Tiny Dancer

by Patricia Hickman

  I felt as bad that Daddy worked for Honest Stan as I had being born and keeping him out of a school for brainiacs.

  I joined Daddy and Vesta for dinner although Vesta still would not look at me. But Daddy made me promise to stop my visits to the Millers. For real no more getting around it. He thought it best I put an end to being missing in action come suppertime. He commented he was thankful we still paid our bills. He had a friend not ten miles from here on food stamps.

  The look in Vesta’s eyes said she was not grateful in the least.

  “Daddy, the last time you talked to your boss at the bank they said they might bring you back on, right?” I asked.

  Vesta said, “I’m tired of the subject. Can we please just talk about something else?”

  Her comment seemed to take all of the air out of Daddy.

  “Vesta, we listen to your problems. Shouldn’t Daddy have a turn?” I asked. Of course, I always lost to Vesta but since the dirt incident was gradually losing my fear of her.

  “We don’t solve anything,” said Vesta, “just keep living the same wrong life over and over.”

  I felt the words erupting as if they had been stored up to be let out at this moment. “Maybe it feels better to talk about things. Like the Millers, they talk about things,” I said. But if eyes had knives, Vesta put a circle of them right through me.

  “Who cares about the Millers?” asked Daddy, dispirited. “Or my job. That’s enough from you, Flannery.”

  I threw down my napkin. My milk glass spilled over and down the table into Vesta’s lap.

  “Flannery, get a hold of yourself,” said Daddy, barely raising his voice.

  “She’s talking about you,” I said, hurt he wasn’t standing up for me.

  Vesta wiped furiously at her skirt. “Flynn, get control of your daughter.”

  Maybe it was the way she called me Flynn’s daughter, or maybe it was the simpering way Vesta cut her eyes back at me, but I erupted like Vesuvius rising from under the floor. “The only thing holding us together was Siobhan! Who are we now?” I pounded the tabletop batting back hot tears.

  “I’m not listening to this,” said Vesta. She left us alone at the table, Daddy resting his head against his closed fist and looking at me as if I had set fire to the house.

  “Don’t bother. I’m finished,” I said, now more angry than ever. I stormed out, leaving the two of them to fall into pouting and arguing about me behind my back. I locked myself in my room, hating the tears wetting my face. I felt weak and helpless. Mama once made me promise to never be at the mercy of another and now I knew why.

  I fully expected Daddy to come into my room and chew me out for my inexcusable display and ruining dinner. But he didn’t come after me at all, leaving me to stew alone.

  I rolled onto my stomach and turned on the radio to drown out my thoughts. But I could not wash the troubles from my mind.

  I was disheartened hearing talk of food stamps and repo men around the dinner table. I clearly remembered Vesta and Daddy planning for the day they would leave this neighborhood for a bigger house on the lake. Lake Wylie, they said. Or a house on the golf course or a manor in the village since any of those neighborhoods would please Vesta. Daddy offered her a fine plan. I imagined it was like Dottie moving into the Marina. Mama had wanted to live in a better house too. Come to think of it, I wondered how Daddy had convinced Vesta he could manage such a life for us since he had no actual experience organizing such high plans. Vesta had bought the dream whole hog, though, and married him. The mortgage hanging over their heads had sealed the deal.

  But taking the job as a repo man demoralized Daddy. When I heard Vesta disappear into her room, I slipped downstairs. I found Daddy slumped in his chair. He complained out loud, more like he was talking to himself about the other repo men, the way they were all barely making ends meet. Everyone had taken the job with the idea that it was easier to be hired by someone if you were already employed. But to hear Daddy tell it, Stan’s work crew arrived at the earliest peep of sunlight and went home by dark. They had no time left in the day to find another job. Daddy and the other repo men were Stanley Harkey’s personal slaves.

  I made a plate of canapés and took a bottle of Coke from the refrigerator. I excused myself and went back to my room. I pushed the worries about my daddy out of mind and played an old dance record. I still loved Irish dance music and sat up late nights reliving the old standards. This one was what our sister act had danced to our last performance. I had not played it since then afraid of how it would affect Daddy or Vesta if they overheard. Tonight I needed the comfort of the old Irish tune, the melancholy scratch of the guitar strings, and the ratchet of the fiddler.

  I closed my eyes, forcing my mind to escape to the green hillside where I had met Siobhan in a daydream about her. A thought came to me, one I had not cultivated while running back and forth between home and the Millers. Siobhan was happier there than she had been with us. Maybe heaven draws people into its hills when nothing is left on earth but the sadness.

  I heard laughter outside my side window. I sat up and opened the window blinds. Dust sifted down like snow.

  I turned down the volume on the old record player, my eyes drawn to the children outside my window. The school kids often stayed up late in the summers slaughtering fireflies for finger jewelry. Down below no less than a dozen boys and girls were running up and down the easement between our house and the next-door neighbor’s, Hui Lin. In the faint light from the fading sky, the children were trailing what appeared to be long red sashes. I slipped on my pale green eyeglasses, my old cat eye pair I would never let anyone catch me wearing, not even Claudia. The sashes undulated behind them, red and silky, much like Siobhan’s red sash she had lost the day of the accident.

  I was haunted by the lost sash to this day though I did not know why. The giggling children drew my attention out my bedroom window again. The space between the houses was growing dark, but the sashes were snaking wildly under the moon’s brightness. They were long as a young woman’s wedding train. I tapped on the window glass, mouthing for them to quiet down—it’s getting late. Children should be indoors sitting down to supper or helping their mothers clean up after dinner. The children did not stop laughing or running though.

  It was then I detected a familiar squeal, Siobhan’s high-pitched voice rising above the children’s levity. She ran toward the house as the children ran in the opposite direction, turning her face up toward our window. She lifted her arms and yelled, “Laugh with us, Flannery. Don’t be sad.”

  I sat up from my sound but restless slumber. The recording was concluding, digressing into the long quiet scratchy sound made between songs. I turned off the record player and flipped on my table lamp. I stumbled out of my room, past Daddy and Vesta’s room that was dark and quiet. I ran down the stairs and found Daddy draping an afghan over Vesta on the couch where she had fallen to sleep.

  Daddy held his finger to his lips not wanting her disturbed. “Join me on the sofa in the den,” he said. I followed him dutifully across the hall to the front living area decorated with the blue sofa they had brought along from their first house. Alice Blue, Daddy had called it since so much of Mama’s decorating incorporated the iron blue tint. I sat beside him under the yellow light of the floor lamp. Strange how two women whose lot it was to be my mother had tastes that melded so well.

  Before he could clear his throat and chasten me for my tacky supper show, I swallowed hard and said, “I know I messed up the night.”

  Daddy stared ahead as if he were watching one of Vesta’s movies, except no TV in the den. His words then burst open from being too long tamped down into polite subordination. “We started out on the right foot, didn’t we? Happy family and all that? But now look at us, all pulled in different directions. No matter what I do it’s wrong, at least where Vesta’s concerned. And even you and I can’t agree on anything,” he said, plying me for a little sympathy. Daddy reached for my hand clasping it inside his long elegan
t fingers.

  “Vesta, she’s got to have her way, Daddy.” I stopped short of talking about my lost college fund.

  “I’ve got more on me than I can manage, daughter. If I have one more weight laid on my back, I’ll snap like a twig. You just wait until you’ve got the whole world on your back plus a child or two as your responsibility.”

  My mother had little patience for the way he used his quiet demeanor to lay stones at her feet. Here in the quiet of our shared turmoil I absorbed trace elements of Alice Curry’s enlightenment. I was coming awake to Mama’s impatience with him, at least in part. When I needed him to speak up, to set wrongs right, he withdrew into that big man shell of his. If I poked too hard, out he came like a snapping turtle.

  I preferred our talks when I was younger. Daddy seemed more understanding. But back then my problems could fit into a shoebox. His skills for bringing up a daughter had hit a peak when I was ten years old. Since then it seemed my teenage needs were stretching him thin, the last four years especially. “I don’t have anyone to talk to, least not at home,” I finally said.

  “Talk,” he said flatly.

  “Some days it feels like I’m sucking water instead of air.”

  “Maybe you’re a mermaid,” he said and laughed dryly, the kind of laugh that used to set Mama off. “What else?”

  It wasn’t as if I had made a list for the occasion, so I asked, “Do you ever dream about Siobhan?”

  “I do.”

  “It seems real.”

  “It’s nothing more than a dream, Sis. It’s the heart’s way of bringing her back home for a while. Does it comfort you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s served its purpose. Don’t read more into it than it is.”

  I kissed Daddy on the cheek. He was good to allow bedtime kisses and had done a better job responding with some minor repartee. Before I left him, I said, “The thing that bothers me the most is that no one has asked me why I don’t dance anymore.”

  I left him wiping his eyes on his sleeve. Men don’t like it when you watch them cry.

  * * * * *

  Reverend Theo waited until sunset to set up four long rows of timber down the sides of his yard. He framed out the boxes for his new garden. I watched him from my window. He hung a work lamp from the cherry tree so he could see.

  The work went surprisingly fast and I was enjoying watching him put it in. Reverend Theo finished off the fourth raised garden. Then he walked to his porch.

  The sun dropped from out of the sky leaving a pale thin paste along the rim of pine trees.

  I wished I could stop all those thoughts from churning around about my sister. For one, how people try to say nice things like ‘God must have needed her,’ stuff like that. Why would he need her? Daddy needed her, and Vesta. They’re both lost, like a big wind came in and blew us all to a different place. Every day I wake up and look over at my sister’s bed. And then I realize we’re never going back to where we were.

  I had that feeling stirring that said I had to admit to myself what was what instead of what was expected. That was when I realized that not since my mother left had I been happy.

  The clouds over Theo’s house divided, like old chewing gum pulled apart. It was like the doors opened to the hospital. I had not let myself think too much about that night in the hospital. I knew so little when they were wheeling me from the emergency room to a room in the children’s ward except those bright lights glaring down at me. Vesta had finally nodded off in a chair after accepting light sedation. Daddy tried to sleep beside me in a reclining chair. All he could do was pace.

  Once I woke up yelling but my nurse gave me another blessed white pill. The nurse finally told Daddy to go down to the cafeteria since he kept getting in the way of nursing rounds. It was good people were telling him what to do. I did not believe Daddy was up to decision-making.

  Daddy stepped out into the hallway saying he was going for a carton of milk from the cafeteria.

  The white pill was taking over just as a large black man came aside my hospital bed. He touched my arm, his thumb inserted under my hospital band.

  I gasped upon sight of the happy face leaning over me, serene, like he had come to carry me off to some distant peaceful place. He had a hooked nose and eyes dark as a pony I had once ridden at summer dance camp. He said my name like he knew me. He knelt beside my bed and watched me until I fell into my drug-induced slumber. I thought he might be an angel sent to take me out of the pain.

  Now, watching Reverend Theo rock from his back porch, it all came back to me. He was the big black angel kneeling next to me that night. How he slipped around security and got into the whites wing of the hospital was beyond me. There Reverend Theo stood that night keeping vigil over me yet never having said word about it since. He had kept me at such a distance at first but it was not because he did not like me. The walls between us were not walls we erected. Slowly, we had found a way around them.

  How to get back was the big dilemma of the moment.

  * * * * *

  The kitchen windows dripped with the sweat of the stew on the back burner near to bubbling over. I turned it down searching the kitchen for Vesta. I headed into first the living room and then the den calling out to her.

  Climbing the staircase, the sound of voices drew me to their door. This time Daddy was mad. He yelled so loud I felt a pain on Vesta’s behalf. Their door flew open unexpectedly. I stepped aside, not saying word to Vesta who looked less than happy to find me standing so close by. “Eavesdropping are we?”

  “Just passing through,” I said, refusing to be drawn into her circus.

  I walked quietly past. But once inside my room, I slammed my door.

  That night I only half filled my dinner plate excusing myself upstairs. I was becoming as skilled as Daddy, learning the fine art of escaping the tension hanging over the things remaining unsaid.

  Remaining invisible and out of their line of fire, Vesta might not notice me slipping away to the Miller’s house tonight. But I had no sooner slipped through the sunflowers than I ran smack into Reverend Theo waiting for me on the other side. “I can’t let you visit any more,” he said.

  “I have to,” I said. “My house is a house of death.”

  “Your stepmother won’t let it happen, you coming over all the time.”

  I begged him but it did not matter. He sent me home even after I manipulated him with tears.

  I resigned myself to being miserable the remainder of the summer. I retreated each day to my room, mailing off letters to schools, collecting a whole cardboard box of information about universities while deciding how far away I could go for my studies. If Claudia Johnson could earn a scholarship, so would I. I would study night and day, I decided.

  I closed the curtains so as not to see those sunflowers looking so happy without me. I opened an atlas to draw points on it to mark each university from my stack. It might as well be a pleasant place, a change of pace from home. I organized the colleges into categories in a notebook especially noting the ones near the ocean or that offered winter skiing as a class. I seldom saw snow for more than a few days in North Carolina at least here in the Sandhills.

  Two days of that and I could not stand it any longer. I opened my curtains. Reverend Theo had put in rows and rows of vegetables for his fall garden. On the far side of the yard he had built a double parallel wall of chicken wire and fence posts. In between the two walls of chicken wire, he had strewn straw. Within the straw, he planted red potatoes. I remember him telling the men about it. Unlike potatoes hidden under the blanket of ground, small pink orbs hung from the vines in plain sight, thus, his wall of potatoes.

  He was at work installing a mini water tower beside his house. I knew Vesta would use that eyesore as another reason to hate him. There he worked, whistling so happy, like he did not even think about me at all any more.

  Maybe it was time I hated him too. Maybe I did need to stick to my own kind. I dropped to my bed and sobbed.
/>   * * * * *

  The moon was so bright Monday night it seemed like daylight pouring into the bedroom. Maybe that was why I thought I was dreaming again when a thin figure leaned over me, staring down at me. The moon outlined the shadowy person from behind as she held out a queen’s scepter. I pulled the covers down from my face to look at what I perceived as an apparition.

  “Flannery.”

  I yanked down the quilt. “Vesta?” I shook myself awake, turning on the table lamp so I could pull on my eyeglasses. Vesta hunched over me holding the regional championship trophy.

  “Did you know this was broken? Did you break it?” she asked, accusing me, of all things, of vandalism in the middle of the night.

  “Vesta, you’re not in your right mind. I didn’t break anything.” I was about to flip off the table lamp when she sat across from me on Siobhan’s bed. No one had dared sit on the sacred pink bedspread all year.

  “It’s broken. It just seemed like something you’d do, you know, being careless,” said Vesta. “A joke, maybe?”

  “That would be a sick joke.” I was fully awake now. I sat up and leaned against the headboard clasping my hands around my knees.