Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  “A ’57 Chevy, in mint condition. Green and cream.”

  “Close. Very close. I was rooting around in the old shed, after I saw you, thinking about us being up there all the time, and I found us a couple of totally vintage bikes. I mean they were just sitting there, on racks even, behind a mower and some shovels. One’s a Schwinn Phantom, that must sell for around two-gee-plus fixed up, and the other’s an old Western Flyer, fifties model, that you can’t get anywhere anymore, period, except from collectors. When you’re up here, when we’re living here, we can bike around on these old roads. I did a little WD-40 on the chains—but I didn’t have time to try them out. Maybe we’ll get married on them.” He sounded happy.

  “Can you believe we’ve done it?”

  “When I was up there I could. Back here, it’s like nothing has changed, zip. I guess that’s why I called. Make sure I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.”

  “But you told her. You told her yesterday.”

  He made some kind of noise in his throat. “I did. Right. I told you. I told her first thing in the morning, broad daylight, in the breakfast room, while the boys were at their tennis lesson. Told her straight out, said I wouldn’t tell them until she said. But then last night, I don’t know, honey, it was like it had never happened. She was going on, on the phone, to my mother about my birthday, what they were going to do for the big Four-Oh in May, you know, like I hadn’t said a word. I don’t know if that’s just her way of getting used to the idea, or what. I’ve only known Mary Virginia since Adam put his long johns on and I still don’t have a clue how her mind works. Anyway, so I kind of coughed and she waved and went on talking.

  “Then, when she got off the phone, she was talking about Easter and then my birthday some more—she’s got a calendar of events that rolls in the back of her head like a Rolodex twenty-four hours a day. And then she said maybe they’d have my party up at the farm, ranch she calls it, so her sister and mom could meet us halfway, just like that. Like I hadn’t said I was moving up there. Then she was on when the boys were going to camp. By the time we went to bed, she was up to Christmas holidays.”

  “She’s trying to see if you mean it, maybe.”

  “But the big preacher just said, ‘Fine’?”

  “He pretended it was old news, you know how Eben is. Ho-hum. To tell the truth, I think he’s more worried about what your mother is going to do than anything else.”

  “I can relate to that.”

  “If she doesn’t leave the church, he probably won’t care I’m gone.”

  “Well, I didn’t really think they’d congratulate us and throw rice, I guess. Ask us if we’d set the date yet.” He made a sort of growling noise.

  I heard a car door slam. “I need to go.”

  “Come up right after you get the kids off.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I love you.”

  “I get the Western Flyer,” I told him.

  THE CAR RADIO said hail the size of golf balls was falling in Dallas County, the storm heading south toward Waxahachie, due down our way by midday. I encouraged the accelerator.

  It had hailed Ping-Pong balls the first March Drew and I met at the farm. In bed, hearing the pounding ice hit the roof, we’d been wild, frantic that my old vehicle would return home with unexplained dents on hood and fenders. Holding layers of newspaper over our heads, hastily back in jeans and tennis shoes, we’d run out to move Drew’s pickup from the shed and pull my Pontiac in its place under cover. Drenched, back inside, we’d clung together under a pile of faded quilts, listening to the globes of ice strike the sloping sheets of tin above our heads.

  Our first April there’d been a tornado watch, and I’d driven through that flat yellow light that goes with twisters, air as still as the inside of a closet, watching to the west for the sighted black funnel. Imagining my car picked up and thrown through the side of a cake-shaped milo silo, much as straws are pushed through trees. My family left to wonder what I’d been doing out on the interstate with warning sirens shrill in the air.

  I’d had a flat on the way home, as if nature had refused to let me off without some sort of retribution. While the motionless air began to turn almost gold and a faint whining rolled across the prairies like a giant airborne tumbleweed, I struggled with the nearly rusted-on lug nuts, standing on the lug wrench and jumping up and down, hoping my physics was sound and that one hundred and three pounds in motion could loosen what my extended arms could not. The spare hadn’t been much better than the flat, which had picked up a nail, but it had got me into town and to a service station.

  Drew, when I told him about it, was mad at himself because in his affection for my car he’d been so busy imagining it reminted to its original flashy glory that he hadn’t paid enough attention to its present state of decline. Over my protest, he set about to get me four new tires. I said he couldn’t buy stuff for me: it was like accepting silk stockings from a traveling salesman. He said that I was taking all the risks coming up to the farm; that if I could take the risks, he could at least minimize them. He’d got the tires one at a time, slightly used, then knocked them around, rolled them along the gravel and dirt roads at the farm, to give them an old look. A distressed finish, he said, the way furniture dealers worked over dining tables and washstands to pass them off as antiques.

  I hated most to drive up the highway when there was a hurricane watch; it had a creepy echo of my mother’s heading south into a sudden flash flood. Although these cyclones were usually confined to the coast, once in a while one would streak up the fault, like electricity along a wire, wind blowing to sixty miles an hour, uprooting trees, plastering trailers against tractors, lifting roofs from farmhouses, floating stores down rising rivers. But I had done that, too, in our three years of meeting at the farm.

  Today, the storm was holding to the north, the line of clouds piling higher and higher above the horizon, occasional streaks of gray straying to the ground. From time to time I could hear a clap of thunder, but mostly there was only sheet lightning to the west. Dairy cows crowded in black and white clumps under the oaks, waiting for it to pass. Their picnic lunch—bluebonnets, paintbrushes, buttercups, daisies in a field of grass and clover—left until later.

  Drew loved to talk about how animals, insects, birds, even plants, knew what was in the air. If the first thing he was going to do when we were up here was fix up my Firebird, the first thing I was going to do was repair the white slatted box on stilts that had been his grandfather’s weather station.

  His granddad had been an official volunteer weather observer for McLennan County all his adult life, a job he’d inherited from his dad. Twice each day, in his big script, he had recorded the high and low temperature and the amount of precipitation—droughts and heat waves calculated in their smallest increments.

  Drew still had the notebooks of these grandfathers, with data going back to 1870, one hundred years of records without a day missed. But when his granddad died in ’70, two years after Drew’s family moved back to Waco, no one assumed the task. Drew’s dad had a new medical practice to set up; besides, he claimed, the National Weather Service had taken over the function of the old-time weather stations. Drew had thought he might start it up again after he graduated from Baylor, but he never did. Then, when his dad died in the awful ice storm of ’78, the worst in recorded history, Drew lost his interest in meteorology. A case of kill the messenger, he said. Instead, he’d thrown all his energies into the business of managing the family land—vast holdings that ran north to the government’s current claims, west to the grain sorghum fields and the tall grasses, east to stock pastures and the bobbing metal grasshoppers pumping residual oil.

  I wanted Drew to clean up the white slatted box, which resembled a beekeeper’s hive, install a new thermometer and rain gauge, and resume the old record keeping. Maybe he would, when we were living at his granddaddy’s farm, east of West.

  THE FIRST TIME we got together, in high school, it was through my mothe
r, not Drew’s.

  She, Celia, was the woman at the Planned Parenthood Clinic whom the patients called the nurse, the board called the director, and she called a glutton for punishment. The first years on the job, the clinicians (doctors who took turns at the clinic, pro bono work) drove her crazy, being, in her words, “country clubbers with tunnel vision.” She’d be dealing with the usual crises: an unmarried twenty-eight-year-old with fourteen living children and no man to fill out the common-law husband blank; a married woman who’d hemorrhaged during her last childbirth but whose husband refused to sign a permit for her to get a diaphragm because she might “lose her nature.” The doctors would turn a deaf ear. The rules were the rules: no advice, counsel, or contraception to unmarried women; no prescriptions without the husband’s written consent.

  Then Andy’s (Drew’s) dad took over as head clinician, and turned everything around. Mother said he hadn’t much of a bedside manner, that he was quiet the way a rancher is quiet, but that he dug his heels in and brought them into the second half of the twentieth century. He told her there were enough ill-treated kids in the world already: heartbreak cases you couldn’t drink your morning coffee if you let yourself think about. He said he’d delivered his share of unwanted kids and that he wasn’t interested in providing the world with any more. With his arrival, they made immediate progress: the pill was permitted; men did not have to give permission for women to obtain birth control; and my mother, Celia, was given time off to travel around the state to set up other clinics, like a circuit-riding preacher, she used to say.

  Andy (Drew) and I had had classes together, Texas History, Physics, Trig. I knew him as a skinny long-legged guy who always wore boots; a smart kid who was always trying to look like a kicker and not quite succeeding. But he was the only other person who knew what my mother did, sticking her nose into the sexual business of half of east Austin (because in those days they were working only with some nebulous group called the Poor). I figured he must feel the same way, only more so. Who would want an OB for a dad? Who would want even to think about what your dad did all day, where he put his hands and what he got out of it? So we stood around and talked, because he knew what my mom did, and I knew what his dad did. It wasn’t that we talked about it; we didn’t. Any more, say, than two black kids in those days stood around talking about the fact of being black. They’d just be looking around, making sounds at one another, being a unit. That’s what Andy and I did. I can’t remember anything we said.

  Then one Friday, in March of our senior year, at the start of the spring, he asked me, “You want to go hear some country?” He named a nothing band I’d never heard. Friday nights at my house no one was ever home; I assumed the same was true at his. My mother was driving south and west, getting a start on the weekend clinics; my father was already up at Lake Travis, getting a start on a weekend of bait fishing.

  I said, “Sure.” I asked him, “Can I go like a normal person or do I have to wear those shirts with pearl snaps and Tony Lama specials?”

  “Just jeans,” he said. “I’ll pick you up. You want to get a hamburger first?”

  We drove up to Round Rock, which was then a smaller town, not the huge bulge on the north end of Austin it is today. Round Rock: out of town but near at hand. There were a couple of country music dives, square windowless buildings with big wooden tables and chairs along one side, a beer bar at one end, bandstand at the other, the rest a vast waxed dance floor. These were not Austin’s famed country music night spots, where Waylon and Willie, Delbert and the rest played with a packed house swaying and screaming. These were where pickup bands were glad to have a place to make music; where the smell of beer and sawdust spread to slick the floor got all mingled together. We weren’t yet eighteen, not quite, my birthday in a week, Drew’s in two months, so we each got one beer. Most of which sat that first night on the table in big draft mugs growing warm and flat. We had to show we could order them, underage; we didn’t sit still long enough to drink them.

  (I remember that the band played the best country gold sounds—“Slide Off Your Satin Sheets,” “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille”—but these must have been later, songs I heard on the radio when I had the babies, when I was single dancing around the parsonage while they napped.)

  We’d got our token beers, set them down, put our wallets in our back pockets, and gone out on the floor. He was a mile taller, but that didn’t matter a bit. He held out his arms, not even really looking at me; the light was dim, the noise of people laughing, pouring out their first pitchers, drowned out any words. He hooked two fingers of his right hand in my waistband, then held my right arm way out with his left arm, up for me, down for him, almost rigid so we could steer, and then we looped our way around the dance floor until the band took its first break. They ended each set with a waltz—if not “Lucille” then one as fine—and we collapsed panting in our straight chairs.

  “How’d you know I liked to dance?” I asked him, when I had my breath back. My face was beet red, as his was, from the exertion, the way it gets when you get a stitch in your side and a rattle in your throat.

  Andy had leaned closer so I could hear him. He was trying to drink a gulp of his warm beer. “You never sit still in class.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re all the time getting up and down or turning around or sticking your feet out.”

  “What class?”

  “You always do that.”

  “But I like school. I’m going to be a teacher.”

  “The teacher gets to move all the time. Haven’t you noticed? Going out in the hall, going to the back of the room. Did you ever see a teacher sit still for fifty minutes?”

  “Miss Moore.” Theodora Moore, our English teacher, was my role model for everything I meant not to be. Stout, brisk and, worst of all, convinced she had a “young person’s” sense of humor.

  “She digs that pencil in her ear,” he said. “That’s moving.”

  The band filed back in.

  “I didn’t know you’d be any good.” He held out his hand.

  I hooked two fingers in his belt and thrust my right arm up in the air. “You didn’t know you’d be this good, did you?”

  He twirled me around a couple of times so we could warm up with the musicians. “Naw,” he said, “I didn’t even know I could dance.”

  Afterward we leaned against his pickup—the same ’58 rebuilt Chevy he had now—him with his feet spread way out so he wouldn’t be too tall, me leaning into the space, leaning up to kiss him whenever he quit talking about the truck. That’s all we did; but then that’s all we ever did. A lot of kissing afterward. Sometimes, later that spring, we’d have a beer in the cab, talking about nothing while he warmed up the motor and we cooled down. I don’t know why we didn’t do more, why we didn’t have sex. Wasn’t everyone else then, in those days? Twenty-two years ago, wasn’t sex all over the air, everybody free and consenting? Or was that just a glazed memory of the times, a yellow hazy backdrop of the way we thought it was going to be? Nobody saying no, least of all females who had nothing to worry about anymore, not guilt or reputation or accidental pregnancies.

  That was why, of course. We couldn’t bear to get ourselves in the position where one of us would have to ask what we were doing about staying safe. One of us was going to have to mention that which we spent most of our time not wanting to deal with. I believe we’d have lasted one minute once we’d started in on the relative merits of rubbers, diaphragm, pill. Because I’d have imagined my mother, the missionary, looking over my shoulder, and he would have seen his father, the deliverer—and then we’d have stopped cold on the spot, been dating someone else within the week. What we had on the dance floor was more than anything we’d ever had before. That was enough.

  That first night, after we’d put the band to bed and were out there in the dirt parking lot, and he’d got his tongue out of my mouth and quit sliding his hands around on the back of my T-shirt, and was just rocking ba
ck and forth, his arms all the way around me, nice and easy, he asked, “You got somebody?”

  “Couple of guys on the honor roll.”

  He tightened his hold. “This going to be all right with your folks?”

  “Us waxing the side of the pickup with your jeans?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure. My dad still thinks I’m going to birthday parties at the roller rink; my mother thinks I spend all my spare time making out.”

  “At my house it’s sort of like that in reverse.” He seemed to go away.

  “This going to be all right with yours?”

  “I guess. My mom has a lot of plans for me; she doesn’t much like to go along with mine.”

  I should have figured out later that he’d moved to Waco; I remembered his saying his mom had picked out Baylor for him. But by the time I got around to looking for him—after Mother had died and the schoolteacher was spending all her waking hours at our house, talking fishing tackle with my father—Andy was gone.

  I asked around, later. By then I was tutoring kids for their SATs, guaranteeing a one-hundred-point rise in scores, and not one kid let me down. Mostly I dealt with doctors’ young who had done all the right things—run track and dissected frogs, played the cello and got Westinghouse Awards, been the class favorites and debated Vietnam—but who couldn’t manage to get their scores above 1100. Doctors’ young who with my help entered Stanford, Duke, Rice, and who made my name a good word in certain households. Lord, how I’d loved that no-failure job.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where a doctor named Williams moved, would you?” I’d asked the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft, who was friendly, one of the nicer mothers, and who had taken me under her wing.

  “What kind of physician?”

  “Obstetrician.”

  “OB? Dear, no.” She didn’t even think it over. How, her voice implied in a very nice way, did I think someone married to a thoracic surgeon would have any idea about the whereabouts of a baby doctor?