Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  Birdsey turned it against her immediately. “No, it was your husband who did that. Poor thing, you didn’t even have a decent love. He was a lady-killer, a ladies’ man who hated women.”

  “And yours,” said Jackie quietly. “Married late. Died early. He’d not had time to go wrong. He’s been dead fifty years. You’ve no idea what he’s been doing. You hardly knew him. So in heaven yours has been smashed in an auto accident. What do you think he’ll look like when you meet him in the sweet by-and-by? And what will he want with a ninety-year-old woman. And mine! God,” she said, “I sure as hell don’t want to be with him. Drunk on women. In heaven.”

  Jackie took a seat near her sister. They sat immovable, eyes closed, blinded, turned to stone by each other. They cried softly, chins down, but couldn’t bear to be touched by Evelyn. They had left no hope for either one of them, so they rocked their own selves till they recovered. Evelyn didn’t blink so long that her eyes felt injured.

  Birdsey asked for time to petititon the other sisters for help. Chessie, who was retelling all her old jokes when she came over, and Jo Jo, who went out to the carport as soon as she could to smoke her husband’s cigarettes (she’d had to give them up for health reasons).

  One said, “Everything I’ve got is brand new, how can I take Birdsey?”

  “Relieve me just for a few weeks at a time? So I can keep her?” asked Jackie.

  The other said, “You know I’m nervous. And I have a bad temper. I’m the one that drew mustaches on all the family pictures. I’m the one that slapped Mama. And I’m so nervous now that my hair is falling out. I’m shedding, how could I handle Birdsey?”

  Just before they were asked to, they shut up.

  Birdsey one more time pleaded. This time with herself. “It’s too late for me to go. And it’s too late to learn to clean up my own room or cut my fingernails, and I just know I can’t train my kidneys tricks—they’ve gone soft as mushrooms. So I added it up and it’s come out against me. I’ll do us a favor. I’ll go. But if I leave I won’t know where I am anymore; I’ve got this place memorized.”

  It didn’t stop anything. Birdsey was taken by Jo Jo for her physical to get into one of the best rest homes on the best side of town. She came back complaining, “Well, I’m not a virgin anymore. They gave me a physical in places they shouldn’t have been.”

  “Oh, Birdsey, you were married,” said Evelyn.

  “It had healed up,” said Birdsey.

  “We need to hire somebody in the family to drive Birdsey. I can’t see to do it,” said Jackie.

  “Cut me in, for paying,” said Chessie, putting her finger in her teeny pocket and drawing out money, folded and pressed, looking old as cloth.

  The last thing Birdsey did before she left was throw all the potted plants against the windows.

  They bought her a new housedress. She left in it. Birdsey grabbed her crack and tried something new, a limp toward the car of a distant relative who was hired to drive her.

  “You gave me away when I wasn’t looking,” said Birdsey. The sky when she left looked like the sea standing on its head.

  Evelyn screamed her name all mixed up, “Elevyn, I’m Elevyn, I hate myself, I tried to get out and leave Birdsey her space and I took it and kept it. I hate Elevyn, I hate the food she eats.” She shut the door in her own face so she could scream at herself against it.

  Jackie said, “No, darling, it was happening before you came. And my space is for you.” And she took and kissed Packhard; Evelyn would not be touched.

  For weeks they all visited with Birdsey. Birdsey and Jackie never spoke again except as polite and gentle strangers. Evelyn wept till she had ruined her sight and had to get glasses.

  Then one day Jackie stood in the door and said, “This morning. Just hemorrhaged. Gone.”

  “What in the world of?” asked Evelyn. “What did she get and when did she get it?”

  “She wasn’t sick,” said Packhard.

  Nothing new, they said. It just came up, they said. She hemorrhaged till she was dead, but it was old, old blood.

  Jackie said, “I asked them to wait with her body till I get there. She’s never been able to do anything alone. Always been scared. This is my journey—I’ll drive.” And Evelyn watched Jackie punish herself for things already finished.

  There was a fog of tears in the room. They wouldn’t fall. They were stuck to Evelyn’s eyes. Long afterward into the night when she held Packhard wrapped in the sheet against her like he was bandaged, when she looked toward any light, she saw fingerprints left on the air. And Packhard kept screaming against her, “The Boogieman’s gone. Come back, Boogieman, and get us.”

  nervous dancer

  We do not leave the ocean’s side, but follow the thin, worn-out highway on the hard ridge of shells and sand cliffs. We see, over the swells of the ocean, night trying hard to come down. Still a crack of white light stays between the ocean and night. It is as if someone keeps reaching up and tearing night off at the bottom.

  For a minute, I feel lonely in the car with Julien, my husband. We should not have come here—to my mother’s house—for vacation. I am not feeling so good away from time schedules, crowds of strangers, and tight deadlines of the city that keep pushing us forward from one event into another. In the city I do not have time to ponder that I love my mother but do not like being around her.

  Julien does not know my mother well. He does not know that she hates men. He knows her in the casual way of her coming to the city to visit, bringing her own washcloth, soap, and a homemade dessert, to sleep fitfully on our living room couch. Julien has never met my father, but he has spoken to him by phone. Ten years ago, when I felt desperate to marry Julien, it was then that my father chose to leave my mother’s house.

  The car headlights are on; it looks like Julien is following the two beams instead of the road, carefully following the color yellow.

  The dog, which I hold on my lap, pants heavily, a wild taint to her breath. I crack the window as if for a heavy smoker. I feel I am inside her lungs.

  We get to my mother’s turnoff, a white wooden sign scarred by wind. On the turn, the empty shells slide under the tires.

  I talk to Julien, his face warm and appealing in the intimate dash light, our voices brushing together feathery wings of sound. “Why have we come?” I ask him. “As a child, the two times I never liked to spend at home were holidays and Sundays.”

  “You have a responsibility to your parents,” he says. “You have a relationship with them.” But then he, too, says, “I do miss our friends. We shouldn’t have come on vacation alone.”

  We find the cottage atilt on one of the stationary dunes, hard-packed ground shaped like swells of water.

  Outside the car, I feel I have Julien’s scent all over me. But it’s just that we’ve been in the car so long together. (Perhaps we both smell like my dog.) It makes me uneasy walking toward my mother’s cottage in the falling dark with Julien. I do not know the ground well. I cannot hold his hand, he is carrying our two cases. Somehow our intimacy seems flagrant now that I am bringing my marriage—actually for the first time—into my mother’s house, her home base instead of ours.

  My dog squats in the yard and I lift the black knocker to the front door. When my mother opens it, my dog is dancing, tethered on the end of the leash.

  “You finally got here,” she says for welcome.

  “We never told you what time we’d come,” I say. I see she is dressed like me—in odd colors—a combination not quite expected. She’s in blue and copper.

  “You’ve brought that dog,” my mother says. “You’re too old to always have a dog with you. Do you still sleep with them? I’ve tried to keep you from putting your face in theirs and to never breathe in their breaths.” She pushes the door back till it catches and it’s safe for us to pass through. She precedes us into her house.

  Julien has been looked at but not spoken to. It is he who unsticks the door and crosses the rug to shake my mother’s hand. Th
ey nod at each other.

  Thinking maybe my father’s in town, I look around to see if there are still signs of him in here. There are only signs of me ten years ago—which unsettles and unwelcomes me. Photographs here and there, framed on walls and tables, all from when I was a kid and pleased her by not being any different from her, not yet grown up. My dog tries to go to her; I hold on.

  “Put your bags away,” she says. For a second I wonder if she will let me sleep with a man in her house. “The guest room—take the hall on the left.” Julien takes my case and his. I hear him clicking a couple of lights on as he goes.

  “It still surprises me that you ever married,” says my mother as soon as Julien leaves. She enjoys telling secrets just loud enough for the other person to overhear. “After your living through my marriage, I was disappointed that you married someone who looks just like your father.”

  “You used to say in front of everyone that you wished I would grow up to be an old maid or a nun, then you’d be happy. Didn’t you want me to ever learn to share?”

  “Do I really look like her father?” asks Julien, back quickly. He doesn’t like the dark and there are no streetlights out here.

  I tell my mother, “Julien is trying to figure out just what he really looks like. It’s one of his hobbies.”

  In the tiny kitchen, my mother gives the dog water out of a pie pan. She doesn’t like to touch animals, but she takes care of them.

  On the counter is a huge bouquet of garden flowers, such bright colors.

  “Why, Mother, you never bring flowers into the house,” I say. “You treat them like yard animals.”

  “For you, Eulene,” she says. “I know you love them by your bed.”

  “Do I?”

  “You know,” says Julien, “I’m interested in what I look like alive—other than in a mirror.”

  “You look like Avery, when I first fell,” says my mother. “He’s old now. I saw him just the other day driving in the car ahead of me.”

  “But since he left us,” I say, “I often see him driving in the car ahead of me, no matter where I am.”

  “No, he’s really here. He’s following the Blues; the Blues are running. I got in touch for you.” Her voice is bitter. “You know how important fish are to him. He loves to go fishing,” she tells Julien, “but he never eats them. He can hardly get one to stay down.”

  She has made us a very delicate and moist cake. She offers Julien two pieces because he’s a man. I’m glad when he refuses. I know my mother believes being overly generous is polite, but she will make fun of you if you accept.

  “You still drink milk?” she asks, when I’ve poured myself some.

  I never took her teasing as good humor. When you show hurt, she doesn’t stop. I’m a bad sport. She tries to teach me humor by teasing me, but I’m only embarrassed.

  We walk the dog together. Julien stays behind reading the same newspaper he read this morning. The dog runs, her hind legs hopping with excitement. The sea air leaves a film that draws my skin. The air catches in the young trees in my mother’s garden. The trees are noisy with air, like watery waves which the ocean breaks on the beach below us and then seems to break again in the trees above us in my mother’s garden.

  The wind changes. My mother notices and says, “Eulene? What’s the matter?”

  There is a moistness between me and my clothes. “Nothing.” Ocean air makes me uneasy. I feel as if everything is too loose. The curl is coming out of my long, heavy hair, which I still wear to my shoulder blades. My hair and my skirt blow forward; my hair gets in my mouth. It tends to get into everybody’s mouth, Julien always says.

  “How do you like having gray hair, old girl?” my mother asks.

  Just this year a little white has come in at the center of my hairline. “Sometimes Julien thinks it’s fascinating; sometimes I think it’s nauseating,” I say. “Like the beginning of the pattern in a snakeskin, I tell him.”

  I see her decide not to tease me about my hair. When I was little, I used to go behind the house and play pretend in the walled-in patio. It was safe and engrossing to talk to myself. This oddity of mine kept my parents from getting what I felt was too close to me. When I do it now, whisper to myself, and Julien interrupts with “Did you say something?” I tell him, “I’m talking to my dog.”

  We walk down long, gritty steps to the black beach, leaving the lights behind our shoulders. We are standing in just the hollow, swelling sound of the ocean. My mother has taken me some place that I am not safe. She’s with me, yet I cannot reach out for her. My dog sees for me. I follow her breath beside my leg. Wet sand crusts my shoes. Back up the steps in the electric light, the sand sparkles and I knock my shoes together and the sand falls. My dog’s claws hook at the wood.

  I take a deep breath of salty, cold air and look up. The stars are out and look like they are riding away from us. We go inside with the dog, where it seems quieter without the surge of the sea, and my mother hugs me. My arm under her hand is warm.

  I think I hear a tape playing somewhere far off along the ridge. I hope it will play over and over again until I am deeply asleep tonight.

  Julien has made accordion folds out of the front page. We say good night to my mother and the dog doesn’t want to go to bed yet, so I leave her in the hall and take the flowers with me, thinking my mother has done for me something she doesn’t like but she knew I like.

  In the guest room, the door is locked and I knock once. Julien is already undressed. “I’m so white,” he says, looking surprised at himself naked. “I’m so white that I’ll tan red.” His naked whiteness makes him loom large. I feel his feet are as big as my head.

  Sheets have been left to be spread out. Julien holds them up. “She gave us the wrong sheets.” Two king-size sheets, and the beds are single, narrow, and stuck to the floor. “Who’s going to tell her?” he asks.

  “Well, you don’t have anything on.” Irritated, I put the flowers close to my bed near the edge of the table. I take the sheets, and when I get to the other end of the cottage to my mother’s room, I find the tape is playing in there. Only my dog is in the room, stretched out, listening to Chopin. Just when the Chopin tape ends, she relaxes the one huge curl at the end of her tail. I take off her pearly collar, undressing her for bed. That funny little protective covering chases across her eyes, and though she looks at me she is falling asleep.

  My mother is not in the other rooms that I check. It is dark inside and out, and I can’t tell where the walls are. I want my mother but I will not call out for her. I want my dog to follow and I do not make her.

  I pull a light cord that skins the top of my hair. My old bedroom is this unrecognizable storage room now; thank heavens she didn’t keep it. I find the linen closet and in the top of it are a few boxes. Then I realize they were once presents—opened, looked at, and never used. I am repelled by my mother counting, saving, but depriving herself of presents.

  My face is raw with anger at my need to avoid my mother and to have seen what she values—abstinence—and to know that I find what she values valueless.

  Back in the guest room with the same sheets, Julien and I share the kinship of my stupid moment. We support each other this way. He takes one king-size and I take the other. I listen for my dog, then remember removing her thin aluminum I.D.’s. I wait till I have the bathroom to take off my dark, opaque stockings and put on my long-legged pajamas. I think the only private thing about me is my pretend and my legs. I have bad legs. I think my mother has passed them on to me, these legs in a net of fine broken veins, though I know I did it to myself. I have broken my veins from ten years of giving myself birth control pills. It strikes me suddenly that I do not even have sex so often. Yet, religiously, I continue to give myself the cycle of pills.

  I don’t want a child. My breasts are too small. I don’t understand what size my mother’s are. I have checked her bras and they are two sizes—36B and 36C. To me, her breasts seem to hang from her shoulders. I got the idea of no
children from my mother. My mother doesn’t like children. I am an only child.

  I am addicted to wearing dark stockings and it is the way my friends remember me, I know—that I hide my legs. For my breasts, I do nothing. For my legs, I have continued my dancing lessons. I am tall and thin and taut with a consciousness of my body that I don’t like. My father started me dancing when I was three. He said I was a nervous child and he believed that dancing would cure me. We both have continued to believe it even after time has proved it untrue. Instead of going to lunch at work, I take ballet; I practice though I never perform.

  I take my king-size sheet to bed and roll up in it, bound and bandaged in my mother’s wrong sheets. “Linens are so personal,” complains Julien. He reaches out to the table lamp between us and puts the three-way down on the lowest.

  The small window looks bright now. The pull and slip of the ocean is loud. The rhythm of it sets me off, rollicking and whispering through my prayers. I ride my childhood path of prayers as erratically and as slumped as I had sat astride my bicycle, always slightly to the side, ready to give up, get off, bail out. I lose my way and start my prayers over. Finally, I ask that my vacation be over soon, and that God protect my mother from herself, and from me. My father almost gets left out because he’s so complicated. I gain heart and continue and ask God to give him peace, but not in the form of death. For the last, I ask slowly that I always have the strength to save myself when I need it.

  My eyes keep opening during my prayers. Julien is watching. “I’ve been reading your lips,” he says. “You are haunted by things that no one cares about but you.”

  The novel we’ve brought to read together is in Julien’s hand. We read to each other the well-ordered words, running them down the delicacy of our closeness, relaxing us both.

  We lean and touch lips, his sticking to mine for a second. I feel that thick peak to his lips—a thickness people generally get from sulking or playing the trumpet or nursing. Then he is lost in himself, sitting back on his bed, rubbing his eye. For all his pleasing good looks, he has a lazy muscle in one eye. It causes his eye to look stranded in his face. His fingers automatically find it and his eye slides to the side away from us, the focus floating from me in uncertainty.