The night was warm and drizzly, a bad night for hairdos: straight locks molded into crisp ringlets went limp and sticky; curly heads exploded into clouds of frizz. A box of Tampax poked from Miss Joetta’s black vinyl tote. She kept fingering a cluster of pimples on her cheek. Her blusher wasn’t well blended. She picked at her panty hose and screamed at Orvis Bickle when he dropped a plywood coffin, tumbling a plastic skeleton and scattering glow-in-the-dark bones. In less than forty minutes, The Tell-Tale Heart of Edgar Allan Poe was scheduled to begin and the backdrops for the opening piece were stuck—the giant heart diagram, the tormented mug of the poet. Elizabeth Ann Tewksbury—Miss Okra Blossom, head cheerleader, radiant performer of Lenore, Annabel Lee, and Madeline Usher—had yet to show, and sometimes it took an hour to make her tan skin look cadaverous. Plus two of the Dying Embers, three tap-dancing demons, and the double in “William Wilson” had come down with the chicken pox. Sandy Bumgarner’d puked on her orangutan costume. And the auditorium smelled like a clothes hamper. Miss Joetta was all over the place: spraying the aisles with Lysol, scrubbing the vomit-crusted monkey suit, phoning the Tewksbury mansion for the fiftieth time. This didn’t stop her from asking me, over and over, if both of my parents were coming.
“Yes,” I said. “My mama and my daddy.”
“Elizabeth Ann’s daddy goes both ways,” said Brunell Hair in her blunt twang. She added that her mama’d let her open her electric rollers early so she could curl her hair for the recital. She said her birthday cake was the cutest thing on earth (Garfield lifted into the air by a cluster of purple balloons), that Tonya Hutto’s mother wore fake breasts inside her bra on account of her double mastectomy, and that Mr. Dale Teeter’s lungs frequently bled. Then she claimed that Elizabeth Ann Tewksbury, daughter of a real estate tycoon and a dentist, was coming to her slumber party. Bonny laughed so hard her fake mustache flew off. I shook my head and croaked, Nevermore. Brunell sucked her painted lips in and tried to shake her puffed-up hair, but it wouldn’t move.
As if to expose Brunell’s lie, Elizabeth Ann Tewksbury strutted backstage wearing one of those old-lady plastic scarves to protect her spill of golden curls. She removed her bonnet, said her daddy’d air-conditioned the Mercedes ahead of time and backed it right up to the front door so her perm wouldn’t go kinky. Miss Joetta said, “Wonderful,” and pounced on the girl with a jar of Merle Norman French Bisque. She dabbed her eyes with purple shadow, giving the beauty queen the dark circles of an incestuous photophobic sleepwalker. We had five minutes until curtain.
Light the color of congealed blood flooded the stage. From hidden speakers the thump-thump-thump of an enormous heart thundered, deafening but intimate, as though your own heart were about to burst out of your chest with a sputter of guilty blood. A big medical diagram of a ruby red heart dropped from the rafters and hung center stage. Miss Joetta Shick emerged, dressed up as a man (cap, fake mustache), and paced back and forth.
“The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them,” she said, speaking deep from her diaphragm. “Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heavens and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Harken! And observe how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
Although Joetta Shick didn’t normally dance in our recitals, for some reason she chose to begin and end The Tell-Tale Heart of Edgar Allan Poe with solo dances of her own that seemed designed to illustrate the suppleness of her body (I had my theories). With no music but the beating heart, she twitched and twirled, leapt and staggered, resembling a person trying to run through hurricane winds. After this prologue, first- and second-graders performed their “Tell-Tale Heart” routine, doing rudimentary ballet steps to horror music, dressed up as giant bloodshot eyes. The thunderous heartbeat popped back on in the middle of the song, and then tap-dancing demons swarmed the stage, sending the eyes running and screaming, only to be replaced by second- and third-graders dressed as black cats. The cats, wearing bow ties and sporting canes, shuffled through an impish jazz routine, at the end of which a coffin was wheeled onto the stage and Susie Horton, a bow-legged eighth-grader who practiced the art of mime, stood in a spotlight and pretended to be trapped in a confined space, growing more and more alarmed until the horror music went crazy and tap-dancing demons swarmed the stage. “William Wilson” was a blur because “The Raven” was up next and my heart was jumping in my throat.
I kept rubbing my feathers with damp hands and matting them. I fiddled with the elastic of my mask, paranoid that it would snap in the middle of the routine and send my beak flying into the audience. I was afraid I’d have a giggle fit, something I suffered from from time to time, and when I heard the earnest voice of Joetta Shick rolling into Once upon a midnight dreary, a laugh rumbled deep in my belly and snickered up through my throat. I bit my lip. I clenched my fists. I watched my best friend, Bonny, dance around with her buzzard quill, writing poems in the air to the mournful whine of violins, and I tried to empty my mind. I watched as each separate Dying Ember (Debbie Dyer, Kendra Jones, and Tina Skaggs) wrought its ghost upon the floor. I watched the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore (Elizabeth Ann Tewksbury) leap around the edges of the stage as the agonized poet reached for her and Joetta Shick shrieked, Lenore, and Brunell Hair skipped behind Elizabeth Ann in her raggedy dress.
Miss Joetta was now whispering into her mike: Lenore, Lenore, Lenore. Bonny flung open the shutters that Mr. Brickie had rigged up, and onto the stage I hopped, the ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore. I fluttered and preened my freestyle modern number as Miss Joetta croaked, Nevermore, with such passion that chills started flickering, not only up and down my spine, but, I felt sure, the collective spine of the audience, who could not fail to be blown away. I was the raven. My feathers, while blacker than the devil’s goatee, gleamed with secret rainbows if you looked closely enough—hinting at possible delights on the distant shores of Death. Nevertheless, who didn’t quake with fear at the sound of my portentous squawk? What mortal would not freak out over the sight of my lustrous black body perched on their window-sill? I felt the mournful darkness of the ominous bird, blooming in my heart like a beautiful night flower, and I leapt higher than I’d ever leapt before, so high that I could almost touch the fake full moon that dangled over my head.
That was when my father started laughing. Laughing fits, like alcoholism and big noses, ran in our family. And we never knew when laughter would fall upon my daddy like a nervous disease, wasting him to a wheezing spasmodic mess that my mother had to take charge of. That’s why we’d quit the Presbyterian Church. That’s why we always sat in the back at funerals and weddings. That’s why my father could not be relied upon to chair a committee or speak before a large crowd, therefore impeding his advancement through what he called the bureaucratic cesspool of Bluebird Community College, “where dreams take flight.” The longer my father restrained himself before a laughing fit, the harder it shook him.
My father’s nervous laughter was an ancient song that spoke to my deepest blood, and I prayed for it to stop, knowing that it would not stop until my mother jabbed him with a sharp object from her purse, snarled at him, threatened him to his feet until he shuffled out into the hall.
Imagining this, I kept at the mechanics of my dance. But the fire that’d stoked every cell of every muscle in me was dead, and the look on Miss Joetta’s gashed-open face—shame-laced horror—started my own fit. I sniggered. I snorted. Laughter slithered through my intestines like a tapeworm, queasy and pity-tainted. Every time I glanced at Miss Joetta’s huge wet eyes or Brunell’s smirk or Bonny’s anger-wrenched face, the throbbing deepened, until a nasty donkey bray finally leapt from my mouth. I staggered to the edge of the stage where I fell to my knees to clutch my seething gut. There was nothing I could do. I let the contagion saw through me. I rolled and shook and howled.
Of course I was too distracted to notice Desmerelda Hair, Brunell’s mama, stan
ding up, righteousness shuddering through her scrunched little body and shooting from her pointing finger right at me, then at poor Joetta Shick. Miss Desmerelda was screaming. I sat up, straightened my beak, and scanned the audience. My mama was sitting by herself on the back row looking worn-out. Twenty-odd seats down, Desmerelda Hair stood trembling, her old-fashioned beehive gone crooked. She called Miss Joetta a spellatizing Jezebel witch. She claimed that my father and I were both possessed by her charms. She said the devil rocked through us, that demons flitted through our bloodstreams, that Beelzebub had taken command of our nervous systems. She shrieked that the whole show, with its black cats and ominous birds, its triumphant jigging demons and taunting skeletons, was the work of Satan, and that she should’ve known not to let her child take dancing. Her own mama had advised against it, knowing how well Satan could work his way into a body through rhythm.
“My mama can pick evil out of a person faster than a woodpecker pecks worms from dead wood,” screamed Desmerelda Hair.
I looked for Brunell. She’d shuffled offstage to sulk in the shadows, her skinny shoulders heaving in her gossamer dress.
“Brunell,” yelled her mama, “get your butt down here.”
Brunell slunk away somewhere—I don’t know where she went—and Miss Joetta came to her senses. She ordered us all backstage and read the prologue for “The Masque of the Red Death.”
“Somebody oughta put a stop to this,” yelled Desmerelda Hair, looking around at the audience, but everybody acted like she was the nastiest-smelling invisible lady who’d ever lived, and Brunell’s mama stomped out of the auditorium just as the first masked dancers bounded onto the stage.
Joetta Shick stood in the wings with her battle face on—the face she wore at the end of class when we still hadn’t learned a difficult step and she was hell-bent on making us. You could tell she was set on saving the show with nonstop perfection from there on out. I sat down by Bonny (who refused to speak to me) and watched Tammy Stucky bolt a pair of cardboard castle doors against a horde of writhing plague victims. Tammy was wearing the Tooty Tewksbury mask my mama’d made. As the rich maskers frolicked through their stately pavane, waving fake silver goblets and peacock feathers in their hands, the plague victims moaned and quivered. One by one, they dropped to the floor, twitched in lavish death throes, and lay still. When Judy Hicks, wearing a glow-in-the-dark plastic skull mask from Spencer’s Gifts, knocked at the bolted palace doors, the real Tooty Tewksbury appeared backstage, looking scary as hell, her mascara-crusted eyes rolling. Her husband dawdled behind her in his plaid golf getup.
Miss Tooty jumped right down Joetta Shick’s throat, hissing and spitting: How dare you make fun of me by putting that child in that mask?
Miss Joetta: What on earth are you talking about?
Miss Tooty: You know good and well you meant something ugly with that red-headed mask.
Miss Joetta: I assure you, no.
Miss Tooty: You made my nose look like a pig snout.
Tooty pointed at Judy Hicks, who was twirling across the stage to invite the elegant skeleton into her palace. Joetta Shick looked at Mama’s mask, then at Miss Tooty, then back at the mask again. Miss Joetta’s eyes flickered and she started slapping her forehead. Shit, shit, shit, she said, that goddamn little bitch Edna Cantey.
Joetta Shick told Tooty that my mama was the one to blame. But Tooty Tewksbury wouldn’t listen to reason. She snatched Elizabeth Ann by the hem of her decayed tutu (Miss Joetta’d buried it for three days to make it look rotten), and dragged her child down the steps that led out to the empty cafeteria. And that was that. Without the angel named Lenore, the rare and radiant Annabel Lee, the undead ingénue Madeline Usher (all variations on the middle-aged poet’s diseased child bride, his cousin and his muse), The Tell-Tale Heart of Edgar Allan Poe was no more.
Miss Joetta sank to the floor with the drama that the situation required. She plunged her head into her hands and moaned. But there was a twitch of authenticity in her rich fit. Her hair had tumbled out of its chignon. And softened by the shadowy light, she looked beautiful. To us, at that moment, she looked exactly like a woman should look: harrowed and lovely with spilled hair. Little girls gathered around her with shy wet eyes enhanced by gothic makeup. We watched our glamorous teacher heave, sadness flickering between us, charging the humid air. Wendy Blitchington, a child who once wept when a boy in our class electrocuted a toad with a coffee can and a battery, patted Miss Joetta on her back. When our dance teacher squinted up at her, Wendy burst into tears and hid her face. A few others started crying. Miss Joetta blew her nose, patted Wendy’s arm, wiped her huge leaking eyes, and stood up.
“You may change clothes and go home,” she said. “The recital’s over. I’m sorry. You have danced like goddesses. Most of you, that is.”
Miss Joetta refused to look at me, but her eyes crinkled and I knew what she was getting at. I felt like a plague victim, so ashamed that my stomach disappeared, and I wanted to drop dead for real. I wondered if my mother had ruined the recital on purpose—maybe to teach me a lesson (deep down she scoffed at dance class, though not for the same reasons Brunell’s mama did). I wondered if her disdain for dancing was tainted by something else.
I wondered and wondered. And Miss Joetta stood in the dark just at the spotlight’s edge, watching as one wealthy masker after another caught the plague and died, playing their roles to perfection. Their performance was all the more harrowing because the recital was ruined, making me think of a beautiful opera singer squalling her guts out on a sinking cruise ship. Judy Hicks surveyed the piles of corpses and performed a jaunty jig. The crowd went wild when she took her bow.
After the dead rose and held hands and curtsied, Miss Joetta turned on her microphone, which squeaked with feedback.
“Due to unanticipated events,” she said, “the rest of the recital will not proceed. I am very sorry. Thank you for coming.” The crowd actually groaned. She put down her microphone and started gathering her things.
Fists clenched, I went to find my laughing fool of a bastard daddy. He was in the cafeteria, shuffling around moodily, strip-mined of humor and ashamed, tearing at his comb-over as his bloodshot eyes strayed over the crappy finger paintings of kindergartners. I was about to jump out from my hiding place behind the trophy case when Joetta Shick came bustling through the room, laden with tote bags and snarling. She stopped in her tracks as though Daddy were a wild boar. She was about to hightail it when he turned toward her.
“Joetta,” he said, walking up to her. “Look, you don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand?” she said. “I feel so humiliated.”
“I was not laughing at your amazing recital. I mean it, just one of the best interpretations of Poe I’ve ever seen. So elaborate, so ambitious, so many thoughtful details. And to organize all those horrible little children so brilliantly.”
Joetta Shick just huffed. She refused to put down her bags.
“I have a nervous condition,” Daddy said. “My father was a hysterical laugher, as was his mother. I think my daughter has the disease too. It’s just, the whole thing was so complicated. You see, I was also taking the audience into consideration. I kept watching Pinkie Sprott throughout the recital. He had his stupid church face on—didn’t understand one iota of what was going on. Do you know what I mean?”
“James,” said Joetta, putting down her bags. “This town is hell.”
“I know it,” said my father.
Joetta Shick put her hand on my father’s arm.
“It’s just that I’m a married man,” said Daddy. “With two kids. And I love my wife, but I think you’re a beautiful and intelligent woman. And maybe, in another world, in different circumstances. Well, you know.”
Miss Joetta made a strange gurgling sound and removed her hand from my father’s arm. “Goodbye, James,” she said, then she picked up her totes once more, bags crammed with costumes and makeup kits, curling irons, rollers, brushes, combs, hair gel, h
airspray, dozens of beauty products too fanciful or obscure to name, and walked out of the cafeteria.
A few months later she left town, the same week Brunell Hair tried to run away to Atlanta after her mama burned her Kiss records, making it all the way to Aiken on her bike before Desmerelda tracked her down. Rumors pulsed throughout school district three. Some people said Miss Joetta had relocated to Charleston to teach dance at a hoity-toity academy. Others said she’d moved to Florence to care for her sick mother. One group had it that she’d gone all the way to New Orleans to be a showgirl (never mind her age), and that she dabbled in voodoo. This is the story I settled on. And I took personal responsibility for helping Miss Joetta fulfill her enchanted destiny. Rather than getting bogged down teaching dance in this podunk town, mooning over men not sophisticated enough to appreciate her glamour, she’d gone on to bigger things.
I liked to picture Miss Joetta on one of those wrought-iron balconies in a Gypsy outfit, petting her bald dogs, watching masked revelers dance in the streets. These fantasies were lit up by a big silver moon, which made her dogs look like they were chiseled out of marble. And in the moonlight you couldn’t see the lines around Miss Joetta’s mouth.
Animal Communication
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
I.
I underestimate the power of my connection with other people, with animals and events that are coincident.
Everyone’s experienced talking with a friend, when conversation suddenly deepens.
Estimation supports the magic of deepening.
Days begin to skew slightly; we open to accident.
Though touching an animal differs from feeling vibrations of its spirit or thinking of it, not as moths, for example, meld light and thought.
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 16