Ernie's Ark

by Monica Wood

  Ernie nodded. Atlantic Pulp & Paper had been bought out by Global Paper Products, a South African firm that promised to have the plant up and running within weeks, honoring back wages and pension packages and seniority. It was as if the town of Abbott Falls, Maine, had won the raffle of raffles, but the whiff of despair and burned bridges had settled so far into the valley that it would be a long time before anyone felt like dancing. No one liked the idea of being bailed out by foreigners, of course, but there were other, worse things: too many who had said and done what they were now ashamed of; too many families ripped apart by money and rage; too many faces with similar features had foamed at one another from opposite sides of the gauntlet over too many shift changes. A year ago there might have been a mass celebration, people kissing in the streets as at the end of a war, an unleashing of church bells, but it was too late now; what Ernie sensed, taking the town’s measure, was an oddly calibrated resignation, a triumph with most of the satisfaction scoured clean off it.

  “Are you glad to be going back to work?” Francine asked.

  “I’m not going,” Ernie told her. “I’m retired. I’ll be getting a check, if they mean what they say.”

  “They do,” Francine assured him.

  The evening was cool and dreamy, and their steps made bright, clopping sounds on the sidewalk as Ernie escorted Francine to 425 West Main. Melanie Bouchard’s School of Dance, which in all these years Ernie had taken no notice of whatsoever, spanned the upper floors of Dave’s Diner and Showers of Flowers. In the florist’s window, as in many storefronts throughout town, hung a computer-generated banner wishing a warm welcome to Global Paper and a warmer welcome-back to the striking papermakers. The proprietress of Showers of Flowers, whose cheerful demeanor Ernie remembered as a comfort while arranging for Marie’s funeral, had festooned her storefront with flowers made of bone-white, coated paper—a specialty of the Abbott Falls mill. “That’s clever,” Ernie said.

  “My stepmother owns that shop,” Francine informed him. “She’s a very beautiful person.”

  Francine didn’t appear to require an answer, so Ernie remained silent.

  “She’s so beautiful people buy flowers just to look at her face,” Francine went on. Her voice dropped. “My father doesn’t appreciate her at all. He has girlfriends I’m not supposed to know about.” Between the shops was a narrow door with stenciled letters reading DANCE UPSTAIRS. “Here goes nothing,” Francine said, flinging open the door.

  Despite his misgivings, Ernie felt momentarily relieved to have something to take his mind away from his son’s impending visit. It would be a typically quick visit, a two-day detour from doing business down in Portland for his new computer company; still, Ernie had written some topics on a note card in case they ran out of conversation. He no longer had Marie to take up the slack.

  He followed Francine up the stairs, but to his confusion they led to a hallway in which people of varying ages and shapes were seated on benches, putting on tap shoes or taking them off. Some were teenaged girls wearing leotards cut embarrassing low in some places and embarrassingly high in others. There were a couple of women Ernie guessed to be young mothers getting out of the house, and a covey of slightly older women who looked like schoolteachers. There was only one other man, whom Ernie recognized as the assistant manager of Laverdiere’s Drug on East Main. Slim and well-appointed as an expensive pencil, he came out of the studio with his face flaming from exertion and his shiny wingtips tapping merrily. Francine, who had put on a pair of black dance slippers, placed a reassuring hand on Ernie’s arm. “He’s in Advanced. You don’t have to get taps right off.”

  Ernie looked around, adrenaline washing hotly through him. “I thought this was a dance lesson, “he said. “Fox-trots and rumbas and what have you.”

  “Melanie doesn’t teach ballroom,” Francine said. “It’s tap and jazz only. Jazz was full, and anyway, that’s Tuesday nights. I have band practice.” She pulled gently on his arm. “Come on.”

  Following Francine down the hallway, Ernie felt hapless, weirdly cornered, like a squirrel accepting a hand-feeding against all its inborn proclivities. They waited in line while a splendidly proportioned woman at a check-in table—Melanie Bouchard, presumably—took either money or punch cards from each prospective dancer, then punched cards or gave change and shooed them on. After giving Melanie ten dollars for her own lesson, Francine plunked down her half of Ernie’s raffle ticket. “Here’s my winner, Melanie,” she said, presenting Ernie as if he himself were the prize. “He’s free.”

  Melanie wrote Ernie’s name on a list, then smiled hard at him, her rouged lips parting to show her big, frightening teeth. Her crimson leotard looked like something borrowed from a circus. “Congratulations, Mr. Whitten,” Melanie said. “Welcome to Adult Tap.” She pulled out a brand-new punch card, popped a fresh hole into its pink smoothness, and handed it to Ernie, who felt at this point the way he had back in Korea, engulfed by forces beyond his control.

  He trailed Francine into the studio, watching dumbly as the beginners’ class assembled: three of the women from the hallway, plus Francine. And Ernie himself. Some music came on, evenly measured, heavy-handed piano music that appeared to have been produced by a talented hippopotamus. Then Melanie clicked into the room and instructed the class to stand facing an unforgiving wall of mirrors.

  “Fa-lap!” she called out, and produced an odd little hiccup with her feet, which were encased in glossy red tap shoes with a high heel and ankle strap. Despite his complete mortification, Ernie could not help but admire the way Melanie held her arms away from her body, the comely turn of her ankle, the way her long neck lifted. “Fa-lap,” she repeated. “Like this.”

  Ernie stood mute as a totem as Melanie demonstrated flaps and flap-heels and ball-changes and pull-backs and shuffles. His classmates imitated her with a mighty earnestness, their mismatched timing making the scene in the mirror resemble a calliope with different-colored animals moving up and down. Francine, who moved like a stalled snowplow, kept glancing at him sideways. Her arms stuck straight out from her sides, and with each connection of toe to floor, her body pitched forward from the waist. Ernie began to move his feet out of pity, surprised by the rhythm his body was able to keep. Fa-lap, ball-change, fa-lap, ball-change. Of course, he wished to go home, but more than that he wished to go home to Marie.

  “Good!” Melanie called out. “Aaand! Shuffle! Like this!” And it was on to shuffle-hop-step, Ernie’s classmates resuming their calliope imitation; Ernie, in his brown pants and shirt and shoes, felt like the ugly carnival man running the machine. “Aaaand,” Melanie foamed, “shuffle-hop-step! Shuffle-hop-step! That’s called an Irish, class—you’re dancing!” As a reward Melanie sent them to the barre, where they did twenty minutes of drills that left Ernie’s calves feeling profoundly insulted. Melanie clapped her hands and pronounced them the best darned beginners it had ever been her privilege to meet.

  Ernie waited in the hallway while Francine changed her shoes, then escorted her down the stairs and into the street. They were both a little out of breath, and didn’t talk until they’d reached the end of West Main and rounded the corner onto River.

  “I took lessons when I was eight,” Francine said. “I forgot everything.”

  Ernie glanced down at her—she came only to his shoulder, and he was not a tall man. “Why didn’t you keep up your lessons?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Too fat.”

  Ernie had been hoping for a longer, more elaborate explanation that might get them as far as Elm, at least. He had never been good at talking to children, including his own son, and didn’t expect much in the way of divine intervention at this late date. James had last visited in December—it wasn’t a visit, it was Marie’s funeral—and they’d mostly sat around the house in Marie’s chairs not talking about her.

  “We made enough on the raffle to send ten kids to band camp,” Francine said.

  “Congratulations,” he said. She had big, bloomy che
eks, he noticed, the only truly childlike thing about her. “When do you go?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m not going. There’s about four million saxophonists better than me.”

  They made their way along the river, where the mill, having lain dormant for months, suddenly looked newly minted. A few cars dotted the parking lot, and people were moving in and out of the administrative offices. The waning sun banked off its brick sides, leaving an auburn burnish that Ernie hoped bespoke better times ahead.

  “Here you are, Mr. Whitten,” she said as they reached Ernie’s gate. It needed paint, he noticed. Francine was smiling like a camp counselor after a successful sing-along. “You’ve got five lessons left,” she reminded him. “Five Fridays.”

  “I was under the impression it was only the one,” Ernie said. “That the one lesson was the prize. A very nice prize indeed.”

  “She gave you a punch card,” Francine said. “It’s a whole class, six weeks.” She put her hands on her hips. “I’ll take you to every one of them. If you want.”

  “I expect I can finish up by myself,” said Ernie, who intended to do no such thing.

  “I was watching you,” she said. “You could be good. You can tell by the way a dancer holds himself.” Another optimist, Ernie thought: Marie had believed the best of everyone, even the doctor who had twice pronounced her cured. Francine stuck out her hand, which was uncommonly soft. “Thank you for winning,” she said. “Could I come visit your dog sometime?”

  “I don’t see why not. He certainly seems to like you.”

  “Animals do,” she said, then sauntered off toward home, the plastic bag swinging from her wrist.

  Ernie let the dog out and made a tour around the ark. Francine was right, he had let it go. He’d left the bare wood to the elements, and the boards had lifted in places, revealing tufts of leaf and grass dragged in there by small determined animals; but he knew what it once had been and meant, and tonight that felt like enough. He sat on the gangplank with the dog in his lap, thinking of the tap dancers he and Marie used to admire on Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Welk, impeccably costumed black men with furrowed brows and all their teeth showing, their shoes sparking against a shiny floor. What struck Ernie now, in the retrospect of this evening, was their self-containment. They were not top-hatted show-offs sweeping beautiful women across yards of stage; they were tap dancers, confined to a spotlight-sized circle made large by virtue of their modest, tippy-tapping pleasure. Every last one of them must have started with a simple fa-lap.

  Out on the street, cars began to cruise by. There was a subtle form of celebration going on after all, bands of people arriving at one doorstep or another. A cautious resurrection, Ernie thought: their rejoicing had a manufactured quality, as if they were so out of practice they’d had to consult a manual.

  After supper Ernie found the stack of unopened cards and selected the one with the Loves’ return address. It was signed From your neighbors, the Loves, with our sympathy in a woman’s hand, and beneath that, in what Ernie took to be Francine’s eighth-grade scrawl: She was a nice person to see around the neighborhood. Ernie closed the card, then read the others. There were some nice remembrances, and he was glad to have them, and surprised to be glad. He collected the cards and put them on the kitchen table for James to read the next day. Then he remembered that James had once liked fudge, so he took sugar and chocolate from the cupboard and set to work.

  James arrived around lunchtime, knocking at the little-used front door just as Francine, holding a leash with the price tag still attached, rang the bell on the side. Ernie let his son in first; then, glad for something to do, hurried through the kitchen and into the sunporch to greet Francine. Once he had them both in his kitchen, he didn’t know what to do with either one of them.

  “I thought the town was after you to take that thing down,” James said, gesturing out the window toward Ernie’s ark.

  “They sent a fellow out here two or three times, but he kept losing the citations and what have you.”

  “Creativity can’t be thwarted,” Francine said. She already had the dog in her arms. “Is that fudge?”

  “Have some,” Ernie urged them both.

  “I’m on a diet,” James said, then sat heavily at the kitchen table. Ernie regarded his son, who had not aged well. His hair was thin as a baby’s and he had a babyish roll of fat around his waist. He’d inherited nothing from his mother except her smile, which he rarely used.

  “Chocolate adds years to your life,” Francine declared. “They did studies.”

  James looked at her.

  “Francine knows everything,” Ernie explained.

  James took a piece of fudge and chewed it thoughtfully. He looked at the stack of sympathy cards on the table. “How are you, Dad?” he asked wearily.

  “He’s fine. He’s a winner,” Francine said, hooking the leash to the dog’s collar. “Can I take Pumpkie-boy for a walk?”

  “Sure,” Ernie said.

  “A really long one? Like down to the mill and back?”

  “Anywhere you want,” Ernie said, and watched as she trotted off, the dog following, obedient as a pull-toy.

  James cleared his throat. “She’s a strange one.”

  Ernie shrugged. “You were like that.”

  “I don’t think I went around haunting the neighbors,” James said, then smiled after all, a flash of Marie passing between them.

  “Actually,” Ernie said, “you did.” He sat down. “How’s Carrie?” He instantly regretted this blunder: James’s daughter, now nineteen, was the type of girl they used to call “wayward.”

  “Last I heard,” James said, “she was in Seattle.” There was more, Ernie guessed—with Carrie there always was—but he was in no position to ask. He sensed that his son could use some advice, the grandfather’s perspective—but he didn’t know his granddaughter well and hadn’t seen her since he and Marie had flown out for her high school graduation.

  “I’ve been looking at condos,” James said.

  Ernie picked up the saltshaker and rolled it in his palms. “I thought you liked where you were, son.” He blushed; the word son sounded hammy and wrong, as if he were auditioning for a part in a family movie.

  James looked up. “Not for me. For you. They have these retirement communities.”

  “You mean in San Francisco?”

  “Walnut Creek,” James said. “I’d be a stone’s throw away.” His voice was heavy with obligation, rich with it.

  “I’m sixty-five years old, James,” Ernie said. “I’ve got better things to do than play bingo with a bunch of people who can’t remember what work is.”

  “What are you so busy doing?” James asked, gesturing around the kitchen, which did need a cleaning. “It doesn’t seem like you’re exactly thriving.”

  Ernie sat back, folding his arms, eyeing his son. He didn’t want to argue with him, for with Marie gone there was no telling what they might say. He missed her acutely, her influence, the way she softened the edges of everything. “You’re in this house ten minutes and you’ve got the picture, is that it?”

  “I thought you’d be relieved,” James said. He turned his blue eyes—he’d always had frank, appraising eyes—toward Ernie. “Do you have friends?” He seemed embarrassed to have to ask.

  “I’ve lived here all my life,” Ernie said, which did not, he knew, answer his son’s question. “I have friends,” he added, but in truth he could think of only two right off the bat: one was dead and the other was going on fourteen years old. He was angry with James, mostly because it was true: he’d been here ten minutes and gotten the picture.

  “What do you do all day?” James asked rhetorically. “Where do you go?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Ernie said, “I seem to have taken up tap dancing.”

  James looked as if Ernie had just announced his candidacy for governor. “It’s excellent exercise,” Ernie went on, “especially for older people.”

  “Tap dancing?” James sai
d. “Seriously?”

  “I won lessons. Francine sold me the ticket.”

  James looked as if he might want to smile, then didn’t. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  Ernie got up slowly and showed his son a shuffle-hop-step. He bit his tongue gently, concentrating. “They call that an Irish,” he said. “I’m not selling this place.”

  James looked exhausted and confused. His suit was travel-rumpled, his fragile hair mashed down on one side, and his eyelids had begun to thicken with age. James’s life was not easy, Ernie knew. He spent most of every day in a car; he lived in a place where fat men did not do well; he’d sired a daughter who courted trouble; he’d married a woman who did not adore him. Ernie himself had had a far easier time of things. “I’m trying to do something right for a change,” James said quietly. “It’s a little late, I know.”

  “Well, I don’t need taking care of. You can rest easy on that score.” Ernie put his hands on the table, flat down, thinking he might slide them over, but instead he picked up the sympathy cards and placed them into a neat stack. “It’s not your fault we’re like this, son.” There it was again, that word; he could not stop saying it.

  James wiped his face hard with his hands. He stared at the cards on the table. “I think of her a lot, Dad. I hope you know that.”

  Ernie had always thought of his son as cold, but here, now, in his soft, travel-worn clothes, he did not seem cold at all. He watched as James leafed through the cards.

  “These are nice,” his son said. “Thanks for getting them out.”

  Ernie shrugged. “I just got down to opening them myself yesterday.”

  James didn’t look surprised. He took off his sports jacket and hung it on the chair-back. This took almost a minute. There was nothing else to say, and two days to fill, and Ernie’s feeling of burden doubled with the knowledge that his son felt the same way.

  “I’ll tell you what you can do for me,” Ernie said, getting up. It felt good just to move. The air stirred, and that was something. “You said you wanted to do something. Well, I’ve got something, if you meant what you said.”