Dancing Lessons

by Olive Senior

  “Grandma,” she said, and leaned in to give me a kiss on the cheek. Her name didn’t come to me right away, but she helped me immediately.

  “Ashley,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said as if I had known, for she truly had grown out of my sight. “How are you, dear?”

  “Fine, Grandma, how are you? You’re looking awesome. Love your hair,” and that brilliant smile again. Then, without waiting for me to answer, she hurried on. “Mom had to go away, so she asked me to pop by. I would have come anyway, now that exams are over. I hope you are feeling better. Anyway, I came by to see if you needed anything. I have Mom’s car, so I could take you someplace. But I don’t know what you’d like to do.”

  “Whoa!” I had to laugh, for she hadn’t paused for breath. Unlike her mother, she was very animated. “Let’s go in for a moment and sit down.”

  On the way to the lounge I got caught up on her doings and the doings of her brother, who was at Harvard. She had just finished high school and had been accepted at the University of the West Indies. I was really happy to see this girl. I couldn’t stop looking at her, trying to unravel the combination she revealed of her father—nose, dark skin, dark eyes—and her mother—mouth, hair. Her high spirits enchanted me. I didn’t even have time to revisit my guilt at how my own blindness in the past had prevented me from my really seeing her and my other grandchildren. Though if truth be told, the few times I had been to Celia’s house the place always seemed filled with young people who all looked the same to me and who never seemed to stop talking or moving long enough for me to figure out who was who.

  When Ashley leaned over and said, “Grandma, let’s go out and do something. Let’s go to a movie,” I said yes without thinking. As I stood to go upstairs to change, she lightly took hold of my hand.

  “Love your ring. Wicked!” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said, “it was my mother’s.”

  I honestly don’t know where that came from, and as soon as I said it I could have bitten off my tongue, but I didn’t want to break the mood of the moment. I thought: I’ll explain to her some other time. As I walked up the stairs, I couldn’t understand why I was feeling elated, whether it was from my granddaughter’s presence or the fact that I was about to visit a cinema for the first time in my life. Of course, I would never have shared that fact with her or anyone else, for wasn’t it a shameful thing?

  Had they known, people would be surprised at how little practical experience of life I had, though I had a vast knowledge from reading and just paying attention to what was happening around me. I had never travelled abroad, for instance, never until I came to town eaten in a real restaurant—meaning not an ice cream parlour—never worn a bathing suit or sat on a beach. That’s so astonishing now, when I think of it, but that’s what living in the country was about for me.

  I knew that all the other women with children in town or overseas had readily taken to the latest of everything, like Millie. Even the old grannies would be seen wearing Jheri curls or bright red wigs or whatever was the fashion of the moment, sporting cell phones and designer track shoes. They had been to Disney World and New York City and Toronto. Ridden trains and roller coasters. Flown on airplanes. But I had so buried myself that I knew nothing of the things that made the modern world go round. I averted my eyes when people flaunted them at me, worse when they flaunted the children and grandchildren who came to visit. I had stayed deliberately ignorant of makeup and the latest fashions, though these were the things I had yearned for in my early life. If I couldn’t have them, I didn’t want them, I decided; my decision, like everything else, hardening into a kind of scorn for those who did. But I was a fast learner. For once I was exposed to all the fashion or home decor magazines lying around Ellesmere Lodge, I began to treat them with the same studious attention I gave to everything. I became knowledgeable about brand names and the latest styles, and quite curious about people’s choices in scent, makeup, or lipstick, even the colours, because of what I felt these choices were saying about them.

  Listening to the Pancake Sisters, of course, was an education in itself as to what was fashionable and what was not—at least in their eyes, which was at least one generation removed from reality. I was lucky that this was counterbalanced by the endless information on the topic of fashion and makeup imparted by Morveen and Kyisha when they worked on me. It was from them that I also managed to extract information on their other clients’ preferences, including Matron, who apparently went to a real beauty parlour where the girls normally worked, as they came to Ellesmere Lodge on Mondays when the parlour was closed. All of this was when I first came and had the feeling that knowledge was power and that the more I knew about my enemies—Matron, the Pancake Sisters—the more I could prepare myself against attack. Those days are long gone, of course, but what I haven’t lost is the insecurity, the fear of being found out as an ignoramus.

  My husband never took me anywhere, preferring to escort other lady loves even before he bought a car. I wasn’t one of those mothers who did things with their children; it was as if they walked away from me once they left to go away to secondary school. After that, they did things with their friends, occupying a world in which I had no place. I might have had to visit their schools once or twice on business. I went to the town at least once a term to buy school supplies and whatever else I needed, but entertainment was never a part of these. Money was always tight, but it really was that I had a profound fear of going out, of being in crowds, surrounded by or interacting with other people. I think it was always because I felt too ashamed of how I looked, how far my clothes, my hair, fell from the internal standards I had set myself. For, thanks to my grandmother and Aunt Zena, I knew what I was supposed to be. But it seemed I had fallen a long way.

  It was as if I was always two people. The one who was visible: plain, awkward, and shy. And the other inside my head: well-dressed, fashionable, and in command. For that, at least, is what Aunt Zena always was, which makes me think now that the scenario of her having travelled, living in the United States, having a husband and a fashionable wedding dress, seems plausible. Having heard some of her story from Ma D I could think of her in another way, as a woman who, in another life, would have been attractive. She wore makeup—at least by the modified standards of the country, powder and lipstick—and who knows what else in the jars I saw sitting on her vanity top when I scouted it out. There was, hidden in her clothes cupboard, a curling iron—which, by the time I came along, she probably never used—jewellery never worn, smart hats in boxes, and beautifully pleated and beaded dresses I never saw her put on. But there must have been considerable vanity in her makeup that I hadn’t recognized, of a woman who saw herself as attractive and attracting male attention, or who had at some time in the past.

  “Oh, Zena was quite the girl,” Ma D had laughed another time when I questioned her. I noticed that she had this peculiar little laugh she only gave when Zena’s name was mentioned. “She was attractive and stylish. She had a way about her. She liked other women’s husbands, that’s for sure. Once I caught her kissing mine.” My eyes popped then, but, instead of continuing, Ma D suddenly pinched her mouth shut as if she’d said too much. Over time I was to learn more about Zena, as I kept on bringing up her name. It turned out that Zena was the scandal of her generation, for she had run off to America with some married man. He had eventually left her, but she stayed on, getting married to a man no one ever met. He too seemed to have wandered on. Zena came home when her father got ill, meaning to stay for only a short time, but she had ended up staying for a long time to nurse him and then forever after he died, trapped by family obligations.

  I remembered other photographs. Her alone looking rather glamorous in a fur collar and a cloche hat. Her with others—male and female—in winter coats and boots with a backdrop of tall buildings and high steps leading up to them. In these photos she was always smiling.

  So what had happened to turn her into such a shrew? Why had she rea
cted to me, her brother’s child in such a manner? Was it because I was illegitimate? For such things mattered a great deal then to such people. Was it because of my colour? I was so much darker than they with what they would have called “bad” or “tough” hair. Was it because my mother came from a dark-skinned family that they, of English origin, refused to recognize? Was it because of my mother’s moral qualities—“the slug”? Or was it because of my father—the madman—and the embarrassment to the leading family of the district? Or was it simply that Zena herself had skidded to such a dead end in her own life she was forced to take out her anger and frustration on the most vulnerable member of the family, me?

  But she did give me one thing, and that was the image of how smart a woman could be. Although that image never left me, I made no attempt to make myself into that person. Perversely, I courted plainness, as punishment, perhaps, for the bad choices I had made in life. If I went out at all, my one objective was to get my errands done and return home as quickly as possible.

  So how did I get here then, so quickly transiting that space? Sitting comfortably in my daughter’s grand car. My smart beige two-piece linen dress , my pointy-toed high-heeled pink shoes, my leather handbag, my feather-cut hair with the blonde highlights, my lipstick—Revlon Super Lustrous in flesh tone. Ruby’s ring! Whence this new feeling of confidence, riding down this hill into the city with my eighteen-year-old granddaughter, a competent driver down to her lacquered fingernails—Poster Pink nail polish, for I asked her.

  With all these thoughts flying through my head as swiftly as the miles, of past, of present, and—for the very first time in my life—of future, it seemed that I had come such a long way since that hurricane blew my roof off.

  102

  I WENT TO MY room in a state of high excitement after Ashley dropped me off at Ellesmere Lodge. I couldn’t remember the name of the film or what it was about, for too many images from the big screen were sliding around and colliding inside my head. I was drunk with new wine—the images of other worlds. The film was a silly comedy, but silly is a place I had never been before and where I wanted to be right now, for I felt giggly and foolish like a young girl.

  Normally I would have slipped off my high heels the minute I came through the door, then stripped down to get into something comfortable, as if I couldn’t wait to take off the face and finery I put on for the world. But this time I didn’t bother. Still fully dressed and without any consciousness of what I was doing, I reached for the box in which I had packed Mr. Bridges’ CD player and headphones and took them out. Then I fished around for the CDS he had brought home and played that last day and which I had taken from his room. I had no desire to play the blues or “Your Red Wagon” or any of that music I had so yearned to hear. What I wanted was the music of a later time, the music of the fifties and sixties that Mr. Bridges had played for me that day.

  It’s funny that the yearning I felt was not for him or those last moments we spent together but for the sweetness of that music as I remembered it, the bearer of memories of a vanished time in which I had never shared. Then I decided I didn’t want the music that we danced to, the mellow tones of the Temptations or Ray Charles. What I wanted was something heard only once but which I remembered as joyous and—yes—silly. Buddy Holly is what had had me tapping my feet and swaying my body before Mr. Bridges had put on that other CD and asked me to dance. In retrospect, it seemed a silly kind of music for Mr. Bridges, too. Was its purchase a last bid to recapture his lost youth before he signed himself on to a life sentence with a gorgon? Perhaps he was really bothered after all; perhaps he was having second thoughts that day. I batted the idea and the image of Ralph Bridges out of the way. What do I know? What do I care? I plugged in the player and the earphones, not feeling in the least bit intimidated by all the buttons and flashing lights. How difficult could it be for an intelligent woman if a Rat could manipulate it? I slipped in the CD and pressed PLAY. Looking at the liner notes, I pressed the number of the tune I wanted. Number seven. I put on the earphones and felt the groove bounce through me.

  Suddenly I was dancing in my room, by myself, all dressed up and wearing my pink high-heeled shoes. Dancing to the music of a young boy who was born the same year I was born and died at twenty-two, as the liner notes told me, around the same time my youthful self had died. I let the rest of the record play, not listening so much as feeling the changing moods, letting the images from the film of my life run through my head as I danced, trying to let each image fade out like a ghost, snatching from the air the few words here and there that I caught, hanging on to these fragments of self-assertiveness and belting them out to the last. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” And truly, for that one night, it didn’t.

  103

  ASHLEY CAME AROUND QUITE a bit after that, while her mother was away, and she seemed to like my company, which surprised me. I went with her to all the places her mother had offered to take me when I first came, but which in my state of misery and anger and frustration I had not wanted to go to. Ashley and I went to the movies again and to the beach and to the mountains, and we ate at roadside shacks and fast food restaurants. I think Ashley loved to be my guide, and I loved everything about Ashley, except the music she played in the car the minute she started driving, slipping in a tape from the stack she seemed to travel with. She shouted above the music as we talked or turned the volume down as needed, which made me nervous no matter how skilful a driver she was. The reggae she played was not the music of Bob Marley or Toots, which I was familiar with and rather liked, but some awful stuff that could not be classified as music in my book. Dancehall, dub, rap, whatever. The pounding in my head! One day I decided to take some of my CDS along.

  “Have you ever heard of Buddy Holly?” I asked as I got into the car, fishing the CD out of my handbag and holding it up before she even started the engine.

  “Oh my God!” she said, laughing and covering her mouth with her hands in mock horror. “I don’t believe it, Grandma. You too?”

  “What?” I was taken aback.

  “My parents. Well, my dad actually. He’s always playing stuff like that. He’s into all this stuff about the history of music and who was the greatest and what have you. Buddy Holly! Gosh, I never knew he had got to you.”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “Herman and I have never talked about music. But I’m surprised, this was long before his time. I thought he would be strictly into classical.”

  “You don’t know him. Sure, he plays the classical stuff. But he’s also into all kinds of popular stuff, not just Jamaican music but rhythm and blues, rock and roll, everything. He fancies himself as this historian of music. Which is so bor-ing! When we were little, he was always trying to get Gaby and me to listen to that stuff. We used to creep around the house when he was in one of these moods so he wouldn’t grab us for a lesson.” She shook her head and laughed. “Both my parents think the fifties and sixties were the greatest times for the music. They dig all that early ska and rock steady. But they also like that American stuff, like these old hippies, you know. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Crosby Stills—”

  “Come on! I know your mom was into Black Power and the women’s movement and all that sort of thing when she was in college in the States, but wouldn’t she have been a little young to be a flower child?” I was pleased to sound so knowledgeable about Celia.

  “Yeah, but she likes to pretend she had this carefree, hippy youth all the same. Like she was once on this big radical kick, throwing off the traces of society or some such thing. My mom! Can you imagine?” With her hands on the wheel, Ashley turned to face me, rolling her eyes.

  I smiled back. “Well, I can’t imagine your father into that sort of thing either.” From the first, Herman to me was always the proper, straight-laced lawyer who chose his words as carefully as his ties.

  Ashley laughed as she turned the key and started the engine. She kept on laughing and tapping the wheel for emphasis as she drove, as if amused by the vision of her parents my
question had brought to mind. “Oh, you really don’t know about my dad? His Rasta phase? What! You’ve never seen the pictures of him in his wild youth, in his dreadlocks and tam?”

  “No!” My tone reflected my absolute disbelief.

  “Don’t tell me Mom never told you. It’s their big party piece. How Herman Alphonso Jerome, Queen’s Counsel, once grew his hair and smoked ganja and dropped out of school to go and join some Rasta commune. The Bobos or something like that. You know the ones that walk around the place with their hair wrapped in these glorious tams, wearing long white robes and selling brooms? Apparently that is what all those middle-class boys were doing then, all his friends. Dropping out to turn Rasta. Like Jeff Markle that everybody says will be the next prime minister. You didn’t know? Gran! He was at school with my dad. Might even have been the one that inveigled him into it. Can you imagine? And he’s such an old stuffed shirt now!”

  “Who, your dad?”

  “No, that Markle. Dad’s all right. We argue a lot, but he still has some kind of social conscience, I have to say. Not like those fat-cat politicians.”

  Although it was hard to imagine Herman as a Rasta, I did have first-hand knowledge about these middle-class youths dropping out to join the brethren, for it was something that my own son, Junior, had tried to do. He came home from that first holiday he spent with his school friends wearing a tam, and when I dragged it off his head, I was appalled to see what was underneath, for Junior had always been so vain about his hair. Now it was long and natty and unkempt. Well, I let him know right away I wasn’t going to put up with that and it was off with that tam and hair if he wanted to stay in my house. He didn’t try any of it as long as he was with me, though I don’t know what happened after he left to join his father. But it was a sign, wasn’t it, of the rebellion all these boys were undergoing at the time, the desire to shed their privileged trappings and become one with the so-called sufferers. Or maybe they just wanted to go and smoke ganja. Not that Junior was privileged, like those others, but he was certainly a lot better off than most of the boys around. I thought with Junior I had nipped it in the bud, just as I refused to let him bring that I-man and Selassie-I talk to me. But it was soon after that he left home to live with his father, and I remember now that he was wearing the tam the day he came back to pick up his things. To tell me how my authority now counted for nothing, I suppose. But Herman’s father was a high court judge and from all accounts very proper. They certainly seemed like that, he and his wife, the one time I met them at the wedding.