Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  Julien pops up floating near me. We bob together. Since neither of us can harmonize, we quote a few lines together from Woolf about colors and old glass. The vacation begins working out. I tip my face to the side. White sun lines in the water run toward my mouth.

  Julien reaches for me from underneath with his legs; liquid electricity vibrates in me, a pleasing shock in water.

  My mother sits up abruptly on the dry float. She shouts at us, “It’s time to go do something different.”

  “My endless vacation,” I say.

  She says, “When you still think you’re young, you’re never satisfied. I’ve saved all the pictures from the time I wasn’t satisfied—pictures of my boyfriends. They’re dying off now, of course, but I have their pictures. I could have married a dentist when your father came chasing after me.”

  “Mother,” I say, “I wouldn’t have been born if you had married a dentist.”

  “Half of you would have been. My half.”

  I go for my mother’s ride, in my bathing suit and trousers, stone in my pocket, to see the wooden churches of the island. The churches drop afternoon shadows more intricate than their architecture.

  I apply brown eye shadow to tone down the burn on my lids and walk carefully in the old, boggy cemeteries. Julien reads headstones aloud as we read novels at night. Then he gets something on his shoe and has to rub it off.

  We nap in the car while my mother drives. I wake with wrinkles on my face from the car velvet. The soft tissue under Julien’s eyes has swollen.

  At the cottage, we have a cold dinner. The dog eats from my hand. My mother comes out into the walled patio with a jug of tea, ice chiming against the glass sides. Light falls through the holes in my straw hat; it falls down into my lap and onto the pot of flowers beside my chair. Everywhere I go, the designs fly along with me on the flat flagstones, over my shoes. The ocean way below calms for sunset. Then twilight comes, a bluish airspace between each of us, as if we are close to stepping inside each other’s fragments of dreams.

  “I’m trying to write a letter,” my mother says. She has eaten with ink stains on her fingers. “I do keep friends to write to, but I have such trouble deciding what not to tell them.” The tea pitcher is between us. “I don’t use sugar because it’s not good for you,” she says. “But I put some in for you. I don’t like sweet. Is it all right?”

  “You’re making me feel so comfortable,” says Julien.

  The tea is too sweet, it drives the taste down to the root of my tongue.

  I touch my dog. She kicks her hind leg convulsively and stretches her mouth into a black fur dog grin.

  That night, in the bathroom, I put on a white batiste ankle-length nightgown. Nothing moves tonight, only me in my batiste gown.

  “Something’s happening,” I say. “I don’t know what.”

  Julien honks, “Huh?” at me as he slides down into the right-size sheets. Mother has made our beds this time. “It must be happening just to you. I don’t feel it,” says Julien, already searching through a book for something interesting.

  I find my stone in my beach trousers pocket and slip it under my pillow. I sit beside it and say, “I need to feel better.”

  He turns his head from me into the sea silence of the room. A roll of deep water. Another sea silence. “I’m afraid, Eulene. If we say it out loud, we won’t recover. It may be a mistake to put everything into words. Words are cruel.”

  Something sharp and deep is riding on my breath. “My mother never says anything out loud. She just thinks it. I believe in saying it out loud.” My voice! A child’s skinny, scabby, sulky one.

  “If your mother told you all that she thinks,” he says, “how would you be able to stand to hear it all? Would you want to know it—how could you receive it? What if you knew what makes her hate? If she gave it to you, could you carry it?”

  I curl my knees toward my mouth and bow to sleep, my pillow over my smooth stone. Later, in the dark, I wake to see Julien edging around the carpet, holding his penis as if it were a banister.

  “Where are you trying to go? Don’t wake up my mother.”

  “I’m lost in this room,” he says.

  “Don’t wake her! She’s so sensitive.”

  “I know,” he says. “All those wrinkles in her face.”

  “No,” I say. “It was my father who wrinkled her.” I am up, too. Trying to catch him. Stop him. This is all too unreal. I touch myself to make sure my breasts are still there.

  The shadows in the room are elastic. The room changes. The wind is up—it blows a small tree’s shadow into the bedroom with us. I think it’s laid a slippery spot on the carpet. Trying to get to Julien.

  Near the door I slip and go down on the end of my white gown.

  “Oh!” he cries out for me. He sees I am really down and he cries out, “Are you hurt? Are you hurt?” Then he comes down beside me and begins to hit me. He strikes me, yelling, “Get up! Get up!” On the third stroke I stand and the striking knocks the loose waist of my batiste gown up over my breasts.

  My voice breaks. There are funny coatings over my vocal cords. I have two voices; another voice screams with me, “I want to go home.”

  Yet I cry it to him who is striking me, whose home it is, too. Because he is the closest I’ve ever been able to get to anybody, this man for whom I now feel hate. I am so slow. I feel tears dropping from my eyes. I try to catch them in my hand, but I can’t and they fall anyway.

  Three times hard he’s struck me. “We should have been just good friends,” he says. Now he flops down on the bed, his back bent, as domed and ancient a shape as a carapace. “I’ve tried hard to keep loving you,” he says.

  My chest aches and stretches with the blood of shock. “But it’s I who don’t love you! I’ve hidden it all this time.” I raise my breasts like plumes on a bird.

  In the doorway, my mother surprises us. She stands half absorbed by sleep, wearing a fancy nightgown, old white yellowed as rich as cream, saved, ripened, so old it splits as we watch—tears without a sound. My mother, in her anger at what she sees in us, has torn the front of her nightgown.

  “Go to bed, Mother,” I say. “Just because I’m in your house doesn’t mean I’ve lost the right to fight with my husband.” It’s as if fights are too intimate for her. My vision has one black dot jumping in each eye.

  She says, “I wouldn’t let either one of you be treated the way you are treating each other.” She leaves with her nightgown open.

  I thought I would scream or tear into the flesh of Julien’s face. Instead, I sit down and put my feet up.

  “Why did you marry me?” he asks.

  “I am the promiscuous daughter of a promiscuous man,” I say, “which is funny because I don’t find sex satisfying. I don’t even like it. I guess I married you to get rid of sex. When we do it great I love it, but then I always panic. Neither of us can take it all the time.”

  Julien looks tired. “I wonder if maybe I’m a homosexual.”

  “No,” I say. “Homosexuals love somebody. You don’t love anybody.”

  I listen to my dog in the other room scratching at the long nap of my mother’s carpet.

  “You and your dog,” he says. “It sure is hard to be married to an only child.”

  “What are you thinking of now?” I ask.

  He says, “I was thinking of aspirins.”

  We take bitter white aspirins together. Then we wait for the white, powdery morning to begin.

  At some point, I slide into sleep. When I wake, my muscles are stiff and my eyelids tight with sun and windburn and I think I am alone. Then I find my dog is curled into the bend of my legs. I get up, dress, and find Julien in the kitchen just sitting. “I’m waiting to work up an appetite,” he says.

  My mother sets the table with dishes from my childhood. “I was known for never breaking things,” she says. “Other people break my things, but I never break things.” Today, she will not look at me.

  I let my dog out for a minut
e. When she comes back, I leave her collar and tags on. “Want to go for a ride soon?” I say. She jumps all over me, her claws leaving white scratches down my arms.

  We do not use any of the plates. I use a teacup and a spoon for honey. I do not want sugar. Because we all feel badly, and Julien has spoiled my face, I wait till no one is looking to eat directly from the honey jar—a mouthful of thick pleasure.

  Minutes later, Julien puts his hand—the back of it—so softly against my marked cheek. He strains for me from his chair. He has never done anything so open and so tender before.

  “I am the continuation of what’s wrong,” I say.

  “So. You are going to sacrifice me?” He laughs.

  I lean and get a spider of sun in my eye.

  My mother has gone to her garden wearing ugly old clothes. She does not like sweat. She will not wear her good clothes for it.

  Julien and I are alone, but for the dog biting and combing and scratching her coat with her claws. “I’ve put pressure on you,” I tell Julien. “I’ve thought too much and put pressure on myself. So in the end I have to be the one to leave.” Julien’s eye is to the side. I rub it slowly to move it back in place.

  In the room, I put my dirty things on top in the case, the city sea-shell still at the bottom. I do not need a souvenir of my vacation. I do not need the stone—it ends under my pillow.

  Now with my case, my dog, and my pocketbook I find my mother in the yard planting leftover seeds from packets with lost labels. She will let them sprout and then see if she wants them. On her knees, she hacks away with a hand hoe at the black silk soil of her yard. “Goddamn, hell, shit, Goddamn them to hell,” she says as she plants. My dog sits in a draft under the tree. My mother gets up in stiff jerks. “No reason for this,” she says to me, seeing me, my case and pocketbook. “You do this to yourself. You always set yourself apart. Alone. What is so courageous about leaving?”

  “I’m leaving Julien here,” I say.

  “Well, you always did love to play by yourself,” she says.

  He has come as far as the door, licking what looks like my honey spoon. “You told them at the office that you’d come back from vacation a different man,” I say. “You have one more week.” He lifts his head to me. This morning’s shadow hangs to his side.

  I thrust my case into the closed-up car; my dog sticks with the draft. The car inside is stuffy. I sneeze hot air and lower the windows to cool the car so I can get in it. I walk with Julien once around my mother’s house. Near her hawthorn, we stop. “I was desperate to marry you, Julien.” The starlings are overrunning the hawthorn. Julien and I make loud clapping sounds together to startle them and then we smell what they’re after—crushed soft fruit fermenting on the ground under the tree. We flatten the grass with our shoes and I lead and tell him that I was wrong. “My mother doesn’t hate men. She has only withdrawn from them to coddle her passion. Be careful.”

  “You’re just angry and scared,” Julien says to me, quite kindly.

  I mask my glance at him, checking, thinking that I am actually leaving another Daddy with Mother again.

  Next time we look at her, my mother’s skin is slick. She is sweating the sweat she hates. Neither sun nor clouds move. “Julien’s staying for a while to finish his vacation,” I say. I move backward one step toward the car, an uneven stone shocking the bottom of my foot.

  To help Julien, maybe, I ask, “Is Daddy really your failure—or your success, Mother?”

  The dog climbs into the open car slowly. I start the car, it quivers with the air-conditioning. Still the dog pants. Her breath is the sharp smell of canned dog food.

  I have something to say, but I cannot bear anything more. I put on my large sunglasses and think they will break the small bones of my nose. The dog beats her tail against me because she loves to ride. I catch myself in the mirror and think I must look like one dark lens to them; or maybe I’m just too small to see.

  I look ahead, up the narrow road from my mother’s house, and see a little boy fully clothed on a powerful motorcycle, and then a blond man bare-chested, painfully pedaling a bicycle. I am laughing and my muscles are hurting. I say, leaving Julien in my mother’s garden, “I had no idea till today, Mother, that I had come here to punish you.”

  I swing the car into my side of the road, the wheel spinning in my hands. The dog barks and runs along the seat with pleasure. I am looking beyond us to the broken, scattered colors of the fields. It is me that’s laughing and heaving in the air conditioner’s air. But way below my heart, I can feel a kitten shaking in my womb. I am at the end of my vacation.

  new eggs

  Dee was out in the fog. A fat girl, popping a clutch, with baby-fine hair, one ear knifing through, riding around in her little red torn-up car. She’d been chasing herself around town—waiting for her parents to come out and catch her and bring her on home. That is, precisely, back inside their house, because they had given her a house of her own, hell she didn’t want it, called it a birthday present. Something else she’d received that was wrong.

  Dee sagged and stuck to the seat, moist and warm as being born again. Her boyfriends—she had two—were not available. They went home to spend the nights with their mothers. Earlier, she’d made them get on their backs and work under her car and fix it so it’d go. She was rough on cars and had busted the bottom out of this one on a hump of a dirt and rock road (she took the back way to everywhere). “Keep running,” she told the car, “cause I’ve got no place I want to stop yet.”

  Town looked weak with fog, soft as cloth, and what was left of the sunlight was watery. Everything seemed to hold still while Dee did the running. Suddenly, without a signal, she crooked the car, horned it down a back road, and bumped her head on the side window. “Ooey,” she said, and then shot past the house she wanted. “I swear,” she said. “I drive faster than I think.”

  She looked backward at where she’d always lived. The light in her bedroom was on. A small image ran past her window; the shade quivered with life. It was Ty. The thought of seeing him excited her as if she were going to date him, though he was just a four-year-old kid with half a name. He was so special that sometimes she got nervous and was mean to him.

  Hooper, her father, was first out, watching her back up, his mouth full of something: false teeth. He looked like he was falling when he slumped into his old stoop-shouldered habit. He was used to being heavyset and was still drawn down by weight he no longer had. His wife, Eleanor (she never let him do anything alone), had lost weight right along with him. Their daughter, Dee, was the fat one now.

  Hooper was mouthing words and doing his hands. He was telling her how to back up. “Keep coming. You’ve got it made.” So her first words to him were not hello as planned, but “Daddy, shut up!”

  Eleanor came out in a rough run, hanging onto Ty, having snagged him by his belt as he ran. It looked like she had a child on a string. Ty pulled ready to snap free.

  Dee killed the engine, grabbed her pocketbook, in which things always got lost—if not in there, then in her mind—shoved herself from the car, and slammed the door so quickly she almost caught herself.

  Ty crouched, shook his little bottom like a cat, and said softly, “Oooh, here comes Dee and her great big pocketbook.”

  On impulse at seeing her mother, Dee waved, forgetting she’d left last time with both of them hating each other. In fact, she’d struck her mother before she’d borrowed the blender and left. Sometimes words were just not enough. They had argued over what things in life Dee should be too embarrassed to do.

  “I’ve been having urgent feelings about you,” said Eleanor.

  Hooper shuffled a dip in the grass to stand in. “You haven’t been this excited about seeing Dee since you went to the hospital to have her.”

  “Dee was borned?” asked Ty.

  Hooper hiked up his britches to say, “Your mother’s had another premonition.”

  “But they never come true,” said Dee.

  “This t
ime the premonition is about you. She thinks something bad is going to happen. If it does, she wants you with her when it comes.” Behind his lips, dentures squeaked. He’d lost so much weight his teeth didn’t fit. It annoyed them both; they glared at each other.

  Eleanor only sniffed. Once she’d sniffed in so hard at them that her nose had bled one drop. Eleanor’s head was small, her hair straight as her bangs. She had no side vision. Bad eyes and sugar in the blood ran in the family. “What did you bring me this time?” she asked.

  “You don’t like to get things.”

  “You generally bring puppies and kittens if not a foster kid that you say you’re going to help.”

  “Mother,” said Dee, “it’s the only humane thing to do.”

  “What? Bring them home for your mother to take care of?”

  “I like pets,” said Ty.

  “But you’re jealous of them,” said Eleanor.

  He lifted his lips. His teeth fit together as tight as teeth in a baby comb.

  “Where’s the dog, Ty?” Dee asked.

  “I shut her in the back room so I could be with you first.”

  Ty had broken all the records for staying the longest. Him and the dog. For all the others, Dee had found homes.

  Eleanor made her usual face, squinting up one eye.

  “Well, I’m certainly not your premonition,” said Dee.

  “What did you come to get, then?” asked her mother.

  “Eggs. I came to borrow eggs.” She could make up anything fast.

  Because if she told them what she really wanted—to be with them—she’d turn on herself and say she didn’t want it, and keep herself from getting it. She had terrible whims. “Have you been to the hen man, Mother, to get your eggs? I like them new.”

  Hooper swung his head, heavy with too much hair now that he was thin. “Why didn’t you buy them, instead of taking your mother’s? You already passed the store. So why not, when you go back, stop and buy them?”

  “I don’t like to think backwards.” Dee poked her pocketbook toward the door.