Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  This morning it was the bumblebee class, four- and five-year-olds, girls who had yet to be touched by the rigors of first grade. We made like daisies, stretched up slowly toward the sun and waggled our fingers at the overhead lights. I found something graceful and flowerlike in every child there, and if my daughter was marrying rich and my sister was coming to stay with me, for a while I forgot about it completely.

  I was on to the second level of the exercise, where the daisies encounter a breeze, when I noticed that one of the flowers was larger than I was. It was George, his black warm-ups rolled at his waist, an old A.B.T. T-shirt with a faded-out picture of Suzanne Farrell on the front. He had managed to sneak in quietly, when all of our faces were thrown back to greet the sun, and when the girls saw him, they let out a high-pitched yell and stamped their feet. Only the very bravest of my students were able to go and throw their arms around George’s legs the way they wanted to. They were all too in love with him.

  “Reach, reach!” he said, his voice set to just the right pitch for the four- and five-year-old crowd, enough enthusiasm to make them work, not so much that they simply spin out of control. “Keep reaching!” He went up on his toes and came close to brushing his fingers against the fluorescent lights. My students squealed in appreciation of his height.

  I GAVE BIRTH to four children and ultimately Tom got every single one. “It wasn’t a contest,” he liked to say with the cool noblesse oblige of someone who’s already won. Henry, our oldest and most practical, was a tax attorney. Charlie, the entrepreneur, was in real-estate law (which almost counted as a failure in Tom’s eyes, though he managed to keep it to himself). Kay, the greatest source of pride, was making slave wages in the P.D.’s office just like her father. And it wasn’t just that they were all lawyers. None of the first three of the children could dance. Despite the nine months of dancing they did in utero, despite the constant sound track of danceable beats that had permeated our home since their first hours of life, despite the fact that they came to every class I taught and were piled in the corner on a high bed of discarded coats and backpacks until they were old enough to take to the floor themselves, they could not dance. I mean, they really could not dance. The second I brought them home from class, they would shimmy up into their father’s big chair, put their arms around his neck, and ask to hear again the story of Brown v. Board of Education.

  Except George. The first time I saw him stand at the barre in fifth position, I thought that maybe the spell had been broken. Maybe I had pushed all of the little lawyers from my body. George was graceful and strong. He had a great understanding of music. Most of all, he possessed the single quality that allows boys to dance: He was completely impervious to teasing. When he was older and the boys on the football team said he was gay, George only smiled and winked at them. After all, he was dating every girl in town who possessed good posture and a pair of tights. By the time he was sixteen, he was teaching the introductory classes himself. He went to dance camps in the summer. He came to the studio at the crack of dawn to practice. Scouts from the big companies were coming to see him. George was going to be my legacy.

  Four children. Four lawyers. He waited a long time to tell me, and when he finally did, what could I say? I would rather see you be a dancer? I would rather see you in a career where you might hold on until you’re thirty-five if you don’t get knocked out by a case of tendinitis or a bad knee?

  “It’s not an either-or thing,” George said. “Just because I’m going to law school doesn’t mean I won’t still look great in tights.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying not to sound defeated. “You can still dance.”

  And he did. He kept on teaching the level-three class on Saturday morning. George loved level three. That’s where you start to relearn everything you already thought you knew cold. He took the prima seventh graders through the six positions over and over again. George was a real stickler for detail.

  But today was a Wednesday, not a Saturday, and this class wasn’t a level at all. It was only the bumblebees, and there George was, dancing the role of the grandest daisy in the bunch.

  “Aunt Taffy called,” he said to me over his shoulder and then threw in a grand jeté just to show off for the girls.

  “Roots in the ground, daisies,” I said. “Use your arms.”

  “She wanted me to tell you she’s on her way.”

  “She’s leaving Atlanta now?”

  George swung down from the waist, made a circle with his torso, and rose up again to the light. The girls followed him. I followed him. “No, no, no. She left at five o’clock this morning. She said she couldn’t sleep, anyway. She said the house stank of Uncle Neddy.”

  I felt a little chill. “So where was she calling from?”

  “She said she was right around the 40-85 split,” George said in an ominous voice.

  She was just outside of Durham. That gave me less than an hour if there was traffic, as little as forty minutes if the roads were clear.

  “I tried to put the house together. Woodrow said he’d get one of the drywall guys to run the vacuum. He said he’d let her in, of course, if you didn’t make it home in time.”

  “I can’t just walk out of here.” I clapped my hands. The girls looked up at me with that expectant expression so often seen on the faces of puppies. “Now your roots come up, all the way out of the ground. That’s right, now stretch up.”

  “I’ll cover this.”

  “You have school.”

  “Believe me, it’s easier to make up a day of law school than it is a day of dance class. I’ve read too far ahead, anyway. It’s hardly even interesting.” He turned his attention to the class. “Skip, daisies! Put your hearts into it! You’re the first daisies on the planet who are able to skip!” George set off in a slow skip and the girls followed him. They would have followed him out of the school, down the street, and into the river.

  “You’re saving my life.”

  “I’m saving my own life. I don’t want to have to listen to Taffy bemoan the fact that you weren’t even there to meet her. Stretch your stems. Long daisy stems!” George pushed his shoulders down and made his neck into something elegant and the little girls strained to follow his example.

  I told the girls I was leaving, but they hardly even blinked at the news. They loved me wildly unless George was around, and then they could barely remember who I was. Such is the fickle nature of the five-year-old. I was grateful to be able to leave without a sobbing daisy pulling at my ankles. It happens sometimes.

  I wanted to stop off at the liquor store on the way home and buy the wine that Taffy liked, but all I could remember was that it was white and French and prohibitively expensive. I wasn’t sure what kind of fruit she might want or what she ate for breakfast. As I tried to remember, I forgot that my sister drove me crazy, and instead gave myself over to feeling bad that we hadn’t been closer over the years. We could make lists together. I would bring in whatever she wanted. I would buy flowers for her room and make sure the sheets were fresh. If there had been time, I would have cleaned the oven and rearranged the linen closet and turned over every cushion on every chair and vacuumed it. I was feeling the onset of a kind of nervousness that tended to manifest itself in weird and unnecessary cleaning. After all, my sister was getting divorced, my daughter was getting married. It was enough to make me want to put down new paper on the kitchen shelves.

  chapter four

  THE VACUUM NEEDED TO BE REPLACED. IT STILL MANAGED to suck up a certain amount of dirt, but for the past year it had made, simultaneously, a horrible, high-pitched whine and a loud clacking that no amount of repair could get rid of. I could hear it before I even opened the door. There were no signs that my sister had arrived. It was only Woodrow and Kay sitting at the kitchen table, a stack of magazines between them.

  “Who’s vacuuming?” I said, raising my voice over the roaring that seemed to be coming from down the hall.

  “Mr. Kelly,” Woodrow said. Mr. Kelly was the plum
ber who had been brought over to assess how much pressure the crumbling foundation was putting on our pipes. “He’s almost finished.”

  “George told me one of your guys was going to vacuum.”

  “Kevin was all set to go, he was plugged in and everything, but Mr. Kelly just took over. He says he loves to vacuum.” Woodrow was practically having to scream. I hadn’t thought about it before the vacuum was on, but he was a soft-spoken man. He waved me over to come and sit down at the table.

  “I was showing Woodrow a few dresses,” Kay said. She held up a picture in a magazine. It looked like a costume for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a blond nymphet tied up in panels of lace. There were a dozen different kinds of flowers woven into her hair. The dress seemed more appropriate for an ascension than for a marriage.

  “I think she can go either way on the sleeves,” Woodrow said.

  “What do you think of sleeves?” my daughter asked me.

  I didn’t have a quick answer. I was still reviewing the questions: Why was someone who charged thirty dollars an hour for plumbing running my vacuum? Why was the contractor hashing out the issue of sleeves for a wedding dress that wasn’t making an appearance for at least another six months? And, on behalf of my husband, why wasn’t Kay at work? “Why aren’t you at work?” I said.

  “Markus Jones came in first thing this morning. It was like a miracle. I walked into the office and there he was, waiting for me. I ran him through his testimony, passed off some paperwork, picked up a stack of magazines, and here I am.”

  “Then help me get ready for Taffy.”

  Kay looked puzzled, almost hurt but not quite. “Don’t you want to see which dresses I like?” She ran her finger over another page. The picture reminded me of Glinda the Good Witch in the scene where she shows up in Oz to tell Dorothy it’s time to go home. It was a dress that cried out for a wand.

  “Has the wedding been moved up? Are you getting married this weekend?” It was something about the sound of the vacuum. It made my nerves feel raw. Coupled with my impending company, I wasn’t so interested in anyone else’s problems. Suddenly Kay looked fifteen to me and I wanted to know why her room wasn’t clean.

  She slapped the pages closed. “If you’re not interested.”

  “Taffy’s going to be walking through the door”—I looked at my watch, hoping to say, In half an hour from now, but no such luck—“any minute. I’m going to need some help here.”

  “This is my wedding. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened in my life. Would it be so terrible to sit down and talk to me about it for a minute? Woodrow was talking to me.”

  “I came in to get the paint cans,” Woodrow said in his own defense. He pointed out the row of paint cans that lined my kitchen counters just in case I hadn’t noticed them. “I was going to put them out in the garage.”

  “Why does Taffy have to come now, anyway?” Kay’s voice was a knot of petulance. “Can’t you call and tell her this isn’t a good time? We have so much planning to do.”

  “Not unless I call her on her cell phone as she’s driving up the driveway.”

  “You don’t even like Taffy. You like her even less than the rest of us do. I don’t see why it would be so hard to tell her no.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. It was her way of saying that she was completely right and I was completely wrong. I know. I’d been watching her do it since she was three.

  If I had been the kind of mother who recorded all the golden moments of her children’s lives with a camcorder, I would take this opportunity to premiere the montage of Kay’s finest moments. I would show what kind of person my daughter had been before the five-and-a-half-carat diamond was implanted on her left hand: Look, there is Kay at four, giving her bucket and shovel to the kid in the sandbox who doesn’t have one. There is Kay at seven, reviving the starling that thunked itself cold against the living-room window (a lice-infested starling, mind you, not a cute little chickadee). There is Kay at every year of her life bringing home some animal that had been left mangled or abandoned by the side of the road. Kay at eleven giving all of her allowance to the Haitian relief fund after the priest’s Sunday sermon about the suffering in Haiti. Kay at fourteen using her baby-sitting money to buy George the iguana that he wanted and I refused to pay for. Kay at thirty working in the public defender’s office, for God’s sake—what more proof did a person need than that? Is it possible that an engagement ring could change a person’s brain chemistry?

  “Listen,” I said. “Give Taffy a break. She’s having a very hard time right now.” I wasn’t being coy. I had every intention of telling them the nature of her hard time, but as soon as I said it, the vacuum was turned off and the doorbell rang and the three of us were suspended in a sudden void of silence.

  “I’ll get that,” I said.

  There stood my sister at the front door with a small red leather suitcase at her feet and a white wire-haired terrier named Stamp in her arms. Even though she had been the bane of my childhood, even though we had never been close as adults, my blood recognized her blood and I remembered what my mother worked tirelessly to drill into us: that a sister was a valuable thing to have in this world.

  “Welcome home,” I said.

  “I look like hell,” she said.

  Taffy didn’t know the first thing about looking like hell. Despite having found out that her husband was leaving her yesterday, despite driving since the crack of dawn to get here, she was still nothing short of radiant. If the only thing Taffy had going for her was the hand that nature dealt her at birth, she would have been a beautiful woman. But she had more than that. She had taste. She had a personal trainer and a brilliant colorist she saw every six weeks. She had good jewelry, flashy Italian shoes, and a very, very subtle plastic surgeon of whom she did not speak. Because we had grown up in the same house, I knew that in a couple of weeks she would be turning sixty (she would swear to fifty-eight if anyone could get that much out of her), but time seemed to leave her alone. If she had been crying half the night, there would be no telling it. She looked like she was on her way to lunch at the polo club. She was wearing soft camel pants that matched her camel sweater set in silk, which matched the small brown ring around her dog’s left eye. I leaned over to give her a hug, but her dog flashed his teeth at me and made a quick lunge in the general direction of my throat, which made me jump back.

  “What’s Stamp’s problem?” I’d never particularly liked Stamp, but it wasn’t as if we were strangers. He had no reason to want to take a piece out of me.

  She put one hand over the dog’s eyes to make a temporary blindfold and then she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Stamp is very protective of me if anyone gets too close. It’s gotten worse as he’s gotten older. I don’t know how well he sees. He bites Neddy all the time now.”

  “Good boy, Stamp.” I was glad to think that something in this life had bitten Neddy. It made me wish I had a box of biscuits.

  “Everybody needs something that loves them best.” Taffy gave Stamp a kiss on his forehead, leaving a little lipstick stain on his wiry white fur. “At twenty I was hoping for more than a dog, but at this point in my life a dog doesn’t seem so bad.”

  I thought about Tom. I needed to call him. I leaned over and picked up the suitcase, which the dog didn’t seem to mind at all. I guess he didn’t feel protective about the luggage. Taffy put Stamp down and he immediately raced off into the house. A second later we heard a round of unrepentantly vicious barking. When I got to the kitchen, Kay was yelling at Stamp, who had stopped about six inches from Woodrow’s shoes. Every bark was a small explosion that momentarily forced all four of the dog’s feet off the floor. The bark was so high, so nerve-shattering, that I felt as if it was reprogramming the regular beating of my heart. Woodrow, on the other hand, never flinched, even though he was the one who was about to be swallowed whole by a twenty-pound fox terrier. He simply sat at the kitchen table and continued to drink his coffee, whic
h in turn drove the dog to new levels of hysteria. Kay scooped Stamp up and, without thinking, tossed him out the back door, at which point he immediately charged at the four men who were unloading cement from a truck. In one balletic gesture the four leapt up and into the flatbed while the dog jumped up and up and up, every time almost reaching the back of the truck and every time crashing back into the driveway undeterred. The very hound from hell.

  “Jesus,” Kay said. “Why don’t you keep that thing on a leash?”

  Taffy seemed to be completely unaffected by the display and I had to wonder if it was a constant event at her house, if all across Atlanta the UPS men were drawing straws to see who would take the heinous job of delivering her packages. “No one keeps a dog on a leash inside. Besides, he’s never bitten anyone except my husband. He looks like he’s going to bite, but he never actually does.”

  “You should tell that to the men in the truck,” Woodrow said.

  “Is that yard completely fenced in?” Taffy asked. “I don’t think I could take Stamp running off right now.”

  The chances of Stamp leaving that truck were about as great as the earth disengaging from its orbit, but it was true, he needed to be relocated. Kay opened up the back door again. “Sorry,” she said to the four grown men who were inching back toward the cab of the truck. “My aunt says it doesn’t bite.”

  “Everyone says that,” one of the men in the truck said. “And then after that they say, ‘Look at that. You’re the first person that dog’s ever bitten.’ ”