Come and Join the Dance

by Joyce Johnson

  There was the sound of glass breaking, falling, splintering all over the floor—then silence until someone shouted down the black tube of the courtyard, “Hey! What’s going on down there!” and she saw the smashed pane in the kitchen window, the jagged wound in the glass that had not been there a moment ago. Was the window really broken? But if you thought about things like that, you would begin to fall—slowly, as if you had been dropped out of an airplane in a nightmare. It was strange, too, that the night was a slightly different color where there wasn’t any glass, and strange the way Anthony kept looking down at his bleeding hands and then at the window as if it were the window that had hurt him.

  “Wow!” he whispered, strangling the word. Was he afraid she would find him ridiculous for talking to himself? Should she offer to help him sweep up the glass, say, “Don’t worry about it”—what was expected of her? She remembered the softness of his hair suddenly, the way he had clutched her when they had been in bed, and felt a peculiar hollow ache in her armpits. There was so much loneliness about the way he stood, all alone in the middle of the kitchen, not even angry but as vacant as she was, watching the ice cubes melt on the floor.

  She wanted to put her arms around Anthony, let him close his eyes, but he might not understand. He might push her away or begin to kiss her—that would be frightening, humiliating. She folded her arms and pressed them against her body as if she were cold. She would think about it. There was still a little time—Anthony hadn’t moved.

  The doorbell rang, unreal in the silence, rang again. Without even a final look at her, Anthony rushed out of the room. But how could he go when she had almost decided to touch him? Now he was opening a door, shouting to someone. “I’ll pay for everything!” Then the door slammed and she thought she heard him running down the hall to the elevator. There was someone moving around in the living room, but it wasn’t Anthony—he was gone. Her arms still folded, Susan confronted only the kitchen’s emptiness, the little square of linoleum where Anthony had stood.

  “Susan?” She looked up and saw Peter standing in the doorway. “Hello,” he said uncertainly.

  “The window’s broken,” she said after a long while.

  He walked into the kitchen and looked at the window without saying anything, peered down at the glass on the floor. Then his eyes were on her again. “Are you all right?” he asked, half as if he cared, half as if he were just curious.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “but the window … ” He was standing exactly where Anthony had stood. A painful lump was forming in her throat.

  “Sit down,” Peter said. “Come on.”

  “Oh, I’m really all right.”

  “Sit.” Peter dragged a chair across the kitchen floor and gently pushed her down on it. He took off his jacket, tossed it into her lap, and knelt down to pick up the glass.

  “I’ll help you.”

  “Just sit there.” Methodically, one by one, he was picking up the splinters and dropping them into the garbage can. He placed the ice tray carefully on the kitchen table.

  “Anthony threw it—but it was my fault.”

  Kneeling among the pieces of glass, Peter had an odd, secret smile. “Well, it let some air in.” He stood up and walked to the window and thrust his arm through the hole in the pane. “It’s a very respectable broken window.” The way he said that reminded her of the careless way he crossed streets, the way he drove his car.

  “You don’t care.” Her arms had slipped into her lap. She stared down at them wearily, a little surprised.

  “Not particularly,” she heard him say. “It’s almost summer.”

  For a moment she felt a funny abstract hatred for him. “Why don’t you break your own windows?”

  “Why don’t you cry?” Peter asked quietly. His face had collapsed into sadness now that he had stopped smiling.

  “I don’t know.” The lump in her throat was swelling larger and larger.

  “Just cry—you’re going to anyway.”

  “I don’t want to.” A bitter fluid had begun to run down her cheeks. If she cried, she would cry forever. “I don’t want to,” she wept, “I don’t want to.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SHE DIDN’T WANT to think. The mornings were the worst times. For three mornings she woke up much earlier than she wanted to; the first morning it wasn’t even six. She would lie stunned on her bed, afraid to move, and it would only be for the moment of waking that she would not remember anything. The early light in her room would be white and sunless, and the room itself would not be quite familiar to her; it would look as though its space had been subtly altered during the night, as though the objects in it had lost their color, grown larger.

  She would not be able to go to sleep again, so she would tell herself that in only two hours it would be time for breakfast and that she could, if she wanted to, get up now and turn on her lamp and even take a shower and put on the dress she was going to wear that day—except that there would still be the problem of what to do before breakfast.

  But already she would have begun to remember. Already the scene in Peter’s kitchen would be playing itself over and over again, she weeping while Peter watched, the evidence of details accumulating—the color of Peter’s shirt, the four beer bottles on the window sill, the coldness of her fingertips when she had pressed them against her eyes. After a while Susan could see it all with such heightened clarity that she would no longer know how much she remembered, how much she imagined.

  I ought to get up, she would think—there was no comfort in the damp, twisted sheets of her bed—but her body would be as strengthless and limp as if it had spent the night wrestling a fever. She would not be able to recall what she had dreamed. Better not to know. Better to stop thinking before one knew too much. There was something about Peter that forced too much knowledge upon her. He was as dangerous, as compassionless as a mirror. She would not see him again before she went away. At first she told herself that it was for Kay’s sake, but she knew very well that that was not the reason.

  When she was leaving that night, he had followed her down the hall to the door. For a moment they had stood facing each other, and she had known that he was holding her there, forcing a dizzying closeness upon her as powerfully as if he had thrust his body against hers. “I’ll see you,” he had said to her, not in the casual way that people often said that, but somehow stating a fact. And she had felt—even remembering it she felt—as much joy as terror. She wished it had not been said at all.

  The afternoons were easier for her. It was easy to find ways of not being alone. She gave herself up to the college. If Peter called, she would tell him how busy she was now before graduation. The first day she was measured for her gown, and then there was the Class Sing and a speech by the Dean; the second day there was the Class Luncheon. The third day there would be the graduation rehearsal; the fourth, the graduation itself; the fifth, her departure.

  Peter didn’t call, of course. She knew that he wouldn’t; he would wait for her to find him. But she had no time to walk up and down Broadway looking for faces.

  Sometimes it amused her that with hardly any effort she could be such a convincing senior. Maybe all that was needed was sheer physical presence and a bland face. Strangers never looked at you hard enough to see that you were sleepwalking. When she went to the Class Sing, only someone listening to her with particular interest would have noticed how few of the songs she knew, that she sang only disjointed fragments of the lyrics, like “youth’s happy shore will evermore … ” and something about lifting one’s glass on high “sans souci.” It had only been a week ago that she had sat in Kay’s room and said, “I’m not going to bother to go to anything. I wouldn’t even go to graduation if it wasn’t for my parents.”

  She was glad that Kay hadn’t called either. Kay would have made her feel guilty, ashamed, as if she were betraying her as much by going to the Class Sing, the Class
Luncheon, as by liking Peter too well.

  She found a window on the top floor of the dorms from which she could see all of Broadway. First, the two blocks nearest the college where nothing ever happened, then 113th, 112th in miniature, a reduced Schulte’s and Riverside Café and the anonymous figures that skittered in and out of them and could have been anybody. If you had a photograph, she thought, the photograph would contain everything really—not only the people you glimpsed in the streets, but people you couldn’t see, people containing invisible thoughts behind walls and other windows. You could have the photograph and look at it forever and know that it contained everything, and it wouldn’t be enough. But at least a photograph asked nothing of you, would never watch you cry.

  On the day before graduation rehearsal, Susan had just come from the Luncheon, was just crossing the campus on the way to her room, when Mrs. Prosser, the postmistress, suddenly materialized on the same brick path.

  Susan felt perfectly calm in a stunned sort of way. It even occurred to her that ironically enough this was the first time she had ever known that Mrs. Prosser was definitely not on duty.

  “Miss Levitt,” Mrs. Prosser said, “you still haven’t picked up your mail.”

  She had nothing to say, no excuse. “I know,” she said. “I’ll pick it up.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing—a girl not wanting her mail.”

  “I know, Mrs. Prosser,” she said politely.

  “Well, you come with me now and get it.”

  “No … I’ll get it later.” Maybe I will get it later, he thought.

  But then, without warning, Mrs. Prosser gave her a sudden shrewd, terrible look, as if she knew the most intimate things about her, as if Susan stood before her wearing only her secret dirty underwear. “You’re a very peculiar girl, aren’t you?” she said in a soft, shocked voice. She turned from Susan without further comment and took up her slow, elderly journey across the campus.

  “You’re a very peculiar girl.” She was standing on the path exactly where Mrs. Prosser had left her and the words were spinning around and around, shaping themselves into a judgment. She was peculiar. Her terror of Mrs. Prosser was peculiar, her fear of getting her mail. She wouldn’t be able to get it now until she had graduated, until she was immune and could stride laughing to the mail desk—“You see, Mrs. Prosser, I’ve come to get my mail”—as if it were a joke they shared. The letters would be dead by then, and meaningless. She could throw them away unread if she wanted to. But would she ever be immune? Her fear was peculiar. She was peculiar.

  She made herself walk the rest of the way to the dorms, made herself climb the stairs, walk down the hall to her room. In her room, she would be temporarily safe.

  There was a note on her door. From Mrs. Prosser, she thought, barely surprised. But it was from Kay:

  Susan, where are you?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ACROSS THE LAWN, in the gymnasium, someone was counting to three over the loudspeaker: “One … two … three … one … two … three … ” The numbers boomed and died in the air. She was being counted off and subtracted.

  The graduation rehearsal had begun half an hour ago, but she found herself incapable of hurrying to it. Slowly she walked across the deserted lawn in her high heels, since no one was watching. If it hadn’t been for the voice, you might have thought that the college was closed for the summer, the gates locked to all except the janitors. She felt a great weariness, as if some machinery inside her had finally run down.

  They had changed the gymnasium, made it unfamiliar. She saw a long, uneven line of girls standing frozen in procession, with rows of empty wooden chairs for an audience. A little stage had been built too, and the Class President, whom Susan identified as the voice over the loud-speaker, was standing precariously at the edge of it, shouting: “Girls! Please make sure you’re in alphabetical order. I want everybody to turn around and memorize the face of the person in front of them and the person in back of them.” Susan wondered if everyone was actually going to do this—it seemed a terrible indignity. But at least it didn’t apply to her.

  How dressed up everyone was, adult, already vaguely secretarial. She was dressed for the occasion, too, in a dress she had never worn before because it had too many little buttons on it; someday she would get around to cutting them off with a razor. Her mother said the buttons “made” the dress. Perhaps she would give the buttons to her mother, who was really the person she had dressed for today. They had all dressed for their mothers because tomorrow they were going out into the world to perpetuate them. Why rehearse? Why graduate? Why make it public that you couldn’t even cut the buttons off your dress?

  “Aren’t you going to get on line?” A girl, dimly remembered as the Class Secretary, had approached her.

  Susan thought of possible rebellious answers. “Well, where are the L’s?” she asked, although she knew that if she looked she would find them immediately.

  “Just line up alphabetically,” said the Class Secretary, in what was obviously her most reassuring voice.

  “Thank you,” said Susan. “Thank you.” Walking to the L’s, she was on the verge of laughter. She remembered with a slight malicious thrill that she was peculiar.

  The loud-speaker was crackling ominously—they were going to have trouble with it. Just like a girl’s school to have trouble with the apparatus. The rehearsal was going to be interminable. One more day to go now, Susan remembered with a sudden panic.

  The Class President announced that now that everyone was present, she was going to call the roll. She opened the roll book, then examined her pencil point. “Abbott,” she read loudly. “Abrams.” She bit off each name and annihilated it with her pencil, scarcely waiting for the anxious little cries of “Here! Here!” There was something appalling about such efficiency, but maybe it would take only half an hour to call the roll. “Allen.” “Here!” “Armour.” There were still three hundred other names. The afternoon was shrinking. Susan, where are you? She was locked in the gymnasium and couldn’t get out. Not that it mattered—she would probably just go back to the dorms later, anyway; she would have another night of too much sleep.

  In the middle of the B’s the loud-speaker uttered a piercing shriek and died. “Oh dear,” the Class President said. “One … two … three … one … two … three … Testing!” she cried boldly, jabbing the microphone with the tip of her index finger. “Can you hear me?” she called to the girls.

  “No!” everyone shouted cheerfully. They were all laughing as if a holiday had been declared. They were still only schoolgirls. Susan liked them for that, but their laughter was making the rehearsal longer. The Class Secretary had gone for the janitor, and now he was entering the gym, crossing it in slow motion. He was peering at the amplifier and fiddling with some wires. Hurry! It was two o’clock on Broadway—Kay was sneaking a forbidden cigarette in the stacks of the library; Peter, who had probably gotten out of bed an hour ago, was just about to go out for coffee… . Nothing was happening at all. And everything was happening and happening without her. She felt time leaving her as if it were being bled from her body.

  The loud-speaker was fixed at last. They finished the B’s, eliminated the C’s, the D’s. When the Class President reached the G’s, Susan found herself listening for Kay’s name. “Gorman,” she secretly prompted, “say Gorman.” “Gordon,” said the Class President. Kay would have been called next, but they had taken her name off the roll months ago. “Grant,” said the Class President without hesitation, as if Kay had never existed.

  When her own name wasn’t called, Susan wasn’t surprised.

  Of course, she thought, almost relieved. She stepped out of line and began to walk across the endless gymnasium, names falling weightlessly around her like dead leaves. Words. Sounds. How strange to be named anything. If you weren’t on a list, you had no name—you weren’t even absent. Well, head up anyway. Back s
traight. In a gymnasium you had to remember your posture even if you were peculiar. She was walking to Paris. No—Broadway. No—she was going to get her mail.

  Dear Miss Levitt:

  Due to lack of attendance, I regret to say you will not receive credit for Physical Education VIII. As you know, the completion of the Physical Education program is a degree requirement. Therefore you will not be eligible for a degree this spring.

  Please stop by my office this week. I am sure you will want to make up this credit over the summer in order to obtain your degree in the fall, and we will be able to arrange a summer program for you at one of the colleges in the city. My office hours are 4:00 to 5:00 P.M. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

  Sincerely,

  Ethel Stroheim

  Physical Education Dept.

  The letter was two weeks old. There was something familiar about it. It was a letter she had received often in dreams.

  Standing in front of the mail room, Susan read it several times. It was difficult to concentrate. Mrs. Prosser watched her from her little window, but it didn’t matter; she had lost her power now. Susan stuffed the letter into her pocketbook with all the others and went back to the gymnasium.

  “Excuse me,” Susan said loudly, placing herself directly in front of the Class President, who had been chatting with another girl, “but I’m not graduating this May, and I wonder where I’m supposed to stand or if I’m supposed to stand anywhere. My last name is Levitt.”

  The Class President and the girl exchanged looks. “Just a minute,” the Class President said distantly. “I have to get the roll book.” Returning with the book open to the last page, she announced, “Here you are. With the October graduates.”

  How strange that it had already been written down. “Who are they?” Susan asked, her voice even louder.

  The Class President frowned and explained rapidly that there were eleven October graduates, that they lined up behind the May graduates and stayed in their seats when the diplomas were being handed out.