Family Dancing (14 page)

He begins. He does all the voices, and makes the sound of applause by driving his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “And now,” he says, “for your viewing pleasure, another episode of ‘The Perfect Brothers Show’!”

The orchestra plays a fanfare. In another voice, Danny sings:

“A perfect night for comedy!

For fun and musicality!

We’ll change you!

Rearrange you!

Just you wait and see!

Welcome to The Perfect Brothers Show!”

He is in the midst of inventing a comic skit, followed by a song from this week’s guest star, Loni Anderson, when Jeff—the younger and more persistently good-natured of the brothers—appears from between the trees. “Can I play?” he asks.

Danny, to his own surprise, doesn’t throw a fit. “Yes,” he says. “We’ll do a comedy skit. You’re the housewife and I’m Superman.”

“I want to be Superman,” Jeff says.

“All right, all right.” Now Danny begins to give instructions for the skit, but halfway through Jeff interrupts and says, “This is boring. Let’s play baseball.”

“If you want to play something like
that
,” Danny says, “go play Capture the Flag.” He throws up his hands in disgust.

“There are girls playing,” Jeff says. “Well, if you won’t play, I’ll play baseball with my dad!”

“Good,” says Danny. “Leave me alone.”

Jeff runs off toward the house. Part of the way there, he turns once. “You’re weird,” he says.

Danny ignores him. He is halfway through his skit—playing both parts—when he is interrupted again. This time it is his father. “How are you, old man?” Allen asks. “Want to go to the Paper Palace?”

For a moment Danny’s eyes widen, and then he remembers how unhappy he is. “All right,” he says.

They take Carol’s station wagon, and drive to the Paper Palace, a huge pink cement structure in the middle of an old shopping center. The shopping center is near Danny’s old house.

“You’ve loved the Paper Palace—how long?” Allen asks. “I think you were four the first time I brought you here. You loved it. Remember what I bought you?”

“An origami set and a Richie Rich comic book,” Danny says. He rarely gets to the Paper Palace anymore; Carol shops in the more elegant mall near her house.

“When we lived here, all I wanted to do was to get into Carol and Nick’s neighborhood. A year ago today. Just think. All I could think about was getting a raise and buying a house. I might have bought the house next door to Carol and Nick’s. I wanted you to grow up in that area. All those trees. The fresh air. The great club.”

“I am anyhow, I guess,” Danny says.

“Don’t let it fool you,” Allen says. “It all seems so perfect. It all looks so perfect. But soon enough the paint chips, there are corners bitten by the dog, you start sweeping things under the bed. Believe me, under the beds, there’s as much dust in Nick and Carol’s house as there was in ours.”

“Carol has a maid,” Danny says.

“Just never trust cleanness. All the bad stuff—the really bad stuff—happens in clean houses, where everything’s tidy and nobody says anything more than good morning.”

“Our house wasn’t like that,” Danny says.

Allen looks at him. But now they are in the parking lot of the shopping center, and the colorful promise of the Paper Palace takes both of them over. They rush inside. Danny browses ritualistically at stationery and comic books, reads through the plot synopses in the soap opera magazines, scrupulously notes each misspelling of a character’s name. Allen lags behind him. They buy a copy of
Vogue
for Elaine. In front of them in line, a fat, balding man upsets a box of candy on the sales counter as he purchases a copy of
Playgirl
. His effort to avoid attention has backfired, and drawn the complicated looks of all around him. Danny avoids looking at Allen, but Allen’s eyes shoot straight to Danny, whose face has a pained, embarrassed expression on it. They do not mention the fat man as they walk out of the store.

Years ago, when Danny was only six or seven, he found a magazine. He was playing in the basement, dressing up in some old clothes of Allen’s which he had found in a cardboard box. The magazine was at the bottom of the box. When Elaine came down to check what Danny was up to, she found him sitting on a trunk, examining a series of pictures of young, dazed-looking men posed to simulate various acts of fornication. Elaine grabbed the magazine away from Danny and demanded to know where he’d gotten it. He told her that he had found it, and he pointed to the box.

Elaine looked again at the magazine, and then at the box. She thumbed through the pages, looking at the photographs. Then she put the magazine down on top of the box and wrapped her arms around herself.

“Danny,” she said, “for God’s sake, don’t lie about this. You don’t have to. You can tell me the truth. Are you sure that’s where you got this thing?”

“Swear to God and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye,” Danny said.

“Get upstairs,” said Elaine.

“Do you want a Velamint?” Allen asks Danny in the car, as they drive back from the Paper Palace. They are riding down a wide, dark road, lined with sycamores. Danny takes the small blue wafer from his father, without saying anything. He opens the window, sticks his hand out into the breeze.

“You know, Danny, I’ve been thinking,” Allen says. “I know this fantastic place, this school, in New Hampshire. It’s great—really innovative—and it’s specially for bright, motivated kids like you.”

Danny doesn’t answer. When Allen turns to look at him, he sees that his son is clutching the armrest so hard his knuckles have turned white, and biting his lip to hold back tears.

“Danny,” Allen says. “Danny, what’s wrong?”

“I know I’ve been a problem,” Danny says. “But I’ve decided to change. Today. I’ve decided to be happy. Please. I’ll make them want me to stay.”

Allen is alarmed by Danny’s panic. “Danny,” he says, “this school isn’t punishment. It’s a great place. You deserve to go there.”

“I played with Jeff today!” Danny says. His voice is at its highest register. He is staring at Allen, his face flushed, a look of pure pleading in his eyes.

Allen puts his hand over his mouth and winces. When they reach a stop sign, he turns to Danny and says, as emphatically as he can, “Danny, don’t worry, no one’s going to
make
you go anywhere. But, Danny, I don’t know if I
want
you to stay with Nick and Carol. After fifteen years in that world, I don’t know if I want my son to be hurt by it like I was.”

“I won’t become a stockbroker. I won’t sweep the dust under the bed. But, please, don’t send me away.”

“Danny, I thought you didn’t like it here,” Allen says.

“I’m not unfit.”

They are still at the stop sign. Behind them, a car is honking, urging them to move on. Danny’s eyes are brimming with tears.

Allen shakes his head, and reaches for his son.

They go to Carvel’s for ice cream. Ahead of them in line a flustered-looking woman buys cones for ten black children who stand in pairs, holding hands. Two of the girls are pulling violently at each other’s arms, while a boy whose spiral of soft-serve ice cream has fallen off his cone cries loudly, and demands reparations. Allen orders two chocolate cones with brown bonnets, and he and Danny sit down in chairs with tiny desks attached to them, like the chairs in Danny’s elementary school. There are red lines from tears on Danny’s face, but he doesn’t really cry—at least, he doesn’t make any of the crying noises, the heaves and stuttering wails. He picks off the chocolate coating of the brown bonnet and eats it in pieces before even touching the actual ice cream.

“I’m glad you haven’t lost your appetite,” Allen says.

Danny nods weakly, and continues to eat. The woman marches the ten children out the door, and into a small pink van. “Danny,” Allen says, “what can I say? What do you want me to say?”

Danny bites off the bottom of his cone. Half-melted ice cream plops onto the little desk. “Jesus Christ,” Allen mutters, and rubs his eyes.

When they get back to the house, Allen joins Nick and Carol under the umbrella on the patio. Elaine is still lying on the chaise, her eyes closed. Danny gets out of the car after his father, walks a circle around the pool, biting his thumbnail, and resumes his position on the diving board. Nearby, Greg and Jeff are again playing catch. “Hey, Danny, want to throw the ball?” Allen shouts. He does not hear Carol hiss her warning, “No!” But Danny neither does nor says anything.

“Danny!” Allen shouts again. “Can you hear me?”

Very slowly Danny hoists himself up, crawls off the diving board and walks back toward the house.

“Oh, Christ,” Carol says, taking off her sunglasses. “This is more than I can take.”

Now Belle appears at the kitchen door, waving a batter-caked spatula. “What happened?” she asks.

“The same story,” Carol says.

“I’ll see to him,” Allen says. He casts a parting glance at Elaine, and walks into the kitchen. “The same thing happened this morning,” Belle tells him as they walk toward Danny’s room.

But this time, the door is wide open, instead of slammed shut, and Danny is lying on his back on the bed, his face blank, his eyes tearless.

At first Belle thinks he is sick. “Honey, are you all right?” she asks, feeling his head. “He’s cool,” she tells Allen.

Allen sits down on the bed and arcs his arms over Danny’s stomach. “Danny, what’s wrong?” he asks.

Danny turns to look at his father, his face full of a pain too strong for a child to mimic.

“I can’t change,” he says. “I can’t change. I can’t change.”

In the kitchen, Belle is wrathful. She does not keep her voice down; she does not seem to care that Danny can hear every word she is saying. “I see red when I look at you people,” she tells her children. “In my day, people didn’t just abandon everything to gratify themselves. In my day, people didn’t abandon their children. You’re so selfish, all you think about is yourselves.”

“What do you want from me?” Allen answers. “What kind of father could I have been? I was living a lie.”

“See what I mean?” Belle says. “Selfish. You assume I’m talking about you. But I’m talking about all of you. And you, too, Carol.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mother, he’s not my son!” Carol says. “And he’s wrecking my sons’ lives. And my life.”

Elaine has been fingering her hair. But now she suddenly slams her hand against the table and lets out a little moan. “He really said that?” she says. “Oh, Christ, he really said that.”

“I’ve had it up to here with all of you,” Belle announces. “It’s unspeakable. I’ve heard enough.”

She turns from them all, as if she has seen enough as well. Allen and Elaine and Nick look down at the table, like ashamed children. But Carol gets up, and walks very deliberately to face her mother. “Now just one minute,” she says, her lips twitching with anger. “Just one minute. It’s easy for you to just stand there and rant and rave. But I have to live with it, day in and day out, I have to take care of him and put up with his crap. And I have to listen to my kids say, ‘What’s with that Danny? When’s he going away?’ Well, maybe I am selfish. I’ve worked hard to raise my kids well. And now, just because Elaine screws everything up for herself, suddenly I’m expected to bear the brunt of it, take all the punishment. And everything I’ve been working for is going down the tubes because she can’t take care of her own kid! Well, then, I will be selfish. I am selfish. I have had enough of this.”

“Now just a minute, Carol,” Allen says.

“You take him,” Carol says, turning around to confront him. “You take him home, or don’t say a word to me. There’s not one word you have a right to say to me.”

“Damn it!” Allen says. “Doesn’t anybody understand? I’m doing my best.”

“You’ve had two months,” Nick says.

Belle, her arms wrapped around her waist, begins to cry softly. Sitting at the table, Elaine cries as well, though more loudly, and with less decorum.

Then, with a small click, the door to Danny’s bedroom opens, and he walks into the kitchen. Allen and Nick stand up, nearly knocking their chairs over in the process. “Danny!” Carol says. Her voice edges on panic. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you,” Danny says.

Elaine lifts her head from the table. “Danny,” she says. “Danny, I—” She moves her lips, struggling to form words. But nothing comes out. Danny looks down at her, his eyes full of a frightening, adult pity. Then he turns away and walks outside.

Everyone jumps up at once to follow him. But Allen holds up his hand. “I’ll go,” he says. He scrambles out the door, and after Danny, who is marching past the swimming pool, toward the patch of woods where he likes to play. When he gets there, he stops and waits, his back to his father.

“Danny,” Allen says, coming up behind him. “You heard everything. I don’t know what to say. I wish I did.”

Danny has his arms crossed tightly over his chest. “I’ve thought about it,” he says. “I’ve decided.”

“What?” Allen says.