Dancing on the Edge

by Han Nolan

  I looked up at Grandaddy Opal. He was waiting, studying the shelf of paint cans off to his right.

  “I’ll just wear the sash, okay?”

  Grandaddy Opal smiled at me and nodded. “Fine, fine,” he said. “Now let’s see you ride the old girl around in the driveway some.”

  Without thinking, I took off the robe. I was tying the sash around my waist when Grandaddy Opal grabbed my arm.

  “What you got there?”

  “What?”

  He took my other hand in his and examined my arms and then my legs. I was in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. In dance I always wore long sleeves and tights. They hid the bruises.

  “Where’d you get all these here?” He moved closer to me, his voice sounding strange, as if he could hardly get it out of his throat.

  “You’re all beat up. Look at you, you’re all beat up!”

  I looked down at myself, at the bruises on my legs. I looked back up at Grandaddy Opal, who had gone as white as his hair. Even his lips had turned pale. I felt my own self turn some kind of unnatural color, my stomach clutching and grabbing at my spleen.

  I spoke. I whispered, with my head bent over the handlebars. “I didn’t want to say because it’s from you know where.”

  “What? I don’t know where. I don’t know nothing about this.”

  “Dance,” I said. “My improvisation class. We do all this rolling around on the floor. We make up dances and express ourselves.”

  It was my turn to look away, at anything but Grandaddy Opal’s face. He always wanted to see my eyes when he asked me a question, but I was afraid he’d know the truth. Susan had said something about it just that week. She didn’t know about the bruises, but she saw the way I threw myself around in class, crashing to the floor, banging into the walls when the music was wild. I loved those classes, that wild feeling. I could spin and spin and fly all over the room, and nothing mattered, nothing existed but the sheer swirling ecstasy of the dance and the music. And when the dance was over, I had the bruises to remind me that for a little while, I felt real—I was a real, whole person.

  I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong until Susan called me out of the room. She placed her arm around my shoulder. She said she admired my expressive dances, but she worried that I might hurt myself.

  “Keep away from the walls, will you?” she said. “And don’t do so many falls and recoveries. We don’t want you breaking a leg, do we?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, but I knew what she really meant. I knew she meant that I was “most disturbing.”

  I told her I would be more careful, and she let me go back to the class.

  Grandaddy Opal’s eyebrows rose clear up to the top of his forehead. “These here are from that dancing school? You can’t be all that good if this is what you look like. You look at me, child. Do all them other little girls get banged up like this here?”

  I didn’t look up. I thought of the other girls in their colorful leotards and fancy leg warmers, the pretty hair ribbons, the dabs of makeup.

  “Some are worse and some are better,” I said. “I’m in between, I guess.” I wouldn’t look up. I couldn’t. I was grabbing onto the handlebars, squeezing, squeezing them so hard I thought they might melt in my hands. My legs were trembling. I wanted to sit down, to breathe. There was no air in the garage.

  “You look at me!” Grandaddy Opal’s voice was sharp.

  I lifted my head and caught his eyes, and my whole body started to shake. Grandaddy Opal’s hair looked shocked as if an electric current were running through his head. His hands were trembling, and he brought them down on my handlebars, so close to mine I could feel their heat.

  “You ain’t going to have any more of these bruises, you hear? Whatever you got to do in that dance class to keep from getting them, you do it!”

  I nodded my head and it kept on bobbing. My voice rattled in my throat. “Yes. Yes, we’re through with that wild music anyway. We’re doing something else now.”

  “You durn sure are or I don’t know what!” he said. Then he blinked at me and I saw his eyes looking so wet, so full of water, and I had this vision of all that water pouring out from his eyes, gushing out like two giant waterfalls, rushing at me and knocking me over, carrying me far away.

  Chapter 7

  I DIDN’T KNOW if Grandaddy Opal had told Gigi about my bruises or not, but that night Gigi called me up from Grandaddy’s basement where I had been sitting on Dane’s bed, drifting in my fairyland, searching for Dane. I jumped up when she called because I didn’t want her to come downstairs and see what I had done with all Dane’s things.

  I rushed up the stairs, and there stood Gigi with a stack of new clothes. She shoved them into my arms and told me I was emanating a green aura and I needed to stop wearing Dane’s bathrobe. She waved her hands over my head, as if she could feel it, the halo of green light.

  “Green is rarely good, sugar,” she said. “It usually means you are putting yourself in someone else’s place, allowing yourself to be taken over by him. Sometimes it even means deceit!” She grabbed both my shoulders. “Now you take off that old stinky robe of Dane’s and put on these new spiritual clothes I bought you for your birthday. See if that doesn’t help. Our years of mourning are at an end.” She let go of me and lifted her arms above her head, her face turned to the ceiling. She closed her eyes and hummed. She opened her mouth, still humming, and then with a sudden snap of her lips she stopped. I waited several minutes for her to speak. Then, in a loud quivering voice, she said, “The winds of change are blowing.” Her arms swayed above her. “The stars are realigning. You must be ready. Great things are about to happen to us all!” She opened her eyes and clasped my head in her hands. “You’ve been green way too long. You start wearing your spiritual clothes every day, you hear? You wear nothing but purple, and you meditate on the highest spiritual matters till you have a purple aura, like me. Purple means you possess spiritual and psychic powers. Now, go on and change and bring me that old robe when you’re done.” Then she turned and glided away.

  I took a long time changing my clothes. I undid the sash of the robe and ran it back and forth through my hands, feeling the worn material slipping between my fingers. Then I set it on my cot and took off the robe. It was like peeling off all the layers of my skin. Anytime I removed it, I felt certain that I had become invisible, as if the robe gave my body its shape and substance. Without it I was nothing at all. I cut off a piece of the sash and stuffed it in my shorts pocket. I tied the rest of it around the robe, and after changing into my purple, carried it out to Gigi. I didn’t watch to see where she put it. I went outside to Etain. We rode around and around in the driveway.

  I wore my purple long-sleeved shirts and long pants and waited through the sticky sweet heat of a Georgia summer for my bruises to disappear. And I watched while the winds of change blew through Grandaddy Opal’s house, reshuffling all our lives.

  They were little things at first. Gigi started getting up earlier to spend some time with me before she went off to the shop. Grandaddy Opal grew his tomatoes and cucumbers and shared them with Gigi without grumbling about her macrobiotic foods, and the two of them started talking in front of me as if they liked each other. I had visions of them someday getting remarried and all of us living happy lives together, just the way it was that summer, happy and slow and sweet.

  I got to take over Grandaddy Opal’s newspaper route and spend the money I earned on anything I wanted. I bought a beautiful illustrated set of Grimm’s and Andersen’s fairy tales and the rest of my money I spent on things for Etain, like a rearview mirror and new reflectors.

  I still missed Dane, and I still looked for him, but for the first time in my life I felt a gentleness, a softness in the unfolding of each day. The dark fears that had hovered over me had faded to gray; the shadow kept its distance.

  One evening, near the end of that summer, the three of us were sitting out on the porch eating tomato sandwiches and drinking root beer. The air fe
lt cool and dry for a change, and we rocked in our chairs with our faces lifted to catch the breeze. I could feel contentment riding on that breeze, flowing from one to the other of us. It was the first time we had all sat together in the same place. It was the first time Gigi and Grandaddy Opal were quiet, but all this didn’t last; the winds of change kept shifting.

  “Your van is blocking my view!” Grandaddy Opal said. “All them painted-on stars when I could be looking at the real thing.” He sat up straighter and strained to see past the van. “I been studying on stars, and I want to see ’em, so you go on and move that durn van out of my view!”

  Gigi kept rocking, holding her face up to the air. “You painted it, remember? I’ll move the van when you’ve fixed the porch floor. It’s so steep a person needs a seat belt on her chair just to keep from rocking herself into someone else’s yard. And you’re a carpenter. It’s an embarrassment.”

  Grandaddy Opal jumped up from his chair and slammed inside. Gigi rocked even harder. “Good,” she said, her rocking chair slipping toward the steps. “Finally some peace around here.”

  But Grandaddy Opal came back. He crept up behind Gigi with a piece of rope and before she could say “Dad-blast-it!” he had her tied to the chair.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing here?” Gigi said, twisting and fussing with the rope.

  “Your seat belt,” he said.

  “This isn’t a seat belt!”

  “Is too.” He jerked her chair back and forth, holding on to the back of it by the knobs. “See, you ain’t flying into anyone’s yard now, are you?”

  “You untie me!”

  “But you wanted a seat belt.”

  “And I’m saying this isn’t a seat belt.”

  “What did you expect?” Grandaddy Opal chuckled, glancing at me. “Custom designed, with stars and crystal balls and tarot cards painted all over it?”

  “Yes,” Gigi said, finally getting the rope turned around so she could untie herself. “And a seat belt with a horse’s behind painted on yours!”

  And that’s when Grandaddy Opal’s new career came to life. He painted seat belts. He made up a brochure and we stuck one in every newspaper I delivered. He put one up at the Piggly Wiggly, and Gigi set one in the windows of the gift shop and Ansel’s Pub. I stuck one up in the gas station and even on the bulletin board at the church where I took my dancing lessons. Susan, my dance instructor, became Grandaddy Opal’s first customer. He painted a copy of a Degas statue he had seen in one of the books in his bedroom. It was a ballet dancer standing with her feet slightly turned out, dressed in a full skirt and a long braid running down her back with a real ribbon tied on the end. Grandaddy Opal painted her side view. The girl had a dreaming, faraway look, so Grandaddy Opal painted above it the words “To DANCE—To DREAM.” Susan was so pleased she showed everyone, even the kids in my dance classes.

  I had hoped they would see it and want to be my partner when we had to perform combinations across the dance floor. I wanted them to see I had changed, I had a real job—I delivered newspapers—and I had people who took care of me, one who made me breakfast and worked at a gift shop and one who made me dinner and painted seat belts. I didn’t dance wild anymore. I even bought a pretty pair of purple leg warmers and had started to grow my hair so I could wear ribbons like the other girls in the class. I felt proud and important, but the kids hadn’t changed. They liked the seat belt, but not the seat belt painter’s granddaughter.

  After his success with Susan’s car, other people started asking Grandaddy Opal to paint their seat belts. They would drop their cars off in our driveway and he’d sit all day inside the car drinking gallons of sweet tea and painting every seat belt special. Grandaddy Opal painted tennis racquets and golf clubs and footballs and baseballs. He painted flowers and ocean scenes and slogans. Especially popular were the team slogans and religious ones like JESUS SAVES and THE LORD IS My COPILOT. Some were funny and some were lines from poems, and some were just people’s names painted really fancy.

  Whenever I could, I sat out in the driveway with him and watched him paint. It was the only chance I had anymore to spend time with him. Once when I went out there, he was painting a sailboat under the slogan I’D RATHER BE SAILING, and he said to me, “Ain’t it a mystery?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “How we are. People, I mean. We always got to be wearing slogans and advertisements all over ourselves. Why, we’re nothing more than walking billboards.”

  “But if people didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have your great seat belt painting business.”

  Grandaddy Opal nodded and wiped the sweat off his face with a rag he pulled out of his back pocket. “Sure enough, but it’s interesting what people take pride in, ain’t it? Painted gold dollar signs yesterday, little bitty ones on all four seat belts. Took me all day. It’s their identity—the fancy car, the bumper stickers, the big wheels—like they’re afraid they’ll forget who they are ’less they can flash it around all the do-dah day.”

  “Their identity?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Grandaddy Opal? If you were going to paint my seat belt, what would you paint?”

  Grandaddy Opal paused with the paintbrush pointed at the sail of the boat. “Girl, if I was painting your seat belt, well, I wouldn’t paint it atall. You ain’t a billboard. No sir, I’d just plain leave it blank.”

  He said it, and I knew he was right.

  Chapter 8

  GRANDADDY OPAL hadn’t been the only one affected by the winds of change. In the late fall, Gigi joined a group called The Other Realms, a group of mediums, clairvoyants, and channelers who got together monthly and planned conferences where people learned about the occult. For once Gigi had friends who called her up and came over to the house more than once, and who invited her to dinners and get-togethers. I asked Gigi about friends, since neither one of us ever had any before. She said the only people she ever got a chance to meet were her clients and they couldn’t be her friends because it would destroy the mystery of her. “They have to believe I’m different,” she said. “That I don’t eat or sleep or go to the bathroom like normal people. They don’t want to see me walking around town in a pair of jeans licking on an ice-cream cone. Someone like that wouldn’t be able to contact the spirit world. Understand? They have to believe it’s possible. They have to believe, or it won’t work.”

  I understood. The mystery of me kept people away, also, or drew them to me, with their dirt balls and their eggs, anything they could throw.

  Now that Gigi had joined The Other Realms, she became much more open and outspoken about what she did. She taught me about astral planes and mental planes and how a nebulous appearance of the astral body meant an imperfect development, and an ovoid appearance was a more perfect development. She said Grandaddy Opal and I had nebulous astral bodies and she had an ovoid one. She said there must be a special reason why I was nebulous. That it must have to do with the way I came into the world. I looked up the word nebulous in the dictionary. It means hazy, indistinct. I closed my eyes after looking up the word and I knew what Gigi said was so. I felt nebulous.

  Grandaddy Opal knew about The Other Realms group, and he reminded Gigi of their agreement. Gigi said she wasn’t doing anything in his house. The place wasn’t filled with incense or candles, and if he’d ignore her doings she’d ignore his. This she said looking pointedly at me. Grandaddy Opal muttered and cussed and Gigi said, “Why, you’re just afraid. You’re just like everybody else. You know what occult means? It means it’s beyond the range of ordinary knowledge. So now, why are people so afraid of knowing more?”

  “’Cause some of that stuff we oughtn’t to be knowing, that’s why,” Grandaddy Opal said. “It’s dangerous getting into that business, and you had better leave Miracle out of it.”

  “Don’t you tell me!” Gigi said.

  Whenever I heard those words, I knew in no time we’d be in the van heading back to Alabama and Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey. Every time Gran
daddy Opal made any suggestion to Gigi about raising me, Gigi would tell him a thing or two, go to the bedroom, pull our suitcases down from the closet, and order me to start packing.

  I would try to take my time packing my bag, giving Gigi a chance to change her mind, but she would always get irritated with me and shove me aside so she could pack the bag herself. I would stand in the doorway, knowing I was supposed to stay with her and watch, but when I felt she wasn’t noticing, I’d twist my head and look down the hallway, my heart beating against my chest in quick trembly rhythms, hoping Grandaddy Opal would be there and he’d say some magic words that would make Gigi want to stay. But Grandaddy Opal had a stubborn streak just as wide as Gigi’s, and as soon as she’d make her decision to leave, he would take off on Old Sam and the last I’d see of him would be his back.

  We wouldn’t be on the road more than an hour before Gigi would think up some reason why we needed to turn around again, but I always feared the day would come when she would run out of good excuses and off we’d ride, getting farther and farther away from my sweet Grandaddy Opal.

  One time, she pulled off to the side of the road and turned to me and said, “That’s Dane’s house he’s living in. Dane bought it. Your grandaddy doesn’t have any more right to it than we do. Why, we have more of a right to it really. I’m the one who raised Dane. If it weren’t for me, he never would have had enough money to move that old man out of his apartment and buy him a house. Come on, we’re going back.” Then she turned the car around and back we went to Grandaddy Opal’s.

  That’s how I learned about Dane buying Grandaddy his house, and I figured if this house really did belong to Dane, then Dane would be coming here when he returned, not back to our old, rented house. He’d be coming here, back to us, I just knew it. Then a few days after Gigi had told me about the house, Aunt Casey came for a visit, which she did about every two months or so, and she proved to me that I was right. I came right out and asked her about Dane owning the house, and she nodded and said that he and Grandaddy Opal had been real close.