The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  “Next time we’ll crank up the tempo and start on open kicks,” she says. “By the end of the month we’ll have a nice little routine.”

  I’m humming as I go back over to my stuff and begin to unbuckle my shoes. “We all go down to Esmerelda’s for the five-dollar margaritas after class,” Isabel says. “Want to come?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Everybody?”

  “Well, everybody except Lucas. He’s a Southern Baptist preacher and they’d have his head on a platter if they even knew he came here to dance, much less drink. And the instructors don’t come. Anatoly doesn’t think they should fraternize with the students. You know, got to keep their distance and all that. But the rest of us, sure.”

  “I’m in,” I say, and we all change shoes and step out into the night. I love this time of year, when you know fall is coming. Jane’s lover has pushed her way out from the couch to join us and to my surprise Steve and Pamela are both tagging along too.

  “What’s your favorite dance?” I ask Harry, who’s beside me.

  “Tango,” he says, and to prove it he does a big jerky promenade down the sidewalk in front of the grocery.

  “Bye, Lucas,” Isabel calls out, and the preacher waves before climbing into his sagging gray car. “He’s a good person,” she says. “I don’t know what sort of God would try to make a man ashamed to dance.”

  Esmerelda’s is the kind of strip-center Mexican where they have sombreros and silver-framed mirrors on the wall and the chips and salsa on the table before you halfway sit down. “How long did you say you’ve been dancing?” Isabel asks me, as we wait to be seated.

  “Six weeks maybe. No, more like eight.”

  “So was it a shock when the price went up?”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Yeah,” she says with a giggle, interpreting the eye roll exactly as I hoped she would. “Here’s the thing. Ballroom is cocaine and Anatoly knows it. He gives it to you free at first, then fairly cheap, and once he knows they have you completely hooked, that’s when the price begins to climb.”

  “If my husband were here, he’d say we’re all paying good money just to be flattered.”

  Isabel snorts. Not a play snort but an actual honk, like she’s blown her nose. “Flattered?” she says. “Maybe the whales are flattered. The rest of us are paying good money—rent money, car payment money, or at least Time Warner Cable bill money—just so we can fail at something.”

  Before I can ask her what she means by that a voice at my shoulder says, “That’s a gorgeous ring.”

  Pamela has come out of nowhere to stand on the other side of me and has apparently managed to appraise my diamond ring at a glance. I don’t know why I didn’t take it off before I came to class.

  “It’s a family heirloom,” I blurt out. “My mother’s.”

  Why did I go and say that? I’m a terrible liar. I never can manage to keep the details straight. Now I’ve got to remember to pretend my mother is dead. Isabel makes a little tsk-tsk sound of consolation but Pamela isn’t fooled in the least, and why should she be? One trophy wife can spot another at a hundred paces.

  The server gestures that she’s finally pushed together enough two-tops to make a table for eight, and we all start to file toward the back of the restaurant.

  “I’m grubby,” I say. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “You always have to wash your hands thoroughly after group,” says Pamela. I’m not sure how she knows this, since apparently she’s never done group. “The women scare the men so bad their hands sweat. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  She leads me down a dark-paneled wall to the little ladies’ room, where we take turns rinsing our palms over the bright yellow and blue ceramic sink.

  “You dance with Nik, right?” she says, looking at her reflection in the mirror as she talks.

  “Right,” I say. She already knew this. “My lesson is right after yours on Thursday. He’s great.”

  She cuts off the water with her elbow and wipes her hands. “Yeah, he is,” she says. “But don’t get too attached.”

  I pull down a paper towel. “Why would I get attached?”

  “You’re single, right?”

  My mind flashes back to Isabel and her BFE. “Yeah, but come on. He’s a baby. His bio says twenty-four. It’s a little sick that we’re even dancing with him, don’t you think?”

  She doesn’t answer. Just uses her forearms to open the door without touching the knob, and we walk back to the table.

  When we get there, only two open seats are left—on either side of Dr. Boob.

  "I MAY AS WELL not have been there,” I’m telling Elyse an hour later on the phone. “First he flirts with the Russian Internet bride and then some poor little mess in angora who’s the studio gossip, and then he moves on to this Silver dancer who, get this, orders chicken tortilla soup without the chicken or the tortillas, and he finishes up by hitting on a pair of lesbians. And all he says to me all night is that I rushed the rock step.”

  “Do you even like this guy?”

  “God, no. Can you imagine dating a plastic surgeon who specializes in breasts? It would be the lowest circle of hell.”

  “Then why does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t. I don’t even know how we got off on this doctor guy when I was calling to tell you that I had a good time. I’m going back for tango tomorrow.”

  “We got off on him because every man you’ve ever met has automatically fallen in love with you at first sight and for some reason this guy didn’t. Of course it bugs you.”

  I walk off the deck and toward the back lawn with the phone pressed to my ear. The soil in the garden is soft and loamy, causing my heels to sink in like little golf tees, and with the next step I stumble, making a noise loud enough that all the way from Arizona Elyse asks me what’s wrong.

  “Remember how we always used to say that when we got old we were going to move to Scotland?”

  “Sure,” says Elyse. “We were going to get a job as caddies and wear sensible tweeds and stomp around in the mist.”

  “How old did you think we’d be when we were wearing those sensible tweeds?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe seventy? Eighty?”

  “Exactly. We had a plan for when we were young and we had a plan for when we were old, but we forgot to make a plan for all those years in between. So what’s a woman supposed to do between the ages of fifty and seventy? There’s at least twenty years in life when you’re not young and you’re not old and there’s absolutely no plan.”

  “We’ve sailed into uncharted territory,” Elyse says. Her voice is light, breathy, almost on the edge of a laugh. Maybe she’s agreeing with me or maybe she’s only pretending to agree with me to humor me out of my mood. I look down at the rosebushes. A few buds are still intact and I give one a yank. I think it’s one of the Moonstones, white with a pink center, but it’s hard to see colors in the darkness so it might be a First Kiss or a Mermaid. I should scavenge whatever blooms are left for Carolina. She’d probably like them. She likes everything.

  I ordered the rosebushes from catalogs when we first moved here, more romanced by the sounds of the names than by any thought of how the colors would look together or what would thrive in this crumbly clay soil. I don’t particularly like roses themselves, or even the way they smell, but I do love their names, which sound like small promises. The garden came together so well that they put our house on the cover of Charlotte Fine Living magazine with me pictured in the foreground, sitting on a white silk couch that the photographer and his assistant had carried off the back of a truck and placed in the middle of the flowers. “She chose her roses by their names” was the first line of the article, a statement that makes me sound dreamy and a little bit daft, but everyone agreed that the picture of me sitting on that white couch in a white dress, gazing into the center of a Moonstone, was proof that our garde
n—that our very marital existence—was a great success.

  “Kelly?” Elyse’s voice is flickering. I must have walked too far from the house. “Did you say something? You’re breaking up.”

  “When it comes to men, I’m over,” I tell Elyse. “I’m like a garden at the end of a season.”

  “Some weird stuff has come out of your mouth lately but that’s the craziest thing you’ve said yet. You’re all about men and you always have been. More than anybody I know. That doesn’t just end with the snap of a finger.”

  “But what happens if you’re sexual and you don’t have anybody to be sexual with? I’ll be like that tree that falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it so it doesn’t make a sound.”

  “I always thought that tree made a sound.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “You’re the one who brought it up.”

  “It was an illustration, Elyse. A metaphor. Men don’t see me anymore and that bothers me, even if they’re crappy men I never would have wanted in the first place. It’s one thing to face the end of sex and it’s a whole other thing to face the end of the possibility of sex. I think I need therapy. Or drugs. Do you know what I really need, in all seriousness? I need to meditate.”

  Elyse laughs. “You just need to get laid.” Getting laid is Elyse’s remedy for everything. If you told her you’d gone deaf in one ear or wrecked your car, she’d tell you that you just needed to get laid.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ELYSE AND I met at cheerleading tryouts, the summer before ninth grade, and I liked her before I even knew her name. My childhood had been a series of lessons—piano and painting and horseback riding and finally gymnastics. I wasn’t particularly good at any of them, but after three years on the balance beam I knew I could handle any namby-pamby routines that a small-town high school cheerleading squad would put together. I was rock solid on a front flip. Pretty good for a back one. And I didn’t mind being on the top of the pyramid just as long as I had somebody strong below me. Just as long as I knew that the person designated to catch me when I fell out of formation would really be there.

  Elyse was strong. Anyone could tell that at a glance. She’s always seemed at home in her body, owning it in a way few young girls do. When I asked her “Can you catch me?” she said “Ab-so-lute-ly,” slowly extending all the syllables in that way that I would later learn meant that she was annoyed by the question. But I scrambled to the top of her shoulders and when that shaky moment came for me to release her hands and stand, it was like we’d been practicing together since birth. I dropped and she caught me, so effortlessly that the judges wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. They made us do it again, over and over, until it was time to break for lunch.

  “If you ever want to drop, I’ll catch you,” I told her, even though I wasn’t totally sure I could do it. It seemed like the right thing to offer, but she had just tossed back her hair and said, “I don’t drop.”

  When the two weeks of tryouts ended, they not only picked me and Elyse for the varsity squad—making varsity was practically unheard-of for ninth graders—but they put us in the middle of the formation. We were together so much that the older girls called us “the little sisters.” Come to think of it, maybe Elyse and I became such fast friends because we were both only children, an unusual condition for that place and time, but whenever the other girls would call us sisters, Elyse would just look at me and wrinkle her nose. Based on what we had observed from our friends who had siblings, we sure didn’t want to be compared to sisters. We liked each other.

  The first football game of the season was in August. We were sweltering in our woolen turtleneck sweaters with the big blue Bs on the front, but as I stood there in the gravel outside the stadium, I knew I was incredibly lucky. High school was going to crack right open for me, crack like an egg. When we all lined up to make a tunnel, I stood opposite Elyse and we raised our arms and clasped hands. It was the traditional way our team took the field. The pep band would begin to play and the football players would duck and run beneath the tunnel of the cheerleaders’ raised arms, and just as we were standing there waiting for the music to begin, one of the players looked at me and mouthed the words “pretty girl.”

  Pretty girl, I thought. That’s why I’m here. I didn’t make the squad because of my front flip, polished though it was. It was more important that I looked the part, and sometime during that last empty summer before high school I had figured out the formula: straight blond hair streaked even blonder through a combination of peroxide, lemon juice, and Sun-In, a swirl of Heaven Sent perfume, short skirts, long T-shirts, and little pots of Yardley makeup. This was what had really earned me my place in the tunnel.

  But at the time it didn’t matter why I was chosen, just as long as I was. As I turned toward Elyse and leaned my weight into hers, I tried to figure out what I was feeling and came up with the word “thrilled.” My mother always described emotion in a collective sense: “We are delighted,” she’d announce, or “This isn’t exactly what we had hoped for, is it?” Elyse used to laugh and say, “Why does your mother use the royal ‘We’—does she think she’s Queen Victoria?” It may have sounded grandiose, but it actually, I eventually realized, was my mother’s way of informing me that every event has a corresponding official emotion: joy for weddings, sorrow for funerals, modesty for compliments, fear for anything new. Whenever I would find myself in an unexpected situation I would unconsciously spin the Rolodex of adjectives in my mind, looking for the one she would deem the most appropriate. And if it’s the first Friday night of the football season and you’re wearing a varsity sweater and linking hands with your best friend as the football team runs through the tunnel of your arms and one of those players notices you—then what you’re feeling is “thrilled.” That must be it. What other word could there possibly be?

  THE FOOTBALL PLAYER WHO'D mouthed the words “pretty girl” to me was named Kevin Pressley, and he eventually did ask me out. The best part was that he had an identical twin brother who decided it would be convenient if he liked Elyse, so we could all double. I still consider this the kinkiest thing I’ve ever done.

  Friday nights were for games, so on Saturday the four of us would go to the drive-in, a broken-down sandpit of a place where they showed vintage films. That was where Elyse and I first learned to love old movies. We loved the fact that the women in them were so beautiful, tragic in ways that we would never be, loved the fact that the men all wore double-breasted suits and knew how to kiss, and smoke, and—come to think of it—dance. We sat with a couple in the front seat and a couple in the back and we would watch for a while and then—just when the plot was getting interesting—the guys would begin to do the things that guys do, and at some point, Elyse would make this noise. That’s how I learned what kind of noise you’re supposed to make. That you don’t do it too soon and you don’t do it too big and it’s not a matter of thrashing around and screaming. I was clever enough to realize that I shouldn’t sound exactly like her, so I came up with a response that was a little higher and breathier. Something that I think of as my Marilyn Monroe, in contrast to hers, which I have always suspected was more of an Elizabeth Taylor.

  After the first few Saturday nights at the drive-in, we had the protocol figured out. I would make my noise first. It seemed selfish to have everyone waiting on me when Elyse was really the one setting the pace, and this is undoubtedly how the myth was born that I’m an easier come than she is. Because the boys, the poor boys, there was never even a hint or a suggestion that anyone was supposed to do anything for them and maybe that’s why they were always jumping out of the car and running off to the snack bar. God knows where they really went or what they really did, but while they were gone, Elyse would climb over into the front seat and we would watch the end of the movie. I would catch her up on the story, since I’d never fully stopped watching, and she never asked how I knew these things, just as I never ask
ed her how she knew all the mysterious things she seemed to know. We would slump against each other, lost in the glamour of the black-and-white story, and at some point she would say, “Do you think there’s something wrong with me? I don’t know why I’m such a slow come.”

  My silence on the subject was cruel. It would have derailed anyone other than Elyse, who was and is the most confident person I have ever known. “I don’t know why I’m such a slow come,” she would say, but she never said this with any particular regret and I suppose I should have learned something, even back then, from her cheerful selfishness and how it never seemed to bother the boys. Not Kevin nor Keith, or whichever one she was with. My memory is fuzzy on this point and besides, I’ve always suspected that sometimes they switched us, both because they liked doing that creepy twin thing and because of a natural desire to find a more equitable distribution of the workload. It seems unfair to think that week after week they could come into the same drive-in and find themselves cast into such different movies—one of them in an Italian Western, climbing over endless miles of sand and rock, without hope, without water, embroiled in an epic quest for Elyse’s elusive orgasm, while the other one, by chance, got the science fiction that was my sexuality, got a woman who only required a couple of clicks to teleport her there.

  ALL WOMEN HAVE THEIR secrets, I guess, and this is mine. Through the years that would follow, whenever I look down to see the heads or hands of men between my legs or put my palms on the sides of their hips and look up into their faces, with those awful pained expressions they always get, I feel guilty. I want to tell them not to bother to hold back. They’re trying so hard and wasting so much time and it’s not their fault, really, it’s just something that failed to grow in me. A therapist once called it an inability to relax, but it’s more, I think, a reluctance to be greedy, to ask someone who is already trying so hard to try even harder, to inform a man who is already waiting that he must wait a little more. To tell him, in effect, that it doesn’t matter if his jaw is aching or his hand has gone numb or his lower back is beginning to spasm, that no, it doesn’t matter at all, he must keep going anyway. In those moments it’s so easy to . . .