Dancing on the Edge

by Han Nolan

  Aunt Casey told me it wasn’t like Gigi to fall for such a line and that he must have some good qualities we didn’t know about.

  “’Course personally I think he’s an A-number-one slimeball,” she said. “He never smiles, he leers, did you notice? He leers at you like he’s the Big Bad Wolf come to eat Granny and her Little Red Riding Hood.”

  I tried to talk to Grandaddy Opal about Gigi’s new friend, but he was too busy with his own friend, Miss Emmaline Wilson, to pay it much mind. Miss Emmaline was a gospel singer with a voice so rich and strong she could topple the National Geographic towers without moving anything but her mouth. Even her speaking voice was loud. It was better if you could listen to her from another room instead of being right there with her.

  She liked to pull one of Grandaddy Opal’s rockers off the porch, set it down by the car he was working on, and yell at him while he painted. I could hear her clear inside the house with all the windows shut. Grandaddy Opal didn’t seem to mind her talking voice at all. He said he was getting hard of hearing anyway.

  Both Miss Emmaline Wilson and Mr. Eugene Wadell had been invited to my thirteenth birthday dinner, and for once I was looking forward to my birthday, even with the dreaded guests, because I knew Dane and Mama were coming home. I knew it the moment I woke up. I could feel it in the air.

  Everything was still that day, no movement in the trees, no birds flying or singing, no squirrels scrambling onto the branches. Gigi always said that when animals stay in their nests and burrows and gathered nuts and berries are left on the ground, when even the wind doesn’t stir, it is the foretelling of a cataclysmic event, and on that day, the beginning of my fourteenth year of life, everything, every creature, was waiting with held breaths for the great arrival of Mama and Dane.

  Gigi planned my birthday dinner for four in the afternoon, so I spent the morning cutting my own hair, trying to get it to look like Dane’s again. I didn’t use a mirror, I just felt along with my hands, holding up the wisps and snipping them until it felt just right. Then I climbed onto Etain and rode her around the neighborhood, spotting abandoned nuts, and daring a single leaf to twitch, flutter, or fall. I felt a zinging tingling in my spine, a pricking of my thumbs, and I searched the darkened sty for signs of their coming. I just knew Dane and Mama were coming that day.

  I had finished looking for signs and riding around the neighborhood by ten o’clock and still had so much of the day left before the party. I tried to settle down at the table in the great room with my notebook and a small stack of newspapers and magazines. These were special papers. Each one of them had a miracle story in them. That was my new hobby. I collected miracle stories. I cut them out of the newspaper or magazines and glued them in my special notebook.

  Aunt Casey said I was collecting them as a way of connecting with my past, with the story of my birth. That was Aunt Casey’s new hobby, analyzing people. She took psychology courses at the university to give her something to do at night while Uncle Toole was busy doing nobody-knew-what, and, as Gigi said, suddenly she was an expert on everything.

  Gigi didn’t like it one bit. Especially after Aunt Casey told her the reason Gigi wore robes all the time was to hide all the disappointments in her life. It made sense to me until Gigi took me to one of her Other Realms conferences and just about everyone there was walking around in long robes.

  I had planned to mention this to Aunt Casey and see what she had to say about it, but she didn’t come around so much anymore.

  She came for my birthday, though. So did Uncle Toole, right in the middle of my cutting out the article with the headline MIRACLE RESCUE SAVES MOTHER, CHILDREN. I heard them outside talking, or rather I heard Miss Emmaline Wilson saying how she was pleased to meet them and how she met Grandaddy Opal through his seat belt painting business and asking if Uncle Toole was any relation to the Hillard Dawseys of Tuggee Creek.

  I looked out the window and saw them coming toward the house, so I shoved the article in my notebook and stood up.

  “Miracle! What on earth happened to your hair?” Aunt Casey asked as soon as she saw me. I opened my mouth to speak, but she jumped in before I could say anything.

  “Even I don’t think I can fix that shag-rag mess unless we just shave it all off. If you had thick curly hair it wouldn’t be so noticeable, but you’ve got that straight wispy stuff. Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  Uncle Toole closed the door behind him and joined us, looking back over his shoulder through the window. Then he turned around and said, “That’s a black woman he’s got out there with him.”

  Aunt Casey shifted her weight so one hip bone was poking way out of her spandex, slapped her hand on the hip, and said, “No kidding. What was your first clue?”

  Toole swatted her behind. “Don’t you be acting so smarty. You just think you know it all. Running around like a bitty coed, acting no older than Miracle.”

  “I’m running around! You say I’m running around? Well let me tell you, Toole Dawsey—”

  Aunt Casey never got to finish what she was going to tell him because Grandaddy Opal and Miss Emmaline Wilson came in, and Grandaddy said he’d just heard a tornado warning over the radio. I looked out the window. A green-gray aura hovered over the neighborhood. Dane and Mama were on their way!

  Grandaddy moved to the windows and started opening them. “Miracle,” he said, “go open the windows in your bedroom.”

  Before I could do as he said, Gigi and Mr. Eugene Wadell burst into the house. “A tornado’s coming, we need to get to the basement,” Gigi said, moving toward the basement door. She opened it and paused, waiting for us all to move. “Come on, don’t waste time with windows, let’s go!”

  Then we all moved at once, with Uncle Toole trying to push through the bunch of us so he could get down the steps first. And first he was, riding down on his bottom calling out Whoa! Whoa! again, with his cowboy boots digging into nothing, the same way he did the night Dane disappeared. And that wasn’t the only coincidence.

  Grandaddy Opal’s basement was one large room, but he had said I could fix up one section of it any way I wanted. “A person’s gotta have a place they can call their own,” he said when I asked if it would be all right. Gigi didn’t know about it. No one did. Not even Grandaddy Opal, really. He’d never seen what I had done. He wouldn’t recognize it anyway. He had never seen Dane’s room, his cave. That’s what was down there, Dane’s room, just the way he left it. It had been easy to do. We had to store his furniture and boxes of stuff down there anyway. I just pulled some of it out and set it up. I pushed the writing desk up under the window and set the picture of Mama at the gate on it. I tucked his bed in the corner against the wall so Dane wouldn’t fall out when he rolled on his right side. He always fell out when he rolled to his right. I changed the sheets every week and set the piece of bathrobe sash I had saved on his pillow. I arranged the bookshelves so they formed the walls of my room and lined them with all his books, Joyce and Sartre and Kafka—all his favorites. On top of the shelves and on his desk, all around his room, I had placed the candle bottles, and lately I had been going down into the cellar, lighting some of the candles, and doing my new dances there. I’d dance with the shadow on the wall. Dane’s shadow. And I would thank him for melting, for trying to save me.

  So there it was, just as it had been the night Dane disappeared, only the candle bottles weren’t lit, and I couldn’t help but think these coincidences were proof that Dane was coming home! He and Mama were going to show up any minute. I could see it, Dane and Mama still melted, still atomic particles dissolved in the air, swirling together into the tornado. And I could see the tornado touching down and releasing them, and they would be whole again. And at that same moment, the very moment their feet touched the earth, I too would become whole, not nebulous or blank or empty, but real. It was the perfect plan. I wanted to light the candle bottles and draw myself up on Dane’s bed and wait. I wanted to close my eyes and feel them coming, feel the atmosphere around me changin
g, but everyone was there, and everyone had something to say about my room.

  Gigi just about passed out when she saw it, falling against one of the walls and holding the back of her hand to her head and exclaiming, “Oh my! Oh my!”

  Aunt Casey declared it was a shrine to Dane and I was worshiping a man I’d never really known. She said I needed a good talking to and if Gigi didn’t do it soon, she would.

  Uncle Toole said it was creepy, and Mr. Eugene Wadell stood in the midst of the candle bottles and claimed he was receiving mysterious vibrations from them. Aunt Casey told him to hush up and stay out of it, and Grandaddy Opal wanted to know what the hey was going on. Then Mr. Wadell bent down to pick up one of the candle bottles and I let out a scream because I didn’t want that man to touch anything of Dane’s. Miss Emmaline sang out in the same key as my scream and held it until we all shut our mouths. Then she started singing a song called “Amazing Grace.” Her voice could take one word in the song and run it through about fifteen different notes before picking up the next word and chasing it up and down the scale as well. The whole room felt charged with her high-voltage voice. It made my hair stand on end and the candle bottles rock. All of us just froze in our places and listened to her, and no one could take their eyes off her, least of all me.

  When she reached the end of the verse, she started all over again with the same words: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.

  I listened every time, to every word, and by about the fifth time I was singing along with her inside my head, as if that’s where the words had come from in the first place. It was just me and this voice—this rich, beautiful voice that sang my words, words I knew had somehow come from within me. Miss Emmaline just happened to hear them and was translating them.

  About the seventh time through, I felt so moved, I rose up off the bed, drifted past the candle bottles and the bookshelves to the open space, and I danced. And for the first time I understood what Susan had always told me. She said I needed to feel the music, feel the pulse inside me, speak it with my body. That night I did it. That night I remembered the lessons, each class, each combination, they were all there, all the classes that I had erased came back to me. It was all there in my head, in my body. It was a miracle! And I knew when I stopped, when Miss Emmaline Wilson stopped, that we had done something special together.

  I waited for Gigi to say something. I waited for her to jump up and say, “See my prodigy! We have another prodigy in the family! Dane is surely coming back, and when he does, we will go to the sea and rent a little place, and we will fix her tuna and tomato sandwiches, and let her dance, dance, dance!”

  Gigi opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out and finally she said, “When—where—how did she learn that? What’s been going on behind my back, Opal? Well?”

  I didn’t know where to look. Grandaddy Opal was hanging his head and picking at the dry paint on his hands, and I could tell Aunt Casey knew all about the lessons because she had gotten real interested in Mama’s picture all of a sudden. Uncle Toole was squinting up his eyes in that everybody-knows-something-but-me way he had, even though I was sure he knew, too. but had probably forgotten.

  “Opal, how could you?”

  Grandaddy Opal lifted his head and spoke, his voice angry and his hair dancing wildly on his head. “Gigi, you can’t do this. She has a right to follow her own . . .”

  “No! No, it isn’t her own, and you know it. You did this to spite me. To get back at me.”

  “You listen here.” Grandaddy Opal pointed his shaky finger at Gigi. “That child has a right to . . .”

  “I decide what rights she has. I decide!” Gigi’s arms were flapping up and down as if she were drowning in a pool.

  “You? You hardly know she’s here.”

  “You knew I didn’t want her dancing. You knew it! How could you do this to me?” Gigi turned to Aunt Casey. “Do you believe this? Behind our backs?”

  Aunt Casey looked up from Mama’s picture and glanced at Opal and then Uncle Toole and finally settled on Gigi. “Just leave it, Gigi,” she said. “It’s done, leave it.”

  Then out of the blue, Uncle Toole jumped in, pointing at Miss Emmaline and saying, “Are we all just going to pretend she ain’t black? Old man Opal’s going around with a black woman at least twenty years too young and we’re all just acting like . . .”

  “Would you hush your mouth?” Aunt Casey said, slamming down Mama’s picture. “Who are you to talk anyway? You always got some girl tagging along after you and not one of them’s older than nineteen. Why, I ought to have you arrested is what I ought to do.”

  Gigi jumped back in, accusing Aunt Casey of knowing about the lessons and yelling at Grandaddy Opal about their arrangement, and Miss Emmaline had a few loud words to say to Uncle Toole so that everyone was talking at once and no one was hearing anything. How could Mama and Dane return with all this commotion going on?

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Everybody stop. You’re messing up the vibrations. They’re coming back and I can’t hear. I can’t feel. Just stop it!”

  Everybody hushed but not because of me. The lights had gone out. Uncle Toole flicked on his lighter and lit some of the candle bottles. We all picked one up and moved to the center of the room. Outside was almost black and the sound of the wind whistled through the edges of the little pull-out window above Dane’s desk. Then the sound grew louder and louder and Miss Emmaline began to sing again, competing with the thunderous noise outside, and when the whole house down to the foundation shook, I wasn’t sure if it was the tornado hitting us or amazing grace.

  Chapter 11

  THE SOUND OF the tornado ripping Grandaddy Opal’s house from its foundation and hurling the splintered pieces across the street left us deaf and stunned. Miss Emmaline Wilson had pushed me to the floor, and when the tornado struck, she was on top of me with her arms wrapped around me, holding on tight. I didn’t think I’d ever want her to let go. It was a new experience being held like that, the way I figured Mama would have held me if she had lived, if she were there then. I knew right away Dane and Mama didn’t make it. I knew something had gone wrong in the touchdown. I wanted to blame someone and I thought about Uncle Toole but he was curled up on the floor in a ball so tight we thought we were going to need one of Grandaddy Opal’s carpentry tools to pry him open again.

  Aunt Casey tried to get him to stand up or speak, but for a good long while he just stayed tight and wouldn’t even look at her. The rest of us brushed ourselves off and examined our bodies and the basement for damage.

  Water poured out of busted pipes and spread out over the floor, running toward Uncle Toole. Aunt Casey shouted at him to get up before he drowned. Uncle Toole lifted his head and said, “It’s okay. It’s okay, I’m alive.”

  “Well, of course it is, baby,” Miss Emmaline said in a sweet, high-pitched voice that didn’t sound like hers. Then she lowered it and said, “The Lord done saved your sorry soul ’cause you still got way too much learning to do. It’s the good that die young, not folks like you.”

  I think we all expected Uncle Toole to start cussing at her and calling her names I wasn’t supposed to hear, but he didn’t. He cried and wagged his head and bit by bit his body unfolded. He stood up, the tears still streaming down his face, the jagged scar on his forehead pale and shiny from sweat. He held his thick-muscled arms straight out in front of him and walked toward Aunt Casey, looking stiff, like a mummy. We all backed away, everyone except Aunt Casey. She stood there and let him throw himself on her and beg her forgiveness for all the hurt he’d ever caused her. “I swear, babe, I’ll make it up to you.”

  Aunt Casey, straining under the weight of his arms flung over her, pointed toward the sky. “Can’t you see we got bigger problems than you to worry about right now?” she said. “Now, pull yourself together and help Opal out. I swear, of all the times to have some kind of conversion experience.”
Aunt Casey pushed him off her, but I could tell she was hopeful.

  The steps leading upstairs had collapsed in the pressure of the house being sucked away. Dane’s bookshelves had fallen over and most of the candle bottles were crushed beneath them.

  Grandaddy Opal kicked his way through the debris and was on the other side of the room with Mr. Eugene Wadell, tugging at some big piece of something blocking the exit from the basement to the backyard. Gigi cheered them on. Finally they got the way clear enough for them to reach the door. Grandaddy Opal opened it and we burst through to the outside, relieved to find the world still there. I lifted my face to the rain and saw the sun trying to break through the silvery clouds.

  Grandaddy Opal pointed to his garage. “Well look-a there, it’s still standing! The tornado skipped right over it.”

  We all trudged up the slope of Grandaddy’s backyard to the front of the garage. Miss Emmaline’s car, the car Grandaddy Opal had been working on before the tornado hit, Uncle Toole’s pickup, and Gigi’s van were all still lined up in the driveway. Gigi declared she was grateful that for once she hadn’t parked her van in front of the house. Mr. Eugene Wadell said it was because he was the one who had been driving. He was the one who had saved her car. He looked around at us all, I think expecting us to get down on our knees and thank him. Gigi took his hand and smiled, but the rest of us followed Grandaddy Opal out to the street to see what other damage had been done to the neighborhood.

  Grandaddy Opal’s house had been hit the worst but shingles and siding had been thrown all over the neighborhood, damaging other people’s roofs and breaking windows. Most of his house landed on the lawns across the street, and that’s where Grandaddy Opal headed. The rest of us trotted along behind him.

  He jumped onto the heap that was his house and started picking through his belongings, picking up books and equipment and setting them in a pile to one side. People came out of their houses and joined us, and because Grandaddy Opal didn’t say anything, neither did anyone else. They just climbed on top of the heap and pulled out anything they could. When they had an armload, they brought it across the street and set it in Grandaddy Opal’s garage.