by Lori Wilde
Looking sadistically perky, the promoter took the stage and picked up the megaphone.
I groaned aloud. Not again.
“It’s time for another Runaround,” the promoter announced. “This time, the last six couples will be eliminated.”
Half of us. Out.
Part of me longed to throw in the towel, but the part that ached for a few precious hours to hold on to the Cinderella fantasy won out. As soon as the strains of “Rhapsody in Blue” leaked from the clarinet, I tightened my grip on John’s hand and we ran as if we were running for our lives.
We made it. Just barely. Me stumbling along in my bloody, tattered bandages, John trying to bolster me without dragging me. We came in sixth out of twelve. Rosalie and Buddy Grass were still in the hunt, but they were bickering. The six eliminated couples looked grateful and staggered for the sidelines.
The rest of us took a short break, then went right back at it.
“Let’s not talk anymore,” I told John.
He nodded and gathered me into his arms. I rested my head on his shoulder as dawn peeked through the gymnasium windows. Tears slipped down my cheeks and I turned my face into his chest so he could not see, but he felt my grief and tightened his arms around me.
If it hadn’t been for the dance marathon I wouldn’t have had any of this in the first place, so I took what I could get, and in the midst of the exhaustion, weariness, pain, and suffering, a peaceful calmness settled over me.
I told myself it was enough.
Slowly, the spectators trickled back in. Volunteers brought in fresh food. The smell of bacon, eggs, and coffee made my stomach rumble. By eight A.M. two more couples had dropped out.
Beau brought Penelope back to the gymnasium at ten A.M. During the ten-minute break, we went over to say hello.
“You look like warmed-over death,” she declared cheerfully.
“Consider yourself very lucky you sprained your ankle,” John said.
“On the upside, you still look better than the rest of the contestants.”
Buddy and Rosalie were still bickering. I eavesdropped a bit as I swallowed down a big gulp of hot coffee. It sounded like she was trying to get him to commit to their relationship.
Penelope’s eyebrows went up. “My friend Wallis says a dance marathon will either make or break a couple. The sheer endurance and teamwork that it takes to win either makes your bond stronger or shows all the cracks in a relationship. Those two”—she waved at Buddy and Rosalie—“aren’t going to make it, and Wallis knows a thing or two about that. She and her husband have separated more times than I can count.”
I glanced at John. The marathon had made us closer than ever. Which was precisely the problem; if we hadn’t been so close together for so long, these feeling would never have been stirred to this extent.
“Wallis will divorce her husband eventually,” Beau predicted. “And she’ll be off to make some other poor sap miserable.”
“Don’t be mean,” Penelope said, and tweaked his ear.
He laughed and kissed her affectionately. “I’m just glad you were not a suffragette.”
“Wallis wasn’t either. She simply has strong ideas about what she wants from life and she’s determined to get it. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
The horn sounded.
“It’s back to the dance floor for us,” John said, holding me a little less closely now that his family was in the building again.
A few minutes later, another couple dropped out when the male partner keeled over. Medical personnel rushed in with a stretcher and carted him off.
That left three of us. Me and John, Buddy Grass and Rosalie, and a married couple who had traveled all the way from El Paso to be in the competition. They’d told us during one of the breaks that they were interested in joining the professional dance circuit, and winning the trophy would help get them there. I had no idea there was such a thing as a professional dance circuit.
Time ticked steadily toward noon. Now I knew how Cinderella felt. Soon, the clock would strike twelve. The Nash roadster would turn into a pumpkin. The flapper dress to rags. The sideline spotters and the promoter would turn into mice and scurry off to a field. The glass slipper was already nothing but a bloody bandage.
At fifteen minutes to twelve, the couple from El Paso were disqualified when they stopped moving. It was just us against Buddy and Rosalie, who were still bickering.
“We’re going to take this thing,” John said.
“I don’t know about that. They’re feeling frisky enough to fight.”
“That might be their ploy to keep going. Stay too mad to fall asleep.”
“It’s a dangerous strategy.”
I gave a halfhearted smile. At this point, I was ready for it all to be over—fall into bed, cry my eyes out, start getting over John. Except I knew there would never be any getting over him. How did you ever get over your one true love?
Twelve noon came and went.
The gymnasium was packed again, people egging us on. It took everything we had in us to keep moving. Every step was painful. Muscles twitched and burned. Gravity pulled on us. Exhaustion sat on our shoulders, whispered lullabies in our ears.
At seven minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon, twenty-six hours after we’d first started dancing, Buddy Grass called Rosalie a rude name.
She slapped his face hard. The loud smack reverberated throughout the entire gym.
The crowd clapped, thrilled by the drama.
Rosalie sank her hands on her hips and proceeded to tell him exactly what she thought of him and his bootlegging ways.
A spotter on the sidelines blew the whistle. “Broken contact. You’re out of the competition.”
My mind was so foggy, my heart so heavy that it took me a minute to realize that John and I had won the dance marathon. “Give the trophy to your sister,” I whispered to him.
“Are you sure you don’t want it? You earned it.”
I shook my head. The last thing I wanted was a glaring reminder of the romance I’d never had.
People flooded onto the dance floor, separating John and me. They picked us up and carried us on their shoulders to the stage while the band played a rousing version of “It Had to Be You.”
Across the heads of the crowd, my eyes met John’s, and he looked so sorrowful it ripped my heart out.
We were deposited side by side on the stage in front of the promoter, who presented us with a trophy and announced that we’d earned the tidy sum of two hundred and fifty-seven dollars for the Ladies’ League. It was the most money an event had ever earned for their charity.
“We did it for my sister, Penelope. She deserves all the credit and this trophy,” John said, and carried it over to her.
The attention shifted to Penelope, and before anyone noticed me, I turned and slipped away. Nothing to do now but go back to my cramped little room in the maid’s quarters and lick my very raw wounds.
JOHN AND I did not speak again after that day. If we saw each other, we’d smile, nod, and then move away from each other as quickly as we could.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mabel asked me two days later. “You look as if your favorite cat died.”
“Still worn out from all that dancing,” I lied.
“I warned you, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
Penelope was humming happily in the dining room. She’d put the dance marathon trophy on the whatnot shelf and had taken to polishing the brass every day until it shone like gold. The dance marathon was the talk of the town, and even the disapproving old biddies had to admit her methods of raising money—while scandalous—had been quite ingenious. They were already preparing for next year’s marathon.
Mabel put a hand to my back. “You’re not going to tell me what’s wrong?”
I wasn’t going to say anything. I promised myself I would never let anyone find out about my foolish infatuation with John, but Mabel smelled too much like home and my tongue just unfurled.
“How come you never told me that John was betrothed?”
Mabel looked surprised. “I suppose I sort of forgot about it. He’s been betrothed for five years and Miss Elizabeth has been away for most of that time. Is that why you’ve been mopin’?”
“No,” I denied, but I could not meet her eyes.
“I told you that story about Ruthie for a reason.”
“I know.”
“It didn’t stop you from falling in love with him, did it?”
I shook my head, blinked back the tears threatening to slide down my cheeks.
“Ah, wee one.” Mabel patted a hand against my back. “He’s an easy man to love. So handsome and rich, but kind and thoughtful too. Yours won’t be the first heart that broke over John Fant.”
“I feel so stupid.”
“You can’t help who you love.” Mabel said sagely. “But you can help acting on it.”
I nodded, still unable to speak.
“You’ll find a young fellow of your own. One that suits your station.”
There it was. The honest truth. Elizabeth Nielson wasn’t the real obstacle between John and me—a betrothal could be broken, after all—but rather, our class differences.
I considered leaving my employment and returning to my mother’s house, but in the end, I stayed with the Bossiers. I’d changed too much to go back to Whistle Stop. To my mother’s mortification, I bobbed my hair, becoming the first woman in Cupid to do so. Cutting my hair was a symbol of liberation. From my past. From my innocence. From John. I’d known heartbreak. It was official. My hairstyle declared me a woman of the world.
I was over John Fant.
Or so I told myself.
By day, I stayed busy, but at night, he would creep into my dreams and I would be a prisoner of my secret desires. Repeatedly, I would awaken bathed in sweat and yearning for something I’d never had.
On the day Elizabeth Nielson arrived home in Cupid, I had taken Addie and Ernest to the park and we were walking past the train station. A glimpse of John stopped me in my tracks, even though both children were tugging on my hands. He was standing on the train platform with his back to me, hand extended to help a beautiful blonde descend from a passenger car.
She was so tiny, probably not much taller than five feet, and petite as a sugarplum fairy. She wore a royal blue dress and had her long, curly hair pulled back with a matching blue ribbon. I put a hand up to my own bobbed curls and for the first time, regretted the cut. She beamed up at John as if he’d hung the moon and sprinkled the sky with stars. Up she went on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. Her lipstick left an imprint of bright red lips on his skin.
He said something to her and she reached up to rub the lips away with a gloved thumb. Her laugh rang out high and pure, like the sound fine crystal made when tapped with a silver spoon. Of course she would have a perfect laugh. Everything about her was perfect.
I put a hand to the children’s backs, anxious to whisk them away before they caught sight of their uncle and wanted to go over and say hello. “Hurry on, children. We must get you home to wash up before dinner.”
But I couldn’t resist glancing over my shoulder for one last look.
Instantly, I regretted it.
Because John was staring at me over the top of his fiancée’s head. Our eyes met, sparked like two flint stones off each other, and it was a sorrowful second. He looked as miserable as I felt.
Immediately, we both turned away. Me to the children. Him to Elizabeth.
My pulse throbbed at my throat and my mouth flooded with a briny taste. It was only then that I realized I’d swallowed my tears. What else could I do?
Love was one thing.
Reality, quite another.
Chapter Eight
I DID MY BEST to reconcile the fact that John was getting married on Christmas Eve. I stayed busy, worked hard cleaning and decorating, helping Mabel with the cooking and watching the children. I went home to see my family on the fourth Sunday of every month, and while I enjoyed visiting there, it seemed each time I was moving further and further from my roots.
I felt detached, adrift, caught between two worlds. I wasn’t really part of the Fant family, but I no longer fit in with my own family either. I’d changed too much. I’d danced and worn short skirts and cut my hair and … and … kissed a man who was engaged to another.
Shamed, I kept to myself as much as possible.
Wedding plans were in high gear now that Elizabeth was back in town. There were fittings for Penelope and Addie’s dresses to wear to the wedding and new shoes ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog. Elizabeth came to call on occasion, asking Penelope’s opinion on this or that.
She was a vapid girl who prattled on and on and on about nothing and everything, but I harbored no ill will toward her. She’d had her claim on John long before I’d come to Cupid. I was the interloper, not she. My poor luck to have fallen for a man I could not have.
The butcher’s son asked me out and I agreed to go. We shared an ice cream sundae at the drugstore soda fountain. He talked of the various cuts of meat as I stared out the plate glass window, watching people go by.
John and Elizabeth came into view. He had her little hand tucked in his big one. My heart careened in my chest and I heaved in a deep sigh.
With uncanny timing, John turned his head and stared right at me. Kissed my face with his eyes. We both startled at the unexpected whap of silent contact. He jerked his attention back to Elizabeth at the same time I cupped my chin in my palms and said to my date, “Tell me more about the New York strip.”
By the week before Christmas, I stopped pretending not to care about John’s upcoming nuptials. I couldn’t eat. Mabel noticed my weight loss. She pinched my ribs, clicked her tongue, said, “Pining ain’t gonna help nothing, eat sumpthin’.”
Penelope said I could have Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off to visit my family, and that was a relief, not to be in Cupid on John’s wedding day, but when I wrote my mother to tell her this, she said she and the kids were going on the train to visit my aunt Sweenie in San Antonio for Christmas. She invited me to come, but I couldn’t be gone the length of time it would take to get to San Antonio on the train and back.
So I was stuck.
“You’ll come to the wedding with us,” Penelope said cheerfully. “You can’t spend Christmas Eve all alone.”
“It’s not my place, ma’am,” I said. “I’m just the help.”
She pondered that a moment. “Do whatever makes you comfortable, Millie, but you’re welcome to sit with my family.”
After she left the kitchen, Mabel shook her head. “That woman can be dense sometimes. No wonder Ruthie got in a family way right underneath her nose.” Then she invited me to come spend Christmas with her and her oldest daughter in Marfa, but I turned Mabel down too.
All right. I will admit it. Two days before Christmas Eve I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I had decorated someone else’s tree. Baked Christmas cookies with someone else’s children. Watched someone else prepare to marry the man I loved madly.
I lay in bed that night, buried under thick wool blankets, staring up at the ceiling, recalling what had led me to be here. Losing my daddy. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I felt so utterly alone.
How could John marry Elizabeth when he was simply fond of her? She could never love him the way I did.
Cupid! What cruelty to have flung his arrows at John and me when we could never be.
I lay there cursing Cupid, but then I remembered the story Rosalie had told me in the Cupid Caverns about Mingus Dill and Louisa Hendricks. How in despair Mingus had gotten down on his knees and prayed before the stalagmite and his life had been spared by Louisa’s love.
Praying to a stalagmite seemed a bit too blasphemous for me, but what if instead of a prayer, I wrote Cupid a letter? Might that work just as well?
Besides, what did I have to lose?
Inspired, I leaped from the bed and went to the small writing desk in the corner
of my little room. I lit a candle, pulled out a piece of paper and the inkwell from the desk and sat down to write.
Dear Cupid,
How heartless of you to make me fall in love with a man who is out of my reach.
My love for John Fant took me unaware. It was not planned nor anticipated nor even wanted, but once it was upon me, I can think of nothing else but him.
He is my beloved, my one and only, my one true love, and yet I can never breathe the word of this to anyone. It is my sorrow that he belongs to another, and even if he didn’t, the chasm between us is so wide. Him on one side, me on the other.
We pass each other in the street, our eyes meet, and the longing is so big you can punch it, but we must not touch, must not say what’s on our minds. Quick, we look away, scurry off, unfulfilled and aching.
So hard. We hide our love. Not only from prying eyes, but from each other. I want to shout my love for him to the world. Stand atop the Davis Mountains and shout it down into the valley for everyone to know. I cannot. I dream sweet dreams of the hot fires of perfect love and wake to cold embers.
Such a misery. Such a curse. This love that can never be.
Oh, Cupid! Don’t be cruel. Break his bond with the other woman. Build a bridge we can cross. Bring him to me. Let my dreams be fulfilled or let me fall forever asleep, and awaken only when his lips touch mine.
I beseech you with all my heart. Help him find a way to me or release me from this desperate burning love.
Forever Hopelessly in Love
My tears dropped on the paper, smeared the ink. I folded the letter, slipped it in an envelope. I had no plan in my head. Driven by pain, sorrow, love, and longing, I tucked the letter into one pocket of my thin wool winter coat, a flashlight in the other. In the dead of night I crept from the servants’ quarters. The half moon lighted my path through the silent streets of Cupid. My breath chuffed out in frosty puffs, but I felt no cold. I was on a mission.
The walk was long and steep. I toiled up the mountain to the Cupid Caverns, my fingers curled around the letter in my pocket. I felt as desperate as Mingus Dill must have felt the night the sheriff’s posse cornered him in the cave. But I was at my wits’ end. I had nowhere else to turn.
