Wait Till You See Me Dance

by Deb Olin Unferth

  I said to her, “I’d like it if you would stay.”

  Open Water

  By the next time she saw him, she had discovered, without much effort and without him knowing, his last name, then his entire work history, previous places of residence, former wife’s occupation and location, children’s names, and she had seen photos of friends of them all. She had learned about his preferences, his dreams, that he believed in a benevolent God, that he enjoyed the open water of a calm lake and the challenge of a narrow rapid. These facts in hand, she had projected into the future what she might say to impress him. She imagined being at his lonely bachelor pad in his four-story apartment complex (she had studied pictures of the fountains and two pools at the complex, the weight room, the bike storage, knew his probable rent depending on whether he had two or three bedrooms—or had he opted for only one?). She imagined his voice getting gruffer as he told her his story (she knew he’d met his wife in college and had married young, just two years after they’d finished their degrees—maybe they’d grown apart, maybe she’d left him, felt she’d given him and their children her best years, willingly, but now wanted more, and why not?). She imagined him telling her all this in his kitchen, the new appliances, the island with its bar stools, going over the facts she already knew. She saw his eyes on her slim body, imagined him pulling her close (he had attended the university where she now taught, and one of his sons was headed there now, the son who looked so much like him, same blue eyes, same thin neck, same tousled hair, a boy who’d won the eco-science fair that year, beat out fifty-four other projects, according to the Web announcement, was going places, this boy). She had already imagined it all, so much so that when she finally did see him, she felt unable to speak. Two short years back he’d had an awakening sweep over him, or a disaster befall him—she wasn’t sure which. He’d left his place of employment after twelve years with the company, where he’d been such a presence, had been featured among the top executives in the country, not that long ago. But something had gone wrong: he’d divorced, made a move and it didn’t seem lateral, though maybe it was, she really had no idea what any of it meant, the ridiculous job titles and descriptions that all sounded the same, vague and grandiose but also somewhat small in their ambitions.

  He’d been through so much. They’d been through it, in a way, together, and now what was left? They were long past pleasantries. If there was anywhere to go from here, it would be in silent understanding, the two of them on the shore of the lake he weekly boated, or alone in one of his quiet rooms. But did she love him? Was he enough? Was she ready to disrupt the course of her life, become a stepmother to two teenagers, for this man, a man who loved water, who’d had children too young and now found himself at one end of a long corridor, more alone than he thought he’d be, but ready for better: this man, cheerful, smiling nonchalantly? She wondered this when he arrived and she watched him across the room, talking to some of the others.

  Alas, she already had the sick feeling of an ending inside her, the long sorrow of a slow breakup, of the impatience with which she would await his emails if he didn’t write, her boredom with his boys (who played basketball and water-skied), their dislike of her and her efforts to assuage it—for what? For this blue-eyed man? She was so disappointed, in this, in them, had wanted much, was offering all, though he had asked for so little. Still she was willing to try.

  The Applicant

  We chose his application because the writing was good but also because the poor man lived in a foreign land where he’d been placed in a camp for no reason other than the religion of his forefathers, and had wasted away there for eight long years, during which time he tried to better himself in whatever way he could, amid atrocities and so on, only to emerge with a deeper empathy for all humankind and begin writing stories of his trials and the trials of the men and women who’d stood around him in the yard, sat next to him by the wall, the ones who’d disappeared, the ones who’d been beaten with padlocks. We spoke on his behalf with increasing eloquence to the higher administration, because of the cost of bringing him on a visa, until we were all imagining him attending our program and afterward going on to write important work that could transform the world, and how our program would be responsible. We won over the administration and secured his passage.

  But after he arrived in the fall amid internal departmental fanfare we had to admit he was not writing about the camp. His stories didn’t include a word about it, because in fact he did not want to transform anybody, and he did not want to write stories anymore that presented his damaged life and the lives of the men and women he once knew. He was hoping to leave that behind at last, start new—could you blame him?—write about sailing away on an ocean, and when that wasn’t far enough, shooting away from the earth in a spaceship, and when that wasn’t far enough, heading out of the solar system toward distant stars.

  The Walk

  The idea was to go for a walk: the baby in a stroller, the child by the hand, the path straight and scenic, the weather warm and breezy, the family fine and in good humor.

  But the dog got too hot and lay panting on the ground, and they’d forgotten again to bring the water. The baby (Kryptonite, they called her) was in one of her moods, weeping on and off, refusing to sit in the stroller, tugging off her hat and throwing it into the dirt, so that they had to stop every few yards, retrieve the hat, pass the baby from one parent to the other because she wanted only to be with the father while he, exhausted (“weakened,” he said), kept handing her back.

  The father didn’t want to carry the baby. He’d carried the baby yesterday when they’d gone to see the sand dunes. Kryptonite had wailed and was hot and had put a fistful of sand into her mouth, and they’d forgotten the water in the car then too. He had sat down in the sand for a while, calling, “We are not having another kid,” a sentence he’d been repeating the whole trip (he no longer called it a vacation), often within earshot of the mother, who, to his horror, only laughed.

  Kryptonite always wanted the father, the mother was thinking. Both the children did, even though without the mother they’d be dead in a day. Kryptonite could hog a whole event, anytime, anywhere. The mother couldn’t manage to have a simple conversation with the father without an elaborate pause in the road to hand off baby, transfer bags, retrieve hat, and so on, couldn’t manage to have a simple joke between them like they used to. “Daddy’s girl,” the mother kept saying each time the baby reached for him—sweetly at first, but after a while with clenched teeth. The baby went back and forth, screaming, between them.

  The father was hot, like the dog, who kept dropping to the ground. The father worried about the dog. He felt every emotion the dog did—powerfully—felt at least as much pain as the dog did at any moment, felt the dog’s hunger, felt the dog’s thirst. Felt the dog’s loneliness and isolation at being the only one of its kind amid this crowd, felt the suffering of walking a path in the heat wearing a heavy fur coat, of walking with no destination, no food or water, tied to a rope, dragged like a slave.

  The mother could tell just what the father was thinking. He didn’t have to say a word. Just the way he moved his feet along the ground said it all, the mother thought for the tenth time that day.

  The older child was the only one among them who was having any fun. She was on her feet, too old for any stroller. She was so used to her younger sister’s cries that she didn’t hear them (“a Kryptonite shield,” the father always said, a talent that later in life would be seen as a defect—“lack of empathy,” people would say), so used to her parents bickering that she didn’t hear them either, uninterested in the suffering dog. She strolled down the path looking at flowers.

  Online

  The plan is to cut back in half-hour increments until she is down to two hours per day. She is old enough to have a memory of life off-line, but it fades each year and now seems far away. She doesn’t recall what she did with that time and whether it was fulfilling.

  The first week is so easy, s
he doesn’t feel it. She can be online twenty-three and a half hours a day! Weeks go by, months, and she doesn’t notice how severely she is restricting her use. Four months pass—a restriction of eight hours—and still she is fine as long as she doesn’t wake in the night and in a fit of insomnia browse. Besides, one must sometimes look up from the screen, if only to pay for a soda, or walk down the hall. Six months in, she hits the twelve-hour mark and that’s when the pain sets in. She leaves her phone at home and now she can’t walk down the street and check her mail. She goes to the movies but she can’t look at the screen while looking at the screen. More hours open up, hours that must be filled with activities, and she can’t remember what there is to do in the world other than study screens of various sizes with various intentions. Now she treasures each minute she has, and her time off-line feels ghostly, like time spent waiting for her real time, her life time, her online time.

  What am I doing out here? she thinks. What is the point?

  Out of sheer boredom she reads a magazine. She has trouble concentrating and at first can think of nothing but how bored she is, but then she smiles in a couple of places and learns one interesting fact (sea seals, like parrots, can mimic!) that she tells a friend over lunch, a friend she made plans with because she is so bored. Now she is down to six hours a day online and she really is at a loss. She exercises every day. She calls her family to chat. (Why do people have families if they’re so boring to talk to?) She does a little home improvement. She sits at the window for minutes at a time. She thinks she could learn an instrument, become a famous star? Or maybe she’ll help the world in some way, give? That’s a smug thought, but she thinks it anyway, since she has nothing else to do. The time lowers to three hours a day online, and she casts desperate looks at people on the streets and in shops, and she thinks, How do people fill their days? Are they unhappy, having to face their own brains so often and with such constancy?

  Is it worth it, this dull life? She feels—as she switches off the light, going to sleep early since there is nothing else to do—that she can glimpse in the distance a time when she might enjoy an experience for what it is, when she might read a book and want to read it, when she might take a walk and find it fun, when she might hear a joke and laugh without awareness of her loss. It is with that hope that she does this, for its possibility.

  Your Character

  Your character is wounded in a ditch. Your character is stuck in lockdown. Your character stalls out in a long line of traffic. Your character meets the last man on earth. Your character stays by the body, waits for the police to arrive.

  Your character runs away from home.

  An unnamed man arrives on the scene.

  Your character gets pushed into a fountain. Your character walks home in the rain. Your character is lost outside in the middle of a storm. Your character cries in a bathroom stall. Your character leaps from a sinking boat.

  Your character makes a snowman.

  Insert random song-and-dance act. Insert random talking animal.

  Every plot has room for an assassin or two.

  Your character convinces the public to try out a new body-modification unit that starts out innocent, then gets mildly addicting, and then becomes a physiological need. By the end the body is converted into a plastic-like substance.

  Your character is shunned by all but one (a talking duck).

  Your character blows up the love interest—an accident, but still.

  Your character beds an old man. Your character sleeps on a board beneath a bridge. Your character stays up all night, cries all night, wakes in the night, walks in the moonlight, sleeptalks. Your character lies down in the graveyard. Your character wakes six weeks later to learn most of the ship’s crew is dead.

  Your character just isn’t sure true love exists.

  Your character is arrested—it’s a wrong place, wrong time scenario. Your character vaults from the roof. Your character stands up and screams. Your character collapses on the sidewalk. Your character takes the ashes, runs through the funeral. Your character feels the water closing overhead.

  A pre-dystopic government is in power.

  Pirates attack!

  The sidekick is lost. The sidekick has the wrong briefcase. The technology fails. The sidekick, who was sitting on a desert island, raggedy, starving, alone, fading, suddenly drops out of the sky and onto your character.

  The love interest is too small to survive. The love interest falls in love with someone else, quits the quest. Might return later. The love interest has been cursed and lost his memory. Does not remember your character. The love interest prays in an ancient temple. The love interest avoids your character at the school dance.

  Your character just wants a normal life—but that is the only thing under heaven that your character cannot have.

  Your character dies. The story goes on without her. The water is rising, the sky is breaking, the air is filling with poison. The bottom of the window is six feet up.

  Fear of Trees

  He hadn’t seen a tree in ten years. There were no trees in any of the four prisons he’d lived in and he moved from prison to prison in a windowless van in chains. When he arrived home at last, the trees on his street were so tall that he was afraid and kept ducking. They seemed about to fall over. They would crash into the houses, crush the cars, kill his family, lay waste to civilization.

  3

  Voltaire Night

  I’m the one who started it. I was depressed as hell and wanted to share my bad news. “Has anyone read Candide?” I said. I don’t even recall what the bad news was now but it must have had to do with a certain man who didn’t love me anymore. In those days I felt most of the time like someone had knocked me in the head with a brick, and even though I had stopped drinking, I had started again, and the way I saw it, a real brick in the head would have been okay because then I’d be dead or at least unconscious.

  I had a job teaching a class in the adult-ed program of a fancy prestigious college. The class went one winter night a week, and while the school was fancy, the adult-ed program was not—classes were not held on the beautiful medieval campus, but shoved over into a hideous office building downtown in order for the working citizens of our land to have easier access to higher learning, though we all knew the truth: it was to keep the fake teachers and students from mingling with (and possibly infecting) the real ones. The hallways of the downtown building were lined with artful black-and-white photographs of the real campus so that we could all look at the place we’d been denied. The classrooms in the downtown building did not have windows. This was an architectural feat, maybe even a masterpiece, something in the league of M. C. Escher, because the outside of the building had windows running up and down three sides and while, yes, one side had no windows, it was not the side that held our classrooms. I sometimes stood at the foot of the building, looking up and marveling at how this had been accomplished.

  Still, getting the job was my one obvious piece of luck that year. The pay wasn’t great, but it was decent and it beat the other adjunct work I was doing. I was teaching all over town and could barely pay the rent. I was drinking in the cheapest bars, driving home blind.

  The people who took these adult-ed classes tended to be smart, overeducated for jobs that were no longer fulfilling or that had never satisfied in the first place—journalists, lawyers—and now, in their middle years, they recalled that they had once wanted something artistic for their lives but it had not worked out, and despite whatever trappings they had—spouses, houses, tykes—they found themselves confronting a deep, colorless meaninglessness each day. They thought that maybe realizing their early dreams would change all that. They wrote books six thousand pages long and made jokes about bringing them to class in a dump truck. Or they wrote nothing but had a great idea for a story that they recorded on their phones and had their assistants transcribe. Or their spouses were working, and they themselves had quit their numbing jobs, were staying home to write, give it a go at
last. Their writing—let’s be honest—was nothing to shout about. Not good, mostly unreadable. No control or sense of timing, no grasp of narrative beyond cliché. But often the language itself had personality, and a clear voice came through: sardonic, witty, self-deprecating, with a tarp of sad earnestness over it, all of which I liked, so I found it easy to read the pages they gave me and to encourage them.

  In Voltaire’s Candide, there’s a certain passage where a huge crowd wants to board a boat, all vying for the same seat that Candide—luckless man, but in this one instance he is lucky and in possession of some extra cash—has offered to pay for. The seat will go, he says, to the man or woman most bad off among them. One by one they choose their woes and tell their tales. That scene—communal, classroom-like, someone in charge judging their stories and making promises no one could keep—and these students, with me as their leader, reminded me of that.

  After the final class of my first course at the school, the students suggested we go for a drink.

  I didn’t usually go for drinks with my students. I knew teachers who did and I found it unprofessional and revolting, though that would not have stopped me. Neither would the fact that I had sworn to quit drinking. But the school had put in place a policy that applied even to the dubious adult ed. I’d had to sign a statement. Still, an end-of-term drink seemed like a nice idea.