House of Dance

by Beth Kephart

  “What size do you wear?” she finally asked.

  “Seven,” I said.

  “You young girls with your tiny feet—oh, what I wouldn’t give.”

  I was rescued by another woman whom Eleanor called Annette, who was only slightly out of breath by the time Marissa buzzed her in. She had perfect legs, arctic hair. Her hazel eyes had dark, deep cores. She carried a notebook with her, where, I’d learn, she copied down her lesson steps. She carried, in addition, a pair of silver satin shoes.

  “Annette!” Eleanor said.

  “Hello, Eleanor.”

  “Are you working the mambo with Max today?”

  “I believe we’re working on the tango.”

  “This girl wears a size seven shoe,” Eleanor said, by way of introduction, I guess.

  “Rosie,” Marissa said now from behind the desk. “The girl is Rosie.”

  “You’ll love the dancing,” Annette said, and she was one of those white-haired women who seem more young than old: the way she talked, the look in her eyes, the pure whiteness of her hair. I wanted to ask her something, anything. I thought: She might have been Aideen if Aideen hadn’t died, if Aideen were still with Granddad today. But then Max was coming down the hall and calling out her name. He was saying good-bye to Teenie, blowing her a kiss, smiling. He had little beads of sweat on his forehead, but he didn’t seem the least bit tired.

  “Annette,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. He leaned down toward Annette’s side of the couch and held out his arm. She stood and opened one elbow like a wing. They turned and, loop-armed, walked down the hall.

  “I’m taking with Peter today,” Eleanor explained as the two went off.

  “Oh,” I said. “Peter.”

  “Canadian,” she said. “And superb. And boy, does he know the smooths.”

  I nodded again, having nothing to say. I didn’t know what a smooth was.

  Marissa had disappeared; she had vanished from the desk somehow. Eleanor had had enough of me. Sighing loudly, she crossed her legs and reached for something on a nearby table. I did as she did, sorted through the printed stuff until I found a book titled Dance. It was heavy and thick, a book of photographs and captions, and when I pulled it down onto my lap, it opened to a page titled “Rumba,” to a map of Cuba, to pictures of dancers in skintight sparkle. “Rumba is a bridge to the past,” I read. “To African desire and Cuban courtship. The rumba is primal.” I stopped reading and looked again at the pictures. Skin and glitter. Hips. I turned the pages. I flipped back.

  “The Argentine tango spirals up from hearsay and legend,” I read, between photos of men and women dressed in severest black and bloodiest red, photos of men and women tight and close. “It comes from slang and intrigue, from the habañera rhythm that had drifted out from the ports of Havana toward Argentina. From the iniquitous Barrio de las Ranas of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. From the rising tide of European immigrants and pampas cowboys, from native impulses and European influences, from the primitive and the lyric, from joy and melancholy. Tango is barrel organs and guitars, opera traditions and street singers.” I tried to understand what any of this meant. I tried to fathom the fox-trot of New York City and the waltz of the Hapsburg court, the cha-cha of Cuba, the samba of Brazil. I couldn’t get enough of the pictures or the words. I could not stop checking the clock. Some new dancers buzzed in and strapped on their shoes. Some dancers left. I kept reading.

  “Rosie Keith?” Finally I heard my name and looked up, and it was Max, Max releasing Annette from his arm, Max bowing in my direction. “Your first lesson?” he said, opening his elbow for me.

  “My first,” I said, and let him help me up. I hooked my arm in his in my best Annette style. I took the long way down the hall.

  SIXTEEN

  HE ASKED ME TO walk across the floor, just a regular walk; I did. He said to walk backward, and because he asked me to, I did, self-conscious in tall shoes. Do you know how when someone is looking at you and very exclusively at you, you feel put together wrong? That, right then, was me.

  Max was—best guess—early thirties. He wore his hair short and slicked back, and up the long pole of one of his forearms were little twines of leather. His jeans were dragging-on-the-floor black jeans. His shoes poked out from his jeans. “Chin up, back straight, “Max told me, and then: “Put your heart toward my heart. Yes. Right. Now hold this frame and dance.”

  He stepped forward, and I slid back. He stepped to the side and took me with him. He stepped back and I stepped forward, and then we did it again. “The waltz,” he said, as if he’d just introduced me to his aunt. “And the count is three-quarter time.” I could feel the muscles of his arms beneath his shirt. They were Olympic-caliber muscles.

  It was three fifteen in the afternoon, and besides me and Max and a wedding couple there were Eleanor and Peter, who was tall with narrow hips. She was leaning her forehead lightly against his, an odd, nervous look on her face. “Turn the music off,” I heard her say after she’d tried several moves, none of which had made her happy. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Peter said something about the bend in her knee. Eleanor said she was feeling off-balance. The music kept playing, and they started again. They wound their way close, and I stepped back.

  “Keep your focus on your own lesson,” Max said. I blushed, and we box stepped and made yet another round of boxes. Max said I’d need about a pound of attitude. He said I’d have to come to think of music as my skin. But first, he said, there is posture and spine. There are the basic fundamentals, and we’d spend our time on that. I thought about Granddad down the street, maybe asleep. I thought about Leisha, and Nick, and Rocco, and my mom. I thought a lot about Mom.

  We boxed again and then more, long enough for Max finally to take what he called my measure. There were little crumbs of green in his eyes, though his eyes were mostly dark, and he stood so straight, you’d have thought he carried some coin upon his head. Rubbing the bottom of his chin, he shook his head thoughtfully. Then he framed me up again with his arms, and I remembered a doll I had on a shelf at home, propped up in a metal wire stand. You can’t actually look at someone who is standing so close, even if you want to, even though you know, when you tell Leisha about it whenever you tell Leisha about it, that she’ll ask you everything.

  Now Eleanor and Peter were splashing against each other like buckets of paint; something he must have said had turned her can’t into a can. And now through the door that opened to the roof came Marissa, a puff of cigarette smoke trailing behind her. If she recognized me from two hours before, she didn’t act as if she did, and now she cut across the floor and disappeared, and then I heard Max was counting. “One TWO three and one TWO three and one,” he was saying, and I was trying to keep up, and just when I thought that maybe I could get the hang of that one step, he said that it was time to test my rumba.

  “My rumba?” I said, wiping the sweat off my forehead with a gooey palm, and he said yes, the rumba, and he started counting, not with numbers but with words, slow quickquickslow, quickquickslow, adding a quicker after slow before he stepped forward and I stepped back, and he stepped to the side and I went with him, and then he stepped back and I stepped forward and tried to remember whatever I’d just read.

  “Think of weather,” he said, “and geography,” fitting one hand to the base of my neck and one onto my shoulder, to release me, he said, from myself. He bent down and wedged out my feet until they were pointing away from each other. “Compass needles,” he said. “Think of that.” He said to try to keep my torso still so that I could work the hips, the knees, the feet. “Count with me, Rosie. Slow quickquickslow, quickquick—”

  “—slow,” I said.

  “Quickquick—”

  I felt like a two-year-old. It was so much harder than I’d thought it would be. I’d been crazy, absolutely, to think I could learn to dance. I pulled back from him and caught my breath. “No one ever said,” I said, “that dancing was so tough.”


  “No one’s an instant dancer,” he said.

  “I just thought—”

  “You’re not supposed to think. You are supposed to dance. Think of yourself as a rag doll for now. Let me see what you can do.” Max went to the sound booth to change the song. He returned and stood before me, still. Then, to the music that had started to play, he led me through a dance. “Show me your split,” he said, and I did the lousiest one. “Put your arm across my shoulder here, and let me lift you as I spin.” I felt my hair get hot and loose with curls, my waistband pull. I felt myself being carried across the floor. We were stopping; we were starting; we were spinning, stepping, stopping. We were small steps and tight steps and scallops and lines, and Max was thinking, and as he thought, the green parts of his eyes got bright. “All right,” he said. “There’s talent here. Definitely something to work with.”

  “I have to get really good really fast,” I said.

  “With dancing there’s no rushing.”

  “I know,” I said, and felt my face get hot. “But this has to do with my grandfather.” We were walking down the hall now, my arm linked with his. There was a gorgeous girl my age out on the couch lobby, fixing her shoes, waiting for him to call her name. “It’s a long story,” I said, feeling weird again about my shoes. “But I can tell you next time.”

  “You’ll have to practice when you’re not here,” he said. “And you’ll have to take a lot of lessons.”

  “I will do both,” I said.

  “Dancing is expensive.”

  “I have money.”

  “Check the schedule with Marissa then,” he said. “Sometimes the evenings are best.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE NEXT DAY started out hot and got much hotter. It began with the sound of crows and the buzz of a juicy housefly that I’d probably let in through the back door by mistake when I was inviting fireflies. Mom was home but not up, and I knew without getting out of my bed how she was lying in hers, her face toward the two old windows she’d have propped up with wide sticks. She’d told me once when I was little that she liked to smell the sky. Not the air but the sky; there was a difference, she said. The sky was what pushed down on us, and the air was what rose high. Sky had the smell of stars in it. Sky had the smell of the moon. I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that I’ve ever smelled the sky, even in spite of Nick Burkeman and even in spite of my mother.

  Except for the crows and the fly, all was quiet. I lay in my bed on my back with my arms pretzeled behind my head, thinking about rumba and box steps, about Max and silver shoes, wishing my mother would push open my door, push her head through, say something, one thing that would make me feel safe again, that would make me trust her with my secret. How have you been? I wanted her to ask me. How’s Granddad? I waited. I waited. Granddad has a nurse named Teresa, I would have told her, except that now she’d made me wait too long. Granddad’s been playing Sammy Davis Jr. songs. Granddad’s been talking about Grandmom. Granddad hardly eats, he’s hardly thirsty. I’ve started dancing. I wanted to be asked what now I would not tell, because she wasn’t up and she still had not gotten up, and I had already found out for sure that I was plenty old to take care of myself. I didn’t need my mother. I just wanted her to come and find out about me, ask me for her sandals back, notice how I was changing. I wanted her to look and see me.

  But she wouldn’t and she didn’t, and it got to be stupid, lying and waiting, so I started doing morning things. Took a shower. Brushed my teeth. Pumped on my mascara. Put my wet hair up in a plastic claw and tied on my sneakers. I was going straight to Sweet Loaves for breakfast, I’d decided. I had money to spend, and I loved those raisins fresh.

  “Rosie?” I heard my name when I was halfway down the steps, coming from the kitchen, not the bedroom. She must have sneaked down while I was primping.

  “What?” I stayed just where I was, took no step farther.

  “Could you come here, Rosie? For a minute?”

  “What for?”

  “Please, Rosie. Don’t make me yell. You know how I hate that.”

  I came down each step the way an old turtle would, scraping the bottoms of my sneakers against the navy-blue nubs of the treads and risers. Mom didn’t tell me to hurry up, and I knew she wouldn’t; she was, by virtue of her own vanishing act, losing her right to order me around. Finally I was down, and where I stood was navy blue, and where she stood was marigold colored. She was wearing her bunny rabbit robe, and her hair was ponytail high. In her hands she held a tea mug.

  “I wanted to talk with you,” she said.

  “What for?” I asked, standing right where I was.

  “Could you sit with me for a while?”

  “Granddad’s expecting me.”

  “This won’t take long.”

  I didn’t budge. “I can hear you from here.”

  “Rosie.”

  “I’m not planning on changing my mind about Mr. Paul, if that’s what you’re hoping,” I said, coming a little, most reluctantly closer, leaning my hips against the kitchen opening.

  “You don’t have to like him, Rosie. But you do have to be polite.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “I want him to feel welcome here. I want—”

  “He’s married, Mom.”

  “I know what he is.” Suddenly she looked minuscule sitting at the table with her fuzzy rabbit on. She’d pulled her knees up to her chin, and she still had both hands on the mug, and she was looking out the window, toward the stiff black socks on Mrs. Robertson’s line, all marching in a row to nowhere. I wasn’t going to talk about Mr. Paul. I decided right then that I wasn’t.

  “Did you know Granddad has a nurse?” I said.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk with you about.”

  “You knew?”

  “Of course I knew, Rosie. I talk with Granddad’s caseworker every day.”

  I stared at her so hard that she must have felt me looking through her, until finally she turned and stared back at me. “I thought you were mad at Granddad,” I said, tying my arms up into such a big knot that nothing she could say next could hurt me, or surprise me, or throw me off my balance.

  “That doesn’t mean that I don’t love him.”

  “If you loved him, you’d go and visit.”

  “I will.”

  “Yeah? When?”

  “When I can, Rosie. When I can. You have to trust me.”

  “The nurse’s name is Teresa,” I said. “And she has a tattoo for a bracelet.”

  “Teresa has had to make a few changes at Granddad’s house,” my mother said, “which is what I wanted to tell you. Wanted you to know, Rosie, before you got there.”

  I felt my heart throwing itself around in my chest. I felt my tongue get all dry and sticky. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” My voice was louder than my mother liked, but I couldn’t keep it gentle.

  “She’s just making things easier on him, Rosie, is all.”

  “Like what things easier?”

  “Like he needs a wheelchair—not all the time but sometimes. He needs his life all on one floor. He’s getting weaker, honey. Teresa is there to help. She’ll be there now around the clock, sleeping in an upstairs room.”

  My mother turned and looked back out the window. Kept her chin on the table of her knees and her hands wrapped tight around her mug, and I could feel that she loved Granddad, I could feel that it was true, but I was also the kind of frightened that came out as anger, the kind of frightened that blamed her.

  “Rosie, I’m sorry,” my mother was saying, but I couldn’t hear her anymore; I wouldn’t. “Rosie—” but I was already running, flying, through the dining room, through the living room, through the front door. My sneakers slapped the sidewalk and the road and the turn in the road and made tunnel echoes, then, under the railroad tracks, made sneaker sounds beneath the House of Dance. I ran past every single store without stopping. I ran, and I heard the crows flapping behind me. I r
an, and I was faster than any train. I ran, and I was calling out his name—Granddad! Granddad!—long before I was close enough for him to know that his true one granddaughter was on her way.

  EIGHTEEN

  TERESA MET ME at Granddad’s side door, her tattooed wrist draped with a towel, her hair back and high in a clip. “Rosie,” she said, blowing her Spanish straight through my name. “Rosie.” Saying it twice, as if she were finishing my mother’s sentence.

  I was out of breath and sweaty. The crows were still so close that I felt their wing wind, the flying electric charges of all their quarreling, and my lungs were chewed up, my voice raspy. “Where is he?” I spat out, not meaning to spit, not really.

  “Waiting for you,” Teresa said. “Like always. But Rosie, listen to me, he—” I didn’t give her time to finish, just motored forward on my hissy sneakers, past her, through the kitchen and around the corner, into the room of books and brown, leaving the squawking crows behind. The couch was gone. A La-Z-Boy too. In their place were a bed and a wheelchair in a little half circle, facing the window. Half the bed was propped up, to make a chair. Thin silver railings ran along the sides. Granddad was wearing his regular khakis and a white, short-sleeved shirt that had no collar and no buttons. He had no blanket, was hooked to no machines, but he sat behind the silver railings, a magazine low in his lap. The place smelled like chemical lemons. The sun was smashed against the window glass, pressing noisily through.