Dancing Lessons

by Olive Senior

  “The minute I saw him I knew, I just knew it was my father.” I had to pause to slow myself down, for I was feeling as excited as I did that day. “I wanted to run to him, but of course I couldn’t move very fast. When I got up closer I could see it was him in truth. But I was so shocked. He was such an old man, filthy, thin to the point of vanishing, his hair long and uncombed, most of his teeth gone. But I already had my arms open. ‘Papa,’ I cried.

  “He had this silly grin on his face the whole time, but when he heard me call out he stopped and looked at me. A smile broke on his face. I thought he recognized me. He held out his arms to embrace me, or so I thought, and I moved towards him. I didn’t care what state he was in, I was just happy to see him.”

  I paused, envisaging the scene again. How my father held out his arms and I thought it was to greet me, but then he clapped his hands together and opened them and looked at his palms and laughed and then he spun around and did the same thing, clapped his hands together before opening them, looking and laughing in glee. As he continued to turn round and round, over and over, reaching up high sometimes, first one side then the other, I realized he hadn’t recognized me at all, he was chasing and killing mosquitoes or some other flying insect that only he could see.

  I think at some point I must have cried out, for I remember hearing the voices of Sam and Georgie and then Sam holding me and getting me into my room and onto the bed. After that I remember very little except the baby coming in a great rush.

  After telling this to Mr. Bridges, I must have sat there with a smile on my face, lost in the miracle of the moment, the birth of my child, for I was startled by his voice asking, “But what happened to him?”

  I had to pull myself back to the thread of this other story.

  “Well, yes, that’s the strangest thing. When I finally asked about him, Sam said that after the midwife came and they knew the baby and I were all right, he and Georgie put him in Georgie’s car and took him to the Richards house—Georgie was, like Sam, a relative on that side of the family. The Richardses claimed he never turned up, though Sam swears he opened the gate and they left him inside. Nobody seems to have seen him from that day to this. If Sam had not been there as a witness I would have thought I had dreamt the whole thing.”

  “So that was it then? Nobody reported it to the police or anything?”

  “I don’t know, I guess the Richardses might have done that. By this time everybody in the district knew he’d turned up again because Sam would have talked about it, I’m sure. But people just saw him as a madman anyway, so who would have cared about him?”

  I paused then, thinking, and we sat in silence for a while. “It’s just that I would give anything to know what happened to him. You know, it’s like a hole in my heart. Of course when they found the skeleton, I thought about him all over again.”

  I wasn’t looking at Mr. Bridges when I said this, I was so focused on the past, but I could sense him turning to stare at me and his voice seemed a bit sharp when he said, “My dear G, this is getting too dramatic. What skeleton?”

  “Oh, this was a long time after, Celia was a big girl then, maybe four or five. Anyway, this man—a neighbour of ours—was bringing some new land under cultivation, on a little side track off the main road, nobody ever went down there really. It was all rocky stuff, bush, and he was working down the gully, very steep-sided, clearing it by burning, when he came across this skull. Well! You can imagine the excitement that caused. The police came and dug around and they found bones strewn all over that gully, probably scattered by animals, but when they assembled it, it was all the bones of one person.”

  “And you think …?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But no one else went missing in those parts, as far as I know. Of course it wasn’t like now when they have all sorts of fancy ways of making identification. DNA and that sort of thing.”

  “So did you tell the police about your father?”

  “Well, I wanted to, but Sam was dead set against it, I didn’t dare. He just kept saying we didn’t want to get involved. I guess he was anxious about the baby too. ‘Just imagine what he could have done to you. To the baby,’ he kept saying. ‘That madman. You didn’t see how he was behaving when you were in labour. Me and Georgie had to tie him up. You were crazy to go out there to him. He could have killed you. He could have knocked you down.’ Of course I knew that he wouldn’t have. But Sam never listened to me. He was always saying I was lucky the baby didn’t come out with a madman’s mark.”

  That made me smile, for I remember the midwife agreeing with him about that.

  “Madman’s mark?” Mr. Bridges raised his eyebrows.

  “You know how country people are,” I explained. “They think shocks to the system of the pregnant mother will mark the baby in some physical way, though I can’t imagine what a madman’s mark would look like. Of course it was all nonsense, for the baby was perfect. I don’t know if anyone else mentioned my father to the police but it was a nine days’ wonder. They carted the bones away and we never heard anything more about it.”

  “You don’t think .?”

  “No, I don’t think,” I said firmly. I suddenly felt tired and headachy and I didn’t want to pursue the matter any further. Thankfully, the dinner bell saved me.

  58

  IT WAS AS IF everyone from my past vanished the years I was having my children. When Junior was two, Aunt Zena died, much to everyone’s surprise, for up to then she had been a hale and hearty woman. She had a massive stroke that took her off quite suddenly. I went to her funeral and stood at the back in both the church and the graveyard, not wanting to disturb any ghosts. She had never reconciled herself to me, though it wasn’t for lack of trying on my part. I left without speaking to any of the family. After that, I did summon up my courage and for the first time in eight years walked up the front steps of their house, determined to see Miss Celia as she hadn’t been at the funeral. I did see her, but it was as I had heard. She no longer recognized anyone. I still felt it as a blow that she didn’t remember me. She otherwise seemed the same, older and more frail. She sat up in bed and chattered away while I was there, giving instructions to her helpers and behaving as if everything was quite normal. I tried to smile. But really, I wanted to weep, for looking on the spotted white skin now fragile as parchment, the straight fleshy nose, the silky white hair, the realization came to me that this woman was really my grandmother. My flesh and blood. For the first time it seemed real. In the years that I lived with them, I had never been encouraged to act as if this was so. No connections were ever made for me. But there she was, my father’s mother. When I was leaving, I wanted to throw myself on the bed beside her and take her in my arms, but all I dared to do was bend down and touch my lips to her cheek. Surprisingly, she reached up her frail arms and put them around my neck and hugged me. I’m not sure who she thought I was. The gesture only pained me more, as if it were a mockery.

  On leaving the house, I stood on the front steps and looked across at the faraway blue hills as I used to do as a child, believing then that they formed the rim of the world, a world that was nevertheless boundless. My own world had so narrowed, I could no longer fantasize about the pull of adventure out there. It was as if I’d found my place at last. Down to earth. Grounded.

  I took a deep breath to steady myself, for I felt a kind of numbness creeping over me. I wasn’t grounded at all. I was terrified by the knowledge that there was nothing to hold on to, all that had shored me up had crumbled, for Aunt Zena and Miss Celia were my last links to that past. And though they were the ones who refused to acknowledge my existence after I had run away, I still felt guilt for what I had done, for they had after all taken me in and cared for me in their own way. Whether they liked it or not, I was their child. They were the ones who had made me.

  59

  OF ALL THE PEOPLE at Ellesmere Lodge, Mr. Bridges goes out the most. He has lots of friends and relatives who come and take him out, and, although he say
s he hates travelling, he goes to Miami from time to time. That is as far as he will go, to stay with a sister. His children must travel from other parts of the States to come and see him. He gets lots of mail too, much of it with U.S. stamps, which is all I ever manage to glimpse. More and more he talks of moving back to his house. This makes sense since he is still quite fit and active, especially compared to most of the people at Ellesmere Lodge. Indeed, for an active person, as I am too, contemplation of the residents collectively is sometimes a depressing prospect, all white hair and glasses and walkers and orthopedic shoes—except for the high-heeled Pancake Sisters, of course—and snoozes and snores mid-morning and afternoon and drooling. There is probably a lot more life here than at similar places; still, the illnesses and operations, the life-sustaining medical interventions, and the endless discussions surrounding them are quite depressing. So are the vanishings, as I think of them—the people who are too ill or frail to stay at Ellesmere Lodge and who disappear, shifted elsewhere to places with hospital beds and bed pans and professional nursing care.

  Equally distressing are the deaths, Babe’s being the most shocking one. She took ill one day, was taken to the hospital, and was gone within a week. Ruby was to say later Babe had had so many medical interventions she was living on borrowed time. In our dismay at the suddenness of it all, I could see the other two, Ruby and Birdie, eyeing each other in a speculative way, as if to say, who will be next? Babe had a lovely funeral, her three children, grandchildren, and great-grands all came from abroad and saw to that, but apart from them and some of the Ellesmere Lodge residents and staff, the turnout was scanty. Like the rest of us, she had outlasted most of her contemporaries.

  Shortly after Babe’s death, Mr. Bridges said, out of the blue, “I am thinking of getting married again.”

  I looked at him, startled, my heart beating so fast I’m sure he could hear it, though on my face I never showed a thing. Is this a proposal, I thought? Should I say something? What should I do? I looked quizzically at him, hoping my face showed nothing but interest at the news. But he just turned his glass round and round and looked at it and smiled and said, “I really need to get back to my house. I was over there on Sunday and though Gerald does try, things are really in a mess.”

  I expected him to go on from there, back to the bit about marriage, wondering if I was up to the task of taking care of the house itself as well as things domestic, but then hadn’t I done all these things on my own? But when I saw he planned to say nothing more, I turned back to my book to hide my confusion. I can’t say I read a single word.

  He never broached the subject again, though now he had planted the idea in my head, my fantasies began to get the better of me. It was at times like this that I truly wished that I had a friend, someone to share secrets with as the Pancake Sisters had done all their lives. Someone to bounce this one off to see if a ball had really been thrown into my court. I was so lacking in social skills I couldn’t figure out a simple thing like that. I went to my room feeling the lowest I had felt for a long time: it made me realize how poverty-stricken I truly was.

  60

  I WONDER WHAT CELIA would say if I told her? I can’t help turning this idea over in my mind. Would she laugh scornfully, be happy, disapproving? Or would she sit there, old stone face, with that slight natural upturn to the corners of her mouth—just like Shirley—that makes her expression seem so pleasant all the while, masking an interior life I know nothing about? I always wondered where she and Shirley got this lovely little feature that no one else in the family has. Was it perhaps something passed down from my mother? Was Shirley smiling when they shot her? Laughing with her big mouth in that joyful way of hers? What really happened to my daughter?

  What was Shirley doing in New York, anyway? A mother should know a thing like that. But I seem to have lost my children like the mother hen is destined to lose her chicks. Only I could never replace mine over and over.

  The day Shirley came to tell me she was going, she was so happy, in her usual excited manner. I was happy for her. I thought she had gotten a scholarship, for I knew she had applied. Until she told me her father was paying for it. I don’t know. Just the mention of their father in those days was enough to drive me crazy—it drew out of me all the pent-up anger, the words I never spoke otherwise, and unfortunately my children were the ones those words fell on. It wasn’t because he was paying, I wanted him to pay and pay and pay. It was just the way she spoke of him, Shirley who had hated him as much as I did, the way she said “Pops” now in this loving tender manner, which let me know that to her he was more than a bank account. I just stood there and said “Pops?” Something in the tone of my voice triggered that angry reaction in her. For she immediately launched into such a defence of him. Which of course ended up with a devastating attack on me. My God! What did that man do to earn such a whitewash?

  Silence. Silence can sever as effectively as a knife. I never once told my children about my own childhood, my past, my relationship to the Richardses, they only knew that we were somehow related. So when Shirley flung at me that day to conclude her narrative of my bad qualities, “Not even your own family would talk to you!” I should have realized the power of that silence, its potential to surround the heart and squeeze it dry. In knowing nothing about me, Shirley knew nothing about her own past; she was as lacking in anchorage as I was. How was I different from the Richardses and their refusal to speak of anything to do with my history, of my mother?

  61

  SOMETIMES I WISH I had someone to talk to, especially now, when I am forced to think about these things, for one can’t live in the world today without becoming aware of one’s own shortcomings, of how the past loops around to choke off the present. Or, perhaps, of how one can undo the knots, set the past free. I am confronted with all of them, the advice-givers, whichever way I turn, the Oprahs and the Doctor Phils. If these oh-so-confident talkers are to be believed, by facing the past we can find our own strengths in the present, to overcome the mountains to be climbed and conquered. Or in my case the pit to crawl out of. I try not to put too much trust in these people; they are foreign and get rich from this sort of thing, so how can they be trusted. But I’m a majority of one, it seems, for their aura, their authority penetrates even into the kitchen. Even the two young beauticians, Morveen and Kyisha, are constantly quoting psychobabble though I’m not sure they understand what it means. I can’t escape it in the glamour and beauty magazines the Pancake Sisters pass on to me.

  Shirley was beautiful enough, in her own way, but she wasn’t obsessed with her looks, like Lise. Shirley was more into herself, I think now, into finding out who she was. Did she? Was that what it was all about? Every time I think of Shirley I’m tempted to pick up her picture and wonder. Try not to open the old biscuit tin and look.

  I never gave them much of an anchor, did I? I launched them on the great sea of life and then I just let them drift off until they disappeared beyond the horizon.

  62

  SOMETIMES I ASK MYSELF, now that my heart seems to be opening wider, did I really love any of them? And when I am feeling sorry for myself: Did anyone ever love me? And now sometimes I ask: Why am I feeling like this? Is it love?

  63

  MATRON IS ALL EXCITEMENT these days, I don’t know what’s gotten into her, but she’s more fluttery and buttery than usual. Ruby swears she’s got a man, which leads Birdie to question in her sweet way, “What ever did she do with the first one?”

  For Matron is Mrs. Spence. She is the Director, as she keeps telling me, for I am the only one who calls her Matron. The rest who’ve been here a long time call her by her first name: Delice, pronounced De-Lees. Which I think is much too nice a name for her: Delice Spence. But I have to confess she’s been awfully nice to me lately, always stopping to exchange a few words, to rave about our latest vegetables, to compliment me on a dress or a new hairstyle, for I’ve gotten quite vain and experimental, I must confess, to Morveen’s delight. Not a single complai
nt from Matron in months. I think it’s all because of Mr. Bridges. Matron is a romantic at heart. Romance is all she ever reads, and she rushes to her cottage every evening to watch the soaps. She is very caught up in them, if her avid discussion with the other fans at our residence, including those in the kitchen, is anything to go by. Even Winston surprises me sometimes with his knowledge of these matters, as I learn from overhearing the post-lunch conversation of the domestic staff when they are relaxing outside the kitchen.

  I think all of this soap opera business has given Matron the idea that something is going on between me and Mr. Bridges and marriage is imminent, which explains her breathlessness, for nothing untoward seems to be happening in her life. She keeps telling me about that old couple in their eighties who met at a retirement home in the city and how they got married and had their pictures in the papers. “On TV, Mrs. Samphire, imagine!” Of course she didn’t tell me, as Ruby did, referring to them as “silly old fools,” that neither survived the shock of new-found love longer than six months. I just smile at Matron and everyone else, for the only evidence they have is that Mr. Bridges and I spend an awful lot of time together, but all of it in the open.

  What do we do in this time? We garden, we sit companionably and read, we listen to music occasionally, we go for walks around the grounds, we talk. Mr. Bridges is impeccable in his politeness, and says nothing more of marriage, although he still talks of going back to his house. Why he hesitates to make that move I don’t know since there is nothing stopping him that I can see. But of late I’ve noticed a restlessness in him, a subtle ruffling of the surface, a slight shifting of his attention from the matter at hand, as if he is not quite as focused as he used to be. And I wonder what is the matter, is he feeling unwell? But I dare not ask. And soon off he goes to Miami again, as he seems to be doing more and more.