House of Dance (6 page)

H
E ASKED ME TO
walk across the floor, just a regular walk; I did. He said to walk backward, and because he asked me to, I did, self-conscious in tall shoes. Do you know how when someone is looking at you and very exclusively at you, you feel put together wrong? That, right then, was me.

Max was—best guess—early thirties. He wore his hair short and slicked back, and up the long pole of one of his forearms were little twines of leather. His jeans were dragging-on-the-floor black jeans. His shoes poked out
from his jeans. “Chin up, back straight, “Max told me, and then: “Put your heart toward my heart. Yes. Right. Now hold this frame and dance.”

He stepped forward, and I slid back. He stepped to the side and took me with him. He stepped back and I stepped forward, and then we did it again. “The waltz,” he said, as if he’d just introduced me to his aunt. “And the count is three-quarter time.” I could feel the muscles of his arms beneath his shirt. They were Olympic-caliber muscles.

It was three fifteen in the afternoon, and besides me and Max and a wedding couple there were Eleanor and Peter, who was tall with narrow hips. She was leaning her forehead lightly against his, an odd, nervous look on her face. “Turn the music off,” I heard her say after she’d tried several moves, none of which had made her happy. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Peter said something about the bend in
her knee. Eleanor said she was feeling off-balance. The music kept playing, and they started again. They wound their way close, and I stepped back.

“Keep your focus on your own lesson,” Max said. I blushed, and we box stepped and made yet another round of boxes. Max said I’d need about a pound of attitude. He said I’d have to come to think of music as my skin. But first, he said, there is posture and spine. There are the basic fundamentals, and we’d spend our time on that. I thought about Granddad down the street, maybe asleep. I thought about Leisha, and Nick, and Rocco, and my mom. I thought a lot about Mom.

We boxed again and then more, long enough for Max finally to take what he called my measure. There were little crumbs of green in his eyes, though his eyes were mostly dark, and he stood so straight, you’d have thought he carried some coin upon his head. Rubbing the bottom of his chin, he shook his
head thoughtfully. Then he framed me up again with his arms, and I remembered a doll I had on a shelf at home, propped up in a metal wire stand. You can’t actually look at someone who is standing so close, even if you want to, even though you know, when you tell Leisha about it whenever you tell Leisha about it, that she’ll ask you everything.

Now Eleanor and Peter were splashing against each other like buckets of paint; something he must have said had turned her
can’t
into a
can
. And now through the door that opened to the roof came Marissa, a puff of cigarette smoke trailing behind her. If she recognized me from two hours before, she didn’t act as if she did, and now she cut across the floor and disappeared, and then I heard Max was counting. “One TWO three and one TWO three and one,” he was saying, and I was trying to keep up, and just when I thought that maybe I could get the hang of that one step, he said that it was
time to test my rumba.

“My rumba?” I said, wiping the sweat off my forehead with a gooey palm, and he said yes, the rumba, and he started counting, not with numbers but with words,
slow quickquickslow
,
quickquickslow
, adding a
quicker
after
slow
before he stepped forward and I stepped back, and he stepped to the side and I went with him, and then he stepped back and I stepped forward and tried to remember whatever I’d just read.

“Think of weather,” he said, “and geography,” fitting one hand to the base of my neck and one onto my shoulder, to release me, he said, from myself. He bent down and wedged out my feet until they were pointing away from each other. “Compass needles,” he said. “Think of that.” He said to try to keep my torso still so that I could work the hips, the knees, the feet. “Count with me, Rosie. Slow quickquickslow, quickquick—”

“—slow,” I said.

“Quickquick—”

I felt like a two-year-old. It was so much harder than I’d thought it would be. I’d been crazy, absolutely, to think I could learn to dance. I pulled back from him and caught my breath. “No one ever said,” I said, “that dancing was so tough.”

“No one’s an instant dancer,” he said.

“I just thought—”

“You’re not supposed to think. You are supposed to dance. Think of yourself as a rag doll for now. Let me see what you can do.” Max went to the sound booth to change the song. He returned and stood before me, still. Then, to the music that had started to play, he led me through a dance. “Show me your split,” he said, and I did the lousiest one. “Put your arm across my shoulder here, and let me lift you as I spin.” I felt my hair get hot and loose with curls, my waistband pull. I felt myself being carried across the floor. We were stopping; we were starting; we were spinning,
stepping, stopping. We were small steps and tight steps and scallops and lines, and Max was thinking, and as he thought, the green parts of his eyes got bright. “All right,” he said. “There’s talent here. Definitely something to work with.”

“I have to get really good really fast,” I said.

“With dancing there’s no rushing.”

“I know,” I said, and felt my face get hot. “But this has to do with my grandfather.” We were walking down the hall now, my arm linked with his. There was a gorgeous girl my age out on the couch lobby, fixing her shoes, waiting for him to call her name. “It’s a long story,” I said, feeling weird again about my shoes. “But I can tell you next time.”

“You’ll have to practice when you’re not here,” he said. “And you’ll have to take a lot of lessons.”

“I will do both,” I said.

“Dancing is expensive.”

“I have money.”

“Check the schedule with Marissa then,” he said. “Sometimes the evenings are best.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
started out hot and got much hotter. It began with the sound of crows and the buzz of a juicy housefly that I’d probably let in through the back door by mistake when I was inviting fireflies. Mom was home but not up, and I knew without getting out of my bed how she was lying in hers, her face toward the two old windows she’d have propped up with wide sticks. She’d told me once when I was little that she liked to smell the sky. Not the air but the sky; there was a difference, she said. The sky was
what pushed down on us, and the air was what rose high. Sky had the smell of stars in it. Sky had the smell of the moon. I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that I’ve ever smelled the sky, even in spite of Nick Burkeman and even in spite of my mother.

Except for the crows and the fly, all was quiet. I lay in my bed on my back with my arms pretzeled behind my head, thinking about rumba and box steps, about Max and silver shoes, wishing my mother would push open my door, push her head through, say something, one thing that would make me feel safe again, that would make me trust her with my secret. How have you been? I wanted her to ask me. How’s Granddad? I waited. I waited. Granddad has a nurse named Teresa, I would have told her, except that now she’d made me wait too long. Granddad’s been playing Sammy Davis Jr. songs. Granddad’s been talking about Grandmom. Granddad hardly eats, he’s hardly thirsty. I’ve started
dancing. I wanted to be asked what now I would not tell, because she wasn’t up and she still had not gotten up, and I had already found out for sure that I was plenty old to take care of myself. I didn’t need my mother. I just wanted her to come and find out about me, ask me for her sandals back, notice how I was changing. I wanted her to look and see me.

But she wouldn’t and she didn’t, and it got to be stupid, lying and waiting, so I started doing morning things. Took a shower. Brushed my teeth. Pumped on my mascara. Put my wet hair up in a plastic claw and tied on my sneakers. I was going straight to Sweet Loaves for breakfast, I’d decided. I had money to spend, and I loved those raisins fresh.

“Rosie?” I heard my name when I was halfway down the steps, coming from the kitchen, not the bedroom. She must have sneaked down while I was primping.

“What?” I stayed just where I was, took no step farther.

“Could you come here, Rosie? For a minute?”

“What for?”

“Please, Rosie. Don’t make me yell. You know how I hate that.”

I came down each step the way an old turtle would, scraping the bottoms of my sneakers against the navy-blue nubs of the treads and risers. Mom didn’t tell me to hurry up, and I knew she wouldn’t; she was, by virtue of her own vanishing act, losing her right to order me around. Finally I was down, and where I stood was navy blue, and where she stood was marigold colored. She was wearing her bunny rabbit robe, and her hair was ponytail high. In her hands she held a tea mug.

“I wanted to talk with you,” she said.

“What for?” I asked, standing right where I was.

“Could you sit with me for a while?”

“Granddad’s expecting me.”

“This won’t take long.”

I didn’t budge. “I can hear you from here.”

“Rosie.”

“I’m not planning on changing my mind about Mr. Paul, if that’s what you’re hoping,” I said, coming a little, most reluctantly closer, leaning my hips against the kitchen opening.

“You don’t have to like him, Rosie. But you do have to be polite.”

“I don’t see why.”

“I want him to feel welcome here. I want—”

“He’s married, Mom.”

“I know what he is.” Suddenly she looked minuscule sitting at the table with her fuzzy rabbit on. She’d pulled her knees up to her chin, and she still had both hands on the mug, and she was looking out the window, toward the stiff black socks on Mrs. Robertson’s line, all marching in a row to nowhere. I wasn’t going to talk about Mr. Paul. I decided right then that I wasn’t.

“Did you know Granddad has a nurse?” I said.

“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about.”

“You knew?”

“Of course I knew, Rosie. I talk with Granddad’s caseworker every day.”

I stared at her so hard that she must have felt me looking through her, until finally she turned and stared back at me. “I thought you were mad at Granddad,” I said, tying my arms up into such a big knot that nothing she could say next could hurt me, or surprise me, or throw me off my balance.

“That doesn’t mean that I don’t love him.”

“If you loved him, you’d go and visit.”

“I will.”

“Yeah? When?”

“When I can, Rosie. When I can. You have to trust me.”

“The nurse’s name is Teresa,” I said. “And she has a tattoo for a bracelet.”

“Teresa has had to make a few changes at Granddad’s house,” my mother said, “which is what I wanted to tell you. Wanted you to know, Rosie, before you got there.”

I felt my heart throwing itself around in my chest. I felt my tongue get all dry and sticky. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” My voice was louder than my mother liked, but I couldn’t keep it gentle.

“She’s just making things easier on him, Rosie, is all.”

“Like what things easier?”

“Like he needs a wheelchair—not all the time but sometimes. He needs his life all on one floor. He’s getting weaker, honey. Teresa is there to help. She’ll be there now around the clock, sleeping in an upstairs room.”

My mother turned and looked back out the window. Kept her chin on the table of her knees and her hands wrapped tight around her mug, and I could feel that she loved Granddad, I could feel that it was true, but
I was also the kind of frightened that came out as anger, the kind of frightened that blamed her.

“Rosie, I’m sorry,” my mother was saying, but I couldn’t hear her anymore; I wouldn’t. “Rosie—” but I was already running, flying, through the dining room, through the living room, through the front door. My sneakers slapped the sidewalk and the road and the turn in the road and made tunnel echoes, then, under the railroad tracks, made sneaker sounds beneath the House of Dance. I ran past every single store without stopping. I ran, and I heard the crows flapping behind me. I ran, and I was faster than any train. I ran, and I was calling out his name—
Granddad! Granddad!
—long before I was close enough for him to know that his true one granddaughter was on her way.

T
ERESA MET ME
at Granddad’s side door, her tattooed wrist draped with a towel, her hair back and high in a clip. “Rosie,” she said, blowing her Spanish straight through my name. “Rosie.” Saying it twice, as if she were finishing my mother’s sentence.

I was out of breath and sweaty. The crows were still so close that I felt their wing wind, the flying electric charges of all their quarreling, and my lungs were chewed up, my voice raspy. “Where is he?” I spat out, not meaning to spit, not really.

“Waiting for you,” Teresa said. “Like always. But Rosie, listen to me, he—” I didn’t give her time to finish, just motored forward on my hissy sneakers, past her, through the kitchen and around the corner, into the room of books and brown, leaving the squawking crows behind. The couch was gone. A La-Z-Boy too. In their place were a bed and a wheelchair in a little half circle, facing the window. Half the bed was propped up, to make a chair. Thin silver railings ran along the sides. Granddad was wearing his regular khakis and a white, short-sleeved shirt that had no collar and no buttons. He had no blanket, was hooked to no machines, but he sat behind the silver railings, a magazine low in his lap. The place smelled like chemical lemons. The sun was smashed against the window glass, pressing noisily through.

“Just the person I was looking for,” Granddad said when he saw me, folding a page down in his magazine and setting the
whole thing aside. Slowly. “Vietnam and Cambodia along the Mekong River.”

I looked around the room, and there was Riot. There was the basket of In Trusts, the basket of D.L., no basket of Toss. On the floor was the Sansui, and beside that the record stash. Not everything had changed. A hot slick of sweat took the short road from the indent of my neck to the indent of my navel, leaving a stripe of dark on my lavender T-shirt. Teresa was standing against the far wall. I lifted my eyes, at last, to Granddad’s.

“Hello,” he said, because I hadn’t.

“Hello,” I said.

“Good to see you,” he said. “Rosie.” Putting my name out into the silence.

I didn’t answer. I heard Teresa, who must have gone back into the kitchen. Teresa picking up dishes, rinsing things. The sound of spraying water. The tinkle of glass against glass. Teresa now humming.

“Cat must have your tongue,” Granddad said.

“Cat’s got her own tongue,” I mumbled, looking now at Riot, who had begun to give herself a fancy spa treatment. Her two back legs were stuck out at a ninety-degree angle. Her two front paws dabbed this way and that, maintaining her balance. “Where did you get Riot, anyway?” I asked finally, for the sake of saying something.

“Your mom gave her to me,” he said, “when your grandmother passed. She was the runt of a litter. Needed some taking care of.”

“Mom showed up with a cat one day?”

“Cat in a basket,” he said. “If I remember. Your mother was pregnant with you at the time, so I guess that means you showed up too. She said, ‘We’ll both have our things now to be taking care of.’ She said taking care was a cure, I remember.” His eyes got misty at the end of his tale.

“Makes Riot a pretty old cat,” I said, to distract him.

Riot went on bathing, oblivious. We watched her antics as if she were some kind of show, I standing with my arms tied tightly across my chest, Granddad in his metal bed, his face so pale in the shaft of sun that had worked its way inside. Teresa had turned the water off. There was stillness now on her side of the wall. Stillness everywhere.

“You got a new bed,” I said.

“Feel like a Jetson,” he said.

“It shines,” I told him, because who knows what a Jetson is, “when the sun hits it.”

“Yes, and there’s quite a bit of sun.”

“Next time I’m bringing shades,” I said.

“I’m not going to stop you.” Granddad said that part with a smile, and that felt good—warm in the way that warm is good—and suddenly that was all I wanted: to make my granddad happy again, to stop feeling so frightened and angry about his getting sicker.
Taking care is a cure, my mother had said. Back when she was smart.

“I see the old Sansui hasn’t been budged,” I said.

“After all you did to fix it up, Teresa and I weren’t going to risk it.”

“You in the mood for music?”

“Music would be fine.”

“Anything in particular?”

“How about my old friend Ella?” He waved his hand toward the stack of records. I crossed the floor and started sorting.

“She have a last name?” I asked.

“Fitzgerald,” he said.

“A rapper, right?” I asked him. I turned and saw him shake his head.

“She came from nothing to become something,” he said. “A schoolgirl dreaming of becoming a dancer who became a singer almost by accident. Aideen adored her. I’d come home from the refinery, and I’d find her here, in this room, the furniture all
shoved aside and Fitzgerald on the radio, live from Birdland or the Apollo or someplace. Aideen would be dancing with the moon. Whole moon or quarter. Never mattered. She’d have the music dialed up so loud that she wouldn’t have heard me come in. I’d stand where Teresa is standing, watching.”

Teresa, I remembered, and turned and saw that some runaway hair had fallen down into her face. She must have slipped back into the room like a shadow, and she was doing nothing but standing there, out of sight, almost. “Didn’t you want to dance too?” I asked Granddad.

“Watching was sweeter.”

“Didn’t she mind being spied upon?”

“Don’t think she did.” He got a funny look on his face, the kind that Mom used to get when a new sprout of basil would push out of the glass or the fireflies would light up a room.

“What kind of dancer was she?”

“Nothing was more sensational than Aideen when she was dancing,” he said. I tried to picture this, but it was hard. I pictured the candy-haired dancer on skyscraper heels instead. Pictured a peony on a wrist. Pictured a man, young, and a woman, young, but no matter how hard I strained to imagine, I couldn’t make the man in my imagination look like Granddad, couldn’t imagine my grandmother from the old, fuzzy photographs.

Outside, two drivers were blowing their horns at each other and a train was sailing into the station. A conversation shuffled by. I waited. “Somewhere in there,” he finally said, looking toward the stacked records,” is the song ‘How High the Moon.’”

“I’m on it,” I told him, but it took me a while. It took me sifting through and sorting the faded album covers until I found not just Ella but the right Ella, the right track on the right piece of vinyl, though Granddad didn’t
mind, he said, listening to “Old Mother Hubbard” first, or “Flying Home” or “Back in Your Own Backyard.” He didn’t mind whatever picture of Ella I found on the covers either, the one with her looking up at someone past the camera, the one with her wearing a white feather hat, the one with some guy looking mesmerized in the background. Anything Ella was good by my granddad. Anything Ella that day.

Finally I found it—“How High the Moon”—pulled it from its cover, got the Sansui whirling, laid the record on, and put the needle down on the right track. Granddad closed his eyes to listen. Out of respect I closed mine, too. Ella was singing. She sang raspy and demanding, giving the song speed. She held some notes forever and chopped others into bits, turned syllables into a million words. She was hard to keep up with, my granddad’s Ella Fitzgerald, but still his eyes were closed, and he was smiling, and
Riot’s tail was going around; the little triangles of her ears were twitching. Then the needle came up, because the record was done, and I could hear the crows outside, as if they had been waiting around for me. I could look into Granddad’s face and know that he was sleeping. I listened for some sound from Teresa in the kitchen, but I heard nothing.

There are one hundred million different ways of feeling you’re alone, I once wrote in a paper for Mr. Marinari. There’s the alone of no one home but you. There’s the alone of losing friends. There’s the alone of not fitting in with others. There’s the alone of being unfathered. But then there’s also the alone of a summer day, just after noon, when there’s stillness all around and someone you love nearby, asleep. I sat where I was, didn’t budge one inch, and watched my granddad dreaming.

“What did you do today?” my mom asked me when I got home under the wing wind of
crows, when the sun was the only color in the sky, after I’d taken my lesson with Max, after I’d found no cool in the tunnel shadows. My sneakers had hissed, but in that hiss I heard the scat of Ella Fitzgerald. There was no sound of Mr. Paul, not coming from the kitchen, not coming from upstairs. My mom was home early, alone.

“Ella Fitzgerald,” I called to her, because her voice came from her bedroom, and her bedroom door was closed.

“Ella what?” she called back. She opened the door now, came out to the upstairs landing, and stood looking down at me, a river of navy-blue carpet between us. Her black hair was half up in a ponytail, half streaming messily down. She was wearing an old cotton dress, not overalls, as if she’d never been to work at all. Her face was puffy.

“Fitzgerald,” I answered, not moving up the stairs, but not moving out of sight either.

“The singer?”

“Yeah.”

A funny expression crossed her face. “He’s got the record player working?”

“I got the record player working.”

“Well,” she said after a pause, “you’re really something.”

I didn’t want her asking more. I didn’t want to have to explain about the bed with the guardrails, the chair with the wheels, the air with the smell of lemons, acids, bleach. I didn’t want to have to say how tired he was or tell her what Teresa had told me when I was leaving, how much sadder sadness sounds in Spanish. I didn’t want to admit that there might not be time for me to give Granddad the present I was planning. “You know what I learned today?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“That I kind of like Granddad’s music.”

“Well, that’s a good thing. I guess.”

“Of course it is.”

“Me and him, Mom. Me and him. We’re
family.” You could have confused my mom for a kid, I swear. She looked that small, that fragile.

“How is he?” she asked.

“He sleeps a lot,” I said.

“I was guessing he would.

“He doesn’t complain.”

“I’m glad for that.”

I had one foot on the bottom step by now, was waiting for my mother to come down so I could go up. But she sank to the step, put her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. I understood that something had shifted.

“It’s getting hot,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“Have you eaten?”

“I had stuff.” I had climbed a couple of steps up by now, closer to her. There were dark traces of mascara raccooned beneath each eye, a little bruise on the lip that she’d been chewing.

“We’ve got more than saltines and peanut
butter in this house,” she said. “I could make you something.”

“I’m okay, Mom. Really.”

“Just offering.”

“Tired,” I said. “Headed for bed.”

“Night, Rosie.”

“Night, Mom.” I slipped past her on the step and then, a few seconds after, came my shadow. I stepped through my bedroom door, closed it behind me, walked to the windows to find the moon. It was round on its way to getting rounder, Ella Fitzgerald style.

I threw open the windows to hear the crows in their trees and the next train coming. I pushed my head out to hear the
swish swish thrum
from the House of Dance, the music that was spilling through the windows there, fizzing up between downfalling star-dust, knocking hard at my heart. I remembered all of a sudden a time that felt like centuries before, when Dad had come up with one of his crazy Christmas schemes.
He’d started taking me to Miss Marie, the local seamstress, sometime just after Thanksgiving. He’d had her make me a dress of purple velvet with a broad white collar onto which she’d threaded hot pink flowers. He’d had her make me a purple hair band too. Then one day we took a snowy walk to Miss Marie’s, and everything was ready. I’d peeled off my everyday clothes, down to my undershirt and panties. I’d stood in the back of that shop with my hands high in the air while Miss Marie pulled the dress into place. I’d waited until she had zippered me up, and then she’d fixed my hair, and then she’d spun me around and called my dad’s name, and he came in to see.

“Do you like it?” he’d ask me.

I nodded.

“Do you think your mommy will?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ll wear it Christmas morning then,” he said, “when I give Mommy her present.”

I remember changing back into my regular clothes. I remember Miss Marie handing my father two long bags. One that was little and mine, with the velvet dress. One that was longer and wide and held inside my mother’s brand-new white wool coat. She’d wanted a coat so badly that winter. Miss Marie had made her one.

“It’s our secret,” Dad had said, and that was such a happiness. That was us, before.