Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  Then, right there, big as life, was ROSA’S CHIMICHANGAS. “That’s it,” I said.

  “What if there’s a Consuela’s Chalupas?” Ruth had a wide smile on her face, as if she was suddenly getting a glimpse that this wasn’t the dumb idea it seemed, some glimmer of how her momma’s mind worked, or how her momma and this man talked to each other. It wouldn’t take a future Academy nester to figure out that Eben Tait and I were never going to work out a system like this.

  “Rosa trumps Chalupas because it comes first,” I said.

  “Does Drew know that?”

  “If he has any sense.” I smiled back at her. Maybe the tone also wasn’t one she’d ever heard before, certainly not in reference to her dad.

  “There he is, Momma,” Martha said, squealing slightly, waving before I had the chance.

  Drew was leaning on the far side of Rosa’s, wolfing a huge messy chimichanga, which appeared to be a tortilla platter with about twenty things piled on it. By his side, waving back at us, were Trey and Jock, dressed in tennis whites, their hair freshly blown, and, strain though I might, I could not spot where exactly the hair in Jock’s dark pigtail had disappeared to or how Trey had managed to brush his to the front so his shaved sideburns didn’t show.

  “Buenas dias, senoritas,” Drew said, and to my everlasting joy and gratitude, planted a big chimichanga kiss right on my mouth in front of our four big-eyed voyeurs. He then bent (not as far) and kissed the cheeks of both my daughters.

  “Buenas dias,” I said, shooting him a look that said he could bark at me in public phone booths all he wanted, and that I’d keep his bikes oiled for life.

  “Ring Around the Rosy,” Jock said, and he and Trey grabbed the girls’ hands and they made a circle around us, then awkwardly stepped apart.

  “There were two chalupa stands,” Drew said. “Chico’s and Carmen’s.”

  “Rosa’s was it.”

  “I know it.” He took a sip of foamy beer from the paper cup in his left hand. “What if there hadn’t been a Rosa’s anything?”

  Ruth answered before I could. “Then we’d have met you at Carmen’s Chalupas.”

  “This person has a future.” Drew looked impressed.

  “We lost,” Trey said, slapping his brother’s hand. “We said food was the point; anybody’s chalupas beat Rosa’s anything.”

  “Naw,” Drew said, sounding just like Jock. He looked around. “Where’s the band?”

  “First,” Ruth said, “there’s the pageant in which they reenact the Battle of Puebla.”

  We groaned.

  “Then,” she recited, as if reading, “there are performances by El Folklórico Juvenil and Las Hispanas.”

  “You reading from a TV monitor or what?” Drew asked her.

  “There were posters all over school.”

  Trey and Jock looked at one another, tickled. “Good graphics, huh?”

  “I guess. I remembered all that stuff. Did you make them or something?”

  “We made them, and something.” Jock was rocking up and down, whether because of my presence or the strain of being with his dad all decked out in his center court clothes.

  “Let’s rank the tacos,” Drew said. “Serious study. No messy halfway stuff. A scale of one to ten. Every booth.”

  “We can’t eat that many tacos, Drew,” Martha said, her face dimpling and blushing at saying his name.

  He noted both and slipped his free hand down her French braid, giving it a tug. “Says who?”

  “We’ll get sick.” She had an attack of the giggles. This was a daughter I’d not seen before.

  “Suffer for the sake of science,” he said. “Just a nibble, honey. One nibble per stall. Winner will be notified.”

  My youngest moved as close to Drew as she could get without straight out touching him. Something like the way a puppy wags around a stranger. A new TAIT offense; or maybe it was defense. TAIT à TAIT with a new daddy.

  Jock bounced in my direction. “Sun’s out again,” he said.

  “I noticed.”

  “Consultation,” he said loudly.

  “Consultation.” We went off to one side, where they couldn’t hear us. “What’d you do with your pigtail?” I said.

  He shrugged. “You just blow it out.”

  “I liked your other shirt better.”

  “Me, too.” He squirmed. “You still want us to rip that crud off your house?”

  “I do. How about next weekend?”

  “If it stays clear.” He looked over at Trey and they nodded at each other.

  Drew had three paper cups of beer and I had one. The kids had two iced teas each, plus the boys split a beer while no one looked. We tasted every taco at the fair, or every one we spotted anyway. Until just the sight of one made me queasy. The winner was the one we all ate every bite of. It was a great idea and lasted us until finally the blaring canned music abruptly died, the stars came out and the evening began.

  We suffered through all the exhibition dancers, all of us locating, cursing and using the white portapotties in their unsteady plastic cubicles. We ate our way through pralines—chewy, crisp and sugary, studded with toasted pecans.

  Finally, when the pageant was over, and we were fed and watered out, Drew asked, “Can we dance now?”

  At which moment, as if on cue, a bandstand was scooted into place at the far end of the tent, on whose floorboards the Mexican hat dance and the flamencos had taken place. From the dark area behind the tent we could see musicians approaching with a shout going up around them as they walked by, young and handsome Latins, hair slicked back, gleaming black skintight tank tops and pants, with wide silver concho belts and high-heeled boots. The crowd, mostly young, those still there, began to chant and stomp, “Las Bambas, Las Bambas.”

  Drew and I stood and watched as two hundred people crowded out onto the floor.

  “They must call that dance the Dog at the Fire Hydrant,” I said.

  “That’s Las Bambas playing the lambada: heavy kettle.” He looked the way I felt.

  “Wanta dance?” Trey came up to me, extending a freckled arm.

  I was touched beyond belief, although I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do.

  I didn’t need to have worried. He led me out, dropped my hand, and moved around two feet away, shaking his arms and legs in an agitated rhythm that I imitated without a lot of trouble. The music had its definite beat and we watched each other’s feet.

  “My turn,” Jock said, shoving his brother out of the way. He got into it with vigor, flailing up and down, lifting his feet off the ground, flinging his arms. A natural.

  What we were really doing, the boys and I, was the descendant of the minuet, although I’m sure that wasn’t likely to cross their minds. Same distance between dancers, same nods and turns to your partner, same conventionalized movements, performed before an audience. Not like the waltz, which came later, where men and women touched in a sexual way, losing themselves as they turned round and round and round together. It might be that “heavy kettle” would become acceptable in this church town, that the Baptists could see their way clear to voting in social no-touch dancing the way these kids were practicing it.

  When Jock took me back to our place on the edge of the dance floor, Ruth was standing there alone, looking busily at the crowd, while out on the boards Drew was shaking himself somewhat like a hound just coming out of a swimming hole. Martha was rolling back and forth, her chest heaving, her color high, her eyes closed. Oh my.

  Then they were back, and he held out his hand to Ruth. “This one’s for us,” he said, and took my tall serious daughter by the elbow, then dropped his arms and began to move. An athlete, she was incredibly graceful, as loose and tight, as precise as when she was shooting baskets. She didn’t smile and she didn’t flirt, but the vibrations she was sending, by the very fact of being so controlled, registered on his face. He looked across at me and shook his head. Some girl, his look said.

  “Now the old folks get their tu
rn,” he told the kids when he was back.

  “Nice kids,” he said.

  “Our fault.”

  He held me so tight, his hand down on my hips, I could hardly move my feet. “The music of their generation is called hard listening,” he said.

  “This dance is hip coupling.” I moved to him, with him, but was aware of the spectators on the sidelines.

  “I’d like to get out of here,” he said, “and do what this is a miserable imitation of. This isn’t dancing.”

  “Think we could slip off and polish the side of your pickup?”

  “It’ll take me an hour to locate row 36B in the dark.” He glanced over at his sons. “They took the lead, didn’t they?”

  “They did.”

  We quit after one number. At the edge of the tent, in the grass, but still in the light, I said, “I brought you a birthday present.”

  “Hey, that’s right.” He looked pleased. “This is what they mean by plowing the back forty.”

  I gave him the STOP TOPSOIL DESTRUCTION T-shirt and the birthday card I’d made with grassroots pasted front and back, and YOURS UNTIL THE COWS COME HOME hand-printed inside where only he could see it.

  He turned his back, took off his white shirt, and pulled on the T. Black with bright green letters and a picture of a stand of grass, it looked fine with his jeans and boots. He turned around to show it off.

  “We saw it already,” Ruth said.

  “We got it for you, Drew,” Martha told him, starry-eyed.

  The boys glanced at each other, at me, at their dad, looking stricken. “We’re saving ours for tomorrow,” Trey said, his words sounding slightly frantic.

  “Happy Birthday,” Jock sang, leading us at top volume.

  The boys walked us to our car, that is the four kids walked ahead, more or less talking to each other, or at least all together going through the motions so that we could walk behind in the dark, holding hands.

  “What’ll we do with them when school’s out?” Drew asked.

  “What’re we going to do with us, this week?”

  “Circleburgers, Monday.”

  “This time you get to walk out.” I leaned against him; he’d been so swell with the girls.

  “This time I get to play the box. Twenty quarters, all on ‘Let’s Fall Apart Together.’ ”

  “Eleven o’clock?”

  “Ten-thirty. We can lean against the truck until they open.”

  “Hey, uh, just a minute,” Jock said when we got to the car. “Consultation. I forgot, Cile, you know—” He made gestures in the air which I took to mean tearing off siding but which might have been just semaphores for help.

  “Consultation,” I said, walking him away from the others while Drew helped the girls into the car. I could see him looking up and down the dark street, seeing uncountable dangers lurking everywhere in the Berries.

  “Listen,” Jock said, “cross your heart.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Don’t you ever tell I told, swear, I’ll get murdered.”

  “Not a word.”

  He looked back at Trey, nodded. Leaning his head way over he said, “Mom and the grandmoms and Aunt Bitsy and Uncle John are all of them having a big surprise party for Dad in the morning. They all drove down tonight and are staying at Grandmom Lila’s. They’ve been planning this since before the rains. They brought all the stuff with them, from Dallas.”

  “Lord,” I whispered. “Have mercy.”

  JAE-MOON OPENED the door to me. “I am so glad to see you, Cile,” she said, taking my hands in both of hers the way she had in church. “Come in. They will be out soon; they are cleaning their rooms.”

  The smell of sesame oil lingered in the air and something sweet and spicy. The parsonage had crossed the line from the potato to the rice belt. I was ravenous. I’d been such a wreck all morning, I’d had nothing but coffee, wondering what was going on at Lila Beth’s or Mary Virginia’s, what they were doing for (or to) Drew. I’d forgotten to eat, a sure sign of head-lapse.

  My former home was unrecognizable. There was a long pink cloth on the dining table, pink and gray and black wall tapestries where my cows had hung, a sectional gray tweed sofa that made an angle with its back to the door, creating a cozy corner which faced a commercial-sized screen on which Korean police—recognizable by their Darth Vadar helmets—were beating rioters.

  Jae-Moon seated herself and leaned forward, the pictures flashing, the sound off. She gestured that I should sit also. “It is dreadful,” she said.

  I made a noise in my throat, not wanting to get into trouble here.

  “Everyone thinks I am connected to this.” She gestured. She was in black trousers the color of her hair and a pale pink shirt. “They ask me how rough are the riot troopers? What are the unions striking for? What is the trouble at Hyundai? What is Roh Tae Woo’s government going to do? They think because I am from there that I have never left there. Even in the labs they ask me questions.” She turned her eyes from the violence. “Shall I turn it off?”

  “That’s okay.”

  She looked at me with the same all-over glow she’d had hearing in public that Eben was a free man; joy was too small and timid a word for her. “This will be better for everyone, don’t you agree?”

  “I do,” I said, hoping she was talking about the passing of Eben from my life to hers and not the riots in Seoul.

  “I think Eben will be happier with a woman who was raised in his church and believes in it. Don’t you agree?”

  I nodded. She said his name e-BEN and not EB-en as I did. It made me think—one of those digressions the mind makes in order not to focus on what’s at hand—of a schooldays’ poem called “Abou ben Adhem.” Abou ben Adhem (may his tribe increase)/Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace. That was all I remembered, except the end. The angel revealing that, as God-lovers went, Abou ben Adhem’s name led all the rest. Perhaps that’s what Eben was looking for, a little rest and peace.

  He might have grown tired of the burden of questioning that went with living with a woman who knew that heretic meant to choose, and heathen, someone who lived on the heath, on uncultivated cow pastures. As Theo had said, I wasn’t the easiest student.

  Perhaps, too, Jae-Moon had clinging to her some aura of his grandfather and father, those early upright high-collared Taits who’d gone forth across the sea. Something that Eben, old son of old men, had never possessed, one of their missionary-baptized and missionary-raised women?

  “You’ll be good for him,” I told her. “You will make him happy.”

  I hoped that was the right thing to say; maybe making someone happy was not the issue or even the goal. Maybe I’d been superficial, spoken in the shallow worldly way of the infidel. What was the right response?

  “Ruth tells me,” she said, taking her eyes from the screen, “that when our S.S.C. is completed, in all likelihood I will be working on land that now belongs to your friend Mr. Williams.”

  “Working under—”

  “We do not work in the tunnel; that is what the magnets will do. Our homes and our laboratories will be aboveground. We will not be a colony of moles. Is that what you think?”

  “No, I was just—”

  “Making a joke? I am slow to learn.” She gazed at my face again, with the spilling-over look. “I am making the effort to find a common ground for us. Do you understand?”

  I made my own effort. “The girls are really excited about having a computer here.”

  “May I say I do not care for ‘the girls’? It is a sexist way of referring to them, a designation that essentially refers only to their genitals.”

  Boy, this was something. This was how she’d got Eben: taking him to task, creating in him that warm-all-over glow of guilt that feels like religion. On me, it had a sort of vaccination effect. I felt a sharp edge of defensiveness nudge my solar plexus. That knowing the Scriptures and helping to wrestle with the mystery of free will didn’t count, that being a sounding board for the texts
of his sermons didn’t matter, that I was still an unbeliever, I could live with. But telling me what to call my daughters?

  “What do you call them?” I asked.

  “By their names, Ruth and Martha.”

  “How about ‘the children’?”

  “Do you call us ‘the adults’? That is an age-based designation. That is what names are for, to identify.”

  I thought of Martha dancing with Drew, her daddy-in-waiting. How could it be wrong to refer to what I had seen as girl?

  “All right, Jae-Moon,” I said. “I’ll go with that here; this is your place now.” Deciding I’d probably stuck my foot in my mouth on that one, too. Was there something sexist about “your place”? As if the female tended the territory, especially considering that she hadn’t officially moved in. If it were a man, what would I have said? “You’re the boss, here.’ Ah ha, I had been sexist. “You’re the boss, here,” I told her.

  “We do not think in those hierarchical class terms, Eben and I.” She returned her gaze to the screen.

  Well, call me a tree stump. I borrowed again from the Bledsoes, helpful etymologists. “Hmmm,” I said, looking toward the hallway of what used to be called the parsonage. A term meaning the house of a parson, therefore ownership. Therefore someone who led a pastorate, therefore a leader. All sorts of evil lurking here. I still liked this house. Cleaning their rooms, my daughters? God in Heaven, they could have refinished them by now.