Blues Dancing

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  He sat down on the bed and shook convulsively at the very thought. He mashed his head in his hands and cried like he hadn’t cried since he was a little boy and stood at the radiator and looked out the front window and watched his father load his suitcases into the generous trunk of his brand-new ’58 Chrysler. That’s how he felt right now, like a little boy, and so abandoned.

  He got himself together, then. The pepper-and-onion aromas wafting from the smoke rising off the food on the desk helped. He started talking to himself, telling himself that it would be okay, his mother, he and Verdi, his brother doing time. Everything that he cared about this night would all be okay he told himself over and over as he started taking up the food from the tins and stacking it on his mother’s brown-and-white-printed china plate.

  He heard Verdi’s voice floating down the hall, heard her laughing, saying yes I’ve got company, I hear you do too. I won’t tell if you don’t. He wiped at his eyes trying to think of something funny to say so that he could laugh right away and distract her from his eyes. He hoped they weren’t wet looking or swollen. Maybe he’d return to his Andy jokes, yeah, he thought, feeling better as he remembered how hysterical Verdi had gotten over Andy.

  She looked almost angelic walking through the door, wrapped up in a pink quilted, satin-collared robe, her hair repulled back into the barrette, her face freshly washed with a dab of Noxema dotted over a pimple on her chin.

  “Okay, what you got for me,” she said as she hung her washcloth and towel on the bar outside of her closet.

  He stood in the middle of the floor. “Drumroll, please.”

  She smiled broadly and hit against her thighs in fast succession.

  “Thank you, my lady,” he said as he bowed and extended his outstretched arm toward the desk. “May I present to you my mother’s very own world-famous meat loaf with rice and gravy and string beans.”

  She jumped up and cheered and put her fingers to her mouth and attempted to whistle. “Bring it on, sir.” She preened, at the thought that this was her man and he was about to serve her up a meal. “Hungry as I am right now, bring it all on.”

  He inched the desk out some, held back the chair, and bowed again offering her the seat.

  “Ooh, ooh, we need candles,” she said as she went to her desk, rummaged through the bottom drawer, and came up with two pink tapers and two crystal candleholders. She held them up and he looked at her, them, in amazement.

  “My mother is so proper,” she said as she put them all on the desk and went to the other end of the room and into the closet. “She insisted that I bring these in case I needed to entertain.” She emerged from the closet with cloth napkins. She stuck the candles in the crystal holders and lit one then the other.

  He dragged the other chair over for himself and positioned his mother’s good china dish between them. “You don’t mind if we eat from the same plate, do you, Verdi?” His voice went soft and uncertain when he asked it.

  “I don’t mind if we eat from the same fork,” she said, and then clapped her hands together and said, “Okay, napkins in our laps.” She smoothed a napkin over her pink quilted robe. “If my mother walked in here right now and smelled the scent of our natures, you know what she’d do, she’d put her gloved hands on her hips and she’d snap at me, ‘Verdi Mae, how dare you begin a meal without saying grace and affixing your napkin in your lap?’”

  Johnson smiled and covered her hand with his. “Why don’t you, um, say it, baby.”

  “Say what, cutie pie?” She reached over and pinched his cheek.

  “Um, you know, a prayer, I mean, um, grace.” He took the other cloth napkin from the desk and put it in his lap. He didn’t know if it was that this napkin was so heavy, or if that’s just how cloth napkins felt.

  She bowed her head and said a quick grace, then took a fork and dove into the meat loaf.

  “Oh my goodness,” she blurted as she closed her eyes and tilted her head and allowed a dreamy smile to take over her face. “This is so good. I mean this is so good.” She took another forkful, and another, chirping in between about how delicious it was, how divine, how damn good, how she already loved his mother just by her food, how she loved him, told him that at least half a dozen times as she plowed through the bowl of food, taking two forkfuls to his one, stopping every so often to dab at her lips with the napkin, to look at him and smile a soft smile through the candle flame dancing from its orange-and-yellow center with a hint of blue. She looked like an angel to him sitting there in the pink quilted robe. So unspoiled. He felt himself getting filled up again as he put his fork down and just sat back and watched her eat.

  Four

  Kitt creamed her fingers for the new back she was about to do. A licensed pratical nurse by training, she’d scaled down to part-time years ago so that she could be there when Sage got home from school. Replaced the lost income by doling out massages from the mauve-colored room off of her kitchen. Business was good though, thanks to her regular clients, mostly cops from the eighteenth district, and she really only held on to her LPN job at the Care Pavilion Nursing Home for the health insurance and retirement benefits.

  This was her last back for the day and she thought that when she was finished she would call Verdi and see how she’d made out getting home so late last night. Kitt was maternal toward Verdi, even though they were both the same age, forty; both only children born to fraternal-twin sisters, Posie and Hortense, who, fortunate for the cousins, had passed down their good looks: their unstoppable cheekbones and fleshy ear-to-ear grins, brown-over-gold complexions, downwardly slanted eyes. Fortunate too that the cousins didn’t inherit their mothers’ relationship that had gone to tin years ago when they parted ways over a man, when Hortense ran away to Atlanta with the smart, upwardly mobile young divinity student that Posie said had first had eyes for her. Posie stayed in Philadelphia and married down, often, each husband filled with more promise and less resources than the one before, and even though Posie’s men made up for in passion and excitement what they lacked in bank balances, she blamed Hortense each time one of her men went bad, said it was Hortense’s conniving ways that had snagged the one who would have been a keeper in her life. But Verdi and Kitt filled in the canyon of sisterly affection their mothers left and managed to spend summers and extended holidays together through all of their growing-up years thanks to the Greyhound bus. And Kitt fussed over Verdi, instructing her as if Verdi’s moneyed upbringing in the cultured mannered traditions of the Georgia black middle class had detracted years from her chronological age and left her too soft around the edges to fend for herself, while Kitt believed that her own raising that happened in the financially varied neighborhood of West Philadelphia added onto her years and turned her into a wise woman even in her youth. An old soul, Kitt called herself.

  Right now Kitt promised herself that she wouldn’t say anything more to Verdi about Johnson being back than she’d already said at dinner last night. She’d decided to just go ahead and set up a meeting between them and not even say anything beforehand, decided to use Sage’s birthday party as the venue. That’s the other reason she needed to call Verdi, to tell her about Sage’s party, if she could ever get to the phone, since she was starting much later than she’d planned on this new back.

  Usually when she came into the massage room on the other side of her kitchen, they were already facedown in the chair or on the table, depending on whether they were getting a neck-and-back or a full-body, but usually they were her regulars, this one had been referred by one of her regular cops from Pine Street. He wasn’t a cop, an accountant, or middle-management something at the university. Had tried to stand there and take off his blue-and-white-striped heavily starched shirt right in front of her. She never watched them take off their shirts, too personal a thing to do. But when she started to turn around and leave the room, he’d called her name, said, “Miss Kitt, where did you say I should hang my shirt?”

  She came all the way into the room and closed the door and showe
d him the hanger and hook on the back of the door. He was doused in some unisex cologne that smelled sweet and musky and she reached into the deep pockets of her soft pink jacket for her cigarette lighter and set it on the table next to her vanilla-scented candle.

  He was out of his shirt now, his undershirt too, and hung both on the hook without using the hanger and she was left staring at his buckskin-colored-shade-of-brown chest. She looked down, focused on his shoes, nice leather oxfords with a hand-stitched look to them.

  She looked quickly past his chest to get to his face, saw how big his pupils were, like silver dollars just dipped in pitch tar as he stood there waiting for her directions. She dismissed the eyes, didn’t want to acknowledge that he was affected by her, that could really skew a session. She cleared her throat, said, “I’ll help you into the chair since this is your first time; next time, if there is a next time, when I come in here, this is how I’d like to find you.”

  “Whatever you say, Miss Kitt.” He half laughed as he unconsciously (seemingly) stroked the hairs on his chest. “I mean, you come so highly recommended, I’ve been told that your massages put a man in the mood for some nighttime frivolity.”

  She took a deep breath, then let the room go completely still. She pointed to the certificate hanging over the specially designed massaging chair made for kneeling onto with a foam-backed face rest at the top of the chair. In a low, even tone she said, “Sir, I’m not at all concerned with what you or anybody else does before or after you take up time and space in my room. My massages are the result of an associate’s degree worth of training and are completely by the book. I hope we understand each other.”

  His face got all sheepish then and he apologized, said he’d meant no disrespect. She softened; he looked so drawn around the mouth, tired.

  She pointed to the knee rests and guided him by the elbow to help him get into position in the chair. Comfortable?” she asked after she manipulated the foam inside of the face rest so that it wasn’t pressing too tightly against his skin. She leaned down to say it in his ear. “Because this face rest adjusts if you’re not.”

  He shook his head, yes.

  She mashed a button on the boom box resting on a shelf above her head. “I’m just turning on a little jazz on RTI. If that doesn’t suit you, I can pop in a tape, or if you’d rather no music, that’s fine too. Just let me know.”

  The back of his head nodded in agreement.

  “I don’t usually talk during the session, most just like to go with the music and what I’m doing to the muscles in their back. But if you got something on your mind, I can listen.” She turned the dimmer switch down and the mauve-colored walls in this room took on a muted brownish tone. She lit the vanilla-scented candle and waved at the flame to get the scent moving through the room. She flexed her fingers one more time, squirted cream in dime-sized puddles at various points from his shoulders to his waist. She leaned then with her whole body into this wide, thick back.

  He released a whispered ooh as she started at his neck. She mashed with her whole weight into her thumbs and dragged them down the length of his frame on either side of his spine. His oohs got louder the harder she pressed and she could feel the muscles in his back expanding, stretching out in response to her fingers. She needed that. Needed to know that what she was doing felt good. She’d always thought backs rendered more grief than any other body part. If you had time to dwell on someone’s back, she reasoned, they were in the process of walking away from you, leaving. Hadn’t she seen her mother cry over the sight of countless backs, shirted, bare, broad, humped, wide, with varying degrees of spine? Hadn’t she cried over one? So what she did with the backs seemingly to generate income, she also did to mitigate her rage at the sight of them. She could either rub them down, or hack them with a carver. On this she was definite, there was no middle ground.

  She breathed in deeply through her nose. The vanilla radiating from the candle swam to her head and she felt a giddiness descend as Sarah Vaughan blared “Misty” through the radio. This one’s oohs had graduated to oh Gods and she added her other fingers to her thumbs, and at certain points mashed with the heel of her palm. She closed her eyes so that she could really palpate this back and even absorb its electrical charge. Some backs were like that; they just opened for her at every possible hairline crevice, allowing her to send her touch to radiate even beyond the bones, and in gratitude the muscles offered up their own impulses that entered through her fingertips and rushed to her brain and affected her like endorphins flying around in a runner’s head. She was buzzing now as she squeezed and pressed and kneaded and hacked and went deeper and deeper and now she couldn’t even tell where her fingers ended and this back began, so fused were the two. And this session was everything it should be, the way she wished they all could be. And when it got to this point, she was no longer starved and afraid at the same time for the companionship of a man, lonely; and her beautiful daughter Sage was no longer mute and could speak fluent sentences like any other seven-year-old. And his sighs of Lord, Lord, oh my Lord filled the room and even flooded out the sound of Sarah’s voice, and now she lived in a center city town house that was better even than Verdi’s house, and she’d been born to Verdi’s sagacious mother Hortense who knew how to do more for a man than keep him stirred up in her pheromonal thickness the way that her own mother Posie did all of the men she loved. Have them half-crazed over her, ready to dispense with whatever they did in their practical lives and kick her door down to get to her until she saturated them in her brand of womanhood that oozed like liquid silk. And once they’d had their fill of her, after a month, two, three, rarely more than a year, they’d disengage from her shaking their heads, asking themselves what had come over them to have them laying up so. Kitt hated that about her mother, that she always allowed them to be the ones doing the leaving. Her aunt Hortense, on the other hand, knew how to make the man do the pleasing, at least she’d done it with Verdi’s father, had him pastoring one of the poshest congregations in Georgia, and at the same time treating her as if she were a queen. Kitt always figured that if the story about Posie and Verdi’s father, Leroy, even had any truth to it, that it was better that he’d favored Hortense in the end, that Posie wouldn’t have known what to do with the likes of a Leroy anyhow.

  But even that didn’t matter, her hands were so on fire as she pushed into this back, as if she’d pummeled all the way through to some other side and was up to her elbows, covered in his buckskin-colored-shade-of-brown back. But right then she felt a change in the air behind her diluting the charge this one was sending to her brain, the creak of the door opening, turned, and there Posie was.

  Kitt grimaced when she looked at Posie standing there, head tilted to the side like a five-year-old, baby blue eye shadow swathed over her generous lids, frosted mocha lipstick like the kind a prom queen would have worn in 1968, hair way too long for a woman her age, hips too rounded, too pronounced, pushing from under her waist-cinching belt.

  She stretched her mouth wide, told Posie to get out without allowing a sound to come from her mouth. She didn’t want to have to stop now, especially since this was his first time; she knew that once she stopped, she could never pick up and get it to be as good as it was where she’d left off. She jabbed her finger in the air, pointing beyond Posie; Posie just stood there with her head tilted, her expression midway between delight and confusion. Kitt scowled at Posie as she kept her other hand moving in wide circles against this back, and then, to her great relief she saw Sage approach the door, walking on her tippy toes, pulling her grandmother by the arm, her finger against her mouth. Gingerly pushing the door all the way closed. My God, Kitt thought, and they say Sage is the one with the limited brain, they never met Mama that’s for sure.

  “Everything okay?” this one asked.

  She tapped his back to let him know that it was.

  “My God, you’re good,” he whispered between his moans of satisfaction. “Damn.”

  She squeezed his neck
in response.

  “Shit, I want to marry you, and after my last wife I swore I’d never do anything as emotionally destabilizing as promising to live in relative harmony with anything that raises as much hell as a black woman.”

  She slapped his back then, it was almost a playful slap and she surprised herself that she felt the need to giggle. What did he say his name was? Bruce. That was it. He looked like a Bruce in the face with his poppy eyes and bulldog nose. Cute though. She did remember that she liked the way his face rounded out when he’d fixed it to apologize. She stopped her thinking. Prided herself on the detachment she maintained with all of her clients. She could quickly kill her business if she ever let a session turn into something it wasn’t by viewing a client as anything more than a back, by allowing her thoughts about a man to ooze through her fingertips. She returned to using her thumbs. Her thumbs were toughened from years of lifting hot pans without an oven mitt.

  “Married?” he asked.

  She stiffened at the question. She didn’t answer though, didn’t tell him that she’d been married once to the father of her daughter but that he had a roaming eye and unfortunately the bulge in his pants tried to keep up with his eye; she just kept working the base of his neck with her thumbs.

  “That’s right, you said you don’t talk, sorry.” He sighed, then added, “Damn, I’ve apologized twice in a very short time frame, anybody that makes me do that ought to at least let me take them out to dinner.”