Wait Till You See Me Dance

by Deb Olin Unferth

  There’s turtle shit everywhere, her son is saying. And you’re bringing home drunks. This place has got to be unfit. Who do I call to report you? I should go live with Dad.

  Go ahead, she says. If you can get him on the phone.

  How has she come to this? How? She can put a heroic spin on it or a negative one. She could make herself look enlightened or close to tramphood. She has never seen a woman make worse choices than she. She has never known any person so transparently wrongheaded, so obviously in need of job counseling, parenting classes, therapy, help of any kind, any lifeboat, any raft, so obviously in need of a hard, careful look at herself, and so obviously not going to do it. She is that unaware. That full of the opposite of insight, that doomed to middling livelihood at best, certain solitude, early illness, weakness, not-quite poverty, strained relations with her son, relatives who don’t really like her taking care of her when she is old. The indignity of all this, the shame. How exhausting, this life, this topic, how senseless, how difficult. She has her face in her hands. And what is that now—turtle shit in her hair? Well, this is a lovely way to spend the afternoon. Does she feel better now, Miss Pity Party? The phone rings. That would be her date.

  Don’t answer that, her son says.

  She reaches for the phone.

  Don’t you dare, her son says. You’re going to go out with that drug addict and leave me here in this shit?

  All right, all right, she says. She picks up the phone. I can’t go, she says to the man on the phone. I’m sorry. I can’t go out.

  Come on, says the man on the phone. You need a night out.

  She tells him about the turtle shit. She is standing in the bathroom doorway looking at it.

  I’m coming over, says the man on the phone.

  No, her son says. He is behind her. Tell that guy he better not show up.

  I’ll help you clean it up, says the man on the phone.

  What? she says.

  Sure, I don’t mind.

  Do you know what we’re talking about here? she says. Have you been drinking?

  He’s been drinking, says her son. Tell him not to come.

  I’m on my way, I’m in the car, he says. I’ve got all the supplies in the back.

  Don’t come. My son’s in hysterics.

  WHAT, her son screams.

  We’ll drive them to the turtle pond.

  What turtle pond? she says.

  WHAT TURTLE POND? her son says.

  There’s a turtle pond, hundreds of turtles. They line up on the logs like dots. Turtles that used to have owners like you. Owners who visit each spring, they bring binoculars. They ride out on the pond in canoes.

  I don’t have any canoe.

  WE HATE CANOES, her son says.

  We’ll go in the spring. The turtles will walk through the grass. They’ll dive bravely into the water.

  They’ll be the ones who get to set me free, she says.

  Wait Till You See Me Dance

  1.

  I know when people will die. I meet them, I can look into their faces and see if they have long to last. It’s like having a knack for math or a green thumb, both of which I also have. People wear their health on their faces.

  There was a time I lived alone in the crappiest neighborhood I would ever live in and had few friends and worked at a place where the people I saw were all quietly abandoning their plans, like I was. I had the faces of dying people all around me. One day the office assistant called me over to her desk and said she was an Indian dancer and how would I like to go to an Indian dance?

  This same office assistant had once said to me, “You know what I think every time I look at you? Guess. Guess what I think.”

  “Here comes the bride,” I said.

  “Wrong,” she said. “I think about that movie where the angel comes to earth and shows a man the future and how bad it’s going to be, and the man looks at the future and says, ‘But what about Mary? What happens to her?’ And the angel says, ‘You’re not going to like it, George.’ And George says, ‘Well, I have to know. Tell me, Angel.’ And the angel says, ‘She’s an old maid! She works at the library!’ And the man says, ‘Nooooooo!”’

  “I don’t know that movie,” I said.

  “‘She’s an old maid! She works at the library!’ You should put that on your voice mail.”

  “I don’t work at the library.”

  “People would know they had the right number.”

  After that she called me Mary and soon had them all calling me Mary.

  This office assistant sat at her desk and handed out notices about forms that people had forgotten to fill out. She wrote down on slips of paper chore lists, reminders, disclosures she’d received from above: Tag your food. Turn in your book orders. You have been chosen for a special assignment. I didn’t like her. She was young and hard to talk to and not nice. She wasn’t the only office assistant. There were two others, who were locked in an eternal battle and fought every single day. A partition had been raised between them in the hope that if they didn’t see each other they would each cease to believe in the other’s existence. It hadn’t worked. All it did was make them think they each had their own office, which they protected fiercely. The entire setup was confusing and inconvenient. If you wanted anything done, you had to depend on the first office assistant, the one who had asked me to the dance.

  So this assistant was a lot of things but she certainly was not Indian, and on the day she asked me to the dance I said so. “What kind of an Indian are you supposed to be?” I said. Then it turned out she meant Native American—or American Indian. But she wasn’t that either.

  “You have the cheeks of a cowgirl,” I said. “You have the face of a cowboy.” It was true. She was both pretty and masculine.

  Well, she had learned how to dance some Native American dances and her own mother had sewn her a Native American costume. It was beautiful, the costume, she said, and if you drove out of the city, you could find the land the Native Americans once lived on and still do today and where they dance still. She had a flyer about it, look.

  “I never heard of this place,” I said.

  “Do you want to come or not?”

  “I don’t know how to dance any Native American dances.”

  “They’ll teach you, everyone will. They’re very nice out there.”

  I didn’t know why she wanted me along. Maybe she wanted more friends, which might not be so bad considering the way things were going just then.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  “Great,” she said. Her eyebrows went up. “You’ll drive? I don’t have a car.”

  At this job, four times a day, thirty people assembled before me, and it was my duty to tell them some useful fact about the English language, a fact they could then take and go out into the world with and use to better their positions in society. There were no grades in the class. It was a pass/fail class and whether they got a “pass” or a “fail” depended on an essay they had to write on the last day, which was read and evaluated by outside sources. These outside sources were supposed to be mysterious, were maybe not even people, were maybe just God, but I happened to know were simply whichever teacher or two the office assistant lined up to do it. It was a probationary class, intended for the students so illiterate that it was almost unseemly to have them there. It was the last-chance class. It went by the number 99. Anyone who passed got to enter college for real, sign up for 101. Anyone who failed had to leave. The students from 99 were all over the hallways. They didn’t care about any useful facts to take out into the world. They cared only about the essay graded by outside sources. Thirty percent failed most years and everybody knew this. The students in 99 disliked me with a vigor and a courage that were kind of amazing. I stood at the front of the room on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and said, “The test is graded by outside sources.” I used this to respond to every complaint, defense, and plea.

  The test is graded by outside sources.

  T
he test is graded by outside sources.

  The test is graded by outside sources.

  That day, after I agreed to bring the assistant to the dance, I went and stood in front of my third class of the day. It was nearly the end of the semester and they had that unstrung look to them—gaunt, spooked, blaming. “Let me remind you,” I told them, “I don’t grade the tests. And I can tell you this much. Any essay without a proper introduction will not get a ‘pass,’ so let’s turn our attention back to the board.”

  I was what is called an adjunct: a thing attached to another thing in a dependent or subordinate position.

  The assistant had it a little wrong about the movie, by the way. It wasn’t the future that George got to see. The angel’s job is to show George what the world would be like if George had never existed. The premise of the movie—because of course I’d seen it, everyone’s seen it, if you were born in America you’ve seen it—is that George is unhappy and has been for many years, his whole life nearly, and he is so full of regret and fear that he wants to die, or, even better, not to have been born in the first place.

  2.

  Some months before the assistant asked me to the dance, the associate chair called me into his office. This was a man whose face held the assurance of the living: he’d hold up a good long while yet.

  “Do you have room in any of your classes?” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t have any room. I certainly don’t have room two weeks into the semester.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mary, because we’ve got this kid here.” He pointed to a kid in the corner whom I hadn’t noticed yet. A thin boy who clutched several plastic grocery bags to his chest.

  “My name’s not Mary,” I said.

  “It’s not?”

  “He missed two weeks,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “He’s here on a visa.”

  “Does he speak any English?” I said.

  We looked at him. He looked back at us as if he might startle himself off his chair.

  “Take the kid,” the associate chair said.

  Once a visa student in 99 wrote me a poem about how much I was helping him improve his grammar. One of the lines of the poem went:

  Thou laid really strong excellent basement.

  The kid was a worse-than-average 99 student. He couldn’t write a sentence. He turned in his first jumbled essay and I thought: There is no way this kid is going to pass. And I thought: What a bother for him to fly all the way across the world to sit in my class and then to fly back home. And by the time I finished those two thoughts he was already shifting to the back of my mind, he was already taking a seat amid the blur of other students, whose names I would never know, whose faces I’d forget, and whose passing or failing grades were like changes in the air temperature, were nothing to do with me.

  Every semester I went through this. I’d had the job two years. I had local city kids and a few foreign students, all of them ready for certain destruction. Some brought me fruit baskets. Some tried to bribe me into passing them. One threatened me, told me his “alliances” would look me up one day.

  By the third week of the semester what this kid was to me was nothing to do with me.

  By accident I heard him play. I was walking down the hallway toward another tedious day and a strange sound stopped me. Strands of violin and piano were coming from behind a door. I looked in.

  Did I mention that this run-down school, this flat barrel-bottom place, was run between the walls of a building designed by a very famous architect? Yes, it was. It had been the high point of the architect’s career. It was while making this building that the architect had come up with his very best ideas about designing buildings and had summed these ideas up in a short catchy sentence that he said aloud and that was later written into books that were read all over the world and that was now familiar even to the layperson. After saying this catchy sentence, the architect succumbed to his drinking problem and never straightened himself out and eventually died bankrupt and alone, but this building still stood, and now somehow these people had gotten their hands on the place and were ruining it as fast as they could. Water damage, broken tiles, missing doorknobs, and, worst of all, modern rehab: linoleum floors, drop ceilings, paint over wood. Catastrophe was setting in, but this one room had been preserved—perhaps because the public still encountered it on festive holiday occasions. The architect’s one mistake had been to put this room on the seventh floor. The public had to be ushered in past the wreckage to reach it, up the new fake-wood-paneled elevators, over the colorless hallway carpet that had been nailed down there. But once inside, an auditorium opened up overhead and it was flawless. It marked that thin line of one artistic movement shifting into another, one great artist at his best.

  On the stage the kid from my class was on the piano. Another student was playing the violin. The kid kept lifting one hand, keeping the left hand going and conducting the violin with his melody hand. Then the violin stopped and the kid continued to play and the sound I was hearing was formal and sad and peculiar. I myself had studied piano for years. I’d wanted to be a concert pianist in high school, which is its own separate bad joke now, but I knew this guy was super good. The piece had a density and a mathematical oddness, an originality. He stopped playing and looked up. I ducked out the door.

  I stood in the hallway, thinking. How had such a talented kid wound up at our school? The school was no great music school. There were better music schools up the street, not to mention all over the country and the world.

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe for a moment, like my lungs were being pressed. I saw the emotional deadness in me and I saw it lift. It was temporarily gone.

  Another paper of his landed in the pile. I couldn’t understand any of it. Something about cars. The color of cars. Maybe about the color of cars. Something about the advent of America, of bank machines and microwave sandwiches. That afternoon he sat in the back of the class, wrote down whatever was going up on the board. I told him to talk to me at the end of the hour. He came and stood in front of me, his plastic bags in his hands at his sides. He was the same height as me, and he had sharp, dark good looks, though his nervousness shaded them. “Yes, miss?” he said.

  “Why don’t you explain to me what you’re trying to say here,” I said. I had his paper in my hand, and he lifted his eyebrows over it.

  “Is it not right?” he said.

  I dropped the paper onto the desk. “This writing is horrendous,” I said. “What are you doing at this school? Didn’t you apply anywhere else? Proper music schools?”

  He said nothing.

  Suddenly I was overwhelmed. “Well?” I said. “Well?”

  The room was washed-out that day. Even the fluorescents were dim.

  “You’re never going to pass this class,” I said.

  He turned and walked toward the door.

  “I heard you in the auditorium,” I said, shaking. “I saw you.”

  He stopped at the door and looked back at me.

  You think it’s so easy doing what’s right?

  Once I had a student from Mexico who’d crossed the Rio Grande over and over and had always been caught. At one point he’d been lost for three days and nights, alone in the Texas desert. He’d thought it was the end of him for sure. At last he found a road and thought, My God, I am saved. The first car that came down the road was border patrol. He was back in Mexico in an hour. Another time he had tried to cross and had been sent back and had been so frustrated that he decided to use all his money and fly to Canada that same day, which he did. I don’t know why he didn’t just stay in Canada. I never asked him that. What’s so bad about Canada? But he had that American addiction, I guess. He tried to cross at Niagara Falls, had been caught again, and was sent back again—so two times from two sides of the country in thirty-nine hours. Well, he’d made it to the United States at last and the only reason he wanted to be here, he said, was to get an education. (“What, they don’t have schools i
n Mexico?” I’d said, and he’d been annoyed.) Here in the United States he’d gotten fake papers, he told me. He’d gotten a job with those papers, was working under a fake name. The job paid for him to go to college, so he was getting a degree under a fake name and would have to give up his identity forever, but he didn’t care. If he didn’t pass the class, the college would make him leave and the job wouldn’t pay for school anymore.

  He didn’t pass.

  Frankly, I knew it didn’t matter if he passed or not, because I knew he wouldn’t live for long. I had no idea how he would die but I knew.

  I went into the chair’s office to find this kid’s file. The music kid, not the Mexican kid.

  “What are you doing in there?” the office assistant called to me. “You’re not supposed to be in there.” She followed me in and watched me pull open a cabinet drawer.

  “Those are confidential,” she said. “That is strictly administrative.”

  “I need to see something.” I took out the kid’s file.

  “What do you need to see?” she said, coming up behind me and leaning over my shoulder. “You don’t get to see.”

  “Could you shut up for two seconds? For God’s sake.” The name of his country was at the top of his file and it surprised me. It happened that his country was in a civil war that year. We’d been bombing them for reasons that had become suspect. It was all over the news. It was a mess.

  The file had several notes in it. There was his acceptance date and his refusal letter. He’d received scholarships from several schools. He’d not chosen our school, the letter said. But thank you. Next there was a note from admissions, dated a year later. He wanted to come after all. He’d lost his scholarship from the school of his choice. He hadn’t been able to get out of his country. He was of drafting age. There was a freeze on his passport. But this year, this week, there was a temporary reprieve. He could leave if he had sponsorship. Would we sponsor him? The date of the note put it two weeks into the semester, three days before he’d joined my class.