Wait Till You See Me Dance

by Deb Olin Unferth

  She switched on the food processor.

  Mr. Simmons asked Ms. Baum about the book he had sent from the bookstore. “It’s all right,” she said. A little wheedling and he discovered she had only a high school diploma.

  “How would you like to take a college class?” he asked. “Something simple to start, like composition or beginning math.” He paused, gathered courage. “I’d be happy to pay for a correspondence course.”

  She spun the pack of Camels in a circle.

  “You can think about it,” he said.

  “Math.”

  Mr. Simmons had to admit: something about the prison was satisfying, like crossing items off a list, or winning at backgammon. He learned the visitors’ rules, told them to his wife, chuckling. He could have nothing in his pockets, he said. No wallet, no keys, no pens. Only unopened cigarette packs and quarters for the vending machine. And no blue shirt on visiting day. They might confuse him with a prisoner, he supposed. Books could be sent only directly from a bookstore, new. She couldn’t receive maps, not even of France. In case she dug a hole to Europe.

  Ms. Baum kept careful track, could quote the rules like a sports announcer. “We’re allowed three electronic appliances in our rooms. I’ve got a TV and a heating pad—for my back, you know,” she said. “A DVD player would make the third. If I had one.”

  Mr. Simmons visited Ms. Baum on Sundays. On Tuesdays, he sent her stamps and enclosed notes with them, perfunctory little letters, lists of ideas to consider, practical matters she might attend to. If she was beginning college, she ought to think about a major. If she would be released in two short years, she should think about employment opportunities. Did she have a social security card? Did she remember how to fill out a job application? He had taken the liberty of printing out some sample job applications for her to practice on. See pages enclosed, he wrote.

  At visits, they talked about the letters.

  “Those job applications,” she said.

  “Yes? Did you have a look at them?”

  “What do I say when they ask if I committed a felony?”

  “In my opinion,” he said, “impolite questions don’t deserve a response.”

  Ms. Baum found her correspondence class difficult. Percents stumped her. Fractions made her panic. Mr. Simmons helped her as much as he could without using pen and paper in the visiting room. Finally he ordered his own copy of the book and wrote some of the exercises for her. Sent them in the mail.

  He wrote her about the technical media company he worked for. I personally invented all their digital filing systems, he wrote. Where would they be without my organizational expertise? In a very messy corner, I can assure you. He wrote about his wife and children, about the time he sent his youngest to France. Poor little thing was scared, only fourteen. She didn’t speak the language. She refused to go, made a big to-do with a social worker at school. But I made her. Who complains about going to France? She had a wonderful time and learned French. But ever since, he wrote wistfully, she’s snubbed me like an ugly suitor. Was I wrong?

  He emailed copies of the letters to his daughters. “Perhaps you should write to Ms. Baum,” he suggested when they called. “She needs contact with the outside.”

  “When was the last time you wrote me a letter?” the older one said.

  “It was Spain, Dad, not France,” the younger one said. “I speak Spanish. God.”

  He was pleased: they had called to talk to him.

  Ms. Baum told him stories about her ex-husband, who introduced her to drugs, and her baby girl, not a baby anymore, eight years old, in Florida with an ex-boyfriend’s mother. Did she have any brothers or sisters? She had a brother. “He shot himself. A few months after I was arrested. I didn’t get to go to the funeral.”

  Mr. Simmons shook his head, patted her hand shyly.

  He sent Ms. Baum piles of books, all his favorites. He reread them, jotting notes on a yellow pad, ideas they might discuss. Along with his usual letters and stamps, he sent cartons of cigarettes, tins of fancy crabmeat, boxes of chocolates, and, a few times, cash for her to spend at the canteen. He lay in bed and dreamed. A parade of Ms. Baums marched down the avenue, held aloft diplomas, books and violins, aprons and rakes. Reunited loved ones waved to cheering crowds. At the podium, the original Ms. Baum introduced him. Mr. Simmons spoke, shook hands with the governor. His wife and daughters stood to the side, smiled for the cameras.

  Then one Sunday, he arrived at the prison and Sally Baum was gone.

  “Released,” said the guard at the front desk.

  “How can she be?” Mr. Simmons asked. “She had another year and two months …”

  “Released.”

  Mr. Simmons turned, gaped-mouthed, and looked behind him at the long line of boyfriends and mothers with more claim to be here than he. He squared shoulders and jaw and marched past them.

  At home, his wife was out, hadn’t left a note. He called the Reform Association. “My prisoner is gone. Released.”

  “That’s wonderful!” the woman said. “Ready for a new one? We have a long list.”

  Early release program. What sort of crappy system lets people go without properly paying for their crimes? He took the initiative to write the warden his thoughts. How do we expect our criminals to learn respect for a government that says one thing and does another? Human law is not God’s law. It is not based on grace and forgiveness but on transaction and fulfillment of contract, he wrote on his new Reform Association letterhead. I assure you Ms. Baum will want to finish her sentence on principle. She will not walk with dignity given the present circumstances. When you hear from Ms. Baum, tell her I must speak with her.

  There was no trace of her online. If she had stayed in the area, she clearly wasn’t taking the bus. She didn’t have a job in any of the convenience stores nearby, but Laura Baum and Larry Baum, both unrelated, did, along with several women who looked vaguely like her. In a parking lot, one woman screamed when he grabbed her arm.

  She might have returned the books, sold the stamps, made a fortune, and split for New Guinea. He’d be getting a message any day now: The sailboat is ready. Come … Would he leave his wife and children? Certainly not. She’d have to return before he’d even speak to her. After all I’ve taught you, he’d say, shaking his head, at least that you should know.

  Or perhaps she watched him each morning as he left for work, stood with her back against the bricks, peered around the corner as he stepped off the curb. One day she’d step out, appear before him. Why, it’s Ms. Baum, he’d say to her shy smile. Each morning he paused on the front step, rocked on his heels, whistled, waited.

  He drove to the small town in southern Illinois where Ms. Baum had mentioned her mother lived. He walked from feed store to grocery to bank. Placed his palms on counters and asked, “Do you happen to know Ms. Sally Baum?” He drove home alone in the rain.

  “Heard from Houdini?” his wife said over dinner.

  “I’ll have you know I’m very concerned for her welfare. I only hope she hasn’t dropped back into the drug business,” he said. “And I will not put up with this scrutinizing my every move.”

  He didn’t think it strange to hire a private investigator. After all, anything might have happened. She might have fallen into a ditch, could be lying there now. She might have hit her head, been kidnapped—Lord knows what lunatic friends of her dead brother might be out prowling the streets. After all, he thought, scanning Ms. Baum’s prison Christmas photo into a file, what function does man serve other than to ensure his charges do not topple out of windows or off bridges? After all, he thought when the email came (Logan Diner, four-to-midnight shift, back-door exit), a man must keep track of his charges’ coordinates on this wretched lonely tossing sea. After all, he thought, trembling in his light coat, foot planted, near to midnight by the back-door dumpster, it isn’t as though he specifically told her to contact him in the event of release. It isn’t as though they had a plan.

  The door swung open. An ir
regular rectangle of light, then she stepped out.

  “Sally.”

  She started. “Mr. Simmons!” She wore a beige uniform, tugged a jacket around her. “You gave me a scare. What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “You have?” She looked up and down the alley. “You want money.”

  His mind went blank. “Money?”

  “For the books and stamps.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I know I owe you.”

  “No. No.”

  “Oh,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “Then what do you want?”

  Suddenly he was very small. He was way down there by the dumpsters, barely recognizable—a man in a coat, hands in his pockets, a plain, dull woman before him. The man lifted his hands, stepped forward, said, “No, you don’t understand.”

  The First Full Thought of Her Life

  There is a place where a fake river runs along the edges of the parking lots, lots that stretch a mile, asphalt poured out over the earth with the whole resort crunched down on top—planted trees, swimming pools, a store that sells snacks, liquor, and a small selection of wines.

  And a family (mother, father, girl, baby) driving away from it toward the dune.

  Her dream had been to go there, the whole time she was pregnant, each time, she imagined it, how they’d all climb the sand dune, how they’d stand in the sun at the top, the breeze, the lake in the distance, the photo they’d bring home of their hands raised in triumph.

  They’d lost the rental car in the lot and almost didn’t make it, found the car, couldn’t find the exit, couldn’t find the road, found the wrong road, found the right road, arrived finally. The parking lot was half-full. The dune was so white it looked like aluminum. A flawless day.

  The shooter was already in position at this point.

  The father pulled the visor down and said that a dune is a pile of sand on a parking lot. He said that people wrote books, created myths, invented whole philosophies, about trudging uphill in hot sand, the futility of such an enterprise.

  He said that sand works like a microwave, cooks you from the inside through its reflective properties.

  He said that a glacier dropped this stuff down here and left ten thousand years ago. Sand is unhygienic, full of prehistoric infection.

  He was out of the car now, frowning into the backseat and attempting to dislodge the baby from her car seat. The little girl said that pee is unhygienic and the father agreed.

  But the mother had climbed this same dune as a child. And now she’d brought her own family here, on a mission of making memories for her daughter, hopefully ones as good as the best of her own, and this dune had been among them. You couldn’t drive right up to it back then. You hiked a path through sandy woods. None of that was here anymore but you could still go up and come down. The same sand carried away on the bottoms of your shoes.

  The shooter was in a silver pickup, ’13 or ’14, green license plates (Colorado?), first letter Y. The mother and girl walked around the shooter’s fender and started up the dune.

  Three miles away a dozen families were waiting for the boat ride. A tour of tiny islands seen from afar.

  Two miles away a dozen families were creating devastation by the pool: pieces of meat and bread, toys that made strange noises, hairpins and spilled drinks, smeared ketchup, tiny stray shoes, wads of napkin, towels tossed onto chairs, strollers overturned, french fries on the ground, and the families—in swimsuits, T-shirts, floaters—parading over the cement toward the water.

  The shooter’s primary weapon lay across his lap, a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. He also had a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun for short range, if necessary.

  E had used a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun.

  D had used an Intratec 9mm semiautomatic handgun attached to a strap slung over his shoulder.

  N had used such an inferior weapon as to be almost adorable, but that was in 1967.

  L had brought 6,300 rounds of ammunition, which seemed either paranoid or optimistic, or like showing off.

  W had used an AK-47-style assault weapon with a thirty-round magazine.

  Y had had a multitude of weapons: an AR-15, a Glock, a SIG Sauer handgun.

  F and C had had sawed-off weapons thirty years old. They’d had bombs and knives, a real showdown.

  White sand. The angle was steep. There’d be nowhere to run. And sand is heavy. It would all be in slow motion. Keatonesque.

  It was hard to climb in the sand. The mother hadn’t counted on that. Halfway up she paused, stopped to catch her breath, and started again. When they were almost to the top, she stopped again, sat down in the sand. (She’d been up half the night [again] with the baby and then couldn’t fall back asleep, and she’d sat on the floor in the bathroom like a drunk.) You go, she said to the girl now. I’m right here. It was only a few yards really. Below, the father was walking gingerly toward the dune, arms out as if he were holding a grenade, because the baby was alert but not yet screaming.

  Green cargo pants, a black T-shirt that read Don’t Shoot, a black cap, bill forward, which he’d now taken off and put on the seat beside him. He spotted the girl, a lone child, staggering, her belly protruding, the sand forming a wave to lift her and gently undulate her higher. The girl, and the shooter raising his weapon.

  Oh, the layers under the surface (he thought), the air pockets, the parallel worlds, the possible futures that could explode out of this moment, the pasts that didn’t come to pass: they continue to spin themselves out until they run into concrete and unspool where they are, spilling into the gaps, gathering around him as he lifted his rifle.

  Oh, the inaccessible inner lives all around us (thought some birds going by above), the lives we can’t imagine, the water world, the dominion of the insects, the plants, the antediluvian consciousnesses, made up of light and dark, moist and dry.

  There is how time doesn’t work the way we think it does (thought the baby), or space either, the scientists have it all wrong and someday we will know this, or someone will, but in the meantime, the wrong way and the real way run alongside each other, along with all the other rejected theories going back through history, the lives of the baby and the father running along them, strings of frayed yarn.

  There is how people think their lives are one thing but they are wrong (thought the father). They think they know the world. What entitled, self-satisfied assholes.

  Ahem. The mother would just like to chime in at this juncture, if all parties have quite finished philosophizing? If she wouldn’t be interrupting anything urgent? If everyone isn’t too busy?

  (Ummmm, sure.)

  Did her husband just propose that she has an illusion of certainty? Did he just suggest she thinks she “knows the world”? (Ummmm.)

  And you, shooter, did you assume you’d be introducing something to this family by flattening the girl out dead and bloody right before their eyes?

  (Well, surely it’d be a shock.)

  In fact there’d already been a “shooter” introduced to this family.

  (There had?)

  Her husband, shot as a child in the head.

  (The father below, the one who’s afraid of sand, he’d already been shot?)

  Lived anyway.

  (In the head?)

  It had been a break-in. His mother had been unable to protect him. Picked off at five years old. World is full of danger.

  (And he was fine, the husband?)

  Fine enough. No pituitary gland. Those things don’t just grow back like a tomato. To this day he had to medicate with hormones every night of his life or he’d die. Try looking that one in the face, Mr. “Shooter.”

  (Well, the shooter wasn’t going to go for the head. Jesus. The middle. He’d get her right in the heart.)

  We’ll see about that, Mr. Stupid.

  At the bottom of the dune another family was arriving, the inside of their car like a circus: ponies and dolls, a tinkling music, glitter sprayed over the seats
along with other less-respectable spills.

  Half a mile down the road another father had pulled to the side of the road and was saying could they shut up back there, could they just please goddamnit shut up for thirty seconds while he figured out where they were?

  Three miles away a dozen families had waited so long for the boat ride that they’d descended through all the rungs of impatience available to them and now were all nearly asleep, a collection of dazed, brightly colored bodies, possessions dropping to their sides, the smallest faces drooling.

  Oh, if he had any notion of the clatter of deaths and broken bodies behind this family. He thought they didn’t know suffering?

  At twelve she’d nursed her mother through an illness that had lasted three hundred days.

  She’d had a brother—now in a grave in a desert.

  She’d had another baby, before these two, who hadn’t made it out alive.

  There had been her grandmother, whom she’d never met, locked up at forty and never seen again so that her father had had a hole in him while he raised her.

  There’d been plenty of others, dead, or alive but damaged. Earth is full of them, more assembling and disassembling every day. Among them, yes, this perfect little girl, but she’d been pretty unlikely, considering.

  (And the baby, don’t forget, if the father might put a word in, holding her up at the edge of the lot, one foot in the sand.)

  (The baby, who had screamed for eight months when she was born, before settling into an intelligence not yet seen in this family and frankly a bit frightening. Arranging her blocks in precise rows. Sitting alone in a tiny chair with a book, “reading.”)

  A civilian version of the M16, tremendous instrument, the same kind carried by F at C, now half-hidden behind the sunshade, impossible to see through the tinted glass, only the tip visible as he cracked the window. His body so tense it felt calm.

  And don’t give her any lip about privilege. This family holds representation of nearly all the seven categories of earthly sufferings. It earned its privilege through immense striving in the face of grief the shooter will never know, and she knew this because she herself was too busy managing this striving and grief to take an afternoon out and wander the area with a weapon. Did he think she never looked around and thought, What a bunch of assholes. I’d like to take them all out? That is a particularly unoriginal thought. She had that thought at the supermarket every week. She saw a whole planeful of people having that thought on the tarmac three days before. She’d think it right now if she took the time to look around, but she wouldn’t, because she was busy, unlike Stupid over here. She had other things on her mind. The idea of killing everyone around her was just one little pile of thought in her brain, off in a corner, might get stepped on and tracked around by her shoe. Her mind was fertile with thoughts, all of them growing and twisting and filling the space, filling the sky, most of them more honorable than that.