Chageet's Electric Dance

by Ashir, Rebecca

  Just as Rave was asking Barbey if she was ready to order, bells, and whistles sounded, the drum banged and Sleeping Beauty and the Big Bad Wolf carrying a huge silver platter over their heads ran around the restaurant to and fro with a Royal Sundae for a little boy’s birthday party. His friends, with party cone hats on their heads, had excited expressions on their faces, and were either pointing at the ice cream on the platter, hitting each other, or blowing their party favors. When the waiters arrived at the party table, one waiter called for everyone’s attention and tried to get the birthday boy to stand on his chair, which he kept refusing to do, until his father agreed to stand on the chair with him. Once the father and son were standing on the chair, the waiters sang a peppy version of the birthday song and the restaurant customers cheered as if this was the most remarkable event of their lives.

  “What are you going to order?” Barbey asked, as she looked nervously through the menu.

  “I’m getting a Rumpelstiltskin Burger, Peter Pan Fries, a Rascal Rootbeer, and a Poisonous Apple Sundae for desert.”

  “What’s in a Poisonous Apple?” She was surprised that he was ordering so much food.

  “It’s a…a,” he looked at the menu. “It’s red dyed vanilla ice cream with hot fudge served in a dish made of black sugar crystals shaped like a tree.”

  “That’s so cute, but I think I’ll get a cup of mushroom barley soup. I’m not that hungry.”

  “I’m not letting you get away with that. We need to fatten you up.”

  “No, really, that’s all I want.”

  “Why are you talking with an Australian accent?”

  Barbey blushed. She had immersed her being so entirely into the Sandy character, who spoke in an Australian dialect that she hadn’t realized that she had mistakenly taken on the vernacular. “Oh, I didn’t realize I was talking with an accent. I’ve been talking a lot on the telephone with a friend who is Australian and I must have picked up on her accent. She’s been, like, having all these problems, so I’ve, umm, been trying to help out by providing a comforting ear. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah…yeah. No cup of soup for you. We’re…we’re going to have to get you the… The Greedy Duke for desert.”

  Barbey giggled feeling pleased that Rave was actually pushing her to eat food, while her last boyfriend, Rich Sanders, was always telling her to not eat too much in fear that she might ruin her slim figure. “What’s The Greedy Duke?”

  “Oh, it’s just a double banana split. And when you finish it, you…you receive an award.”

  “Have you ever finished one?”

  “Uh, uh… ‘outstaaaaaaaanding,’” he said looking away facetiously.

  “What’s that mean?” she asked feeling perplexed. “Yes or no?”

  He looked at her as if feigning deep contemplation and responded, “No,” and then smiled.

  Barbey giggled, “You’re kind of goofy, but I like it. Fine, I’ll have a diet cola float after my soup.”

  “Oooo, you’re…you’re living on the edge. You’re too thin. You need to eat more.”

  “Yes, Doctor Robinson,” Barbey responded sarcastically, while inwardly beaming with glee that he would actually like her even if she gained weight. Keeping her weight so low had always been a constant stress. She couldn’t eat normal meals like most people and she always had to pretend like she was eating so that relatives wouldn’t give her a hard time. Even with Rave’s approval, she wouldn’t dare gain weight, but knowing that her value to him wasn’t based on her weight, gave her a sense of relief.

  ****

  When the waiter placed her cup of soup on the table, Barbey suddenly felt consumed with self-consciousness. Her hands trembled as she looked at the mushrooms floating in a dark gelatinous liquid, the steam rising in her face. She was terrified to eat in front of Rave. A suffocating fear of humiliation began to wrap around her throat and she began to worry obsessively that she might get food on her face or spill on her dress. What would she do if a brown, muddy smear of soup leaped onto her beautiful green tube dress, causing her to look like pond scum rather than Paulina? Taking in a deep breath of air to calm herself, she thought about Sandy and how blonde and gorgeous she was and this seemed to distract her for a moment. Oh no! The fear is back! Desperately, she stared into her soup, hoping to summon an escapist thought into her consciousness. The steam was dancing above the soup. It looked—Pink, pink, pink! This thought brought her to a new sphere of hope for redemption—she remembered a suntanned-hair-growing Barbie Doll she had as a child! All you had to do was press the button on her plastic back and her hair just grew and grew becoming more and more beautiful with each press. She reached her arm around to the middle of her back and pressed. Nothing happened. So, she tilted her head back and screamed silently in her mind, “Barbie power now!” The pink fairy dust did not fall from the ceiling.

  Her nose began to tickle. Oh phooey—please don’t grow now! It didn’t grow much—just a glitter. My, oh my, she was feeling neurotic, so to mask her fears, she began asking Rave a lot of questions. “Have you ever smoked marijuana?”

  “Uh, yeah…yeah, sure. Have you?”

  “Of course not!” she responded, trying to sound innocent and prudish like Sandy, but without the accent. “It’s illegal and damaging to the lungs.” She noticed that Rave seemed uncomfortable, so she quickly decided to tone down her didactic approach a bit for her next question. She inhaled deeply, thought of Paulina’s long, thin legs, leaned back in her seat and smiled flirtatiously at Rave, as she exhaled, feeling suddenly more in control. “When you tried it, what was it like?”

  Rave also seemed to relax and seemed soothed by her transition. “It…it relaxed me. Made me feel superior in some ways.”

  She tasted her soup. It was warm and salty. “What do you mean by ‘superior’?”

  “You know—feelings of…feelings of grandeur, I suppose…”

  “Oh.” Barbey didn’t know what grandeur meant, but it sounded like a familiar word.

  “...like I could conquer Wall Street or I…I could wipe out the human race.”

  Barbey’s eyes widened in disapproval.

  “Nah, I’m…I’m just…just kidding. I felt like I could write the Great American Novel—especially that time I was getting high in the tomato garden when the clouds opened up and I could see that there was nothing behind them—just empty space. Then I…I knew I was a poet. I knew I’d fit in with all the Greats who saw the world as random chaos with no true…true rhyme or reason, only that which…which we could invent on the page. That empty space seemed a canvas for my inventions, but then…then some star fell from the sky and…and landed…landed on my arm screwing everything up. See.” He lifted up the sleeve of his t-shirt to show Barbey the star-shaped scar burned in his flesh.

  “Ouch!” Barbey retreated as she flinched at the scar. “That’s crazy. How could a star from the sky fall on your arm and then leave a burn mark shaped like that?” She leaned in closely to examine the scar, feeling his breath on her hair. “Real stars aren’t even shaped like that. That’s shaped kind of like one of those stars that a teacher, like, stamps on your paper when you like get an A on your math assignment or something. Actually…” She looked closer. “It looks more like a sheriff’s badge with six points.”

  “That’s...that’s just what…what happened,” Rave smiled and looked at his Rumpelstiltskin Burger. “At least that’s…that’s how I remember it.”

  “Did that kidnapper burn that into your skin?”

  He appeared suddenly uncomfortable, responding in slight irritation, “It fell from the sky, like I said.”

  Just then the waiter walked up and asked how the meal was. Rave, wiping perspiration from his forehead, asked for his desert and for Barbey’s ice cream float as he glanced around the restaurant anxiously. The waiter refilled Barbey’s water glass and removed her half consumed soup bowl from the table because she had pushed it to the side, indicating that she was finished.

  “Would you
like to dine and ditch?” Rave asked, raising his eyebrows.

  Barbey feigned Sandy indignation, which was easy because she honestly felt a twinge of discomfort, “What! Of course not.”

  “Just checking,” Rave snickered.

  “Don’t you have the money?”

  “Yeah, I got the money. I…I just think this place is full of itself and it…it would tie that lady’s panties in a knot.” He pointed at an uptight woman with wide rimmed glasses, sitting across from them, who had been scolding her son all night for various infractions and was now reprimanding him for sticking his gum under the table. “She’d have a fit. She’d be mortified that her son had…had been exposed to criminals at Dreambee’s. I bet she’d sue the joint.”

  “Yeah, she’s pretty relentless with her son. I hate it so much when parents are overly critical with their kids,” Barbey replied. “My parents were like that with me growing up. It was like nothing I ever did was good enough. Parents think they’re doing something good for their kids by meticulously shaping them into high achievers, but really they’re just screwing them up. A kid will only try so long to live up to her parents’ expectations. If the parent is never satisfied or, like, their expectations are unrealistic or overbearing, the kid will rebel. I don’t know why my parents were so stupid.” Barbey realized that she was falling out of character, but her feelings were taking over.

  “Did you rebel?” He asked as the waiter set down their deserts.

  “Yeah, my father cornered me, telling me it was his way or the highway. I would have chosen his way had it been possible, but his expectations were so insane. And to top it off, after he freaked out on me, he just took off and didn’t even come back for, like, a super long time. Once he left, my mother blamed it on me and kicked me out.”

  She noticed how he focused all of his attention on her like she was the most fascinating girl in the world. It was as if being in her presence was deeply pleasurable. “Where’d you go?” he asked.

  Barbey tried to restrain herself recognizing that Sandy wouldn’t tell a childhood sob story to Danny on a first date. In fact, she realized, Sandy probably didn’t have any sob stories to tell. She was likely raised by doting parents that were perfect in every way like an Australian version of June and Ward Cleaver from the 1950s television show, “Leave It to Beaver.”

  Rave repeated his question, “Where…where did you go?” His eyes looked glazed.

  “Oh, I didn’t know where to go, so I hid out in my boyfriend’s, Rich Sander’s, garage for awhile.” Barbey looked around the room and saw two little boys running around their table squirting each other with water guns. She looked at the giant swallow suspended from the ceiling that seemed to be laughing at her. “It was so tough because I didn’t really like that boyfriend anyway and he had to keep my stay a secret from his parents. I think he was hoping that if he let me stay, he’d get some action, which he didn’t get much, so after about a month he told me his parents were, like, converting the garage into a guesthouse and there’d be too many people going in and out of the garage to keep me a secret. But, I knew that was a lie.”

  “What a bastard.”

  Barbey smiled, “Yeah, he was a jerk on many levels.”

  “So, what did you do?” Rave asked as he tasted the ice cream.

  “Well, then I talked Sage into hiding me out in the tack room of her barn. She was very reluctant because she never kept secrets from her parents. She kept trying to convince me to talk with them, saying that they’d let me stay in the house, but I knew they’d tell my parents and honestly, I, like, wanted my parents to worry about me.” Barbey’s eyes welled up briefly, but in embarrassment, she subdued her feelings.

  “What did you do during the…the daytime? You must have quit going to school otherwise…otherwise your parents would have found you—that…that is if they wanted to find you.”

  “I don’t think they wanted to find me, but yeah, I didn’t go to school. I got a job working at the concession stand at Roller World. At first it was kind of corny watching all the colors from the disco strobe lights as kids skated hand in hand to the sappy love songs. Weird, creepy men would flirt with me and try to get me to skate with them whenever a slow song came on. I remember watching the Hokey Pokey day after day with the skaters all joined in a circle as they sang: ‘Put your right foot in. Put your right foot out…’” she shrugged her shoulders and sighed.

  Rave nodded, “I remember that song.”

  “Yeah. After awhile, I got used to Roller World and its rituals and grew to like the predictability of it, but something about it was always kind of eerie. When I wasn’t working, I mostly walked around the mall. It was lonely. And then at night, I’d go to the gym because I had a membership. I’d take an aerobics class or use the machines. The great thing was that I could use the gym showers and hair dryers, so I didn’t look homeless or anything. Sage loaned me clothes and I had some stuff with me that I threw in a duffel bag before I left the house. It was all really depressing though, especially at night, sleeping in the tack room feeling so lonely and afraid. And it was scary too in the darkness with all those insects.”

  “How long did you hide out in Sage’s tack room?”

  “I stayed there for, like, almost two months before her father got suspicious when he caught Sage going out back late at night a few times to bring me food. She’d make up excuses—like that she was going to check on her horse because it seemed a little colicky earlier in the day or that she left her backpack out by the corrals by mistake. But after awhile, he put two and two together.” The sirens, bells and whistles sounded and Sleeping Beauty and the Big Bad Wolf charged through the restaurant. Barbey rolled her eyes and laughed uncomfortably.

  After the waiters sang the birthday song, Rave reengaged, “So, you were…were saying that Sage’s father figured out that you were staying in their barn.”

  “Yeah, so, one night instead of Sage coming out to bring me food, her father brought the food. When I saw him, I screamed. I was so startled. He was really nice, as usual, but of course he, like, wanted to tell my parents where I was. So, I lied and said we could tell them in the morning. He told me to sleep in Sage’s room with her. I got my stuff and after he and Sage’s mother went to sleep, I left. I was so angry and heartbroken by my parents and I figured they wished I was dead, so I snuck back into that ex-boyfriend’s garage without him knowing it that night. After that, things got pretty bad for the next couple of weeks trying to talk different people from work into letting me sleep on their couches, and trying to get enough food and what not. So, one rainy night, when I couldn’t find a place to stay and I was so hungry, I called my mother and asked for a loaf of bread. Her voice was sort of shaky sounding, which I couldn’t really read, but then she said I could come home. When I got home, she looked like she might have been crying, but I wasn’t sure. Then she embraced me and started yelling at me. But, then she said she was glad to have me home.”

  “What happened to your dad?” He pushed his dessert aside, seemingly dissatisfied with it.

  “Mama said he had had a nervous breakdown or something and was taking some time to himself—traveling around Europe as had been his stupid childhood dream. She said he’d be back in a month, but he didn’t come home until, like, the next year. From the day that he kicked me out until the day he came back was one year and two months in total. He just went back to his former quiet self, hardly ever speaking to me, but lucky for me, he never tried to structure my life again. In fact, I have had pretty much free reign to do whatever I wanted since I returned home.”

  “Wow, I am sorry that happened to you. You had a rough time.”

  “Yeah, it was tough. But, what about you? What are your parents like?”