The Firefly Dance

by Sarah Addison Allen

  When I got home, my mother came into the living room the moment I walked in. I ruefully handed her the bag of cookies and told her I couldn’t eat dinner because I was full. I was more than full. I was sick. She reached into the bag and took one. “So, what did Aunt Sophie say?” she asked as she bit into the cookie with an expectant, almost girlish look on her face.

  “Nothing much.” I shrugged, just wanting to lie down. “I told her what he looked like and about his cane. Then I told her about the Charlotte Naomi and she got all quiet and sent me and Sue home.”

  Mom had the cookie almost to her mouth for another bite, but then she lowered her hand as a hushed look fell across her face. She slowly sat down on the edge of the couch and shook her head. “She didn’t know,” she said quietly.

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “About the ship.” She paused then looked up at me and smiled. “My mother’s name was Charlotte Naomi,” she explained. “My dad loved my mom. That’s always been a hard thing for Aunt Sophie to accept.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m going upstairs now, Mom.” I felt awful. I never wanted to see another cookie as long as I lived. I was getting too old. In my younger days, I thought, I could wolf down cookies with the best of them. I felt defeated.

  “Okay,” my mom replied, distracted, as she dropped her half-eaten cookie back into the brown paper lunch bag. She carefully folded the top of the bag and set it in her lap. She smoothed her hands over it gently, as if to wipe away any creases. Then, sighing, she reached for the phone.

  God’s Honest Truth at the Fashionette

  Vivian opened the door and propped a broken piece of cinder block in front of it. The day was warm and breezy. She hated to look out the window and see that there was such grand weather going on and she couldn’t be out in it. She kept the door open as much as possible. She stood in the doorway and watched the traffic pass. A pickup truck pulled into the parking lot.

  She waved as an older couple got out of the pickup. Sometimes Vivian would see them driving in town. Ginger sat close to James in the cab of the truck, not all the way over on the other side. Sometimes Vivian wondered why. Did Ginger still love her husband that much? Or was it just habit?

  “That must be Ginger and James,” Harriet said from her chair, where Vivian had left her when she went to open the door.

  “Right on time.” Which is to say an hour early, Vivian added to herself, for her own benefit. She knew these people. She knew their habits. They came to her, to her place, and she hosted them.

  “Sophie should be here any minute. I’m surprised she’s not here already,” Harriet said as Vivian picked up her comb and resumed brushing through Harriet’s wet hair. “I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about Lorelei Horton’s new car.”

  “Time to get pretty!” Ginger said as she walked in, her arms stretched wide like she was receiving applause from an audience. “Harriet,” she said, breathlessly, like she had a secret to tell. “Have you seen Lorelei’s new car?”

  Harriet laughed and jiggled her wet hair out of place. “Yes. Yes, I have.”

  “Has Sophie?” Ginger asked, vaguely disappointed that she’d been the bearer of old news.

  “I have no doubt,” Harriet said as she shook her head. Vivian had to put both hands on her neck to still her. Harriet was a fidgeter, as anxious and impatient as a toddler sitting in the chair.

  “That color,” James said as he walked in behind Ginger, shaking his keys in his hand like dice, “is not found occurring naturally in the known universe.”

  “Are you referring to my hair or Lorelei’s new car?” Harriet asked him.

  “I’ll get back to you on that one as soon as Vivian is finished with you.” He winked and pocketed the keys.

  “You are a wicked man,” Harriet laughed.

  “Yes, he’s dreadful,” Ginger agreed simply. Ginger was tiny, barely over five-two and, in his heyday, James was well over six feet. They didn’t look like they fit, yet no one could imagine one without the other. “But I’ve been married to him for fifty-eight years and I’m used to it.”

  James sat down in one of the cracked plastic waiting chairs lining the long front window with FASHIONETTE written on it in white shoe polish. “This is the thanks I get for bringing you to gossip with your hair cronies every Tuesday.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Ginger said, sitting next to him with a flourish. “You enjoy it every bit as much as we do.” She patted his knee at the face he made. “Go on, tell them. Tell them what you heard.”

  “What did you hear, James?” Harriet asked from under the veil of her wet hair as Vivian combed it forward.

  James settled himself comfortably in his chair. “My cousin Roy over in Jonestown told me that Lorelei had bought herself one of those dancing hula girls that you put on the dashboard for her new car.”

  “You don’t mean it!” Harriet said, parting her hair so she could look at James.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Lord, that woman thinks she’s sixteen,” Harriet said.

  “Where is Sophie? She’s always here before we are,” Ginger said, looking pointedly to her right as if Sophie was going to pop out of the bathroom.

  There was a concerned pause.

  “Didn’t you pass her out on the highway?” Vivian asked.

  “No.”

  “Why she insists on riding that bicycle all the time, I have no idea,” Harriet said, nervously twirling her garnet pinky ring under the yellow plastic covering her from neck to knee. Where was Sophie? Harriet had offered to drive her to the Fashionette that very morning, like she did every Tuesday. Old and stubborn, Harriet thought. One sneaks up on you just as fast as the other. Didn’t Sophie see how dangerous it was, riding that bike at her age? Too independent for her own good, Harriet thought. Sophie never wanted help. She never needed help.

  Harriet had to learn early how to ask. Her husband, God rest his soul, was a no-good son of a gun. She married him when she was eighteen. But when he came home from the war, she hardly recognized him. And when she thought of him now, she couldn’t picture him without a drink in his hand, his fingers blurring into the glass like it was an extension of him. Most of the time he even slept with the glass, in the living room chair, and over time she found she preferred him there rather than in the bedroom with her.

  There was never enough money. Harriet took a job at the factory, back when it was small and only made parachutes, to support herself and the children. Whatever her husband managed to make went toward his liquor. She’d known Sophie for ages, ever since Sophie’s husband let Harriet have credit at the gas station he owned when things got tight.

  Harriet still worked at the factory three days a week. Social Security wasn’t enough to live on and the factory didn’t have retirement. She wondered what it was going to be like when she was finally too old to work. Would she know when it was time or would she be one of those poor old souls who tried to do everything for themselves and ending up breaking a hip in the garden or in the dairy section of the grocery store? It hurt her deep in her heart to think of being a burden to her children. They were the sweetest things known to man, but not in any real position to support her. She asked so much of them anyway. They mowed her lawn and had her car serviced. Her youngest had her over for lunch after church every Sunday and her oldest brought her dinner from the diner every Thursday, turkey pot pie night.

  Being old never seemed to bother Sophie. She did it easily. Harriet liked that about her. Being old on your own, knowing you could do it. For heaven’s sake, she even rode her bike out on the highway. Sophie did it because she knew she could. But what would it mean if something happened to her on her way to the Fashionette?

  One down, Harriet thought. That’s what it would mean.

  “I don’t have a clue how those things stay on the dashboard,” James was sa
ying. “Some sort of glue, I guess. But why would Lorelei risk hurting the interior of her new car like that? Those hula dancers can really move.”

  “And how do you know that, James?” Vivian teased as she began to snip the ends of Harriet’s hair with short, quick movements. She barely had to look at what she was doing.

  “He thinks he’s a man of the world,” Ginger said. It was an unwritten rule at the Fashionette that men entered at their own risk. Teasing James was a big part of Tuesday afternoons at the Fashionette.

  “I’ve been to Korea,” James said.

  Ginger patted his knee again. “There aren’t hula dancers in Korea, dear.”

  James grinned. “How do you know?”

  Vivian smiled and surreptitiously glanced at the digital clock over on Beth’s side of the Fashionette. Sophie was late.

  Vivian didn’t like that Sophie wasn’t on time. Harriet, Ginger, and Sophie made appointments together so that they could spend all afternoon at the Fashionette. Sophie was usually the first to arrive because she had to leave so early to get here. She bicycled instead of driving a car. She had refused to learn how to drive after her husband died, or so Vivian was told. This happened before Vivian even knew Sophie.

  Vivian didn’t consider herself a spring chicken, but at fifty-seven she was younger than most all her clients. Her only employee, Beth, quietly doing a teenager’s perm in the chair across the small room, brought in most of the younger clientele.

  Vivian had moved the Fashionette out onto Clementine Highway because it was the only place she could afford. It was nice enough, but Clementine Highway was much busier than it used to be, ever since the factory on down the highway expanded. Vivian worried about traffic holding back her regulars, especially Sophie, riding that bike. She rode down the side of the highway like nobody’s business, which she always said was true, anyway.

  Vivian looked outside at the beautiful day. The rolling green mountains looked like kids playing under a green blanket. Vivian couldn’t remember the last time she was on a bicycle. Her boys used to have bicycles. She remembered that much. What did she do with those bikes? She had no idea. Travis was three and Barry was four when they died, along with their father, when that train hit their truck. God, how long ago was that? She thought. More than thirty years? Sometimes, even when she tried really hard, she couldn’t conjure up their faces. She sometimes thought of her boys’ fat cheeks, crusty with breakfast, and the veins in her husband’s hands. But that was it, memories going by like traffic passing.

  She had the Fashionette and it was her life now. It had moved to six different locations since she’d opened it thirty years ago, but her regulars followed her. Harriet and Sophie, who’d been cohorts since she’d known them, had brought cake and casseroles to her when her family died. It was the one thing they didn’t talk about when they all got together at the Fashionette, although Vivian thought she wouldn’t mind so much now.

  Ginger and James came into her life after she opened the Fashionette in its first location on Main Street, back when the leases weren’t so high in downtown Clementine.

  She pinched her eyebrows together and tuned back in to the conversation. She hoped Sophie was all right. One thing she would never forget in all her living days was that losing people was hard. Deathly hard.

  “I’ve seen the car,” Beth was saying from across the room. She was putting the solution on the young girl’s hair she was perming. “Lorelei parked at the grocery store and no one would park next to her.”

  “I wouldn’t park next to her,” Harriet said, her hands fidgeting under the yellow plastic, twirling her pinky ring again. “That paint looks contagious.”

  “James parked right next to her in front of the Dairy Queen yesterday,” Ginger said.

  “I was looking for the hula dancer.”

  Ginger shook her head. “Devil man.”

  James looked innocently at Harriet, who was now having her hair curled with hot rollers. “Don’t look at me,” Harriet warned. “I think she’s right.”

  Beth smiled as she set the timer for Tracy Lyn’s perm. The young woman was silent, like most of her clients were. They either didn’t have much to say or, like Beth, they enjoyed listening to the conversation over on the older ladies’ side.

  Beth could have gotten herself a booth of her own at Clipper’s in Jonestown. But she was closer to home working for Vivian. That son of hers was always getting in trouble. Lord, he was only thirteen. Sometimes Beth was tempted to ask the Tuesday afternoon club about how they raised their children, about what to do. But they had their own little world over there and she rarely interrupted unless she had something pertaining to the conversation at hand.

  Beth owed Vivian for hiring her while she was still in beauty school over in Jonestown. She needed the money after her husband Kenny left her. Vivian said she understood. Being a woman is rough, she said. You need a job, you need a conscience and, when it comes to men, you need accouterments. Beth had to look up the word later. It meant to outfit as in the military. Beth supposed you had to steel yourself when it came to men.

  She liked it at the Fashionette. She liked that her younger clients were well behaved and sometimes talked politely about school and their fresh lives, and she liked to listen to the keen-minded ladies. Her own mother had Alzheimer’s. Beth had to finally put her in a nursing home last year. Her son was getting worse by the day and Beth just couldn’t take care of them both. It broke her heart harder than when Kenny left, to put her mother in the home. She hated seeing her fade away and wanted to stop it somehow, but she couldn’t. The harder she tried, the worse it got. It was like sweeping back the sea.

  Where was Miss Sophie? Beth wondered. She’d never been this late. Come to think of it, Beth couldn’t remember her ever being late. Could she have forgotten? Beth glanced at the wall phone near the bathroom. Maybe she could sneak a call to Miss Sophie’s house and remind her. Her mother’s symptoms started with forgetfulness. Good Lord in heaven, she hoped it wasn’t that. She eyed the phone again.

  “Where did Lorelei get the car?” Harriet was asking.

  “At a dealership in Charlotte,” James answered, recognizing a man question when he heard one. “No one in this part of North Carolina would have the gall to sell something like that.”

  “I can’t wait until she comes for her Thursday morning wash and set so I can see this car for myself,” Vivian said.

  “You won’t believe it,” Ginger shook her head. “You just won’t believe your eyes. That color.”

  “Where did she get the hula dancer?” Harriet asked.

  James shot a look at Ginger. “Korea?” He offered.

  Ginger popped his knee. She loved James with all her heart and soul, in a fanatical kind of way. She thought every day of losing him and loved him even more in hopes that it would make him stay. She was the only one of her friends whose husband was still alive and she felt privileged, like she’d done something right to deserve this. Like she was somehow different from Sophie and Harriet in an enviable way.

  Their children didn’t visit anymore—they didn’t like her, and she knew it. James was hurt by that, so she tried to make up for it. She was always with him, close to him in the truck, laughing with him on Tuesdays at the Fashionette, going to choir practice with him even though she couldn’t carry a tune and Helen the organist didn’t like her.

  Ginger didn’t know how to be independent. Sometimes she would wonder what it would be like, living without James. She tried to imagine the sympathetic glances she’d get, the calls and offers to be driven places. It was almost unbearable. Almost because of one person. Sophie knew how to be independent. Ginger both loved and hated it about her. In the name of all that was holy, she hoped Sophie was all right. She was the one who showed her that living was possible after loving a man so much. She was proof that it was possible to get on without driving.<
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  Ginger discreetly glanced at James’ wristwatch. She never wore one herself. They had been at the Fashionette for half an hour and Sophie still hadn’t shown herself.

  You can do it, Sophie. You can do anything. Maybe, Ginger thought, independence isn’t something you can find or lose. Maybe, for good or bad, you either have it or you don’t. If that was the case, Ginger thought it would just be easier to die when James did.

  “Do you think Lorelei is color blind?” Vivian was asking.

  “No, I think she knows exactly what color her car is and she’s getting a kick out of everyone talking about her,” Harriet said.

  “Well, you ladies are doing a good job of it, that’s for sure,” James said.

  “Oh, don’t you even try that.” Ginger smiled at him. “You’re one of us.”

  Traffic outside whizzed by on Clementine Highway. The timer for Tracy Lyn’s perm ticked away steadily. A light wind blew in and Vivian and Harriet, closest to the door, felt the breeze on their legs. Everyone looked around uncomfortably. Harriet spun her ring nervously. Ginger tried to think of something to say. James noticed for the first time that FASHIONETTE was spelled with two T’s, not one. Time slowed, movements became sluggish, the tick of the timer lingered longer after each tick, breathing became lazy.

  Then, like the burst of a bubble, Sophie stomped in saying, “Doggone it!”

  “Sophie!” Harriet exclaimed, startling everyone more than Sophie did in the first place. She almost hopped out of the chair before Vivian stopped her. “Where on earth have you been?”

  Sophie proceeded to take a tissue out of her wicker purse. She patted her forehead. Her face was flushed, and her curly silver hair was pushed flat against her head on one side, sticking out like fire flames on the other. “My bicycle had a flat halfway down the highway. Had to push it the rest of the way here.”