Tiny Dancer

by Patricia Hickman

  “Listen to this. He packed a small overnight case. He left, was gone without saying a word to me. I think he went to her,” she said contemptuously, “His stripper girlfriend.”

  I had yet to set up my next meeting with Alice. “Did he tell your mother the woman’s name?” I asked, my voice thin. I may have held my breath until Claudia answered, “No. But she is a dancer at the club for certain where we saw him.” She dropped her eyes. “He acts as if he’s in love with her. She wants to move away and he’s all for it. He says he’s had it with the pressure of his businesses. Mother says he is too materialistic to give up his life here on the golf course.” She had not touched her coffee. “Flannery, I’m scared.”

  I felt sickened. “Where’s Irene?”

  “She dropped me off here early. She’s gone to her sister’s across town. She was sobbing and told me to meet you here since you’re the only other person who knows. She’s mortified it will be all over town. She wanted time alone with her sister. She’s got to tell someone.”

  “I’m sorry you had to hear them fight,” I said.

  Claudia blew on her coffee and then she rolled her shoulders seemingly to try and shake off her current reality.

  “Vesta’s signed me on with a traveling dance troupe.” My timing could not have been worse.

  She sat up, exasperated, as if I had slapped her. “But what about us? Our plans”

  “She didn’t ask me. She just organized it and then told me.”

  “But you hate dance now,” she said.

  “I don’t hate it,” I said, trying to remember if I had ever said “hate.”

  “You told her no, didn’t you?”

  “I’m telling her that I won’t go.”

  She then launched into a new tirade. “I heard about her lawsuit against your neighbor.”

  “She filed charges. Not the same as a lawsuit, but criminal.”

  “Vesta sure hates the man.”

  “She’s gotten it into her head we’re all moving to Los Angeles,” I said.

  Claudia sat up, not smiling, and looking incredulous. “When?”

  “September. Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Two weeks! When were you going to tell me?”

  “I told you, I’m just finding out.”

  She looked more pitiful than she had walking into the cafe. “If you’re at all happy about this, I’ll hate you.”

  I halved her iced chocolate donut, knowing what Vesta would say about the calories, dunking my half into my cup. “Apparently the troupe’s director has been trying to run us down all summer.”

  “It’s good news then, for you,” she said, but it was obvious she was trying to put on a supportive front. “I won’t be jealous. I know you think I am, but your family’s gone through so much this summer. Maybe fate did this figuring it was your turn for something good to happen.”

  I could barely stand to listen to her. “That’s not what I wanted to hear from you.”

  She finally bit into her half of the donut and sipped her coffee. “Oh, what’s the use, I’m jealous.”

  “I’m not going. I like it here. I like our friends. Even you, sometimes,” I said laughing.

  “I hate to say this, but I was depending on you to get me through this first semester,” she said.

  “I have to study twice as hard to make grades even close to what you make.”

  “Not my grades,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I mean the stuff about my family. I don’t know what to expect, what will happen to us, or me. You’ve always risen above your family’s problems. I figure you’re the expert.” She smiled, although it was one of the weakest smiles she had ever pasted on.

  “Thanks. I’m glad I’m good at something,” I said, accepting her sideways compliment.

  She held up her donut and said, “Cheers. To whatever.”

  My emotions were fragile. But that had been the way of things the whole summer. I pulled out a tissue. “Don’t get me started.” I could not bring myself to say that college no longer figured into the equation at all. Perhaps it never had.

  * * * * *

  Daddy was home by supper and he was more jubilant than he had been in months. He poured himself a beer and offered a toast to his soon-to-be-famous daughter. I sat at the dinner table, incredulous at the interest he was taking in a dance opportunity. He had never cared much about it before. “I’ve got some news of my own,” he said, slapping the table in triumph.

  Vesta was smiling as if she already knew.

  “I’ve filled out the paperwork for a transfer,” he said, hesitating. “To Los Angeles. Can you believe it? And my boss thinks I’ll get it. He has already written my letter of recommendation.”

  Vesta was laughing while I could hardly speak.

  This was why Daddy had been gone all day yesterday. I felt as if I were looking through a window, watching a scene from a movie, like the happily-ever-after’s Vesta had watched all summer to mask her depression.

  A half hour passed. A horn honked from the front drive. The doorbell sounded. It was Billy. He came inside, politely acknowledging Vesta and Daddy, but then headed directly for the kitchen where he found me dully sulking. “I came looking for you. It’s all over town. I called here and Vesta told me.” He helped himself to coffee and then sat down next to me at the kitchen table. “You’re going?”

  “It’s a runaway train,” I said, void of any emotion.

  “You look awful,” he said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that I expected something else from you. You’re not exactly bouncing off the walls about this gig.”

  “That’s my next trick, I’m working up to it.”

  “Then you’re not excited, not at all?”

  Vesta eavesdropped outside the kitchen, so I shrugged indifferently.

  “Then don’t go,” he said, whispering.

  I knew all he was going to say. “It’s complicated. I’ve not seen them this happy, not since the accident. We came apart last April, but now this dance thing, this thing we’ve worked toward our whole lives has fused us back together again like a family,” I said.

  “That’s plain silly.”

  “No, listen. If I don’t get on that plane in September, I’ll bring down what little goodness remains of us.”

  Daddy stuck his head through the kitchen entry. “I’m going to the store for Vesta. She needs needles and threads and what-not. You need anything?” he asked me.

  I shook my head. Billy sat quietly until Daddy left. “What do you want?” he asked me. “Tell me.”

  I dropped the ruse, whispering, “To see Reverend Theo.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, before I chicken out. If I leave with you, you can drive me over there. Will you?” I had to keep my voice low.

  “Can’t you just. . . go?”

  I shook my head. I hoped beyond any hope that if Billy stood with me on the Miller’s porch, I wouldn’t have the door shut in my face.

  Billy slipped into our entry and, finding that Vesta had gone upstairs, told me, “Hurry, the coast is clear.” He drove us wordlessly past Hui Lin’s house and Effie Sanderson’s house, turning off Cotton Street, circling around to Battalion. He walked me to the porch. Then he backed away, standing on their front walk. “I’ll wait for you,” he promised me.

  I took a deep breath and mounted the stone stairs with its happy border of azaleas.

  I rehearsed a speech in case Ratonda answered. She had served Theo well of late as head gatekeeper. I thought of what to say if Dorothea answered, her fragile eyes looking at me and weighing my trust in light of my family’s judgment on them. The door opened. Theo looked out as if he were expecting the paperboy.

  “Reverend Theo, I’m here to see you,” I said, clasping my hands in front of me.

  He looked first at me and then Billy out on the walk. “He coming?”

  “No,” I said. “Just me.”

  He let me in.

  He led me into
the kitchen. No one was making bread. Ratonda wasn’t scolding the girls to keep away from the hot stove.

  When he saw me looking around, he said, “It’s just us. Women folk have gone to market. Coffee?”

  “I’ve already had about six gallons,” I said.

  He smiled. “Always liked your sense of humor. Comes in handy when life stops being funny.” We sat down at the same tabletop where Dorothea and the aunts had started all their bowls of dough.

  I was blank as slate. “I knew what I was going to say but now, with you sitting here, it all seems unhelpful,” I said.

  “Let’s just get it out on the table then,” he said, for he was like that. “You first thought you had to apologize for your family.”

  I nodded.

  “No need. I already knew your family before I met you.”

  “Vesta,” I assumed he meant.

  “Siobhan.”

  “Listen, that was something I should have told you from the beginning,” I said.

  “Did you think we invited you over here so that you could atone for your family’s transgressions?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “We invited you over for the same reason we invited Siobhan into our lives. We love you. We loved her.”

  “I know. I found Siobhan’s picture, her bread making picture.”

  “That little girl could cook like nobody’s business,” he said. “But, you need to know something, Miss Curry. You can’t keep carrying the weight of the past. The older you get, the heavier the past gets. It will crush you and that would be a shame. You have a lot to offer.”

  “When I’m here under your roof, everything is so clear. Then I leave and it’s like mud’s been splashed all over my willpower.”

  “You got too much debt.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “You heard the aunts singing about heavy loads, didn’t you?”

  “I know and it all lifts when they sing. But it doesn’t stay lifted.”

  “Music soothes the savage soul. But it can’t save you either.”

  “Save me?”

  “You keep trying to save yourself and everyone around you.”

  “But you do that, don’t you? Rescue people.”

  “I just point to the Rescuer. I can’t save anyone.”

  I was perplexed. He was saying I had gotten it all wrong.

  “Only one qualified as Savior.”

  “I thought he might say more, but when he didn’t, I said, “And I can’t be him.”

  “Good.”

  “I don’t have to walk no aisle. Say no special words?” He had said that before.

  “Change comes from within. But people can’t change themselves from within.”

  “He’s taking his time fixing me, that’s for sure.”

  “He made you. He’s still making you,” he said. “Human clay takes a while to take shape.”

  “My life is more mud.” I said.

  He knew I was joking, but then, not really.

  “I came here to make you feel better,” I said.

  “You have.” He emptied his cup. “What makes you feel better?”

  I had to think about it. “We have a custom in our Irish culture. We make an altar of stones at the end of our dancing and feasting.”

  “A memorial.”

  “Yes. We each lay a stone on an altar in memory of someone we’ve lost.”

  “You like that?”

  “I do.”

  “Because?”

  “When I leave, I feel better. That’s how I feel after I leave here.”

  “What stone do you want to leave here today, Sister?”

  We looked at each other for a moment, kind of like when Billy and I sat quietly without talking. “It’s a big stone. You won’t want me to leave it here. No one does.” I explained myself. “People like me best when I’m funny or entertaining, but my biggest stone, well, it can clear a room.”

  “Don’t you listen to others who say you can’t talk about it.”

  I had to keep talking or I would never get it out. “Our last day dancing, Siobhan did not want to be there,” I said.

  “You’ve told me that before,” he said.

  “I really felt for her. I thought it was time for Vesta to stop her dance lessons. Let her go swimming with her friends, do other things. If she wanted to dance, she would return to it. I think Vesta thought she had invested too much in her to let her go her own way. She thought Siobhan was too young to know what she wanted.”

  “Parenting is often done with blinders on” he said.

  “I told you that Siobhan broke down that day. Sure she had lost her sash, but she didn’t care for it anyway. As soon as Siobhan exited from center stage, Vesta followed her and took Siobhan’s arm. She smiled pleasantly for the sake of the stagehands. But I knew Vesta well enough to know she was putting on the best face she could manage in front of onlookers.”

  “Vesta crossed behind the rear panel and met me at the stage exit. She told me to pick up the remaining bags she couldn’t carry and head for the van. I wanted to ride home with Claudia and Irene. I told her so, knowing full well that Vesta and Siobhan would fight all of the way home. I had invited the Johnsons and knew they were still milling around the festival. I was too hot and tired for the battle ahead.”

  Then my father showed up. “Daddy put his arm around me and told me what a good job I did. ‘Ride home with Vesta, sis. Maybe you can bring peace to the feud,’ he said. That was the way of things between us.

  It occurred to me he had said that to me when I was four, although not in those exact words. “He had told me to go and give Alice a kiss, that it would help her stop crying. While walking out of the bedroom he said, ‘If you ask her to stay, maybe she’ll stay.’”

  Reverend Theo said, “That was when your mama left you and your daddy.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did your mama say to you?”

  “She said, ‘I have to leave here, Flannery. I’ve got to get on with my life. I know you’re too young to understand.’”

  Theo had a rather distant look when he said, “Alice Curry.”

  I continued. “My mother left after that so it seemed to me I was a lousy peacemaker.

  The most beautiful thing about Daddy was the softness of his voice. In the same kind of surrender he had passed on to me, I told him, ‘I’ll go with them,’ not wanting to disappoint him.

  When I got to the parking lot, Vesta was tossing our things in through the open van door. Daddy was nowhere around. His brother, my Uncle Shawn, had come to see us dance. Uncle Shawn’s truck passed us and Daddy waved at me from the cab of his brother’s truck.

  Siobhan’s face shimmered in the parking lot heat. “Vesta whispered to Siobhan, but I could hear all of it. ‘You did that on purpose. You’re a selfish girl.’”

  I continued. “Siobhan was old enough to care what others milling around us thought, so her words slid out quietly, but through bared teeth. ‘I was perfect.’

  Vesta reached for the zipper on her dress in an angry obligatory gesture. Siobhan pulled away, not in the mood to give in to her mother’s tirade.

  That was when I noticed how Billy hung back, nearly lost in the dispersing crowd, not escorting us back to the parking lot like usual. In spite of what he thought, I saw him. I knew he witnessed our worst last hour with my sister. He sipped iced tea from a safe distance, watching Siobhan goaded back to the van. “When I saw Billy watching, I turned away, ashamed of us.”

  Our Ford Galaxie was cooking as if we had parked it over red coals. Siobhan stood outside it refusing to climb in. “Run the air. It’s too hot,” she said, bitterly pulling hairpins from her wig.

  Vesta argued with her. “Get in. Let’s go,” she said, still so angry. “She wasn’t always like that with Siobhan,” I said to Reverend Theo.

  “Everybody has something they wish they could take back,” he said.

  “Vesta could be kind too. The day of the regional competition, the day we took fi
rst place, she walked with her arm around Siobhan as we escaped into a nearby five and dime. She bought her a headband with glittering antennas. Siobhan twirled on the store’s linoleum floor, the antennae bobbing. She looked like a bee. They were closer on that day. Daddy even treated us to burgers against Vesta’s wishes.

  “You speak of him tenderly,” said Theo.

  “Daddy thought he had failed at giving me a happy family the first go around. It was like him to pour sugar over our disputes. But I was lucky to have come into the equation with the parent borne of grace. At times, I grew resentful at Vesta for not recognizing the gift she had been handed in Flynn Curry.”

  “A tender nature has its thorn, though?”

  “He cowers. That’s too harsh a word,” I said. Truth was, I couldn’t think of a good word for what Daddy did when the heat was on. Alice would call him a runner. “I think he thought that others were made to fight the battles and he was there to tie pretty balloons to everything.”

  “Did your stepmother finally calm herself, out in the parking lot?”

  “Not really. Vesta was mad, thinking our chances at making a name for ourselves was ruined, you know, like everything hinged on that one performance,” I said.

  Reverend Theo kept still, listening. By now the sun was setting on Bitterwood Park.

  “I thought if Vesta knew Billy was watching, it would change things. “Look, Billy’s coming,” I told her.

  But he stood on the periphery of pavement, his face disappearing in the hot sunlight.

  “What with the doors all standing open, I tossed my tote bag into the front seat. I stepped away to grab the last remaining bag. But before I could position my gear and claim my place facing the front air conditioning vent, Siobhan climbed into the passenger seat, tossing my bag into the pile of gear in the backseat. She tore off her wig and flung it onto the front seat. ‘I’m sitting here. It’s my turn for the front seat.’”