Chageet's Electric Dance

by Ashir, Rebecca

  She thought of her own family and how even with all their problems, they’d be upset if she died. But then shortly after the news, her father would fight with Mama over the price of her coffin. He’d want the cheapest coffin possible because he was always very practical and cautious with money. There would be no reason to spend on something that just rots underground, he’d say. Mama would argue that all their friends would see how cheap he was and judge them as low class. She’d want the most extravagant funeral possible to impress her friends, but in the end, she’d give into her father. Her father was a stubborn man, quiet and subdued, but with an inner intensity that had always scared her. When it came to money, he usually won. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that they’d just cremate her and throw her ashes into the sea because it would likely be the cheapest method of disposal and that’s what they did to her grandmother. At that moment, she wanted to be at sea scattered over the ocean and one with Rave.

  Her emotions became thicker and richer and she collapsed into herself in yearning for her true love while engulfed in self-pity. She indulged her emotions and her insides began to rip and tear. How could my own father kick me out of our home? I was only twelve and what did he expect of me? He made it impossible for me to stay. After basically ignoring me for my entire childhood, suddenly he got a whim to structure and improve my life through a crazy rigorous controlling plan. It was as if he woke up one morning and decided that I wasn’t a good enough daughter and he needed to fix the problem. My B and C grades were below his standards and he was going to make an academic of me. He structured my days from 5 A.M. to bedtime into a stupid meticulous schedule of studying and community service. I was to forget about spending time with my friends and I had to stop dating my “football player” boyfriend because the time had suddenly come for me to get serious and prepare for college. He typed out these lame schedules with time slots that I had to initial throughout each day. He must have been just looking for an excuse to kick me out of the house because his plan was impossible.

  It was 4:02 P.M. and Barbey was sitting on her bed talking on the phone with Sage, when her father burst into her room unexpectedly. He was enraged like an angry bull, rearing up, kicking his front hooves in the air. “What in Hell’s name are you doing on the phone?” he yelled in a thunderous bull snorting voice. “I said no phone calls on weekdays. How the hell do you expect to get into Harvard if you’re yakking it up with your friends?”

  Barbey was stunned. Her father had become so unreasonable.

  “Answer me, young lady,” he demanded, blowing smoke through his nostrils.

  She couldn’t speak. He was frightening her. His massive stature was too threatening combined with the crazed look in his eyes.

  “Answer me, damn it!” He grabbed the phone out of her hand while Sage was still on the line and ripped the cord out of the wall. “Who do you think you are, missy? Primadonna, spoiled rotten brat! Answer me!”

  She couldn’t think straight, so she said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You don’t know!” He threw the telephone hard and fast past her, skimming the sleeve of her shirt as it smashed into the wall. “You think this is funny?”

  She was shaking. He seemed insane with anger and she couldn’t speak. She wanted to jump out the window and run away, but was afraid of getting in more trouble. Then, he got really crazy and picked up her stereo and slammed it on the floor. “You won’t be needing that anymore.”

  At that point, she became afraid for her life.

  “Get up,” he said. “Where are your moped keys?”

  She was crying and couldn’t speak.

  “Get up!” He demanded.

  She got off the bed and started looking for the keys. By this time, she was so disoriented and shuddering from fear and emotional pain that she couldn’t think straight. She knew she had to just get the keys and do what he said, but couldn’t remember where her keys were. She was looking under her backpack which was on the dresser and under her pile of clothes on the floor. All the while he was standing over her screaming profanities. Finally, she found the keys in her jacket pocket that was hanging in her closet and she gave them to him. He looked at her coldly with his nostrils flaring, “Either follow the schedule and rules or leave this house.”

  The next morning when she woke up, he was gone and so was her moped that he had given her for her birthday. That night he didn’t come home and Mama was screaming at her to get out. Mama said he left because of her. “Why couldn’t you have just done what he said?” She kept demanding. “Why? Why? Why?”

  “He was unreasonable,” Barbey screamed back.

  “Get out! You’re ungrateful!” she ran to her room crying. Barbey had never seen her cry before.

  Barbey still had Rave’s clothes in her hand when she realized that she had been standing in the parking lot, leaning against a lamppost for about fifteen minutes. Sage and Parker hadn’t come back. She had hoped that they had just taken a little drive around the block, but now assumed that they went home. The loneliness was so thick, she felt like she was dying. What am I going to do?

  She opened the door of her car and there was Rave, in the passenger seat, wet and shivering, with a wry grin on his face. How did he get there? Her mind was so conflicted, she didn’t know what to think or feel. She was happy. She was angry. She was confused. And then she became overwhelmed by love. She desperately wanted to kiss him, embrace him and melt into his body, but something inside of her stopped her. She pulled the seat belt around herself and snapped it in place. Somehow she must have hoped that the seat belt would protect her. She felt like a windup doll, wound too tight with no control over her fate—plastic legs and arms flailing back and forth in one place as she sat belted in the passenger seat. She had never felt such inner intensity with no control over its release. When he stared at her with those dark eyes, she forgot about everything. The air felt thick and tasted salty. She sat there entranced by his stare as the entire ocean seemed to pour into her rubber head.

  Suddenly he stopped the connection, turning away for an instant. The springs in her body were too tightly coiled with no emission as if the lever had been plucked from the windup key on the back of her plastic body and the stored energy within would remain forever trapped. To her relief, though, she was saved when he resumed his stare, further penetrating her being. She was perplexed, but simultaneously exalted when he edged away from her to the far side of his seat, shaking his head to and fro, seemingly belaying his desires, as if she were too pure to touch.

  The ocean water gushed from her head and she was released into a warm misty cloud on some deserted tropical island. They were the only two people in the world. Though, now, there was something tragic about the way he looked at her. There seemed to be this fear in him as if the fact that they had found each other was an inevitable tragedy. It was as if he knew they were stranded on this deserted island and that in reality they would never be saved. Nobody would come for them and they would be left alone. For Barbey, being stranded alone with Rave was heavenly, but for him it seemed like his eyes would close forever and the darkness would engulf him. Then he said, as if coming out of a heavy fog, “You are… you are a… a glowing lighthouse… a glowing lighthouse in a stormy sea that… that a tired and beaten down sailor can only dream of reaching.” She almost laughed, but then she filled with anger and didn’t know why.

  12

  Though Barbey returned home late last night, she didn’t mind the lack of sleep because she believed she had found Prince Charming. Her parents hadn’t even noticed that she’d come in late, yet even if they had, they probably wouldn’t have said anything. They regretted having kicked her out of the house two years prior and as a result had resigned to never enforcing rules upon her since.

  It seemed strange to her that until she was twelve, when her father went on his campaign to get her into Harvard, they hadn’t paid much attention to her at all. Throughout her childhood, Mama had always been too
busy working in real estate and her father working as a plastic surgeon to notice her. Then one day for no reason at all, to her knowledge, her father decided to structure her life. At the time, he was seeing a psychiatrist due to a sort of midlife crisis he was apparently experiencing, so possibly the psychiatrist had instructed him to put her on a rigorous schedule. Who knows? Psychiatrists can be such morons. They must have realized in the therapy that he had neglected her. Then, as a result, he went to the other extreme and tried to control every second of her life.

  It might have been a felicitous idea had the structure been implemented when she was a young child and still malleable, but she was already twelve and frankly, according to her, set in her ways. She wasn’t a disobedient teenager. Had she been a troublemaker, maybe she would have understood his fanaticism. But she was a decent girl. I was a virgin and had already made it to sweepstakes in tons of dance competitions. She was striving to be a Charger Cheerleader some day. After she achieved her goal of becoming a professional cheerleader, she planned to become a supermodel for Guess? and Victoria’s Secret. If her father wanted her to become something different, he should have helped her become it when she was a child. She was dying for some parental guidance and love. Who did he think he was just waltzing into my life and turning it upside down because he decided on some stupid whim to be father of the month?

  Well, who cares about all that idiotic junk now? I sure don’t give a darn about it because now I’m in love. Tonight at 7:00, Rave was taking Barbey out on their first official date. He didn’t have a car, so he asked her to pick him up in the parking lot at Rennette Park after he finished playing air hockey.

  It was morning and she lay in her bed, gazing up at the white canopy that her grandmother given her when Barbey was a child. It was lacy and textured in white embroidery. The canopy always made Barbey think of a bride on her wedding day. She felt somehow protected under the canopy, yet the inexplicability of it haunted her mind throughout her childhood. It was as if the secrets of the universe lay hidden in the threads of this white material, that the fabric somehow linked Barbey to a past long forgotten. Since childhood, she had imagined nearly every night before falling asleep, running gaily through a grassy field with the white fabric flowing in the wind over her head. This image soothed her, carrying her into slumber gently like a mother rocking an infant to sleep.

  But now Barbey did not want to be soothed by the white threads; she wanted to review in her mind’s eye, like watching a savage rock video, every detail of the previous night. Her mind was being caressed with the memory of Rave’s eyes penetrating hers. The sound of his voice was sensual and rhythmical with the intensity of a Led Zeppelin song. Barbey had been intimate with boys before, but with Rave it was different because he hadn’t actually physically touched her. The intimacy with Rave was otherworldly, like being repeatedly strummed out of the universe by a great invisible electric guitar and then gently guided down a smooth flowing waterfall of musical notes. As she remembered, she could imagine his jagged voice against her skin as if he were singing life into her right then and there and she had to stop herself because the music was overtaking her and what if Mama walked into the room and could tell what she was thinking.

  Barbey directed her mind toward more practical matters—the intricate fantasies of transforming herself into her perception of Rave’s ideal woman. She pondered the possibility of hypnotizing him as a femme fatal seductress, but thought better of it because intuitively she recognized that he wanted innocence and maybe a little bit of naiveté. Mary Poppins was too square and Snow White too boring. She would act innocent, a little air-headed possibly, but style herself sexy. He mentioned he didn’t like models. What man doesn’t like models?—she thought with an exclamation mark! He just doesn’t think he could get one. Barbey loved that Rave wasn’t arrogant or debauched like some of her past boyfriends whose biggest thrills were bragging about football victories and ogling over women’s body parts. Rave wants beautiful and sexy because every man does. The night before, he had mentioned that she didn’t need fake blonde hair, so Barbey decided to dye it a more natural color.

  Her latest supermodel obsession was Paulina Porizkova, so that was who she was going to be on this night. On her wall, she had taped up a picture of Paulina from a Cosmo magazine that had served as a dieting motivational tool. Barbey stood naked, gazing at herself in the mirror, comparing her body to Paulina’s. After all the aerobics and rice cakes, their bodies were nearly identical. Barbey was not as tall and had fuller breasts and a more rounded buttocks because of her implants, but every other body part looked the same. Paulina was dressed in an emerald green, strapless tube dress and wore a chunky gold bracelet. Her hair was long, medium brown and daringly messy as if she had just risen from bed. The dress was not a problem because Barbey had sewn the same dress last month and was just waiting for an opportunity to wear it. She didn’t have a gold bracelet, but her chunky silver bracelets would complement her silver Egyptian sandals that laced midway up her calves. Now all she needed was to dye her hair golden brown and give herself some subtle blonde highlights, cut some wispy bangs and a few layers on the sides. Why fuss with all this?—she thought. Tonight was a special night, so she decided to pamper herself and go to the salon to get her hair done.

  Oh, no! I can’t believe I almost forgot that my photo shoot with John Prince is this evening! She was utterly shocked at herself for almost forgetting something sooooo important to her career. Never before had she been this forgetful and careless. How could she manage transforming herself into a Paulina, which would take a considerable amount of time at the beauty parlor and still make it to the photo shoot on time? The photo shoot could take hours! Oh the situation is so terrible! She really didn’t know what to do. Ordinarily, she would never choose a date with a guy over something as important as her modeling career, but she wanted to see Rave more than anything in the world.

  Her indecisiveness made her anxious, so she tried to remember if she had ever seen any television shows or movies where one of the characters was faced with her dilemma. Suddenly she remembered the seventies drama, “Happy Folks,” where the teenage girl, Laura, had to choose between going to the school dance and helping her boyfriend escape from a mental institution that his evil parents had forced him into. If she went to the school dance, she would likely win Dance Queen and get her picture in the yearbook. If she helped her boyfriend, they could be together forever, against the world in romantic bliss. They’d make history like Bonnie and Clyde—two lovers against the world. Laura chose the school dance; consequently, her boyfriend committed suicide in the mental institution. Barbey would choose Rave—definitely—Rave was her choice.

  She called the Sunrise Hotel and left a message with the clerk, saying she would have to reschedule her shoot at a later date. The clerk agreed to give the message to the man in room 402 even though he said nobody by the name of John Prince was staying in that room. “Tell him that I am soooooo sorry and made the mistake of double-booking myself.”

  “I’ll relay the message. Thank you for calling Sunrise.” He hung up the phone.

  She was so proud of herself for using the phrase, “double-booking,” because it sounded so professional and adult-like.

  ****

  When she got home from the salon, Mama was quite surprised to see her new look. She was in the kitchen making broccoli casserole for dinner, which Barbey abhorred, when she started discussing Barbey’s new hairdo. “What happened to the Palomino locks? Well, I deeee-clare, you look prettier and downright more natural as a brunette than a blonde, but kick the daisies and call me Susan, I miss that silky black hair of yours.” She was touching Barbey’s hair while waving her spatula in the air in Kentucky dramatics. “I reckon they used a sprits too much hairspray. You’re a Rocky Mountain stallion now with the brown and blonde wisps all rearin’ up like that, but I like that it’s fuller than that flat look you’d been wearin’. You were lookin’ like a worn out workhorse, drippin’ in the rai
n for awhile there with that bleached flat mane.”

  Barbey detested her subtle criticisms and being compared to horses, but nothing could bother her now that she’d met her soul mate. “Mama, can’t you ever just be happy for me?” she asked, trying to feign annoyance while internally feeling overwhelmed with joy in her new state of romantic bliss.

  “I’m happy. Where you goin’ tonight!” she said more as a statement than as a question.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Barbey responded facetiously as she performed a childish pirouette and a little curtsy.