Wait Till You See Me Dance

by Deb Olin Unferth

  Any other school would have said, Come spring semester, come next year. But he couldn’t come next year. It was leave then or be drafted and surely die. Probably his second choice and third choice had refused him. Fourth choice. Who knows how low on the list we lay. All I know is our school said they would take him—not out of generosity, it seemed from the paperwork, but sheer incompetence. If he failed this class, he’d have to go back, sign up for the war like everybody else.

  The odd thing was, I looked at him, and I couldn’t get a read on him. He could live another month, or he could live eighty more years.

  I went to his musical-composition teacher and asked him what he planned to do about this kid.

  “‘Do?”’ said the composition teacher. “Explain ‘do.’ Can you guess how many students I have?” he wanted to know. “Look, I’m not a blood donor. Do I look like a blood donor?”

  “I’m an adjunct too,” I said.

  “Okay. You know what I’m talking about.”

  The adjuncts were always tired. Our classes were over-enrolled. The school didn’t give us health insurance. Every year there was a Christmas party and the adjuncts were never invited. All the adjuncts shared one big office in a space like a spaceship, full of desks and boxes and books. We worked under contract and we were paid nearly nothing. Below minimum wage. People were shocked when they found out how much I made. I hated the other adjuncts, some younger, some older, each with their own cowardly reason for being there. And I hated the associate chair and the smug new-world music he played with his suburban band on weekends, and how he assigned me 99 semester after semester, somehow slotted me in there without even knowing my name. And I hated myself for hating all these perfectly reasonable citizens who were just going about their lives.

  I needed to just pass him myself. Put a big P on his paper and move him through.

  I guess I was in love with him a little. I didn’t want him to go back.

  I wasn’t used to being in love, not with anyone and certainly not with a student, certainly not one eleven years younger than I, one I barely spoke to. It was horrible. I had to wait for our class and then hope to see him in the hallway beforehand, maybe walk in at the same moment, and I had to wonder whether he’d be going to some performance at the school that night and therefore whether I should go too. I had to puzzle out where he’d be rehearsing and which group he hung around with (the other foreign musicians: the Chileans, the Russians, the Japanese) and where they might be and whether I could sometimes be nearby, watching. I tried to do an especially good job in his class. I stopped reading aloud from the textbook. I required the students to visit the writing center. The papers came back even worse.

  I was giving it up, had given it up. He wasn’t even going to pass the class.

  “That’s some lousy job you’ve got.”

  This was the office assistant talking. I was stapling sheets of paper together. I was pulling out staples from papers I had incorrectly stapled and restapling the papers to the correct ones. I looked over at her and could suddenly see that she was doomed. I could see it as clearly and abruptly as if I’d reached over and stapled right through her jugular, put six staples into her neck.

  “What else do you do,” she said, “walk dogs? Clean up their crap? This job’s not for you. You should quit.”

  A staple lodged under my fingernail. “Hey,” I said, “do you have anyone lined up to do the essays yet?”

  “What essays?”

  “The 99s.”

  “Oh, crap. I was going to bribe someone.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “No one wants to do it.”

  “Put me down.”

  “I can’t put you down.”

  “Go ahead. Put me down.”

  “Can’t do that. You’re not an outside source.”

  She was right about that. The outside sources weren’t from outside the school or the country or the planet but from outside 99. The 101 teachers read the 99s. The 205 teachers.

  I said, “Who checks? Does anybody check?”

  “I check. I’m supposed to check.”

  “Don’t check.”

  “I’m not putting you down.”

  I was surprised by this. In previous semesters, I’d been on the receiving end of mass emails begging someone to volunteer. Anyone not teaching 99 could expect to get asked to come in on the last Saturday of final-exam week. I had thought it would be easy to convince her, that she would be relieved.

  I’m not saying it’s proper or right to love a student, and I’m not going to pretend I never did anything about it, because I did, but I can say I didn’t do much.

  All I did was to bring the office assistant to the dance and threaten to kill her.

  In the movie about George and the angel, the angel shows George what the world would be like if George had never existed. It turns out that without George the world would be a cold, dark place. Without George people would be poor and lonely. Some people would be dead because he hadn’t been there to save them. Others would be older than they would be if he had lived. Without George a dark force would be in control, and the population would be suppressed and subdued by it. People would walk, bundled against the fierce winds, to their coal stoves to eat their bland Christmas dinners alone.

  The moral of the movie is that, well, it’s too bad that George is so unhappy and that he never got to do the things he wanted to do, that he never even got to form a clear idea of what he might want to do, had instead carried with him in his heart all these years a vague longing, a sense that somehow this was all wrong, that there was a shimmering ship bumping around out there in the dark that he’d wanted to board, not knowing where it was headed but feeling so trapped and helpless where he was that he had to believe the ship would bring him someplace better. It’s too bad that’s how it was for him, that his life had been so sad, but on the upside, look how much his misery was doing for others. His daily struggles, his failures, his defeats, somehow held in place this delicate system, so that while the population wasn’t happy exactly, at least they weren’t despondent or dead.

  3.

  It was toward the end of the semester. We were rushing toward winter break, zooming around the hallways. Outside, the city looked as if it had been tacked up and smudged with a thumb. It was the days of early darkness, a few sprigs of tinsel. No snow, but somehow we had slush or something slushish and damp on the streets.

  “How would you like to go to an Indian dance?” the office assistant said to me.

  “What kind of an Indian are you supposed to be?” I said.

  On Saturday morning I drove to her neighborhood. It was the first clear bright day we’d had in weeks. Her neighborhood consisted of a set of small streets squeezed between two enormous bridges. She lived at one end of a long brick street that started out luminous, with shiny storefronts and upscale groceries, and smoothed out into pretty little residential three-flats, painted matte colors or made of brown stones. As I drove down it, I could see glimpses of the river between buildings. I pulled up and waited.

  I had known my brother would die young and he did. I had known my neighbor would die. I had known about a high school friend and about another friend who became a lover and then went back to being a friend and then was dead.

  This was the kind of neighborhood where people live long lives.

  The office assistant came out of the building. She was carrying a large black case, like for a cumbersome instrument. “What is that?” I said.

  “Our costumes,” she said.

  The dance turned out to be incredibly far. It took hours to get there. We drove on roads leading out of the city and into the vast land of America. It was a hell of a lot of highway out there unreeling beside the median strip, dry fields behind chain-link fences, antenna towers, tollbooths, flagpoles, sky. It was the kind of drive where you pass a series of billboards and road signs that promise there will be snow cones, there will be rest in forty-eight miles, God is on the way. There was a sudden
insane rainstorm, clear out of a drained day. The rain drummed down so hard on the car it drowned out our voices. All we could see were stars of water on the windshield. We were driving through outer space, through a comet.

  “I’m going to pull over,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Go.”

  After a while the rain dried up, and we were once again going over the empty land, passing an occasional spray of houses, the lost communities of our citizenry. A line of fat white birds flew by overhead, making it look like real work to get where they were going.

  “Is the dance on a reservation?”

  No, what did I think, the assistant wondered, that the reservations were just there for anyone to go in and steal out of their wigwams?

  “Where, then?”

  Well, I’d see, for God’s sake. Now would I quit asking questions and listen to the story the assistant was trying to tell about her mother, something about the costumes, how her mother had sewed them with her own fingers based on a Native American costume description. Her mother had supported her through everything. When she drew comic books her mother had always been the first to read them. When she had love problems she could always bring them home. She’d had drug troubles, she’d suffered rejection from her father, but her mother had always been there.

  I still hadn’t told her that no matter how great her mother was I wasn’t wearing any fucking Indian costume.

  Another note about the movie. The office assistant had not been comparing me to George, the lead, who at the end of the movie cries out that he is grateful for his bad life and enjoins his daughter to get over to that piano and play them all a song. I was being compared to Mary, his wife, who, if she were not around, nothing would be much different—George would have married a different lady, that’s all—and I have to say I do see the connection. Nothing would be different if I weren’t around. I haven’t caused anything, good or bad. Even if I have done something inadvertently, as, say, in the movies when a man moves a cup and a thousand years later all of humanity explodes, it’s likely that if I hadn’t been born, my mother would have had a different baby around the same time and that baby would have been somewhat like me or mostly like me and would have made similar choices, probably the very same ones, and she would be here right now instead of me, feeling the things that I feel in my stead. And any ill or beneficial effects that I may have caused would be caused by her, not me. She’d take care of moving or not moving any cup that I would have or not.

  “You should quit that job,” said the office assistant. “You’re no good at it.”

  “I do all right,” I said. “You might let me help you out with those essays.”

  “What essays?”

  “The 99s.”

  “Not this again.”

  “Did we talk about this?”

  “What makes you think you have any reason to ask me for a favor?”

  “Not a favor. I’m doing you a turn. A friendly turn, friend to friend.”

  “You think we’re friends? Why do you think I asked you along? You have a car. I asked five other people before you.”

  “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars,” I said.

  This made her laugh. “You think I’m going to risk my job for a hundred bucks?”

  “A thousand.”

  She looked over at me then, and I could see she knew I had my secret reasons for wanting to do this, reasons that were in some way shameful. And she knew it because she had her own dark, shameful secrets, all you had to do was look at her to see them, lurking behind her face, old pains, secrets having to do with the ancient beginnings of her life—with the end of it too.

  “Pull over,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  “No way,” she said. “I just have to pee.”

  We were on the blankest, bleakest stretch of road of the whole trip so far. I don’t know why she chose that moment and not twenty minutes back at the gas station and not twenty ahead into whatever was up there waiting.

  “All right, all right,” I said. I eased to the side of the road. “Hurry.” She got out and ran over the brown earth.

  I stared out the windshield at the flat land. Bits of rain and mud were still coming down. I waited. I considered dumping the costumes on the side of the road where she wouldn’t see.

  The thing about the kid’s music was that you didn’t know what was going to happen next. You’d think you knew where it was going but you were wrong. There are very few parts of life like that.

  What was she taking so long for? I stretched my neck around, saw nothing. The land around me seemed pressed into the ground, the blades of grass crushed, the few trees bent and barren. I noted the time on the dashboard. She’d been gone twenty minutes. I turned off the engine, put on the flashers. Got out. It was damn cold. Was she playing a trick on me? Had somebody picked her up out there? Was I supposed to wait here for hours and then, after dark, drive back lost, run out of gas, wander around on these roads with a gas can, which I didn’t even have, only to be made fun of on Monday? I knew there was a game that went something like that, but in the version I knew, the person in the field was the one left behind. The one in the car was the one who laughed.

  I called to her. I locked the car, took a few steps in the direction I thought she’d gone. It was early afternoon by this time but the sky had turned a heavy dark gray. I stepped into the field and looked back at my car to be sure she wasn’t springing out, breaking a window, hot-wiring the car, and speeding away without me. The wind swayed the antenna. I walked farther into the field. It was when I came to a little block of cement, no higher than my knee, that I finally heard her.

  “Hey! Hey!”

  “Where are you?” I said. On the other side of the cement was a hole. I leaned in and saw her. “What are you doing in there?” I said.

  It was a well that had been partially filled in. The sides were smooth. Her face was turned up to me, and in that moment her death came at me so strongly and vividly I felt dazed. “That’s the stupidest question anyone has ever asked me in my life,” she said. “Didn’t you hear me screaming?”

  The fact is, no, I hadn’t, until I was almost upon her. The wind, I guess. From the road I hadn’t heard a thing. The well was far too deep to climb out of. She could have been out here for days. She could have never been found.

  “Are you hurt?” I called down.

  “I’m wet. There’s mud.”

  “Did you break anything?”

  “I don’t think so. Get help.”

  I hesitated. If I left, went driving down the road, I was pretty sure I’d never find her again.

  “Maybe I have something in my car,” I said.

  “Well, go look.”

  I ran back to the car, studying the angle so I’d find my way back. I had so much crap in my trunk—crates of books, laundry detergents. I had a board she might be able to grab onto. I found a piece of rope from when I’d tied my mattress to the roof and moved over two blocks. I ran back to the well.

  “I’ve got this rope,” I said. “Might be long enough.” I crouched down on the wet ground.

  “Toss me an end.”

  I almost tossed her an end.

  I didn’t toss her an end.

  I dangled the rope out of her reach. “You’ll put me down?”

  “Put you down?” She jumped for it, missed.

  “The 99s. You’ll let me read?”

  “For fuck’s sake,” she shouted.

  “Will you?” I waved the rope between us.

  She thought about it. “No,” she said.

  “Suit yourself,” I said. I pulled the rope out of sight. So it turned out her death was by my own hand, or lack of, it appeared. I walked away.

  I heard her call, “You don’t scare me …” and then her voice was gone. I went back to the car.

  It may seem like I was being heroic here, trying to save this kid, but the truth is I was just grateful to be feeling something.

  I sta
rted the car. If she was gone, paperwork would jam up for weeks. There’d be an administrative breakdown. Next week was finals. They’d be grateful to me for volunteering to do the essays.

  “Don’t worry about 99,” I’d say. “I’ve got it covered on this end.”

  If, at that moment, someone had been strolling along, they would have thought I was checking my map, not leaving a life in a hole. And if someone were looking in from overhead, she, in her hole, would look completely separate from me. What was really going on was a fact she and I would share and no one else would ever know, because there was no one looking down from the clouds. Civilization settled on that a century ago. It would be her word against mine for all eternity, and who would ever believe a person would do something like that?

  I shut off the car. I got out of the car and went back. “You still there?” I said.

  “No, I left,” she said.

  I didn’t ask her if she’d changed her mind, if she was ready to beg. I just lowered the rope and she grabbed it.

  I had done this for a kid who’d never even looked my way. I grasped the rope with all my might and, inch by inch, I pulled her out.

  Something she had on me, this assistant, which I didn’t know at the time, was that I had been fired already. Or not hired back. The next semester’s class assignments were sitting in our boxes. There was nothing in my box. I just hadn’t realized it yet. There’d been complaints about me, poor evaluations. The students in my 99s had the lowest passing rates. For two weeks now she’d been trying to tell me and I’d ignored her. I’d thought she was just being mean.