Tiny Dancer

by Patricia Hickman

  Soon the laughter faded as the students wandered a half-mile from our spot, gathering into a tiki bar. Temperatures dropped. Billy slept soundly. I reached over him to pull a corner of the blanket around his bare feet. As I came back up I stopped, one hand on either side of him. I stared into his face and nearly laughed. I had only seen him in one role, as my demanding dance teacher. He looked a bit helpless. No one would know if I took advantage of him, but it was not like me to do such a thing. I couldn’t, I knew. But here I hovered an inch from his face. I placed what I could only describe as a platonic kiss on the side of his mouth. I assumed he slept too soundly to realize what was going on, but his arms came up around me. He pulled me close to him, his eyes still closed.

  Billy had broken up with a long-time girlfriend, Celia Straights, right after the senior ball. He had not mentioned Celia since then. Quite honestly, I did not give a care for her and thought her too crude for him. She was beautiful and they cut a figure on the dance floor, but Billy had a sensibility too cultured, too mature for any of the girls his age. That was why he would never give me a serious thought. But perhaps the pain of the breakup still lodged inside him. In his drunken state, he was not wrapping his arms around me, I deduced, but Celia. I was doing him a favor, I reasoned, silently allowing him to pull me against his chest. I was merely helping him work through his state of break-up misery. Like an army nurse. I came up off the blanket, my heart pounding, my wobbly thin wrists scarcely able to hold me up. There my body dropped against his. It was my first time to be that close to a boy. It was my first kiss, although I would have never admitted it to Claudia. I was not about to waste it on anyone but Billy Thornton.

  Billy’s lips parted and I could smell his breath, the slight mixture of spearmint gum and Pabst beer intoxicating me. I closed my eyes and pressed my mouth against his. His tongue came slightly into my mouth and I reciprocated, hardly aware of the art of the French kiss.

  He moaned and I felt his stomach rise into mine. That scared the wits out of me. I rolled off him just as Claudia came squealing back up the shoreline. “I just tasted my first margarita,” she yelled, running toward me in her bare feet.

  Billy sat up, startled. I was getting up onto my feet by the time he was aware of me. I could not look at him. I stepped across his legs and joined Claudia who could not see how flushed I was in the dark. We ran back toward the tiki hut where I disappeared into the throng of students. Only once did I peer back where I saw Billy sitting up and staring out at the ocean alone. I assumed he was pondering his strange dream. I would tell no one what had happened, torn between my own long-held fantasy of kissing Billy Thornton and a fifteen-year-old’s shame.

  Chapter Three

  Irene Johnson could not look at Claudia without mourning the loss of her long blonde curls. She was so quiet on the way out of town Friday, saying so little to me I worried Irene held me responsible. Then once we neared Bitterwood Park, Claudia was forced to hear her mother’s complaining the rest of the way home, and did she give it to her for taking on important decisions without asking first. “And what is all that teased business at the crown of your head?” she asked Claudia.

  Claudia was about to defend herself when I said, “But she looks older, don’t you think? Maybe that’s why it’s hard for you to accept her new look.”

  Irene calmed down upon hearing me comment, saying, “Maybe you’re right. It’s hard to see you two grown up all of a sudden.”

  Claudia was further put out when I faced nothing more than Vesta meeting us at the door and then passing off the responsibility to Daddy who only shrugged when I walked through the door, my red hair now jet black. I passed the hall mirror and then stepped back to look at the dark strands framing my face. “Don’t I look different?” I asked Claudia who set my extra bag of travel things inside the door and said she would call later, still looking mystified at my stepmother’s blasé reaction. She had known us for years, and was well acquainted with Vesta’s temper. “I’ll call you,” was all she said and then left, still yawning from our lack of sleep. If we weren’t plying Irene for yet another night out with our new college friends, we were sitting up in Dottie’s guest room talking nearly until dawn about our secret new night life.

  But without explanation, Vesta had no nagging left in her the afternoon we rolled back in from the seashore.

  As I dressed for bed Friday night, I overheard Vesta as she passed down the hallway, complaining to Daddy about how little support he was giving her the week of their anniversary of loss. Did he not feel the emptiness of what had happened? How could he return to life-as-it-once-was and not notice that she was dying inside? Her broken voice broke me open inside. I could not take another minute of hearing them go at it.

  I closed my door and turned up the radio to drown them out. I went straight to sleep, exhausted from the late hours I had kept between following Irene and Dottie on shopping trips days and chasing Billy and his friends down to the beach every night.

  I did not unpack until Saturday morning. That was when I pulled out the college brochures that Drake and Jordan had collected while in Wilmington. They had plenty to spare, they said, and gladly gave their extras to me, as did Dottie who gave pamphlets to both us girls from UNC Chapel Hill upon Irene’s request. Best of all, Irene’s hope was satisfied that our time away from her was not spent frivolously.

  I was intrigued with the fact that each of Billy’s friends’ parents had groomed their children to attend a university, while Billy and I seemed to be left to figure out schooling on our own. I stowed away my new bag of seashells and the giant hair rollers Ashley had told me to buy to straighten my hair. I put on a load of my laundry to wash. Then, tucking the college tracts into my back pocket, I crept through the kitchen and out of the house, while the possibilities of attending a school near the ocean swarmed through my mind. Or else it was my jealousy of Claudia going away to a college near the ocean leaving me behind.

  The sunflower forest was still in the shade of the stately cherry trees by early morning, so I meandered through the potent rows to hide out in the center for privacy where I seated myself back inside the playhouse. I pulled out the University of Wilmington brochure labeled Admissions. I could contact the office about financing school, so I folded that page open. Attending a university seemed far from my small life until now. Vesta had not mentioned it although she had often nagged us about our grades. Siobhan had been an easy girl to rear as she cared naturally about her schoolwork. Vesta had not seen the purpose of scholarships for her girls, though, what with her sights set on show business. The word “college” never came out of Vesta’s mouth.

  Then there was the new blankness in our family that had reordered so much. No longer was I being driven to dance classes and recitals, my afternoons shared by leotard-clad girls competing for their mother’s approval and a shelf full of trophies. I felt as if I had been cut adrift until my trip to Wilmington with Claudia.

  Finally honest with myself, I laid the brochures in a stack still pondering what had transpired between Billy and me the night of the clambake. The whole way it had happened cheapened the reality of it. I had imagined kissing him many, many times. But he was sober and aware of me, wanting me too. He was quiet the remaining day we spent together. I even asked Claudia if she noticed Billy unusually quiet, but she thought I was wrong. He was not a loud boy, like Drake, she assured me. Truth be told, she admitted to me she considered Billy Thornton boring. She said it the same way she called Dottie boring. I was mad at her for saying so, but could not let on. Claudia could not ever know how wrong she was about him for that would only prove right her assumptions about me and my infatuation with him. Nor could Billy know I was the one he kissed that night. He would never feel comfortable talking to me ever again. On evenings when I called him after ten o’clock about to scream from the isolation bearing down on my family, he would tell me to stop calling him. He would never look at me the same.

  I looked up startled upon hearing the familiar whishing
sound of the sunflowers parting when someone else entered the garden. Not wanting to surprise one of the Millers with my uninvited presence, I called out expecting next to see Reverend Theo. The man seemed to possess an instinct about knowing when someone entered his sunflower forest.

  “I thought that was you when I saw the tops of those sunflowers bobbing like ducks,” said the low feminine voice.

  I was so surprised, I rose up and hit my head against the playhouse ceiling like before.

  “Don’t get up on my account. I’m Dorothea,” said Dorothea Miller.

  I stammered around saying, “Oh, y-yes. I met Reverend Theo.”

  She smiled at me through the window, sort of laughing at me with her eyes. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “Not at all,” I assured her. “But it’s starting to heat up in here, so it’s time I skedaddled anyway,” I said, excusing myself quickly. I remembered how the preacher had dismissed me and sent me on my way. I crawled out on hands and knees while Dorothea held open the child-sized door.

  “No hurry. I made some fresh juice and thought you’d like to come up on the porch.”

  “I don’t think your husband’d like me hanging around. I shouldn’t have come back.” I turned to leave.

  Dorothea stepped back, seeming to notice my new hairstyle. “Like’d to have not known you. Don’t you look nice?” She said it like she had noticed me before, as if we knew one another. “Come onto the porch and join me for lemonade. You’ll like it. When I make my juice, it’s not all sour like most recipes. Mine is sweet as syrup.”

  I dutifully followed her out of the garden. When Dorothea opened the porch door, there sat Reverend Theo stringing a guitar that looked as old as Salem. He scowled at his wife with disdain, most of his face hidden beneath his big straw gardening hat.

  “I invited her,” said Dorothea, “and that’s that.”

  I did not know whether to sit or stand.

  Reverend Theo got up like he was going inside. That caused Dorothea to say, “Just keep your seat.”

  He sighed so big that I flinched. Then he took his seat again and finished stringing the guitar, clipping the excess strings from the neck. He set to tuning it, humming out the notes in a la-la-la-la-bum-bum cadence.

  I sat down next to her. A big square of gauze was taped beside the preacher’s eye. It had a stain of red and his right eye was bruised. So as not to be obvious, I did not gasp. The last I time I saw him was the morning he was high-tailing it down through the foggy lane, the day voter registration opened up to the local black families. I was slow to piece together the fact that he had met with ruffians that morning. Although I didn’t know for certain, I was in no position to ask. He might think it impolite for a white girl to pry.

  He fingered the strings again and I saw his knuckles, all scraped and scabbed over. He would not look at me.

  Dorothea said with a certain degree of pride, “The Reverend has perfect pitch.” She habitually referred to him as the Reverend, I noticed. But perhaps she thought he was getting too heady for such compliments, for she said, “It nearly makes up for the rest of his imperfect ways.”

  A pig carcass smoked underground in the usual pit dug out of the ground for the smoking process. I wanted to know where he had learned to cook in such a manner as I had never seen the likes of it at any of the picnics I had attended. “I never saw a pig cooked in the ground,” I said.

  Reverend Theo might not have responded at all if Dorothea had not have given him a look that would ice fish. Finally he said, “My mother is Cuban.”

  “May as well tell her the rest. You always do,” said Dorothea.

  He paused a good long while. Then he finally said, “My father was a soldier visiting a friend and, I might add, passing off some seriously secret military papers to an underground agent while in Cuba.”

  Dorothea rolled her eyes. “Here it comes.”

  “Now you know it’s true,” he said defensively. “Daddy was a spy and what with him looking, first of all black, and secondly, of no importance, it was easy for him to enter and leave without much of a fuss. He might have done his business and left, but a Cuban girl named Esperanza caught his eye. She had a thing for American soldiers. When she saw this strapping young black man buying pottery off her mother, she stepped right up and introduced herself and invited him that night to a family dinner. My daddy could not stand to be away from Esperanza for even a day after that night, so her father would open the front door first thing of a morning and there he would be. That’s when Esperanza’s daddy, Domingo Perez-Estrada, ordered a sit-down with this young American soldier, Cuban style. That meant the whole family gathered for a time of asking him questions.”

  “More like bringing down the Spanish Inquisition,” said Dorothea.

  Reverend Theo continued. “A few days later in front of the whole family he presented Esperanza with a little gold ring he had bought off a Cuban shopkeeper.”

  “He proposed?” I asked.

  “Right then and there. And of course Esperanza said yes. They were married that same week in a village church. My father said he never saw so much food. It was as if the President had come to Cuba the way they welcomed him into their family. And since my mother Esperanza was put in charge of smoking the pork for all the family to-dos that is how we come to have such a tradition in our family.”

  “About half of that is true,” said Dorothea. “She was a good cook. And she did say most of the village came to the wedding.”

  “Taught me and my brother her Cuban ways. My black grandmother taught me the rest, so there you have it,” said Reverend Theo. “I’m the best cook in the family.”

  “You have the biggest head maybe. My father-in-law helped Esperanza escape Castro’s regime, of this I’m certain,” said Dorothea. “The man had some backing, but I don’t know about him being a real spy.”

  “They don’t tell everything in the papers,” said Reverend Theo, finishing up the guitar and picking out a tune, his fingers moving so quickly I realized he was not kidding about his musicianship.

  “Reverend,” said Dorothea as if she were the brakes on his runaway tongue.

  Reverend Theo closed his eyes and disappeared into the tune he was playing. Dorothea picked up the pitcher of tea. “I’ll refill this, Theo. Needs more ice. Flannery, you can come with me.”

  I followed her inside. The whole house had filled with the smell of whatever simmered on the cook stove. Three large bowls were set out on the countertop.

  “You cook for a lot of people, I noticed,” I said.

  “I do at that. Today I’ve got so much bread to get rising and only two hands. My daughter-in-law Ratonda is coming later, but with my granddaughters underfoot, it’s best I get my bread dough making at least out of the way. Don’t mind me if I work while we talk.”

  “I don’t know much about bread making,” I said, trying not to act overly interested. “But I can do whatever is explained to me.”

  Dorothea looked skeptical. She glanced in the general direction of Periwinkle House.

  “My stepmother won’t care,” I explained casually, knowing I told a big fat lie. But I was simply feeling out the terrain. The only way to discover Siobhan’s other life, if indeed one existed, was to offer a helping hand in Dorothea’s kitchen. I followed Dorothea and hefted the flour sack from the pantry standing open. She saw me standing with arms around the flour sack. Finally, she acquiesced and let me stay and help out. She told me exactly what to do and I worked beside her, my hands in one of the big pottery bowls, her hands measuring out the bread flour.

  “Most people knead the bread or use all kinds of fancy gizmos like dough hooks, but that ruins the recipe,” said Dorothea, demonstrating how to moisten the dough using a fork. She put the fork into my hands. “You stir in your flour with a fork, see if it don’t make the prettiest, softest rolls you ever tasted.” She watched me following her instructions in sequence saying, “Yes, yes. Good.”

  I formed a large dough ball. T
hen I laid a red and white terry cloth towel over the top and put the bowl aside not far from Dorothea’s big double ovens where the mixture would rise for pinching out later, she said.

  The two of us had no sooner washed and dried our hands and cleaned off the tiled surfaces than the high-pitched squeals of Dorothea’s granddaughters Charlotte and Diana filled up the living room.

  “Calm down!” snapped Ratonda, their mother, striding in behind them. “Good grief, you wild animals could raise the dead. Hello, Mama Miller,” she said, kissing Dorothea’s cheek and smelling the fresh dough in approval. I was strangely jealous of the affection passing between them.

  I recognized her right away. She was the woman who had come up on our front porch bearing a casserole the week of the funeral. I mustered the words to say, “I never thanked you properly for dropping by with dinner. It was so thoughtful.” I spoke gingerly, not letting my words get away like usual when I was nervous. In my mind, I was putting her at ease from our shared embarrassment, or so I thought. For the morning Ratonda showed up with a casserole, Vesta had turned her away, saying the refrigerator was filled already. I put the embarrassing memory out of mind.

  Ratonda stopped in her stride while chasing Diana away from the stove. “Have we met?”

  Dorothea smiled approvingly at me. “She’s the Curry’s daughter. You know, I sent you over with my squash casserole,” she said as if expecting Ratonda to know right off who I was. Dorothea was too polite to bring up the grief and all the sensitive matters. But I detected a flicker of what I deemed sorrow in her eyes.

  From the way Ratonda’s soft brown eyes cooled I could tell she remembered more than she was admitting. “Oh, them.” Then she minced back to the worktable and peeked under the checkered bread rag. “How did you like it?” she asked me, her right brow lifting. She was so visibly aloof, it was as if she and I had sat down to the squash that very night.