by Alan Cumyn
Janine headed up the stairs into the shadows, and her dad stood grinning like he was going to remember this moment for a long, long time.
“Are you coming?” Janine said.
—
The bathroom was large and orderly and didn’t smell of spilled perfume. Stan looked at himself in the mirror.
Drowned rat. Grinning fool.
She had given him a plaid shirt that fit perfectly and smelled a little like someone adorable had worn it not so long ago. It looked fine on him. It looked better than most of his own shirts.
The jeans were a little long but he could roll up the cuffs, and large at the waist. Janine wasn’t a big girl, not in the middle. But he was a skinny guy.
Stan went up for a pretend jump shot in the bathroom. The tips of his fingers brushed the ceiling on his follow-through. Monday morning, six-thirty — rendezvous with destiny. For just a moment he saw himself dribbling the ball through Karl Brolin’s legs, then pulling up, fading slightly on the shot. Nothing but net.
Sweetness.
Why did Janine Igwash wear boys’ clothes?
Because she could wear anything and still steal the eyes of most men with a pulse.
Or maybe . . . she was tilted.
Stan stepped slightly back and launched a high side kick at his own reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall by the brown towels. It was a perfectly executed blow that left a footprint at face level but shattered nothing. Mark of a master. He wiped the footprint off with toilet paper, and when that still left a murky smudge he wet the toilet paper and wiped again, and when that left greasy streaks he used his hand, then the tail of Janine’s shirt.
The dull, blotchy spot that remained on the mirror was about the size of his own face.
—
Down the darkened hallway. Janine’s room was at the end with the door closed. Two other bedroom doors loomed. One was to a study, which had a desk and a computer and a nice view of the front lawn. The other room, darkened, had its door only slightly ajar. Stan had the feeling that someone was in there dying.
Stan slid past it, didn’t want to look.
He knocked quietly on Janine’s door.
“Everything fits,” he whispered.
“Great.” Her voice sounded cool. Did she want him to push open the door and come in? “I’ll be down in a minute.”
Instructions clear.
Stan descended the thickly carpeted steps. In the kitchen Janine’s dad whirled amidst controlled confusion. Saucepans bubbled, pots steamed, hot oils spat and hissed while the big man poked, adjusted, fiddled with lids.
“How are you in the kitchen, Stan?” her father asked.
“Do you need any help?” Stan took his hands out of his pockets — out of Janine’s pockets — in preparation.
“This is perfectly under control. All I’m saying is a man ought to have at least one dish under his command. One never-fail. Are you a basketball player?”
Stan smiled. “I am, actually.”
“Then you know. When the heat’s on, you’re down to the last shot, the defense is tightening like a vise.” Barehanded, Janine’s dad picked up a scalding hot iron-handled frying pan. “You need something you can rely on.” He waved it like it was a badminton racket. “In the kitchen, for me, it’s chicken-leg spaghetti. I wooed Janine’s mom on it exclusively. It’s dead simple. Buy some spaghetti sauce, pour it in a pan like this, dump in the chicken legs and cook it all slowly. The secret’s in the spices. This is true for all of life, practically. Onion, of course. But garlic first. The older you get, the more you put in. Basil. I’m starting to really appreciate basil. And rosemary. Rosemary and chicken are practically a perfect marriage. Peppers — green and red, maybe a little bit of —”
The front door opened and Stan felt the draft pull him around. A woman appeared in a brilliant purple and silver headscarf and a raincoat so yellow it nearly vibrated. She had shopping bags in her hands.
“Not spaghetti chicken again!” she said. She peeled off her coat. “I told you I was handling dinner!” She squinted at Stan. “Janine, honey, what are you wearing? The dance is tonight!”
Janine’s dad walked past Stan into the hallway and wrapped the woman in his big arms.
“I’ve got dinner covered,” he said. “And this is Stan —”
She squinted again. “You’re Stan?”
Stan failed to reply, as if indeed he might be an imposter. The moment grew so awkward that Janine’s mother seemed almost forced to say, “I’m sorry. I took my contacts out in the store, they were hurting so much. I’m blind as a bat like this.”
She pushed her husband aside and hugged Stan fiercely. She was a tiny woman, mostly bone.
“Janine has a shirt exactly like yours,” she said. “Thank God she isn’t —”
Suddenly Janine was at the base of the stairs in a killer black dress with a slit up to her waist, practically, and black leggings and a big silver buckle and white cowboy boots.
She was so beautiful, Stan felt his jaw soften, his hinges melt.
Her hair really was black now, and her eyes seemed dark, dark. She didn’t look like the same girl at all.
What was she doing going out with Stan?
“I see you’ve met my mom,” Janine said.
Janine’s mother was still clenching him.
“I didn’t know he was coming for dinner,” she said. “But he’s got a good feel to him.”
—
“The main thing I tell my clients is, prepare for life. You don’t know all the twists and turns. You can’t predict every bounce of the ball. But you can prepare your reserve force. That’s the key. The single most important investment in almost anyone’s life . . .”
Janine’s father paused. The four of them were sitting at a round table in a back alcove — candlelight, linen napkins that seemed to have been starched. Darkness pressing from the outside.
“. . . is the home, of course. Cover your mortgage. But that’s only the start. What if you lose your job? Or you fall ill? What if —”
“Stan isn’t married, dear,” Janine’s mother — Gillian — said. “He doesn’t have children and he doesn’t want to think about it for years and years.”
“The smart investor,” Janine’s father went on, “looks at those risks. What about retirement? Okay, you tell me you’re sixteen years old. You think retirement is a hundred years away. Do you think the government is going to look after you when you’re sixty-five? Consider the deficit. Consider the ominous shifts in global trade —”
“Joe.” Gillian placed her thin hand on his long forearm. “Maybe we can talk about other things.”
Janine was studying her plate across the table from Stan. Her tiny lizard shoulder tattoo peeked out at him. If this wasn’t dinner, if they were alone, he could reach over — if he brushed aside some of her black, black hair . . .
“Tell us about your family, Stan,” Gillian said. “What does your father do?”
A slurp of sauce caught in the back of Stan’s throat and he sneezed some of it, without thinking, onto the white linen napkin.
“He’s a carpenter,” Stan spat out.
“A carpenter!” Gillian exclaimed. “You know, I’d really like to expand the family room. But it’s so hard to find someone . . .”
Joe glared at his wife. Janine shook her head slowly, staring a rut into her plate.
“Contractors rip you off,” Joe said. “No offense to your father, Stan. But if it’s at all possible to do the work yourself . . .”
Gillian snorted. “Two words, dear. The bathroom. And three more. Lest we forget.”
Joe picked up his chicken leg dripping with sauce and tore a chunk from it with his teeth like Henry VIII in some movie.
“The bathroom was years ago. I’ve learned a lot since the bathroom.”
“You have learned to hire a contractor. Somebody who will do it right the first time.” Gillian turned to Stan. “How long has your father been a carpenter?”
&n
bsp; Stan had to concentrate to pick up his own chicken leg cleanly.
“I’m not really sure. I think only a couple of months. He was in real estate before that, and a lawyer before that.”
Silence. Finally Joe said, “A lot of lawyers decide they want to do an honest day’s work in midlife.”
“You just said most contractors are shysters,” Gillian said to her husband.
“For God’s sake!” Joe said. “I’m getting to know Janine’s boyfriend.”
Stan felt all eyes on him again now. Was he supposed to say something? Silence stretched like ice taking over the room. Then the words just popped out of him.
“My father left us five years ago and never sent a dollar to help my mom with my sister and me. I never talk to him, he never writes, he’s missed every birthday since I was eleven. Then yesterday he just showed up again, and today he brought Feldon, my half-brother.”
Stan sucked the chicken bone. He was breathing like a marathon runner.
“They’re all back there right now in the living room. My mom, her boyfriend, Gary, Ron — that’s my dad. I wouldn’t be surprised if World War III has broken out. That’s why I showed up early.” He wiped his fingers properly on the napkin. “This is really delicious,” he said.
Gillian was trembling.
“You poor boy,” she said. “You’re getting the full wallop.”
“The what?”
“Life’s all hitting at once. The way it does sometimes. That’s why we all need to go out dancing.”
Stan glanced at Janine, then back at her mom.
“The universe kicks you in the teeth and the only thing to do is dance like crazy. You’ll see. Tonight is going to be a huge release!”
15
They drove in the rainy dark. Stan sat in the back behind Gillian. As soon as Janine clicked her seatbelt shut she reached across to Stan and their fingers interlaced again. Stan started to come to a boil from the inside.
Then Gillian coughed so hard her little body shook the car. When it was over she stretched back awkwardly for a moment to view Stan. She smiled when she saw their hands.
The car kept going. Janine squeezed tighter.
Maybe he really was Janine’s boyfriend?
“Your mother must be an amazing woman to raise the both of you on her own,” Gillian said.
Was his mother amazing? Maybe. But what Stan ended up explaining was that she could never figure out how to work the TV remote no matter how often he explained it.
“My mom has two degrees but when it comes to electronics —”
Gillian asked about the degrees, so Stan said what he could about sociology and the history of art.
“She’s a Vermeer freak,” he said, and he tried to remember the name of the painting — a copy, obviously — that hung in their living room near the fireplace that didn’t work.
“The Girl with the Pearl Earring?” Gillian said.
“Not that one. But it looks like that one. My mom could tell you all about it.”
Why couldn’t Stan tell them all about it? Maybe he didn’t pay enough attention to his mother. She was terrifically smart in her own way.
He could feel the pulse in Janine’s fingers.
“She used to drag us to galleries all the time. But my little sister is allergic to them. It’s like her skin starts to itch from the inside. She just can’t stay still. So my mom goes on her own, or else she drags Gary.” The wipers sloshed water back and forth without seeming to clear anything. Could Joe see out the windshield at all?
“Gary’s great,” Janine breathed then. “He let me win at silly basketball.” She had the sexiest voice when she was talking quietly.
Let this ride go on and on, Stan thought.
“Did you . . . go to university?” he asked Gillian.
She turned and smiled oddly. “I studied to be an anthropologist, but ended up working in the bank, and then I got sick.”
Joe reached across and covered her frail hand gently with his own.
It was a sticky part of the conversation. Stan wasn’t sure what he should say next. He felt like he could spill anything about his own family now, that a rusty door had been knocked open. His mother’s purple sweatsuit. Gary and Ron like bulls in the living room. Feldon dripping on the porch in the rain.
The wipers sloshed. Janine withdrew her hand. Was he gripping too hard?
“I met Joe at the bank,” Gillian said. “I was supervising him, actually. He married me to get ahead.”
“I married her to get ahead,” Joe chimed. It seemed to be a family joke.
“There was a rule at the time against office dating, so we had to sneak around,” Gillian said. “That’s the thing about those kinds of rules.”
“They encourage the opposite behavior,” Joe said.
“We were illicit lovers.” Gillian beamed at him now. These two middle-aged people — Joe with his bristly head, Gillian with her scarf and the hard lines on her neck, like the flesh was retreating from her bit by bit — looked like they had more love between them in just this car ride than Stan had ever seen between his own parents.
This was what Janine had grown up with.
He wanted to take her hand again, but suddenly felt shy.
—
The rec center was a squat brownish building in a part of town Stan didn’t recognize. Were they downtown? He couldn’t even guess.
As soon as they walked in, Gillian took charge.
“Put the pop table over there!” she said to two boys fiddling with fold-up legs. “Did you bring the banner?”
It was rolled up in a corner, and Gillian had Stan and Janine hang it on the far wall under the shaded windows.
Dance for Life, it said.
Families arrived in noisy clumps. The kids seemed to be of all ages, the girls wearing everything from pants to slinky dresses, the boys in probably whatever they’d had on earlier in the day. So Stan wasn’t out of place in Janine’s plaid shirt and jeans.
Some of the kids were . . . bald, or otherwise sickly looking.
Or they had a parent who was too thin or trembly and pale, lost in the eyes.
“It’s for cancer families,” Janine explained. “And guests. My mom just wants everybody to dance their brains out.”
She gave him a nervous glance. A flash of a smile that was a firefly zipping past a window.
Gillian gave him exactly the same smile a moment later when she was wrestling a cooler into place all by herself. Stan hurried over to help her.
“I really like the look of you,” she said. “Janine has never had a boyfriend before.”
That word again. Boyfriend.
“For a while we wondered if she would ever get one,” Gillian said.
—
Stan wasn’t a dancer. He’d been to a couple of school events, had stood in the shadows shifting his weight from side to side, wishing he were somewhere else. But here everybody danced: parents, kids, old folks, teenagers. The whole crowd wriggled and shook with their hands in the air. They all seemed to be laughing and smiling in the sweaty semidarkness.
So Stan bounced on his heels and let his shoulders jiggle around and his pec muscles — if that’s what they were — quiver and his hands flap. It was all by feel. A musician in black jeans bopped between an electric guitar, some drums and the microphone. A skinny girl with orange hair sang and blew sometimes on a harmonica. Most of the words were unrecognizable — “Going to ax my kaleidoscope” was one line that stayed in Stan’s head.
“Who are they?” he screamed across at Janine, but she couldn’t hear. She danced with her eyes closed a lot of the time, and her body was . . . fluid. Everything melted together, like waves moving in wax that hardened slightly then melted again into something else.
Before too long the band took a break but the music continued — some kid’s computer hooked up to the sound system. Stan was taken by surprise when a slow song came on. Couples just seemed to fall together, but Stan felt like he couldn’t fall. He was
a wooden post stuck in the ground. Janine wasn’t standing next to him, anyway. She was a few paces off. Waiting?
Wasn’t this what he’d come for? Wouldn’t a real boyfriend just walk over and they would cling together and shuffle their feet the way other people did?
Except Joe and Gillian weren’t shuffling their feet. They were waltzing. Was that what it was? Gliding. She barely came to chest height on her husband, but how straight they both stood, how buttery their movements looked.
They were really dancing.
Stan couldn’t compete with that. He stood a bit behind Janine and watched those two dip and glide. Then he clapped with all the others when the song was over.
“Your parents are amazing!” he said. But Janine rolled her eyes. Maybe nobody thought their own parents were amazing.
When the band came back, Stan just started bouncing. Janine shimmied and melted and spun more or less on her own. He tried to bounce in time with the way she was moving her shoulders. But then she would break it off and dance with somebody else — with a tiny girl in a white dress and black shoes who had her own way of moving. She would dip her shoulder and sway back, then throw her hands in the air. Stan threw his hands, too, but thought he probably looked like he was going for a rebound so he stopped. Better to just let his hands dangle at the end of his arms.
Janine had said she wasn’t much of a dancer. What an outright lie that was! A fish in a pool couldn’t have looked more graceful.
He was the one who didn’t know what he was doing.
He bounced closer to her.
“Janine!” he yelled, two inches from her ear.
She vibrated with the girl in the white dress and didn’t hear him.
“Janine!” He brushed against her shoulder. She opened her eyes like she was waking up from something pleasant.
“ . . . mini-mega mall mart monkeys,” the singer seemed to be screaming.
“What?”
“You’re a great dancer!” he yelled.
“ . . . making like rogue-wing flunkies,” the singer screeched.
