Dance, Gladys, Dance

by Cassie Stocks

  “Who?” She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “You found a hot stud for me? Or some sort of social work detoxifier?”

  “No, this is a female artist, a screenwriter. She lives a few blocks away. She’s pretty interesting. I thought we could stop in and see if she’s home.”

  “Could do,” said Girl. “I’m pretty hungry, though. Think she’ll have any munchies?”

  “I doubt it. How about we stop for lunch first?”

  “Have any money this time?”

  “Well, no, but I have a coupon for a free muffin.”

  “You’re even sadder than me,” she said. “Never mind, let’s go.”

  I half hoped Marilyn wouldn’t be home. I wasn’t at all sure how this was going to go. I did hope she would try to clue Girl in on what she was doing with her life — i.e., wasting it. Or maybe Girl would see how she could end up, or maybe the prejudice thing would help Girl understand something. Actually, I didn’t know what the hell to expect, but at least I could say I tried.

  “Nice place,” said Girl as we walked into the hotel. “What does she write scripts for, cheap porno movies? Stud A: Ohhh baby. Chick B: Oh oh oh uh uh uh.” She got louder and louder as we went across the lobby.

  “Take it inside the room,” yelled a voice from the room behind the invariably empty front desk.

  I jumped — there was actually someone back there. “Shut up,” I said to Girl.

  She laughed and continued whispering as we went up the stairs, “Stud B: Come on over here, honey. . .”

  “Shhh.” I knocked on Marilyn’s door. Nothing. I knocked again. Louder.

  “Open up,” yelled Girl, “it’s the police.”

  There was silence, then the sound of scrambling and flushing toilets from behind doors all up and down the hall.

  “Shit,” said Girl, “what a waste.”

  I was ready to turn around and leave when the door opened.

  “What the hell is all the yelling about?” asked a very dishevelled Marilyn leaning on the doorframe.

  “Hi, it’s me,” I said brightly.

  “Who’re you? The Avon lady? I don’t want any.”

  “No, I’m Frieda. Remember? I helped you home from the art show the other night.”

  Marilyn squinted. “I remember getting ready to go out, then I remember walking with someone and wearing these fucking ugly slippers.”

  “That was me.”

  “Right,” Marilyn nodded slowly. “You want your slippers back? I think I lost one.”

  “No, I brought someone to meet you. This is Girl. She’s an artist, a photographer, and designer.”

  Girl raised her hand. “Hey.”

  “Hay is for horses,” said Marilyn. She stood looking back and forth between the two of us. “Well, come in.” She walked to the bed and threw everything off it onto the floor. “Sit down.”

  We made our way in and sat on the bed. Marilyn took the chair by the packing crate desk.

  “Hang on,” she said, standing. “If I remember, last night, I think, wait, move.” She went to look under the bed and Girl and I stood up. “I thought so,” she said, emerging with a half-full bottle of tequila.

  “Now we’re talking,” said Girl.

  “No we’re not,” I said.

  “What?” said Marilyn. “It’s a social drink.” She unscrewed the top of the bottle, took a long swallow, and passed it to Girl.

  “I brought her here for you to talk to,” I said to Marilyn, “not to get her drunk. I want you to tell her all that stuff you told me. About female artists and inequality and the expressway.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said taking the bottle back from Girl.

  “Yes you do.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said, standing. “Come on, Girl.”

  “No way,” said Girl. She tilted her head back and compressed her lips like a toddler refusing food. When the bottle returned, she opened wide, and took another long swallow. “I’m staying here with my new friend.”

  “Fine. See you later.” So much for that idea. I opened the door.

  “I’m not interested in saving anyone,” said Marilyn. “What are you, some sort of missionary?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “just like the Blues Brothers, only I’m on a mission from Gladys.”

  “Riiiight,” said Marilyn. “I think you need a drink.”

  “I had a great-great-grandma named Gladys,” said Girl, wiping her mouth and handing the bottle back to Marilyn.

  I froze. “What?”

  “Oh yeah, she was a nutburger.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, a wigger, a looney-tune. She was in the nuthouse.”

  “Well, you come by it honestly, then,” said Marilyn, patting Girl on the shoulder. They both began to snicker.

  “What’s your last name?” I said, staring at Girl.

  “Why, are you going to report me?”

  “Don’t tell her,” said Marilyn. “That’s privileged information.”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake,” I said. “I’m not going to report you. Just tell me.”

  “Roulston,” said Girl. “Why?”

  My heart stopped.

  “Do you know anything else about your great-great-grandmother, other than that she was a nutburger?”

  “Yeah,” said Girl, “she was also a whore.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” I said.

  “Yes, she was,” said Girl. “What are you on about anyway?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. Please come with me.”

  “No way,” said Girl. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  I dug in the pockets of my jacket and came up with a pen and the muffin coupon. “Here,” I said. I wrote down my phone number on the back of the coupon and handed it to her. “Call me.”

  Girl nodded. “Later.”

  I walked out and closed the door on the two of them. All the way home I could hardly think. Girl was Gladys’ great-great-granddaughter. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Still, what was I supposed to do? Save her? Someone better equipped than me should have been chosen for this job. Gladys a whore? Where on earth did that come from? Family histories get mixed up over the years, or maybe Jack had started the lie to ruin Gladys’ reputation.

  I walked and the buildings around me emptied of office workers, and traffic on the sidewalk increased. Instead of helping Girl, I end up leaving her with a crazy woman to get pissed. Great. Did I know anything about Girl? I knew what I felt at her age. Being an artist seemed the only way out of somewhere I felt I didn’t belong. Somewhere Girl obviously felt she didn’t fit in either. The world in front of me had seemed empty. I didn’t want to be a nurse, or a teacher, or even a doctor or a lawyer. But when I told people I wanted to become an artist, they met my youthful ignorance with amusement, as if I’d said I wanted to grow up to become a fire truck. I looked at all the people walking around me. Were they happy? All I felt was confused and lonely. It had never occurred to me that others, like Girl, maybe felt the same way. But what to do with that?

  There was no one home when I got back to Mr. H.’s. I went and sat on the front porch to have a think and do my toenails. I was surrounded by nail polish bottles and trying to decide on a colour when Lady March came up the walk and onto the porch. She carried shopping bags from the IGA down the street.

  “Salmon and new potatoes for dinner tonight,” she said.

  “Sounds good. Do you like this or this?” I held up a red bottle and a bright purple.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, sitting on the railing across from me. “Why don’t you do each toe a different colour?”

  “Good idea.” I watched the birds hopping on the lawn in front of the house. “Did you ever hear of stormy petrels?” I asked. Lady March shook her head.

  “They’re seabirds that appear in a storm. They surround ships to catch little creatures that rise to the surface when the seas are rough; when the storm i
s over, they disappear.”

  “Oh,” said Lady March, “those are magpies, you know.” She gestured to the black and white birds congregating on the lawn.

  “I know,” I said shaking a bottle of nail polish. “But I was thinking about things, people, or birds, just appearing and disappearing. I read about petrels in the encyclopedia.”

  “I don’t know about petrels,” said Lady March, “but magpies are a sign of steadfastness; they stay even through the cold winter. Perhaps your fallow period has ended and it’s the time for action.”

  “What action?” I asked.

  “Anything as long as it’s movement forward,” she said.

  Wasn’t reading encyclopedias in the bathroom action?

  “Well,” said Lady March, “I’m going inside to meditate on the Art Centre quandary. Want to come?”

  I shook my head and away she went, her psychedelic caftan billowing around her.

  I had a sudden picture of myself surrounded by a whirlwind of people: Gladys in her dancing outfit, Ginny with a handful of forks, Marilyn at her packing crate desk with a bottle held to her lips, Girl emerging from her box, Miss Kesstle holding her red binder full of crochet designs — they spun all around me and then moved off. A regular tornado of artistic women barreling down the street and I stood still, alone. Not the calm in the eye of the storm; I wasn’t even a part of the storm. I was— how the hell did that Winnie the Pooh song go? I’m just a little black rain cloud. Pay no attention to little me. Except that I felt more like Eeyore than Winnie the Pooh. Eeyore’s slow grey voice sounded in the back of my head: ”We can’t all and some of us don’t. That’s all there is.”

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said Norman coming out the front door.

  I turned. “Inflation,” I said. “Thoughts are two thousand bucks now. Where were you?”

  “Took the Valiant out to get the tires rotated. I parked in the back. Take an IOU?”

  “I was thinking about Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh,” I said.

  Norman sat on the chair beside me. “I think Leonard Cohen and Eeyore sound a lot alike.”

  “Get out.”

  “That same mournful tone; it’s uncanny.”

  “I was thinking I sounded like Eeyore.”

  Norman nodded. “Maybe, just a little higher pitched.” He shuffled his feet. “Why aren’t you painting? I’m sorry about what happened in Kentucky. . . I should have left you alone.”

  “Yes, you should have.”

  “But don’t give it all up because of me,” he said.

  “What an ego. I didn’t quit because of you. I got tired, okay?” I picked up the bottle of white nail polish, shook it, and began painting my toenails. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  He sat there. And sat there. I finally looked up.

  “I was wondering if I ever told you that I had an imaginary friend when I was little,” he said. “His name was Poginos.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  Norman stared at me, smiling. What the hell was this about? “Did you ever have an imaginary friend?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh. Are you sure?”

  It dawned on me that he was trying to give me an easy way to talk about the imaginary person I’d supposedly been having conversations with. Norman might, just might understand, or believe me. I could tell him and make him promise not to tell anyone.

  He shifted in his chair. “I was thinking that starting to paint again might be therapeutic for you.”

  “Ther-a-peu-tic?” I choked out. “Like what — fucking basket weaving? You’re too much. You are too fucking much.” I left my bottles of nail polish on the porch and went inside with one set of toes painted. I clumped upstairs to my bedroom, put Deep Purple on the CD player, cleaned my room, and then I cleaned it again.

  At about nine that evening, Mr. H., Lady March, and I were relaxing in the living room. Lady March sat on a kitchen chair beside Mr. H. in his recliner. She held his hand in hers. “Because you’re right-handed, this is your active hand. Your left hand is your passive hand; it shows your childhood. Hmmm. Your fate line forks towards the Mount of Jupiter; this shows a person with a pleasant humanitarian approach.”

  I perked up. “A fate line?” I went over to the recliner and held my hand out to Lady March. “What does mine show?”

  She took my hand.

  “Your fate line is broken.”

  “Broken?” Typical.

  “See, it isn’t a continuous line. All these breaks mean you will have a variety of life experiences —”

  The phone rang. I took my spastic fate line hand away and went to answer it. It was Girl.

  “Well,” she said, “I was going to get a muffin, but I’m glad I didn’t, ’cause I needed your phone number. Can you come and get me?”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the downtown police station.”

  Surprise, surprise.

  Behind the front desk stood the same policeman who’d been on duty the night I picked up Ginny.

  “You again?” he said when I walked in.

  “What do you mean, me again? I haven’t done anything. Maybe I’m running a home for chronically unstable females.”

  “You have to have a license for that, you know.”

  “Is Girl here?”

  In the car, Girl filled me in on what had happened after I left her. She’d finished the tequila with Marilyn and then they went out on the town. One of them got the brilliant idea to go to some fancy downtown bar and of course they couldn’t get past the front entry. Marilyn decked the hostess and the bouncer came out and grabbed Girl. Marilyn took off. They called the police, but because it wasn’t Girl who hit the woman, they let her go.

  I tried to talk to her as I drove her back to her foster parents’ house across the city. “You’ll kill yourself if you carry on this way.”

  Girl reached forward and turned on the radio; classical music from the CBC filled the car. “Holy time warp, Batman,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Kill yourself?” I reached down and turned the radio off. “Your photos are stunning, that’s why. They’re like your box; those women are real women, just like you and me. You could be famous.”

  “Sure, and get chewed up in some celebrity-making machine.” She leaned forward and opened the glove compartment. “The box is a joke. I was going to do something about shitting — like, even movie stars have to take a big dump sometimes. But I couldn’t figure out how to do it.” She rummaged through the compartment and pulled out a map of Canada. “Cool.” She unfolded the map, closed her eyes, pointed, and then pulled the map closer to her face. “Want to go to Grimsby?”

  “No. Where is it?”

  “Uh, Ontario.”

  “No. Put that away. Okay, not famous, but you have talent, and you have the chance to do something with it. Eighty years ago, women got locked away. Did you know that? If a woman didn’t agree with her husband or was inconvenient, they could just lock her up.”

  She mangled the map into a smaller package, put it in the glove compartment, and slammed it shut. “Is this going to be a history lesson?”

  “It’s your history.” I banged my hand on the steering wheel.

  “You’re whacked.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence except for Girl’s muttered directions.

  I parked in front of the house.

  “Grimbsy would have been better than here,” she said, got out, and slammed the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Damsel In Distress

  “Did you see your boyfriend has his own little porno emporium set up in his bedroom?” asked Whitman as I walked into the kitchen late the next day, carrying five bags of groceries. “There’s mail for you,” he added, holding out a letter.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. I put down my bags, took the letter, and went upstairs to see. I had visions of vibrators, leather clothing, and naked inflatable people strewn all over No
rman’s room. What would Mr. H. think?

  Norman’s room was filled with his father’s collection of Victorian pornography. There were sepia-toned photographs of Victorian women and sometimes men in every imaginable pose. I found the collection oddly fascinating; it was such a contrast to how I believed people of that time behaved. I’d once heard that carrots were always diced when served for dinner in the early 1900s, the natural shape of them being too suggestive. The Victorians in these photos had moved far beyond titillating vegetables. There were some very explicit pictures, but what seemed amusing, in a horrifying sort of way, was the typical Victorian accoutrements involved in the scenes: heavy fringed draperies, ferns and classical urns, and ladies wearing large flowered hats and gloves and nothing else. Norman seemed to be organizing the collection; there were piles marked Pre-1900 American and so on, and, over on the desk, stacks marked Canadian with various dates. I was about to go and rifle through the stacks to see if Canadians had put their own distinctive mark on their photos — partially clad Mounties, perhaps, or women lounging on beaver pelts — when Norman walked in.

  “So Norman, whatcha doing with these?”

  “I can’t tell you yet. It’s a surprise.”

  “It’s surprising all right.”

  He shrugged.

  “No hints at all?” I asked.

  “Nope. Mom and I are going out for dinner tonight with Mr. Hausselman. Do you want to come or are you still mad at me?”

  “Just promise me you won’t talk to me about painting ever again and we’ll be fine. Is Whitman going?”

  “He has to fly to Toronto for a few days. He’s leaving at five.”

  The house to myself for a few precious hours. . . maybe Gladys would finally show up again. “I need to be alone for awhile. You guys go.”

  I went upstairs to my room and looked at the letter. Mom again. I opened it. She was happy about my decision to go back to school, someone’s daughter had triplets, and she included a cheque, “to get some school clothes.” I had a vision of myself in a blue plaid skirt and white knee-high socks, with a leather tool belt hanging from my hips — a look that would probably would fuel some man’s fantasies, but I wouldn’t want to meet him. You know you’ve been a bum for too long when your parents automatically send money without you even asking for it. Clothes weren’t a bad idea, though. Since nothing else had turned out ordinary so far, maybe I could try looking conventional.