Nervous Dancer

by Carol Lee Lorenzo

  Eleanor said, “I want to find signs of something on you.”

  “I already said it’s just for eggs!” Dee sprang the screen door and started through like she’d been stung from behind, her hair flying straight out.

  “You’re wearing your hair longer than Jesus,” said Eleanor.

  “First,” yelped Ty. “I’m always allowed to be first in!”

  Dee’s gaze slid past Ty’s smile and ran down his shirt. She said, “Still got on that same shirt I bought you? Ever think of changing it?” And that stopped him and Dee got to be first. “Stop showing off just because I praised it last time. Don’t run it dry.” She went into the house, quickly trying to get used to her old home.

  She entered the warm clutter of each room, touched the lights on for just a minute. When her parents were young they liked new things. Now that they were old, they were getting rid of everything that was new except that big bug-eyed color TV. She tried to resist turning it on and couldn’t. “A radio taught me to sing,” she told it. “What can you teach me?” Then she sat on the rug and looked up into it. It did have such ripe colors. “My feet are suffocating,” she told her shoes and shook them off.

  Ty came in soundless, trying to be with her. This time she caught herself. “Aw,” she said, “you have such beautiful skin,” and they both blushed.

  From behind one door came a wet gnawing and a long uninhibited sneeze.

  “Is that the premonition I hear?” Dee laughed.

  “It’s the pet trying to chew down the door to get to you,” said Ty.

  Dee whooshed the door open and the dog spun into the middle of the family, delighted, brown as shoe polish, her tail as stiff as a bludgeon. They had to dodge her. Hooper told the dog he loved her.

  Ty’s face knotted. “I don’t like her unless I’m alone with her. Then I love her.” Abruptly, he left the circle for a chair edge. His sandals pattered on the floor. A knee rose up sharply.

  “Jealous,” sang Eleanor.

  “I don’t understand children,” said Hooper. “I understand dogs.”

  Dee grabbed Ty up. She wanted to teach him to fly. But he was much lighter than she expected and she almost threw him away.

  “Every minute, goes at a run, trying to play by himself,” said Eleanor. “Makes it look worse than work.”

  Ty wet his lips and puckered them.

  “Don’t kiss me. I’m too fat,” Dee said. “Besides, I dip snuff.”

  Her mother said, “What for?”

  “To see the look I put on people’s faces when I do it. But at that first spoonful, it does take everything I have to keep my guts from welling up out of me.”

  “I don’t feel so good myself,” said Eleanor, and she sat down.

  Hooper started straightening up around them. “What’s this?” he said, and lifted a small object, looking at the bottom as if he were identifying a piece of a puzzle.

  “Daddy, I recognize it. You’ve had it for years, since I was born,” Dee said.

  “Must be a souvenir,” said Hooper. “But that still doesn’t answer ‘What is it?’”

  Ty was returned to the floor so fast his sandals clapped against his feet. Dee went directly to the kitchen sink, washed out her mouth; she had seen something in a small bowl. “Eggs, peeled and beautiful as china figurines.” She ate two while pretending to look out the window.

  The fog was tied down to the yard on threads of itself. It was fading. Daylight was back and getting old. It would clear. It would get pitch black. Time to leave would come. What if nobody asked her to stay? She thought how she should love sex, but the dark that you do it in scared her so. She needed something to go with her; it made her feel warm to have something. She scratched at the inside of her hand, her Lifeline itched.

  “Mother, I’m finally up to your biggest weight,” she said. “Can I take all your old clothes?”

  “That’s worse than stealing—wearing someone else’s clothes!”

  Ty scraped his sandals along the floor with restlessness. “Wanna play pocketbook with me?” He had Dee’s pocketbook strapped over him like a saddlebag.

  “Everything in it has been broken at least once,” said Dee. Ty slipped it off, reached in, and rubbed some of the things against his face. But not the plastic picnic spoon that she used for dipping snuff, which looked dangerously dirty on the end.

  Then Ty threw his voice as high as if he were singing, an only child pretending to be himself and his best friend. Dee could feel every hair on her arms rise. Now he had her baby brush. It was worn as a broom, and he was concentrating and rubbing the soft hairbrush up and down his zipper.

  “Stop that with my brush,” said Dee. “It’s for my hair. I still use it.”

  “It feels good,” said Ty.

  “Quit it,” everybody said.

  “I can’t stand it, he’s growing up,” said Dee. “I’m going to stop coming by. He’s not a baby anymore. I don’t like babies when they become people.”

  “Don’t make me laugh, I hurt,” said Eleanor. She was half holding her breasts in her arms. “Maybe my premonition was just a noisy dream. I feel too tired for it now.” She thrust her small head toward the wall mirror. “Do I look different tonight? It’s like something happening inside me—like I was pregnant or going to start my periods again.”

  Dee’s lower lip swelled with anger. “That’s not it! You swore I would be your only pregnancy.”

  That made Eleanor quiver. “Who are you telling who to have whom?”

  “Borned,” Ty said. “Every girl is borned with a baby already inside her. Then one day she just has it.”

  “I told him that,” said Dee, “for easy answers.”

  Ty rested the brush in her pocketbook like it was a small human.

  “Guess what I found? Eleanor’s stuff for dinner. I got it together,” said Hooper.

  Dee wavered. “Should I eat with you? I won’t be able to leave so easily. I didn’t leave a light on. I won’t be able to see my own door to get in.”

  “We’re stuck on leftovers here.”

  They fixed a dish for the dog.

  Eleanor said, “We keep having leftovers because we’re not fat anymore.” She sat sideways to the table. “I feel allergic to food. I think I’ll have a ketchup sandwich.” She fixed it, doubled the bread over, ate half and put it down. “I think I’ll have a smoke.” She struck a match and looked past the flame to see if anything was happening to Dee yet.

  Dee ate musically with her fork and knife together.

  Eleanor fanned cigarette smoke behind her. “Can’t eat. My constitution is all fouled up.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Dee. “I can’t chew. Been eating like a frog for a week. Choking everything down whole. Nerves. Thinking.”

  “Thinking what?” asked Hooper.

  “Love.”

  He poked a plate at her. “Here, take the biggest piece.”

  She took it with one hand and with the other dug her spoon into the sugar at the bottom of her iced tea. “I guess you know, Daddy, that fat people need more love than other people. How much you eat means how much bigger your appetite for love is.”

  “Don’t close your eyes when you eat, Ty,” said Eleanor.

  “The pizza deliver boy told me that,” said Dee. “‘You’re a sitting duck,’ he said. ‘You got more to give and need to get more,’ he says, given what I appear to weigh. The pizza deliver boy is very attracted to me,” said Dee, and it pleased her so much that she took a little bow sitting down. “He says I have hard work just to find the right man who needs my kind of woman.”

  “Fat men do,” said Hooper.

  “Stop grinding your teeth, Ty. Tops’ll break off,” said Eleanor.

  “Oh, I don’t like fat men!” Dee drained her tea down to the sugar. “There’s all kinds of love, Daddy.”

  “You’re weakening the taste of your dinner, washing it around with liquid,” said Hooper.

  Dee carried the bottom sugar up on her spoon and dissolved it on he
r tongue. She drew down her lids like blinds and peeked under them. “Some people don’t like children. I don’t think I like grownups.”

  “Stop chopping your food, Ty, you’ve got it too little to eat.”

  “Mother, will you go home and spend the night with me?”

  “I’m not well enough,” said Eleanor. “It’s too hard to catch my breath in your house, it smells just like you, bath powder and candy. And it’s rumpled in every room. Do you sleep everywhere? Of course, my heart beats up in my ears when I look and find you’ve soaped up every mirror.”

  “What’s shocking?” said Dee, before her mother could. “Some days I look awful and I soap all the mirrors so I can’t see. I’m just trying not to care.”

  “Ty, don’t hit yourself with your spoon!”

  “Please ‘scuse,” said Dee. “I’m a slow eater, so I get cramps if I sit too long at the table. I’m going to walk it off.” And she started toward the room that held all her old baby furniture.

  Ty got up from his chair. He yipped numbers. He’d started playing Hide ’n Seek.

  “You can’t play that alone,” said Dee. “And you’re not supposed to chase me in the house.”

  “He’s not running,” said Eleanor.

  “His eyes are.”

  Ty called in his disguised voice, counting, hunting her down.

  Dee said, “I’m not good at games so I won’t play.” She shut him out of his own bedroom. “You hear?” Like lips locking, she snapped the door to. He howled. “It’s my baby furniture,” she said. Privacy gave her a minute to check the insides of her legs: bruises the color of double blushes, the faint friction of walking. She looked away from them. “I’m just too delicate.”

  She tested her old bed. The only change was in the middle: Ty had made the impression of his sleeping—a half-undone curl. How wonderfully safe her childhood things were with Ty. It saddened her. To him everything had feelings.

  His sandal soles rubbed along the bottom of the door, like leather noses sniffing. “I know a secret.” He stuffed his whisper through the lock.

  She protested. “No fair. You know I love secrets. If I won’t listen to a secret, then you know either I’ve just eaten something that disagreed with me or my heart’s broken. Do you have a secret I haven’t heard?”

  Edging the door open, he was beside her, his eyes cool as the surface of glass with his kidding.

  “I can give you my secret.” His small, shallow chest arched with eagerness. She bent to him. Her back cracked softly like knuckles. He’d won.

  “Well, you got my attention now,” said Dee.

  So at the last minute, like he was saving his secret, he sucked his breath back in and said, “Psst, psst, psst,” exploded it in her ear, the joke of a secret.

  It hurt her inside her head. “You have to be older to know what is funny,” said Dee.

  When she got back to the table, they had washed her dish. Eleanor said, “We decided to stop dinner.” She went into the other room and turned everything on low: the lamps, the fan—even the TV had most of its words missing.

  “Too quiet,” said Eleanor. “We’ll fall asleep before something happens. I never did have the patience for a premonition.”

  Overhead a murmur of an airplane passed. They all cricked their necks to hear it. “Want to go out and see which lights are planes and which are stars?” asked Dee. No one wanted to.

  Hooper had gotten the rocking chair and was holding a dark drink. He did not drink in secret, but he did hold the glass carefully so the ice wouldn’t rattle and draw attention. Instead of rocking, he opened and closed his legs in a pinching motion.

  Dee dropped down hard on the rug with the dog. “It only sounds like it hurts,” she said and laid her head back and looked up to the ceiling. “Mother! There’s a spider’s web over me. Get the broom and sweep the ceiling. Get it away from me.”

  “It’s empty, Dee. It’s out of reach.”

  Dee watched the web. She didn’t hate spiders—just their webs. Webs were not like lace but cool as human skin. Though she could see they were nothing but an intricate design. “Didn’t I know a kid once that ate spiderwebs?”

  “Your best friend, the year you turned twelve,” Eleanor said.

  Dee petted the dog and thought how she liked dogs because what she hated most was human complexity. “I’d better catch a nap before leaving,” she said. If she drifted off fast enough, maybe they wouldn’t wake her and send her home. Her eyes were already swimming with sleep when a worry dug into her and she asked with a start, “Mother, is it okay to close my eyes while you’ve still got a premonition?”

  “I’m not shutting mine,” said Eleanor.

  His drink glass dry, Hooper still opened and closed his legs. A grin came up to the surface of his mouth. He didn’t open his eyes but said to Eleanor, “It’s not about another woman, you know. I was only thinking about us when we were young and you were a tomboy.” Hooper subsided into long breaths and twitching eyelids. The TV played muffled music, the colors quietly leaped with life.

  “Listen,” said Eleanor. “Someone’s running in my house. Who is it? Oh, it’s my pulse. Hey, don’t leave me alone, everybody. Did you know I’m as constipated as a cat?”

  Dee breathed deep, trying to get a million miles of sleep away.

  The dog snored.

  Dee’s eyelashes, straight as her hair, opened and closed. She glimpsed her mother. In a fraction of sight, she saw Eleanor squeeze a fist at her. “These hands are tingling; I’ve got worms in my fingers.”

  Ty’s breath, caught tight in his nose, cheeped like a bird.

  “I can’t feel the tips of my fingers, it feels like they’ve dropped off.”

  “Go to bed, Mother,” said Dee, her head rushing toward the deep bottom of a dream.

  “I won’t go in my bedroom. It’s almost night and my furniture is dark and scratched. I like to sleep during the day when I can hear the neighborhood coming and going. At night I wake up and listen and hear the dark. It catches its breath through my curtains.”

  Hooper unrolled his face from dozing. “I gave you our whole bedroom.”

  Eleanor had a habit of hooking a finger into Dee’s pocketbook, like it was a mouth—did it several weeks ago, to hold her close and still enough to get said what Dee didn’t want to know: “His loving disturbs me more than it soothes me now.” That time, Dee had gone and found her father sleeping in a cold, queer bed in the spare room. She knew he did this so they could all believe it was temporary. Several times she had tiptoed to his new door, her heart pecking inside her, watching him lie alone with night dropping down in small pieces, listening for him to whisper her mother’s name—not wanting Eleanor to come there now, but to answer him from a long, long time ago.

  Now Dee watched Eleanor raise her arms. “Something’s growing inside of me. It’s moving around and it’s making my body hair bristle and I’m wet-cold. Oh, I want, I want, I want. . .”

  Dee, drowning in sleep, peeked over the threshold of her eyelids, feeling her sight was the only thing awake. Her mother looked like something was sticking her in her right eye. She commenced to run from whatever it was. Repeating God’s name, Eleanor took a crooked step, as if a weight in one shoe had pulled one side of her body down from her eye to the floor. She was headed toward the TV.

  Dee sat up so as not to get walked on. “Mother? I can’t understand you. What have you got in your mouth? Take it out. You’re not talking right.”

  Ty roused, hands picking at the air.

  When Dee stood level with Eleanor, she looked at her carefully. “Mother,” she whispered. Then she put Eleanor gently down on the floor. Getting her down, Eleanor was brittle as a cookie.

  “I don’t want to fall down,” said Eleanor. “Stand me up again.”

  In the rocker, Hooper was stuck. “What on earth?” he said. “Just when I was dreaming about us.” And he gave a yank, thinking he had the arms of the rocker when he was pulling on his own sharp shinbones. “It’l
l take me a lifetime to figure us out.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Eleanor, and she seemed to listen. “My voice. It’s crooked, it’s wrong. Something’s stolen my voice.” She spoke slurred, thick, rocky. “Who knocked me down?”

  “I did not knock you down,” said Dee. Her face burned. “I haven’t hit you since last time. How dare you bring it up at a moment like this.”

  There was such tension in the room that the dog got up.

  “Do you recognize me, Mother?” asked Dee.

  “Of course,” said Eleanor.

  “It’s Dee-Dee,” she said, giving her full name. She took a big step back. “Daddy, she’s got it all right. This family’s famous for having strokes. She’s got the famous family stroke.”

  “I’m alone.” One of Eleanor’s eyes roamed out of control.

  Ty let out a tiny whistle. “I’m here.”

  “You’re just a child,” said Dee. “Don’t worry, Mother, I’ll take care of you.” How she could shine in an emergency. “If I have to, I’ll carry you up in my arms like a baby.”

  “But I’m the baby!” Ty’s nostrils stretched like two little black mouths shouting.

  Eleanor jerked one hand to her chest as if she were catching a hardball. “Cared for yes, but helpless, that’s too much.” Then she pressed a searching finger to her chest as if her heart had knotted smaller for protection. “I’m going to be the baby.”

  “No,” screamed Ty. “It’s me that stays the baby.”

  “Quick,” said Dee.

  Hooper sprang forward from the rocker and hung over Eleanor. He looked down into her eyes. A tear ran along his nose and dropped onto Eleanor’s cheek.

  Then at the phone Hooper wiped his tears on his thumbs. “Hospital answered on first ring,” he said. He knew everybody there, but he had gone hoarse with fear; who could understand him? He calmed down and said, quite clearly, “It’s Hooper Johnson, you ninnies, over on Meade Place. My missus has had a bad attack and my daughter diagnosed it. It’s a stroke. Send the ambulance. Tell them to come in the back, we never use the front door.”

  It was then that Hooper began confusing Eleanor’s new voice with the hospital’s on the phone.