Winning Chance

by Katherine Koller

  In haste he stowed the stool back inside the garage, stuffed his back pockets with garden gloves in one and his smallest trowel in the other, pulled on his hat, zipped on his jacket, fetched the tray of painted pansies, closed the trunk and the overhead door and, for the second time that day, crossed the street in heated-up confusion. His face burned red.

  The bunhead boarder whizzed by the other way. “Watch out, Romeo.”

  Charlie pushed open Donna’s gate. The mechanism needed tightening. In the bare backyard, freshly rototilled, in the last of the setting sun, Donna placed a jug of lemonade on a little patio table. Two glasses.

  But Charlie didn’t see that, nor the blooming marigolds, zinnias, asters, and cosmos in nursery packs all over the sidewalk. He didn’t even wait for Donna to turn around.

  “Why did you take my Jaguar?”

  “Rosie gave me the keys years ago.”

  In his stern managerial voice, Charlie said, “In case of fire.”

  Donna’s voice was quiet as she fingered a blue pansy in the tray he carried. “Yeah. I got it bad.”

  Charlie put down the flat of pansies. “Why didn’t you ask me for the car?” He never would have lent it to her anyway, and she must know that. “Or ask me to drive you to the greenhouse?” Even though the bus went right there.

  “To get your attention.”

  Charlie wondered how much Donna and Rosie had talked. Since Rosie passed, he had admonished himself for having spent all his free time with Sweetheart, restoring her from near-ruin when he acquired her at an incredible price twenty years ago. Yet Rosie never seemed to mind. They’d had no children, but Rosie had her groups, her friends, her activities, and he had work at the gas company and Sweetheart. Why had he picked that name? At Donna’s tentative smile, it hit him.

  “Spring fever,” he and Donna said at once, then laughed, young again, together.

  His face relaxed as he considered the expanse of soft soil to be planted. The trays of blooms. Donna, waiting. The sun lingering. The kitchen window, and the aroma of meatloaf in the oven. The lemonade.

  Charlie pulled out his worn gloves and his trusty trowel. “Let me give you a hand with these.”

  The Red Velvet Curtain

  At the next full moon circle of wives on the range road, Maura wished for it to be over, so she could drive home and walk up to the lookout with Karl. For a while now, Maura felt worse after seeing her friends than she did before she arrived. Everyone complained and they found less and less to laugh about. Even the name of the group, Moongirls, felt artificial, like a bad Halloween costume.

  As everyone rose to get dessert and coffee, she backed away.

  “I’m going now. I have to take a break from this. I love you all, you know that, but this is not working for me anymore and I don’t know why. Sorry.”

  The women protested, stepping on each other’s words like mewling kittens in a box. “What?”

  “You’ve never missed a meeting before.”

  “It’s only hormones!”

  “No more green apple cake?”

  “We need your apple cake.”

  “How will you know what’s going on?”

  Maura knew what she’d miss: rehashed divorces, dying parents, and the antics of distressed teenagers. Together, they’d endured miscarriages, mothering mistakes, and desert patches in their marriages. But Maura needed to spin away from all of it, the wheel of needs and responsibilities, free. Now, more than ever, she listened to her body, and her body wanted to move.

  Driving home with the moon as her sole friend, she wondered about the land it illuminated and, as she parked, how the porch light exposed her shrivelling pansies.

  Karl met her in the yard, waited while she watered the flowers, and walked with her across the dark pasture up the hill, the path they took together most nights, and where she’d been wandering every afternoon since their youngest started school. Her hand drifted away from Karl’s into her pocket. He loved the land, this land that came from her parents, who loved him and died content knowing that Maura and Karl would care for it. Karl absorbed the movements of animals in the dark, the smell of the grasses, the direction of wind, and promise of rain.

  “The land talks if you listen,” he said.

  So he’d noticed her restlessness, Maura thought.

  His arm went around her shoulder. Her eyes lifted to the stars. She resolved to keep the moon in her eyeshot every evening, every early morning, too. It might have something to tell her. It kept waking her up at night like a spotlight on stage, but when it did, it left her calmer. The moon settled her down. She had no one to talk to about this, not even the Moongirls, and no language to explain it.

  “The moon is watching me,” she said to herself on the way back.

  “She knows about change,” was all Karl said.

  As they approached the yard, Maura gazed at their old barn fitted with high church windows, her wedding present from Karl, her dance studio, her constant. She fitted her arm around his waist. As Karl opened the door, she bent to her pansies, perking up already, dark purple under the porchlight.

  The day that stripped the trees naked, rain and wind drove Maura to the bookstore in the city. Maura leafed through pages of a book about the river Nile. Travel, was that what she craved? At random, she read: “Only two things in this world are innately good: water and one’s mother.” Maura shelved the book. All she needed was that one line. Whatever she yearned, it wouldn’t ruin her as a mother. It would enhance, like water for pansies. It even validated her moon watching.

  Maura asked for books about life transitions. The young man pulled titles from the Women’s section.

  “What about this one? Taking Charge of Perimenopause.”

  Maura shook her head, smiling that this fellow, all of twenty, even knew what perimenopause was, but maybe everyone could see what she felt. A red velvet curtain rising in her.

  Next, the bookstore guy offered Men are Clams, Women are Crowbars. Again Maura shook her head. Karl was the same, predictable as breakfast, lunch, and dinner and Friday night sex. No, this strange turbulence erupted, volcanic and furious, inside her. She had time now, and so much energy, but nowhere to put it, and it demanded all of her, but—

  Thwack. Bookstore guy slapped a finale on the counter. Skinny Bitch.

  “I gave this one to my ex-girlfriend, but she brought it back,” the guy said.

  Maura ran for the door and stopped short at the poster on it. The door blew open for a fresh-faced young woman, and Maura held it for her, took a picture of the poster with her phone, and hurried out.

  She studied the photo in the van, windows open to the loud wind. Auditions for Cats! Maura had seen the original production of Cats! in New York on a student trip. Makeup and whiskers.

  “I could be the ancient one,” she breathed, to the storm wailing within her. She raised her window and breathed again, in gratitude to the wind, the moon, and her mother for guiding her here.

  The lines of agile women and men in their twenties filled up the studio, testing her balance, her grace, at her first audition since she left her dance career to come home and marry Karl. The girls behind her, two of her former ballet students, whispered.

  “From the back, she still has a dancer body.”

  “If you cut off her head.”

  Maura saw them in the mirror but bowed her head to the floor, feigning a neck stretch. Nothing has changed, she thought, not in twenty-five years. She exhaled and blew away the cattiness. She should have worn more makeup, to cover her lines, but then it would drip and distract her. Take me as I am, she thought, giving her face in profile now, neck tall. I’ve earned every mark. She showed the other side. And proud of it. Another long slow exhale. She moved her body, counting the reps. She stayed with her reps. It kept her steady, focused. The girls behind her hardly did any warm-up. They seemed to be watching her
s, even following. Copycats, she thought. Watch me.

  Maura depended on her warm-up, a routine she did every day, to keep her back straight, arms moving, legs high, stomach zipped up tight. Although there was nowhere else she’d rather be in that moment, her mind kept wandering. She tried to focus on her breathing, what she always told her students.

  In this room full of insanely young dancers in the rows behind her, to transport herself into the zone of pure movement, she needed the music. If the tired, wrinkled pianist, glasses looped around her neck, shuffling through her binder, didn’t start soon, Maura would lose her nerve. Flee to the washroom. Cry down the hallway. Slink back to the van.

  The director, Raj, led the class. He’d had some dance training and was fit enough to practice most of the work with them. A standard ballet routine, a little jazz movement, no leaps or pointe work, a bit of basic choreography with turns, but it lasted ninety minutes. After the closing révérence, Maura dropped quivering spaghetti limbs to the floor and removed her sweaty old ballet slippers.

  Raj, the replacement drama and music teacher at the high school, spoke. “Thank you, everyone.” He seemed energized, inspired by their efforts. “I’d like the following dancers to stay, please….” Here he shuffled the pile of photos attached to résumés and called out a group of eight dancers: six women, including the two behind Maura, and two men. As the selected squealed to each other, the pianist, slowly, and the unselected, quickly, picked up bags and gear to leave. Raj crouched down to Maura and asked her to wait until he’d handed out rehearsal schedules and dismissed the chosen eight. Maura stood up and was introduced as dance captain.

  When it was only the two of them, Raj held both of

  her hands.

  “I’m so happy to have you in the show.”

  “Not more than I am,” she laughed.

  “You’re a pro.”

  When he opened his arms to her, she hugged him anyway. “An old pro. I’m so glad I saw the poster.”

  She let go of Raj when the pianist tottered back in to fetch her glasses case, left on the keyboard at the highest notes, which she hit as she fumbled the case, startling them both.

  Raj continued, “You know there’s a role for you, but I also want you to be choreographer. That will give me more time to work on the singing.” He took the opportunity to introduce Maura to the pianist, whose pursed face momentarily revealed beautiful teeth.

  Raj asked Maura, “Do you live in town?”

  “Forty minutes away. But I feel like I’ve come home.” To myself, Maura thought, my older and wiser self. Their spontaneous hug was bonding, if unprofessional. Artistic attraction, she told herself. They remained in the studio another hour and tripped over each other’s excitement, enthusing over the script, the schedule, the score, the cast and crew.

  “We’ll be working side by side for months. We’ll read each other’s minds,” he said.

  He didn’t say forever but Maura filled it in for herself. She adored his Oxford accent. She’d found what would keep her sane, rebalance her. A new partner. An artistic partner. A sun to her moon.

  Karl had never seen her on stage, never knew her as a dancer, “married her and buried her,” as Raj said, on the farm. The kids protested that their friends would be weirded out by Maura in a cat suit, and Karl’s coolness suggested that he feared his perfect life of prepared meals, organized household, available wife, and personal down time was at risk.

  “Karl, this is only the beginning.”

  He listened, jaw set, when he didn’t say what was on his mind. His horse face, Maura called it.

  “I want to be involved in the annual musical every year and help Raj choose plays with plenty of dance numbers.”

  “But you’ll be gone a lot. What if you get pregnant again?”

  “No more kids, Karl. We decided.”

  “It made you happy before. Until this last time.” He meant the one they lost, three years ago.

  So he still hadn’t given up hope for a son, Maura thought. “Karl, we’re both on our way to fifty.” The red velvet curtain was rising to the light of the moon and this time, the show, her show, would go on.

  “It would keep us young,” he pressed.

  Hadn’t he seen how that miscarriage aged her? She never wanted to put her body through that again. It had taken a full year to get her energy back, but now here she was, an erupting mess.

  “I need to be feline.” At his confused look, she said it again, “The show is Cats!”

  “Feral.” Karl looked at her as if he didn’t know her at all. “You’re all over the place. People have been asking why you’re walking the country down. And then there’s that guy you’re working with. Nobody knows much about him.”

  “I need a little freedom,” she said. “If you want me here at all.”

  “I thought the dance barn, the ballet lessons … isn’t that enough?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Did I do something wrong?” he asked.

  “It’s me. And it’s normal and natural. I want to dance, Karl. With other dancers.”

  Genuine surprise creased his face. Maura left it there. He needed time, she thought, to get used to it. His wife on stage, dancing, singing, acting, an entity entirely unknown to him. Working and creating with a male colleague whose intentions were entirely also unknown and therefore completely suspicious. And, Karl hated cats.

  Maura scrambled to plan for the kids and Karl during rehearsal, six to nine, three nights a week, and all day Saturday. Because this was community theatre, rehearsals were scheduled around everyone’s workdays. On the phone to Raj, she mentioned that her work on Mommy Island as mother of five and farmwife had been eighteen hours a day for over two decades.

  “I’m going to put turkeys in the dance barn.” Karl said.

  “No way!” protested the girls.

  “No,” Maura said. “I need to plan the choreography, then practise it so I can teach the others. I’ll be using it every day. If I didn’t have the dance barn you made me, I’d never have this.”

  Karl was silent. Maura went out to look at the moon. She had so much to say and she would say it with movement, gesture, muscle. Fluidly, inspired by magical moon water.

  Maura’s oldest daughter reported, “The whole Grade Twelve drama class, including the one boy, is in love with Raj. He left England because he was stalked by an ex-girlfriend!”

  That explained why Raj’s experience made him ridiculously overqualified to teach high school and put on one community musical each spring. He was in hiding. Maura would need to be careful. People will talk, no matter what she did or what she felt or what she thought. Karl knew it, too.

  “It’s him,” Karl growled. “It’s dinnertime.”

  Maura took the call in the kitchen so everyone could hear and see as she marked in some new dates on the family calendar. Karl had walked, ridden, driven over the land, her land, their land now, for the years of her marriage while she remained plugged into the walls of her kitchen like the stove, the deep freeze, and the dishwasher. When she got off the phone, she cornered Karl.

  “Raj will be phoning me a lot. He has the right to call me anytime. And we’ll have meetings before and after every rehearsal.”

  “What about the kids?” It came out as what about me?

  “Up to you,” she said. Her dance captain voice surged from inside. “You’ll be parent in charge.”

  He didn’t give a comeback to that.

  Maura agreed to prepare a crockpot meal on Tuesdays if Karl would provide a dad dinner on Thursdays.

  “Dad dinners come in a flat box. And you can’t criticize.”

  “They’ll love it.” Maybe, she thought, she’d never given him space in the kitchen before. It was time she let him in. And the girls. And herself out.

  The kids would learn to cook on Friday nights and feed their fr
iends themselves. The fridge would be full, as always. The dance barn would be open, as usual, to parties and sleepovers.

  “But you have to be around to supervise,” she said to Karl. “Not holed up in your workshop with your country music on full blast.”

  “On Saturdays,” Karl said, “I’ll pick you up after rehearsal, take you out to supper and the kids can eat their own leftovers.” Friday nights would simply switch to Saturday nights. Flexible Karl.

  But as Maura chopped onions for the soup, her thoughts wandered to the umber skin of Raj. She wondered whether he was five or ten years younger than her. She inhaled the onions, letting go the tears that had simmered inside her all fall. She decided to wear the teaching skirt her mom had made many years ago to the first rehearsal. The skirt was deep purple, like her revived pansies.

  She called Raj about costumes while she chopped celery and carrots and dumped them, leftover chicken, and stock into the pot. Maura knew a fabric artist who could paint everyone’s bodysuits.

  “I love that concept!” he said. “See you Tuesday.”

  Maura flipped the radio on. The kids were home, available for conversation, but she needed music after talking to Raj. He made her feel like dancing. His voice, his enthusiasm. She danced while she stirred the soup. Turns and leg lifts and, with spatula in hand, even a couple scissor-kicks.

  “That’s the first time I’ve seen you do that,” said Susan, her middle child. “You only dance in the barn.”

  “I’m a cat on the prowl. I’m breaking out.” She kept on. She was filling herself up, that gaping maw inside. She sang “Hello” with Adele. She was singing to Raj.

  The girls pretended to be on their phones, but they were watching her. Probably texting emoticons to each other, making fun of her voice.

  Maura read from behind Susan, “Our mom is turning into Catwoman!”