Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  “Green and cream,” he said. “Can you beat that? Even the colors?”

  “How did the boys take it?”

  Drew looked around, as if they might be here and he could check it out. “They had to leave,” he remembered. “They had a match and had to leave. Before we cut the cake.”

  “White hats, those boys,” I said, wishing they were here right this minute in their great rowdy T-shirts, with a whole basket of tomatoes to throw on their dad’s swanky showpiece auto. Or dressed in their tennis whites, using the Chevy for a backboard, bouncing a few yellow balls off the grille. They were such neat guys, with such great natural moves. I tried to let my mind wander to what they would do if they were here and as mad as I was. I thought about going back inside Circleburgers and playing carhop, seeing how a malt would look dumped on the front seat. But I didn’t want to panic the good ladies having a smoke inside by stealing the merchandise.

  “You’re going off mad,” Drew said again, looking at me in a worried way.

  “I just want to get a proper look at the car,” I said, jingling my car keys. The boys had sent me a nice telepathy message. “You know, the way you used to see them in the rearview mirror, in high school?”

  “After they go back to Dallas, we can—” Drew was repeating himself again, his face wearing a troubled frown.

  Clearly there was something I was supposed to be doing that I wasn’t. What was it? Wishing I’d been invited to the big Four-Oh? Asking if he’d give me a ride? The light went off in my head. Of course; he wanted to give me a spin in the Chevy and show off the engine. Varoom, varoom.

  The thought made me hot enough to rev up my own motor and the Pontiac’s, too.

  “Where’re you going?” he called. “I thought we could—”

  “Gonna move this heap.” I stuck my head out the window, to get the lustrous waxed green and cream expanse in my sights.

  “Yeah, okay.” He watched the Firebird leap into reverse.

  Watched until the last minute when he had to jump out of the way as I rammed a big sweet dent in the jutting uplift of my competition.

  “What the hell?” he bellowed.

  “Give it that old look,” I shouted, throwing him a big 1950s red-lipstick, hip-wiggling sort of smile over my shoulder. Hitting the traffic circle at fifty miles per.

  THE ROAD THROUGH City Park had been cleaned up, curbs installed, and a general beautification project put into effect. At Miss Nellie’s Pretty Place, wild-flowers bloomed along marked paths. On the columned terrace, Pacific Rim ladies set out orange and green tablecloths for a civic luncheon. I parked and took one of the lower loops through the flowers, reading the tidy signs, getting the common names of plants I knew by sight from spring drives to the farm: butterfly weeds, winecups, Engleman daisies, golden wave, Mexican hats, black-eyed Susans. The leached-out morning sky made the oranges, purples, greens and yellows bright as watercolors.

  Driving up the hill, I saw black and white senior citizens at tables set out under the live oaks, having what looked to be a bridge tournament; and at the wooden jungle gym, two blond young men held hands and watched three toddlers climb.

  It wouldn’t have surprised me to see a horse-drawn buggy round the bend up ahead, so restored did the park look. Turning from what once were bridle paths and now were paved streets, I reckoned that it had been an amount of time beyond counting since I’d had my flat and crept to this halfway point on the hillside, riding on a rim because of worrisome elements on the grounds above. Times had changed in a decade; the world had mixed itself and tidied itself, and, on the whole, improved itself. It appeared to me now as if this once grand City Park might just truly be a park for the whole city now.

  The intent of my trip wasn’t retrospection, although any visit to Lila Beth had that as a result. My trip today was not that different, really, from the one I’d made so many years ago on the day after Easter, hoping for a glimpse of Andy/Drew in front of her house. Risking losing her for a chance to find him again. Only this time it was more out in the open. She’d made it clear that my wanting him, my seeking him out, might cost me both of them.

  Today I could sense the rivers beyond the leafy trees (some change in the quality of light), here on this hill high above the junction of the North Bosque and the Brazos, and this time I did not get lost, did not turn down a dead end or end up at Lovers Leap. I knew the turnoff, now, from the old road to her house, knew just which branch of the fork to take: a circle with picnic tables off to the right, her street off to the left.

  She would be home; I counted on that. Because Drew’s birthday party had to be cleaned up after; because she’d only recently been down with the flu; because she was always home on Mondays. She’d be dressed; I doubted she appeared any other way. She’d be alone, because I had need of that. And if she wasn’t any or all of those? I didn’t know. Then I would turn and wend my way back down the hill again through the park, across the bridge, maybe back to the horseshoe pits. I would not be brave enough to try again.

  I parked on the street, not quite having the nerve to turn onto her property, cross over the creek, pull my familiar, doubtless unwelcome, Pontiac into the driveway in front of the house, the gravel and caliche drive which had a small block-lettered sign saying PRIVATE to discourage strangers.

  She answered the door. “Cile.” She seemed surprised, then quickly recovered.

  “May I come in, Lila Beth?”

  “Of course, my dear. But where is your car?”

  “On the street.”

  “Do you want to pull it in here?”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “How nice you look.” She took in my white church dress and heels.

  “I dressed up to meet your son.” I let my breath out slowly. “He was dressed up himself.”

  “You’ve come to talk about Andrew.” She sounded resigned, yet, as ever, cordial.

  “No, I’ve come to talk about my mother.”

  She sighed and led me into the George Everything room, where she raised the shades on the back windows to let in some of the rained-out daylight. She moved a vase of roses to catch the sun; straightened a chair. “Shall I make us tea?” she asked.

  “That would be good.”

  So we had our tea ceremony once again, in tall crystal glasses complete with mint from her own backyard and lemon slices see-through thin. I told her how well City Park looked. Yes, she said, since they’d put in the nearby probation center the city had gone all out to prove the grounds were more safe rather than less. I said I’d stopped at Miss Nellie’s Pretty Place to see the hillside of flowers. The coreopsis must be out, she said, and the rudbeckia. How were my daughters? Did Ruth plan to try for the Academy program next year? It saddened her, she said, her grandson Trey being shipped off before he had a chance to enroll.

  At last she put down her tea glass and asked, “Shall we talk about your mother, then?”

  I’d rehearsed so much, gone over the story so many times, that I was temporarily at a loss where to begin.

  I’d remembered the look on Lila Beth’s face that Easter so long ago, her tone of voice, surprised and dismayed, when she’d asked, “You were Celia Winters?” using my mother’s name. I’d faced up to the difficult truth that one reason I’d kept Shorty and Theo at arm’s length all those years was so that I didn’t have to learn what they knew about my mother and Dr. Williams. I’d recognized that Lila Beth’s turning against me was because she had first lost her husband to my mother and now was afraid she was losing her son to me. Still, it was hard to talk about it, even to broach so tender a topic, here, in her house, in the presence of her unfailing hospitality. “I’m not her,” I began defensively. “I’m not my mother, and Drew is not his daddy.” I met her eyes. “We’re not them, and however mad you were at them, you can’t take that out on us.”

  She looked unsettled, stopping to choose her words. “Were you aware my husband was seeing your mother at the time?”

  “No. Not then. Only recent
ly.”

  “I suppose one sees only what’s presented at that age. Eighteen, you were.” It was not a question.

  “You think I’m like her—breaking up Drew’s marriage the same way she tried to break up yours. But it isn’t fair to your son to take out your revenge on me.”

  “Oh, my, is that how you see it?” Lila Beth closed her eyes, pressed her fingers to her temples. She was such a fine-looking woman, trim, tanned. “May I speak my mind, Cile? Will you hear me out?”

  “Yes,” I said. Relieved to have it in the open between us; afraid of what she was going to say. “If we don’t talk about it, nothing will ever be all right again.” My voice faltered. I was unable to keep the hurt and anger from it. “I owed you, Lila Beth. You were like a mother to me. I hardly spoke to my own folks for wanting to impress you, to have you approve of me.”

  “May I speak?” She took the tongs and put extra ice in our glasses, refilled them from a frosted silver pitcher.

  “I’m sorry. Please.” I bit my lip, having confessed too much.

  “I held him fully responsible for your mother’s death. It was so needless, so pointless. She was such a beautiful girl, so full of life. Married to that man—everyone knew that Shorty Guest was likely as not to be in his cups at any hour of the day or night—not noticing what was right under his nose. But that is not to excuse my husband. ‘How could you have let her make that trip?’ I asked him, when he was grieving, wanting sympathy. ‘Why couldn’t you either have married her or let her go?’ But men, they do that. He couldn’t come to me and say there was someone else, he was leaving. I could have handled that. I knew I was not the most—companionable of women. I could see a man might prefer someone more available. I’m not using that in a pejorative sense at all, but as the word is intended. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” I was wadding up my thick napkin, about to bite down on it. How could it be that nobody else in the world remembered my mother but Lila Beth Williams?

  “He had excuses. He hadn’t wanted to hurt me; his practice; her child. Not convincing. We were more than comfortable. There was ample to go around. I’d have returned here in any case; my roots were here. This is my home. How could he have let her drive out into that flood warning?”

  I used the napkin on my eyes instead.

  “They were to meet in Wimberly. He said he’d left word at her house that the ‘meeting’ or ‘clinic’ or whatever term they used, had been canceled. But that she had already gone.”

  “His office called me.”

  She looked pained. “He could have telephoned her the night before. He could have gone to your house and stopped her. The truth was, he wanted your mother and he wanted his life the way it was. He didn’t want to change one thing.” She put two fingers against her lips, as if to steady them. She looked away and sighed.

  I waited.

  “Don’t you see, my dear, I was not going to have that happen again. I’d cried my eyes out for that poor youngster, motherless, with nobody but Shorty Guest to raise her. I saw that it was my fault as well; I could have seen what was under my nose, walked out, brought the matter into the open. I could have prevented it. I had my own burden connected with Celia’s death, you see. Then, when I learned that the girl Andrew was so crazy about was that daughter, my only thought was to get him out of town. To put a stop to that in the fastest way possible. My husband could hardly object to the move; he had his own conscience to deal with.”

  “You left Austin because of me?”

  “It was more than I could bear, later, here, when you, Cile, turned out to be that girl, that motherless Guest girl. I was sick in bed for a week. It seemed to me one of those awful cruelties found only in literature: the man rides all night to escape death, who awaits him in the town to which he’s fled. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded.

  “I watched and waited, fretted, questioned Andrew. Then it seemed to me that I had worried for nothing. That he and you had got past that teenage romance. I relaxed, seeing you each Sunday grow lovelier, become less of a girl, more of a woman, raise your young daughters, handle the congregation without being devoured by it, handle that dour Scot husband of yours with a light touch. The past seemed erased; put to rest. When my husband died, whether by accident or choice in that ice storm I’ll never be sure, I’d felt the earlier death had been atoned for, that it was behind me. Behind us all. Then, as your youngsters and Andrew’s grew, and there appeared to be no rekindling of the attraction between you, I felt that danger was behind me as well, and rejoiced.” She rose, carefully setting down her glass of tea. “You will have to excuse me for a moment.”

  I wiped my eyes, blew my nose on her white damask napkin, wheezed (getting more like Shorty every day). How I had worried that first time I came to call, that the babies or I would spill something in this fine room; that we’d never be invited back again.

  “I must watch my blood sugar far too carefully,” Lila Beth said, placing a plate of cheese and apple slices for us by the pitcher. The plate itself had green apples glazed on its center.

  “May I continue?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m all right.”

  We smiled at one another briefly over this small transparent social lie.

  She began again. “It became apparent to me in the last two years that my son was spending time out of town on a fairly regular basis, on the Tuesdays, in fact, which happened to coincide with my daughter-in-law’s much publicized weekly trips to Dallas, her attendance at that putative exercise class. His office reported that he was checking with the foreman of the properties, meeting with grain representatives about increasing the number of head per acre, attending meetings with concerned citizens about the government’s plans for north central Texas. I hoped it was not you; I prayed it was not you. But when you could not be reached by phone, when your car was not at the church or at the parsonage, I began to grow concerned. Pressed, Andrew revealed what he was perhaps unaware of confiding.

  “By the time he got around to presenting me with the fact of your alliance, coming out in the open with his plans for divorce, I was unable to handle the news. I told him that he could get over you; that he’d got over you before. I resolved it would not happen again. My fear was that he was too much like his father. My daughter-in-law had picked out a camp for his sons, and off to that camp they went. She’d selected a preparatory school for them, and the matter was settled. I had no doubt she would have taken this matter in her own hands as well, had the economy not taken a downturn. I’d no doubt she’d had her eye for some time on a bigger catch than our small city could provide; it was hardly a secret she had no love for Waco. But, unfortunately for her plans, it was a seller’s market. She played for time.”

  “Is that why she had her family come down to the farm?”

  “No, my dear. That was my doing. I knew that you had been meeting Andrew up there; it stood to reason. I also knew that he was giving no thought to the danger of those country roads, the risk of your driving that unsafe old car of yours, in an—please pardon me if I am frank—aroused state. I must have walked a path in this rug every Tuesday for the past year. Then, when your affair was out in the open, when you could be more careless still about your frequent meetings, the rains came.” Lila Beth stopped, got control. “I went, to tell you the truth, Cile, quite mad. I could see the entire tragedy of your mother’s death repeating itself with gruesome coincidence: the same circumstances of weather, the same time of year, the same day even.”

  The first of May she had died. I thought back. Was that the day I’d been standing in the rain in the phone booth on Lago Lake Drive, getting wet feet? It must have been. Would I have driven up to the farm if Drew had asked me to? Did birds fly south in the winter?

  “And you, Cile, if I’m not mistaken, are exactly the age she was.”

  “Yes.” The tears came again.

  “I could not sleep for worrying about it. The newspapers and the television carried daily pictures of destruction and
fatalities. In desperation I called Mary Virginia and told her to get her family to the farm. They have a deer lease in the hill country; it was hardly a matter of their needing a roof over their heads, far from it. But I insisted they stay at the farm. I became quite adamant. It was standing idle, I said; there was ample room. It was near the highway north to Dallas and south to us. My daughter-in-law could see the merit of the idea from her own perspective, and so her sister and her husband and their mother were there by sundown. I slept the night straight through for the first time since the flooding began.”

  I recalled all those times driving to meet Drew in the hail, during tornado watches, through dusters and rain. It would have seemed just one more trip in the chancy old Firebird. She had guessed right.

  “I thought I’d got matters under control. Then when I saw that a woman had drowned on a two-lane south of West, and it was four hours before I was sure it was not you—” Lila Beth broke down, seeming to be appalled at herself that she had lost control. She used her napkin to wipe her eyes as I’d used mine. “I took to my bed,” she said, “believing that I had let it happen once again.”

  “Drew said you had the flu.”

  “No flu bug could survive in this tough hide.” She folded the napkin in half, laid it across her knees.

  “Whose idea was the birthday party?” I was still stung by the way they had all turned Drew’s head with the dream car, the old buddies from way back, the band, pulling all the stops out, tugging every string of his heart. She couldn’t have been unaware what was going on.

  “My daughter-in-law, as I said, was buying time. Getting her options in order in Dallas. She begged me to let her have the surprise party here; she’d enlisted her family since they were close at hand. She wanted to give Andrew such a fete that he would stay in his marriage long enough for her to get her interests in place. ‘I want to give him something he wants more than anything in the world,’ she told me. ‘That he’s always wanted.’ ” Lila Beth smiled at me ruefully. “That wasn’t too difficult to come up with, was it?”