by Susan Shreve
“Maybe I will,” Franny said.
And maybe not, she thought.
But in spite of herself, in spite of her worries and better judgment, she was picturing herself in a black velvet strapless dress long enough to cover her feet hidden in silver shoes. She would be leaning against a post at the gymnasium, one hand on her hip, her eyes half closed in make-believe boredom, the expression she’d seen on the faces of the models in her mother’s fashion magazines. The band would be playing Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” the lights dim, and Mikey Houston would be moving across the gymnasium floor in Franny’s direction.
THE 1956 EASTERBROOK HIGH VALENTINE’S DANCE
The gymnasium at Easterbrook was a blaze of light, festooned with ribbons and strips of white crepe paper and flashing Christmas tree bulbs and pots of ferns and flowers. A huge red heart with two chairs decked out as thrones for the king and queen of the Valentine’s Dance was at center stage, next to where Johnny and the Teddy Bears were playing “No Not Much.”
Franny, her stomach on fire, walked into the gym with Boots.
Johnny was the lead singer, and his voice quivered and trilled as he sang to some girl that he didn’t want his arms around her, but then admitted that wasn’t true: “Nnnnnnno, nnnnot, muuuuuuch.”
Franny wrapped her arms around her chest, determined to hold up her strapless black velvet dress. Her feet hurt in the silver shoes in spite of the toilet paper bed into which they’d been stuffed. But the pain, the simple physical pain in her fragile feet, didn’t bother her so much as the possibility that she would humiliate herself right there in the gym with most of the people her age in the town of Easterbrook dancing their hearts out!
Boots was wearing a white dress with a gathered skirt and puffed sleeves.
“Because I’m Catholic and Catholics can’t wear strapless.”
Boots’s parents had only permitted her to attend the Valentine’s Dance if she wore a dress that looked very much like the dress she had worn when she was eight for her first Communion. They had a habit of worrying there could be sex at the dances and then Boots would be defiled and no one, at least no good Catholic boy, would want to marry her.
“I’d like to be defiled,” Eleanor said. “Soon, while I’m still a freshman.”
“Me too,” Boots said. “And so would Franny, right Franny?”
Franny had thought about lying in her bed in the dark with Mikey Houston so he couldn’t see her crippled foot, but she never wanted any boy to see her without all of her clothes. Defiled sounded similar to naked.
Marriage was the goal in Easterbrook, the only solution for a girl. Parents started to talk about their daughter’s domestic future early, sometimes as early as eighth grade when coupling began at the soda shop. Boots’s parents especially talked about her future as a wife and mother as if it might happen any moment.
“I’m so excited I can hardly stand it,” Boots said. “Aren’t you?”
“Not yet,” Franny said.
She had started feeling sick at dinner.
“You feel sick because you’re nervous,” Dr. Henry Hall said. “I can give you a medical description of why your stomach reacts to nerves.”
Her father liked to supply the family with medical information, what it meant when Franny’s heartbeat accelerated or she blushed or Zeke sneezed as he was in the habit of doing or Margaret Hall had an asthma attack.
“No medical descriptions, thank you,” Franny said.
“You’ll be fine, in any case,” Dr. Hall said.
“I feel sick too,” Zeke said.
“You always feel what Franny is feeling, Zekey,” Dr. Hall said. “You need to learn to feel for yourself.”
“I do,” Zeke said. “I feel sick.”
Franny’s mother leaned over and whispered in her ear. “You don’t have to eat a thing, puss, whatever your father says. He doesn’t understand girls or dances.”
All week her mother had been teaching her to dance, especially slow dance, pushing the furniture in the living room against the wall, turning the Victrola on full volume.
Franny had a tendency to trip over her own feet.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “Especially I can’t do the cheek-to-cheek dancing like you and Daddy do.”
“We’ll practice one more time in your bare feet before you put on your new shoes,” her mother said.
Her mother put “Don’t Fence Me In” on the Victrola, took Franny in her arms, and they danced as they had done the night before.
“I keep feeling as if I’m going to trip,” Franny said.
“Don’t worry,” her mother said. “The boys will be awful. You’ll think you’re dancing with a cutting board.”
They danced from one end of the living room to the other and through the dining room where poor Zeke sat next to Dr. Henry Hall, trying to finish his dinner so he could belong to the Clean Plate Club.
“I don’t want to belong to the Clean Plate Club,” Zeke was saying as his sister danced with his mother around the dining room table.
Dancing out of the room and into the kitchen, Margaret whispered in Franny’s ear, “You’re getting so good, darling.”
“Am I really?”
“So much better.”
As she danced, smelling the sweet gardenia toilet water Margaret Hall always wore, Franny felt a kind of sizzle in her belly, imagining Mikey Houston with his greased blond bangs and blue eyes and double dimples on his cheeks, floating around the gymnasium with her.
It was also possible, she thought with a mixture of hope and fear, that no one would ask her to dance, that she’d sit at a table around the dance floor, her silver shoes hidden by her dress, watching the dancers rock back and forth on the gymnasium floor, checking the clock over the basketball net, counting the hours until the dance was over.
If she got any more nervous, it was possible that she’d throw up right on the dance floor.
Mikey Houston was by the refreshment table drinking ginger ale punch when Franny walked into the gymnasium, her left foot locked into the silver shoe in a bed of toilet paper, loosely fitted around her foot. The dance was in full swing, the dance floor crowded with jitterbugging couples flying from one another’s arms, girls screaming on the sidelines, boys smoking just outside the gymnasium door, Johnny and the Teddy Bears shouting above the conversations.
Franny sat on a folding chair with Boots and Eleanor, her lap full of sugar cookies.
They were talking about boys.
“Do you see Bobby Mason with Belinda?” Eleanor said. “I hear she’s really fast.”
“I heard that too,” Boots said. “My sister told me Belinda was making out with Bobby something terrible in the cemetery last Friday night.”
“Behind the Freys’ gravestone,” Eleanor said. “You know the one that says Frey in curvy letters with the whole family, all six of them including the grandmother dying in a fire in 1925 and getting buried in the same grave.”
“Icky,” Franny said.
From time to time, Bobby looked over at the group of girls, a wicked half smile on his face. Franny assumed it was Eleanor that he was planning to dance with, and who wouldn’t want to dance with Eleanor, she thought, a little round pumpkin of a pretty girl with melon breasts.
“Bobby’s looking at you, Franny,” Boots said.
“He is, Franny,” Eleanor said. “He keeps looking at you out of the corner of his eye.”
“He’s the coolest in the ninth grade, whatever he did behind the Freys’ gravestone,” Boots said. “But I’d be terrified to dance with him.”
“Afraid you’d be defiled?” Franny giggled.
“My mom says he’s the kind of boy who puts his hand straight down the front of a girl’s dress. That she’s heard it from the other mothers at coffee after Mass at St. Bernadette’s.”
“I don’t think he’s even cute,” Eleanor said. “Too greasy and pimply for me. Have you seen him close-up?”
“I like him
close-up,” Boots said. “He’s sort of got this look and you know he carries cigarettes in his back pocket.”
“The one I like is Mikey Houston,” Eleanor said wistfully. “But I think he likes someone else.”
“Who?” Franny asked so quickly she surprised herself.
She had been scanning the dance floor for Mikey, watching the gym door, which was open so the boys at Easterbrook could have a smoke on the blacktop, to see if Mikey was among them.
“Maybe Linda Farmer.”
“I don’t think Linda Farmer is his type,” Franny said.
“How do you know his type?” Eleanor asked. “I didn’t even know you’d ever spoken to Mikey Houston.”
“I haven’t.” Franny shrugged. “But sometimes you just get a sense of a person.” She had never told Eleanor or anyone else, including her mother, that she thought about Mikey Houston a lot, that she watched him in the halls when he wasn’t looking, rode by his house on her bicycle hoping to see him playing basketball in his driveway, called him on the telephone, hanging up when he answered.
“Do you like him too?” Eleanor asked.
“I don’t even know him.”
“You know him as well as we do,” Boots said.
“You always keep everything a secret, Franny,” Eleanor said. “I never know what you think about anyone and you’re my first cousin and almost best friend.”
Mikey Houston was a tall and quiet, confident boy and well-liked — not like the other boys at Easterbrook High School, the athletes, the regular half-bad boys who hung out at the Sweet Shoppe, or the losers. He had deep blue eyes and when he looked at someone — and he had made eye contact with Franny Hall three times since school opened, once in the cafeteria line when they were standing side by side — he had a habit of looking directly at a person. His eyes were electric beams that seemed to see right through to the heart. Franny liked that about him especially.
In her daydreams she loved him deeply. The only conversation they had was that same day in the cafeteria line. He asked her did she have a dollar since he had left his money at home.
“Maybe only fifty cents,” he’d said softly.
Franny could only shake her head, too nervous to speak.
No, I didn’t bring any money to school today, she should have said. But I will tomorrow just in case.
Or, I’m out of money now but maybe after school, we could meet at the Sweet Shoppe for a soda.
Or, I have a dollar for lunch today and I’ll split lunch with you.
Which was true since she did have a dollar for a tuna fish sandwich and a carton of milk.
Franny was just about to get another cup of lemonade when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She could feel his breath warm on the top of her head and his voice in her ear.
“Want to dance?” he asked. “Or not.”
No thank you was what she should have said and beat it out of the gymnasium. She should have called Zeke, who would have been watching something like Hopalong Cassidy on the TV in the kitchen and asked him to tell their mother she was feeling sick.
“I will dance, yes,” Franny said, turning to face him, almost cheek to cheek.
It was Kirk Salt leaning over her.
Behind her, she could hear Boots saying something to Eleanor, but Kirk had her by the hand, his hand sweaty even in February, and she wiggled her left foot in the toilet paper bed trying to balance and followed him to the middle of the dance floor.
Johnny and the Teddy Bears were playing a slow dance.
She knew Kirk Salt from English and math classes even though he lived in the country outside of Easterbrook. Kirk was nice and smart and boring, like a lot of the very small group of smart boys at Easterbrook, just the kind of boy willing to try his luck with Franny Hall, who was pretty enough to dance with but not exactly a catch. He wasn’t the kind of boy Franny would ever daydream about kissing, but at least if she did tip over in her silver shoes or something else dreadful happened, she’d rather be dancing with Kirk Salt than Mikey Houston.
He was so tall that her head came up to the middle of his chest. In order to talk to him she had to bend her neck way backward, her shoulders arched, his hot, putrid breath floating down on her. Johnny was singing “Tennessee Waltz,” and she wondered how long it would be before the song was over.
“So,” he began, struggling to think of something to say. “I guess you’re trying out for cheerleader.”
“No,” she said so quickly that she had to come up with a reason since every girl in the ninth grade tried out for cheerleader. “I have too many other things to do so I can’t.” And then, not wishing to leave him with the impression that she wasn’t good enough for cheerleading, she added, “Maybe sophomore year.”
Cheerleading was the one predictable requirement for popularity at Easterbrook High, and Franny had thought about it, thought how it would look from the bleachers on the football field for a girl like her with lumpy shoes and a big lift and a bad limp to be a cheerleader in a little red skirt and thick sweater with a big red E in the middle.
“Don’t try out,” her father had said to her and Franny knew that he was protecting her from disappointment. “It’s not a smart idea.”
Sometimes she wished for another father who wasn’t so careful. A father more like her mother who said, “What’s to lose? You either make the squad or not.”
Kirk bent down, a crooked smile on his face and asked if she wanted to go to the movies next week. Maybe her parents would let her go to the late night show. She was about to say “I can’t,” since she certainly didn’t want to sit in a dark movie theater with Kirk Salt breathing his hot bad breath into the air next to her, when someone tapped her on the back and it was Mikey Houston.
“Can I cut in?” Mikey Houston asked, angling between Franny and Kirk Salt.
“Is it okay?” Franny asked, her heart pounding in her chest, anxious because it was Mikey Houston, not wishing to hurt Kirk Salt’s feelings.
“Sure,” Kirk said almost as if he were grateful and he lumbered across the floor to the refreshment table.
Mikey slipped Franny’s right hand loosely in the V between his thumb and index finger. He took hold of her back just in the center and pulled her toward him with such confidence it took her breath away.
“You’re Franny Hall,” he said. “I’ve been watching you around school.”
“Me too,” Franny said. “I’ve been watching you too.”
Their heads were almost together and her face close enough to feel the warmth of his breath, to notice that his dimples didn’t match — one and a half dimples in the right corner of his mouth and a tiny one in the left and that his eyes which looked blue were actually gray, although the lights had been dimmed in the gymnasium.
“You’re noticeable,” he said.
She was sure that he had taken note of her because of her problem, that he’d watched from behind as she limped down the second-floor corridor of Easterbrook High.
“Because of the way I walk?” she asked, and her voice, even in her own ears, sounded casual.
“No,” he said. “You have a cute way of walking but you’re noticeable because your hair’s so black you look foreign.”
“My mother’s Danish.”
“No, I mean really foreign. Like from India.”
“So is that good?”
“It’s good to me. Nobody I know in Easterbrook has such black hair.”
Mikey rested his chin on the top of her head, just that much taller than she was, only a head, and Franny thought she was going to explode.
The music was picking up and he pulled back, turning his head from side to side in time to the rhythm, still holding hard on to Franny’s hand, his other hand firmly on her back and she was keeping up with him at that pace. But if the music got any faster, she knew she’d have to sit out the dance.
Maybe he didn’t care about her clunky shoes or the way she tilted side to side when she walked. Maybe he thought she was pretty.
&
nbsp; “Here they go,” he said as the tempo of Johnny and the Teddy Bears got faster and faster, but as Mikey swung her away from him into all the other jitterbugging couples, Franny lost the rhythm.
Boots dancing with Bilbo Nutley accidentally stepped on the toe of her silver shoes and Franny, tipping to the left, felt herself losing control.
“Too fast?” Mikey asked.
She nodded.
And almost as if the band were listening, the music slowed down, Mikey pulled her close, her head tucked barely under his chin, and he was more or less rocking back and forth in the middle of the room. She was grateful for the slow sway of swing music since her foot pressed up against the hard knot of toilet paper hurt, and it felt to her as if the cushion of paper had disappeared.
She closed her eyes and lay her cheek against the nubby roughness of his wool jacket.
At first, she didn’t notice that people had stopped dancing and were looking in her direction, looking at the floor, looking at her.
She stopped still.
“Franny,” Boots said in a stage whisper. “Look behind you.”
She dropped Mikey Houston’s hand and turned around.
Behind her, streaming in a long ribbon of white from under the black velvet skirt of her dress, was the toilet paper her mother so carefully had laced around her foot, stuffed into the toe of her silver shoe.
The president of the student council was standing on the stage with the microphone ready to announce the king and queen of the Valentine’s Dance but Franny was limping toward the girls’ room as fast as she could, across the dance floor, weaving in and out among the dancers.
Mikey Houston was standing where she had left him in the middle of the dance floor with a group of boys. She saw him when she turned to go into the bathroom.
There were four cubicles and she went into the last one, closed the door behind her, locked it, sat on the toilet seat, and pulled her feet up so no one coming into the girls’ room would know she was there.
She would wait until the dance was over. Until the last person had left the gymnasium and her worried father was the only parent left standing outside in the freezing cold.