P.S. Be Eleven (21 page)

I'm here
, I kept telling myself.
At the sixth-grade dance!
With my eyes temporarily blinded from the flashbulb, I moved toward the center where everyone was. The speakers crackled loud and scratchy while the Archies sang “Sugar, Sugar.” All I could see were pink and red hearts hanging from crepe-paper chains, clusters of girls and boys and a few kids dancing in the center, and Principal Myers manning the record player. I closed my eyes, then opened them, searching. I didn't have to search for long. Frieda and Lucy came running toward me. A chaperone said, “Young ladies! No running!”

“Delphine!”

“Your hair!” Lucy bounced my bangs. “You must have Cherokee blood,” she said of the straightness, when all I had was Big Ma's hot comb and Mrs.'s curling expertise. Only Lucy would say a thing like “Cherokee blood.” She couldn't stop fussing with my hair. “I love it!”

“I like yours too,” I said. “Nice dress, Frieda. Yours too, Lucy.”

“You know it.” Lucy twirled and modeled without shame. “It was the only one like this in the store. I made my mother buy it.”

“It could have been the last one,” Frieda teased. “Not the only one.”

“Well, I'm the only one at the dance wearing it,” Lucy said, taking a spin around and pretending to look for anyone wearing her dress. When she stopped spinning, she said, “So, Delphine . . . did you come with anyone?”

There was no sense spinning any straw. Lucy knew no one had asked me to the dance. I shrugged and said, “My father drove me.”
Pa
was a word I kept at home.

“You drove here?” Frieda asked. “John-Isaac walked me over.”

I offered to give her a ride back but she said her brother would be here looking for her.

“Did Michael bring you?” I asked Lucy.

Frieda's cheeks filled with warm colors. She put her hands over her mouth but laughed anyway. “Tell Delphine what happened!” Frieda said. “Tell her.”

Lucy laid the back of her hand against her forehead, flung her head back like an old-time Southern belle, and gasped. “Michael S. comes over and rings the bell,” she said. “My mom says, ‘Who's that boy ringing my bell?' I say, ‘It's my date, Michael S.' My mom says, ‘Date? Lucy Ray Raleigh, there's no dating going on under this roof. You're only eleven years old.'”

“All of that while he's waiting on the stoop,” Frieda said.

“I'll be twelve in three weeks,” Lucy said. “She didn't have to go make a federal case out of it.”

“How awful,” I said.

“You better believe it,” Lucy said. “It was awful. Embarrassing. Mortifying. You know how loud my mother talks.”

I said, “Simply mortifying, Lucy Ray Raleigh,” in her mother's loud voice. We all laughed. I missed how we used to be with each other. Joking, but underneath it, still friends. I felt like we were back. Really back to being friends.

“So she sent Michael away?” I asked.

Frieda laughed louder than Frieda usually laughs. The same chaperone wagged her finger at us. A fine bunch of young ladies, or as Mr. Mwila would say, “upperclasswomen,” we were. “Michael walked her, all right,” Frieda said between snorts.

“Yeah. And my mama walked with us.”

“In between them!” Frieda said. “So they couldn't hold hands.”

Lucy gave Frieda a playful shove. “We weren't going to hold hands.”

“You know you wanted to,” I teased.

“So what if I did, Miss Too Cute in her Happening Bangs.”

The three of us walked around the gym arm in arm, then ran over to the giant valentine and paid a quarter to take a picture together.

To my surprise and horror, Mr. Mwila had come to the sixth-grade dance. The last thing any of us wanted was to see our teacher dance or to know he was watching us dance.
When he entered the gymnasium, falling in with the music, bobbing his head slightly, I knew it couldn't be helped. We would have to watch him dance, and I just couldn't picture it. He caught me looking his way and called out, “Save me a dance, Miss Gaither.” I nodded and dragged Frieda and Lucy to the refreshments table at the other end of the gym.

We stood over the bowl of candy valentines. I looked into the bowl, searching for the perfect valentine to pick out, but Lucy caught me and said, “No, Delphine. Just close your eyes and pick one.” So we each did. Frieda's said “Be Mine.” Lucy's said, “Sweet Heart.” Mine said, “O U Kid.” No one knew what that one meant. We put them on our tongues.

“So your breath will smell like candy when you're dancing the slow dance.”

“Slow dance,” I said.

We “ewwed” and giggled.

Principal Myers put on a good record. The kind of record that makes a boy want to dance with a girl without feeling stupid. We inched up closer to the circle of dancers waiting, but not too close. Just close enough to join the dancing, and close enough to watch.

Michael S. walked over, I thought, to look for Lucy. But he walked over to Evelyn Alvarez. Instead of asking the way the boys were instructed during the sixth-grade assembly, Michael S. did this head thing. A jerk to the
dance floor and Evelyn walked away from Anthony B. and followed Michael S.

Lucy tried to act as though she was looking away, but she was watching them. And then she started chattering about another dress she almost bought and how that color wouldn't go right with her skin tone and the collar was too babyish with all of those bows but her mother really liked that dress. We chatterboxed with her but even though she said yeah in the right places, her eyes were filling up.

Then Anthony B., who had come to the dance with Evelyn and her brothers, headed straight for the punch bowl. We were so busy watching Anthony, no one noticed James T. had walked up to Frieda and asked her to dance, but Frieda said she'd dance the next dance with him. Lucy then pushed Frieda into James T. and they started dancing. All I could think was that was nice of Lucy.

I grabbed Lucy's hand and dragged her out to the center of the dance floor. I sang like Fern, “Lucy, Lucy goosey,” in time with the record playing. “Come on. Lucee, Lucee goosey.”

She wiped her face quickly and said, “You can't dance with me, Delphine.” And she was doing her Lucy-goosey dance. I started to copy her, then she started to laugh, maybe because my arms are so long and I do it a little different. A crowd of girls rushed over, some even leaving
their dance partners, and we took turns doing the Lucy goosey, each of us doing it our own way.

Principal Myers put on James Brown's song “There Was a Time,” and the girls moved back. Every boy forgot about the girls they wanted to dance with. They peeled themselves off the wall, away from the punch, cookies, and candy, and made it to the center of the dance floor. Whatever dance James Brown called out, the boys from all the sixth-grade classes threw down their Three Musketeers gloves to challenge one another. We watched them dance. The expressions on their faces said “Take that!” “Copy that!” “How ya like that?” as they did the splits, the camel walk, and the mashed potato. All those shoes sliding and scraping up the floor, leaving black shoe polish across the newly varnished floor.

We hollered for all the boys in our class. Anthony, Ant, Enrique, the Jameses, the Michaels, Upton, Willy. All of them. As much as I hated to admit it, Danny the K had the best camel walk of the boys, throwing his head side to side, crunching up his shoulder, sliding across the floor. I forgot how much I couldn't stand him and I cheered along with the six-three girls. Then right in the middle of the K's camel walk, Ellis Carter did a James Brown slide and split out in the center of the floor. Danny knew what was best and camel-walked out of Ellis's way. And when
Ellis rose up, his long legs made a clean triangle, then he snapped his legs together and spun one, two, three times, then did a mashed-potato slide off center stage.

The gym went crazy. We were screaming like Ellis was Jackie Jackson and his brothers rolled up into one. If the PTA were giving out a James Brown trophy, six-three would have won it easily, thanks to Ellis Carter and maybe Danny the K.

After all of that excitement, the principal cooled things down with a slow record—the first slow record of the dance. Boys wiped the sweat and cookie crumbs off their hands and went up to girls to ask them to dance.

Upton walked up to Frieda. “Frieda, may I have this dance?” he asked. She answered, “Yes, you may.” Then Michael S. walked over to Lucy and said, “Lucy, may I have this dance?” Lucy rolled her eyes and said, “No, you may not.” Then I pushed her into Michael S. and she cut me a glare. But she followed him onto the dance floor.

I watched them all dancing. All dancing in twos. They looked right. The same height for boy-girl dancing. Even the girls dancing in twos looked nice dancing together in their dresses. If Rukia had been allowed to come to the dance and she didn't have a partner, I would have danced with her even though I'm way taller and we would have looked way dumb.

Mr. Mwila walked between the dancers, tapping couples on the shoulder. I could hear him saying, “Decorum,” or
something like that. Then he looked my way.

I turned away only to face two short boys from class six-five.

“You go ask,” one said.

“No. You go.”

I felt like a giant. Too tall to look right with anyone. I turned again, wanting to get out of there.

Ellis Carter stood a few feet away from me. He had finished wiping his forehead and his hands with a handkerchief and slipped it into his pocket. He walked up to me.

“Delphine, may I have this dance?” He held out his hand.

I was supposed to say, “Yes, you may,” but I sort of nodded and took his hand and we walked out there where everyone danced in twos, each step out to the center in time to the dip of the music, like we were already dancing.

He smiled a little and so did I while we figured out how our hands were supposed to go. Ellis was taller than me. By a full inch. Finally we took one step together. Then another. And another. And another. A perfect box step. And in the middle of the fifth step the slow song faded away. I let go of his hand.

Then Principal Myers put on a fast record. And Mr. Mwila got everyone clapping their hands in rhythm.

Ellis began to clap and so did I.

Then Mr. Mwila called out to all of the PTA moms,
the chaperones, and the other teachers and they all surrounded him.

“This dance,” he said, “is from my native Zambia.”

Ellis and I looked at each other, mortified. But we still clapped.

“Here we go,” Mr. Mwila said. He shook his hips left, then right, while doing this marching step that ended in a hop or a kick. It was hard to tell. Next, the chaperones followed his movements. They were all doing the hop-kick at the same time. When they were all doing the march-and-hop, they formed a train, hands on shoulders, and did a choo-choo or conga around the gym.

“Dance, grade six!” Mr. Mwila shouted. “Dance!”

One by one, the kids caught on and joined the train. Ellis grabbed my hand and said, “Come on!” Before I had time to think about it, I placed my hands on Ellis's shoulders and I marched, kicked, and shook like they did. Somewhere on the gym floor, doing the dance from Zambia, I lost my red paper heart.

The pink envelope was sitting on my dresser when I got home. I didn't rush to open it, like I thought I would. Instead, I arranged my dress on a hanger and hung it on my doorknob so I could fall asleep looking at it. I took two sponge rollers and wound my bangs around them.

Then I took the envelope from my dresser, postmarked
Oakland, CA
. The handwriting was cursive and extra neat.
Neither the address nor the handwriting were Cecile's. I pried the pink envelope open carefully, not wanting to tear a thing, and pulled out the card. I didn't expect anything, but if I had, I would have expected he'd send me a funny valentine. But I wouldn't call his valentine card funny. Not at all.

Dear Delphine
,

I was in the kitchen making our after-school snack when the doorbell rang. I hurried into the parlor and pulled back the curtain. A white special-delivery jeep stood double-parked outside. I went to the front door, unbolted the top and bottom locks, and turned the knob. The door chain only allowed a few inches between the postman and me.

“Special delivery,” the postman said. “Sign here.”

Our neighborhood postman was probably used to being met with chains over cracked doors. He slid the clipboard and pen through the space. “Print, then sign,” he said.

I printed and signed my name and passed the clipboard and pen back to him. “You can leave it,” I said, and closed the door. Once he was back inside his jeep, I unlatched the chain, opened the door, and picked up the package. It was a white box. The kind they sell at the post office. It was square, like a kitchen floor tile, but bigger and two inches deep, like a cereal box. The right-hand corner of the box was decorated with a mess of stamps. Probably more than it needed. The words
WALTER REED HOSPITAL
and a Washington, DC, postmark in broken letters showed through faintly over the stamps. There was no return address or sender's name in the upper left-hand corner, the way a package or letter should be addressed. Just
To Miss Vonetta Gaither
with our address on Herkimer Street, Brooklyn, NY, in black ink, dead-center of the package. The handwriting wasn't a hundred percent straight, but it wasn't wavy.