Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  Now I can’t get the pee-pee off because their door is next to the bathroom and I’m not supposed to stay that near. I do wait to hear what they’re doing—and it turns out they are making little sounds of surprise to each other.

  After a while my mother comes out, wearing her hair up.

  “May we have a Brown Cow?” I say. Then I hurry to get fresh, while my mother shouts, “Gia, don’t you dare take another bath. Too many baths make you skinny.” She doesn’t stop talking, but dry sniffs in the middle. “I thought I smelled cat pee.”

  She is digging at the hard vanilla ice cream with a big spoon when I come out with my skin and clothes freshened. My mother pours the Coke over the vanilla ice cream for a Brown Cow. She looks pretty. “That’s Daddy’s shirt,” I say sarcastically. No one answers me. “Why are you wearing it?” I persist. Why must she wear my father’s clothes with nothing under it?

  Jewel and I sit across from each other at the dinette. Jewel eats the foam off her Brown Cow with her front teeth. I hold the foam with my top lip and swallow the strong Coke quickly.

  My father roams in and out of the kitchen. Though this is the end of the day, he’s put on another clean shirt. How broad his arms are. He tells me he only thinks at work. So why does he have those long, smooth muscles?

  He wanders when he’s home early—dropping sounds through the house, clinking keys, tapping his teeth, ruffling for things in a drawer. He doesn’t seem to know where things are at home.

  The birds in the outside cage are talking nonsense; I listen to them mixing up all the words we’ve taught them. Jewel watches me. “When I’m here you’re not supposed to bother with pets,” she says. She scratches her face hard. She may be getting ready to tell on me. My peeing is a joke she can make to get my mother’s attention. A swallow of Coke backs up my throat.

  It’s then that I remember the dirty words list I’ve been working on. “I can tell you the meaning of things now. They’re in my room,” I whisper when my mother turns on the water to rinse. I lead Jewel back to where we both sleep on matching cherry wood beds. Because Jewel is here, my parents have taken down my sleeping rope and hidden it. It’s used to rope up the sides of my bed so I won’t go to sleep and fall right out of bed. I’ve always done that. My cousin knows it, but we don’t want to remind her. I’m trying to sleep without it, but my mother is nervous.

  I open my dresser drawer. “These are all the words you said last time you were here. Now I have the meanings for you.” I take out my chocolate box. On the first layer are unwanted candies with fallen fillings.

  Jewel looks at them. “Let’s eat some,” she says.

  “Don’t touch them. I bit all the bottoms off and put them back. I only taste each one once, I don’t eat candy.”

  “But your mother says you can have all the candy you want.”

  “She gives me candy cause she never has to worry about me eating it. She says it proves how nice I am,” I say.

  Under the false floor of the chocolate box are the pieces of paper with dirty words on them. I begin to read what all these dirty words mean. I’m the one who wants to know exactly.

  Jewel paces and then shouts at me, “Where did you get those answers? They are not definitions. Those are daffynitions. Did you get them out of a dictionary?”

  I say, “I tried to.” Air stops in my throat; a bubble lodges. I speak through a tiny pinprick hole. “I had to make them up. They weren’t in the dictionary.”

  “You mean you’re reading me what you think those filthy words mean?”

  “Then what do they mean?” I ask.

  “You will never mature if you make up definitions.” She strains her patience with me till I think her eyelids will tear in two. “Now listen and remember. I’m not telling you again,” she says.

  “I thought you didn’t know the definitions,” I wail.

  “What I know is not to say everything I know out loud.”

  She slaps my wall and leaves my room. I bend over my dirty words.

  Night comes with a slow moon. Because Florida is flat, sunset takes forever. On the jalousied porch, I try to play gently with my cockatoo. Jewel braces her hands to screen the bird off if it flies at her face. She says, “Birds in the house mean bad luck. Something dies.”

  “They’re pets,” I say.

  “Nobody’s tamed them.” She scuffs her voice at me.

  With his hooked beak, the cockatoo bites me in the quick of my cuticle. I return him to the outside cage. I put my fresh water offering on the cage bottom. The birds perch near the roof. Their mouths are closed, no song or imitation human words come out.

  With the birds falling asleep, the air seems so still. I play “March Militaire” for Jewel. My fingers touch the keys but seem to clang at the roof of my mouth.

  The phone rings and rings. Someone is not giving up. My parents don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone tonight. My father kisses my mother’s neck because she has left her hair up. “Ouch,” she says about his kiss, “that’s hot.”

  The phone rests. Then it starts ringing again.

  The moon looks breakable. I ask Jewel not to point her finger at it.

  My father joins us and sits on the small of his back. His legs are getting longer; he is stretching out. We have him on the porch with us. He doesn’t read; he holds the paper on top of him.

  Caught at the phone, my mother looks at the wall and listens.

  A mosquito sings. Jewel kills it. For this summer, she’s calling my father Uncle Daddy. We giggle. Mother’s voice on the phone has gone tart. We press our fingernails to our mouths and our knuckles stop-up our noses. My hands smell very good. Jewel says she’s making fun of me, the way I sound when I call him Daddy. “You get too sweet when you try to talk to your daa-dee. It’s enough to make me heave hot vomit.” We talk about my father as if he were deaf, but he’s only bored. We are hysterical with this exchange.

  “Shut up,” calls my mother. The phone has made her irritable. And my father has to go inside; my mother tells him to.

  In the kitchen, my mother and father mumble to each other and make coffee. “It will keep them awake and nervous all night,” promises Jewel.

  They bring their cups to the porch. “Have some coffee, darling,” my father says to me. I love him so much but I won’t drink after him. I’m afraid I’d be able to taste my father.

  He tells my mother to sit with him on the rattan settee and make him comfortable. She puts her leg over his. My cousin sees this and quickly she cleans out the corners of both of her eyes.

  “Something has happened,” says my mother. “The phone. Your piano teacher has had a terrible accident.”

  “Did she hit a car or a truck?” asks Jewel.

  “No. Not a wreck. Someone.”

  I remember the twin frantically running in the air. “Did she hurt someone?”

  Jewel has reached for one of her eyelashes. She may pull it any minute.

  My mother says, “You must practice very hard and make her feel better. She’s been raped.”

  My father slides his leg from under Mother’s and now he rests his right ankle on his left knee.

  “It’s already happened to her. Don’t cry.”

  I laugh. Ha, ha, ha, chopping it into three bites. Rape was one of the words on my list.

  “They haven’t caught him yet. We don’t know who he is.”

  “Then how do they know it was a man?” I say. My stomach laughs now, in and out like it is riding a horse.

  My father pets the leather of his new shoes.

  “For some reason,” she says to my father, “she’s just not getting it. Growing up. She’ll never know how to take care of herself.”

  My father says, “You don’t have to worry about her. She’s so young that she’s a little knock-kneed and still swaybacked. Men won’t be after her yet.” They laugh with their joke and they seem so happy that I make the mistake of laughing with them.

  My laugh cools my mother off. She pulls out the pins in he
r hair and watches me, but I don’t jump.

  Jewel and I go to bed, because we feel like it. She is wearing see-through pajamas and I can see the lamp through the side of her pajamas. My mother has set my rubber baby doll at the extreme foot of the bed, hoping I will wake when I roll onto it instead of fall. “You still like to sleep with dolls?” asks Jewel.

  “No.” I force my toe into the doll’s mouth. It is not quite a lie, but I have told my doll she will be mine forever.

  Instead of prayers, Jewel croons, “So-o-o, your teacher was raped, w-e-1-1, we don’t really care.” She flips off my light. I find my rubber doll by feel and stroke her stiff, hard-rubber face.

  It has been raining. The ground takes it and then gives it back up, standing water. Our shoes have been wet for two days and have sand specks dried into the white polish. We are all over inside into everything. What we do not know is that on this day my mother is hiding her birthday. Then at dinner she tells us she’s had her 35th birthday. “I didn’t want it anyway,” she says to my father, “but you did forget it.”

  “When did I forget it?” my father asks.

  “Today,” my mother says. She needs to blow her nose. But no one has a Kleenex. Except Jewel, who uses them to fill her first training bra. Jewel stretches the neck of her T-shirt and pulls out a Kleenex from what she calls her right cup. My mother laughs and tells Jewel, “You look like you’ve collapsed a lung.” She doesn’t want to use Jewel’s Kleenex. Jewel refuses to wear it again. No one wants it on the table. My mother looks angrily and then sickly at it. She has no choice but to blow. Her nose now sounds empty. Then she stretches the napkin longways and wrings its little neck. Jewel has to be the one to get up and carry it out of the dinette.

  We decide to finish fast and go play in the black grass of the back yard where the moon isn’t. My father follows us. “Tomorrow early, get flowers for your mother,” he says. He gives me the exact name of the arrangement. In the moist back yard, he makes me turn my chin up at him to read his lips. He’s not sure of my memory. He gives me money between a paper clip. I promise not to forget.

  When he steps out of our dark, Jewel asks me, “Don’t you get it yet? He still doesn’t want to give your mother flowers, he’s making you give them to her.” When she slits her eyes to laugh, I slip away.

  The next day Jewel and I take the hot spidery bridge to downtown and I hand the florist my father’s words and money. I remember my mother’s nose when she doesn’t want to blow it. When we get home, my mother takes the flowers in their paper lace collar. She doesn’t inhale the flowers, but she blows on our bridge windburns to cool us. Then my father comes home and says, “A nosegay for you,” to my mother. “No,” she says, “Gia called it a nose gauge.” They laugh together, but when it dies my father tiptoes out of the room. He smiles around the house but he is staying too careful.

  In a few days we are up in the tiny raw wood attic investigating for something forbidden. The wood we are on is a rough fur of splinters. Jewel and I are too excited to be careful because we have to sneak fast. I breathe hot air out of my mouth and the same air back into my nose. We want to find the box of dresses my mother wore when they danced together before I was born. She won’t even let me touch those dresses. We want to put them on and play house in rhinestone straps and black eyelet and black sheers.

  The dresses are gone. The box is gone. Jewel doesn’t care because she’s hurt her fingers. I’ve hurt my fingers, too.

  Mother finds us on our beds with needles trying to work out our fine splinters. “What are you two sewing? Your own skin?” I blurt out, “Where are the dresses I’m not supposed to play in?” She tells. She has given them to that skinny Myrna who works with my father.

  After dark, when the breeze reverses and Florida cools off, she surprises my father with what she’s done. “You made me eat and get fat.” I can see that my mother is not fat—merely grown-up.

  One-sided conversations excite Jewel, who has been painting her toenails in the living room; some of her toes are stuck together. She whispers to me, her voice thin as a stem, harsh as a broom, “Don’t you know that Myrna is your father’s girlfriend?”

  Dark drops in front of my eye. I brush at my hair, thinking it has fallen in my face. “How could you know that?” I ask as I bend over her toes. “You only saw her one day last week.”

  “You shut your eyes and sleep at night. I stay awake and listen. You ought to be more nervous.”

  My father’s breath saws across me to Jewel. “What did you say, Jewel?” She grunts. But I think my father has heard because he leaves the room in his beautifully clean and pressed clothes, his pants flicking at his legs.

  We pull Jewel’s polished toes apart. Jewel crosses her legs and counts her naked toes. I don’t hear how many. A funny soft cloth seems to be wiping my eardrums clean.

  Our house can’t get to sleep tonight. Jewel and I are in bed in the dark. The attic fan kicks on. The refrigerator makes ice, pushes it, drops it. The tap drips hot water, I know. A night bird, not a singer, shrieks.

  Then sound is in our house that gets behind my eyes and claws. It sits Jewel up in bed. “My God! Who screamed?”

  My mother has screamed, “Let Myrna wear them.”

  “She and I work together.” My father’s voice. “You be careful!”

  Don’t they know where I am? That I’m here, listening. Jewel’s shadow lies against the wall, a dry paper doll.

  Now the house doesn’t make a sound. “Why—why don’t you leave me?” he asks.

  “Because you love me,” she answers.

  My heart runs on high, thin toes. The dark has another sound now. It’s a pair of bird wings folding, stretching, and being preened. I say to Jewel, “Sometimes I’m afraid my father will get hurt.”

  “Don’t you know,” she says, “it’s your mother that you should worry about?”

  All day, something hurts my stomach like I have taken in what my body cannot handle. My mother and father won’t look at each other, and when he nears her she jumps a little, and for his part, he will not eat her special banana pudding. A pain climbs and scratches and swings inside me all day. I practice piano standing up because it feels awful to sit. I am getting ready for my first lesson with my teacher since her rape.

  Late afternoon, I am wet between my legs. Cousin Jewel is busy stretched out on a chaise wearing my jewelry. In the bathroom I pick up my summer skirt and look. I don’t have to turn on a light; I am bright red. I rush to tell Jewel. I need to give her this news. “Look, I’m wet as paint.” I lift my skirt.

  She springs up, the chaise webbing snaps its fingers under her.

  Then I say, “Have I lost my virginity?”

  “Who told you that one?” says Jewel, and then she runs from me.

  I give chase. “I got it first. I can explain it to you.”

  She tells me abruptly to shut up.

  “It feels like a baby already inside,” I shout to her, but I can’t catch her. I chase her into the back yard. I run her into the flowers. Though the yard isn’t fenced, Jewel runs only so far and then back, never leaving the privacy of our yard.

  My mother stops me because she says you shouldn’t chase a guest. “What could make you two not get along?” she asks. There is wet laundry on the line and I stand near it. My mother likes for the breeze to whip it dry.

  “Look.” I lift my skirt.

  “That’s ugly, put down your skirt.” My mother speaks softly. Still her voice makes the back yard air ring. “Damn Jesus. Goddamn Jesus to hell,” my mother says. “The damn piano teacher gets raped on a bicycle and scares the period out of you.” She leaves on the heels of her thought with me. She half turns, remembering, and says into her shoulder, “Jewel, stop whirling like a dervish. What an idiot my sister’s child is. Always thought so; never could take her for long or short.”

  Inside the house she gives me the white thing. “Do you know about this?”

  I try to rhyme “administration, ministration, ministe
r, menustration.”

  “My God, Gia.” She tells me, to make herself feel better, “I would be so happy if you never get married.”

  Outside, when I’m together again, I can see Jewel has put on socks to protect her legs. I call to her because she won’t get near, and I tell her I’m wearing a sanitary pad like the one I tried to look up in the dictionary. “Now I’m not making up the answers. It fits and feels like I’m wearing my bicycle seat.” I laugh, but it’s hard to do.

  Jewel says, “You’re terrible. But I don’t want to go back home and leave you. I’m sorry you were snooping in dirty words and got your period. I don’t want to go, but they’ll make me go now.” She adjusts her socks.

  My mother and father say, “We must make her feel welcome and then get rid of her.” They hurry into the back yard to play with her. She plays ball with them in her dress and socks. She holds out the lap of her skirt and they throw the ball into it. That night, after I get used to my period being with me, I feel better; I put my hands against my face and my heart pounds only in the heels of my hands.

  The inevitable phone call is made. My mother makes herself do it and holds onto me for support, she says, and rubs the hair on my arm the wrong way. She says, “We think Jewel should be out of this. Gia’s piano teacher has been raped and what with Gia starting her period, there’s been so much.” I take my arm away and excuse myself to go ease up the extension in the next room.

  My mother’s sister is saying, “Well, that’s why I sent her. You know how much Jewel’s been through. And me, too, so much, what with my foul divorce and my foul life with him and him being her lousy father. Me, too. I was just, well, beating her every day. You know? Put her back on the bus. I don’t want the poor thing in it. She’s practically pulled out her eyelashes over my divorce; she sheds them in the ashtray and you know I smoke. And did she do this there, did you hear her grunt—little grunts? She grunts because she says she can’t think of what to say anymore.”