Dance Real Slow

by Michael Grant Jaffe

  He has just been swimming in a toilet teeming with bacteria, and all my powers of persuasion will not get him to take a bath. Not now. Not after what’s happened. I cannot even convince him to clean his little body of filmy germs.

  Turning off the bathroom light, I sit down on the top step, hugging my knees close to my chest. Calvin is crying in his bedroom. And I am alone. It starts slowly, a single tear welling against my right eye before cresting over the bottom eyelid, clinging briefly to the lower lashes and then dropping, slithering down my cheek, following the straight curve of my jawline, and finally falling free, absorbed into blue pinpoint oxford cloth. Soon, it comes hard. I lie back, covering my face with the crook of my arm. My chest lifts, quivering heavy with sobs. And I am loud and I cannot stop. Rolling onto one side, I curl into a large, bent letter G. The wetness sinks into my collar, holding it flush against the skin of my neck. I try to think about why I am crying, but I do not know. Not really. Whether it is for Calvin or for myself. For my own life.

  After some time, breathing comes easier. My saliva is thick and syrupy and I bring it together on the back of my tongue before swallowing hard, forcing the mucus down with the muscles of my throat. The carpet is matted, twisting into flat, stubby bunches pressed in various directions that I can feel against my forearms. In the darkness I am still, and prudently, quietly, I can sense Calvin at my side. He is standing at my left, confused by his father’s tears. It is the first time he has seen me cry. Or at least the first time that he can remember.

  “I’m all right,” I say, sliding again onto my back.

  “I’m sorry that I made you sad,” he says.

  I do not answer him for a moment or so. When I do, I sit up and reach for his hands, taking them into my own and holding them below my chin.

  “Sweetheart, it wasn’t you. Really. It’s just a bad day. It’s just—” I pause, rubbing his tiny, pink thumb against my lower lip. “It’s just that I haven’t done this before. Being a dad is hard and I’m not sure I’m doing it right.”

  He pulls his hands away and begins petting the back of my head, where the hairline turns to flesh. “You’re doing good.”

  “I’m glad one of us thinks so.”

  “I think so.”

  I smile and kiss him on both cheeks. “I’m sorry I had to throw out your man-o-war.”

  He shrugs and then looks down at the toes of his sneakers. “Me too.”

  Indeed, being a father is difficult and there are no blueprints to insure that we do not stray, do not wander, misdirecting our children down a barbed, prickly path that they will hate us for, deeply, truly, for the rest of their cursed lives. And forgiveness is foreign. Years after I had left home, while I was in Ann Arbor, Kate asked me why I didn’t talk to my father more? Why didn’t I ask to speak to him after talking with my mother? Why didn’t my mother insist, reaching over on their couch and putting the telephone in his hand. I told her I didn’t know; we were just like that. We had never said much to each other, even during the seventeen years we lived under the same roof. Then Kate asked how about when I was a child, when my father was young?

  There is not much I remember of the time I was very little, I said. And my father was never young, at least not while I was alive. I was born when my father was forty-two, and even my earliest memories of him—reed-thin, his skin red and warm, not the gray hue it would achieve in his later years; white weeds of hair pushing back above his temples, and his hands, the hands he would pass on to me, large and webbed with blue veins—even those first memories are of a man isolated from his family. Of my mother and me eating casserole or cold chicken by ourselves in the dim light of the kitchen and then her taking me to bed, sitting over me, brushing the wisps of hair from my face and telling me about the time she found me in the storage closet wearing her waxy underwear like a hat, or kneeling on a table, lapping water from my aunt’s fish tank. Later, after my mother had already dressed for bed and then had fallen asleep reading a magazine or watching television, my father would come home. Most of the time he had already had his dinner, so he would sit in the dark at the kitchen table eating butter-pecan ice cream from the container and drinking beer. Often, my mother awakened and went in to ask if she could fix him eggs or a sandwich, but he would just say no, the ice cream was fine. Only once, when I was seven and sick with pneumonia, did he come in to say good night to me. Even then, he stood silently at the doorway, letting the hall light creep in cautiously with the push of his wrist, falling in a narrow block against my face. He was silent for a long time, thinking I was asleep, and then, before turning to leave, he blew me a kiss. I had opened my eyes, briefly, and I remember how awkward and uncomfortable my father looked, blowing a kiss to his only son, as if the act was completely foreign to him. And it was.

  I don’t ever want things to be like that between Calvin and me. But I wonder if my father had the same noble intentions when I was born, only somehow he lost his way. It wasn’t necessarily that things became more important to him than his son, only that he always figured there would be time, time enough to make it up. And, of course, there never is. Mostly, I try not to hold this spacious void of emotion against my father. It is how things happened. But I don’t ever want them to happen like that for Calvin and me. It is a large part of the reason why, after Kate left, I accepted Harper’s job offer and moved to Tarent. Because I knew I would be able to spend time with Cal. To watch him eat a powdered-sugar doughnut for the first time and get it on his nose and cheeks, to have him ask me why dogs can’t talk or if fish sleep, to yell at him for chasing a ball into the street, to kiss him on the lips as long as he will allow.

  Now, lifting Calvin’s shirt, I press my mouth hard against his belly and blow, turning slightly from side to side so it makes a loud, wet noise, like a fart. Calvin laughs and tries to push me away, but I hold him tight from behind, spraying spit onto his chest until he has had enough.

  Chapter Five

  The floorboards are tanned and brittle, creaky beneath their slick varnished glaze. At the center is an enormous crimson circle with a gray letter T painted in its middle, barely touching the inside of the circle’s edges. Tired black girders drop from the ceiling, holding Plexiglas backboards above both ends of the floor. Two baskets, evenly spaced, set along each side of the court, can be raised or lowered depending on need. Near the main doorway, below three large dangling heaters, is a pair of long wooden grandstands that pull out for seating. High on the far wall is a scoreboard protected by thin wire fencing, with Trojans listed on one side and Visitors on the other.

  There is another set of grandstands across from the first, and these have been opened, revealing six levels, the lowest only two feet or so behind a white line that encompasses the floor. The room’s light is a warm orange, soothing, not harsh like the bold neon that is used in most of the newer gymnasiums. A few boys dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and high-top sneakers lie stretched out on the open grandstand, talking. Several others are shooting basketballs into two of the far baskets, but instead of chasing after their missed shots, they simply reach into a large, wheeled hamper and pull out another ball. Calvin seems to like the idea of a limitless supply of balls and he lets go of my hand and runs over to where the boys are shooting.

  “Come here, Cal. Before you hurt yourself,” I say.

  A stocky boy with a crew cut bends down beside Calvin, holding a basketball out in front of himself, carefully, like a melon.

  “You play, fella?” he asks, pulling the ball away as Calvin reaches for it.

  Calvin moans, missing as he swipes for the ball, instead grabbing a narrow band of cloth from the boy’s tank top and yanking it off the boy’s shoulder.

  “Hey, Calvin. That’s enough,” I say, turning toward the boy. “I’m Gordon Nash. I think Coach Miller mentioned that I might be filling in for him.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.” The boy stands, dropping the basketball back into the hamper. “He called us last night.”

  “This is my son, Calvin.�
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  “I’m Peter Sawyer.”

  He shakes my hand and then tries to do the same with Calvin, but Calvin wants no part of it and he hides his face behind my thigh.

  “He’s shy, huh?” asks Peter Sawyer, tucking his tank top down into his shorts.

  “Sometimes,” I say, reaching back and leading Calvin around to the front of my legs. “And sometimes he just wants attention.”

  The rest of the boys gather by Peter Sawyer and I introduce Calvin and myself. There are eleven of them, and two absent. They move back to the open grandstand and sit scattered, sneakers untied and socks rolled down tight to their ankles, in the style of the day.

  “I have never really coached before,” I say, seating Calvin at the end of the first row and setting my briefcase down beside him. “I will try to do my best. Obviously, I don’t know any of you and I don’t know your abilities. So, as far as I’m concerned, you’re all the same—starting at ground zero.”

  Most of them are staring at points off behind me, with shallow expressions on their faces. Except for Calvin, who truly appears interested, for he has never heard me talk this way, and certainly never to a captive audience this size. His head is cocked and his mouth forms a supple, pink O.

  “I suppose,” I say, and then fall silent. Although it has not turned especially cold yet, one of the space heaters over my shoulder clicks on, rattling with a tinny belch at first and then settling into a steady, low-pitched hum. “Really, I’m not a basketball coach at all. I’m a father—a lawyer.” The decision came to me several nights ago, as I lay nearly asleep in the gentle darkness of my bedroom: if I made an effort, I could manage coaching this team for a few months. I would not allow those fears of mirroring my father, of being like him in ways I could not tolerate, to stop me from attempting something I might actually enjoy—that Calvin might enjoy, too. Perhaps, along with the delicate attention to the details of daily life, basketball might serve to bring Calvin and me closer together, which is exactly what it did not do for my own father and me. “Mostly, I’m just trying to help out Coach Miller.”

  Peter Sawyer smiles when I look his way and then drops his eyes, hypnotized by the dark cuticle pattern in the wooden seat beneath him.

  “Let’s … let’s make this fun. All right?”

  Most of the boys nod. At first, I have them run a simple lay-up drill, forming two lines, one at each side of the basket. After a while, they switch sides, shooting instead from the left. Then I call out Peter Sawyer and another boy and have them choose teams for a scrimmage, with each boy introducing himself to me after he is picked. Midway through the selection process, one of the missing boys walks in, barefoot, his sneakers tied together, slung over his right shoulder.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” says Peter, gesturing toward the new boy and then turning to me. “He’d have been my first or second pick. Now they’ve got Eric and Noah. They’re the two best players.”

  Eric Shaw, the first selection, is nearly six feet six inches tall—lean, with sharp, well-defined muscles stretched tight over his bones, creating thin, mottled ridges that catch crescents of light on his tobacco-colored skin. His calves are narrow as forearms and he walks on the balls of his feet with a quick, short bounce. His hair is shorn close as a shadow, leaving only stubble.

  The late arrival is Noah Ward. He sits on the floor, bunching his socks before slipping them on his chalky feet. I recognize him as one of the letter-jacket-clad boys from the football game Calvin and I attended a month or so ago. Noah was the boy driving the pickup truck with the miniature basketball sneakers swinging from the rearview mirror. His face is narrow and angular, with a minor constellation of freckles spattered across the bridge of his nose. Bisecting the nearly perfect oval of his left earlobe is a small, gold hoop earring. He doesn’t seem concerned in the least which team he ends up on, or that he has interrupted practice.

  “Why’re you late?” I ask.

  “Just one of those unavoidable things, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. I believe this is what’s called getting off to a bad start. So let’s try again. Why are you late?”

  “Girl problems,” he answers, rising to his feet.

  Someone mutters something under his breath about a person named Ann and a few of the other boys snicker.

  “Look, y’all don’t have to be here if you’ve got better things to do with your time,” I say, preparing to kick a basketball from out of my path. But I stop, realizing I sound an awful lot like my father when he was coaching. These are boys, simply boys, and this is a game. It should be fun. Which is something my father, in his later years, simply forgot. “I didn’t really mean that. Well, I did, but not in that tone. Nobody has to be here if they don’t want. Really. But if you do, let’s try and accord each other a little respect. If someone has trouble at home, or with school or a girl,” I say, glancing at Noah, “then I’d be glad to talk to him about it. I know I’m new and you don’t know me from Adam, but I’m a pretty good listener. Christ, it hasn’t been all that long since I was in high school. Right, Cal?” Calvin is steering the hamper of balls around in circles, but he pretends to know what I am talking about and he answers with a nod. “Otherwise, let’s try and get here on time.”

  They play forty minutes of basketball, enough for me to get a rough idea of how much talent each boy has. Eric Shaw is spectacular, clearly the best, with Noah Ward and a boy named Russell Johns next. After the scrimmage, they distribute a few balls and tell me they have to punch out—which means make one final long-range shot before exiting the gym. They scurry, chasing down missed baskets nearly as fast as they hoist them. In several minutes, only Cy Connell is left. He is painfully thin, with a slight curve to his posture raising unavoidably between his shoulder blades. A gray pallor about his cheeks and neck makes the dark, half-moon-shaped wells below his eyes appear almost black. When shooting, he lowers the ball close to his chest, like Calvin, so as to get all his weight behind each effort. If he did this in a game, the ball would be blocked before it rose above his forehead. Most of his shots do not even strike the rim or backboard, and after a few more, he turns to see if I am still watching.

  “You’ll be here all night,” says Noah, heading off to the locker room.

  I move to where Cy is standing, placing my hands on his triceps.

  “First, you’ve got to try and shoot from here,” I say, pushing his arms up so his elbows are level with his shoulders. “It’ll take some getting used to. And walk in a few steps. There’s no reason for you to be this far back.”

  “You’re not supposed to punch out from close.”

  “Who says?”

  “I’m not sure,” he answers. “It’s just the way everyone else does it.”

  “Maybe you’re not everyone else.”

  When he shoots above his face, as I’ve shown him, the ball twists off to the left, dropping even shorter of its goal than the old way. He tries several more and I tell him it looks better, although I am lying.

  Crunched against the far wall, his knees near his ears, Calvin watches, puckering his lips as if he swallowed something sour. For a brief moment, in the refracted school-hall light, he resembles his mother, this image I have of her not long after we discovered she was pregnant. She was resting on the stairs to our apartment building, late-afternoon sunshine banking off the picture window above her shoulders, as she sucked the pink and purple and blue sand from a bag of Pixy Stix. Later, in the darkness of our bedroom, I awakened and walked to the kitchen for a glass of tap water. When I returned to our bed, I recall wishing it could always be like that afternoon: Kate waiting for me at home, alone, her hair tied back loosely with a cotton band, her mouth powdered with granules of sweet, colored sugar. Pregnant. We could hold our lives like a spool of twine, letting it unravel at whatever speed we chose. Then, watching the bed, her chest slowly sinking and climbing, I had a series of horrible thoughts, appalling premonitions that I would force an accident with a delicate shove or errant elbow—bony,
direct. An accident that might cause the fetus to abort. Leak down Kate’s thighs in soupy yokes of blood—tissue as delicate and transparent as rice paper.

  Eventually, the feelings subsided. There were other times, though, in the ensuing months when those same thoughts would rise again like a watery blister, hateful and hot.

  The first thing Calvin does when we get home is to take our basketball out and try to dribble it across the porch. Of course, he is unable to, and after a few pats the ball rolls away from him, bounceless. He chases after it, again lifting the ball chest-high and then releasing it, slapping it with both palms. This time, the ball caroms off his foot and down the stairs.

  “What’re you doing?” I ask.

  “I’m just gonna play a little.”

  “No, you’re not. You told me you were hungry.”

  “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  He pauses, looking puzzled, and then says, “Just before.”

  “Calvin, it’s too dark to play now. Besides, if you don’t eat soon you’re going to get a Belly Cat.”

  When Calvin was younger and got hunger pangs, Kate would place her ear to his stomach and say, “Hey, do you hear that growling? I know what your problem is, you’ve got a cat in there. A Belly Cat.”

  “I don’t have Billy Cat,” he says, descending the stairs, his hand at nose level, gripping the rail. “I had him before.”

  “See, that’s worse. He’s gone hiding and now he’s gonna come back even meaner.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Sure is. So come on and let’s get something in there.”

  After dinner, Calvin and I sit in a hammock that is strung from column to column on the side of the porch. We are eating brownies that Mrs. Grafton baked and left on a cellophane-covered plate in our kitchen. The two of us swing back and forth, my feet grounded, Calvin’s barely hanging over the edge, toes pointed inward. When I kick us higher, he turns to me and says “Whoa,” flashing teeth coated in fudgy mortar.