Dancing Lessons

by Olive Senior

  4

  ABANDON. ABAN-DON. A WORD with a nice swing to it. Like a hammock. Well, no. More like something slung out. Thrown up. Thrown away. Dumped. Forlorn, forsaken. Or some-body. Hea-vy. A-ban-don. Did She think I abandoned her when we allowed her to go and live with those people? I hardly ever saw her after that, it’s true, but was that my fault? Her father certainly went visiting, got quite chummy if you please, though what the Prince of Darkness had in common with those self-righteous paleface people is beyond me. But he was the one with the car. Did he ever once offer to take me?

  Apart from rushing me to the doctor with a sick child, did he ever once take me anywhere? I knew he never wanted to be seen with me, once he and the children turned me into a witch. I saw it in the way he looked at me, or rather, the way he let his eyes slide off me with the smoothness of a green lizard. And whose fault was it? Did he once give me money to straighten my hair? Get a new dress? Buy a box of face powder? Lipstick? Rouge for my cheeks? For that’s what he liked. That girl Esmie Roche with her penny hair straightened and wrapped up in a pound worth of bows. Think I didn’t know? Think I didn’t know of Mrs. Carter’s daughter, the mealy-mouthed schoolteacher with the skinny legs and the lisp? Think I didn’t know of that girl who worked in the office at the estate? He liked them young and dark-skinned, ripe and bursting like starapples. Pretty faces and hair upswept. Young and easy to break in. Easy to break. Until he met his match with that one there, that hard-back woman who finally lured him away—and broke him. That story was music to my heart. But of course he bounced back. He always did. That’s the Samphire men for you. But why am I wasting my time thinking about him?

  5

  I can’t truthfully say my mother abandoned me. But she upped and died when I was only a few days old, so what would you call that? My father’s mother, Miss Celia, and his sister, Aunt Zena, took me in and I grew up in the same house with my father, only I never knew he was my father until I was about eight or nine years old. I never knew I was related to them. Truly. Nobody told me anything. First he was away at the War and then he was there and wasn’t there, if you know what I mean. He wasn’t like the other men who went to the fields or out to a job. He just wandered around the place not doing very much and sometimes he got boisterous. He disappeared for long periods of time, returning without a word, at least not a word to me. They said it was the War that did it, shell-shocked him, though I didn’t know what that meant since at the time we didn’t even have electricity. I knew about the War because several of the men around had gone over to England to fight in it and were known as the Old Soldiers, and very proud of it they were too, wearing their old uniforms and hats and medals on Poppy Day. But he did things sometimes that made his mother and sister afraid of him, and even when I was too young to know what was going on, I could sense their relief when he was not around. I was afraid of him too, the only man in the house, but only because in those days I was afraid of everyone and everything. I could never do anything right. When Aunt Zena wanted to be nasty, which was every day, she would say to Miss Celia, “Well, what do you expect? The child of a slug and a madman.”

  It took me a long time to figure out that it was me she was talking about, and after I realized it I would cry and cry inside myself for I didn’t want to be the daughter of a slug. I didn’t understand why Aunt Zena would insult me so, calling my mother the lowest, most hateful thing there is on God’s earth. Once I told this to my husband and he nearly fell out of the bed laughing. He leaned over, gave me a hug and kissed me on the forehead, and wow wasn’t that a nice surprise and couldn’t I have done with more of that, and he said, laughing still, “‘Slut,’ ‘slut,’ you little idiot. Not slug.” I didn’t know what slut meant and he wouldn’t tell me, he just kept on laughing, his eyes dancing for me the way they never did at any other time, and it certainly made me feel better. For it is only in other people’s gaze that we see ourselves, isn’t it?

  Already those were the days when I couldn’t look into his eyes without feeling pain and humiliation, for I knew now they made four so easily with others, so reluctantly with mine. I didn’t know how to make my wishes known, how to please him, how to hold his gaze. And when I did manage to do so, it was like falling into water that was not the river or the sea but a pool with endless depth, like the blue hole at the riverhead where dangerous water spirits lurked. He only gazed at me now with anger or exasperation, or to issue commands. I’d look, and look away, drowning.

  6

  I only ever danced this one other time in my life and it turned into the saddest thing that ever happened. It was like this. Once I knew my father was my father, and I can’t remember how I knew, I would watch him closely, not that there was anything between us, he never paid any special attention to me. It was always “Girl this” and “Girl that” if he needed anything, I don’t think he ever called me by name. But I loved him just the same for he was the only thing that belonged to me or the only person I could say I belonged to, for I never knew my mother’s family and Miss Celia and Aunt Zena acted as if they would rather I didn’t belong to them. Maybe I was a slug, or some sort of obstacle cast into their world that they were forced to walk around, to their great inconvenience. Maybe it was this thing of my mother being a slug that made them watch me so closely, for I never had space to breathe. If I wasn’t at school I was put to work in the house and on Sundays I was straight laced and jacketed and marched off to church with them. Tied up tight as a knot the whole time and never a kind word, a tender smile, from them or anyone else, for all took their cue from the Richards family. I was the one who had brought disgrace on them, though how, I didn’t know.

  One time I thought it was because of my hair, which Aunt Zena would not even touch; when I was little it was Dulcie’s job to comb it. Dulcie, the maid who had been with them forever, long before I was born, so I think she too hated me from the way she pushed my head and pulled that hair. It took me a long time to realize that my hair was more like Dulcie’s than Aunt Zena’s, so then I thought that was the disgrace. For me. For them. And I didn’t have their nose either. Nice and straight. I only realized that much later, as if my body parts were becoming visible to me piece by piece, a jigsaw puzzle fitting into place, revealing a strange hatchling.

  To this day I remember looking at myself in the mirror, staring hard as if seeing myself for the very first time, and suddenly having my nose jump out at me, a large and fleshy nose that took up most of my face. Not at all the shape and beauty of theirs. Once I noticed it, I became preoccupied with this nose. It was all I could see when I looked in the mirror. I began to steal glimpses of my reflection everywhere, even in the distorted lenses of the dinner cutlery, the shiny pots in the kitchen. It was all I thought people saw when they looked at me. Nose Girl. Then I must have gotten over that for I became obsessed with other parts of my body. I ran my critical eye over my features, piece by piece, and nothing I saw pleased me; I was not like them at all, those others in the house I occupied. My face was too large, my forehead too broad, my cheekbones too high, my lips too thick, my eyes too muddy, my skin too dark, my hair too coarse. I looked like nobody. I couldn’t see below my neck in the bedroom mirror so I would steal into Aunt Zena’s room when she was out to stare at multiple reflections of myself in her three-way mirror, gasping anew each time at the big head, the long, coltish limbs, the knobby elbows and knees. I was so shocked to see myself, my ugly self revealed, that I felt true heartbreak, for I had no idea where I, this strange person in the mirror, had come from.

  For a long time, I was haunted by my own ugliness, yet I took a perverse pride in it too, for it gave me a reason why no one could love me. To this day I have no idea if as a child I was really ugly or beautiful, for I had no one to tell me. And I have nothing to look at. No one ever bothered to take a picture.

  Here’s something funny when I think about it now, funny to anyone who believes in signs. The wedding as non-event. The photographer who was hired to take our wedding picture messed up
and the pictures didn’t come out. We were supposed to dress up in our wedding clothes again and go to his studio. For years the poor man kept trying to make an appointment with us, for he was mortified, but it just never happened. Well, within a few months of the wedding it would have been impossible for me to get into that dress anyway, for my first child—She—was on the way.

  I don’t know if such pictures matter, because I am forever haunted by all these other pictures in my head, so clear to me even now I could print and paste them into an album, though they are not all pictures I would keep if I had a choice. Except for the one of my father laughing and singing, the one time he danced with me.

  7

  THIS HAPPENED DURING A period when my father was at home for a good long while. Since he never went to church, I got it into my head that I would stay home that Sunday, pretending to be sick, even though I knew it would mean castor oil and no Sunday dinner, when Aunt Zena came home. But even if nothing happened with my father, it would give me a chance to read the book I had borrowed from the school library and hidden under the bed. They went off and left me, to an empty house, for Dulcie too went to church, eleven o’clock service. All the respectable did. Except for my father.

  I was lurking in the doorway of my room, looking down the hallway to where his was, wondering what to do, when from his room came the most marvellous sounds. I knew it was from the gramophone he had brought from his latest time away. I hadn’t heard him play anything on it, though he must have done so when I was at school, for at the dinner table Miss Celia called what he played the devil’s work and asked why he couldn’t have brought home some hymns. But now the minute her back was turned this noise started up and what he was playing certainly sounded like the devil. It was the strangest cacophonous music I had ever heard, though I had never heard anything more than hymns and school songs. It was raucous and loud, with a driving rhythm like horses galloping overlaid by discordant gawps and boops and bleeps. It shocked me so much, I felt tilted into another world. Without thinking I walked down the hallway to his room and peeped in.

  He was standing by the window overlooking the veranda, facing into the room where the windup gramophone stood, conducting this music with one hand and moving his head and shoulders to the beat, with a smile on his face that I had never seen before. It was some time before he noticed me, and I had time to study him and to wonder anew at what a handsome man my father was. He was tall and well built, his limbs gangly and loose, with the triangular face and straight nose of his mother, for her parents had come over from England, Miss Celia was always proudly saying. Which is probably why she hated me. My mother’s family had come from out of the canefields, I once heard her say. But where her husband came from, I don’t know. All I ever saw of him was a picture in a large oval frame of a fierce-looking man with bushy hair and a moustache and skin that was very much darker than the young Miss Celia, who sat primly in a wicker-work chair with her legs crossed at the ankles while he stood behind her beside a small wicker table with a vase of artificial-looking flowers.

  But while Miss Celia and Aunt Zena’s skin was white and mottled with freckles, my father’s was logwood honey. And while their hair was brown and dead straight, both the same, his was rich dark brown with lots of kinky waves and red highlights. He wore it longish, swept back from his broad forehead. The more I looked and admired, the more conscious I became that I was nothing at all like him, except for the long legs. This day he was wearing what I thought of as his uniform when he was at home, his cream linen pants with cuffs, his red suspenders, and a pale blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows that brought out the blue in his hazel eyes and reminded me that mine were dirty brown.

  When he saw me, he didn’t look surprised, he smiled but didn’t stop moving to the music. A curl of his hair that had been plastered down with pomade came loose and flopped about in time to his movements. I couldn’t believe anyone who looked so young and carefree could be my dad.

  “Hey, Girl,” he said when the record stopped. “Know what music this is?”

  “No, sir.” I shook my head, suddenly feeling my body shrink with shyness.

  “Well, this is the greatest music in the world. Jazz. American music. This is ragtime. The devil ripping it up.” And he threw back his head and laughed, showing his beautiful teeth. He picked up the record sleeve and started to read from it, “Harry James and His Orchestra ‘One O’Clock Jump’ composed by Count Basie; Louis Jordan ‘Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’…”

  After that, it was talk, talk, so much talk in a non-stop stream. He’d put on a new record and smile and move his body until the record stopped and then he’d start talking again, getting almost as fast and frenzied as the music, his eyes bright, his face and body mobile, the lock of hair dancing to its own syncopation. At first I was simply entranced, so happy to be there, alone with him, feeding on his energy, as if he were an incandescent spark. But this went on for so long, this talk about things I knew nothing about, it drained me until my chest tightened so much I could hardly breathe. I wanted desperately to go back to my room, but having put myself into the picture, I didn’t know how to pull away. I didn’t want to go without getting what I’d come for. I so desperately wanted him to talk about me, us, my mother, him, that I exerted all my mental faculties. Please, please, I remember saying silently to him, please, please talk to me.

  I don’t know what I actually conveyed, but as if he sensed my mood, he took a record from a different album when the music stopped and said as he wound up the gramophone, “Listen to this!” As soon as the needle touched the record, I was lost in the most joyous, raucous sounds I had ever heard. This one had a beat I could understand and a woman’s voice like a razor blade. My father sang along with the chorus:

  That’s YOUR RED WAGON

  just keep dragging YOUR RED WAGON along.

  I had no idea what the words meant, but the beat, the mood, transported me out of that room in that country house to another world and my head was still spinning when the record finished.

  “Like it?”

  I nodded, and he played the record again.

  “Come, Girl, sing with me,” he said. At first I felt small and my throat dry as I tried to follow the words.

  If you’re gonna play horses and blow your dough

  Don’t you run to me if they don’t show

  That’s YOUR RED WAGON …

  He kept putting on the same record, and repeating the words, and soon I could belt them out as good as him and we were singing along at the tops of our voices:

  … just keep dragging YOUR RED WAGON along.

  So when he said, “Let’s dance” and took hold of my hands, “Like this,” I didn’t feel awkward and clumsy as he showed me what to do. I felt careless and free. How easy I found it to follow him. He nodded in approval as I caught the beat and soon we were dancing to that music as if there were devils after us, inside his room and into the hallway, where we galloped up and down, into the dining and living room and back down again. Each time the record stopped he would go and put it on again and we would resume our dance through the house, singing at the tops of our voices, stomping for emphasis, getting wilder and wilder:

  So you fell for somebody who pinned your ears

  Baby don’t be bringing me your tears

  That’s YOUR RED WAGON—

  Badoom! The loudness of the mahogany front door crashing against the wall as it swung open with force stopped us in our tracks, at the far end of the hallway. We froze together, my father and me, hands clasped, each with a foot in the air ready for another round, the words dying on our lips:

  So just keep dragging …

  Miss Celia stood in the doorway, Aunt Zena behind her, and the maid Dulcie: I remember still the quivering of their churchgoing hats like the tips of windswept palm trees. They were deadly silent, the entire world had hushed, but for the scratchy music that played on: we were caught red-handed with the evidence hot as the devil. I could feel my father’
s hand tighten, grow cold. Suddenly his body slumped, like a child’s. Aunt Zena brushed past Miss Celia into the hallway. That terrible tightness in my chest came back for I knew exactly what she was going to do. My father knew it too. He didn’t move. The words “No. Don’t.” broke away from him. But it wasn’t from the smiling man of a moment ago. It came out high-pitched and anguished, like a child’s. His hand still held mine, but it was as if he had suddenly become the child and he was holding on to me, not the other way round. I could feel his hand, then his whole body shaking. I felt as if I wanted to faint. My head started to grow big, for I knew something terrible was about to happen.