Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  We dance through the evening, the smell of perfumed sweat filling the little building, the windows steaming over. The old ladies occupying the folding chairs in their wilting dresses try to keep their gazes interested and curious, expectant. Like any moment, some good thing might happen. A couple times, I ask them to dance. I smile like a salesman and dance gently; they smell of powder and ammonia. The bones of their hands and ribs feel as fragile as bird bones. I almost envy them, for how imminent their deaths are, how perfectly placed at the end of their long years. Just where it is supposed to be. All my life death has been cutting ahead in line: first my father, a heart attack at forty-two, my mother of ovarian cancer at fifty-six, and now my daughter, at eleven months, killed by a fucking acronym. When we finish dancing, they kiss my cheek or squeeze my hand. Rhonda tells me I’m a sweetheart.

  Friday night at Kmart, after the floors are all done, the boys throw a party. I allow this for certain occasions, and lately I’ve allowed it more and more. Party the rest of your lives, I feel like telling them. Tonight is Corliss’s birthday, plus Danny and Lisa’s first wedding anniversary. They all bring along wives and girlfriends. The assistant manager gives me a look before he locks me in, but he doesn’t say anything; as long as the place is shiny clean at 8:00 A.M. he doesn’t really care what happens while it’s dark.

  The boys work fast and by one o’clock the place is scrubbed and the supplies are back in the storeroom. Danny cranks up all the stereos in the appliance department to the same station, and while Led Zeppelin rattles the counters, we dig bags of stale popcorn out of the snack bar. On the returns shelf in the back they find open packages of candy bars and Red Hots. The boys have all brought small coolers loaded with six-packs. Lisa and Danny start dancing in the aisle beside sporting goods, where a large empty space waits to be made into the garden center for spring. Lisa is eight months pregnant, and I stand watching her, the high, clear glow of her skin, the sway of her back. I keep bugging her to quit smoking. I remember how relieved we were after the first trimester with all its sickness and worry, how Rhonda invented cravings she did not really have just so she could send me out in the middle of the night for bean burritos or Milky Ways. This was my part of her pregnancy, helping her learn to breathe, feeding her, all the usual. We gave into it, feeling corny. A kid feeling, like playing house, like you could take a good thing and make it last forever. We believed that for a while. Stupid.

  Carlo and his girlfriend Tammy borrow a couple of bikes from sporting goods and ride in circles around the store, disappearing for minutes at a time, their whoops and laughs echoing around us. The rest of us sit in the snack bar drinking beer, watching the dancers, waiting for the bicyclers to show up again. Wilson shows us where the doctors put the pins in his arm after his motocross accident. From that we are drawn into the usual drinking habit of trading stories and scars. I show them mine from when the lawnmower sent a roofing nail into my leg.

  “That hardly even counts, Curt,” Terry says, and pulls up his shirt to show us a foot-long scar across his chest from a car wreck when he was sixteen.

  “My Uncle Don has a bullet in his jaw from Vietnam,” Wilson says. “You can see this little lump.”

  “My roommate has a polycarbon rod in his arm,” Terry says. “Broke it operating a jackhammer.”

  “I went to grade school with this kid, had a metal plate in his head,” I tell them. “You could see the dent in his skull.” They all laugh at this, the girls making faces.

  “No way,” Terry says. “What was his name?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t remember. Too long ago.”

  This is a lie, but I don’t feel like talking about him. It is too long, and it’s not a funny story. Joseph Turlow had been in my class since third grade, and he did have a metal plate in his head following surgery to correct a benign tumor putting pressure on his brain. But we didn’t learn anything about the plate or the tumor until the sixth grade, when Mr. Levine was our teacher. Until then, everyone had pretty much ignored Joseph, afraid of his injury, of our imaginings about that metal plate. He was a fat kid, with a constant dewy sprinkling of sweat on the skin under his eyes. His teeth protruded at odd angles. His ears were overly small. All of this—what we might otherwise have thought of as the normal, awkward differences we all had (in my case, freckles and ears that stuck out)—instead seemed connected to the metal plate, as if his ugliness had been created in him or attached to him, much like the plate itself. We stayed away, averted our eyes, stole looks at the dent on his head, the clipped hair there that seemed to grow in a different direction from the rest. He sat at the end of our lunchroom table, and at recess spent his half hour hurling rocks over the fence. I felt bad for him, as I suspect everyone did, but our whispered knowledge of the plate in his head formed a barrier through which we were not able to approach him.

  All of this Mr. Levine attempted to change. He told us one day that we all might learn from Joseph, then called him up to the front of the class and made him explain about the operation. Joseph stared at the pair of flags in their brass stands while he mumbled the details, his face darkening as he spoke, sweat dripping from the tip of his nose. Everyone looked away, some laugh. Mr. Levine sat on the edge of his desk with his legs crossed, watching Joseph and thoughtfully stroking his chin. Joseph knew all the words associated with his illness, and spoke about his dura and brain stem, about the tools they had used on him. He said these words the way a parrot might, with no apparent understanding of them. When he finished, Mr. Levine asked if we had any questions, then produced and passed around a plate of iron he said was the approximate size and shape of Joseph’s. From this he segued into a discussion of magnetics and the properties of stainless steel. Joseph seemed unaffected by this, though after we left in the spring for Easter vacation he never came back. I didn’t understand why I felt so bad for him. What I wanted all those years, I thought, was for people to stop ignoring Joseph for his steel plate, to accept it the way we accepted and joked about our own crossed eyes or glasses or out-of-style clothes. But when Mr. Levine had tried to do just that, it seemed like the worst thing I’d ever watched. I thought then, and think now, that the worst of our anguish we carry in our bowels, part of the rhythm of daily life, but hidden, not discussed or shown—not to our classmates, our science teachers, our husbands or wives.

  Saturday night we went back to the dance. Things that week had seemed better, and on Wednesday I did not fight with Dr. Goodwin. We were able to go shopping together again at Food-4-Less, as we had always done before, making a game of our chores, but had not done since Sarah died. The shopping cart with the bolted-on baby seat was now just another useless device. Rhonda pushed past it without looking, but once we were inside, I fell back into old jokes—sneaking grapes out of the bag, sacking up and weighing one peanut—and soon had her smiling. These were old roles we were playing; the memorized lines came easily.

  We are late this time and miss most of the lessons. Phil is finishing up, wiping his face with a bandanna while the band retunes. We start to practice our balance and swing.

  “No, no, Rhonda,” I say. “Both at the same time: balance and swing, not balance or swing.” She laughs out loud.

  “Let’s make a pact not to step on each other,” she says.

  I shake her hand. “Deal.”

  “Remember everything Phil taught us.”

  “Phil who?” She laughs again, and I pull close and kiss the side of her face.

  There is a strong grip on my shoulder and I turn to face Robert Olander, who was manager of Kmart the year I started the cleaning contracting business. He’d been transferred only a month before Sarah died.

  “Curt, good as hell to see you,” he says, pumping my hand. His voice is low, and I can barely hear him over the noise of the band, of people talking and laughing. “This is Rhonda, then. Good to see you out.”

  I’m surprised to hear him call Rhonda by name, as they have never met. But worse is his tone of conciliation, of pity. I f
eel my stomach clench up.

  “I was sorry to hear of…about your losing the baby,” he says. He looks at me. “Mr. Comensoli told me at a manager’s meeting.”

  “Thank you for thinking of us,” Rhonda says, practiced at saying the right things.

  “Yes, Robert,” I say, “but we didn’t lose her.” Rhonda squeezes my hand, her nails in my palm.

  Robert snaps to attention. “I understood … I mean … I was given to believe—”

  “She died,” I say. “God, if only we had just lost her, right? Then we could go out and find her. We could put an ad in the paper.”

  “Curt,” Rhonda says.

  “Misplaced,” I say. “There’s a diagnosis I could live with.”

  “Curt, I understand this is difficult…” Robert says.

  “It is, Robert,” I say. “It’s very difficult. I’m sorry. You should ignore me.” My voice is shaking, and I jam my hands into my pockets. Rhonda is crying. Robert blushes, his eyes cutting around the room while he nods at me. I suddenly feel sorry for him, which feels a hell of a lot better than the other way around. This was something I wish I could have told Joseph Turlow: Feel sorry for us, Joe. Make us uncomfortable, make us question God because of your existence. Rub our faces in you.

  “You’re in our prayers, Curt,” Robert says. He shrugs. I shake his hand and apologize again, let him make his escape from me.

  “Let’s go,” I say to Rhonda.

  For a few moments she doesn’t say anything. She wipes her eyes, squares her chin. “You go if you want, I’m dancing.”

  I nod. “Okay. I’ll wait.” I sit for a while by the door, in one of the folding chairs that a little while later the old ladies in their dresses will fill. The dance lines begin to form as the caller steps up on a chair at the front of the room, a microphone in her hand. They begin a walk-through of the dance, and my eyes search out Rhonda, who is partnered with Phil, near the front of the fine. I see him point to her feet, giving her further instruction in the fast twirling of the balance and swing, which still gives her problems. All week she has made us practice this basic step, in the kitchen while the pasta was boiling, in the den during commercials.

  The caller makes jokes and everyone laughs. The windows are already covered with moisture; against one flutters a large white moth, tangled in spiderweb. The music kicks in and the dance begins in full, a couple dozen pairs of feet shuffling and stomping in unison. It’s a good noise; I go outside to escape it.

  Outside is frigid, a bright, icy moon in the trees. I sit on the cold steps and watch the cars zoom past on the road, some with headlights missing, some stereos thumping. From one car a cigarette gets tossed, and it bounces behind in the dark, throwing up sparks like little fireworks. Dancers are still arriving, shrugging their shoulders against the cold as they move across the lot. A German shepherd barks at them from the bed of a red pickup truck. People nod hello as they arrive, step around me into the building. One man moves across the parking lot with an exaggerated limp while a younger couple, who seem to be with him, moves patiently behind him, holding hands. His progress is slow; though he is hard to make out in the dark, each step seems to involve a complex series of mechanized movements. Like the others, he nods hello as he makes his slow, incremental progress up the stairs. I smile at him, exaggerate my pretense of not noticing his difficulties, relieved when finally he makes it past me. It is quiet now outside; I sit there until my butt feels numb, my hands stiff.

  Inside, Rhonda is flush-faced and damp, like all the other dancers. The heat hits me all at once, like stepping into a greenhouse. When they finish drinking their water, the dancers take the floor again, the caller shuffling her note cards. Rhonda smiles at the man beside her; he leans next to her, pointing at the band, making some small-talk joke. I sit next to one of the old ladies, who has come in without my noticing. When Rhonda starts for the floor with the man, I realize that he is the man from outside, with the limp. His left leg seems twisted beneath the long pants he wears, and the shoe on his left foot has a sole at least four inches thick. Even from where I sit I can hear the creak of braces on his legs, something I hadn’t heard before, in the cold. With each step he has to lean far out to his left and bring his leg around in a circle, dragged by nothing more than his momentum. Again I think of Joseph Turlow, and it occurs to me that once you have decided to notice it, ruin is everywhere.

  They make it okay through the walk-through, though the man (his nametag, I see as they move closer, reads “Tom”) is sweating heavily. Unlike everyone else here, he wears long pants and long shirtsleeves, and his dancing must be twice the effort of anyone else’s. They slowly walk through the balance and swing, Rhonda looking at her feet as she always does, uncertain, while Tom pivots easily on his big shoe. Then the walk-through is finished and they head back to their original places in the line, Tom dragging his foot and smiling, holding her hand.

  Then the music starts up, full of banjo and fiddle. The caller sends out directions through the PA system, staying just ahead of the next move the dancers make. Tom and Rhonda work their way through the parts of the dance, walking down past the line around the outside, then back up through the middle, spinning into their allemandes and castoffs; it is all pretty easy after a while. While they move through the paces I silently count off the beats of the music, hoping they don’t fall behind. Several times when they advance up or down the line, the next couple they are to dance with is already there, waiting for them to catch up. Tom is huffing now, smiling all the time with his big teeth, the back of his shirt damp. His limp becomes more pronounced—he is tiring, I guess—and he has to bob and weave his way through a single step. A couple times I find myself silently urging him, hurrying him along from within me, like when you’re a passenger in someone’s car, pressing an imaginary gas pedal. Rhonda seems not to notice, or else she covers well; I can’t decide which. She smiles at him, laughs when they twirl. She must be the highlight of his night, I decide.

  I’m glad that she found us the dancing. Rhonda was right, and so was Dr. Goodwin in her own abstract way. This has given us something else to look at together besides the scratches along the wall where the crib sat for nearly a year, besides the big Sears Christmas photo in the pewter frame on the bookshelf. We are learning these simple things together…steps, literally, like learning to walk all over again. One easy thing at a time.

  Tom and Rhonda have advanced in the line and are now near me, standing under one of the ceiling fans. I give a little wave to Rhonda and smile, and she arches her eyebrows at me. Just then Tom grabs her up for a balance and swing, all those feet stomping in unison, and she looks back at me as Tom begins to pivot on his big shoe. She looks down at her own feet, still unsure, as Tom holds her waist and lifts her arm, and her pivot foot, as if trying to find its place by itself, slides fully in between Tom’s legs. I watch this, and it seems like a magic trick waiting to happen, that in the next half second as his leg swings back around, it will meet her shin and somehow pass right through it, like a scarf through a ring. Instead their feet tangle, Rhonda cries out, and Tom pitches forward chest first onto the floor. He lands with all his weight on his chin and sternum, the sound like a bowling ball hitting the floor. Rhonda’s hands fly up to her mouth and Tom’s face freezes into its wide smile, and already he is protesting that he’s fine, he’s okay, while this chorus of noise rises up over the string sounds. Tom’s feet drum against the wooden floor, trying to find traction, his hands trapped under him. The line stops, people bumping into one another, craning their necks to see the trouble. Rhonda looks over at me, and when she does I realize I’m doing nothing but sitting here, not jumping up to help. I shake my head and look at her, feeling once again the helplessness which seems to have taken root in me. I start to get up, then two of the men from the line are there picking Tom up by his arms, patting his back. He smiles, shaking his head, and I hear him say that he thought it was part of the dance. Everyone laughs big over this, let off the hook, relieved. Rhonda k
eeps dancing with him, but even from here I can see how shaken she is, her lips a thin white line.

  When they finish I watch her smile as he thanks her, bowing to her a little. She rushes over to me, her eyes already starting to rim up.

  “Let’s please go,” she says.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I tell her.

  “No, it never is. Everything just crashes down all around me.”

  In the dark of the parking lot I hear the next song starting up, the sound of it muffled, made brittle by the cold.

  The next few days we don’t say much. There is no more talk of upcoming dances. Rhonda spends more time looking through the back window, past the tree with the split trunk, out into nothing. She doesn’t even seem to see the tree anymore. She cancels our next appointment with Dr. Goodwin, and silence settles over our house the way it did just after Sarah died. Wednesday would have been her second birthday, so, as planned, we head out to Greenview to visit her gravesite. We have stopped bringing flowers, saying it is because they are always stolen. What we don’t say is that it just seems so useless, the emptiest of gestures.

  At Greenview, a fast-food paper cup sits on the ground beside Sarah’s brass marker. Nearby are the leftovers from a campfire some kids have lit, sections of charred logs, blackened Coke cans and beer bottles. Down the hill below us, two boys are bundled up in denim jackets, fishing out of the small pond. We stand there a while, reading the words that seem so old by now.

  “I don’t know what to say anymore,” Rhonda says.

  I shrug. “I don’t think there is anything. There is no thing to say.”

  She slips her fingers into mine. “It stops seeming real after a time, I think. I keep telling myself I shouldn’t let that happen, let it become unreal. It’s the easy way out.”