Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  The edge of the grave mounds high. I put Smokey in and let him go. I bury him in the mantle.

  Ms. Parks pushes with bare feet gentle as hands and lets the edges down around our dog. I put the lid on and poke the yard back with the sharp shovel. There is a soft spot, a new grave.

  Dusk dulls, coming in on us fast. I can see only one color, yellow: leaves, a flower against the wall of her house, and the draining color of sunlight on my boots. A bird drifts down through the air and slides behind leaves of a tree.

  Ms. Parks says, “I saw you peeking. I don’t look like a serious person. My mouth is too small.” I had noticed that she had a shallow mouth. “I am scared to death of things. But I do think about them. I’m a good listener, are you?” Looking past us, she says, “You know, I’ve already had a hysterectomy. I made a bad baby, the doctor said it ought to be taken. I got all torn up, you see.” A fine mist comes from her lips, hard for her to say. “I’m empty.” She points to her belly button. “Well, not really. It just feels that way sometimes.”

  I give back the sharp shovel and say thank-you. A few words brim. Ms. Parks says, “See you,” to both of us. Leaving, I wade in my boots up on my toes so they won’t break.

  I let the car roll the short way back down the drive.

  The dog shakes her stomach and then her hips, and then leads Ms. Parks, careful of her feet, back inside.

  Tyler says, “I like Ms. Parks. For an adult.”

  I guide the car home, center it in our garage, draw in the limbs of the tree in a pot, wrap them into each other, and lock our door. In the kitchen, we are in the stone silence of Tyler doing his homework. He leans on the table and chips away at it, whispering his answers.

  This long day is leaving me so tired that maybe I will be peaceful. I shake off my boots and the rest of me hurts. I fiddle with dinner and watch Tyler and feel the empty corners in both of us. We are missing things. I look out to where Smokey had lain for the day. I miss Smokey, whom I only knew in his death. My sadness cracks like an egg; I do miss my former husband. I miss his jokes, his help, his care, and the way he would look so far into what I tried to say. He is part of who I have become and part of who Tyler is. Even when there is no chance of love, tenderness can keep rising.

  I swallow. Tears lick down my throat.

  “Quit crying or I’ll laugh at you,” Tyler says. He won’t look up from his homework. He pinches hard to his ballpoint. “Things come in cycles.” His voice, too small, sings high in sarcasm. “That’s what you tell me, you know.” The ink on his homework runs, it looks like the color of his eyes has spilled. Trying not to cry but to see, he pushes his face close to the paper.

  An ugly wrinkled Kleenex is in my back pocket. I pass the Kleenex to him. “You gave me a used Kleenex, Mom.” It makes him snort with laughter.

  I blot his eyes and his homework. Outside, the leaves blow and sound like paper.

  My headache is so big it goes in my temple and comes out my chest. Tyler gives me a one-finger test. “You’re warmer than your temperature, Mom.” My stomach tightens and pulls. I realize I am not getting sick from new boots. This is nothing I’ve done to myself. My period has begun. My grief for this dead dog and other permanently missing things roars forth with my period.

  Nothing is static. Things evolve. The natural outcome of caring is grief.

  Cycles. I am almost believing it myself.

  the night instructor

  Drewanne hurried over. Her father, David, had bought another present for himself, and her mother and father were fighting about it. It was a boat that was due tomorrow, and her mother, called Honey because it was David’s name for her, was afraid of water. Honey felt unsafe on anything that floated. David said the boat was the biggest prize ever and that he’d earned it. Honey said he didn’t need one because he drove their car like a boat. That was when she’d started riding in the back seat with her eyes closed and taking seasick medicine with her.

  The jokes were on the outside; on the inside the family wasn’t funny. They played out jokes, and that was dangerous. “I don’t like to watch you anymore,” Honey had said, riding around Daytona with him driving, her in the back seat, eyes closed. She kept saying, “You ordered a boat. We’re not a swimming family. We’ll drown.”

  “Sailors don’t have to be swimmers,” he’d said.

  “We all hate water,” she’d said.

  “I love what I hate,” he’d said.

  Then she’d close her eyes and let the Dramamine do the thinking.

  They lived under the influence of water, a small spit of land between ocean and river—Daytona stuck growing older in a beautiful spot. The streets had the same tiny old Spanish and tropical houses that Drewanne had passed all her life, webs in their stucco, painted the colors of sucked candy. There were spurs in the grass and sand drifts on the sidewalks. Daytona could not move. Other tiny fish towns lay in wait at its edges. Drewanne’s parents were now living as high as they dared go because of hurricanes, fourth-floor condo. They had glass walls, bathroom-sized balconies, and carpeting so deep you felt like you were walking on chairs, and everything they had had a timer and a buzzer on it.

  Currently, Drewanne lived where she felt safe and hidden, in the rental side room of an old house of a huge family. It had its own entrance with sand like loose sugar creeping across the floor and one window crammed with air-conditioning whose trembling respiration made her feel like she was living in her own lungs. When she over-cooled and got to the point of icy, she would say, “When will I ever get enough of myself?” and open the airtight door to sit on an outdoor step, knees to her mouth, like a child trapped in a growth spurt.

  She liked to listen to the laundry on the line of the huge family. They always had something that needed washing, and it flapped like birds preening. She’d watch the dog next door, who was always busy burying things.

  She never had a pet and she never in her life bought a whole tank of gas at one time. That was about commitments. She did, however, watch out sideways, while driving, for roadkills; she was in sympathy with them. “There’s Pain and Terror One,” she’d say quietly. Then, shortly, on the little crumbly Daytona roads, “Pain and Terror Two.” Sometimes that was followed by “A Half Pain and Terror” for one that had been there a few days without being delivered from its death place. “And I can’t do anything about it but feel,” she’d say. All she could do was watch the road and say, “It’s God I’m seeing,” and not hit anything herself, though her eyes were funny and sometimes pieces of her sight were missing. Maybe it helped their deaths that she felt and counted them, a terrible hobby. Maybe it helped, though she couldn’t for the world think how.

  She was a little nervous now, and she felt it in her eyes. A piece of the truck in front of her came off but didn’t fall. It was something her eyes did, the sign of her affliction. But the affliction from what she couldn’t be certain.

  In the guest parking lot, she crossed the speed bumps and rang them. Her wallet pulled down one pocket. She hid her glasses in the other; she tried not to wear them except for seeing. She got her Styrofoam box of dinner and carried it tightly. She knew the wind from the water would take life and pull at it.

  Her hair was wound up in back, twisted. Done in anticipation of the wind and it might make her sight better. It did keep her awake; she was a night instructor.

  She had done, again, what was contrary. She had ordered a takeout seafood dinner when her taste buds were set for breakfast. The Styrofoam was hot like it was still cooking. In a minute she realized she was carrying it too low. Under her clothes between her legs felt like the soft spot in a baby’s head; heat made it keep pulsing. She knew her pubis was a mess, disheveled as a small bird’s nest. She’d just gotten up, her lone sex dreams weren’t really finished; she’d given up on her boyfriend—he was disgusting and had a daylight job anyway. She was a night person and got up while he was sleeping.

  She washed her hair today as she always did. She couldn’t stand the touch of day-o
ld hair, it made her cross. The breeze now moved through the little tunnels of fresh-washed fringe, hair broken at the ends.

  The elevator was occupied. She knew the man, a friend of her father. He squinted at her. He didn’t have a free hand; he only had one arm and he was pushing the door button. The one-armed neighbor was as close as her father got to anyone. “Is that you?” he said. “Drewanne Aubrey? I just bought your father’s electronic piano.”

  “He must have given up teaching himself music,” Drewanne said, amazed. “Another new thing gone. Last week, wasn’t it the hot-air popcorn popper?”

  The one-armed man said, “You know he’s not a good loser.”

  “Before that, an exercise bicycle. It was a Life Fitness bike. He’d gotten it up to a hill profile.”

  “Just trying to get pleasure, Drewanne.”

  “But he’s tried everything. A siege of buy, sell, nothing’s striking him right.”

  “Well, I heard him and he couldn’t play music,” said the one-armed man. “It’s an electronic piano and he’s an electrician, and it didn’t work out. I’m teaching myself. I have to play twice as fast as anybody to have musical talent. I thought it ran in your family—talent. Puzzles me. Don’t you teach at night? Keyboard, as I remember?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Computer.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That was the problem.”

  The little room of the elevator bobbled up a column between connecting halls, really breezeways which stayed open to the water and air and made it feel like the edge of a diving board.

  He held the button on open again so the elevator floor wagged beneath them. She turned to the side as if sunlight were sharp to step into. He squinted good-bye at her. She knew sunlight almost erased her.

  At the door to her parents’ she knocked under the number with the only available part of her body, her funny bone. Her “It’s me” had an odd ring to it. So instead of an opened door, she got Honey’s eyeball at the security hole. The center of her eye looked busy as an anthill.

  “It’s you,” said Honey, unplugging the door against the breeze. “Aren’t you ever going to buy any clothes?”

  “World’s oldest clothes on a living body. Honestly, I know it,” Drewanne said.

  “Carrying a Styrofoam container instead of a pocketbook. Don’t tell me you’re going to actually eat in front of us. As a child you hid to eat, so we always ate without you, and by habit just now we’ve gone ahead, though we ate separately. But I left you a share of mine, you can nibble.”

  “Thanks,” Drewanne said, “though I don’t eat after people. Where’s Daddy?” she asked, listening as if there would be an answer.

  Honey didn’t think David was an interesting subject. “Oh, keeping walls between us, I guess.”

  The condo kitchen was tiny. It fit around Drewanne’s waist, a space saver. She unlocked the Styrofoam lid and poked her face close to see how fresh the stuff was she’d bought. “It smells like the seafood has been having sex in there,” she said.

  “Like David. He has to smell everything, too,” said Honey. A peevish expression pulled at her lipstick.

  Drewanne had a sudden urge to lay a fist to the side of her own head, to take her own dinner away from herself, bury it all in her mother’s freezer. Honey didn’t put up with throwaways; she didn’t approve of garbage. If you had garbage, you needed to freeze and save it.

  “About the clothes. They are looking dangerously worn.”

  “Honey, clothes aren’t car tires, and any day now I may gain weight and not fit them.”

  “You talk so much,” said her mother, “that’s what keeps you skinny.”

  Drewanne was stuck with hush puppies like hot rocks in her hand. “If I keep walking while I eat,” she said, “I can finish.” The dining room table gleamed like dark water. Flat skirts of wallpaper spread out in a huge pattern. A soft sofa looked like it floated. A lone ashtray held everything but ashes. It was filled with loose threads curly from unraveling, a paper clip pulled straight to make a poker, things that could be dropped and found on a carpet. There was a tiny key flattened as if it had been run over by a car; Drewanne stole it and put it down in her pocket. She liked finding things rather than being given them.

  The room was such pale colors, Honey looked like she was wearing silk slipcovers. Her hair had been hennaed. “It’s not dye,” she said. “Henna is a vegetable. And I’m watching you, Drewanne. If you stand with your legs crossed, you’ll look bigger. You know—one foot slightly ahead of the other?”

  “Oh,” Drewanne said all of a sudden, “dinner is so tiring.” She drew up tight. “I’ve got too much inside to eat right now.”

  “All you’ve got inside is organs.”

  “And each one makes me feel too full. I ate on Thursday, so I still owe.”

  “You’re not a bank, Drewanne.”

  She ate so little, she almost didn’t have a face. Her profile was fragile; any expression seemed big enough to break it.

  “Well, you eat standing up. Your nerves can’t let your body use it. Relax.”

  “I can’t,” Drewanne said. “I don’t have that much of a sense of humor.”

  “Keep your legs together when you walk, so you won’t look so painfully thin. Where’s that blouse I gave you for your birthday? The one with the metallic threads. It made your whole face light up.”

  “Oh, I forget,” said Drewanne. “I’ll think of where it is in a minute.”

  “I mean you should be wearing it.”

  “Clothes are heavy, Honey. They make my skin feel like I’m a burn victim. I think it’s just being raised in Florida that did it. The whole state stings or bites you. We’re all saturated with heat.”

  Where was her beautiful blouse? She knew. She’d torn it up and scared herself. Anything that was special to her—presents—put her in an agony she couldn’t understand. That’s why she liked living in someone else’s little room, furnished mostly with unbreakable books and a whole family of strangers living behind her walls. Their eavesdropping kept her safe, and made her behave and live her private life like a careful guest. Who was she really—inside? If she thought too much, she had to slap herself for relief. Once, to change the subject, she’d tried scratching at her face as if it would come off. That was it—she didn’t approve of things inside her.

  “This condo’s too clean, Honey. There are no tweets, woofs, or meows. Pets are the nicest things.”

  “You talk silly half the day. Why must you continue that night job? Who wants to work the wrong way?”

  “But I’m an instructor for people who work at the right time,” said Drewanne. “Night’s the only time they can take my class.” She’d tried staying up all night so she wouldn’t be surprised by her dreams. “My dreams tell me secrets I can’t imagine. They get me into places I don’t know how I got there or how to get back. Don’t you dream anything, Honey?”

  “Not since I stopped sleeping with David,” said Honey. Late last month she’d started going into the guest room, down to bare ticking, not making up the bed. She’d wear the sheets in her sleep and then throw them into the laundry when she woke up. “It was his snoring.”

  “When did he start?”

  “Oh, he’s always snored,” said her mother.

  Often before Drewanne got to sleep, drowning herself in morning, night had already shaken her by her neck as she drove home, as if it were a big man hidden in the back seat behind her. It left a pit that stayed in her stomach—suddenly a space had been made in her. She’d peek into the rear mirror to see what she had imagined. She saw her own pupils with night in them waiting to get out. It was the pupils that marred her eyes; her irises were green as the sides of a fish tank. Surely there was something bad inside her that only her nerves remembered and her worry was a blind finger that kept searching. Her eyes felt nervous now; she had learned to hold them still by pressing them with her fingers. In front of her, her father’s footsteps had left white strokes on the carpet. She followed them. When she got
near her father’s door, she heard her mother say, “Ugh.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to be so mad at somebody and stay in the same house with him?”

  “I’m leaving. Sometime,” said Honey.

  “Hello,” Drewanne said when she stepped into his room suddenly.

  He was giving his face a little squeeze. “What?” he said.

  “Oh. What’s the matter with your face? Did you sleep wrong on it?”

  “I haven’t been sleeping. All afternoon, I’ve been at the boat slip watching them trim it up. My boat’s due tomorrow,” he said quietly. He didn’t sit down, but chose a bedroom chair and just nudged it. “The sun burned me on one side.”

  For a minute, the toe of her shoe came apart, pieces missing as she stood still. Then her pieces flocked together again. She tapped her chest as if she were typing a thought on it.

  “So why are you here?” asked David. “Is it your birthday?”

  “Just visiting,” she said.

  “I’ve got private things to do,” said David. “Don’t you come round here on your birthday?” His teasing could hurt her. It looked like it hurt him, too. “So you better go, I’m busy.”

  “You were just standing there holding your face on, Daddy.”

  “You’re not listening and leaving, right? Don’t you have any friends?” he asked. “Specifically boyfriends?”

  “Some boys like me cause I’m funny.”

  “And then what?”

  “They get tired of it.”

  He turned from her. “You hold on for dear life the wrong way. I told you that the other day, didn’t I? Well, I told somebody,” he said. “Who was it? I can’t remember. Oh, yes, I was talking to the wall.”

  She felt neck-deep in his embarrassment of her. Her fingers rooted for her glasses and she stuck them on; they clung to the sides of her nose as if they were afraid of falling.