Dance Lessons

by Aine Greaney

  She has, of course, driven out to see where they live, Native American and Latina and Caucasian, each in their separate-race trailer parks. The trailers are placed at odd angles from each other, most without shade or vegetation, as if someone had just spat them from the sky.

  At the college, her fellow teachers invite her for potluck dinners or to join them for lunch in the cafeteria. But so far, there is an unspoken caution toward Ellen Boisvert, the petite, self-contained woman from back east who rarely speaks of a family, a relationship, a reason for being here. People like Ellen Boisvert have nearly always come here from something.

  She pulls aside again for a man with his toddler hoisted into a baby backpack. The blond child bops with his father’s steps. When they pass, the kid stares, slack-jawed, at her. Up here, the trail is bordered by sapling Ponderosa pines. She steps off the trail to a gap in the trees, a spot from which she can see the whole town down there—the clusters of houses and gas stations and roadside casinos—all of it cast in pink by the evening sun.

  After her first week in a downtown motel, she called the number on a “for rent” sign. The estate agent led her through the Paso Robles model apartment, opening the white built-in closets and directing her to the view of the Paseo out front. But Ellen never ventured past the living room and its white stucco walls and its vaulted ceilings.

  “I’ll take it. How much do you need for the deposit?”

  At least once a week, her friend Viktor Ortiz sends her newsy updates from the Academy and its faculty; he says he might come out here to visit on Christmas break. Ellen hopes he doesn’t. Already, Ellen finds herself being bored by the Coventry Academy gossip. She feels her and Viktor’s friendship stretching apart, losing its elasticity.

  “Where you from?” someone often asks when they overhear her accent in a downtown café where she sometimes sits with a cappuccino and her piles of student tests to grade. These people tell how they visited Boston once, had a beer in the Cheers pub; how even the local cab driver got lost in the ridiculous traffic in those unfathomable streets.

  During these disposable conversations, Ellen waits for that nod of the head, that mental ranking of New England alma maters, professions, Boston suburbs. But there is none.

  For the first time in her life, Ellen Boisvert is just another woman alone in a town. She’s nobody’s daughter. Nobody’s wife.

  On these winter weekends, when Santa Madera’s downtown smells of the piñon that burns in the outdoor cafés’ chimineas, local Indian and immigrant Guatemalan women sit under the wooden eaves, their turquoise and silver jewelry set out on colored blankets. They never meet her eye. She never meets theirs. Perhaps each woman fears that she will see a mirror of her own displacement, the same resolve to eschew a past life, to abandon a previous existence and place.

  Ellen pulls to the left for a young, twenty-something couple who have been climbing the trail behind her, their voices loud on the still, afternoon air. Their golden retriever strains on its leash. “Thanks,” the man says, breathlessly, as he and his girlfriend hurry past and up this steepest part of the arroyo.

  Up here, Knockduff Hill, or that house at the top of the sloping avenue could be in another place, another galaxy—that house and the hundred-acre farm that Jo somehow, secretly, willed to Ellen Boisvert, her dead son’s wife. When?

  Over and over, Ellen has tried to pinpoint the day, the time when Jo managed to change her will. It must have been the day when she found Jo and Ned out walking on the avenue, that sudden, lively day when the old woman had a reprieve of wellness. The damn woman could get Ned to do anything for her. She left Ellen her 100 acres and house. She left Ned her money.

  The Ballinkeady lawyer’s letter arrived, certified delivery, two days after Ellen arrived back in Boston from London.

  Dear Ms. Boisvert:

  As the legal representatives for the property and cash assets of the late Josephine Dowd, nee Burke, we wish to inform you . . .

  The young couple is sitting on one of the three rough-hewn benches that are set in a semicircle on the western edge of the lookout. The benches are angled toward the opposite mesa and the sunset over the valley. The man is testing his camera’s lens setting, lifting, pointing the camera toward the mountain, then fiddling with the lens again. Set for the perfect sunset shot.

  On her own bench, Ellen unfolds the Irish airmail envelope from her fanny pack.

  November 24, 2002

  Unit 4, The Willows

  Malahide,

  County Dublin

  Ireland.

  Dear Ellen,

  I have tried this letter many times. I would have e-mailed you, but that would have been rude, wouldn’t it?

  First, a sincere “thank you” for caring for my sister in her final days. You must know by now that Father Bradley, the Gowna priest, has come to see me. I rang him, not the other way around, though he had been looking for me. I rang him because I knew, dreamed that she was gone. After that phone call, he came to visit me.

  All last summer I had been dreaming of my sister. Every night, I’d wake up and there she was, lying in the bed beside me. We shared a bed as children, as young girls. Did she mention that? Happy times. Sometimes, her voice in the room was so real that I thought she really was here, that she’d come, finally, to make up friends.

  The night she died, I dreamed of her again, the two of us sitting on the wall in the front of the house, chattering away and swinging our legs in the sunshine. In that dream, she smiled and said good-bye to me.

  First I made a phone call down there, to the house at Knockduff, because I was sure poor little Fintan would be home. But the phone just rang and rang. After that, a Telecom voice said it was disconnected. For days I scanned the death notices in the daily paper. Then at last, I forced myself to ring down there, to Gowna’s presbytery.

  Even when you’ve fallen out with someone, you still miss them. Three, four times a day, you catch yourself thinking that they’re still there, that Knockduff is all still there—all the noise and the cattle and the apple blossoms in the orchard.

  And then Father Bradley told me the news of Fintan. My dear Ellen, I just couldn’t believe it, couldn’t, wouldn’t accept it. I don’t still. I think that he’s there, over there in Boston working away, being important and brainy.

  I wish that we’d met when you were here. She should have told you where I was. Should have let you ring and bring me to her bedside to say good-bye in person. Or afterward, you could have come and visited me here. But that’s all gone now and I hope there will be a next time. Next time you’re in Ireland. Or would you come specially?

  It’s a nice place here at the Willows. My husband Brian died five years ago, and I sent my sister a letter with the news, but heard nothing in return.

  I had to sell our old house in Whitehall. Brian’s niece Caroline and her husband helped me move in here. I have my own small flat. When the weather is fine (we’ve had terrible rain and storms the last week), I sit out on the patio and I can smell Dublin Bay.

  They’ve taught all of us residents how to use computers and the Internet and e-mail. I told them I was writing to my niece in America and one of the attendants, a lovely Polish girl, took this photo of me and put it on a screen and then printed it up for me to send to you. Honest to God, I think they teach us all this in the hope that it helps us to remember how to put on our own shoes and not grow more doddery than we already are.

  Anyway, I’m including the e-mail and the photo in this letter. It’s always nice to learn something new. And then there’s the online catalogs—lovely style and shoes. I just order them and they deliver them straight to the door. Do you shop with them yourself?

  There’s a van that brings us out to the shopping centre every week, but with the walking stick it’s just a bother, an embarrassment.

  Carmel Cawley e-mails or rings me now and again. A few summers back, they were both home here for a visit. I keep Catherine’s photos on my fridge. She’s grown up so fast, that c
hild. It seems only the other day since my husband and I flew to London for her first birthday party, and she was even jigging and dancing in her playpen back then! Carmel told me what you did for them. May God reward you a hundredfold.

  Ellen, I hope this isn’t our last correspondence. I hope you come over and visit again. All I can say to you is that we should let the dead rest in peace. There were times when my sister Jo seemed like the devil incarnate. But we all do things we regret, wish that we’d never done or said. Since hearing about my sister’s death, I am sorry, so sorry for taking heed of her and her old huffs and tempers. I wish now that I had defied her, that I had forced her to talk to me.

  That last Sunday I’ll never forget the rage in her face and eyes. Maybe my sister was always full of that temper, that silent resentment. You don’t see it when you’re young. I hope for your sake that old age softened her.

  Ellen stops reading to remember her first sighting of Jo Dowd in that house in Knockduff—a tall old woman with her cane held above her head, ready to murder or attack the intruder. No, Kitty, Aunt Kitty. No, old age didn’t soften your sister Jo—not really, not until the very end.

  You know, Jo always believed that I’d been the pet down at home, that I got away with everything, and later, that I had the perfect life up here in Dublin. As if, without land and cattle, life was all a bed of roses. God, if she only knew the half!

  I still dream of that last Sunday morning in Knockduff.

  After Father Bradley’s visit last month, the attendants here wanted me to see a grief counselor. They brought a woman to see me. But with all her degrees and qualifications, I thought she had very bad manners. She slugged her tea and was far too nosy. So I stopped after a few weeks. But I did ask her about the dream I’ve been having for years now. Told her how sometimes, it goes away, but then it comes back again, five or six nights in a row. She said that our minds get trapped like that, keep going back over the things that frighten us.

  I told her it would frighten anyone to see my only nephew, a grown man on his knees, down on his knees in the orchard and cradling his poor dog in his arms. Awake or dreaming, I still hear Fintan crying. Still hear him screaming out that poor dog’s name. Rosie.

  When Brian and I got there, he’d already been kneeling there for over an hour, in the damp afternoon, dressed in nothing but an old T-shirt. He was crying and crying and the rope dangling from the apple tree above them.

  I say forgive, I pray to forgive, but what kind of a woman would try to get rid of her own grandchild? And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, to hang a dog?

  When he was a young fellow, that dog was the one thing that he loved after all his years of hard work, all his years of being up there in that house alone with the pair of them and his grandmother, every day working as hard as they did.

  That Sunday, we only drove down there after she rang the house, ranting and raving that it was all my fault, all my fault to let himself and his girlfriend stay here like that, let them carry on like that under my own roof. And now look at the fix he was in—trapped with a pregnant girlfriend. My fault, my fault, my fault. It was all name-calling and accusations and how it had always been easy for me, so easy with my posh house and no children.

  Brian insisted that we drive down there. To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to. I was so vexed I said to just let her stew in her own venom. But he talked me into it. Said we could make a weekend of it, stay someplace nice on Saturday night, then drive on to Mayo first thing on Sunday morning. A chat, he said. A chat would get her to see a bit of sense.

  I knew. I knew the minute we opened that first gate and drove up the avenue. Knew something was bad, wrong. You always do, don’t you? And then, there they were—Fintan and his poor dog.

  Lord, here I am again—writing it down this time, as if dreaming it weren’t enough! But he screamed at her, screamed that he hated her, that she’d never be happy until she made him as miserable as her; so miserable she was even refusing to come to his own wedding.

  She stood over her weeping son and said if he really wanted to know what was what, if he really wanted to go ahead and marry that girl, maybe he should just take his bike and pedal off down to the village hall for himself, around seven o’clock. Take a little trip down there and see for himself what sort of girl he was insisting he’d marry.

  So he did. We drove him down. And you know the rest.

  After the hall, he came back with us to Dublin. We drove off the three of us. Fintan with only the clothes on his back but insisting we had to bring him away, away. For Christ’s sake bring him away or he’d go back up to Knockduff and kill her.

  We stopped at a chemist shop in a town where Brian went and knocked on the private hall door and begged the man to give us something, something to sedate the boy so we could drive him back to our house in Whitehall, Dublin.

  He stayed with us for a fortnight that summer. I tried to cheer him up. I got him an appointment with a doctor. I even went into town to a pet shop and bought him a pup and brought it home on the bus.

  He’d be gone running and jogging for hours, out in the dark. I’d be just about to ring the guards, frantic he was mugged or half dead someplace, when here he’d finally turn up, exhausted and fit to drop.

  That day we drove him out to the airport, he told us he was flying to London, to follow Carmel, to make it up with her. We’d given him the money for the ticket and to get them started in a place to live.

  Then we never heard from him. Only from Carmel. She rang our house one night looking for him, wondering why he hadn’t turned up. Then she wrote me a letter saying that her brother had found out, that her brother had a friend who knew him over there in Boston. That she never wanted to hear the name “Dowd” again.

  I didn’t even know he was married, but hoped that he was. I hoped and prayed that he had found a nice girl that could make him happy. I’m sure you did.

  They tell me it’s better not to dwell. To keep busy, to force myself to think of happy things. So I do, at least until I fall asleep and dream.

  Ellen, dear, this is a much, much longer letter than I had intended. It’s getting dark outside now, and it’s only just after four o’clock here. They already have the place decorated for Christmas, so here I am sitting at my little kitchen table, looking out at the garden and shrubs all lit-up with little white lights.

  I’ll look forward to hearing back from you, to hearing all about your life out there. I will remember you in my prayers.

  Love, Auntie Kitty.

  01-356978

  KitWalsh@eircom.net.

  Ellen studies the computer-printed photo of the pretty little woman dwarfed by the wing-backed armchair she’s sitting in. The photographer has snapped her from the waist up. Kitty is facing the camera with a wistful smile. Her hair is dyed a butterscotch blond. Her eyebrows are penciled in. She’s wearing large pearl earrings and a silky scarf knotted over a pink sweater set. Behind her rimless spectacles, the eyes are bright and inquisitive. She reminds Ellen of a dainty, aging doll.

  In the Santa Madera National Park, the young man and his girlfriend are standing at the very edge of the lookout, their backs silhouetted against the pinking sky. Snap, snap, snap, goes his camera.

  The retriever’s nose startles Ellen, nuzzling at her hand. Then the dog rests its head on her lap, the sad, limpid eyes looking up at her.

  “Sorry,” the man calls back over his shoulder. “But she is friendly.”

  “Oh, she’s fine,” Ellen answers, then bends to kiss the dog’s golden head.

  Epilogue

  “GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS!” Mrs. Pritchard shouts up at them on stage. Her voice is all echoey in the empty theater. “Start again. Please. From the top. Gerda, let’s start right back to the roses again. And you, yes, Catherine, let’s drop the ax-murderer look, darling, okay? You’re supposed to be Gerda in The Snow Queen, not Jack the Ripper, all right?”

  Crap, Cat thinks. But then, Cat Cawley forces herself to smile down there into th
e lit-up theater where Mrs. Pritchard stands and paces in front of the rows and rows of empty seats.

  It’s November 12. So Christmas is still more than a month away. And anyway, this is just their first week’s practice away from Mrs. Pritchard’s studio, at real stage rehearsals.

  At the studio, over a month ago now, Mrs. Pritchard asked all interested students to audition for the part of Gerda. Even two of the boys tried out, and maybe Cat had got it wrong, but she was sure this guy, Franklin, was going to get the lead part. On audition night, they were all dead nervous.

  For nights and nights before that night, Cat practiced every single afternoon after school. She rented the DVD, of course, and just watched and practiced in their living room, until Mum said that if she ever heard one of those bloody songs again she’d put the sodding telly out on the footpath for someone to just take away.

  And then it happened. Mrs. Pritchard chose sixteen-year-old Cat Cawley to be Gerda. Mrs. Pritchard said that she, Cat, could hold the part longer.

  When Treacy Atchinson-Radcliffe heard the news she said—out loud so everyone could really hear—“How come the new girl gets picked? She hasn’t even come here from a proper dance school.”

  Treacy Atchinson-Radcliffe is on stage now, standing behind Cat in the chorus, playing the hyacinth. Cat really hates her. One of the other girls said that Treacy even had her mum call Mrs. P to make a formal complaint and threaten to reenroll her daughter in a different dance studio. That girl told Cat that Mrs. P only made Treacy the hyacinth to shut Treacy’s mum up.

  Now Cat moves slowly across the stage like she’s supposed to, but one eye on Mrs. P down there, gauging the dance teacher’s reaction, if she’s pleased with Cat’s moves or not. Okay, Cat, she reminds herself, keep the smiley sweetie face.

  Mum has a bet on with Cat. Mum reckons that her daughter just can’t keep it up, all this looking innocent and nice. Not even now that Cat’s got the lead part.