. “Maybe you could help with the art classes.”

  “I don’t think I have anything to teach anyone right now. I’m sort of still finding myself.”

  “Life isn’t about finding yourself, Frieda. Life is about creating yourself.”

  “Who said that? Emerson?”

  “No, good old Anonymous. Let’s stop at Barney’s on the way home for a cheesecake for dessert tonight.” Mr. H. stood and put on his jacket.

  After dinner and two pieces of raspberry chocolate cheesecake, I went upstairs to read. Mr. H. had hooked me on a Barbara Vine mystery series. I lay on the bed staring at the same page for three minutes without reading a word. I got up, wandered around the room, put a Billie Holiday 78 on the record player, then took it off; I put the Ramones in the CD player, then turned it off; I went over to the box of art supplies I’d never got around to donating. It still sat in the corner of my room. I nudged the box with my toe. I got down on my hands and knees, unpacked it, cleared the desk, set up the easel, laid out the paints and brushes, and placed a canvas on the easel. Then I sat on the chair and looked at it.

  I woke up with a squalling headache. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Gladys in the armchair.

  “Good morning, Frieda. Are you painting?”

  “Shit, Gladys, I’m sleeping. I don’t really talk to people before I’ve had coffee, okay?”

  “Well, I’m not really people. What are you painting?”

  “What does it look like? It’s the proverbial white cat with its eyes closed in a snowstorm. There’s nothing there. I’m not painting.” I sat up on the edge of the bed. “Do you think we could make appointments or something? Not that I don’t enjoy you showing up anytime, anywhere.”

  “Sure, when’s good for you?”

  “I don’t know. After lunch sometime, okay?”

  “Okay. Good luck on the painting.” She was gone.

  I started to get up, then heard something behind me; I turned quickly and bashed my knee on the nightstand. “Damn.”

  “Oh, sorry,” said Gladys, “but I was wondering, if you’re not painting, why did you set up your painting supplies?”

  I rubbed my knee. “Because I was temporarily delusional, but I’m better now. Is that all?”

  Gladys nodded and disappeared again.

  I went downstairs to put on the coffee. Mr. H. was in the study listening to some sort of booming, crashing classical music. Cymbals — first thing in the morning.

  The sink was full of dishes and there wasn’t a clean coffee cup. Yesterday had been my day for dishes and I hadn’t done any. I put the coffee on and started washing. In minutes, my crankiness had escalated. I was particularly peeved at Mr. H.’s egg plate from breakfast. Egg cement. Piss me off. I flicked at the little yellow globs with my fingernail. I planned to look for work today, but now I had to spend all morning scrubbing someone’s egg plate. All the good jobs would be gone before I finished.

  The door to the study opened and Mr. H. walked out, the classical music leaking out of the study and expanding into the kitchen behind him.

  “Good morning, Frieda.”

  “For some.”

  He sat at the table. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said holding up the offending egg-encrusted plate and gesturing at the sink full of dishes and withering soap bubbles. “This is wrong.”

  “Is it my day for dishes?”

  “That’s not the point. Egg cement is the point, not having the consideration to rinse dishes is the point.”

  “What a thing to say.”

  “I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say.”

  Mr. H. pulled the sugar bowl from the centre of the table towards him and then pushed it back again. “Reasonable isn’t quite the word I would use. Petty might be more like it, considering I’ve washed some terrifying dishes from your cooking experiments.”

  “Experiments? Is that what you think of my cooking?”

  Mr. H.’s face turned red. “That isn’t what I meant at all.”

  “Well, maybe if you find me so petty,” I said, “I should find another place to stay.”

  “Perhaps you should.”

  “Perhaps I will.” I dropped the plate back in the sink and dried off my hands. “Somewhere where they don’t play music with cymbals before noon.” I turned to go upstairs.

  “Frieda. . .” If it had been one of my boyfriends I would have ignored him, gone upstairs and packed, but this was Mr. H. I stopped and turned back.

  He smiled. “I could probably refrain from playing Schönberg symphonies before noon.”

  “I don’t want to move,” I said.

  “And I don’t want you to. Come, sit, and have a coffee.”

  I sat down at the table and Mr. H. got up, got a tea towel from the drawer, dried two mugs, and poured us coffees. “Good Lord, Frieda, this isn’t coffee, it’s nuclear reactor fluid.”

  “I lost count of the scoops. It’ll get us going.”

  “To the moon.” He sat down at the table. “I haven’t had a fight like that since Shirley was alive. Only then it was her being confused and me being a jerk.”

  “Do you think I’m a jerk?”

  He added four spoons of sugar to his cup and stirred. “Sometimes you
can be a little. . . sensitive.”

  “You mean insensitive.”

  “No, I mean sensitive. Like an artist is sensitive.”

  “I’m not an artist. I’m Frieda Zweig, Ordinary Woman.”

  “Yes, right. I know. But you don’t seem very happy about it.”

  “What’s there to be all joyful about? I’m entirely immature, this morning at least, and I have no purpose.”

  “Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play. Friedrich Nietzsche.”

  “And where the hell do you get all these pithy sayings?”

  “I can’t take credit for those,” he said. “Either Shirley said them to me, or they’re from her dream book.”

  “Her what?”

  He stood, went to the study, and brought out a large leather-bound journal. He sat in the chair closest to me and laid it on the table. “She collected things that struck her over the years.”

  “May I?” He nodded. The pages of the journal were filled with poems copied out, quotes, pictures, pressed leaves, and any number of the small bits of beauty and wisdom that one finds in a life and either disregards or accumulates in one way or another. Underneath a photo of a smiling, trim Mr. H. and herself in a fifties pin-up bathing suit holding hands on a beach, Shirley had written,

  Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  I closed the journal and pushed it back over to him. “Do you still miss her?”

  “Every day. I used to think the pain might quit one day, but it doesn’t, it gets easier, but it never disappears.” He opened the book again and turned the pages.

  “Here’s Whitman’s footprint when he was two. I remember Shirley trying to get him to stand still after she made the print so she could wipe the ink off and he ran away. He left a trail of tiny single footprints all down the hallway. Shirley varnished over them. You can still see some parts of them.” He looked down at the table. “Lord, this is terrible coffee.”

  “When did you last talk to Whitman?”

  “Two months ago, on his thirty-third birthday. I had IGA deliver him a fruit basket. I wanted to make sure he got it.”