Dancing on the Edge

by Han Nolan

  Uncle Toole read the note.

  “Says here you’re erasing your name off the blackboard.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So?”

  I shrugged, and he shook his head.

  “Go find me a pen so’s I can sign this thing.”

  I brought him my pen and he wrote at the bottom of the note, “So What!!!” and signed it.

  I gave my English teacher the note before I went home that afternoon, and I erased my name. I heard the teacher sighing behind me. The next day was Wednesday and my name was back on the board. The teacher had me read my story first. I had written a story about a ballerina who loved to do pirouettes. She did them all the time—morning, noon, and night—and she got so good at doing them and so fast that she began to spin like a tornado. She spun so fast she couldn’t stop. She got thinner and thinner until she was as thin as a needle. Still she spun because she couldn’t stop. She spun until she disappeared.

  The teacher reminded me that the story was supposed to be about a fantasy vacation not just a fantasy, and I told him it was about a fantasy vacation. The kids laughed.

  At the end of the class, the English teacher erased my name off the board. He just rubbed it out, took it away. I asked him to put it back up so that I could erase it. He refused and told me he had had enough of my nonsense. I stopped signing my name on all my papers after that and the teachers gave me zeros. They said they would give me a real grade if I signed my name and turned the papers back in. Zero is a real grade. I didn’t sign my name. At the end of the year I got all incompletes on my report card. I didn’t show it to Uncle Toole or Aunt Casey and they never asked to see it.

  UNCLE TOOLE wanted a baby. That’s what their latest fights were all about. That’s all they talked and argued about. Uncle Toole said the tornado had made everything clear to him. He said we all could have died. He wanted a baby to carry on the Dawsey name.

  At night, he followed Aunt Casey from room to room, even coming into my room, if that’s where Aunt Casey had settled, and argued again and again about having children. And every time they argued I closed my eyes and drifted away to my safe place, the place with the green fields and butterfly blanket. The place where I used to talk to Dane. He wasn’t there anymore; his voice had gone. I knew he felt too disappointed in me to speak and that my trying to bring him and Mama back, willing them to appear on my thirteenth birthday—and thirteen a very bad luck number—only sent Gigi and Grandaddy Opal away, and Dane and Mama were no closer to me. I’d lost them all. All I had left were Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole, and they were fighting about having children.

  “Children!” I remember Aunt Casey shouting, breaking into my fairy dream. “What do I need with children? I’ve already got one child, and I’m not talking about Miracle. Besides, you know we agreed long ago we weren’t going to have any children, that I had done all the raising up I was going to do.”

  “But come on, babe, every woman wants a little bundle to cuddle. It ain’t natural not to,” Uncle Toole had whined.

  “You’re saying I’m not normal? Don’t try reverse psychology on me. Anyways, as soon as I have a baby tying me to the house, you’ll be off again, same as usual. I know you, Toole Dawsey, you’ll be bored and restless in no time. Bored and restless, bored and restless, that’s your middle name.”

  Aunt Casey was right, too. He could never sit still. Even when he was lying on the bed watching TV, he could never stay on one channel for more than a couple of minutes, and he was always fussing with his beer cans and tearing at his cigarette pack. Aunt Casey told him he had attention deficit disorder and if they had a baby, the baby would more than likely have it, too. She read to him all about it from one of her psychology books, pointing out that the person in the case study ran red lights all the time just the way he did, but Uncle Toole didn’t listen. He was too busy picking out food grime from between the slats in the kitchen table with a toothpick.

  Aunt Casey said he needed to be on medication. She’d gotten to thinking just about everybody needed to be on medication. She said Grandaddy Opal could use some Valium or something to calm him down. “He’s so hyper. He’s an itch,” she said. “He’s just an itch.”

  She said I needed Prozac. “You must have chronic depression,” she told me once in front of Mrs. Beane, who had come for her final wig fitting.

  “You never talk anymore. You’re like a ghost drifting around this house. Really, I never know what you’re thinking. You used to talk. You used to stick your tongue out at me, remember? When you were younger?” She shook her head and patted Mrs. Beane’s new hair.

  “What do you think?” She held a mirror above the back of Mrs. Beane’s head so she could see how it looked.

  “I don’t really know her, but she does look awful thin and pale. And her hair’s a bit peculiar, isn’t it?”

  “I meant your hair,” Aunt Casey said.

  “Oh, yes, it fits much better.” Mrs. Beane turned to me. “What do you think, dear?”

  I looked up from the book I was reading. I studied Mrs. Beane’s face. She reminded me of one of the wig heads, one of the shiny plastic heads with indentations where the eyes should go and a mound for the nose and no mouth at all. I didn’t want to tell her this, I didn’t want to tell her I could already see her astral and physical bodies separating, that she wasn’t going to make it, she wouldn’t survive her cancer. I didn’t want to look at her anymore or think about her. I tried to say something nice, but when I opened my mouth nothing came out.

  Aunt Casey turned Mrs. Beane around. “See what I mean? She didn’t used to be like this. She used to have some life in her. She used to always be jumping around on the furniture, asking Dane—that’s her father—to watch. ‘Dane, Dane, look-it, Dane,’” she said, imitating me. “‘Look. Dane, look. Dane, Dane, watch this.’” She turned to see if I was listening.

  I was.

  “I think purple depresses you,” she said, taking up her scissors and cutting some invisible hairs from the bottom of the wig. “Gigi’s not here, why not try some red or green—or pink. Pink’s a pretty color. And you could grow your hair back out and I’d buy you hair ribbons—pinks and reds and greens, plaids even. Don’t you think pink would be pretty on her, Mrs. Beane?”

  I stayed in the purple. Purple was spiritual, purple was power. Purple protected me from the wig heads that had no faces, and from cancer, and from the dark. I had grown afraid of the dark, of what might be waiting for me there. I put on Dane’s bathrobe, over the purple—a double shield.

  Chapter 14

  THAT SUMMER, Gigi went to Greece with Mr. Eugene Wadell and married him, standing in the ruins of an ancient cathedral near the Sanctuary of Asklepios. I didn’t know she had gone until Aunt Casey handed me a letter from her, saying how she guessed Gigi had discovered Mr. Eugene Wadell’s one good trait: He had a lot of money.

  I took the letter to my room and read it with my back to the wig heads.

  Miracle,

  It’s ridiculous that Casey didn’t tell you all this about me going to Greece and getting married. By the time you get this letter we’ll have been here forever, and I’ll be an old married lady, but Casey, the psychologist, insisted I tell you myself, so now you know. We got married in these ancient ruins under some lovely pine trees, at least I think they were pine. The whole place is a sanctuary to the Greek god-physician Asklepios, and way back when, patients would sleep in the building called the abaton where the god would visit them in their dreams and miraculously cure them. It’s very exciting! Some of the stories of the miracles and magic cures were carved into the stones here. Well, Eugene and I held a séance and contacted the ancient god and he has given us the healing powers. I have been visited by him several times in my dreams. When we get back to the States (that’s how they say it here when you’re talking about going home), we’re going to have our own sanctuary done up like the pictures of the one here. Not the Gymnasium, or some of the other buildings, but we’ll have healing baths an
d the abaton where you sleep and receive the healing visitations. So, how about that? How about your old Gigi getting married?

  I’m sending you something real special in the mail. It may not arrive for months, who knows, it’s got to get all the way from Greece to Alabama! Now you know what’s going on.

  Gigi

  After I read the letter, Aunt Casey came into my room. She sat down at the wig table and picked up the blond wig with the needle and thread dangling from the underside and said, “So did she tell you?”

  “That she got married? Yes.”

  “Anyway, isn’t it a kicker? Gigi married. And who would have thought that little phony was rich.”

  “What’s he do?” I asked.

  “Do? I don’t think he does anything. Maybe he won the lottery, or maybe he stole it, I don’t know.”

  “When’s Gigi coming back? When will I move back in with her and Grandaddy Opal?”

  “Miracle,” Aunt Casey said, pausing with the needle in one hand and the wig balanced on the other. “We need to have us a heart-to-heart.” She poked the needle into the wig’s cap and pulled the thread through. I folded Gigi’s letter back into its envelope and waited.

  “It’s just that now Gigi’s married she’ll be living with that Eugene Wadell. He’s got a place in Tennessee.”

  “Tennessee?”

  Aunt Casey held up the wig and examined it, peering into the underside as if she were about to put it on her face. “Yeah, Tennessee.” She came out from behind the wig. “Come on, you’re thirteen, you know how it is. She’s a newlywed. She needs to be alone with her hubby.”

  I shrugged. “I know. It’s okay. Grandaddy Opal and I can do all right on our own. We were really on our own before anyway. His house will be ready soon, I bet, and we . . .”

  Aunt Casey shook her head. “There’s a lot of red tape with insurance and all. His house, who knows when they’ll get around to that, and anyway, it’s been decided, you’ll just stay on with us.”

  Aunt Casey’s face went back into the wig and I just sat there on my bed, the bed that was really a sofa, only Uncle Toole or somebody sawed the back off of it. I stuck the letter in the pocket of my robe and stood up.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go ride Etain.”

  “Good. Good idea.” Aunt Casey popped out from behind the wig and smiled, and for once there wasn’t any lipstick stuck to her teeth.

  I lost Gigi’s letter on that ride with Etain. I don’t know how. It must have fallen out of the pocket of Dane’s robe. The wind must have carried it off somewhere.

  We didn’t talk about Gigi or her marriage or Tennessee all summer. I didn’t talk much at all that summer because there was no one around to talk to. Uncle Toole’s moving business was so busy he never got in till late at night, sometimes after midnight even, and then he’d have to get up at six the next day and load up another van all over again. He came home tired and dirty and moaning.

  Aunt Casey had decided to go for a degree in psychology instead of just taking random courses in it, and every spare minute she had was spent down at the university. She had even begun to dress differently. Instead of spandex and tight sparkly shirts, she wore baggy jeans and extra large tee shirts and socks and flat wide sandals that had no back strap and kept flying off her feet. She had to learn a whole new way of walking. Her hair was combed down, too, less stiff, and she kept it dyed red and wore almost no makeup. She reminded me of Susan, my old dance teacher.

  I asked Aunt Casey about taking dancing lessons again since I was going to be living with them, and she went white in the face and said I’d better not.

  I danced anyway. No one was home. I taught myself. Every day I danced, slow quiet dances, movement without music. I couldn’t play any music because I had to listen in case Dane had forgiven me and wanted to speak to me again. I decided he must have gone back in time, found Mama, and the two of them had passed through one of those wormholes Grandaddy Opal had talked about. One of the wormholes that you could pass through and into a parallel universe. That’s where they were, living in a parallel universe and waiting for me to find my way to them. Of course, I wasn’t sure. Last time I had been so sure. I had to be careful, certain, so I waited, and danced, and listened.

  I stopped dancing at night, when it got dark. If no one else was home, I turned on all the lights and sat on the kitchen counter drinking sweet tea and counting to ten thousand. As long as someone came home before I reached ten thousand I knew I was safe. I still didn’t know why I was so frightened, so afraid of the dark, as if the darkness mirrored something hidden, dangerous, but dancing and counting kept me safe.

  We were always going to go see Grandaddy Opal one of these days but that day never came. I spoke to him on the phone a few times, but he seemed distracted, and it was as if he had to force himself to sound happy to be talking to me. He never called me, and I stopped calling him after a while because I understood. I knew he blamed me for trying to bring Mama and Dane back too soon. He blamed me for his heart attack. I rode Etain a lot that summer, riding farther and farther away from home each time. I read the newspaper every day and cut out any miracle stories I found and glued them in my new notebook. I made my own meals out of what we had in the house: spaghetti with salad dressing, Frosted Mini-Wheats in beer, mayonnaise sandwiches, and sometimes wild cherry tomatoes picked from a one-time garden in the back of the house, but they gave me diarrhea. Then school started up again and Gigi’s package arrived from Greece.

  It was leaning against the front door of the house when Etain and I rode home from my first day at school. I brought it to my bedroom and set it down on Aunt Casey’s wig table to open it. Beneath the brown paper wrapping was a box with a letter taped to the top. I tore it off and read it.

  Miracle,

  The Greeks are full of the knowledge of magic and the supernatural. I found this old book of love potions and magic ceremonies in a musty, dusty bookstore underneath a pile of Life magazines, of all things. The book is in Greek, but the pictures are great. Thought you might be interested. The shawl, of course, is to wear. So that’s all from this happily married lady—

  Gigi

  The book was written in Greek just as Gigi had said, and the strange letters made the idea of love potions seem more magical and exciting. The pictures were pen-and-ink drawings of plants and bugs used, I guessed, in the potions. The shawl was silk, dyed a deep purple with shiny gold threads running through it, outlining the shape of a giant red bird. The tassels that ran around the edges of the shawl were made of tiny silver and gold beads on loops of gold thread. I doubled the shawl over so it made a triangle and wrapped it around my shoulders. It felt heavy and the tip of the triangle came all the way down to the backs of my knees. I decided to wear it to school.

  I knew everyone in school would stare at me in my shawl, but one girl, Mary Louise Pickard, a popular girl who usually traveled in a pack of other girls, stopped me in the hallway and said, “Cool, where’d you get it?”

  She moved around me the way Grandaddy Opal did years ago when I had fallen down the stairs, and I felt a tingling buzz of excitement shoot through my body and spill across my chest. It was hard to breathe, the pleasure was so great.

  A couple of Mary Louise’s friends also stopped to stare.

  “Is that real gold?” one of them asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of getting it stolen? I don’t think I’d wear it to school,” said Mary Louise.

  “No, it has an ancient curse on it,” I said, feeling the buzz rush up to my head and flash behind my eyes. “It can only be given away, never stolen, or the person who stole it will die a terrible death.”

  “Really?” the group said, looking at one another.

  “Oh, yes. It’s from Greece, which is just full of curses.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “Huh?” I turned around to face another girl, another stranger.

  “Like, is it supposed to be magic, or something?”r />
  “Oh, my grandmother gave it to me—uh, passed it down to me. I come from a long line of mediums and healers and clairvoyants. The shawl is—is used for love ceremonies.”

  “Love ceremonies!” several of the girls said at the same time, and their voices were pitched higher than before. They moved in closer to me, and Mary Louise asked me what kind of love ceremonies, but the bell rang and I couldn’t answer; we were all late for our classes.

  After school, while I was unlocking Etain from the bike rack, some of the girls came back up to me and asked about the ceremonies. By then I had had time to think. I told them how each generation of women in my family had one of the supernatural talents. My grandmother could contact the dead, my mother could see into the future, and I could cast love spells, spells that would make someone fall in love with you.

  The girls were laughing and their voices got high and squeally again. They had turned to each other, ignoring me and talking about Cash Franklin, the hottest guy in school. One of the girls mentioned another boy’s name and they all laughed, imagining him under their spell. More girls gathered around me and they told one another who they wanted for their “love punkin” and laughed some more and pretended to be under a spell themselves, and some of them missed their bus but they didn’t care.

  Etain and I stood at the center of the crowd almost forgotten and then someone asked, “But what if more than one person likes the same guy? Then what?”

  Everyone got quiet and turned to me, waiting for my answer.

  I tightened my shawl, making a double knot, keeping my fingers busy and trying to think fast. My knees were shaking. “Oh, well,” I said, still busy with the knot, “I do a spell that only lasts a couple of weeks, and whoever comes to me first gets the spell. Because, uh, in order to make the spell permanent, the guy who’s under the spell must come to me and request the girl who put him under the spell. If he does that, then it becomes permanent, but permanent means forever, so I’m very careful about doing permanent spells. Permanent can be a disaster.” I tried to give them a knowing look to show them I had had plenty of experience with disasters.