Dancing After Hours

by Andre Dubus

  She was afraid to turn and run out the front door, or the door to the deck at the other side of the house, or out the back door, down the hall between the playroom and the library; she saw herself running up the hill behind the house, into the woods; running down the sloping front lawn to the road; saw herself dying in the woods and beside the road and on the carpet near the doorway. Her body would not turn its back on them; it knew that if it did, it would die. She was looking at the brown eyes of the one in red; his mustache was brown, he had not shaved today, brown hair curled out from the front of his hood, and his eyes terrified her. There was no fear in them. In their light she saw hatred and anger, and the excitement they gave this man. The other man had darker brown hair and a mustache, and also had not shaved today. Excitement was in his eyes, but not hatred and anger, and she knew he was the follower, the one who would help with and watch whatever happened. Her mouth was still open. She willed it to shape words, utter sounds that would save her. She waited for this, waited for images to form in her mind and become words. But she saw only the eyes of the man in red, and in them she saw herself stripped naked, struck with fists, choked, raped on the floor, both of them raping her; they would take away every bit of her. Now words came to her mind, but not her open mouth: No, God; not like this.

  Fury rushed with her fear, and she trembled as her soul gathered itself into her blood and muscles. The man in red lifted a hand to his brow and pushed back his hood; his brown curls stirred, and the hood settled behind his neck. Then her left foot was striding quickly forward once, and she watched her right leg and booted foot kicking upward, felt her knee lock before her foot struck the testicles of the man in red. She was amazed; her heart was a flood that filled her chest; she watched his head and torso come forward and down, heard him gasp and groan. Her body was moving, swinging a backhanded left fist at the other man; she saw the one in red fall to his knees and saw her knuckles graze the nose of the one in blue. He pushed her across the room, her back struck the counter near the stove, and he was coming with closed fists and angry eyes. On the counter to her left she saw the teakettle, its copper surface animate, drawing her to it; with her right hand she reached across her body and gripped the handle; she spun to her right, her arm extended, and released the kettle, but his face was gone; the kettle was in the air above his lowered head, then hitting a cabinet. Within the sound of that, she was moving to her left to the skillet on the stove; she grabbed its wooden handle as the kettle hit the floor. She swung backhanded, holding the skillet flat, and its side hit his nose, above his rising hands; blood flowed and she was lifting the skillet with two hands above her head, swinging it to his forehead and the fingers of one hand. His body lowered, his head level now with hers. She hit the top of his head twice; blood was on his mouth and chin and parka, and she felt the man in red to her right; her body was already starting to move toward him as for the third time she hit the head of the man in blue, and he fell.

  She leaped to her right: the man in red was on his knees, holding the counter by the refrigerator with his left hand, pulling himself up; his face was pale, and with the anger and hatred in his eyes was pain. She swung the skillet two-handed, from left to right; he lifted his right hand to his face, and with the skillet’s bottom she hit his fingers and cheekbone, and knocked his head against the counter. The sound of the blow filled her; the shock of it danced in her. She swung again, hitting his hand and face; and again, smelling blood and saliva from his mouth; then she raised the skillet over her head and hit his brow, and his right hand dropped from his cheek, and his left hand slid off the counter. He was kneeling still; then his head and upper body fell forward, and on the floor his outstretched hands cushioned his face as it hit. He lay bleeding onto the backs of his hands. She looked behind her: the one in blue was on his back now, both hands touching his bleeding nose and lips. She ran to the phone and faced them. They rolled onto their sides, their stomachs, and began pushing themselves up with their arms and legs. She raised the skillet with her right hand and held the phone in her left.

  They were crawling away from her. The one in blue stood, weaved once, then bent to the man in red and held his armpits and pulled him upward. The man groaned. Blood was on the floor, and the man in blue had his arm around the waist of the one in red; they went past the refrigerator and into the mudroom. She stood holding the phone and the skillet. They went out the door and down the steps; snow landed on their shoulders and heads. She was breathing fast; the sound of it filled the room. She looked out the doors at snow and, beyond the driveway, a large pine tree. Then she dropped the phone and ran to the steps and stopped. The man in red was in the passenger seat of the car, his hands at his face; the one in blue was starting it. She stood on the top step, holding the skillet with both hands. When the man in blue backed the car and turned it to go downhill, she ran down the steps and stood on snow and read the numbers on the license plate, repeated them aloud as she ran into the mudroom, closed and locked the door, went into the kitchen, closed and locked that door, saying: “Six two seven seven three one.”

  She faced the door, holding the skillet in her right hand, and picked up the dangling and beeping phone, repeating the license number aloud as her finger pressed nine and one and one.

  The two men vanished, and she would never see them again. They remained part of her life: their eyes looking at her before she kicked, and swung the skillet; the feel of her foot striking, and the feel and sound of the skillet hitting skin and bone; the pain in their eyes then; their blood. From the parking lot of the shopping center they had stolen the car they followed her in; they left it at a mall west of her house and stole another, which they left at a hospital in Albany, where they gave names that were probably not theirs and paid cash to have their noses set, then stole a nurse’s car that Chicago police found without its tires and radio near the train station.

  She told her story first to Ted on the phone, while she waited for the cruiser; then to the young officer who came with the siren on, and whom she asked for a cigarette. He did not smoke. The snow stopped falling while he helped her carry in the groceries. Then she told it to the tall graying detective in a tan overcoat who came to show her photographs of men who broke into houses, and to dust for fingerprints and take samples of blood. He had cigarettes and she smoked and sat at the dining room table and looked at pictures of men whom she had never seen. The detective took off his suit coat and rolled up his sleeves and filled a bucket with hot water, and they kneeled on the floor and with sponges washed the blood from the tile, standing to wring the sponges over the sink. She was doing this when Marsha called from the gym, and she told Marsha the story while the detective emptied the bucket into the sink and began washing it. He gave her a cigarette and left, and Marsha came, trotting from the car, and made tea and gave her cigarettes and LuAnn told her again. Ted phoned to tell her when his flight would arrive in Boston that night; he would be home before the children were in bed, and he was not going to work tomorrow; he was not going to work until they had an alarm system, and its remote control was in her purse.

  “In case more than you can handle show up,” he said. “Twenty guys or so.”

  Marsha called her husband and told him, and said to come to LuAnn’s after work; then she gave LuAnn her cigarettes and left to get her children at school and buy more steaks. At three-thirty LuAnn went outside and looked at snow on the earth and gathered on wide branches of pines. She said: “Thank You.” Then she looked up at the gray sky. “That I didn’t get killed. That I didn’t get raped. That I didn’t miss his balls. That I didn’t miss with the skillet. That I didn’t beg for their mercy. That I didn’t kill anyone.”

  She lowered her face to the earth before her and walked down the driveway and waited for the yellow bus to come around the curve of snow and green and gray trees. When it came, she crouched and hugged Julia and Elizabeth and Sam, and climbed to the house, where in the living room fireplace she stacked logs and started a fire, and they sat on cushions be
fore it, and she told them her story She stood and showed them how she had kicked, and how she had swung the skillet, her empty hands clenched tightly, her arms quick, and she watched her children’s dark and wondering eyes, lit by fire.

  Near midnight, the upstairs hall was lighted, all the downstairs rooms were dark, and in front of the burning logs she sat with Ted on cushions. She said: “When I came out of the store and the one in red looked at me the way he did, I looked down. I pushed the cart to the car and put the groceries in the trunk. I was pissed off, but that was going away. I could see the groceries, feel their weight in my hands; feel the snow on my face, and smell it. Then I turned to push the cart back, and they were still there.”

  She took a cigarette from the second pack Marsha had given her, and looked at Ted’s eyes. “I’ll quit again tomorrow. This strange sacrament from the earth.”

  He smiled.

  “I’ve never told you this,” she said. “But there’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot. I don’t know when this came to me; it was a few years ago. There’s a difference between leaving it where you empty it and taking it back to the front of the store. It’s significant.”

  “Because somebody has to take them in.”

  “Yes. And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world. With your body. And for those few moments, you join it with your soul. You move out of your isolation and become universal. But they were standing there watching me. Then I was afraid: a woman so far removed from nature that the checkout clerk had to tell me which way the wind was blowing. And she heard it from someone in the coffee room. Then the men left, and I pushed the cart back. I live by trying to be what I’m doing. I could do nearly everything I do without thinking about it. But I’d be different.”

  His face was tender in the light of the fire; he said: “Yes.”

  “They collided with me: all this harmony I work for; this life of the spirit with the flesh. They walked into the kitchen and I said No, God; not like this, and I beat them with a skillet. But I’m not sure that was the answer to my prayer.”

  “It was.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What else could you have done?”

  “I can’t think of anything else. I know what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t turn the other cheek.”

  “Listen,” he said, and he leaned closer and placed both palms on her cheeks. “You did what you had to do. It’s a jungle out there.”

  “No. It’s not out there. Everything is out there, and everything is in here.” She touched her heart. “Hitting them, seeing their blood, seeing them fall. All afternoon I was amazed at my body. But that was me hitting them.”

  He lowered his hands, rested one on her shoulder, and said: “You had to. For yourself. For the children. For me.”

  “I don’t even know what they wanted.”

  “You saw it in their eyes.”

  “I know what I wanted. And, no, I don’t think I have the right to give away my life. Because of you and the children. I think the one in red wanted to rape me. Maybe that was all. Then the other one probably would have, too.”

  “All? LuAnn, that’s reason enough to beat them till …” He paused, looking at her eyes. She could see him imagining himself attacking the two men. She said: “Till they were dead? On the kitchen floor? I don’t know how close I came to killing them. Who knows, when you hit someone’s face and head with a steel skillet? I’d do it again. But I have to know this, and remember this, and tell it to the children: I didn’t hit those men so I could be alive for the children, or for you. I hit them so my blood would stay in my body; so I could keep breathing. And if it’s that easy, how are we supposed to live? If evil can walk through the door, and there’s a place deep in our hearts that knows how to look at its face, and beat it till it’s broken and bleeding, till it crawls away. And we do this with rapture.”

  He moved closer to her. Their legs touched, their hips, their arms; and they sat looking at the fire.

  Dancing After Hours

  FOR M.L.

  EMILY MOORE WAS A FORTY-YEAR-OLD bartender in a town in Massachusetts. On a July evening, after making three margaritas and giving them to Kay to take to a table, and drawing four mugs of beer for two young couples at the bar, wearing bathing suits and sweatshirts and smelling of sunscreen, she went outside to see the sun before it set. She blinked and stood on the landing of the wooden ramp that angled down the front wall of the bar. She smelled hot asphalt; when the wind blew from the east, she could smell the ocean here, and at her apartment, and sometimes she smelled it in the rain, but now the air was still. In front of the bar was a road, and across it were white houses and beyond them was a hill with green trees. A few cars passed. She looked to her right, at a grassy hill where the road curved; above the hill, the sun was low and the sky was red.

  Emily wore a dark blue shirt with short sleeves and a pale yellow skirt; she had brown hair, and for over thirty years she had wanted a pretty face. For too long, as a girl and adolescent, then a young woman, she had believed her face was homely. Now she knew it was simply not pretty. Its parts were: her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her cheeks and jaw, and chin and brow; but, combined, they lacked the mysterious proportion of a pretty face during Emily’s womanhood in America. Often, looking at photographs of models and actresses, she thought how disfiguring an eighth of an inch could be, if a beautiful woman’s nose were moved laterally that distance, or an eye moved vertically. Her body had vigor, and beneath its skin were firm muscles, and for decades her female friends had told Emily they envied it. They admired her hair, too: it was thick and soft and fell in waves to her shoulders.

  Believing she was homely as a girl and a young woman had deeply wounded her. She knew this affected her when she was with people, and she knew she could do nothing but feel it. She could not change. She also liked her face, even loved it; she had to: it held her eyes and nose and mouth and ears; they let her see and hear and smell and taste the world; and behind her face was her brain. Alone in her apartment, looking in the mirror above her dressing table, she saw her entire life, perhaps her entire self, in her face, and she could see it as it was when she was a child, a girl, a young woman. She knew now that most people’s faces were plain, that most women of forty, even if they had been lovely once, were plain. But she felt that her face was an injustice she had suffered, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not achieve some new clarity, could not see herself as an ordinary and attractive woman walking the earth within meeting radius of hundreds of men whose eyes she could draw, whose hearts she could inspire.

  On the landing outside the bar, she was gazing at the trees and blue sky and setting sun, and smelling the exhaust of passing cars. A red van heading east, with a black man driving and a white man beside him, turned left from the road and came into the parking lot. Then she saw that the white man sat in a wheelchair. Emily had worked here for over seven years, had never had a customer in a wheelchair, and had never wondered why the front entrance had a ramp instead of steps. The driver parked in a row of cars facing the bar, with an open space of twenty feet or so between the van and the ramp; he reached across the man in the wheelchair and closed the window and locked the door, then got out and walked around to the passenger side. The man in the wheelchair looked to his right at Emily and smiled; then, still looking at her, he moved smoothly backward till he was at the door behind the front seat, and turned his chair to face the window. Emily returned the smile. The black man turned a key at the side of the van, there was the low sound of a motor, and the door swung open. On a lift, the man in the wheelchair came out and, smiling at her again, descended to the ground. The wheelchair had a motor, and the man moved forward onto the asphalt, and the black man turned the key, and the lift rose and went into the van and the door closed.

  Emily hoped the man’s injury was not to his brain as well; she had a long shift ahead of her, until one o’clock closing, and she d
id not want the embarrassment of trying to speak to someone and listen to someone whose body was anchored in a chair and whose mind was afloat. She did not want to feel this way, but she knew she had no talent for it, and she would end by talking to him as though he were an infant, or a dog. He moved across the parking lot, toward the ramp and Emily. She turned to her right, so she faced him, and the sun.

  The black man walked behind him but did not touch the chair. He wore jeans and a red T-shirt, he was tall and could still be in his twenties, and he exercised: she guessed with medium weights and running. The man in the moving chair wore a pale blue shirt with the cuffs rolled up twice at his wrists, tan slacks, and polished brown loafers. Emily glanced at his hands, their palms up and fingers curled and motionless on the armrests of his chair; he could work the chair’s controls on the right armrest, but she knew he had not polished the loafers; knew he had not put them on his feet either, and had not put on his socks, or his pants and shirt. His clothes fit him loosely and his body looked small; arrested, she thought, and this made his head seem large, though it was not. She wanted to treat him well. She guessed he was in his mid-thirties, but all she saw clearly in his face was his condition: he was not new to it. His hair was brown, thinning on top, and at the sides it was combed back and trimmed. Someone took very good care of this man, and she looked beyond him at the black man’s eyes. Then she pulled open the door, heard the couples in bathing suits and the couples at tables and the men at the dartboard; smells of cigarette smoke and beer and liquor came from the air-conditioned dark; she liked those smells. The man in the chair was climbing the ramp, and he said: “Thank you.”