Dance, Gladys, Dance

by Cassie Stocks

“She walked in front of a bus. We won’t know for sure until the autopsy, but we strongly suspect alcohol and drugs were a factor.”

  “Why?” said Miss Kesstle. “Why would she do that?” She slid back down into her chair.

  “We don’t know,” said the officer. “It may have been a mistake. She died immediately; there was no chance for resuscitation. Her foster parents ID’d her already. They told us that she was living with you.”

  Miss Kesstle stared at him. A shocked silence filled the room.

  “Fuck you!” screamed Marilyn jumping up from the couch. “Fuck you! You just go away. You’re wrong. Get the hell out of here.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the policeman, stepping back from Marilyn. “If there’s anything we can do —” He handed Mr. H. a card. “We may have to get back in touch with you.”

  Mr. H. led him out, then came back into the living room. Everything fragmented. Miss Kesstle put her head in her hands and started to wail. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Gladys by the stairs. She was crying. I took a step towards her and she disappeared.

  Mr. H. and Lady March took Miss Kesstle home. Marilyn looked around the room for someone to fight, then collapsed into sobs. Whitman led her out the door. Norman and Ginny left together. I slowly turned and went upstairs to my room.

  Gladys was rocking in her chair. I sat on the bed. I felt like I was going to be sick; supper rolled in my stomach. I looked at her. “What did I do wrong? I was supposed to save her and I didn’t. I told you to go haunt Ginny.” My voice shook. “Tell me what I should have done.” I twisted the bed cover in my fingers.

  “She was the last of my line,” Gladys said. “It’s over.”

  “Oh, fuck. I — Why didn’t you —”

  “It was going to happen,” said Gladys. She gave me a wavering smile. “You did everything you could and more. I wanted some good to come out of it.”

  “What good?” I cried. “There’s nothing good happened. She’s dead. That beautiful talented girl is dead. Probably doped up out of her mind and that’s it. I hate this.”

  Gladys continued to rock. “Don’t be angry. Plenty of good has come from Girl’s life. You’ve done so much.”

  “I sure as hell don’t see it,” I said.

  “You will,” said Gladys and disappeared.

  I sat and images of Girl formed and dissipated in my head. Girl emerging from her box in the back alley, at the party in her Haute Crochet evening gown with the tea cozy on her head, yelling from the roof from behind her skull and crossbones bird mask, and in her apron as Martha-fucking-Stewart at Miss Kesstle’s, her bruised face filled with laughter. Then I could see Girl’s broken body in the morgue. Her hand fallen out from underneath the white sheet, the cracked and bitten nails painted aubergine. I could see the terrible beauty of her hand, the translucence of the skin. Then (to the horror of my imagination) a drop of blood rolled down the arm and fell to the floor, the tiny splash of crimson extending until the world was covered, blanketed with the scarlet of Girl’s blood, Girl’s pain.

  I went and sat in the chair in front of my desk, opened some tubes of paint, and squeezed colours on my fingers. Rubbing my thumb and my forefinger together, I blended dots of blue and scarlet into a muddy purple. A small wail of grief rose unbidden from my throat and escaped into the room. I stared at my hands and wept. I was still sitting like that when there was a knock at my door. I didn’t answer. The door creaked open; footsteps crossed the room and stopped beside me at the desk. I looked up. Whitman. He reached out and brushed my cheek with his fingers then let his hand fall. I looked back down at my hands.

  “I took Marilyn home,” he said. “She fell right asleep. I — I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Whitman,” I said. He kneeled down on the floor beside me. My dress rustled as he leaned against my legs. “I was supposed to save her,” I said. He took my painted hands and put them on his face. I couldn’t see his face. I couldn’t see anything. It was like looking through a broken kaleidoscope.

  I leaned forward and put my lips on his forehead. His skin was still cool from outside. “I don’t need you,” I said. “I don’t need you. I just want you.”

  “That’s okay.” I felt his head nod underneath my lips. “It’s fine. It’s all right.”

  The next morning the bedsheets were stained with oil paints and I was alone. I got up and sat naked on the chair in front of the desk. My fingers shook as I picked up a pencil and began to draw on the canvas. Later, I squeezed paints out on the palette. Zinc white, golden ochre, cadmium red, more white to make it paler, a little blue to neutralize in the shadows. I picked up a round brush and pressed it against my lips. Then I dipped it in the paint, and I began.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Damn Decent

  The next three days passed in a doldrum of grief. Miss Kesstle began crocheting again: a blanket of multicoloured cotton to cover Girl in her coffin. She sat out on the porch half the night working on the blanket after we found out about Girl’s death. Mr. H. finally made her go inside, but she wouldn’t sleep. She wanted to get the blanket done before Girl’s service on Wednesday.

  I sat with my own work. I put my head in my hands and then I looked up and began to paint again. I growled at the canvas, I despaired, and I listened to a lot of angry music, but I stayed with it. And in the midst of feeling like I was empty, less than empty, that I was painting with my oxygen and my blood and my nerve endings, the perfect strokes came, the perfect colours, and filled me back up.

  Norman had been staying with Ginny since the night of the dinner party. We seldom saw them, and when we did, they were smiling.

  “I’m sorry to be so happy,” whispered Ginny when they dropped in, “but I can’t help it. He’s talking about me moving to Kentucky.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “Happy is good, or so I’ve heard.” Part of me wanted to be pissed at Ginny. Wasn’t there something in the Code about getting together with your best friend’s ex? The other part of me, well, why waste a perfectly good millionaire?

  “Are you and Whitman, you know?” she asked.

  “No, we’re not.” We weren’t. It had been a beautiful and sad night, but I couldn’t even think about a relationship.

  Miss Kesstle asked me to take her to the funeral home the day before the service. I’d finished the painting and I carried it downstairs from my room. Norman, Ginny, Lady March, and Mr. H. sat at the kitchen table playing Scrabble. Mr. H. was about to be beat for the first time in history by Lady March, who’d just scored 126 points for “xenomancy.”

  I held the painting up. Mr. H. began to clap. I smiled at him and felt the tears begin again. Norman stood. “Very nice,” he said. “I like what you’ve done with the colours. This is a much stronger painting. You’ve a hold on your technique, the brushstrokes seem more confident —”

  “Don’t critique my painting,” I said quietly.

  Norman’s mouth fell open. “Why not? I didn’t say anything bad about it.”

  “Because I don’t want you to,” I said.

  I felt like those were the six mightiest words I ever said in my life. Because. I. Don’t. Want. You. To. Period. End of sentence. End of discussion. I didn’t paint the picture for approval. I didn’t paint it for anything but the love of painting and because there was something I needed to paint.

  Norman looked as though he might cry. I walked over to him. “It’s not you, Norman, it never was. You didn’t tie me to that white horse. I asked you to give me something I didn’t want. I needed to believe in who I am myself.”

  Norman nodded then looked even more confused. I opened my mouth, then closed it. It wasn’t my job to make the world understand.

  “She’s amazing,” said Lady March.

  Miss Kesstle waited on the porch with the blanket in a plastic shopping bag in her hands. She looked like a lady scarecrow with her print dress and sweater hanging off her. I held the painting up. “I did this for you. Actually, I painted
it for myself, but I want you to have it.” I propped the canvas up on the porch railing. It was Girl as I’d first imagined her in the back alley, a Pre-Raphaelite-style painting with a background of graffiti-painted cement, only instead of her velvet gown, Girl wore the long dress she made from Miss Kesstle’s doilies. From Girl’s hand, almost indistinguishable from the graffiti behind it, fell a tiny drop of blood, forever suspended between her hand and the cement.

  “Thank you,” said Miss Kesstle and she hugged me. We stood together like that for a moment and then she drew away, reached into the pocket of her sweater, and withdrew two Kleenexes folded neatly into squares. “Here,” she said. “I brought plenty.”

  “Do you think we should stop and see if Marilyn wants to come with us?” she asked as I drove out the back driveway. “I thought it might be better if she came today instead of tomorrow, just in case she. . .”

  “Pitches a fit?”

  Miss Kesstle nodded. “Well, we can check,” I said, “but she’s not known for answering her door.”

  “What a place,” said Miss Kesstle as we walked through the lobby. She stopped to read the defecation sign on the stairway, which was thankfully free of poop that day, then kept her eyes on the floor and watched where she stepped.

  Amazingly enough, Marilyn answered her door. She looked like hell boiled over. Her hair was plastered against her head with sweat and her face was a bizarre combination of pallor and redness, but she wanted to come along. Miss Kesstle reached into the shopping bag and pulled out a pair of brand-new white sneakers. Marilyn took them from her and sat down on the bed, then stood up, hugged Miss Kesstle, and burst into tears.

  “That was damn decent of you,” Marilyn said as she laced up the shoes.

  We waited in the lobby of the funeral home while a man wearing a black suit checked to see if we could go in yet. The smell of lilies was overpowering. We’d only been there a minute when Marilyn excused herself and went outside. I stood with Miss Kesstle for a little bit and then went to find Marilyn. She was hiding behind a shrub around the side of the building. I walked over to her, stepping around the red geraniums in the flowerbed.

  “How dare you get stoned here?” I said, “after what happened to Girl?”

  “I’m not stoned.” Marilyn leaned over and heaved into the shrubbery.

  “It’s the flu, right?”

  “I’m dope sick.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Withdrawal,” said Marilyn and she heaved again, hanging onto the corner of the building. “Three days. If you’d just kill me now, I’d be near a coffin. I’d appreciate the fucking lie-down.”

  “That’s great,” I said, patting her on the back.

  Marilyn flung her arm back and pushed my hand away. “It’s not great, it’s terrible, horrible. I hate it. I tried to talk to her, you know. I tried to tell her to quit now, while she still could, but who’s going to listen to an old dope hag like me?”

  I helped Marilyn back inside. Her new white sneakers were covered in dirt and her face was as red as the geranium petals we’d scattered coming back though the flowerbed. Miss Kesstle was gone. The man in the black suit — Chester, I think — met us in the foyer.

  “If you’ll follow me,” he said, “your companion has gone to the Reposing Room to visit with the deceased. Girl’s foster father is in the Arrangement Room if you would care to meet with him first. If you wish to return later, visitation will be from noon until five o’clock this evening. The bereaved will be meeting for the memorial service tomorrow in the Daisy Chapel at two in the afternoon, followed by the graveside service, committal service, and interment at Gardens of Hope cemetery.”

  “That’s way more services than Girl ever got when she was alive,” muttered Marilyn.

  We went into a small room with heavy gold drapes on three of the walls. Utterly noxious music oozed down from the ceiling. Miss Kesstle stood in the middle of the room, the plastic bag grasped in her hands, an open casket a few feet in front of her.

  “We should have brought flowers,” she said. “She has no flowers.”

  “I’ll call Mr. H. and ask him to bring some,” I said. “Did you ask them about the blanket?”

  Miss Kesstle nodded. “The man said he’d check with the foster father.”

  We approached the dark wood casket together. There’s nothing more Goth than lying in a coffin, but Girl wouldn’t have been happy. She looked like a perfect young woman having a nap before the prom. They’d removed all of her piercings, painted her face a rosy pink, and curled her hair in ringlets. She wore a pale pink dress with ruffles around the bodice and white lace sleeves.

  “She looks — beautiful,” I said.

  “But not like Girl,” said Marilyn. “She looks way too healthy.”

  “It’s not fair,” said Miss Kesstle, “a young girl like her lying there and an old woman like me still walking around.” She reached out and pushed the curls away from Girl’s forehead. “You poor thing,” she whispered. “Dorothea Sioux misses you very much. We all miss you very much.”

  We stood in silence for a moment. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Death. No more screwing up for Girl, no more laughing or swearing or wild outfits. I thought of her last box sitting empty outside in the back alley, eventually breaking down in the rain, the pages peeling off and the cardboard disintegrating until it was thrown away in an unrecognizable heap in a dump somewhere.

  There was a polite cough from the back of the room. Chester said, “Mr. Edwarg would prefer that the blanket not be placed in the casket. Perhaps Mrs. . . .”

  “Miss Kesstle,” I said.

  “Right. Miss Kesstle can leave it with us and we will arrange it on the catafalque for the service.”

  “Arrange it where?” said Miss Kesstle. “I made the blanket for her, to have with her; she loved my crocheting, she made all kinds of things with my doilies.”

  “We would place the blanket on the stand where the casket will sit during the service,” he said.

  “Is it possible for us to speak to Mr. Edwarg?” I asked. “Perhaps we could work something out.”

  Chester tipped his head to the side. “I could try.”

  “Please do,” I said. Marilyn started to breathe heavily beside me. Either she was getting angry or was about to upchuck again. Neither seemed like a good thing.

  “Let’s follow him,” Marilyn said. She took Miss Kesstle’s arm and started after him.

  I quickly bowed my head. There was a catch in my chest like a deep breath half taken. I couldn’t think of a prayer, then, from elementary school assemblies, came the line, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. It would have to do. I turned and followed Marilyn and Miss Kesstle.

  Chester knocked on a door with a small brass plaque reading “Arrangement Room.” He left the door open a bit and we went and stood by it.

  “What is it?” said a man’s voice. “Things are bad enough without those people showing up.”

  I walked past Marilyn and into the room. The half a breath of sorrow in my chest swelled into anger and burst into my throat. “What do you mean those people? You never looked after Girl for one minute. You just collected your cheque while she slept in a back alley half the night.” I addressed a balding man in a drooping grey suit.

  “Do I know you?” asked the man.

  “If you don’t want me to report you for foster care fraud, you’d better let them put this blanket in.”

  “Me?” said the man. “You were the ones giving her drugs. I should report you.”

  “You goddamn bonehead, deadbeat —” Marilyn began to sputter.

  “Asshole,” supplied Miss Kesstle. She had high pink spots on her cheeks.

  “What is the matter with you people?” said Mr. Edwarg. He scrutinized us slowly, one by one, as though choosing between us in a police lineup. “We tried everything to get Girl to clean up. My wife told her that the door would always be open, she could come home anytime, no matter wha
t. That we’d help her if she wanted.” The man’s voice trembled. “I don’t know what else we could have done. She only had a few months before she was out of the system. . .”

  We stood silently. “I’m so sorry,” said Miss Kesstle. “We had no idea.”

  Chester, having missed the change in tone completely, stepped in front of Marilyn. “Perhaps it’s time you ladies left. The inside accoutrements have already been chosen.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Marilyn, “Well you can —” She grabbed my arm, bent forward, and threw up. A puddle of greenish bile formed at her feet and spread out across the floor.

  “What the hell!” said Chester. He looked down and grimaced. Marilyn remained doubled over heaving.

  Mr. Edwarg began to walk out. “We tried to help her too,” I said. “We really did. Miss Kesstle made her the blanket. . .”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “Put it with her. None of it makes any difference now.” He left the room, looking drained, giving the mess on the floor a wide berth.

  Miss Kesstle walked up to Chester and handed him the bag. “Please be sure it’s pulled right up to her chin. Girl didn’t like to sleep uncovered. I’ll check tomorrow to see if you did.”

  Chester took the bag, still staring mutely at the vomit on the shiny marble tiles.

  I helped Marilyn straighten up. Her head lolled to the side. Miss Kesstle took her other arm and we began to walk out.

  “Thank you, Chester,” I said, “and, for your information, we are ladies.”

  We laid Marilyn down in the backseat of the Chevrolet. She raised her head and looked around. “I haven’t been horizontal in the backseat of a car since I was a teenager,” she said, then seemed to fall asleep.

  “What’s the matter with her?” whispered Miss Kesstle.

  “Withdrawal,” I said. “She’s probably got a ways to go yet.” I signaled to turn towards Marilyn’s hotel.

  Miss Kesstle put her hand on my arm. “Bring her to my house,” she said. “We can’t leave her alone at that terrible place.”

  “She should be in detox or something. She could get bad.”