Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  I stood. “Shall I see if Ruth and Martha are ready?”

  “Oh, they are ready,” she said, rising also. “I asked them to wait so that we might have a talk together.”

  The Korean riot controllers, the Darth Vadars, were clubbing someone on the head, while in the background another contingent was dragging a body out of the frame. I could sympathize.

  Jae-Moon walked toward the hall and lightly, ever so lightly, clapped her hands, as if calling Great Danes to chow. Ruth stuck her head out of the private room, now the high-tech center I supposed. She looked interrupted, but cordial. “Okay.”

  Martha, braiding her hair, peeked around the door frame. “In a minute, Momma.”

  On impulse, I put a question to Dr. Song. My tongue was loose and careless because I was full of anger here and elsewhere, and some of it was leaking out. “What was Eben’s sermon today?”

  Jae-Moon paused, pressed her palms quickly to the sides of her trousers. “A Paradox—” she faltered.

  “ ‘The Paradox of the Judged,’ ” I supplied for her. It was the third Sunday after Easter. He had explored the question of how can you be judged if you are not free to have made a different choice? Suggested that judgment by definition must imply freedom. “John twelve,” I added.

  “I would have to check the bulletin,” she said, a spot of color rising on her high cheekbones.

  Score one small point for the heathen.

  I DIDN’T KNOW whether Drew had meant ten-thirty, if that was just frustration talking at Cinco de Mayo, or if he’d meant eleven when Circleburgers opened. Taking no chances, I got there at ten-thirty, about half frantic to see him and about half frantic not to have to hear about it. I had a permanent soft spot in my heart for Jock, for telling me about the birthday party. If I’d come toodling around the circle, thinking about having enough quarters for the jukebox, and heard for the first time that Drew’s kin had given him the surprise Four-Oh after all, I’d have been wiped out. Flattened to a smear.

  Maybe I’d get him, them, both boys, a couple of real white hats, gaucho version.

  A quarter till eleven, Drew still wasn’t there. The staff arrived, let themselves in, talking up a storm to each other. All in new-model Japanese cars. I guessed they didn’t have to worry about buying American; they weren’t going to lose or gain any more customers than they’d always had. Drew said nobody used these converging highways anymore, but he meant nobody he knew.

  At eleven I decided to go in anyway, get an iced tea, make myself sloppy sick playing “Second Chances” and a couple of other favorites. But when I got out of the bathroom, he was there, sitting in the same booth where we’d sat before.

  “You work here?” he asked, trying to locate a grin.

  “I was just checking the soap dish,” I said.

  “You ordered?”

  “I was waiting.”

  “Just a strawberry shake for me, I’m not hungry.”

  “Here.” I handed him half a dozen quarters. “Play the box.”

  “What’d you want to hear?” He jiggled the coins.

  Bad. Maybe worse than bad. What did I want to hear? What musicians did I like? Did I want easy listening? I ordered us two shakes, a flameburger and a chiliburger, an order of French fries and an order of onions. I figured we owed them some rent for the booth.

  Carrying the tray over, I realized that Drew didn’t know that I knew about the party. He was probably sitting back in the booth shortening his life span trying to figure out how to tell me. At least I could put him out of that misery.

  “Drink this,” I said, handing him the strawberry shake. “It’s good for postparty shock.”

  It took him a minute to hear that. Willie Nelson was singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” a week late, as the sky outside still had that used-up no-color look. As if the weather film was over and they weren’t planning a rerun till summer.

  “How’d you know about that?” he said, looking surprised. “You guessed?” He had on a shirt and tie and suit pants; his jacket must be in the truck.

  I took a swallow of the vanilla shake, having totally lost my appetite. It wasn’t that Drew was dressed up, although I hadn’t seen him in a suit and tie since the last Easter at Lila Beth’s a year ago. But he must wear them to the office when he went, sometimes anyway. But why today? Was he headed for the lawyer’s? Were they drawing up a reconciliation agreement? No, it was more the way he was: flat, with an affect bearing the general configuration of west Texas.

  “How I know,” I said, “is the boys dropped the news.”

  “Yeah? Saturday? Why didn’t they tell me?”

  “I don’t think they could go that far, get themselves in trouble.”

  “They tell you all about it?”

  “Just that the Dallas contingent had brought down a portable party.”

  “Jesus, Cile, I don’t know where to begin. Shut Willie up, will you—I hate that song. Did you play that?”

  “You played it.”

  “I did?” He looked down at the remaining quarter on the table. “I hope I didn’t play anything else.”

  “How about ‘Let’s Fall Apart Together’?”

  “Let me get a handle on things.” He ate the flameburger in a couple of bites, wiped his mouth. Checked his tie for stains. Nice tie, bright red with blue and green fish on it. Something Shorty might like, but where would he wear it? For his birthday?

  “Sure,” I said. Willie was still crying away.

  “How’s your house coming?” he asked, polishing off the rings, again making sure he wasn’t greasing up his tie.

  How’s my house coming? It was worse than bad, worse than worse. Last time he wasn’t even going to think about me getting a house. Now he was inquiring after its health. A really awful sign. “Fine,” I said. I told him about the furniture from Theo, talking mostly to myself, about how I’d really like to get a table and was going to check out the yard sales and garage sales. That I was getting some day help the first sunny weekend, heavy labor types, to remove the tack-up filigreed cuckoo cutwork siding. “I got a phone,” I said. Hoping he’d ask for the number; hoping he’d wonder who was calling.

  “That’s good,” he said, attacking the fries. “God, is he still singing that?”

  “That’s the second time.”

  He looked at the jukebox as if it wasn’t possible.

  “Why don’t you tell me about the party.”

  “What’s to tell?”

  I took a spoon and cooled myself down with a slurp of vanilla shake. “What is to tell?”

  Maybe it was my voice, the calm cobra inflection, that finally got past his dazed glaze. “You want to hear about it?” he said, considering the idea.

  “As long as we’re both here—”

  “Yeah.” He pushed the tray away. “I haven’t got an appetite,” he said. “I think I’ll just have a cup of coffee.”

  I got the coffee, two cups, and a couple of peach fried pies with a dusting of powdered sugar.

  He broke one, let the steam out, wiped a spot off his shirt, ate the pie. “You want to hear about it?” he asked.

  “Drew, are you in there?”

  “You want to hear about it, don’t you?”

  “You got up yesterday morning—”

  “I got up yesterday morning.” He looked like he could do it, with this slight bit of prodding. He brightened at the idea. “I was sleeping in that football field that’s a king-sized bed by myself, wrestling with the covers, hearing the Las Bambas playing the lambada over and over like kettledrums on my temples. I thought I had a hangover, but it wasn’t from the beer, well, maybe it was, because I had two scotches when I got home. It was frustrating hell out of me, seeing you like that, but then me being back in that bed in that house of hers just like nothing had happened. Emvee up at the farm, my farm, with her Johns. Okay. You want to hear about it?

  “I got up. The phone rang, that got me up. It was Mother. Mother never calls me on the phone, not on Sunday. Su
nday she’s going to hear her preacher preach, the preacher whose wife has been trifling with her baby boy, so she’s definitely not going to miss a single one of his sermons until she’s in that pine box. It’s my mother on the phone. Sounding like death warmed over.”

  I pushed the other fried pie in his direction. If this story didn’t have a nasty ending, then why didn’t he come by and tell me all about this yesterday afternoon? Take me and the girls out to supper and laugh about what chumps, what consumers Dallas folks were? I didn’t actually want to listen to a story with a bad ending. Willie was crooning out a third rendition of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Drew must have put in his quarters and kept pushing the same numbers.

  “And?” I said.

  “She wanted me to come over. She’d didn’t want to alarm me, she said, but it was something of a crisis.

  “Naturally I thought, first, since she’d been sick in bed with the flu and wouldn’t come to the phone—which I’d thought was just an excuse not to talk to me about the land—that she was dying. I thought what she figured I was going to think. I knew the boys were okay; I’d put them down in their air-conditioned hotel accommodation apartments, picked up a beer bottle, and turned out their lights.” He interrupted himself. “Hey, they did all right Saturday, didn’t they? Taking the lead, getting out there and dancing to that music?”

  “They did.” I took a bite of lukewarm chiliburger, but it just sat there not going up or down, so I put the idea out of my mind. This was going to take all day; I’d work on my shake, sip at a time.

  I’d dressed up, too, without quite realizing it. Not a suit and tie, but a Sunday dress, now that I didn’t have to keep track of my clothes, be sure I didn’t wear the same dress two Sundays in a row. It was white with real sleeves and a square neck, and I’d put on sandals with heels. The sky was so bright and light, I’d thought I was dolling up to celebrate seeing it back again after a long absence. But maybe it was that I didn’t want to get bad news in jeans and a T, in anything that I’d ever worn to the farm with Drew. This one could get recycled to the big downtown Presbyterian, where they had so many members it would take them two years to notice that Grace Church’s parson’s ex had darkened their doors.

  “So I get dressed.” He was working up to his story. “I get dressed, more or less. Thinking with one part of my brain that if we had to call an ambulance or do any hospital admitting that they were a lot nicer, quicker, if you didn’t look like a milk farmer. So I put on a suit. Brush my hair. I can remember that. Standing there brushing my hair, drinking some orange juice, trying to get it together. I was in a fugue state, I think they call it.”

  “ ‘Zombie’ I believe is the technical term.”

  “That’s it. I debated waking the boys, thought no, hell, let them sleep, thought yeah, wake ’em, they better be prepared, thought forget it, they’ll be gone to a tennis match by now. I looked, no sons. Beds made, that’s a shocker, tidy boys making their beds. No sign of breakfast stuff in the kitchen. No juice glasses, except mine, which I refill.”

  I was about to climb the wall. I concentrated on the fifties photos of fullbacks and queens. Wondering whatever happened to fullbacks and why they’d got rid of them. And when queens began to have another meaning. Wondering if by now fullback did, too. Maybe I hadn’t picked up on the change in the language. I’d have to ask the boys or the Bledsoes when they came to help with the Gingerbread.

  “I drive over there, this is Sunday morning about ten, no, it’s about nine-thirty, maybe it’s closer to ten.”

  “How many times did you play that?” Willie is crying his eyes out for the fourth time now. Not a cloud in the sky and we’re hearing this back-to-back. Where was Drew’s head?

  “Must have been somebody else played it.”

  We were the only people in Circleburgers, except for the staff, who were standing with their backs to the windows, nothing to see, having a quick smoke and a cup.

  “So—” I nudged him along.

  “I get over to Mom’s, going the short way, not through the park, but up the hill, past those big places that look like only ghosts live there anymore. There’re about forty cars on her street. I’m thinking, God, she’s died, everybody from the church came over, I took too long. I still don’t have a glimmer.

  “I park halfway to China Spring and walk across the footbridge, short cut, run along the path, step over the stone wall, charge right in the front door. Mary Virginia, Bitsy, their mom, John, a couple of other Johns, Mother, everyone we ever knew back in bridge club days, parents of the boys’ buddies at camp, couples we used to trade dinners with, every single person I ever knew is there. And they all start singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Would you believe I started to cry? Pissing my pants would have been better. Tears just running like rainwater down my face—”

  Willie and his backup band were singing the chorus.

  “—and they’re all taking it that I’m so surprised. I’ve got out a handkerchief and I’m trying to get a grip on myself. I was seeing those sheets of red I told you about—do you think it can be high blood pressure, at my age, would it start this soon?—because I’m thinking that I’m a cooked goose, that I’m not getting out of there. They’ve stolen my farm and now they’ve got me at Mother’s, and I kind of sit down on the George Three sofa, you know the one in the main living room—” Here he digressed to furnish Lila Beth’s George Something room, down to the prize Aubusson rug, item by item. So I knew we were getting close.

  “Then they’re all tugging at me, pulling me to my feet. Big surprise, brought it all the way from Dallas. Drove it all the way from Dallas, hint, hint. They lead me out to the drive behind the house and there with a red bow on it is—Cile, honey, get this—a 1957 Chevy Bel Air, green and cream!”

  He gave me a look: crippled boy finds puppy under Christmas tree; orphan is reunited with long-lost dad.

  “You want to see?” he said.

  Lord, he’d driven it to Circleburgers? Was Emvee going to be sitting in the front seat, her hair in a flip, roses in her arms? Singing “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi”?

  I carried the tray to the trash can as we left, giving a quick kick to the jukebox, from which lachrymose Willie was still getting wet.

  It was a beauty, sure enough. Waxed and shiny, white-walled tires, all the extras. We walked all around it, then Drew leaned on it, all but embracing it. “Then Mother hands me a box—she was actually, if you can believe this, cutting church for the party. Your old spouse must have stopped mid-sermon seeing her absent.” He seemed tickled that he’d got his mother away from my husband; had it not occurred to me there was competition there?

  “It was her dad’s watch, the one she’s had in her safety-deposit box my whole life. Look at this—” He stuck out his wrist, showing me a gold watch with three dials and a moon phase. “Audemars Piguet, can you believe it? These things go for about thirty gee, minimum, new; this doesn’t have to be reset until the year 2030. I thought maybe she was going to have it buried with her. She told me, ‘I’ve saved it for your fortieth birthday; that’s how old your grandfather was when he received it from the bank.’ By this time I’m completely reeling.

  “Then, the kicker, they’ve done the whole fifties scene. Out there in the garden where the egg hunts always are, you remember, between the rock walls, above the creek, well, they’ve got these old geezers playing, sax man who actually played with Tony Bennett, they strike up their theme song, ‘Because of You,’ and all the girls get mum corsages and all the guys get pennants. People were there I hadn’t seen since Adam put on trousers. Johnny Mack Jones, you don’t know him, but we were buddies at Baylor, he was in our wedding. They passed around kid pictures of us, because that’s what we were doing in the fifties, being kids. It must have taken Mary Virginia a year to set everything up.

  “She said the rain drove them nuts, that they brought the Chevy to the farm for safekeeping, they had this vision of it floating down the Trinity—these jobs only happen to cost about s
ixty grand is all. But you know, Cile, what I couldn’t get over? How on earth did she know I wanted a ’57 Bel Air? It was like she read my mind!”

  “That must have taken a lot of detective work,” I said, leaning against the side of Circleburgers watching him, trying not to choke on my words.

  “That’s the truth. Nobody could have known I wanted one except you, maybe you, I’ve mentioned it to you a couple of times, right?”

  “You have. Mentioned it to me.”

  “Can you imagine? I about fell out.”

  I breathed in and out, shut my eyes and opened them. Looked at the Firebird and then at the magic-mobile on its wide wheels. I was working on giving him the benefit of some doubt. Maybe he knew if he left he was going to lose the land; so he was just pretending that it was the car and the watch that kept him there. I ran that by myself, but it didn’t fly. I thought, flushing with anger at my foolishness, at the birthday presents I’d given him: the topsoil T-shirt, the homemade pasted-up grass-roots birthday card. I called myself a few names that maybe I’d share with the boys and the Bledsoes when they came over, expand their vocabularies. Vintage words I used, not just old but old.

  “What now?”

  He leaned against the car, not reaching for me, not even seeing me. It was clear I wasn’t going to be invited to help him wax the side of the Bel Air; besides, it was already waxed till you could see your face.

  “I’ve got to think it out,” he said, leaning down to wipe dust off his dress shoes. “I still want to see you. It’s just, I don’t know where I am about this. You could have knocked me over, seeing this buggy. I guess I never thought she heard a word I was saying.”

  “I’ve got to trot,” I said. “Now that I’m dating, I don’t like to be gone from the phone too long.”

  “You’re going off mad.”

  “Now look who’s reading minds.”

  “After they’ve gone back to Dallas. They’re staying with us until the water’s gone. It didn’t seem like the time—”

  “Let me just ask you one thing,” I said, getting out my car keys.