Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  The engine is hot and ready to go.

  Badger has put her Frisbee in the car with me.

  Gary says, “Just push the patio doors and put the key on the table.” Their house is as easy to break into as ours is to break out of. “I wish you were a boy, Caroline, so we could be close friends,” says Gary.

  “If you were a girl,” I say, “I could trust you.” His pupils tighten. He rubs Badger’s coat down the spine. Badger is pleased and the black lining of her mouth falls loose.

  My son waits for his ride, drawing words with his shoes along the dirt edge of the road. He speaks.

  “What?” I say. “I can’t hear you with your face down.”

  “Don’t forget I’m singing today, Mom, at ten.”

  I don’t remember. “What are you singing? And why?” But I am already down the road in the unfamiliar car, practicing the brakes.

  I am careful not to touch anything in Gary’s car, though I do feel for the radio and turn it on. But I don’t like it. Someone I don’t know is singing. I turn it off. It’s not on my setting. The car moves faster, downslope, and I remember my son’s singing. I must get there. I hope he’ll be on key and his zipper will stay up; he’s nine.

  I stop by the parking lot of old cars and our good one that my husband can’t drive. The car sits idle. Locked. I’m afraid it’s run down. My pocketbook is hiding on the floor. I turn around and watch the traffic light change. Town is dead. Old run-down men, old run-down cars, a salesman in a phone booth gesturing, snapping his mouth, working his pencil, cigarette smoke filling up the booth, women driving around with plain faces, all their makeup off, letting their skin breathe. There is one prostitute, but she’s fifteen and she won’t be out of school till afternoon. The police force can’t be just one, must be two men.

  William has cautioned me—never trust a policeman; they can guess the truth, but they’ll never tell the truth. He knows I have this impulse to tell everybody everything. I have answers to questions no one would dare ask.

  I park Gary’s car in the empty space in front of the Police Station. I have to go in. I finger Gary’s keys and hang them on the belt of my jeans. My jeans are tight so that it hurts to put much in the pockets but leftover grocery change.

  Inside, the hall is too narrow to be a municipal building. It’s really just an old Boro house with several offices. Past a sharp turn in the hall, I see the Police Department, but the door is closed. Inside, I hear the police band radio talking away. The Police Department is locked. A paper sign hangs from Scotch tape and says “Back in 20 mins. school crossing.”

  The police have a small yard, no place to wait. The traffic control box clicks near my shoulder and I cross the street on the red, headed for Prout’s Diner. I pull against the diner door to break the suction of cool outside and warm as coffee inside. It gives and I remember my garden grown weak and rank and wild to work in, so acid it will make my hands itch. As I head straight for the counter, I glimpse my mechanic sitting at the table with his friends. He waves at me. He is not working on my car. He is here in Prout’s eating pie for breakfast.

  I swing in a half-circle on the stool, order and smile and drink coffee which is so bad I know not to waste cream and sugar on it. The pulse in my legs starts beating. I feel the veins of my legs will break. I am worried about the police. I’d rather spend the morning somewhere else. I look down at my garden shoes.

  Between newspaper clippings too small to be interesting, menus, and Little League pictures pasted against the mirror behind the counter, I can see the white Seton Boro Police car cross the glass. It’s a Dodge with a souped-up engine. My mechanic has sharp blue eyes, he watches it. “Do you want to buy it? It only has 100,000 miles.”

  “The second time around,” I say. The Seton Boro Police car is backing into the garage.

  The mechanic stands next to me. We are the same height, but he is much wider. “Work is boring,” says the mechanic. “You have to make a lot of jokes,” he says sadly. “Since they closed down the movie house, I haven’t had a thing to do. I’ve ruined my knees getting under cars. When I get home, I want relief for my knees. I start to lie down on the couch and I find my wife already there. Do you have a vacant couch?” He wiggles his blond eyebrows so I’ll know it’s a friendly joke. “There’s no one in town worth knowing,” he says quietly so as not to hurt his friends. Sweat from his hot coffee grows on his lip. “What are you doing down here?” he asks suddenly. “I have your car.”

  “It’s a long story,” I say. “I can’t tell you because it’s not finished yet.”

  I don’t leave a tip because the owner’s working behind the counter today. I pay from the grocery change that’s still in my pocket.

  My mechanic goes back to his pie for breakfast and his old retired friends. I say, “Work on my car, please.” He waves a hand too big to fit in the engine anyway.

  I walk against the light, open the door with a whoosh, and my hair blows forward and seems to precede me. The radiator hammers at me. I prepare to see the old faded redhead of a police chief.

  The hall doglegs and I’m back at the P.D.’s door, where I don’t want to be. I think now that I have parked Gary’s car illegally and I haven’t my wallet, just grocery change, so I don’t have a driver’s license or I.D. with me.

  The Boro policeman turns, startling me, calling me my nickname. “Hi, Carrie.”

  I stiffen onto my flat heels. “You’re not the chief,” I say.

  “Sergeant.” Right away, he slips off new-looking gold rims and hangs them on his shirt pocket like sunglasses. “I called you.” He leans over a distressed looking counter top.

  I go closer and see that the wooden top is soft and marred with signatures, the pressure of pens signing for things, messages left. Maybe I shouldn’t get so close without an I.D. He is quite tall. I step back and leave the marred counter between us. He has a large mouth that rests open—as if he will ask and answer his own questions. His nose is beautiful, a policeman with a beautiful nose. When I’m too tired to fall asleep and too bored tonight, I’ll think of that. It’s past his haircut time. Whatever kind of blond he was as a kid has grown into a straight no-color blond/brown now. The ends of his hair catch on his uniform collar. I like seeing it catch. It makes my neck itch.

  In the old days, for self-control, I used to wear ugly underpants on a date so that I wouldn’t overstay my welcome and sleep with my date. How long ago was that that ugly underpants gave me morals? It almost always worked.

  William has often been mad at me, alternately for acting like a little girl and for ever sleeping with a man as a woman. “I told you before we were married,” I say. “I wasn’t listening then,” he says. So I went through his things. I found his wallet—the old one, soft and moldy as cheese. I slipped it open and sorrow rolled out on me. Pictures held onto of women I could never be, in remarkably obscene postures. Naked for his camera. Why had I forced my way past the present? William asks me to pose with my clothes on. It scared me that I am not what he wanted. It makes me angry that those women are the opposite. One of us is the lie. Which one? He carries old dreams I don’t know about—unbroken, intact. Things he wanted in an old wallet, muddy-colored pictures he says were taken when he was eighteen and I was eight. I showed his naked muddy ladies to him, trembling. “No defense,” he says. “You’re the one with the guilt.” He tears up the muddy ladies and I sob. But that was a long time ago at the beginning.

  The policeman turns sideways. There is a faint arch to his back, an arch of fatigue or spentness. He reaches below the counter.

  “Ah,” I say.

  He draws out my car key ring. But instead of handing it to me he puts the ring around his finger.

  I don’t like this. I poke the tip of my tongue into the back crown of my tooth.

  He nods toward the low ceiling. “You live all the way up the mountain. I’ve seen you through the trees. I’ve been in your basement.” He’s full of spirit now. He lifts his head up to the light.

 
; “Why?” I ask.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “You don’t recognize me when I’m out of uniform.” He sags for a minute. “I’ve been to your house off-duty. I’m a friend of Gary’s. I help him deliver.”

  “Gary. My appliances.”

  “I can’t find a reason to get back up there without a delivery.” It looks like the pinpoint of his eye quivers with embarrassment. I’m embarrassed by this line, too. “I go to cookouts on Gary’s patio.” He presses ahead, “I haven’t seen you close up since last Christmas when your washer died. I brought in the new white one in the dark blue room. Sometimes you’re in the junior high parking lot, but you don’t come to town Sunday and go to church.”

  “No, we stay in bed,” I explain. “I have lots of books at home that I haven’t finished yet.”

  He tips his head to laugh; his hat is not there, just the rim line in his hair where it fits. “Three times I’ve been to your house,” he says. “You and Gary kid each other so. I just like to listen when I come along.”

  I think desperately of something hilarious to say right now. He rounds the counter that he shares with the chief. He’s watching me, not where he’s going. He bumps his leg. He stops to rub it and I look away. I’m not going anywhere right now; he’s wearing my keys.

  He stands close and I’m afraid he can hear me breathing. I struggle to stay out of synch with his starched uniform shirt rising and falling near me. I’m desperate to laugh loudly at having so much pleasure from an unexpected talk.

  “When I finally got to your car this morning, it had been running for a while.”

  “Oh my goodness.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I never turned off the engine.” My heart slumps against my ribs.

  “You left it running, doors locked, keys in the ignition. I’d say it had been running for near an hour.”

  “No,” I say.

  “When I got the door open and got inside, that car was red hot. But it smelled like perfume,” he says.

  “Soap,” I say. “But it’s worn off now.”

  There is the pale line on his skin where he has shaved. I feel like I’m seeing him just out of bed, rising.

  “The school janitor was sweeping the parking lot. He thought a couple of times he saw exhaust, so when he went over and the exhaust was real and the car was running but locked, he called me. That’s what we’re for—to help.”

  He leans back against the counter for support. It skids. His fingernails are very flat, his fingers are long. I have a flash recall of him in front of the school parking lot. He had a malt-sized Dixie cup braced at the windshield of the police car. I was parked in my car waiting for Ian and reading a novel by Sartre. That’s when I saw him check the speed monitor on the dash next to the malt. Then he walked to the narrow highway and by pointing his finger and stepping onto the macadam he pulled a car over onto the gravel shoulders. On foot, he had caught a speeder.

  He says, “You must have been thinking about a lot to lock a running car.”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I say.

  He’s talking softly, hesitantly, as if he’s telling me his secrets. “Gary tells me he worries about what’s up with you. He tells me to mind my own business ... ”

  “Is it out of gas?”

  “No.” He takes a breath. I take a breath. He continues. “Something’s going on underneath, he says you’re a very private person but. . .”

  “Am I going to get a ticket?” I ask curtly, very daring since I don’t have my driver’s license.

  Then I’m thinking of him, someone in the peripheral distance of my yard. He’s in a white T-shirt in the snow that is iced over. His heavy ugly jacket and heavy sweater are off. He’s been struggling hard on ice and he and Gary have this huge washing machine. They are hugging it to move it and protecting it from the ice by hitching their jackets under its container and they are sliding with the washer on its side down to the basement door. That ice storm that had frozen our family together. It is a day when William is trying so hard to please and ease us. William goes down to talk to Gary. I go halfway down the inside basement stairs just where the light is dull and high overhead to watch them bring it in. I ask to help. “No,” they say. “We have it.” They are very strong about this and guard my washing machine from me. William stands on the last step, the dropped ceiling over his head. He chain-smokes and flicks the ash off the end of his cigarette with a snap of his wrist. After he has bought something, he is anxious to know that new really means perfect. These guys laugh and enjoy what they are doing. Gary, who’s not supposed to smoke, says to William, “Should you be smoking?” The inner basket tumbles and gives soft thuds to their movements. I squat on the steps to watch all of them down below me, and I start to laugh at myself. I wash everything, my money sometimes right in my jeans. And the time I had a Tampax spare in my pocket and it went in with my clothes, through all the cycles—hot soak and cool rinse. It came out fluffed, it was gigantic, huge. I held it up to the light.

  William has joined them, rare since he’s mostly in his pajamas here or suited up for the city. But now, on this cold day, he joins them. I pay little heed to their words. Men together sound like they are speaking in tongues, no meaning to me. They are fiddling with the washer and enjoying it, telling each other how to do it. I spool my hair on my finger and watch. But now I see them the way I did that day—backlit against the door light. A dream shadow—the policeman in his undershirt; awake—it’s just my husband. They seem to have the same body. I shake this image out of my eye.

  “How could you be okay? The locked door and all.” The sergeant speaks gently, as if he’s been a friend a long time. “Maybe you can be too private.”

  He is too close, too intense. I think of saying: we are from the city, so we are too smooth to tell. We don’t go to church and spill our sins. The pressure of that image at my optical nerves makes my vision dance up and I pretend to sneeze.

  “Bless me,” I say. “Could I have my keys?”

  He smiles. “Don’t you want to know how I got into your locked car?” The front of his hair hangs down, dry bangs. I think how silly of him to think wet would make it stay combed. He pushes his dry bangs back as if trusting his forehead to me.

  “I have a master key,” he says. “A policeman can get in anywhere. I had the key, so I could help you.”

  I apologize for the trouble I’ve caused.

  “I’m glad it happened,” he says, holding his bangs back. “I’m Gary’s friend, too.” He looks at my car keys. “When I’m up the hill, can I stop by?”

  “I have to get home,” I say. “I’ve got stuff to do, my son will be home from school.” I try saying “my son” for our protection. “And I’ve got to hide my vegetables. The zucchinis in my garden are growing bigger than babies. I’ve got to get them out of the garden before anyone sees them.”

  He laughs and says, “I’m going to help you with those zucchinis. I’m going to arrest them and take them away in the police car as illegal aliens. And I can show your son the police car.”

  “Great,” I say. I’m thinking of Gary seeing this.

  “Wouldn’t your son like that? I thought policemen were great when I was a kid,” he says and blushes. “Wouldn’t he like that? And you could make me laugh. I remembered what a funny lady you really are when I got in your car today. Even when you’re just talking to Gary, you make me feel good.”

  I have to slide my car key ring off his finger. “That’s a really nice thing to say. That I’m funny. That I made you laugh. I mean it. Thanks,” I say. I don’t dare look up. I watch his long, pretty hand let go of my keys.

  “I’d like to come up the mountain.” He looks very serious.

  “But my sense of humor .. . do you want to know how I got it?” My heart beats but I don’t breathe. I think I am taking him too seriously. Am I falling for it?

  He holds out both hands to me. He doesn’t have my keys anymore.

  “I have to hurry,” I say. “Tell the chief hello fo
r me.” Though I don’t know the chief at all. And I’m out of there, but he is walking with me, and on the periphery of my eyes the osprey at my redwood house is flying low over my yard, wet from fishing in the pond, and I see the sergeant lying in my yard. This time it’s summer and for some reason all the ants in all the fifty-two anthills in our grass have dropped dead. And I can lie beside the sergeant and he is so long, his hair has grown so long, he let it grow for me, and his mouth rests open and we have iced tea which we barely sit up and sip, and the first taste is full of lime. Everything is so calm.

  Then I can taste Prout’s coffee on the roof of my mouth. This is just a flirt, I make fun of myself, and pretend that I am being funny.

  I walk fast with him and make the hall short. He stops hard in his overly shiny policeman shoes. “What is this?” he asks, pointing through the dust on the glass door.

  “I borrowed a car to come get my keys. Is it illegal to park at the door?”

  “This is Gary’s car.” He is excited by the idea. “Gary delivered you to me. That’s his car.”

  “No,” I say. I start moving past him, my footsteps sound doubled with his and then the police band radio clicks and blares and insists it’s an emergency.

  I push the door alone, not enough, and have to slide sideways to get free. I’m out. The wind fills my hair.

  I make up so many things that I can’t even lift my dreams anymore. When I’m still wearing my old clothes of dreams, why want another?

  I hear, “Stop. Stop.” An urgent call. This time I don’t like it. I think I’ve always found it safe to do as I’m told and later get mad about it. This time I won’t. Am I choosing the wrong time, just to choose? I let the minute go. Then I pivot once. It’s the mechanic, his voice wrapped in the wind coming to me from the wrong side. He’s not talking to me, being busy shouting at his old retired friend who’s trying to remember from his youth how to back a tow truck with a car hitched on. They’re trying to leave old Prout’s hooked to someone else’s broken car.

  That night I wait in the school’s parking lot for the big city commuter bus. Gary’s wife, in a loose dress, has come down the hill by my side. She takes me to my husband’s car and leaves me in it. The image of the commuter bus is big enough to fill my head and leave no room for thought. All six local husbands get off. William doesn’t get off. Back up the hill in the twilight pond fog, my son pops the door open and leans out before I’m there and says, “Our dad’s on the phone.”