Dance Real Slow

by Michael Grant Jaffe

  “We’ll have to remember to read the directions off the highway in reverse,” says Zoe.

  The motel is a Super 8 at the western edge of town. Zoe spots it first, from the right side of the truck. As we pull into the parking lot, yellow and red lights from a rotating neon sign blink through our windows, laying fuzzy shadows across Zoe’s face. Now we are moving slowly, waiting for Kate’s rental car to rise in the glass of my door. My heart runs with a fury and I can feel the new blood, especially as it sinks past my temples in tingling waves. Kate’s car finally appears at the twisting S-curve of the motel from behind a dark green van.

  “Look,” says Zoe, sliding her hand across the dashboard.

  Glowing saffron in the dappled motel light, Calvin stands beneath the concrete awning with his right arm extended. More than anything I want to lift him, hold him so tight that our chests lock, swelling to the same stilted rhythm. But I won’t, I decide. Nothing that will alarm him. As I approach, I notice he is holding a small plastic measuring scoop in his right hand, the kind that comes free with a tin of coffee. At first, I’m not sure what words to say. And then I settle simply for asking him what he is doing.

  “I’m seein’ how much water will fill this,” he says.

  As I run my hand down his back, he dips his shoulder as if to shake me loose. Then, when I move behind him, nearer to the doorway of Kate’s room, he. asks if we are going home in a voice so genuine, so unfettered by troubles, that I can only smile. Perhaps Zoe was right and soon, very soon, everything will be fine.

  “Yes,” I say. “In a few minutes.”

  “Good.”

  The lapse in concentration that occurs when he speaks causes his arm to stir, spilling some of the collected rainwater on the already wet cement. I bend down beside him, tilting my head so it is almost touching his face.

  “Pal?” I start, in a broken falsetto. “Can you do something for me? Can you give me a kiss?”

  Keeping his eyes focused ahead, he turns and gives me a peck on the cheek. Again, he loses some of his water, and this time he lets out a loud “Sheesh.” I point to Zoe, who is still sitting in the truck with her legs hanging out of the open door.

  “Will you keep an eye on him?” I ask.

  The only light in Kate’s motel room comes from a shaded desk lamp positioned between the twin beds. Several of Calvin’s toys lie scattered across the floor, including his new blue tow truck. This feeling will not escape me: the same heightened sensation of being in a basketball game with only seconds remaining and my team ahead by a point. As the other team tries to inbound the ball, I’m guarding the baseline, sprinting laterally from end to end, my arms waving wildly in an attempt to deflect the pass. Things move at an exaggeratedly slow pace and if this were real I would notice what I might normally gloss over, like a solitary bead of sweat tumbling down the referee’s forehead, or the drawstring on a player’s shorts as it flicks like a tongue at his waist. Soon, once the ball has been tossed into play, things will move quickly again and then it will be over. But for now, in this very immediate moment, I am capable of anything.

  The motel room is warm and I can hear the accordion-style radiator against the far wall clanking with fresh coursing steam. At my side, the window has turned foggy and I look to see if Calvin has drawn any of his familiar etchings, but there is nothing. A pungent smell like kerosene or hairspray sifts through the air. My knee brushes against the near bed and when I look down, past the comforter stretched close as animal hide, I can see a page from Calvin’s coloring book, the one of the baker, resting, slightly folded, beside the headboard. On the other bed, Kate’s suitcase lies open with its guts stacked in neat, random piles. There are also several sets of new clothing belonging to Calvin: stiff indigo jeans, furry sweatshirts of green and gray, tube socks, and a pair of boots that are much too high for him to wear comfortably.

  The night Kate first arrived in Tarent, I remember standing on the front lawn, gesturing back toward the house and declaring in a bold, confident tone that this was the way Calvin and I lived. Now, as my eyes scan the cluttered motel room, its walls pressing close, I can’t help but think that this is the way Calvin and Kate would have lived. For a while, anyway. Until decisions were made. Decisions made by someone else.

  A creaking comes from the bathroom as the door pushes open and Kate, dressed in a white terry-cloth robe, is at my side. Before I can think or, maybe, because I have had time to think, I swing out with my left arm, catching her flush with the back of my hand across her cheekbone. She drops to the floor, holding her face and tucking her thighs against her chest for protection.

  Leaning down, I extend my hand and help her back on her feet. Once standing, she takes me by the elbow and walks to the edge of the bed.

  “I deserved that,” she says, touching the salmon-colored petal above her cheekbone.

  There is a towel beside the bathroom sink and I soak it in cold water before wringing it damp and then handing it to her. She holds it gently against the side of her face, pulling it back every few seconds and folding it anew for a fresh, cooler swatch of cloth.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” she says, taking a seat on the end of the bed. Several times her voice crumbles, as if she’s going to burst into tears, but she is able to swallow them down like wandering hiccups. When she crosses her legs the motion causes a stack of Calvin’s new clothing, behind her, to fall on its side. “I just didn’t expect …” She pauses, dabbing higher on her cheek. “I guess I don’t know what I expected.”

  “I never hit a woman before,” I say. “Not even when I was little.”

  She takes my hand and rubs it briefly, across the joints, before letting go again.

  “There are so many things I don’t know about him,” she says. “Important things. Like sometimes he drinks his orange juice from Budweiser bottles, or when he has pancakes, he wants them rolled into log-shaped tubes that he can spear with a fork and eat like a hot dog on a stick.”

  “You learn over time.”

  “Time’s the one thing I never had with him. I suppose that’s what made me do this. However crazy it may sound, I thought I could force motherhood, on both of us.” She picks a thread from her face and flicks it to the floor. “I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew I couldn’t have him forever. I just wanted him to spend some time with his mother. Alone. Like maybe we were going away on vacation, the two of us, and none of the stuff between you and me had ever happened. I wanted to pretend that I knew things about him—like the beer bottles and pancakes.”

  “This didn’t exactly work out like we planned,” I say, sitting down beside her. “The visit, I mean. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so difficult. I don’t know,” I start, straightening my feet so they both point toward the bathroom. “For a long time I thought you should pay for your actions.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I don’t know what to think.”

  She nods.

  “You know what it was?” asks Kate. “You know what made me finally call you? He had a stomachache. I think it was something he ate for lunch, maybe the maple syrup or the home fries.” She is trembling, so, for support, she knots her fingers together and lays them across her belly. “Anyway, we had just gotten back to the room when he started complaining. For a while, I was really scared. He was rolling on the floor, kicking and screaming. I didn’t know what to do. I tried massaging his stomach and putting a hot compress on it and I even went to the drugstore to get him some Pepto. But he wouldn’t take it. He just wailed. Then, finally, I locked myself in the bathroom and started crying myself. Quite a picture: me in there and Calvin out here, both bawling our eyes out. Some mother, I thought. That’s when I called you.

  “By the time I got off the phone, he was fine. He was playing with his toys and watching TV. But when it mattered most, I couldn’t make him better.”

  “That’s how it is sometimes,” I say.

  She shrugs, and then says, “I love him so dearly. But maybe I was right, maybe this is no
t the time for me to be a mother. At least not every day.”

  Parenting is rarely convenient, I’m tempted to say.

  “When I was in the bathroom, alone, all I wanted was for him to shut up, to shut his mouth and … and go away. I don’t have the patience. But you know what I remembered? I started thinking about the time we went to visit my folks in Texas, not long after Calvin was born. It was hot and muggy and we went to the beach. Near the end of the day, when we were waiting for my parents to pick us up, it began to rain. I remember you took the lid off our drinks cooler and placed Calvin inside. Then you covered it, lightly, with a blanket. This isn’t the first time that incident has crossed my mind. Sometimes I’ll think of him as being like that when he’s with you. Of being safe, in a cool, dry place.”

  She lets the towel fall to her lap. Then she leans close and kisses me above my eyebrow.

  “Do you think I could come visit from time to time?” she asks.

  “Maybe,” I say, if only to fill the silence.

  “I told him I’d take him riding over the summer. And next fall I want to watch him leave for his first day of school. That would be nice.”

  She brings her knees together, allowing the flesh at the base of her thighs to squeeze against itself.

  “I’d like to say goodbye to him,” she says. “If that’s okay.”

  When I open the door, Calvin is no longer collecting raindrops. He is sitting near Zoe inside the cab of her truck and I can see them both looking at pictures in a magazine. He comes to my side when I call him.

  “Your mother is leaving,” I say.

  “When are we leavin’?”

  “Soon. But she wants to say goodbye. You won’t see her for a little while.”

  He flashes a quizzical look. “We’re going riding.”

  “Later,” I say. “In the spring or summer, when it gets warm.”

  The motel room seems darker now and the sober twang of slide guitar rises from a radio on the nightstand. Kate holds open her arms and beckons Calvin in a voice as fragile as a reed. He walks over and touches her, tenderly, on the damaged line of her cheek.

  “Hold me,” she says, grabbing him beneath his spiky shoulder blades.

  She rocks him from side to side in time to the music. Then she raises his shirt and places her face flush against the skin of his chest.

  “Will you dance with me?” she asks.

  Calvin does not know how to dance, except for a lame, spastic rendition of the jitterbug that I taught him about a year ago. He looks to me for help.

  “He doesn’t really know how,” I say.

  “Nonsense,” says Kate. “It’s easy.”

  She lifts Calvin onto a chair so his head nearly reaches her collarbone. Together they move to Kate’s music, Calvin kicking his feet awkwardly to a rhythm of his own.

  “No, honey,” says Kate into his ear. “Slower.”

  When Calvin still doesn’t get it, she just holds him, tight this time.

  “Slower,” she says, again, almost to herself. “Dance real slow.”

  She wants to make these final, fleeting moments of motherhood last. Soon, Calvin has had enough and he pulls away.

  “Okay,” she says, kissing him on the mouth and nose before letting go. “That’s all.”

  Then she gathers his belongings and places them into a satchel. She kisses him, again, and escorts us to the door. “Next time I see you, we’ll go riding,” she says.

  Calvin nods.

  “Good.”

  And that’s the last thing Kate says before closing the door behind Calvin and me.

  “She doesn’t have ice cream,” whispers Calvin, randomly, as he tugs at the hem of my jacket.

  In the shining headlights of Zoe’s truck, the concrete walk has turned as white as the powdery undersides of scrub-oak leaves. Before Calvin climbs onto the seat, beside Zoe, he bends down and makes a funny face at the truck’s silvery grillwork. There is no one close enough to see this except me.

  First published in Great Britain 1996

  This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 1996 by Michael Grant Jaffe

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Rock Springs by Richard Ford, with permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Copyright © 1987. ‘Lonely Ol’ Night,’ words and music by John Mellencamp, with permission of Warner Brothers. Copyright © 1985 Windswept Pacific Entertainment Co. d/b/a Full Keel Music Co. ‘You Can Close Your Eyes,’ words and music by James Taylor, with permission of EMI Blackwood Music Inc. Copyright © 1971 EMI Blackwood Music Inc. and Country Road Music Inc.

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