Dancing on the Edge

by Han Nolan

  Then when Mr. Hewlett, through Gigi, gave his wife a successful decorating tip for the shop and told her she would be a great success, Mrs. Hewlett set Gigi up with her own special place in the back. In no time, word got around about Gigi and she was in business, holding séances, contacting the dearly departed, and reading tarot cards and tea leaves, but she never used the Ouija board again.

  At first I used to go to the shop and stand in the farthest, darkest corner, hidden from her clients, and just watch Gigi. She’d slip into one of her colorful robes, green for seeking knowledge of the beyond, white for ceremonies held on Mondays—moon days—sky blue for love, purple for Sundays. Then she’d dance around the table with circular motions—always circular to keep out evil—and she’d chant her incantations over the anxious client or clients who sat at the table with eyes closed, palms resting face up. She’d sit down then and light the candles, and slowly, with a circular, swaying motion in her torso, go into a trance, letting the spirits enter her body. Her voice would change. Sometimes she was Rasmus, her spirit guide, and other times she was the dearly departed. I would watch the way her skin turned yellow and her eyes rolled slowly forward before she opened them wide and focused on some unseen face.

  Later, when Gigi had gotten used to my being there, I became her assistant. She didn’t ask me to help her, I just offered to get her coffee one day and she let me. I was so pleased to get a chance to show her I could be useful that I began to rush about, helping her clean up in the evening, running out to the diner down the road to fetch her lunch, and bringing the footstool to her between clients so she could prop up her swollen feet.

  I figured she must have been really pleased with me, because after a while she began to let me help her get ready for her ceremonies. I got to select the ingredients for the incense, choosing from rose, cedar, citron, aloe, cinnamon, sandal, camphor, amber, lily, benzoin, mace, saffron—she had so many jars and vials, and each combination of herbs, flowers, spices, and oils had a special meaning, was meant for special ceremonies. I learned them all.

  I got to select the appropriate robe from Gigi’s closet and help her slip into it, and I brought messages to Mrs. Hewlett at the front of the shop and led clients to their seats in the back.

  One time Mrs. Hewlett said to me that maybe I would become a medium like my grandmother, and I thought maybe I would. Maybe that would be my special gift. Maybe if I could do a good enough job, Gigi would see this and declare that I was a prodigy as a medium! Then she would forgive me for making Dane melt, and she would want me again, and Dane would come back, and everything would be right once more.

  One day, after months of helping at the shop, I suggested to Gigi that I could do the dances for warding off evil while she concentrated on going beyond and reaching the dearly departed.

  Gigi shook her head. “No, I’ll do the dances.”

  “But I can do it,” I told her. “I can help you. I can do the dances for you so your legs won’t get tired. Watch, I can do it.”

  Then, before she could say anything, I started dancing around the table. I swept my arms up above my head and circled the table, two times, two representing social communion. My arms swung down, then up again. I leaned over the table, sweeping my torso in a low circle. In my mind I was a great ballerina. I pretended a crowd had gathered in the shop; all the kids from school who teased me about wearing Dane’s bathrobe and who slammed dirt balls in my ears were watching. They stared wide eyed, stunned by my beauty and skill. I circled back in the other direction, my arms waving gracefully above my head. Someone was breaking through the crowd of kids. A man. A man was straining to see me over the heads of my audience. Dane! It was Dane! He had come to see my great performance.

  “Miracle! I said to stop it!” Gigi caught one of my arms in midilight and gripped it in her hands, pulling it down to my side.

  “I do the dances,” she said. “Anyway, you look ridiculous. From now on you had better just sit on that pillow over there and keep out of the way!” Gigi pointed to the large tiger-skin pillow that sat on the floor beneath a fan of swan feathers. “Go on.”

  I backed away. I didn’t know what I had done, what evil spirit I had conjured up with my dance. I sat down on the pillow and closed my eyes and drifted far away, leaving behind the noise of Gigi’s swishing robe, the clinking jars of incense, and Rasmus’s murmurings. I went to a special place, a safe, new place. There were green fields and wildflowers there, and fairies and gnomes and distant castles poking through swirls of pink and white clouds. A blanket of butterflies flew overhead to greet me. Then they drifted down and settled about my shoulders and kept me warm and safe No words, no dirt balls, no teacher, no child—nobody could reach me there, except Dane. I talked to Dane in my special new place.

  I told him he was the first one to really see me dance, and he said my dance was beautiful. I told him about the dance recitals I could never be in because no one knew I took lessons. He said he understood, and the blanket of butterflies wrapped about me like a hug.

  I told him about the giant eraser that swept down the street behind me every afternoon erasing my lessons, and how the other kids in class laughed at me because I couldn’t remember the steps from one day to the next.

  Dane was very sorry, and the gnomes and fairies nodded their heads; they were sorry, too.

  “It’s okay,” I told them, shrugging off the blanket of butterflies. “I stand in the back of the room and I become invisible, just like in school. Most of the time I’m invisible.”

  Dane said he knew all about being invisible, and I asked him when he was coming back. When would I see him again?

  “Soon,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.” And I heard my own voice saying aloud, “Soon. Soon.”

  Chapter 6

  NO ONE EVER talked about Dane. Not Gigi. Not Grandaddy Opal. When I tried to bring him up, to remember something about him, Gigi would go into a trance and Grandaddy Opal would just say, “Hooey!” But whenever Gigi and Grandaddy Opal got together, they fought, and they fought about Dane. I knew it even though they never mentioned his name. Sometimes Gigi and Grandaddy Opal would head for the bathroom at the same time and they’d see each other coming and race to the bathroom door, both trying to get there first. Grandaddy Opal always won because he was skinny and springy while Gigi was heavy and didn’t like moving fast in the first place. It upset the karmic balance, she said. Grandaddy Opal would slam the door in her face and laugh a crazy man’s laugh, and Gigi would stand in the hallway, chanting one of her spells at him.

  They had other little wars, too. Gigi said Grandaddy Opal’s orange La-Z-Boy had to go because it was giving off a bad aura left over from when Grandaddy Opal sat in it. She and I dragged it out to the sidewalk, and she put a big FREE sign on it, and it was gone by the next morning. Grandaddy Opal had a fit and a half and retaliated by dumping all of Gigi’s fresh-bought macrobiotic food in the garbage. “I ain’t having all that yin-yang food in my house,” he said to her, the garbage truck rolling down the drive. “It gives off bad orals all over the durn place.”

  “It’s aura,” Gigi said. “A-U-R-A.”

  “Well, the plural of aura is orals,” Grandaddy Opal shot back, embarrassed that Gigi caught him in a mistake.

  That’s the way it was. They tried to stay clear of each other, but when they couldn’t, it was war, and even though no one said Dane’s name, I knew somehow that’s what the fighting was all about, because every time they fought, Dane was there. I could feel him. Gigi and Grandaddy Opal faced each other and argued, and Dane was the air between them, the hot angry air each of them breathed out of their mouths when they spoke. And when they stopped fighting and went their separate ways, the Dane vapors remained behind, and I’d stand in the midst of them and close my eyes, waiting for him to speak to me, to tell me that he was coming soon, but soon seemed to be getting farther and farther away. So were my chances of becoming any kind of prodigy, and every day I needed Dane even more than the day before. I needed to sit
with him in his candlelit cave again and hear him read to me in his mellow voice, and feel safe and warm and content, because it seemed nothing felt safe anymore. Fear, like a shadow, hung about me, waiting. It wanted in. It wanted to take over my whole self. Every once in a while, I could feel the dark thing hovering, jabbing at me, looking for a way in, and my heart would begin to race and my palms to sweat. And then I’d think, it’s that scary fear thing trying to get me. It hid everywhere, waiting for me to let go of Dane, let go of wanting to bring my daddy back, so that it could get inside me, and then Dane would never be able to come back to me. That’s what I knew, and I searched everywhere for things to hold on to that would keep me safe, keep the fear away: simple, good things, like Grandaddy Opal’s job. He delivered newspapers to all the houses in the neighborhood, and in the early mornings I would watch him from my bedroom window as he pedaled down the driveway on his bicycle, his newspaper bag draped over his shoulder and his long white hair flying like a wing from the back of his head.

  I told Grandaddy Opal that delivering papers on a bicycle looked like the most fun thing to do—besides dancing, of course, but I didn’t mention the dancing.

  Grandaddy Opal said he would get me a bicycle and then I could join him on his route. It wouldn’t be a new bicycle, though. He said it would be an old beat-up one picked up at a yard sale. He was good at fixing bicycles. “You fix it up, paint it, and then it’s yours,” he said. “You take care of it, grease it up good every now and then, give it a name, and you ride it everywhere. You and that bicycle become best friends. It’s a real special relationship.”

  I couldn’t wait to get one, to own something special, but Grandaddy Opal said it had to be the right one. “Has to be cheap as dirt,” he said, “and it’s got to have personality. Don’t worry, I’ll know it when I see it. Meanwhile, I can teach you how to ride some on Old Sam.”

  We practiced in the late afternoons, after my dance lessons and before Gigi came home. Learning to ride was hard for me. Old Sam belonged to Grandaddy Opal, and he didn’t want anybody but Grandaddy riding him. Even with the seat lowered all the way, I had to pedal with the tips of my toes and Grandaddy Opal had to hold on to the back of the seat to keep me steady. I couldn’t wait to get my own bicycle.

  We had been living with Grandaddy Opal well over a year—I was almost twelve—when he came into our bedroom one morning and shook me awake. I saw his empty newspaper pouch hanging around his neck like a feed bag.

  He put his finger to his lips. “Shh.” Then he told me to hurry up and get dressed. He left and I put on clothes from the day before, not worrying about making too much noise and waking Gigi. Since we’d been living with Grandaddy Opal, nothing woke Gigi before nine or ten in the morning.

  I went out to the kitchen, but Grandaddy Opal wasn’t there. I went into the great room, and that was empty, too. Then I saw him through the window, wheeling his bicycle out of the garage. I ran outside and called to him.

  “Well, what took you so long?”

  “I wasn’t so long.”

  “Sure you were. Now, go on into that garage and see what you see.”

  I knew right then what I’d find, and I was right—my bicycle. I could see its dark form leaning against the washing machine, waiting for me. It didn’t have the freshly painted shine of a just-fixed-up bicycle because Grandaddy Opal said I would have to do all the fixing and caring for it myself, that way it would become special, and really mine.

  “That there is an old English racer,” Grandaddy Opal said, coming into the garage and switching on a light. “And look-a here”—he pointed to a decal on the bar just below the seat. “See what that says? Nottingham, England. And see the picture of Robin Hood? Robin Hood was from Nottingham. You ever read about Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor?”

  I nodded. I had written a book report on it for school and the teacher had read my paper to the class. Everyone said that I had made half of it up because they had seen the movie on TV and it didn’t have all the stuff I had put in my report. Even when we all had to read the same book, I never understood it the way the rest of the class did. The teachers often called my responses to the book discussions “most disturbing.”

  I rubbed my finger over the decal. “Thank you, Grandaddy Opal,” I said. “It’s the most beautiful bicycle in the world.”

  “See on the front here it’s got this plate nailed in that says made by the Raleigh Company. Yup, an English racer’s what you got, girl. Bought it off an English lady, too, from Cambridge originally. So imagine that, this bicycle coming all the way from England when the woman first came over way back in 1964.”

  “Wow, it’s old,” I said.

  “Paint’s still good on her, too, just needs a bit of a touch-up and a polish. And I got some new tires so you can learn how to put them on, and I’ll show you how to fix the brakes, they don’t work at all, and it’s got three speeds, but they ain’t working neither. But look at her—so simple. She’s sleek, that’s what she is. Just like you, not an ounce of fat on her.” Grandaddy Opal’s face was all lit up with joy, as if it were his first bicycle instead of mine.

  I held on to the handlebars with one hand and reached back and patted the cracked saddle with the other. “It’s perfect,” I said.

  IT WAS HARD putting in the time to fix up my bicycle because of dancing and helping Gigi and going to school. One time, when it had been almost a week since I had last been able to work on it, Grandaddy Opal woke me at three in the morning and we worked on it then.

  I told Grandaddy Opal that I hoped Gigi didn’t catch us out in the garage working so early, even though I knew she never would, and Grandaddy Opal said it was all just a lot of fat hooey. “What does she think you live on, air? Why, you got to eat, don’t you? Your clothes need cleaning, all them sweated-up leotards and tights, and you’re growing, too. You need new clothes. How does she think it’s all happening? Magic? She ain’t doing it, that’s for sure. And I shouldn’t be doing it neither ’cause the day will come when she’ll take a notion you’re going to be the next great something or other and away you’ll go from here!”

  I looked away, feeling guilty for wishing I’d become a prodigy, but then I figured if Grandaddy Opal understood, if he knew the way I did that it was our only chance of getting Dane back, he’d wish it, too.

  I turned back to Grandaddy Opal and watched him fussing with the wrenches. Then he bumped into his toolbox and all his tools crashed to the floor.

  “Dang that Gigi!” he said, turning this way and that, looking at his mess.

  I knew just thinking about Gigi could get Grandaddy Opal all worked up. It was as if he kept playing some old fight over in his head, trying to wring all the anger out of it one more time, maybe hoping this time would be the last.

  “I guess we’ll just go on pretending I don’t even know you,” he said, bending down to help me pick up his tools, his voice calming down again. “Even though you’re living under my roof all the day long. We’ll just pretend and say nothing to her. Long as we ain’t saying nothing, we ain’t bringing it to her mind, and she don’t have to do nothing about it.”

  I finally finished fixing up my bicycle the night before my twelfth birthday. I wanted to ride it right away, but Grandaddy Opal said it was too dark and too late and I needed to get to bed before Gigi came home and had a fit.

  I didn’t want to go to bed. I didn’t want to go to sleep and wake up to another birthday, to hear the story one more time of my birth, full of portents and omens. It was easier to be with Grandaddy Opal and forget. He always seemed to know when I was thinking too hard on things, when I was scared. He’d come up behind me and say, “Come on, girlie, let’s go get us some watermelon,” or “Let’s go weed that garden.” He always pulled me away from my thoughts.

  Grandaddy Opal bought me a helmet for my birthday. He gave it to me in secret the next morning, waking me early and bringing me out to the dark garage. Then he switched on the overhead light and sang out “Happ
y birthday!” He set the shiny blue helmet on my head, the same color as my bicycle, and said, “Now then, you and Etain are ready to roll.”

  I had named my bicycle Etain after a woman in an old Irish tale I’d just read. She had been turned into a butterfly by another woman jealous of Etain’s beauty, and then was blown by a magic storm out of the palace where she lived. After seven years she landed in a fairy palace where she fed on sweet honey flowers and loved a man named Angus. Then the evil woman discovered where Etain lived and she sent another storm that blew Etain out of the palace and into the drinking glass of a woman who swallowed her and later gave birth to her. When Etain grew up, she married the High King of Ireland.

  Etain and I were perfect together. I was about to climb onto her when Grandaddy Opal spoke up, not looking at me but just to the side of me.

  “Wonder if it would be easier without that old bathrobe you got on? Now that you’re twelve and all.”

  I looked down at Dane’s old black-and-yellow plaid robe. Gigi said they were the worst colors to wear together besides black and red, or just plain black—the evil colors. I think that’s why Dane wore it in the first place, to spite Gigi. It had become faded and tom in the past two years and I had spilled all kinds of food on it—grape juice, spaghetti sauce, and chocolate—and it smelled of incense. Even when Grandaddy pulled it fresh out of the dryer, it still had the incense smells, but Grandaddy Opal never mentioned it, maybe never noticed.

  In dance class, Susan said she needed to be able to see my body. She said she needed to make sure my knees were in line with my feet in a plié and that I didn’t hitch my hips to one side in a grande battement. For Susan, I wore just the sash tied around my waist. She said I looked cool. The rest of the class said I still looked dumb.