by Joan Barfoot
I can dance tears and weep for Harry, and dry them again with the sweeping of a turn. It feels fine, dancing tears. I can feel his pain in my steps, his terror in my leaps. His bewilderment and confusion, and what he may have seen for twenty years, are in a glide. I can dance his eyes and his vision. I can feel his body finally in my own. I can tap along the blade into his body and weep some more, and once again dry the tears with a whirl.
I can dance his touches, of me and of her. I can dance lies. I can dance all the shining surfaces.
I feel muscles leaping, blood thundering, heart hammering. Like the dances, they want to leap from my body. Everything wants out to dance. Lost words too, all inside, clamouring like my lost children. I can dance and dance.
Not forever. The muscles and blood and heart are nearly forty-four years old and this freedom, the dancing, comes as a shock.
But while they can, I shall dance. I can dance all there is to be danced, as if there’s no tomorrow.
There will be one, of course. A mystery, how it will feel. But it will feel something. I shall dance the freedom of tomorrow, eyes open, watching the people watching. I may sing, if I think of a song.
Whatever will become of me, this agile, dancing, fearless Edna who killed her husband and herself in another life? Another forty years, perhaps, to see; a medieval lifetime. A whole pure future in which to sketch a whole new Edna, the singer and the dancer, the free woman in the narrow corridor, alone in a small white bed.
JOAN BARFOOT is an award-winning novelist whose work has been compared internationally with that of Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood. Her novels include the Giller Prize Finalist Luck in 2005, as well as Abra, which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, Dancing in the Dark, which became an award-winning Canadian entry in the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, Duet for Three, Family News, Plain Jane, Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch, Some Things About Flying and Getting Over Edgar. Her 2001 novel, Critical Injuries, was longlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2001 Trillium Book Award. In 1992 she was given the Marian Engel Award. Also a journalist during much of her career, she lives in London, Ontario.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2006
Copyright © 1982 Joan Barfoot
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2006. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Macmillan of Canada, a division of Gage Publishing Limited, Toronto, in 1982. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Barfoot, Joan, 1946-
Dancing in the dark / Joan Barfoot.
Originally publ.: Toronto : Macmillan, 1982.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36842-3
I. Title.
PS8553.A7624D36 2006 C813′.54 2006 C2005-906546-X
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