Dancing Lessons

by Olive Senior

  26

  I WANT TO TELL her—tell Celia—some of this for she never knew, did she? At least about that one time I went to take her home. Maybe we could have a good laugh about it, for my actions seem so silly now. I could tell her about Shirley lying in the middle of the road and howling when she left. Does she have any recollection of such things?

  Here at Ellesmere Lodge, displaced and far away from everything I have known, the past rises in front of me like a hill to be climbed, for there is no other way through. I’m thinking there’s so much I would like to tell her. We have never talked about the past, she and I. Though now I’m wondering if she never spoke about her other life because she didn’t want to hurt me. Did she sense how much I resented the Reverend Doctor and his wife? It must have been clear to her even when she was little that I didn’t want to hear about them. But did I actually say that to her, in so many words? I don’t remember. But I didn’t have to, not really. Children pick up these things easily, don’t they? The clever ones know just what to do to survive.

  In my saner moments I long to tell her, “I did love you. I do love you.” That would be something, wouldn’t it? But it’s probably too late. I wouldn’t know how. I see it on TV all the time, people doing that sort of thing, flinging their arms around each other and bawling and begging each other’s forgiveness, saying “I love you” over and over. But is it real? How does one just come out and say a thing like that?

  27

  SHIRLEY WOULD HAVE, THOUGH, wouldn’t she? Shirley was like that. The expansive one in a family where we didn’t much show our feelings for each other. The good feelings, that is. She was the one who would hug and touch and say “I love you” and throw her arms around you. The one who would come into my room at night when I was reading, when they were supposed to be sleeping, and throw her body across mine. Just for the contact, I think. Just for the warmth. She would say nothing and fall asleep there, her head on my bosom. She hugged her father when he came home and twined her arms around him. She always had her arms around Junior’s shoulders or those of her chums. She walked arm in arm with her girlfriends to school. It was as if she was perpetually thirsty for human contact, in need of love and reassurance through touch. Eager to give, too. I don’t know, though, maybe I misread Shirley and her needs. I think it is so sad that in the last picture I have of her she is standing in a street all by herself. Just herself and some tall buildings behind.

  Shirley in the picture is not herself. She is gaunt, with an underwater smile and wild looking hair, and she is squinting as if the sun is in her eyes. She does not look like the Shirley I know. Shirley came out the darkest of the children with hair that was thick and hard to comb, like mine, so she was glad when it became stylish for her to chop it off and she continued to wear it short and curly like that for many years. I didn’t know this Shirley with the wild hair. The short style suited her, for she had a beautifully shaped head and well-defined features with my high cheekbones. And though she was not beautiful—she was the one who looked most like me in every way—she had her father’s light coloured eyes, which gave her an exotic cast. She was the kind of girl who attracted second looks wherever she went, as if people were perpetually trying to figure out what combination of parents could have produced her. She had lots of personality too, too much perhaps, because she had a big mouth she was not afraid of using.

  28

  IT WAS CELIA WHO brought me the news. Stale news, as it turned out, but I didn’t know it then. It was the middle of the week. Her husband drove her. As soon as Celia stepped out of the car wearing huge dark glasses, I knew right away something was wrong. Herman quickly went around to her side and put his arm around her and gave her a hug and said something. He kept his arm around her shoulder as they walked towards the house. All this I saw as I watched from behind the curtain. I was moved by the tenderness he always showed towards her, even though they had been married almost four years by then. I felt anxiety as to what had happened to bring them down in the middle of the week and immediately thought it was something to do with one of their children. I never thought it could be one of mine.

  We greeted each other and Celia smiled and tried to look normal, but I couldn’t hold my own anxiety in.

  “Celia, what’s wrong?” I asked as soon as they sat down.

  “It’s bad news, Mom. It’s Shirley.”

  “Shirley! What happened?”

  Celia started crying then, and it was Herman who told me Shirley was dead, shot to death on a New York street.

  At first I didn’t even take it in, for there were so many questions to be asked. But not many answers were forthcoming, for they didn’t seem to know much themselves.

  “She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” was the only explanation I got.

  “So, what are we going to do?” I asked. “When are we bringing home the body?”

  And this was the most painful part of the whole thing, when Celia told me Shirley was already buried. The shooting had happened some time before.

  My anger overcame my grief then, because I couldn’t understand how my child could be not just dead but buried without my knowing. I probably took my anger out on Celia, for I can’t remember all that was said. It was only later that I understood why she had brought Herman, for he was the one who managed to calm things down, explain as best he could. Shirley seemed to have been caught in crossfire between two rival gangs, he said. He and Celia hadn’t known anything about it for a while because they had been away in Europe on holiday and it wasn’t until they returned home that they’d found out. By this time, Shirley had been buried. Her friends over there had taken care of everything.

  “Friends?” I remember crying. “What kind of friends that they couldn’t inform her own mother? Where is Junior, why didn’t he tell me? Where is Lise? Does she know? She couldn’t tell me?”

  I could feel tears welling up, but they weren’t tears for Shirley. Her death hadn’t sunk in. They were tears for what I saw as the indignity done to me. A reversal of the right order of things. What kind of friends did Shirley have, in truth, that they knew so little about proper conduct? I was raving, but not so I didn’t see the looks passing between Celia and Herman all this while, looks that were both embarrassed and wary. I felt that they knew far more than they were telling.

  “Why didn’t Junior tell me?” I asked again, for Shirley and Junior had always been tight. Celia and Herman had no answer to that either, they just looked more uncomfortable.

  “I don’t know, Mom, I don’t even know where Junior is at the moment,” Celia said, her voice flat and dull. She suddenly looked incredibly weary to me.

  I felt guilty then that they had travelled all that way and I had treated them so badly. I remember bustling into the kitchen, offering them food and drink, trying to act normal, but apart from coffee none of us could take anything. By the time the coffee was ready, we seemed to have run out of things to say. We sat there in embarrassed silence until Herman stood up and said he was terribly sorry but they had to go, he had to get back to the office. They promised they would let me know everything as soon as they found out. Celia hugged me and I hugged her back. I’m afraid I must have felt cold and unyielding to her, for I was already blaming the bringer of bad news, angry with her, with myself, with everybody.

  After they left I couldn’t keep still, couldn’t focus on any thing. I remember that I kept walking up and down, up and down like a mad woman, feeling stunned, as if I had been hit over the head and was no longer fully conscious. After a while, I called Ken and asked him to go get Millie, as I had to talk to somebody.

  Millie came over and acted surprised when I told her. She had all the right responses, she screamed, she groaned and moaned, she raised her hands to high heaven to think my daughter could be dead and buried without my knowing. But I remember that I had the same feeling that I had had with Celia and Herman, that there was something here that other people knew that I didn’t and that Millie was one of those people. It
was as if she was acting out a performance just for me.

  “You hear anything from Junior?” she asked. I shook my head. “Well, if anybody should know anything it’s Junior.”

  I was taken aback by her tone, how aggressive she sounded when she said this, for Junior was a favourite of hers. She knew me and my family better than anyone else.

  Then she asked suddenly, “Them catch the boy them yet?”

  “Who?” I asked. “What boys?”

  “The ones that shoot her.”

  “How you know they are boys?”

  “Then how! Don’t is shoot them shoot her? Right there in cold blood! Don’t is pure little youth them use to do that sort of thing?”

  “What sort of thing? Celia said it was an accident, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Oh! Is so?”

  Millie’s tone was so skeptical I looked hard at her, and she looked away from me. To my eyes she had a guilty look.

  “Millie, tell me the truth,” I pleaded. “You always know everything. You know something I should know? Please tell me if you hear anything.”

  “Me, Miss G?” This in her self-righteous tone. Millie was protean in her reactions and expressions. “Why you think I would know something and not tell you? Believe me, my heart really grieving for you. Little Shirley! Lawd. Ah can’t believe it. Ah can’t believe it.”

  Instead of making me feel better, Millie’s presence was making me feel worse. I could not stop myself walking up and down, ceaselessly. I felt hot and cold at the same time. My hands seemed to take on a life of their own, holding on to my body as if for warmth, clutching each other. Millie took hold of me and led me to my bed. She sat with me for a long time that day, sopping Bay Rum on my forehead to cool me down and brewing fever grass tea. She made me sit up in bed and sip the tea. After a while I began to take hold of myself. But I felt haunted by that great gap of my ignorance. What had really happened to Shirley? I remember saying over and over, “Millie, I have to know. I just have to know. Oh God, what am I to do?”

  Millie didn’t answer, but I already knew it was a useless question for it only made me feel my poverty more acutely, recognize my lowly place in the world, my inability to act. I had never travelled. I didn’t have a passport. I didn’t have money. What could I do? Nothing but wait on Celia to bring further news. Or for Junior to turn up. I thought of turning to Sam then, but my pride held me back. After all, he was the one in touch with them all, he probably knew long before I did. He hadn’t contacted me.

  The funny thing is I did get a letter from Sam, the day after Celia’s visit, so they must have stopped at his house too. It was a nice letter, and it touched me for it seemed sincere, though it failed to yield any information. He said he knew Celia had told me the news and he just wanted to let me know he was thinking of me. He wanted to come and see me but he wasn’t able to drive at this time, nothing serious but he had just had an eye operation. But if I needed anything or if there was anything he could do, I should let him know. He signed it, Yours ever, Sam. Well! I turned the letter over and over, staring at it as if I could force it to yield some meaning beyond the bare words. It was the first letter of a personal nature Sam had written to me, one in which we were not dryly exchanging information about Junior’s schooling, and it woke in me all the complex feelings I had ever felt for him. Instead of comforting me as I am sure he intended, it just added to my overall misery. My sense of everything that mattered slipping away from me.

  29

  I HAVEN’T SEEN MUCH of Celia recently, but that might be a sign that I’m behaving myself at last and Matron has no need to summon her to report on my bad conduct. I have to admit I did miss her phone calls. So I was pleased when she called to say she was back from a trip and would I like to go for a drive. Instead of saying no as I usually did, I remembered I wanted to buy notebooks. I said I would like to go into town to the bookstore. In her typical way, she didn’t ask questions, she just said, “Sure.” She knew that I didn’t like going into the city. It was hot and crowded with people, noisy and dirty, something I wasn’t used to. But I had to go to the bookstore myself to get exactly the right kind of notebook; I couldn’t leave it up to her.

  Once we were beyond the fancy cast-iron gates of Ellesmere Lodge, I was amazed at the world beyond those gates. It shocked me that I had so easily left it behind. For that was a world where lawns weren’t always manicured and hedges not always trimmed, where sticks and the bare earth and cardboard were home for many in a city that was full of poor people, people who looked like me and acted more like me, I’m sure, than that little corner of the Empire that I was leaving. The world outside these gates was full of dark-skinned people, while back there Matron and I and now Mr. Bridges were the darkest people, and we were more brown than black. All the domestic staff were dark, so was the gardener, the workmen who came to fix things, the drivers, the deliverymen, the little hairdresser and manicurist, all the people who did the hard, heavy, low-paying work.

  I don’t think I really noticed these things until I came to Ellesmere Lodge, which was like taking me back to the world of my childhood. Some of the people inside acted like that too, like Miss Celia and Aunt Zena, as if their pale colour gave them a right to lord it over everyone who was darker than they. Which is probably why I so wanted to get my own back at them. For now I was grown up and not scared. I had a physical advantage, too. I was younger than most of them, except Miss Loony if she is to be believed. I was taller, too, and now that I had taken to eating most heartily, I was bigger as well. No shrinking with old age for me. I had no idea being big could give one such a sense of being formidable, but that is what it was doing for me. I could feel them shrink away if I sat down on a couch beside them, shrivel up if we had to pass in the corridors or squeeze through the same door. Big. Silent and big was even better.

  But big and a murderer was even worse. Months later Matron was still going on about my almost killing Mr. Bridges. I heard her remarking on it to someone on the veranda the other day, though I couldn’t see who it was from the other side of the latticework. So it’s still there, that feeling of being in the wrong hanging over my head, though Mr. Bridges is looking more and more like an upstanding gentleman to me. He likes his food, and I admire someone who does, and he cleans his plate at every meal. He likes to walk briskly around the grounds, as I do, and he has taken to playing music again in his room, though now it’s classical stuff. When he plays dance-type romantic tunes he makes sure to lock his door. The key turning in his lock is like a dagger in my heart. I’m really sorry I started out on such a wrong footing with him, for of all the people here, he is the one I would like to get to know.

  I already know a lot about him, from listening to the talk. He’s a retired director of a very big firm; his wife is dead, his children all live abroad. He used to keep racehorses and was a noted tennis player. Nothing bad about him so far, but give them time. He’s brown-skinned, darker than me, and well set up financially. Much discussion about how much he is worth. Quite respectable, thank you. Most people here seem to have already known him so he’s settled in quite well, unlike some of us. Mr. Levy and Miss Pitt-Grainger and old Mr. McNab are overjoyed to have him, for he makes up a fourth at bridge, the other player having recently passed on, as Matron describes death. He and Ruby knock their heads together over the racing form. I’ve seen him in earnest conversation with Mrs. Holier-than-Thou Humphrey, with Miss Loony looking as if she is about to warble at him, and at the chessboard with Heathcliff, so a most versatile gentleman is he.

  He reads books too, and has similar tastes to mine as I have sussed from checking his titles. This gives him something in common with me, the only other reader at Ellesmere Lodge. I assume we are ignoring the Pancakes and their Mills and Boon and Harlequins and Mrs. Humphrey with her Daily Word and her bodice rippers disguised in hand-sewn book cover. Even Miss Pitt-Bull with her crosswords and even crosser books, for I am sure she chews them up and eats them when she’s done.
But how will I find a way to get into his good books when I am sure by now the rest of them have defamed me?

  I lean back in Celia’s lovely car and smell the leather. Think of all the paper and pencils I will buy. Maybe a book or two, a special, desirable book, perhaps one on the bestseller list that I will wave around like a hook, to bring him around to me. I know exactly which one he would like.

  30

  IT’S A LONG DRIVE, and after a while I am no longer with my thoughts at Ellesmere Lodge, I am increasingly conscious of being in the car, alone with Celia. I look at her sideways, at her thin, manicured hands on the steering wheel, at her face, all bones and angles, her beautiful hair that is honey coloured and crisp and crinkled like her father’s, but which like her skin now looks dried out as straw. I can tell she is trying to think of something to say to me, for I am trying to think of something to say to her. The way it always is between us. My throat is dry as I try to speak and I know the same things will be uttered. Me: “Are you okay, dear?” “How is work?” She: “Is everything okay?” “Need anything?” I am sad that all we ever do is go around in these circles. I’m angry too that she makes me feel inadequate. Even as a small child she would just stand her ground, her little legs braced, and stare me down. She was a sturdy little girl and her feet seemed to take root when she didn’t want to do something. Now I wonder where this sturdy little girl has gone, as all of a sudden she seems so brittle to me, so delicate, as if a light wind would blow her over. I know she works too hard and probably doesn’t take care of herself, but is something else the matter? Is her thinness saying something else?