Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  nervous dancer

  winner of the flannery o’connor award

  for short fiction

  nervous dancer

  carol lee lorenzo

  Paperback edition published in 2011 by

  The University of Georgia Press

  Athens, Georgia 30602

  www.ugapress.org

  © 1995 by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  All rights reserved

  Designed by Kathi Dailey Morgan

  Set in Electra by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

  Printed digitally in the United States of America

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:

  Lorenzo, Carol Lee.

  Nervous dancer / Carol Lee Lorenzo.

  171 p.; 23 cm.

  “Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award

  for Short Fiction.”

  ISBN 0-8203-1704-7 (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3562.0755N47 1995

  8134’.54—dc20 94-13062

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-3995-5

  ISBN-10: 0-8203-3995-4

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  Some of these stories first appeared in the following publications: “Two Piano Players” in Epoch, “Something Almost Invisible” in Primavera, “Unconfirmed Invitations” in MSS, “Peripheral Vision” in Painted Bride Quarterly, and “New Eggs” in the Pennsylvania Review.

  ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4199-6

  To my son, “P.T.”

  Peter Todd Lorenzo

  contents

  two piano players

  something almost invisible

  the night instructor

  unconfirmed invitations

  peripheral vision

  the one-armed man

  the boogieman

  nervous dancer

  new eggs

  nervous dancer

  two piano players

  The old blue afternoon air sticks to the roof of my mouth. My cousin, Jewel, dogs me all the way through the Florida heat to the back of the church. Our feet stir a breeze, but it stings. I’ve been pointing out new sights to Jewel all day. My hands feel too tired for a piano lesson.

  “I don’t want to go in the back door of any church,” she tells me. Jewel is on her vacation from up in Georgia. She pulls her skirt so tight I can see the split between her legs. She does not trust me as a long-term friend. Only two days here and she feels that I am already wearing thin. But she will sit through my church piano lessons with me because she doesn’t want to get lost in Florida. So she stays close, walking in rhythm with the jingle of my bracelet collection on my arm.

  Jewel complains, “You can’t play piano good at all.”

  I tell her, “It’s my mother that wants to learn to play piano. But she won’t take lessons. I have to take and then teach her.”

  “You are going to bore me,” Jewel confides.

  At the church door, slick dark birds come from nowhere, settle and argue in a tree. Jewel is fighting to get in the church first. “Gia! Gia! I’m afraid of birds.”

  “Birds?”

  “Wild birds!”

  I don’t like to touch my cousin. Jewel’s thin hair has gone sticky with Florida humidity, and her hands feel as hard as weapons. To make her calm down, I pull at her blue clothes; she’s wearing something old of mine. She wears it but says it’s not too pretty. She tells me I’m not too pretty either because I have too much dark hair and my mouth is mean. I tell her my mouth only looks mean because I’m shy. She tells me I look like the foreigners that work on the Boardwalk. I tell her it’s just that I tan too easily, that I’m not a foreigner because I’m her real cousin. She makes a face.

  I get her into the back hall where it’s as cool and dark as the inside of the minister’s nose. I have seen up the minister’s nose. I dare to take communion, but I watch out for the minister. He looks down at me kneeling with my friends. All my friends are baptized. I go with them to the rail. I’m the only one who takes the Body and the Blood and then can’t swallow. And cries because I’m not supposed to have it. And the minister knows.

  When I’m in the living room begging to be baptized, my mother and father turn their smooth faces together, then look at me and say, “Gia cannot be baptized because she doesn’t yet know what she’s doing.” So I punish us all by playing my piano sideways, pecking into its face until it slips and scratches the white off the living room wall.

  With a clatter like rings dropped to the bottom of a bottle, here come the minister’s sons. Sometimes I think the two of them came out of his nose. In this cool, cool corridor, the minister’s twins are coming toward us with sweat under their arms.

  Immediately Jewel sits on her legs on a yellowed corridor bench. She looks awed, but she isn’t. She has tea-colored hair, but it’s her albino eyelashes that give her that peculiar stare. She sits on her legs because they are her best feature.

  Jewel says, “What are they carrying? Teeth?” Long, whitish things are in their hands. Of course, they live for tricks.

  Really, it’s the ivory tops of piano keys. Miraculously, they have pulled them off in whole pieces. Who knows what rooms they have been in.

  Close, the boys smell as strong as onions. One shows us that he’s all muscle, but all his muscle is in his stomach. He shoves his stomach out and it makes his pants snap open.

  “You’re in for trouble with those piano keys,” I say.

  “Oh no we’re not,” one says. “It’s as good as never doing it, cause we never get caught.”

  The minister’s sons get bad grades, but they are very bright. “We are looking for your legs. Do you have any?” they ask Jewel.

  I tell them to stop. “Jewel doesn’t take jokes.”

  The only sound comes from Jewel, her teeth tapping together like tiny feet running away. Her legs are good from playing hard-ball with boys in her back-yard dust. I love boys in secret. She does things with them, she says, and then she cusses them out loud to their faces. But now she won’t talk to boys, not in hot Florida. She opens her mouth and breathes humidity.

  I try to stay still, but I only get a cramp in my leg.

  When nothing is said, one swells his lip and says, “You better leave us alone or our father will damn you to hell.”

  “He can’t hurt me,” I say quite certain. “I’ve not been baptized, so he can’t do anything to me yet.”

  The doors in the church won’t stay closed. The piano teacher opens the door to the practice room and creates a suction. So another door down the hall gasps open, and another slams shut.

  We go in watching out for our fingers. Jewel is introduced while she’s heading for a chair against the far wall. She sits and presses her skirt into her lap. It’s hard for her to be still if she’s not asleep. Jewel has lots of energy. She eats too much sugar. She’s allowed because her mother has no patience to teach her differently. She puts her head back, trying to fall asleep. She will not listen to me play because she has perfect pitch.

  The blue cotton top that yesterday was mine overpowers the thin blue in her eyes till they look as empty as her drained glass at lunch. She never leaves anything of hers behind. In fact, though she’s here for a stay, she won’t unpack and merely nods her head into the old hard suitcase each morning, chooses for one day only, and slams it shut. That’s why a mistake was made—I have on short shorts and she has on a skirt; once done, Jewel does not reverse.

  The piano teacher says, “Pleased to meet you,” but warns her, “Learn something by staying awake right in this room. Have you ever been taught piano?”

  “I won’t play anything,” Jewel says, “except by ear.”

  She and I have tried: “
Blue Moon,” “Chopsticks,” and “Detour, There’s a Muddy Road Ahead,” which I told Jewel was a Methodist hymn and she slapped me.

  My teacher has on her perfume today. It gives her a deep smell and makes me feel tipsy.

  At first I sit at a paper keyboard laid out on a table. Using my ears as my barrettes, I hook my long hair back to rest my neck. My mother wants to cut it. My father won’t let her. “Whores have long hair.” My mother’s words, hardly heard, have played across the cords in her neck. “His whores.” She capitalized His and let the words drain back down her throat so my father couldn’t be sure he’d heard. I love the word whore and wrote it down immediately; it will be my favorite word one day.

  As of late, my mother has let her short hair grow. She has tried to stretch it with her fingers.

  The piano teacher asks me to remove my bracelet collection for the lesson. I push them high up my arm till they stick. I hear my teacher suck her tongue, so I let them off my arm and they ring down beside me on the table. I play finger exercises on the tabletop to no music at all.

  The real piano is under a Jesus-on-the-Cross. The practice room’s electric light runs down his wooden legs. Whether truth or a trick, it makes his legs look broken. Teacher sits in a chair beside me. She strokes the backs of her hands, loving to be the example. She doesn’t look down. By habit, she watches Jesus on his cross and plays by feel.

  One chord; unexpectedly she sings. “AAAAAh,” the world’s longest vowel, pitches out of her throat. “I’ve touched Jesus’s wounds!” She sticks her fingers in the air. So the ivory keys were lifted from here, too. “The minister’s twins,” I tell immediately and taste my lips. But no one likes tattletales.

  “You play, Gia.” Her hands dangle in her way and she paws her own breasts with embarrassment.

  The sounds of my playing on old glue and spoiled wood seem to stain the room brown. My tune is too simple and plodding. Plus I’m playing it wrong. I will have to hide this from my mother. I’m supposed to be teaching her, but she couldn’t resist showing me how to do it wrong.

  My teacher is confused by my inabilities. Her breasts point at me sharply through her full dress. I hate breasts. I’m afraid my mother won’t ever let me have any. She tells me I don’t need them now. But I think, secretly, that boys like them very much. She tells me out loud she will be happy if I never let anyone love me like “this and that.”

  The piano squeaks and I’m tired of my lazy little talent. I catch my teacher pushing the bar up higher on the metronome, making me faster. She watches her watch and cleans her shoulders. The teacher’s nervousness must be what keeps Cousin Jewel awake.

  “Over,” says the teacher, and she pulls her pocketbook out of hiding. I count my bracelet collection on the table and string them back up my arm. Jewel and I can’t stand to walk out beside a teacher. We hurry, but the teacher succeeds in leaving with us.

  Outside is too green and blue after the pale church and its bottled-up air. My eyelashes try to sweep the sun away.

  The piano teacher hurries for her bike, she has laid it against the shade on the church wall.

  Jewel calls, “Why is she running beside that bike?”

  “Because,” I say, “she has to jump over the boy’s bar.”

  “She shouldn’t do that. She could hurt herself.” Jewel is a tomboy, my mother says. Then why does she get so sick at accidents?

  My piano teacher grips the handlebars and her old pocketbook, which is so flat as to be uninteresting.

  “That’s a man’s bike,” calls Jewel again.

  “Well, I’m off to see a man,” the teacher announces and mounts her bike on a fast trot.

  A boy comes out of nowhere, covered by the blast of sunlight. The piano teacher’s bike wobbles and hits him. It’s a lone twin. For a moment he dances on air, screaming, “Okay, okay, okay!” before he lands catching his balance on two feet. The piano teacher is down, gear grit on her dress. She pushes herself up, saying, “I’m sorry. I apologize.” The twin seals his lips, but the spit in his smile crests at the corners. She kneels to the twin’s bare summer skin and checks it over. “Thank God I didn’t leave any marks on you,” she says.

  The teacher knocks the sand off her bike. She loves to talk so much to me, I’ve noticed, so she even talks to the silent twin. “Today I have man things to do. First I’m going to visit my old father, but he’s disoriented. If I’m not on time I’ll disorient him more. He thinks things happen that don’t. We often spend our time together talking about things that don’t really happen.”

  “Boy, is she rattled,” says Jewel.

  The piano teacher coughs and runs and jumps the man’s bar again. I gasp but she makes it. Her pocketbook caught underarm, she sets off determinedly on her bike. She bumps up off the seat to pull at her skirt and make sure it has not been eaten.

  Jewel says, “Jesus, she’s sure got looks from behind.”

  “I hate behinds,” I say. “Let’s go. I want to go home and play with my wild birds.”

  “I’m sure you do.” She wags her head.

  Passing through downtown, Jewel struts among strangers, wearing my clothes. Rows of dull heat waves stretch down the street. We pass stubs of stores and go into a short street where my father’s business is. It’s really where my father works for someone else, but my mother calls it his business anyway.

  The back door to the offices opens. “Let’s go look,” says Jewel. She pulls up her underpants through her skirt. But Myrna, the woman who works with my father, steps into the flickering blue shadow of the doorway and gets in our way. In the heat, her hair has run into one long, thin tail which she lifts, then lays against her shoulder.

  She has two cigarettes with her, she feeds one from the other. The short one falls at her shoe. She looks skinny and childlike. She pulls at the cigarette twice, and twice again.

  When we get too close, Myrna laughs. “Don’t you come in here, cause he’s already gone,” she says.

  “She means he left for home,” I say. We retreat to the sharp edge of the building. “She doesn’t talk to me this way when my father’s around.”

  Jewel stares at her over the albino rims of her eyes and says loudly, “I’ll just bet she doesn’t.”

  The air wrinkles Myrna’s dress. But it’s not air, it’s heat waves because Myrna’s body ripples, too. “Hey, you with no hair on your head—aw, forget it.” She doesn’t finish, but slings her cigarette onto the street with a hard crack of her thumbnail.

  Jewel grunts. Myrna’s gone. I go put out both of her cigarettes with my hot sandal.

  Now the heat waves are as fine as the mesh on my bedroom window screen. Heat splashes over my open shoes onto my feet. Jewel won’t walk. But I won’t wait. So Jewel says, “Oh,” and adds a funny, starchy twist to her walk. The white sidewalk looks closer than it is; it looks like it’s jumping.

  The thin wall of Jewel’s face draws tight. .“Oh, I don’t feel too good,” she says. “I have to go.” She laughs with a tiny terror, and speaks to me in thumps like her heart has popped into her cheeks. “I have to go to the bathroom. If only your father had been where he was supposed to be. Because I have to go right now!”

  “I don’t,” I say cruelly.

  “It burns,” she says, agitated. “It burns.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Don’t say ‘lemonade’ to me.” She is desperate now. She twists like a mad dog with fleas everywhere.

  “Lemonade, lemonade, lemonade,” I sing into the glare that ricochets off the storefronts. The glare is running all over everything, the color of lemonade; it runs down me, both my legs. I giggle from shock. It is I who have peed. I pee right down into my footprints.

  “I told you not to say it,” says Jewel, so relieved that my clothes on her quiver.

  “I don’t feel like I have to go anymore,” says Jewel minutes later and flatly.

  Lucky for me, my footprints steam quickly and dry up behind me. Not so lucky with my outfit—the center
of my cool summer shorts feels like wool.

  “Don’t look up,” cautions Jewel. “Some things you do are just too disgusting.”

  She pulls out an albino eyelash to measure it against the color all around us. The eyelash is a used-looking white. Trying to throw it away is hard. Her eyelash sticks to any finger that touches it. Finally she leaves it on the side of the bank.

  There is only one bridge in town, a steel spiderweb. Crossing it makes Jewel uneasy. The creosote and fish smell of the river’s edge rises under us and Jewel holds the sides of the bridge like she’s on a melting ice staircase.

  On level road again, she zigzags, feels her face, and says she’s overheated. She wants to hurry to my house and sit down. “Then let’s go have a Brown Cow. You ask for it,” she says.

  The sprinkler is out on our lawn, throwing stitches of water. We stay out of the water, afraid the colors of our clothes will run. But the white car has broken the stitches of spray, and my father has left his fresh, wet tracks through the shade to the front door.

  The porch of our house is made of glass slats. They are called jalousies. We can see out through them, but the neighbors can’t see us inside. I really call them jealousies because when my mother is jealous of my father he walks and talks her out to the porch. Then she has to stop accusing him, otherwise the neighbors will hear what she thinks my father has done. He keeps her from taking their arguments too far.

  Jewel likes the yellow chaise behind the jalousies. She wants an ice cube for her temperature. She would like for me to get it for her. At the same time, she doesn’t want me to touch it. She gets it herself, sits in the chaise, and holds it to her face.

  My father’s smooth voice glides through the house, calling to my mother. I hear the bedroom door close and I go to it. Lightly, I knock. He opens the door just enough to not let me fit through. He smiles my name, “Gia, you’re home.” He’s the one who named me. He says teasingly but meaning it, “No, Gia, don’t disturb your mother, she’s going to rest.” In the dark hall, where I feel I am turning into a shadow, his eyes stay a pale blue. He closes the door easily so as not to let the sound hurt my feelings.