Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  Her mother stretched and touched the raised oil paint of one of the paintings she’d bought of foreign places, places she’d never wanted to go. “Pretty,” she said, “but I’ve never needed to be in different places. I only want to stay home. But nobody else does.”

  The tomcat in the kitchen knocked something over and rolled it.

  Sophie’s father was still sitting, pinned by his wife’s position in front of him. “She’s going as far as she can go,” he said. “She’s going all the way up North.”

  “I could never trust my family to stay with me.”

  “Friday, I’ll be in New York,” Sophie said.

  Her mother popped out the staples at the top of her department store package. “I’ve bought something.” Both Sophie and her father looked apprehensive. They dreaded her mother’s choices. “Today I’ve started changing Sophie’s room for her.” From this package she spread out new curtains. They were as delicate and short as dresses. “You can see through them,” her mother said and blushed. She was always trying to see what Sophie looked like, blundering into the bathroom to catch her in the tub, interrupting her at the beach where she walked the water line in a tiny dry bathing suit, happening to knock her head up against the bedroom window while weeding in the thin line of flowers. The doctor who delivered Sophie had told her mother that she was perfectly shaped at the moment of birth. Her mother was trying to confirm that that had stayed true. It was a conflict in her mother’s character because Sophie knew that her mother didn’t even like having a body herself and that she hated to confront her own body in the bath.

  “Can you get your money back?” Sophie asked. “Curtains aren’t not-returnable like buying underwear, are they?”

  Her mother went down the hall to the closed door to Sophie’s room. “I’m going to pretty up your room and nothing’s going to stop me,” she said. She threw the door back.

  Sophie shuddered. “Don’t. I’m afraid if you put anything new in there, it’ll change my personality.”

  Posters on the door and bedroom walls rattled like beans in a jar; they were warped and swaybacked, thumbtacked at the corners. The posters Sophie collected were of rock stars, showing their exaggerated and excitingly bad looks. She got them of any rock star, it didn’t matter who, it was only their magnified selves for which she was hungry. Against the center of the wall was her dead grandmother’s bed, a monstrosity that Sophie rode to sleep every night, headboard and footboard thick as walls, the whole thing without screws or nails, pegged so that it creaked like a raft, oak, yellow streaks running through earth-dark wood, polished by her mother weekly with a glove and beeswax.

  “It’s as if,” her mother said, “you have something hidden in this room that makes you want to leave, and all I have to do is find it.”

  Sophie’s father had followed and was peering into her bedroom, too. Sophie leaned against the hall wall, put a foot up on it, working one finger back and forth in her mouth. Anxiety squeezed her at what her mother might find, though she knew absolutely nothing was hidden in there but a paper wad that only scared her.

  “This bedroom looks like it belongs to a group rather than one girl,” her mother said. “I’m just going to keep emptying out your stuff and filling it with beautiful things of mine that will look so much better that you’ll learn to love them, isn’t that so?”

  Her mother needed only to ask questions, she didn’t want the answers. She turned again to Sophie. “What’s making you want to leave home? Is it because your father gets so many girlfriends? How do you suppose he gets so many without trying?”

  She talked as if Sophie’s father were not there. Politely, he stepped into the living room and looked out a window.

  Her mother’s arms crossed in tight satisfaction. “His girlfriends give him pills, drugs, and he puts them up to his mouth by the handful. He takes how many fall in and lets the rest spill and he leaves them all over the floor of the car so I can see his evidence of how loved he is.”

  Her father filled his cheeks with what must have been warm air and waited for her mother to finish. First he seemed tense with the pleasure of hearing his girlfriends talked about, and then he looked just lost in the pleasure of standing in sunshine.

  Sophie started swaying in a tight little rhythm, rolling worry like a small marble in her head. I hope my life isn’t going to be more dramatic than my acting career, she thought. She felt faintly off-balance and wondered briefly what in the world normal was.

  “Do you know that I try not to feel?” her mother said. “I have trained myself to never get hungry. Just to eat when it’s time.”

  “That’s what she’s doing to me,” Sophie’s father said. He licked his bottom lip and put another brand of cigarette in his mouth. It stuck to his lip and he smoked it, When he put it out in an ashtray, the cigarette broke in half.

  “Your father falls in love with a lot of other women that aren’t us. But I’m glad that they’re always white trash.”

  “I wish I could see just one,” said Sophie.

  “They don’t speak English,” said her mother. “Sometimes they speak Cuban.”

  He could never resist telling his wife about his women. He’d told her two were from the bayou. They spoke Cajun, he said. Two sisters. But by last week he’d tired of them, worn out his impulse and he’d lost the two sisters and didn’t have any girlfriends. Sophie had heard snatches of his talking to her mother during the nights so that it was stitched into the peculiar dreams she had. For a while now, with no girlfriends, he would be more interested in baking himself chocolate cakes. His chocolate cakes were made with butter, dark chocolate, and strong coffee; they were so rich only he could eat them.

  Her father lit a new cigarette. A string of smoke rose straight up without a curl in it. “Excuse me,” he said. “Has anybody in this house ever heard the word ‘seduced’? I keep getting seduced. Bad women can make hell for good men.”

  From the living room, they saw the cat in the kitchen jump on the cold stove.

  “Now let’s get it all back together,” he said. “Let’s go out and get barbecue for dinner.”

  Sophie put on loose sandals and went out to be the first in the car, roll down her window, and sit and wait. She yanked the car door open and bent, always getting in head first. The minute her head was down, she whirled back and threw up on gravel—the smallest bit, yellow as dog vomit. She hid it with dirt. She cleaned up with a tissue hot from the glove compartment. Then she sat in the back seat waiting.

  At the barbecue joint they ate chopped pork on buns at a bare table with the jukebox music saturating their conversation. The sauce was wet and warm and sweet on all of Sophie’s fingers.

  In the sand parking lot, her father gave her rumpled money from the bottom of his back pocket, a lot of big bills wadded like Kleenex.

  For the first time she thought: are they going to really let me go?

  That night her parents went to bed early, the same time she did. The bed in their room made light bird sounds, the bed and the box springs. Then Sophie heard her father cry out, a child’s short helpless sound. She knew it had to do with her mother receiving him.

  Later she woke and heard her mother in the kitchen. Her mother had started to eat. She had begun eating during the night.

  Still later in the dark, her mother was trying to wake her, patting her. Sophie wasn’t back on earth yet. The flat mattress didn’t feel real under her. But time was speeding up, picking up speed from the slow, turgid time of sleep, and the moon had moved to this side of the house.

  Her mother looked funny in the light from the sharp-horned moon and shadow. Her face looked peeled. She whispered, “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want to be here with your father alone. Something awful will happen to me when you go. He’s so angry at me. Secretly. He’s secretly angry at me. What can I do to stop what stays secret? There’s no way I can protect myself.” Her mother’s lips trembled. “I could go with you. It’s an ideal time for me to leave him, too.”
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br />   “No,” Sophie said. “He said you can’t ever leave him. He’d come to New York, too. We’d all be up there.”

  “Then we’d have to get an apartment and take the cat and dog. Your dog might live longer with us all together.”

  “No fair about my dog.”

  “But you do know she has an enlarged heart.”

  Sophie fell into a bad sleep planning how to punish her mother for wanting to leave her father. She would tear up all her father’s prophylactics. That would make her mother sorry. She dreamed of her father’s three secrets in the drawer: the prophylactics, the close-up glasses, and the Detective Special with the safety. She woke. Wasn’t it dangerous to have some secrets that seemed to have no use? Again and again, she heard the back door open. All night someone was up letting the tomcat in and out.

  For two mornings Sophie woke up tired. Her dog heeled but she wouldn’t look at it. Late in the next day she was ready to go. She wore a limp dress and carried two new suitcases of half-clean clothes and a used edition of The Complete Shakespeare, which she did not understand but had recited back to herself against her bedroom wall and which she loved because it was nothing familiar but all different. She told her parents, “I may not—yet—be a great actress because I think I try too hard. And I don’t listen to the other actors.” Her last stop was the kitchen.

  In his favorite good clothes, dressed except for choosing his shoes, her father had been throwing away all day getting ready to take her to the West Palm airport; he’d given himself the day off from work. “I can’t go up there with you,” he said, in his sock feet, “but I have this Cuban boy, he works for me at the store in the back putting out stock. He’s got a lot of family all over New York City. I’ll send this Cuban boy up there. He can come see you for me.”

  “What did you say? Don’t you dare send a boy,” she said and stopped breathing, hoping he wouldn’t answer.

  He didn’t. His lips heaved with disappointment. He sulked and wouldn’t talk. His eyes were tender, sore looking, as if he had been hurt in his eyes.

  Sophie drank a lot of milk standing up. Her mother poured it for her. “From the beginning I had formula specially made for you,” she said. “As a baby you never would nurse.”

  Oddly, wearing a dress and carrying a pocketbook (her mother’s, borrowed) made her feel like she was a small child again. She was wearing heavy platform shoes.

  Her dog stayed in the kitchen, chin down on the floor, legs spread out behind her. A film crossed the dog’s eyes. The dog blinked, the film lifted.

  When the back door was open for Sophie to leave, the tomcat came in and smelled the dog. There was a natural split in the cat’s top lip leading up to his nose. That split separated now so he was able to smell the dog better. Then the tomcat curled up to the dog.

  Her mother said, “When you’re not here, they will finally love me.”

  The Complete Shakespeare filled the borrowed pocketbook, made it heavy. She put the straps over her shoulder and carried both suitcases. She stepped outside. The sun was already low as the telephone pole. For a second, she was light-blind.

  They got her to the airport in West Palm in time. Taking her there, her father was driving too fast and crying, driving as fast as when he’d rushed her to the pink stucco Fort Pierce Hospital with her fever so high that a change in light and shadow would make her scream. Then in a week she’d recovered from whatever it had been that the doctor couldn’t figure out, and her father forgot about it.

  At the parking lot they walked the path ringed by royal palms. The air rushed with the sounds of jets on the other side of the terminal. The high oar-shaped fronds of the royal palms were motionless. Electric lights planted in the soil at their bases turned the palms Jell-O green, showing off Florida to people for whom Florida would be strange.

  Up the escalator on the mezzanine, her father felt his nose and said, “What’s happening to us?” and he gave her more money and said he would mail her even more.

  Now she saw he was full of money, just not interested in counting it. He pulled it out from every pocket, dry freckles of tobacco caught up on everything.

  “I’m not feeling so good,” her father said. “This leaving is making me nervous. I wish it would hurry and be over before I get sick.”

  “Heart attacks are on my side of the family, they’re not on yours,” said Sophie’s mother. She turned, quickly looking Sophie over. “I just hope they dress the way you do up there.”

  Sophie made a cat’s cradle with the long string handles of her pocketbook. “It’s hard to be ready to go and not be leaving yet,” she said.

  “Nothing is soothing me,” said her father.

  “Don’t forget to change your clothes up there. And your bedclothes,” said her mother.

  “Too late,” said Sophie. “Don’t teach me anything now.”

  Her father said, “Did you shave under your arms? You have dark hair under your arms, you get a blue shadow, don’t you?”

  “I won’t raise my arms, I promise I’ll keep my arms down.”

  Feeling in one pocket, her father found a throat lozenge and shelled it out of its tight foil.

  Sophie was both excited and in pain. In the minutes left, she didn’t want to listen to her father finish the lozenge. She was having trouble with the milk she’d drunk.

  He choked down the lozenge whole and asked her shyly, “What name did you use for your ticket? I’ll go get it. Don’t be sorry.” He blushed. “For a long time I’ve known you make up different names for yourself. Which one of them did you use?”

  “Today I’m Sophie Schuyler.”

  “Your real last name is the one that I gave you, and it’s the one you keep dropping off. It’s okay. I’m good for a joke when I understand the joke.” He took away with him the present of two suitcases and went for the ticket.

  Before she could be asked if she was afraid of planes, she said, “I sure should be all right. I’ve done the Loop-the-Loop at the fair all my life.”

  They were both so uncomfortable. Her mother was taking shallow breaths and with her nervous energy pacing on frail thin heels. “I ought to spank you for this,” she said. Sophie had only been spanked once in her life, with a newspaper, for drinking too much Coca-Cola. “You realize, I’ve never gone a day away from home; never left you in my life. I’ve stayed beside you constantly since you were born. Other parents only want their kids to stay out of their way. I thought it was important to always be with you.”

  The pressure of a laugh, the jelly of it, was shaking in Sophie.

  Dangling on the front of her mother’s thin voile dress were, huge and pendulous, a silly pair of white earrings. “Your leaving is as much as I can take, Sophie. I don’t feel up to talking to you now. But you can call me on the telephone after you’re there.”

  Again her mother had sought relief from the grip of her earrings. Simply to say “Mother, you’re wearing them in the wrong place for being in public” was not possible. If Sophie mentioned it, she would humiliate her mother.

  The sky had turned into night as slick and black as paint. At the tail ends of the taxiing strips, the planes were almost invisible, blinking lights shooting off and dropping.

  Sophie thought, at least some things she and her parents didn’t know how to do made them safe. None of them knew how to be physically casual so none of them would kiss good-bye; kissing raised the family hackles. Tiny nerve pains crossed her skin.

  Coming back, trying to read the fine print on the ticket, her father looked almost sad. “Things are just damn wrong,” he said. “It’s been four days since I’ve been happy. It’s upsetting my system not to be happy.” He didn’t smoke, he coughed softly, took out a new white handkerchief and put it to his lips. “Checking for blood,” he said. “I’m having too many dreams, and that can make you nervous. I’m tired of appearing in my own dreams.”

  “My goodness,” Sophie’s mother said. “You can’t have a dream unless you appear in it.”

  “Bu
t I dream I shoot myself from close up and miss.”

  The still air was ringing with rising planes. “It’s time for Sophie to go.” He seemed excited now. “If she’s going to go, she ought to go early.”

  Sophie went down on one knee, touched it to the floor so she wouldn’t fall.

  “Be damned,” said her father, barely audible, but the veins in his face bulged. “Are you going no farther—then faint?”

  She felt his small neat dry hand. He was drawing her up to her feet.

  Holding herself politely away from him, so politely that not even he would notice, she was scared and certain that this time, to seal the act of her going away, this time he would get too close and that his body against her would feel angry and sharp as a broken shell.

  “I better try New York out.” She sprang forward, tripping over her mother’s feet, almost being thrown by them, crunching heavily over her mother’s open-toed shoes that left her big toes showing.

  “Quit it,” her mother said. “Quit having a fit. My God, Sophie, what’s wrong? You’ve hurt my big toe. I think I’ve broken my toe. What’s wrong?”

  Beyond them, a distant explosion, the air was being torn slightly by jet thrust. Music, not loud, started playing over the paging system.

  “Please, Sophie,” said her mother. “You’re in public, and though we don’t know any of these people, we certainly don’t want anyone to remember us.”

  Her father was looking interestedly at other groups of people looking at them.

  “Maybe I am too young for New York,” said Sophie. “New York is very old. Maybe I should stay home and grow up and then go later.”

  “We didn’t really mean we needed you to stay with us.” Her mother turned her half-pretty, half-ruined face to Sophie. “We always counted on your doing what you had to do.” Then they both looked at Sophie; when they were mad, they looked exactly like twins.

  “Are you going to worry about your parents being alone together?” her mother said. “Why? It is sad, but life’s just like that. Perhaps your leaving is our second chance.”