Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “You loved Neddy?” I don’t know why this surprised me.

  “Sure I loved him.”

  “Do you love him now?”

  Taffy cut across two lanes of traffic and got in the left-hand turn lane. Taffy was a dynamite driver, I would give her that. “You spend all those years with somebody, how do you know? Do you love them now or is it just that you used to love them? Is it that you get into patterns—How did you sleep? How was your day? What sounds good for dinner? It has something to do with love, but I don’t know what, exactly. All I’m saying is, if Mother and Dad were still alive, I don’t think they’d be entitled to a rebate on my wedding. I think even though things didn’t work out in the end, I got their money’s worth out of it.”

  Taffy pulled up in front of McSwan’s. “I really don’t think I can do this,” I said.

  “You can do this,” she said. “You always do.”

  But I wasn’t doing it well. The class was Tap One, which came after the Bumblebees and Introductory Tap. These were seven- and eight-year-olds and they had a keen eye for mistakes.

  “Mrs. McSwan! You keep saying, Shuffle shuffle flap ball change, but you keep doing shuffle shuffle step ball change.”

  I looked at my feet. What were my feet doing? They could fly on autopilot. I should be able to do this stuff when I’m dead. I tapped my toes together and stood there feeling utterly lost. Then suddenly the seas were parted and a leader stepped forward.

  “Okay now, girls,” Taffy said. “I’m Mrs. McSwan’s sister. I’m the other tap teacher.”

  “You’re Mrs. McSwan, too?” asked a suspicious eight-year-old with a fat red braid.

  “For now, yes.” Taffy clapped her hands. “Get in line, girls, because we’ve got work to do.” She rattled off a routine: “Starting on the right, flap, flap, flap, heel, heel, pick up heel, toe, heel, shuffle heel, cramp roll, and then repeat.” It was nothing they knew. It was more complicated than what they were used to. Taffy accepted no mistakes. I went to the side of the room and watched for a change. She made them go over it again and again. In the end, they all got it.

  THAT NIGHT KAY called. “I talked to Mrs. Bennett,” she said. “She just loves you.”

  “She loves me?”

  “She talked a lot about your posture. She said you were very elegant. She said she wishes she had been taking dance classes all these years.”

  “Well, I guess it’s never too late to start.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure I’m all right, why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess you just sound tired.”

  “It was a long day.”

  “Well,” Kay said. “I really just wanted to call and thank you.”

  “For going to lunch?”

  “I know that sounds crazy, but she can be a little overwhelming.”

  “I was happy to do it. I wanted to.” I waited for a minute. I wasn’t sure if I should ask her at all. Maybe I should wait and ask her when my voice wasn’t shaking. “Kay, you know all those things we were talking about in the kitchen the other night?”

  “Don’t worry about that. I was just being emotional. Seeing Jack threw me off course for a minute, but I’m fine now.”

  “So you’re feeling better … about marrying Trey?”

  “I feel great about it,” she said. “I think this is going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “That’s great. That’s all I wanted to know. But if anything changes, you’ll tell me?”

  “Of course I’ll tell you,” Kay said, her voice reminding me of the little girl she had once been. “I tell you everything.”

  TOM AND I lay in bed in the dark, my shoulder pressed against his shoulder.

  “Is that a crack in the ceiling?” he said.

  Maybe. Maybe it was just a shadow. “I can’t tell. It’s too dark.”

  “I’m going to turn the light on for a minute.”

  I grabbed his arm. If there was a new crack in the ceiling, I absolutely did not want to know about it until morning. “Don’t you dare.”

  He settled back down next to me and let out a sigh. I think he was relieved that I had stopped him. “What are we going to do about all of this?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I feel like my brain is spinning. I can’t even think anymore. All I know is that we shouldn’t turn the light on.”

  Now we were both staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was slowly splitting in half.

  “Did you ever think about getting a divorce?” I asked him.

  “Divorcing you?”

  “Unless you were married to somebody else.”

  He waited a beat. “Maybe,” he said, “just for a minute when it’s pouring down rain and I realize you’ve taken the umbrella out of the car again.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m serious, too.” We were quiet for a while. We watched the ceiling. “Did you ever think about divorcing me?”

  I had and he knew it. There had been a time. The boys were seven and nine, Kay was almost five. Things had been going along okay and then one day Tom and I were like two people who had never even met before. I don’t know what happened. Everything that passed between us took the most unbelievable amount of effort. Every conversation, every arrangement, even handing him a cup of coffee in the morning felt nearly impossible. It was as if we had wandered into a darkness that we couldn’t find our way out of, and at the time I had thought, This is it. This is over. The word divorce set up camp in my brain. But then one day we woke up and we could see a little bit of light and we just kept moving toward it. Just as fast as things had gone bad, we turned another corner and found our way out. Who knows how these things work? When we came out of that slump, it was like we had found each other again. I was so happy. There was a long period of giddiness, and it was in that time that we wound up with George. I don’t know why we fell apart or how we fell back together, but after that we were always more careful with each other. We taught ourselves to be kinder, more patient. We had seen what we stood to lose and it scared the hell out of us.

  There was moonlight coming in through the window now and it might have been enough to see the ceiling, but I didn’t look in that direction. I looked at my husband. “No,” I said, kissing the curve of his neck. “I’d never divorce you.”

  chapter nine

  FOUR DAYS LATER, STAMP WAS OFF THE LEASH. Woodrow had brought over a little dog bed for him that was kept beneath the kitchen table, and on the morning of his liberation, Tom and I came into the kitchen and didn’t even notice that anything had changed. Woodrow had made the coffee and was reading the paper before descending into the basement. There was no barking, no growling. As soon as we sat down, Stamp got out of bed and walked over to sniff Tom’s leg. Tom put down his coffee and looked under the table.

  “It’s all right,” Woodrow said. “He’s just checking things out.”

  When Stamp was finished surveying whatever damage he had done to Tom, he came over to me and I scratched his head. Then he lay down on the floor beside Woodrow’s feet.

  “What did you do to the dog?” Tom said.

  “I just gave him a few boundaries. Everybody needs boundaries.”

  “So is he finished?” Tom asked. “Is this a reliable dog?”

  Woodrow looked at Stamp, who seemed to know we were talking about him and began to thump his stumpy tail without opening his eyes. “I would hope that Stamp would stay around for a while. He is a better dog, but I wouldn’t call him reliable quite yet.”

  Tom suggested that maybe he could finish up with a correspondence course from Atlanta.

  Woodrow nodded and picked up the paper again. “It’s possible. But it takes so long to teach them to read.”

  If Stamp stayed, Taffy stayed. Or maybe it was the other way around. She took her empty suitcases across the hall to Henry and Charlie’s room and stored them there. I did not ask her how long she planned to live in Kay’s old bedroom and she did not volunteer the in
formation. After the first week had passed, all she would say was that she thought that Stamp was learning a great deal and that she was looking on the whole experience as a kind of dog college. “Maybe this is what was supposed to come out of my marriage,” she said. “Maybe Neddy was supposed to leave me so that I could come up here and Stamp could get some help. Woodrow said that the first step was for me to admit that Stamp needed help.”

  “You don’t actually believe that, do you?”

  “God, Minnie, have a sense of humor.”

  Most nights Neddy called.

  “Car-o-line-a,” Neddy said, putting the original a back on the end of my name so as to get out the full four syllables. Neddy loved syllables. It was how he had always said my name. I had never particularly liked it, but now that he was planning to extricate himself from the family, it seemed almost unbearable to the ear.

  “Ned.”

  “How are things going up there in Ra-leigh, North Car-o-line-a?”

  “Is there something you need, Ned?”

  “I was calling to speak to Taffy, but I’m always glad to have the chance to talk to my favorite sister-in-law.” Fave-or-right.

  Did he think I didn’t know? I suppose it was possible that he thought Taffy wouldn’t tell me and that I would assume that this was simply the first long visit of our lives. The complete nondisclosure of personal information would have been in keeping with our relationship up until this point. “I’ll get her,” I said, and dropped the phone onto the table.

  Whenever Neddy called, I reminded Taffy that she was under no obligation to come to the phone and that I would be more than happy to lie to him on her behalf, but she always shrugged me off. She came into the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

  “Hmm?” she said, and spread out her fingers to study the coat of polish she had just finished applying. She pressed the phone between her shoulder and her ear and listened. From time to time she rolled her eyes. “Um-hmm. Right.” She blew on her fingers. “Third drawer in the bathroom. No, on your side.” She waited. “Your side. Well, look again. No, I didn’t take them. No. Go look.” She waited for a minute and then looked up at me. I’ll admit it, I found the whole thing strangely fascinating. “I’m on hold,” she said.

  “You have hold in your house?”

  Taffy nodded and then held up her hand. Ned was back on the line. “There. Exactly. What did I tell you?” She waited. “That’s right. Okay. Okay, bye.” She hung up the phone and shook her head in disgust. “He thought I had taken his toenail clippers. As if I have ever used toenail clippers in my life.”

  “Why do you tell him where they are? Why do you even talk to him?” Every night Neddy called looking for the extra set of car keys or wanting to know if there was something in the freezer he could eat for dinner. Sometimes he’d call back five minutes later asking how he was supposed to heat it up. Taffy always told him.

  “Why isn’t the junior executive finding the toenail clippers?”

  “I told him she wasn’t allowed in the house. Anyway, Neddy hasn’t mentioned her again.”

  “Why don’t you ask him? You don’t seem to talk about the divorce or what’s going to happen.”

  “It’s too depressing.”

  “So why talk to him at all?”

  “He doesn’t know where anything is.”

  “So what? Why shouldn’t he have to look for things?”

  Taffy didn’t like to talk about Neddy. The subject made her weepy and she hated to cry about as much as most fully dressed adults hated to be thrown into swimming pools, but she took a deep breath and tried to explain it to me in terms I could understand. “You always had a job,” she said patiently. “You had the studio. You had four kids and the house and Tom to look after. Well, my job was to take care of Neddy. He was always adamant that we hire people to help with Holden because he didn’t want anything to distract me from my job, even if it was our daughter. And I went right along with it because I figured that’s just the way things were.” She stopped for a minute. I must have been staring at her with blank disbelief, so she tried again. “What would you do if someone came in and told you you weren’t allowed to teach dance anymore? Wouldn’t you have days when you still felt like you were supposed to go to work? If the studio called and asked you how to turn on the heat and where the tax records were kept, wouldn’t you tell them?”

  “Not if they tossed me out on the street after a lifetime of loyal service.”

  “Well, all that means is that you’re smarter than I am, and we’ve both always known that.”

  BUT I DIDN’T know any such thing. Childhood is the time to cobble together an identity: I am good at this, I could never do that. I love this, I wouldn’t touch that. We put together lists, stake claims. The people around us make assumptions and we grow to fit them. I can remember my mother sitting on the edge of Taffy’s bed at night, combing my sister’s long blond hair and twisting it into pin curls, Taffy sleeping with her head full of pins without complaint, and then in the morning my mother would take out all the bobby pins and carefully brush her hair. Never was there a child with more beautiful hair, heavy yellow ringlets that came halfway down her back. People would come up in the grocery store and ask if they could touch Taffy’s hair. But I couldn’t stand to sit still. When my mother rolled up my hair, it became a battle of wills. The more I jerked around, the more likely she was to poke me with the pins and so the more I complained. I felt like I was sleeping with a head full of nettles, and in the morning when the whole thing came down, my hair was still no competition for the silky cloud that fell over my sister’s shoulders. So I said I didn’t like to have my hair curled. I said that it hurt and that it was a waste of time, which meant there was no place for me in the evening ritual that was now just between my mother and Taffy. I went downstairs and pretended I was interested in watching the news with my father, until finally I was interested. Taffy was praised for her beauty and received pink smocked dresses for her birthday. I was praised for being smart and got a set of The Children’s Encyclopedia of Knowledge. I read the books, Taffy wore the dresses, and inch by inch our worlds moved farther apart.

  I’m sure the decisions we make about ourselves at six and eight and ten are helpful, but do we still have to live with them at sixty and sixty-two? If Neddy had been my sister’s life’s work, then it was time for her to get another job. The second week that Taffy was with us, I told her to come and work for me.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I’m not saying you should teach point classes, just teach the Intro to Tap. Teach Tap One. Teach the Bumblebees if you want to. It’s a room full of five-year-olds. You like the five-year-olds.”

  “I don’t know how to teach.”

  “I saw you teach. You were great. You’ve danced every day you’ve been here. You know you can do this.”

  “Don’t you have to be licensed?”

  “You’re not teaching them how to fly.”

  “Woodrow told me I should get a job,” she said.

  “Woodrow?”

  “He said I was going to go out of my mind if I just kept sitting around. I told him if that was the case, I would have gone out of my mind a long time ago.”

  “What does he think you should do?”

  “He thought I should learn how to train dogs.”

  “Why? Because you did such a good job with the one you have?”

  “Woodrow says I have a great rapport with Stamp.”

  “He’s only saying that because he hasn’t seen you dance.”

  Taffy stalled. She seemed like the most coolly self-confident person in the world, but the idea of teaching rattled her. “I don’t even live here. I’m going to go back to Atlanta eventually.”

  “I won’t make you sign a contract. I won’t even pay you. I’ll put your salary in the wedding fund.”

  “There’s a wedding fund?” George said. He came in and went straight for the refrigerator. “If Kay has a wedding fund, then it�
��s only fair that I get one, too. There needs to be some equality in this family.”

  “I’m trying to talk your aunt into teaching a couple of dance classes,” I said.

  George took a bite of an apple and chewed it thoughtfully. “Well, it would certainly get the piano off my back. If you’re covering classes, it would mean that I wouldn’t have to run down there every time somebody caught a cold.”

  “You’d quit teaching?” Taffy said to George. “You’d want to do that?”

  “I am in law school,” he said. “I know that law school is very passé around here, but I do have a lot of work to do. I need to get through a hundred pages of reading this weekend for Torts alone.” Then George glanced out the window and his face froze. His mouth was still open and I could see little bits of apple sitting on his tongue.

  “Are you choking?” Taffy asked.

  “Who is that?” George said.

  I turned around and looked out the window. “That’s Erica.”

  “Who’s Erica?” He put the apple down on the counter and walked to the window.

  “Woodrow’s daughter.”

  Erica was wearing blue jeans and a green plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled back. She was getting a shovel out of the back of the truck. When she turned around and saw that all of us were staring at her, she gave a big wave, and headed off to work. Clearly, Erica was a girl who was used to having people stare at her.

  “There are four daughters,” George said weakly.

  “This is the one that’s still at home,” I said. It was funny. I had never seen George like this.

  “You’re telling me she’s been here before?”

  “She works with Woodrow sometimes on Saturday.”

  “Then why haven’t I seen her?” Erica went out of view and George walked over to the other side of the table and craned his neck.

  “Have a little dignity,” Taffy said.

  “You’re never home on Saturdays,” I reminded him.