Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  The house feels busy now. We go for a ride when we are supposed to be asleep in bed. My father, my mother in front with him, takes us to a place where I don’t think he can get us and our big white car through. The sides of the road are high with hard, full mounds of saw palmettos. Sand blows like clean smoke along the road. Jewel asks to stop ahead at the Silver Palomino Motel. In the roadside sand and ragged grass is a concrete horse outlined in neon. Jewel is very attracted. Since she is strong-willed, my father lets her have her way. The car gives sideways into the soft side of the road, and I hope my father can get us out. He lights his cigarette on the orange ring of the car lighter and laughs, “Careful, that’s a big horse.”

  Jewel and I go alone to approach the palomino. We check back toward the car. My mother and father have their hair together under the white cap of the top.

  “Well yes,” says Jewel, at the big concrete hindquarters. “It’s a male, a stallion.” There’s a reflecting pool, too, and water lilies and the reflections of our faces float on it. I put my hand deep down into the water and through my face.

  I’ve left a puddle of lily water on the concrete and Jewel stands in it to reach as high as she can for the staff of neon over the horse’s huge haunches. She gets it and moans, a quiet sound only I can hear. Then she does a funny thing with her pelvis. Kick, kick, kick, Jewel punches her pelvis forward. My high-pitched laughter does not break her concentration. Her body turns into a tongue that shouts without sound. I am jealous of her doing this. My mother is rushing toward us, each step sounding like she is stripping grass. Then Jewel breaks her hands up into the air; I clap wildly to celebrate.

  My mother rushes at Jewel. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Being electrocuted—don’t you know?” says Jewel.

  “Don’t give me that. Bump, bump, bump,” says my mother. “You were making fun of what we do.”

  “What do you do?” asks Jewel politely.

  My mother rattles breath around in her mouth.

  “It hurt me,” Jewel says. “I stuck to electricity and it ran all through my private places.” Her face has clear sweat on it like spit.

  “Let’s not ever tell how I looked being electrocuted,” says Jewel.

  My mother’s eyelid ticks like a pulse, and she agrees.

  When we get back in the car, we sit still. Small bugs fly in the car dome light. My father spins and rocks the car onto the weathered road. The bugs fly out with the breeze. My mother sits sideways, maybe so Jewel can’t stare at the back of her head.

  “Thank you for tonight,” Jewel says to herself. Her words fall down the front of her dress. Her teeth smile at me; they are moist.

  It is the morning that I’m losing my cousin and I’m in the dressing room with its perfume stains on the carpet. “Hurry,” my mother says. “Brush your teeth and blow your nose.” I find I can’t do both at the same time. She combs my hair. Jewel darts behind us and her smirk leaves a streak across the mirror. She says, “She cuts your meat at the table; you can’t tell time or comb your hair. And there are things you don’t know!” My mother catches her, waters down her head, and takes a spare to scrape at Jewel’s tea-colored hair. When she finishes, Jewel’s hair looks like it has been sewn on. “You made my hairdo hurt,” complains Jewel, and my mother sticks the teeth of the comb into the back of Jewel’s hair and lets her walk away with it riding on her.

  Finally Jewel shakes it off and my mother flings one hip out in an ugly way she has and leaves us. Jewel says, “I pretend that your mother is pretend.”

  On the way to the bus, Jewel insists on hanging her elbow out her window. My father puts on the air-conditioning anyway, so it is noisy in the car, a loud baffle under which I can talk. I’m in a hurry. I need to tell Jewel all the ugly things about me that I hide because I’m afraid to be so ugly alone. I try to tell her so she can take it away in her head. But my cousin won’t listen. “I can’t,” she says. “Listening is a waste of time.” She lets the wind blow in her ear.

  At the bus station, both of us grab at her old hard suitcase. Neither of us will let go, so we run raggedly, bumping it between us, to the waiting spot where the bus will come in, drip oil, and leave.

  When we settle, she thumps me on my head to make me think hard. “I don’t remember what my father looks like,” she says.

  “I do. I remember.”

  “Do I look like him?” she asks.

  “No,” I lie. Because I know her mother hates her father and so Jewel doesn’t want to be his image, she has to look like her mother.

  The bus comes, blowing its warning horn. Jewel is stuck on calling it a trumpet. She is the only one leaving town today.

  Without me, she is climbing up the steep bus steps. It sounds like she is walking in rubber shoes, but it’s the steps that are padded. I don’t take my eyes off of her; she stands sideways to me and I can see through the clear cornea of my cousin’s eyes. I never could hold her attention.

  Jewel is busy choosing a seat. The bus backfires a vivid metal blue cloud. My mother says, “Close your mouth, Gia, you’ll get cancer.” I keep waving good-bye, I can’t find Jewel. Finally, the bus driver waves good-bye to me.

  At night, my father and I take two fat parakeets from their outside cage and bring them in. We put them in my dollhouse and they go upstairs and downstairs and room to room for us. “Are you two playing house, dears?” my mother laughs at us. My father goes to the bathroom to get ready for bed, and I’ve got a rough sore throat from trying not to cry for somebody I see every half a year. I start to the kitchen for milk and meet my father again in the hall. He is in his stiff undershorts. “Night,” he says, oblivious that his fly is gaping open. I am as transfixed as if I’d sniffed pepper. I have something new to tell my cousin already. What I saw has shocked me more than what I had imagined. I saw hair.

  Next day, I stop talking so much and start thinking.

  The weather is dry; the grass sounds like a rug to walk on, the sky and the clouds are almost no color, and the air smells like Clorox. The dry heat gives my mother a temper. She listens to weather reports and taps the barometer till it breaks; she has lost her willpower to be nice.

  Alone I hunt the breeze, standing on the bridge and sitting on shaded benches. When I go home, my mother is ironing my father’s khaki pants. I begin to talk about the boys playing in the park. My mother says I’m boy crazy. She punishes me for looking at boys. She tells me to take off my top because it’s too hot. I tell her I’m too big now and she says I’m flat as an iron. She makes me take off my pretty top. I won’t walk around now, so I sit and my flat boy’s chest tingles with all that attention. Because she’s mad at me, my mother works the steam iron over the legs of my father’s pants and nails them so tight with the iron I doubt that he’ll ever get back in them.

  Next, she has an argument with my father. I mean he stands and takes it, looking out the same direction she is, on the porch. I knew it was about him and his sorry ways.

  She corners her eyes at me when I take up for him. “Your father is unmanageable.” She gets mad and wears her wedding ring on the wrong finger. She calls my father’s boss and gets my father fired. Myrna, the woman she’d given her clothes to, is accused of adultery with my father, but her husband stands by her anyway. Only my father lost.

  “I’ve broken your wings,” she tells my father. “Now you won’t fly.” My father receives his punishment and it’s true he doesn’t seem so good-looking. She has brought down my father. The problem is that we are a family, so we are all attached.

  Today, the air conditioner shivers like the nervous system of the church, cooling with used air. I am in the practice room. My piano teacher comes to me. I hand her what my mother has made me bring—cut flowers and a Hallmark occasion card, for her rape. She rubs the flowers against her face and twirls them into what had been her drinking water for when she went dry listening to me play. “I want to hear your fingers,” she says. I play on the table for control, then the piano. She holds
the card while I play with muscles that hurt inside my hands. “You try too hard,” she says. I want to wring my hands, but I wring my dress instead.

  The church’s air-conditioning shuts down. “Let’s just stop the lesson,” says my teacher.

  “We’re moving away,” I say, making sure I don’t tell her where.

  She reads the card. I see now that she needs glasses because she has to move her lips to read silently. She polishes the slick surface of the card along her dress. “Tell your mother they never caught him. Tell her your piano teacher’s father thinks your piano teacher got raped. But he tells your piano teacher that he knows he’s so old he makes up things.”

  The air conditioner does not come back on. She takes up my sheet music, and this time she keeps it. She slides her pocketbook out of hiding. “No!” I say. “My mother said he took all you had, every old thing, and you’ve still got your pocketbook.” Her hand hangs onto her neck. Under it is a blush spot, I think. Then I see it might be a gouge mark.

  “This time I won’t leave with you,” she says, and puts her pocket-book back in hiding. She helps me from the bench for good-bye. Where she’s touched my dress, it stays stuck to my skin. I try to smile ahead of myself.

  The halls are humid. The minister’s twins are exploring the church with a screwdriver that has a long yellow handle. They snicker air up through the hairs in their noses.

  “The church stinks,” they tell me.

  “Well, what do you expect? The air conditioner is on the blink.”

  The skin around their eyes stretches with laughter, and I know what they’re up to—they have shut the air-conditioning off. They love to break things.

  So we throw away, give away what can’t come with us, and sell, and move to Jax. My father sets out like it’s a Sunday drive for the town he only calls by its nickname. In Jax, we start over.

  My mother chooses the new empty house; it’s on the oceanside. In its rooms you can hear the waves rolling toward us. Even when she tells me that the tide is going out, it is rolling toward us. My mother gets too close to my father. Her eyelashes brush into his; I don’t know if she tickles. They are both really very beautiful, I realize.

  I sit with a whole box of stationery. I will send letters to Jewel. This is my first one. “We are in Jax now with the birds, but my mother won’t let them live outside. She’s put them in little cages inside with us. The piano came, too, so I will have to take lessons. But I don’t have to teach my mother. She found out she can’t learn.”

  Next thing I say is “Uncle Daddy,” to make Jewel laugh. (She has smiled at me, but laughing, of course, is something very different.) I underline and try. “Uncle Daddy has a night job loading trucks, so he’s tired all the time. I don’t like the looks of my father asleep in daylight. My mother says the words that scare me: his wings are broken. I will also tell you that my father has hair—only I bet you can’t guess where. We don’t go to church anymore. Instead, I go to the library. I don’t have to wonder about being baptized. Remember my rubber baby doll? She’s gone. Do you know where she might be? I told my father that in my prayers I wanted to ask God where she was. You know what? He said why don’t I shortcut it and just ask you. You may not even smile at my letter. But I always knew, Jewel, that you don’t take jokes. I don’t take jokes either.”

  What I can’t say yet—maybe next letter—is I’m afraid now. Under my blouse are “you know whats,” soft little marshmallows that will worry my mother if she finds out about them. I can’t say the word for it from my dirty list because now I know the meaning.

  something almost invisible

  The highway is never clean of sounds. We have moved to live by this road so we won’t be afraid. If anything happens to us, surely somebody will see it and stop. But I don’t expect anything to happen to my son and me. I am hoping for nothing new.

  Inside all morning, busy with silly things, I have come out for a change of light. I stand in my yard and part the grass with my new boots. I’m going to wear these boots till they fit. Can new shoes make you feel sick? A wide wave of sound washes by. A car has passed me, already out of sight down the highway. It is then that I see something up on the grass. I hope it is only a plastic garbage bag at the edge of the road and not anything that I will have to do something about. Tires keen, a car passes again. The black color ripples. It is fur.

  This morning, in the midst of my noiseless sleep, there were terrible sounds. I knew it was not my dream because I dream of nothing now but my favorite houseplants. I sat carefully on the edge of my bed, same side I’d gotten in on, and tried to wake up fully. It is bad luck to get up on the side you didn’t get in on. In the room across, I heard my son, Tyler, sit up on the only side he can. I’ve pushed his bed against the wall so he only has a good luck side.

  “Let’s go,” I called to Tyler. But then the sounds stopped. We thought it was good luck; it was such a short moment of sounds.

  I go up to whatever it is by the road. It is a dog, dead. I lean over fast to make sure that I don’t have to save it.

  It is dead. It does not look asleep. It looks tense, as if it were grinding its teeth in a determined moment. How much everything tries to keep living. Last year, I believed in determination.

  I have straightened back up too fast; the ground spins once. When Tyler gets home, he and I will edge into the neighborhood and find what family this dog belongs to, so they can bury him. Tyler knows all about our new neighbors, not me. I don’t like anybody right now.

  Since the dog can’t get hurt any more than he is, he can stay safely in my grass and I try to continue my day. Today is the day I send out clothes to John Hunter. His winter clothes are in boxes in my living room. He has stopped off by plane to leave me his summer stuff, taking just a few light, change-of-season clothes; he has always refused to carry heavy packages. I feel like he has left me holding his clothes for him by my fingertips while he goes out naked into the world.

  We have finally, after twenty years of living together, parted forever. It’s just the clothes we can’t work out. We have gotten through with the love, anger, joy, fulfillment, jealousy, and hate. I think. I met him when I was a promiscuous young girl and he was an orderly man. He always knew how much money he had in his pockets, carried a filled-out daily “to do” list, and knew the answer to everything or how to get it. I made fun of him for that. Now our marriage has left me not even wanting to think about sex. This worries me. I know what is going to happen—this will have to change, and I no longer like the feeling of change. All this has left me orderly and him promiscuous. John tells me he doesn’t even know what room he will wake up in next. He can’t find a rented room big enough for all the clothes he’s accumulated in our marriage. He has seventeen pairs of casual slacks alone. I think I have waited till I have too much to return. I pick up his stuff. I remember at the end how we kissed with closed mouths, and I sling his best stuff into the bottom of the box.

  Since we are not intimate, I do not do John Hunter’s washing anymore. I won’t do his socks. I refuse to touch the inside of his clothes. He gets hurt too easily. I’m afraid there will be stains from cuts. I fold his clothes flat and mail them, dirty. I tape and tie string carefully and will insure this package so John Hunter will not lose more things. He tells me he’s lost so much that he can’t find himself anymore.

  Pieces of my clothes are missing. In the shuffle, I wonder if John has them. At the very beginning of the separation, in the last wash, a pair of my underpants got stuck in John’s jeans by static cling. My son found them and pulled them apart. What if I had mailed that message? I laughed till my eyelids rolled over.

  I keep remembering favorite old tops. I have lefts and rights in shoes, but I need left-rights. My former husband tells me by phone to put my new boots in the oven till they get hot and then wear them till they give to my shape. Luckily, I think he’s crazy.

  Divorced from everything, we are all living in slow motion, not at home anywhere. Tyler is trying the hardest,
riding his bike round and round the circular roads and cul-de-sacs of the suburbs, meeting all the neighbors. I tell him I’m not going in there. It’s a maze, roads and houses repeating. I live on the highway; I stay aloof. I like the keening of cars in my head, the running ribbon of bumpy echoes. Because of the constant roll and roar, I feel our house is traveling, and I like that. I am trying hard not to arrive.

  I have explained to Tyler, sitting on the edge of my seat and keeping my face calm, how bad it feels when you know it has to stay bad for a while. Adults know that even when something feels so wrong it needs to be left feeling wrong. Tyler’s eyes look only hazel—no expression. He is getting very sophisticated now. I can tell because he’s started saying ha, ha, ha to everything I say.

  I breathe dust motes and work at clothes. Finally, elementary school is over for today. Muffin, the toasted-looking, lonely dog next door, runs his fence line, walks on his hind legs, and in his hoarse warf warf tells me Tyler is coming down the street. Sometimes this dog digs himself out of his caged yard, only to come up in the neighbor’s caged yard.

  A day in the fourth grade leaves Tyler with one hip pocket inside out, a white flag fluttering behind him, not caring, thinking of other things. He is preoccupied. He cares about spiders, crickets, birds, spelling bees, truck parts, and people’s feelings.

  I wait while he pets all he can reach of Muffin, his nose, then I meet him on the hot grit of the drive. “That sound that woke us this morning,” I tell him. “I think it was another dog you know.” I always listen to our conversations carefully because he puts in so much detail: the exact names, locations, and what whoever looked like at the time. He helps me find my way.

  Tyler stops. The white toes of his sneakers are gnawed from using them as quick brakes for his bike.

  “I didn’t go outside today till an hour ago. He’s on the edge of the grass. I’ve been sending away your father’s clothes,” I say.

  His book bag hangs by one strap. He drops it, and we go slowly toward the road and the dog. “Is it that dog named Smokey?” I ask before we are close enough. Oh, I didn’t need a dead dog today.