Dancing in the Dark (2 page)

   There was a yellow sky, it was smoky yellow, it was around 6:45 on a June night, and we were sitting, draped over large over-size white-painted wicker furniture, on the long front porch before supper. I was having supper at Susan’s, her parents were in New York for the weekend, there was water boiling for spaghetti, we were going to go in soon and make a tossed salad, nothing special, maybe some cracked walnuts and orange sections, and then we were going to go to a film with Ted and Alice.

Something made me think of a Suzanne Vega story, she’s a singer, and she does comic monologues when she feels like it, I’ve seen her on television a couple of times. I said, “Suzanne Vega has a funny story.” Susan nods with repressed hilarity, she’d been laughing violently about something else we were talking about, she’s wearing a pale mauve shirt, a big loose shirt, one of her father’s. She says, “Okay?”

I say, “She claims this is one of her earliest memories, I don’t know if that changes the nature of the story or not, gives it a special emphasis. She’s about 4 ½, she’s sitting on the floor on the carpet in her parents’ living room, Massachusetts or wherever, in front of the television set maybe. Her first boyfriend …”

“Just a second,” says Susan, leaning forward and almost falling agile athlete over the wide arm of her white-painted wicker chair, “her
first
boyfriend.”

I say, “Yeah, her first boyfriend.”

“So, how many boyfriends did she have at 4 ½?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “this was her first, so it’s special, I guess, okay.” We’ve been drinking gin & lemon juice & grapefruit juice & orange juice & cracked ice, I have a little bit left in my tall glass. “Anyway, they’re sitting there, and she remembers saying to him, at least she claims she remembers this, and she has every right to claim she remembers this, it’s private, sure, but it’s her life, right? she says to him very nicely, very seriously, maybe her parents were there, who knows, ‘When I grow up, Mark, I’m going to marry you.’ ”

“His name was Mark?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. We don’t know for sure if the story is actually true, or if it’s simply one of her stories, I mean, she’s a comic, right, or a writer.”

“The other kid’s name may have been Albert or something and she could have changed it.”

“Right, so, that’s what she says to him. I like to imagine, she doesn’t go into details, that she was wearing one of those really neat little white dresses with a sash, like that photograph of your sister …”

“Very proper.”

“Yeah.”

“They weren’t working class?” Susan loves nitty gritties.

“I don’t know, she’s got a very upper middle class style, I mean, she’s preppy, she’s got that style.”

“Yeah, okay.” Susan is sitting up now straddling the wide arm of her wicker chair, she has loose multicoloured Bermudas on and the loose floppy legs of her cotton shorts ride up over her smooth tanned thighs creating an impression not of prurience, she just has white underwear on anyway, I mean it’s nothing exotic, but rather an impression of piled-up energy.

“So that’s what she says to Mark, if that was his name, if he, Mark, ever existed in actual fact land or not.”

“Girls are always saying that,” she says, with an odd, wrinkling of the nose, Susan has quite a beautiful nose, not aquiline exactly, not large, a fair-size nose, sort of Roman with a very distinct tip and just a bit delicate around the nostrils. “They usually say it to their fathers. I did. I walked up to my father in the living room, living rooms are the settings for all sorts of stuff, it was one night
after
supper, it was sometime around the time I started school. And I walked right up to him, he was sitting in his favourite armchair in the living room, my mother describes it, and I said, ‘Father, when I grow up, I’m going to marry you.’ ”

“And you’ve got no memory at this time as to whether you premeditated this dramatic statement, or it just occurred to you, apparently, out of nothing, apropos of something your mother said a few minutes earlier?”

“Oh, nothing, just, you know, one of those 5 million and 1 passing whims that go through your mind if you’re a little girl.” She leans forward resting her weight on her hands. Susan has beautiful wide strong simple hands, they’re not as tanned as her thighs, or her shoulders under the pale mauve man’s shirt, probably her father’s.

“So what next?” She gives me a big up from under her thick bronzy eyebrows look.

Okay, this is where the anecdote goes Freudian. And it’s already turned into a whole conversation, whereas what I thought I was doing was that I was just rattling off a quick photograph, and then we were going to go inside and make a big salad, because Susan loves big salads, even if the leftover balance has to be sealed with Saran Wrap and the bowl put away in the fridge. This has gotten deeper, not difficult or anything, but deeper, sort of like that Sunday afternoon deep old brown hole out in the middle of the Thames River.

I say okay. “So that’s what she said, ‘When I grow up I’m going to marry you.’ And then he stands up, at least I think she says he stood up, I suppose it makes a difference, and he says, ‘Well, when I grow up, I’m going to be a fireman, and I’m going to have a big hose, and I’m going to squirt water all over you.’ ” I’m laughing while I finish the story. I can’t help thinking it’s funny. It is funny. Most of the stuff that children do is funny. Even though I’m much too young to have children myself, although I suppose if I was careless, I’m not, then I might have. Children. James Purdy has a great book called
Children Is All
, that’s what’s going through my head at the moment, I’d love to be able to write as well as James Purdy, oh yeah, and other unlikely dreams. I’ll probably wind up playing bass fiddle in a dance band.

Susan’s hysterical. “Oh yeah,” she says between gasps, her violet eyes half-slitted, her mouth coping for air, “that’s so true, that’s so true it hurts. If you’ve ever been a young high school girl on a first date, and the boy has a car, and of course you don’t, then you know how true that is. The little fats.”

She’s getting up, I’m getting up, she’s clutching her slim flat stomach, also tanned, under the pale mauve man’s shirt, still laughing, and tucking in her shirt at the same time.

“Children are so beautiful,” I say, guilelessly, “that they can say anything.”

“Oh sure,” Susan says, “and they do, they do.”

The story is floating around us like a few distant maple keys in spring floating on a light breeze and drifting down to your front sidewalk or your back porch. “Is she good-looking?” Susan asks, picking up her empty glass and a bowl of salted redskins.