She put us in the centre of the room and stood before us, trim in her own woman-size black leotard and tap shoes. Nancy apologized for not having proper taps.
My mother told her it wasn’t too important right now. Maybe we could get her some later. In the old days, they just slapped some coins on the soles of street shoes anyway, to get the sound.
“The sound’s what makes it come to life!” She grinned at Nancy and began her instruction with heel-toe heel-toe heel-toe.
I picked up the move right away, but Nancy’s feet insisted on toe-heel toe-heel.
My mother came and stood next to her, demonstrating slowly. Once Nancy’d caught on, Marion stepped up the pace with a shuffle demonstration, then a double shuffle, then the grapevine. By now, Nancy was getting it all down fast and she and my mother laughed at their feet as they shuffled and snapped the floor. My feet weren’t in on the joke. Marion went to the record player and set the needle down on a 45 of Sammy Davis Jr. singing “The Candy Man.”
“Wait, Mom, wait for a sec, I don’t get it.”
I could swear she sighed when she came over and showed me again, a little more slowly, the shuffle and the grapevine. Meanwhile, Nancy appeared to be ad libbing on her own, new little grooves in the standard steps, and my mother gave her a small ovation. I rolled my eyes.
“The Candy Man” played and reset itself over and over, and by what had to be the forty-seventh time that Sammy Davis asked us who could wrap a rainbow in a sigh and make a groovy lemon pie, Nancy and Marion were side by side, dancing up a storm, my mother interjecting “Good girl” and “Nancy, look at you go!”
I was beginning to feel like a six-month-old beige carpet.
I slipped out of the room, telling them I needed a drink of water.
A few days later, I came home to find my mother in the kitchen, laughing and red-headed. Her hair was still long but it looked thick now, wavy, and Ann-Margret flaming, high at the crown with a few long bangs brushed off to the side.
Nancy Donner was already there, as if she’d cut class. She and I hadn’t talked much the last few days. I was sick of looking at her; everywhere I turned, there she was.
They were laughing, as usual, Nancy at the kitchen table, my mother at the counter making sandwiches. My mother grinned when she saw me and spun around. “Ta-dah!”
I looked at her.
“Well! What do you think? Do I look like Ann-Margret or what?”
So, it was intentional. I didn’t know if I wanted some big-haired Kitten with a Whip for a mother. Nancy’s face split wide in a grin. They were waiting. Some sort of uplifting and generous response was in order.
“Kind of. Why would you dye your hair that colour? I thought you said you wanted to keep it blonde and cut it to look like Grace Kelly.”
“What would I want to do that for? The chick can’t dance.” She smirked and snapped her fingers like Sammy Davis. The two of them cackled. My mother made a face at me, mimicking the one I wore. “What are you so sour about?”
“Nothing.”
She glanced at the ceiling and sighed, then said, “Oh, and guess what! I’m taking driving lessons. Took my first one this morning. My instructor thinks I have a natural instinct for traffic.”
I looked from her to Nancy and back. “Aren’t you a little old to be learning to drive? Aren’t you s’posed to do that when you’re a teenager or something?”
“Oh, piffle on that—where do you get these stodgy old man ideas, Mitzi? You’re as bad as your father.” She sounded a little clipped. At least she’d knocked off the gushing though.
She walked over to the table and set sandwiches down for Nancy and herself. “There’s another one on the counter if you want it, but I’m sure you’ll turn your nose up at that too.”
Nancy bit into her ham-and-cheese and grabbed a magazine lying on the table. She set her sandwich down and folded the magazine open, then turned around in her seat to show me an old picture of Ann-Margret. She swallowed as much as she could and said, “Your mom’s gonna get an outfit like this and run away with Elvis Presley!” and laughed. She wore on her feet the tap shoes my mother’d bought me.
I was in the living room watching a program about a guy who swallowed an entire Volkswagon Bug piece by piece, when my mother pulled up alongside the curb in the Shining Star Driver’s Ed car. Watching over the back of the couch, I could see her smiling wide and holding up a pink sheet of paper, then laughing and shaking her head, smoothing the page down against her steering wheel.
A man sat in the passenger seat, his hands resting on his own steering wheel; he was too shadowed for me to make out any expression. I assumed the way she was laughing and prattling on, though, that he must be doing the same. After two or three minutes she got out of the car, and he got out of his side and came around the front end to hers. She left her door open, stepping out from behind it as he came close, and threw open her arms. He walked into her embrace and squeezed her back, his bald head smothered in her long red hair. She took a couple of gleeful hops as she held him. He stood back from her, smoothing his shirt front, fingers of one hand dancing to his breast pocket, touching his pens and then fluttering down to his sides. He folded his arms and unfolded them.
My mother kissed the pink paper in her hands, blew him a kiss and walked back to the house, waving over her shoulder. He watched after her with a moony sort of smile, started back to the passenger’s side and then stopped, shook his head, and came back toward the driver’s.
I turned from the window as the front door flew open and my mother breezed into the living room with another one of her ta-dah’s and screamed, “I passed!” Then she put her arms in the air and danced a Broadway musical to the tune of “I passed I passed I passed!”
“You don’t have to tell the whole world, already.”
She froze in mid-flounce, dropped her arms and looked at me, face blank. Her head wobbled a little, her eyes growing watery, fixing on mine. She made a tiny sound as though she were about to speak, then walked out of the room.
That night and the next, I lay awake listening to the rise and fall of my mother’s and father’s murmur in their bedroom. I couldn’t catch much as far as actual conversation went. It sounded as if he were holding back, never quite raising his voice. As if he were afraid that a harsh tone or sudden movement might cause her to evaporate.
I think now that maybe he was seeing something I wasn’t; he understood that the peace she got from car rides had nothing to do with speed.
Come Saturday morning, I woke up to his rap on the door. He poked his head in. “Oh, I thought your mother might be in here.”
“What time is it?”
It was ten. I felt as if I could sleep into the afternoon. My father looked of the same mind. He’d slept the sleep of the dead, he said. He had a vague memory of my mother kissing his cheek and saying something about coffee, but that was ages ago, seemed like it was the middle of the night. Maybe she went to the farmers’ market for fruit or something, he said.
Then the phone rang. He ran off to get it.
A minute later he was back in my room. “You don’t know where Nancy is, do you?”
I squinted and sat up, shaking my head. He went back to the phone.
Soon he was leaning in my doorway again. “That was Nancy’s mother. Their car is missing. The old one. Nancy’s not there either.”
“Nancy can’t drive.”
“No kidding,” he said. “They don’t know what to think. Their daughter’s not home and the car is missing.”
We had given it a day before calling the police; maybe the two of them had gone off for a drive in the country. The Donners’ car was a convertible, a fun summer drive, a joyride. But luggage was missing and clothes, Nancy’s and my mother’s. The adults argued amongst themselves as to whether these things were all related: the car, Nancy, Marion. We shouldn’t assume, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
The police directed their questions more toward me than to my father: Nancy was
my friend. Marion, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any friends.
My father looked away.
I explained that Nancy and I hadn’t talked much in the last few weeks; she and my mother hung out more, they tap danced. I shrugged. Nancy wanted to dye her hair red too.
The police took notes, leaning back as I spoke. They asked me what I thought my mother’s interest in Nancy was. If I’d noticed anything peculiar in the way she behaved toward her, anything inappropriate.
My father glanced at me and then stared at the cop who’d posed the question with the same sort of expression my mother had worn that afternoon I burst her bubble in the living room, somewhere between pain and mystification.
I looked at my father’s arms poking out from the sleeves of his T-shirt and I thought how peculiar they looked, white and rubbery. It was rare I ever saw his bare arms. To my father, a T-shirt had always been more of an undershirt, the first of two layers.
Finally one of the officers turned to my father and inquired whether he thought my mother might have a friend somewhere. Dad repeated the question as though he were trying to translate from a language he hadn’t heard spoken in years.
The cop looked uncomfortably at me, then back at him.
“Normally,” the cop explained, “that would be the first question, but this”—he cleared his throat—“this situation is a little less usual.”
My father shook his head no and began to cry, head rocking side to side in his hands, fingers buried in his hair, his chest jerking quietly. My gaze blurred down over his pale arms again. They were bent at the elbows. Like flippers. Fins.
Nancy’s mother called twice after the police left, wanting to know if we’d heard anything.
She called again that night. I watched Dad’s back as he stood at the wall, the receiver not quite at his ear. Nancy’s mother wailed through the phone. I could hear her from my chair.
“What kind of man can’t control his wife?” she demanded to know.
It was less than a week before someone turned my mother in. She and Nancy had taken a leisurely drive to Vegas. When they arrived in town they went to the Tropicana so that Marion could apply for a job as a dancer in one of their shows. She and Nancy, mother and daughter, sat in a lounge talking with the manager, who couldn’t make Marion understand that he wasn’t the entertainment director, he didn’t hire showgirls. That was a whole ’nother department, he told her. The lounge television was tuned to the news, sound off. Marion pulled out her scrapbook, explaining she really could dance if she could just get an audition. He let her go on, jabbering like her freakin’ life depended on it, he said later. He looked away, thinking that maybe he’d offer her a cocktail job, on account of the fact that this was Vegas and she was too old to start dancing. That’s when he glanced up at the TV screen and saw pictures of my mother with her straight blonde hair and Nancy with hers, bold print stating: Marion Adler, age 30, grand theft auto and kidnapping of Nancy Donner, age eleven.
Though they were both redheads now, the manager recognized them instantly, aided by the fact that my mother had given Donner as their family name. Apparently she didn’t see the television, or if she did, she didn’t absorb the content. Nancy didn’t notice either. Head down, she was too busy counting the nickels she’d won at slots.
The manager excused himself a moment and called Security and the police. Turned out his own wife had run off with his son the year before, and as much as this Donner broad was a looker, he told police, he didn’t have any kind of sympathy for what she’d done.
Back home, Nancy and the car were handed over to the Donners. The Nevada State Police delivered my mother to the local authorities, who charged her and put her behind bars to await trial. I saw her only on the news; no one would post her bail, they said.
We turned off the TV altogether and didn’t leave the house unless we ran out of food. Not for school or work, not until the trial was over and my mother had been convicted. My father stayed away from work so long they eventually had to let him go. I stayed away from school so long my father agreed to let me switch, to take the bus to another to avoid the looks and whispers. We lived on unemployment insurance. My father mortgaged the house.
I saw Nancy twice before the Donners moved: once on the news, the back of her head bobbing as she walked down the courthouse steps, her parents ducking away from the press and into their cars. The second time was at the corner store. I had just picked up some milk and bread and canned stuff that my father’d written down on a list.
On her way in, Nancy stopped and faced me with an uncertain “Hi.” She appeared shaken, as though I were a car accident she’d witnessed.
“Hi.”
Then she just stood there, staring, blocking my way out. When I tried to go around her, she reached for my arm, and I flinched like I’d been burned.
“Wanna go play or something?” she asked me. “Like maybe go with my brother and his friends to the waterslides?”
“Go to hell.” I shoved past her out of the store, the bell jingling summer-clear behind me.
It was two years before my father came out of his stupor. My mother was released on parole about the same time. There must have been a correlation. He started to leave the house more regularly again, never walking anywhere, only driving. He would disappear all day, just driving, he said. I don’t think it calmed him exactly. I think it woke him up, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it got him breathing. As if continuous motion kept him alive. Soon he applied for a job as a courier, driving packages all over town.
My mother showed up after school one afternoon, a couple of weeks after she was released. She waited outside, scanning the crowd of kids until she caught sight of me. I saw her first and felt a bit sick, as if the school bully were waiting. She took several nervous steps and stopped. Her hair was back to blonde and her skin was thinner, drier, as though she’d aged suddenly.
I walked in the other direction toward the swings and monkey bars and she followed.
Sitting down on a swing, I watched her come closer, her feet delicate in heels, crunching and wobbling on the pebbles, her trench coat flapping in the breeze. She eyed the swing beside me but kept her distance, hands worrying over a gnarled up Kleenex. I wished she would turn and vanish. I sat in the swing, turning myself instead.
“Mitzi?” Her voice cracked. She sounded fragile, uncertain.
I closed my eyes, spinning the chains overhead to knots.
“Will you let me talk to you just for a minute?”
She stuffed the Kleenex into her pocket, then rubbed her fingertips at her forehead the way my father used to when they fought.
Finally she said, “I must’ve started a hundred different letters but I didn’t know what to say. I just—”
I let the swing unspin from its tangle and then caught the earth with my feet, dizzy, the ground breathing under me.
“Hey, I, uh, I enrolled in university while I was away, you know. Through correspondence. I’ll have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree soon.”
I didn’t speak.
“Are you okay? Is everything okay for you?”
I opened my eyes at the ground.
“How about Nancy? Do you still see her?”
“Nancy can go to hell,” I said matter-of-factly, the way you might give someone a weather forecast.
She was quiet a moment. “You’ve gotten so old in two years.” She looked away. “A day hasn’t gone by where I didn’t—I just thought I should tell you that I’m going to be in the phone book. Under ‘Donner.’ For when you’re ready. I thought you should know.”
Tipping my head back to look at the sky, I took in all the air I could swallow and still felt as if I might suffocate. I saw the hem of her coat out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head and got off the swing, walked across the football field and through the opening in the chain-link fence.
I walked across town instead of taking the bus, walked up and down the streets in our neighbourhood, until long past
dark. It was after eleven when I wandered up our driveway.
My father sat in his car staring straight ahead with the windows down, no motor running. His elbow balanced on the bottom of the window frame, fingertips touching the top as though a Sunday breeze were playing at them. A street light shone through the rear window, illuminating a dry cleaning bag, its wispy plastic glistening over pairs of dark boxy shoulders.
I headed for the house, slowing to touch his shirt sleeve as I passed.
Clown Lessons
THE BANK HAD CALLED EACH DAY to find out when I’d be in again, offering up “casual Friday” as some sort of carrot—as though the lure of staying in my sweats might just bring my fever down. The third time the assistant manager phoned I clung to my blanket and apologized for the spot I’d put him in, promising I’d let him know if I was well enough to come in the next morning.
James yanked a suspender back onto his shoulder and pulled off his spongy red nose. Grabbing the receiver out of my hand, he said, “Who’s this? Gerald? Listen, Gerald, you try and get my sister out of her sickbed before she’s ready and I swear to Christ, I’ll come down there, rip your head off and stuff it back up your ass!” He slammed the phone back in its cradle.
Sitting forward on the couch, I rested my head in my hands. “Thanks, James. Now I have to apologize for you, too.” I could feel flu tears swell with heat and pain and inflated emotion. I reached for the receiver.
“No. Clarisse, just relax. It’s about time they figured out how valuable you are. They pay you dog shit. They’re using you. You’re not going back unless you get a raise. You can help me instead.”
I raised my knees and dropped my forehead against them. It felt like it might sway and roll off under the couch, given a chance.
“Come on,” he said, “help me with my makeup. I can’t get the lines straight, my hands are shaking.”
Greedy Little Eyes Page 7
