by Alan Cumyn
“What?”
“You’re a . . .”
Suddenly the wall of sound collapsed into rubble and everyone was clapping. Janine hugged the white-dress girl — who gave Stan a bit of a sour look — and Stan’s voice broke.
“. . . a great dancer,” he said pitifully.
No reply. Janine and the girl unclenched. Something slow started up. The band was much better loud and rough. They should have left the soft stuff to the recorded music. Stan steeled himself to — to what? He was already close enough to put his arms around Janine. He was so close his arms would have gone around the white-dress girl, too. She and Janine had an eye thing going — a secret message telegraphed between them.
Stan felt something in his belly turn sour.
A boyfriend at this point would just say, “Wanna dance?” And Janine would throw her arms around him . . .
“Do you want to get a drink?” Janine said to him instead.
What did he want?
He wanted to breathe in her intoxication. He wanted her to bury her head in the hollow of his shoulder. She was a little taller than him but it still might work.
He wanted the music to be so much better than this. He wanted to open his eyes slowly and find that her mouth was searching for his. What would that be like?
He wanted . . .
He wanted to not be standing all alone in the middle of everything — of nothing — while she moved off to get a cup of juice.
—
And then she disappeared. One moment she was sipping from a paper cup and the white-dress girl bumped her elbow and Janine splashed something on her own killer dress. It was black, anyway. How much could show in a darkened auditorium? And then the two of them were heading off to the washroom. So Stan went to the men’s room and checked himself out in the mirror. He looked stupid, and the jeans didn’t fit. With that belt cinched tight and the cuffs rolled up he looked like a farmer.
He needed to call his mom to tell her where he was. If he had a cellphone he’d call her right from there, in the men’s can.
It smelled of wine and someone’s cigarette.
Those same muscles that had run out the back door at home now wanted to run out of this suffocating place.
She’d held his hand most of the way on the rainy car ride here.
Why hadn’t he just said, “Wanna dance?”
He didn’t know any steps. But she would have rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder and they would have clutched and shuffled, welded together for infinity.
—
Back in the dark again, the music still tortured the air. Next slow dance, whatever it was, he’d just grab her and everything else would disappear.
Where was she, anyway?
Stan couldn’t see her on the dance floor. The whole crowd was up writhing, wriggling, Gillian and Joe in the middle, clutched like lovers.
Stan didn’t know where to stand, what to do, where to put his hands. He shuffled over to the drink table. It was fifty cents for an apple juice and he had nothing in his pockets.
They were Janine’s pockets.
He smiled dopily at the guy behind the table and backed away as if he’d planned all along to pick up one of the paper cups and look at it and put it down again without drinking or paying.
No harm no foul.
There she was! Janine exited the girls’ room with the white-dress girl.
The girl was welded up against her. Janine took the girl’s hand and removed it from her waist.
Stan felt like he was in a movie all of a sudden. Janine dropped the girl’s arm and looked around the room — searching for him? — but she couldn’t see him. She was real, he was in a movie, this was all happening and it wasn’t.
She liked girls. Simple as that. He’d known it and had fooled himself into not knowing it. The truth of it was like a ball bouncing hard off the rim straight down into his face.
She’d dragged Stan to this dance to be a cover for . . . for what?
She was scanning the room, looking for him. But he was turned to nothing.
Janine saw him trying to push through. He felt stopped but his body kept going. Past the writhing, dancing families, out the doors into hard rain but night now, too, and again no umbrella, no jacket.
Where?
Feet slipping on the pavement. It was a drenched street in an unknown part of the city. There was Janine’s parents’ car parked with dozens of others. Why hadn’t he paid attention to where they were going? It was colder even than it had been that afternoon. But he was running.
He was going to cramp up soon. He was going too fast. Lactic acid was crackling his muscles.
He didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Hey!” someone called out miles behind him. So far back he could easily not have heard her.
Breathe, stride-stride-stride, breathe . . .
“Hey!” she called from farther back.
He didn’t have to stop. He could just have slowed and even then she would never catch him.
She was in her killer dress but she looked like a soggy shadow except for her white boots.
She probably wasn’t much of a runner. But she’d come after him.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he shot back.
Her shoulders were bare and wet. She had to be bloody freezing.
Her chest was heaving. She had a glorious chest. He wasn’t sure she was going to be able to say anything.
He thought maybe she was going to try to lie about what he’d seen.
But instead she said, “I’m sorry.”
She was standing in her killer black dress with her black hair plastered to her white, white face a few paces off, like she was about to draw her pistol and shoot him dead. He was already shot through.
16
He had known that going to the dance would be a whole bigger deal than it should have been.
“Sorry about what?”
She was crying in the rain. When he was the one who should be upset. Was this the way all girls operated?
“I broke it off with Leona weeks ago and then she came tonight anyway and I couldn’t keep her away.” She wiped her face. “My parents don’t know anything. Please don’t tell them. I thought . . . I thought asking you was the right thing.”
“For what?”
“My mother has gone through second chemo. She only has about two months to live. That’s what all the doctors say. She lives for these dances. She just shines. But she’ll be days and days in bed afterwards. And I know she wanted me to invite one boy I liked. Just one.”
“But you like girls?”
She was shivering and crying and not answering.
He’d seen the two of them dancing together. He’d seen the white-dress girl — Leona — with her arm around Janine.
“I like boys, too,” Janine said. “Maybe. I like you.” She shivered deeply.
Clearly, despite everything, it was his duty to hold her, warm her. “I called you,” she said. “I wanted to go with you.”
It was his duty but he couldn’t move. It felt like . . . rigor mortis was setting in. If she wanted him to hold her, to warm her . . .
Even as the argument presented itself in his mind, she somehow curled into his arms. How did that happen? She felt . . . quite warm and soft in all the right places. She clutched him and even though they weren’t moving it was almost as if the two of them were slow dancing after all. Her words were terribly sad and the sound of them — the feel of her — had a different effect.
“So . . . you do like me?” he said. The words fell out. Stupidly, pathetically.
“Of course.”
There was no reason to stay clenched wherever they were — in the middle of the street, practically. He, too, was starting to shake with the night’s cold.
How confused was this? But the feel of her now . . . her hands on the small of his back, pulling him firmly against her middle.
“I saw yo
u looking at me in class,” she whispered. “Guys think we don’t notice or something.”
This close there was no focus. This close they could say anything.
It was odd. Any moment a truck was going to split the darkness with its headlights and crush their bones.
YOUNG COUPLE KILLED IN MIDDLE OF THE ROAD!
His mother would evaporate with shock and grief.
But now they were slow-motion dancing.
None of this made any sense.
And neither did the kiss. It only took each of them to move slightly. At first she turned her cheek a bit toward his, and he edged away because he didn’t know if she wanted to kiss him. She pressed closer. Then he couldn’t turn any farther. Once on a science class nature trip in elementary school he’d seen a brown owl — at a nature center, in a big pen — turn his head farther, farther, until he’d almost corkscrewed it completely around. But at 270 degrees or so — was that possible? — the owl swiveled his head the other way.
So Stan turned back to her and at first their lips just collided, the way two people pass in a crowded corridor when they aren’t paying attention. An accident, then . . .
Lock.
Her lips were terribly smooth and cold at first, then wondrously warm. If he kept his eyes open the rain crept in, so he closed them and held her even tighter. She was very strong. She had an enormous grip on . . . on all of him. But she didn’t move her head or lips around. She had . . . smooth teeth. He could taste the sweet juice.
She was kissing him.
And it wasn’t making a lot of sense.
Her tongue was . . . and his was . . . and everything was . . .
A car honked then, God! It swerved hard and could have hit them. Stan pulled Janine over to the sidewalk. Where they should have been all the time.
KISSING TEENS BREATHE THEIR LAST!
They stood apart now. Stan had no idea what his face looked like, but Janine’s was . . . astonished. Her mouth was hanging open.
And then she was running, running back to the dance. She was fast, too. It was surprising how strong her stride was.
She could run track. She could run track in a black dress and cowboy boots.
I should go after her, Stan thought.
Because that kiss meant something.
It wasn’t what she’d expected.
His very first kiss. Maybe hers, too. With a boy.
She was a block away already when he started after her. She was fast but he was faster.
Or he should have been. If he wasn’t so cold. And wet. His pants — her pants on him — were soaked and grabbed at his legs. He was a better runner than this, but she was pulling away.
She hadn’t said anything about being a track star.
She made it to the door of the rec center far ahead of him, and that changed things somehow. She was running away — away from him — so he had no right to follow. She was back safe with her family . . . with her girlfriend, Leona.
She kissed him, then chose her.
And Stan did know where he was. May Creek Boulevard was just over there. It would be a long walk but he’d make it home. May Creek to Eddington and then he’d hit the river and it would be only a couple more miles from there.
He’d been Janine Igwash’s boyfriend for about fifteen minutes. That had to be some kind of record.
17
When Stan staggered down the stairs the next day at three o’clock in the afternoon, wiping the sleep from his eyes, the house was empty except for his father taking apart the toilet.
“What are you doing?” Stan asked.
His father was on his knees surrounded by greasy tools, and the toilet lay on its side like an upended ship. A dark hole ringed by yellowy black wax stared up from the bathroom floor. The sewer reek was far worse than the leftover Chanel disaster upstairs.
“I’m trying to save your mother a substantial amount of money,” Ron said. “You know how much water these relics use in a year?”
Stan didn’t know. His father’s hands were covered in the yellowy black wax, a dab of which dangled from his cheek as well.
“You disappeared last night,” Ron said. “Your mother’s going to kill you when she gets back.” Ron explained that they had all gone to the art gallery: Stan’s mother, Lily, Feldon and Gary.
“Isn’t Feldon sick?” Stan asked.
“Miraculous recovery. Must be something in the air around here.”
Could he not smell anything?
Stan couldn’t figure out what Ron was doing with the toilet. He just seemed to be wiping grease on himself, a rag, the tools, the rag again . . .
“So it’s . . . pretty serious with this guy, I guess,” Ron said. “Gary.”
What was his father fishing for?
“They’ve been together what — a couple of months?” Ron’s eyes didn’t stay on a person. They darted here and there. And why did he just keep wiping himself?
“Longer than a couple of months,” Stan said.
“I bet he doesn’t play hockey,” Ron pressed. “Guy looks like he’d fall flat on his ass if you put him in a pair of skates.”
Stan and his father did play hockey together. Stan remembered the cold on his face in the morning at the outdoor rink, the slap of the puck against the boards, how hot they would get in just a few minutes of hard skating.
“Gary is . . . surprising in a lot of ways,” Stan said.
“I wish your mother was,” Ron muttered. He shifted from his knees and sat on the side of the tub, his body hunched forward as if they were in the change hut after a full morning of chasing the puck. “Your mother is completely predictable, I hate to say.”
Why didn’t he cover the hole? The entire house was going to stink.
“She’s hard-assed. Pardon my French. Fucking unforgiving.”
Stan couldn’t help himself.
“You left us,” he said. “You started a family with somebody else. Why would you think Mom would forgive you for that?”
Ron shook his head slowly. “It’s not a simple world, kid. Sometimes people pretend it is. Kelly-Ann is a piece of work, let me tell you. She turned my head, then she got herself pregnant, and if I didn’t go with her . . .”
The thought hovered in the bathroom like the swamp gas.
“What?”
“She was threatening to kill herself. And the baby. My hands were tied. I put up with it as long as I could.”
“So, you took Feldon? Does Kelly-Ann know you’re here?”
“I’m just doing what’s good for the boy.” Somehow another blob of yellowy black appeared on Ron’s chin. “And if your mother has no room in her heart for forgiveness, well . . .”
Ron glanced to either side of Stan’s face, his eyes never settling.
“A man does according to his nature,” Ron said. “You’ll figure that out. Probably exactly what you were doing last night. Tomcatting, my father used to call it. You never knew your grandfather. He was a tough old bastard. But we’ve all got it in us. What you asked me the other night on the phone. That’s the family curse right there. Women don’t understand and they don’t fucking forgive and the next thing you’re out in the cold.”
Something was not right in those eyes, in the way his hands kept moving, wiping here, rubbing there. As if he didn’t know entirely what he was doing.
Ron tapped the side of the gaping hole with a wrench.
“I thought maybe this wasn’t going to be a standard size. And I was right. It’s not. I know some things, you see. I fucking do.”
A sound then from the front of the house. His mother and the rest getting back from the gallery. Stan went to the front hall as they came in all together.
Feldon did look recovered. He was carrying a small bag with the gallery’s logo on it. Probably they’d bought postcards in the gift shop.
Gary seemed to be chewing on words he didn’t want to let out.
“Daddy!” Lily said and pushed past Stan to the bathroom. Had she come unsprung at the gal
lery as usual?
His mother glanced at Stan — cold-eyed — shook out her umbrella and hung up her coat.
Not a word.
That’s how bad it was.
Gary nodded to him grimly, then shuffled in the hallway.
“I . . . I’ll call you tonight,” he said to Stan’s mother.
“You better,” she said. And they kissed. It wasn’t earth-shattering. It wasn’t like Stan’s kiss. The memory of it zinged through his body like an uncoiling spring.
Then Gary was gone, and Stan’s mother banged cupboards in the kitchen. Not good.
Ron wanted back into the family! But he didn’t deserve it.
Anyone could see that.
Feldon came up to Stan with his big eyes and his long face. “You snore!”
“How would you know?” Stan asked gently. Feldon seemed to be wearing new clothes.
“Because!” Feldon scrunched his nose and made snuffling noises, which caused Stan to remember vaguely that the dark bed had been lumpy in the middle of the night when he’d slumped in.
Of course! He’d put Feldon in it himself the day before. Feldon with a fever, this same boy now balancing on one leg and scratching his nose.
“How are you feeling?” Stan put his hand on the boy’s forehead. Not boiling. Stan remembered being sick like Feldon when he was little and then the next day being perfectly fine.
Feldon blew through his lips and hopped around the room with his arms open like an airplane.
Better, apparently.
“Want to go fishing?” Stan asked.
The thought just occurred to him as he spoke it — a stroke of genius. They still had two rods in the basement. Stan thought he knew where. And the tackle box was in the laundry room under the old table.
“I know a place,” Stan said. “If you don’t get a bass, at least you’ll get a sunfish.”
Feldon the airplane continued to circle as if out of radio contact.
How badly was it raining? Nothing like last night. His mother couldn’t possibly stay mad at him if he took the kid out. And if they left, his mother would say what she needed to say to Ron, who would realize this wasn’t his house anymore. Even if he did replace the toilet.
