Tiny Dancer

by Patricia Hickman

  She held the trophy in both hands. By lamplight I saw it was just as she said, the little Irish dancer once adorning the top of the trophy was broken off. She started speaking in such a low and rambling way I thought for a second she was sleepwalking. “If you didn’t do it, then who? Is it Siobhan, trying to haunt me?”

  “You’re tired. Here, you lie down.” I sighed, slipping out of my bed. It took little effort for her to crumple onto Siobhan’s bed. Then I was surprised to find how easily she let me her tuck her in, slipping her weathered feet under the coverlet. She dropped the trophy onto the floor succumbing to my attention. I dabbed my stepmother’s cheeks with a tissue but surprisingly she didn’t raise a fuss about me touching her. I do not know how long must have lay crying in her room before coming to see me, but the circles under her red-rimmed eyes indicated she had been genuinely upset. She thanked me and then she closed her eyes. She fell asleep so fast it made me feel useful to her for once.

  I lay awake for the few minutes it took to hear her breathing easy, but no sooner had I turned off the lamp than my door opened. Daddy had gotten up in the night having heard his women talking. “Vesta’s not in our room,” he said, but then he saw her form in Siobhan’s bed, the moonlight enfolding her in long fingers.

  “Was she fighting with you?” asked Daddy.

  I shook my head for what would be the point of explaining Vesta’s fear? If he doubted my sanity for believing Siobhan was visiting me in my dreams he would certainly throw the net over us for discussing the whys of the broken trophy in the middle of the night.

  He went back to his room. I pushed the broken trophy under my bed to hide it. I felt a strange justification in being the one to put it out of sight. Maybe a few months would pass and no one would ask about it. Then I would throw it into the waste can, the one that was once filled with dead funeral flowers. I saw the bottom of the trophy stand still poking out from under my bedspread, so I kicked it entirely out of sight.

  I did wonder how it had fallen and broken in such a way. Vesta was slurring her words and that could mean that she had doubled up on her sleeping medicine. She must have gotten up in the night and knocked the trophy off the shelf.

  It was strange seeing the outline of her small frame in Siobhan’s bed. Then all at once she turned over, apparently awakened by my talk with Daddy. She said, “Flynn told me that you’ve dreamed about Siobhan.”

  I liked her better asleep so I spoke softly, telling her about the green hill daydream since it was the most pleasant to retell. But instead of falling back to sleep she complained with a degree of jealousy, saying, “I haven’t dreamed of her at all. I think there’s something wrong with me. After all, I’m her mother.” She got up and slipped out of bed still wrapped in Siobhan’s coverlet.

  I had carefully preserved Siobhan’s bed as it had been left, not so much as causing a ripple in her coverlet. Vesta minced out of my room and retreated to her bedroom still wrapped up like a rosebud in the pink bedspread. I wondered if she would remember anything that had transpired between us tonight. Even if she did remember, I doubted she would admit anything that would make her appear vulnerable.

  But I liked how Vesta had needed me. There are things that add to life while others subtract. I considered our minutes on this night an addition.

  Chapter Six

  Daddy left a note on my door telling me he had taken Vesta into Raleigh, his usual way of telling me why he was not underfoot on a weekday off. We were not lucky enough to have two cars like the Johnsons. Vesta often wanted him to drive her to the farmer’s market in the city before the heirloom tomatoes were all taken. He wrote, “If you go into the village, pick up a town newspaper for Vesta. She’s got a recipe published in the cooking section.”

  Since being in Vesta’s good graces was a place I had not visited in a long time, I grabbed change from the kitchen change jar and rode into the village on my bike.

  One newspaper remained in the stand in front of Bernie’s Drug Store. I dropped in a dime and took it inside. Bernie’s daughter Ellen wiped down the sandwich counter. I ordered a cup of coffee and a sweet roll and took my breakfast to a booth. I perused the front page for the cooking section, but then a familiar face drew my eye. I looked twice at the photograph thinking I was surely wrong, but I wasn’t. Calvin Miller and a group of black youths were being dragged in handcuffs from a lunch counter in Rockingham. Calvin was a student at the Friendship College in Rockingham, but I thought he was off for the summer.

  Then I remembered he had been missing at the last Miller party. When I asked about him, no one said a word to me. Now that I thought about it, Theo and his relatives all looked at one another as if they knew something but couldn’t say.

  I continued reading the article about their arrest. My stomach nearly turned inside out. He and a group of eight others walked into the downtown diner in Rockingham and ordered burgers at the lunch counter. The cops appeared to be waiting for them. Calvin was identified as a student from the friendship college but resided in Lost City. Lost City was one of the black communities tucked behind a golf course in Vineland. It was really part of Vineland but wasn’t allowed the rights of Vineland’s township. Ratonda lived there too. They had to use well water, had no utilities, and could not vote.

  I found Vesta’s recipe in the cooking section. I don’t know why I was surprised to see that it was Rosetta’s recipe for Chocolate Indians. Vesta had asked me how I made them.

  I tore out the recipe and tucked it into my pocket. If Vesta saw the article about Calvin Miller, she might connect the name to Theo. I saw no need to rouse more animosity. I shoved the newspaper into the drug store waste bin before leaving. There was a distant rumble of thunder. A black cloud bank moved in from the southwest.

  I climbed onto my bike. I was about to pull onto the street and head out of the village when I saw a couple emerge from the small inn off Main. I climbed off my bike and pushed it to a corner where I could watch unseen. The young dark-haired man was kissing a young blonde woman. He turned and then I knew that he was indeed Drake Keller. The girl with him was not Marcy. I waited, watching them walk toward Drake’s new Impala convertible. She giggled worse than Claudia. I recognized her as an upperclassman. He lifted the trunk lid and dropped a small case into his trunk. They had spent the night in the Village Inn.

  He drove them up toward Main. I waited and just as he was turning the corner, I waved at him. He looked shocked and then turned his face from me. It was too late, though. I had already seen them.

  * * * * *

  Reverend Theo must have found some of the parts he needed for his irrigation system from the salvage yard. The big yellow barrel he used for his water tower was most likely discarded for its sheer ugliness. Of course, it would not be seen from the front of Battalion Street, just out the back and only in plain sight of where Vesta took her coffee most mornings. Lovely, I groaned.

  “There has got to be an ordinance of some sort,” said Vesta, pacing in front of the kitchen sink, sloshing coffee as she ranted. Her sullen frown when she glared at me suggested she still nursed a resentment toward me.

  I said, “He’s a farmer. Farmer’s have to have water, don’t they?”

  “ Flannery Curry, who has bewitched you?” asked Vesta. “He’s no farmer.”

  “I have a headache, could we launch the Second Civil War tomorrow?” asked Daddy.

  I watched under a cloud of tension as Reverend Theo rolled the big yellow barrel to the far right corner of his house. I knew the pride of his mission, to grow food to give away to the poor. Dorothea had told me outright. “I think I know why he does it,” I finally said.

  “To run off the whites,” said Vesta, obviously convinced.

  “No. He wants us all to see.”

  Saturday morning I finished my college folder, a loose-leaf binder filled with the pamphlets and letters from the universities in Wilmington and others I had written, requesting admissions qualifications.

  “I’m jealous, this is amaz
ing.” Claudia lay on her stomach next to me. She had slept over. She was more interested in the section I had created under the label “Beach Universities”. “My mother would never allow me to pick out a college for its location. I don’t think she’s going to like it when I tell her I’ve chosen UNCW.”

  “What’s wrong with liking the place where you go to school?” I asked, dropping alongside her and smoothing out the plastic cover.

  “She’s trying to please Daddy who’s got this crazy idea that I should be the first Johnson woman to go to an Ivy League school,” she said, twirling her finger above her head like she often did when she repeated one of her parents’ lectures.

  “Vesta doesn’t talk to me about college at all. I’m free to decide, I guess, ” I said, although I envied Irene and Dwayne’s involvement in Claudia’s choices. I brightened at a thought. “Maybe we could share a dorm room.”

  Claudia squealed. “Imagine picking out our room linens and lamps together!”

  I sat up, my head full of the endless possibilities ahead of us, the two of us acting like women who decide our own fate.

  Then she grew serious. “I have a question. I’ve called here a few times and when I would ask if you were home, your father would say, ‘Isn’t she with you?’ Of course I would make up something on the spot, like I was just checking to see if you were already on your way over to my house.”

  I did not answer right away.

  “You were at the Millers, I guess.”

  Finally I shrugged. “Not any more.”

  “I knew it the day of Vesta’s party.” Then she said she did not understand my interest in the old couple, especially a black family hated by neighbors. To my relief, she left it at that and didn’t make me as mad as usual. Claudia was not the type person to understand anyone with ways as different from hers as the Millers were to the Johnsons.

  Irene collected Claudia within the hour, she said, to take her clothes shopping for back-to-school. I dared not ask Daddy about shopping for school clothes, not with him already under so much strain from his work. Besides, the first four months of the fall semester were as warm as summer and I had plenty of clothes to last until the first frost. I was becoming less worried about my wardrobe as I grew more intent on preparing for a university degree.

  I closed my eyes willing myself to think about how different life would be on campus. I was not certain that Claudia and I would remain friends that long. We barely managed to make it year-to-year through junior high, so I had my doubts about us remaining friends through high school. I didn’t doubt she would make it into an Ivy League school. If that happened, I was sure I would never see her again. I vowed not to let her know how miserable I felt thinking that thought. Her already swollen head would blow up like a melon.

  I did wish obsessively though for Billy to be on campus the same time as me, although he never talked about going off to a university life. He mentioned more than once he wanted to travel like a vagabond through Europe staying in hostels and meeting someone new every day. I imagined him differently, though. If I got my wish, he might take off for a short excursion but then return feet on the ground. My imagination ran riot with the thought that Billy would return about the time I was graduating high school.

  When Drake and Marcy babbled about going off to school, I had watched Billy to see if I detected a wistful longing in his brown eyes. I certainly thought wistfully about him. It was in that instant I realized how often my plans had failed to materialize over just such a distraction. I could not entertain the luxury of throwing myself at a boy like Claudia did. She was thick as otters with Billy’s friends over a mere few days. But she had the Johnsons for parents opening the doors ahead of her, pretty as you please. I couldn’t be distracted. Not even by Billy Thornton.

  * * * * *

  I awoke the next morning to the sound of Reverend Theo’s lawn tractor. Although I no longer shared in the parties under the Miller’s moon, no one could steal the rumble of Theo’s tractor from me. Its familiar racket was as much a home to me as the little pink house in the center of the sunflowers where I hid out preparing my grand departure from Periwinkle House.

  The sky grayed threatening rain. Reverend Theo was trying to beat the rain into town, same as always, by cutting his acreage ahead of the showers.

  Daddy shuffled around in their bedroom, not having left for work since his job with Honest Stan did not start as early as the guard job at Equity National. I crept past their bedroom, seating myself quickly at the top of the stairs. Still dressed in my yellow summer pajamas, I clipped out some threads from a pair of Bermuda shorts that needed re-hemming.

  What I heard next made me wish I had chosen another spot for my sewing.

  “I just think that your resentment is not with Flannery but with me. I can’t stand to see you punish her when you’re really mad at me,” said Daddy from inside the bedroom. “And for what, that I’m not bringing home the money you had hoped I would by now?”

  I cringed upon hearing Daddy confronting Vesta again. Not because she didn’t deserve it but she might blame me for his outburst. It was clear their fight was about me. Even though I had not hammered them about her draining my college fund account, she might imagine a conspiracy afoot between us.

  Vesta shot back, “I just want you to see her as I do because you can’t see the plain truth—she’s your mirror image, and I don’t mean the good side.”

  I refrained from knocking on their door and demanding Vesta stop blaming Daddy for the fact that I was like him. Before he had met her, we had liked the way we were. Mama had once accused me of being like him too so we considered it our bond.

  “I think it’s best for Flannery if we separate,” said Daddy, not at all acting like he was going to back down. “She’s at a vulnerable age. She needs you to be a mother to her. I was hoping you would be.”

  Daddy’s threats emptied out what little remained of my sense of security.

  I ran downstairs. Tears stung my eyes as I bolted out the back door. But I wasn’t about to wait for Daddy to drag into the kitchen dejected, only to tell me to pack all my belongings. In spite of my issues with Vesta, the last thing I wanted was change of that scale.

  Rain pelted my forehead but I was too anxiety-ridden to care. Besides, raindrops are a welcome comfort when troubles come spilling down. I ran past the sunflower forest and its forbidden corridors. I ran until I reached the shed. I pushed against the door and made my way inside. The rain let loose overhead battering the tin roof like bullets. I scrambled through the shed that shuddered as I ran across its feeble planks.

  I rested my forearms against the bare, framed walls, catching my breath. I turned to try and find a place to squat or sit, but only knocked my right barefoot against an old table leg. A dagger-like pain spiked up my leg along with my anger. I punted a bushel basket into the air and then pushed to the back of the shed. I watched the wind-blown rain through the dirty windows.

  Vesta had erected the sawhorses again. But she had doubly fortified it since her first little blockade. They were stacked three-high abutting the corner of Theo’s tangle of golden flowers. My toes bled but I felt nothing. Nothing except the anger I had tamped down so far back I could only trace its roots to the day my mother left. I threw open the door and ran out into the rain. My yellow pajamas were soaked-through within minutes. I shoved hard against the sawhorse wall. The sawhorses rocked back and forth but were too heavy for me to budge. I screamed at the rain and the wind and hit the sawhorses with my fists. I pushed and shoved until the palms of my hands bled down my arms.

  I screamed again and swung a shovel at the top sawhorse. It rocked and swayed, one leg shuffling loose. I smacked it again, growling like an animal, willing it down. The shovel handle turned red from my hands. I took another whack and the entire ridiculous structure tilted forward and then rocked backward and forward. Unstable, it rocked toward me. I gasped, attempting to dart out of the way. I tripped and fell backward and that was when I saw the top sawhorse f
loating against the backdrop of storm and wind. Reverend Theo stood holding it up in the rain, like a giant bird with wings as wide as the Blue Ridge Mountains. He lifted the remaining sawhorses like they were pick-up sticks and dropped each one on its side. All fifteen of them.

  Then he hefted me up like I was a bag of marbles. My head fell against his shoulder, and my arms went around his neck.

  “Easy, Little Sister,” he said.

  His shirtsleeve was stained red from my hands. We were both soaked through.

  “Why do things have to be like this?” I said, wailing. The rain was blinding me. “All I ever wanted was to be in a real family.” I went limp against him, sobbing.

  He let me cry, walking us through the rain, down past the swaying sunflowers. It was hard to hear anything he said in a storm, but I did hear him say one thing. “I love you, Little Sister. You are family. You’re our family.”

  * * * * *

  I had gotten stuck at the Millers to my great relief during the downpour. When I slipped back, all dried out, having sat wrapped in a blanket while Dorothea squeeze-dried and then ironed my pajamas, rain was still dripping from the house eaves. I brought in the empty trashcan by the back stoop as if I had taken out the trash. I was surprised to find Vesta tending the one houseplant, even using my rainwater. Reverend Theo had taught me how to save rain in a barrel under the eaves of our house.

  Three potted plants gasped for life on the porch patio table not two weeks prior. She had thrown out one potted plant at a time into the big garbage can behind the shed. I had counted over two hundred of them the day the plants first lined our front porch and covered every table surface in the house. But Vesta consulted a local nursery and determined she would not let the only remaining plant die. She was apparently serious about it.

  I picked off the yellowing leaves. “You’re over watering,” I said as good-naturedly as I could muster. I didn’t let on I had overheard her and Daddy’s split-up fight.