Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend

by Robert James Waller

  He picked up the bottle of red he’d bought for the occasion and walked the six blocks to the two-story brick the Bradens had purchased. Three cars were parked outside, the Bradens’ Buick was in the driveway. Jim answered the bell, impeccable—perfect as it gets—in a dark blue pinstripe, white collar-barred starched shirt with a yellow-and-black polka-dotted tie. At the bottom end were black, lightweight wingtips—banker’s shoes. Crisp white hanky in his breast pocket. Michael had already guessed Jimmy Braden came from old money, and today he looked it.

  “Hi, Michael. Jellie and I are pleased you could come. I think you probably know everyone here except for Jellie’s parents, who flew in from Syracuse. Say, that’s quite a tie!“

  Michael hated entrance scenes. His blue-collar upbringing surged forward when he was paraded into a room full of people, and he’d get sort of stupid and uncomfortable almost to the point of appearing bellicose, which he really wasn’t. His growing years didn’t provide him with much experience in entrances, that’s all.

  A motley little outfit awaited him in the small living room: sociologist (female, unpartnered, acquaintance of Jellie’s), accountant and wife (“Did you see any cobras?”), the overweight operations research guy with an equally heavy wife and crushing handshake (double-elimination volleyball genius). Patricia Sanchez was in the middle of the sofa, seated next to a guy she dated from the student services office. An older man he took to be Jellie’s father sat on Pat’s other side. It was stuffy warm, with a perfect fire crackling away and everybody looking at him standing in the doorway to the living room. He took a deep breath and wished he could light up, but there wasn’t a chance in hell of that.

  Jimmy took him by the elbow. “I think everybody here knows Michael Tillman from my department.” The voices reached toward Michael in ragged unison. He gave them all a little wave and handed the bottle of wine to Jimmy.

  “Jellie and her mother are in the kitchen. Oh, how clumsy of me, I nearly forgot you haven’t met Jellie’s father, Mr. Markham.”

  Mr. Markham was somewhere over sixty, with bright eyes and a firm hand. He grinned. Michael grinned back and judged Leonard Markham to be all right, as long as you didn’t cross him.

  Through an open door and down the hall he could see Jellie in the kitchen. She looked up, waved, and called, “Hi, Michael, come meet my mother.”

  He went back to the kitchen while the living room went back to whatever conversations he’d interrupted. Jellie wiped her hands on a white apron that had HI! and four torn turkeys with big, floppy red combs printed on it. She kissed him on the cheek, whispering, “I’m so glad you came,” then turned him to the gray-haired woman who was doing something or other with giblet dressing. The kiss and the whisper surprised him, but he chalked it up to holiday spirit.

  “Mother, this is our friend, Michael Tillman.”

  Jellie got her looks from her mother. Eleanor Markham was a knock-’em-dead lady about the same age as her husband and with the same gray eyes as Jellie’s. “I’m glad to meet you, Michael. We’re so pleased Jellie and Jim have made such nice friends in the short time they’ve been here.”

  She turned to Jellie. “Michael’s the one who rides a motorcycle, right?” Jellie nodded. “Where do you ride it, Michael? Very far?”

  “Oh, here and there. Around town, up to the Great Lakes sometimes, Colorado if I’m really feeling sporty. It’s an old buzzard, and you have to carry a full tool kit if you’re going any distance at all.”

  “Don’t you live in an apartment, Michael? Where do you keep the motorcycle during the winter?” Jellie was stirring gravy, looking over her shoulder at him.

  “In my living room.”

  Jellie laughed. Eleanor Markham smiled and asked, “Why on earth do you keep it there?”

  “Because it’s too big for the John.”

  Both of them were laughing now. Michael was grinning, appreciating a nice groove as much as any jazz musician. “Besides, I can work on it there during cold weather, and if the walls start closing in on me, I sit on it and go ‘vroom, vroom.’ When I’m not using it, my cat likes to sleep on the seat. I live on the first floor of an old place, been living there for ten years. It’s hard to find people in a college town who pay their rent on time, and I do, so the landlord puts up with me.”

  “Mother, of course Michael would keep his motorcycle in the living room. It all fits, and it’s perfect… unlike this damn gravy that won’t thicken up.”

  He could see they were busy, so he excused himself and ambled back to the living room, trying to adopt a veneer of sociability, which was just about impossible for Michael Tillman to carry off. The furnishings were typical and a little better than that— good postmodern prints, agreeable pottery pieces, an abstract bronze sculpture about eighteen inches high, and a black-and-white print of Edward Weston’s famous portrait of a cabbage, which cost somebody real bucks. A few new chairs, a few old ones. A Mozart quintet came from a system in the den.

  He looked back once at Jellie, who was still fretting over the gravy, and tried to articulate in his mind what he’d seen on her face. A blend, maybe, of contentment and weariness, of being happy where she was and yet wishing she was somewhere else. The sense that she was running a long race she believed she was supposed to run but would rather not have been running at all.

  “Come over here, Michael.” Pat Sanchez reached out for his hand. He’d always liked Pat. She’d fought her way out of the Los Angeles barrios, got her doctorate at Texas, and joined the faculty about ten years before. They’d done a couple of papers together and ended up naked and laughing and drinking margaritas on her bed when they’d finished the first one late on a Friday night. After that they’d gone out a few times, then let go of it by mutual, but unspoken, consent. The mathematics of transportation networks evidently were not enough on which to sustain a loving relationship.

  She introduced him to her friend, who had recently become vice-president of student services, but the friend already knew Michael from their days on the Student Conduct Committee. He had a therapeutic way about him, characteristic of those who devote their lives to dealing with the pleasures of dormitory havoc and other garbage the university continued to tolerate. He shook Michael’s hand and said, “I remember you. You’re the one who was in favor of expelling anybody who so much as thought about writing on the walls. What was it you said?… I used to quote you as an example of the kind of approach that just doesn’t work with today’s students.”

  Michael sighed inside himself, then thought about sticking the sweet fellow’s head up his ass or in the fireplace, depending on whether he decided the coagulated brain ought to be quick-frozen or hard-boiled, but let it go and leaned toward him, whispering, “I remember almost exactly what I said. It went something like this: ‘We’re running a university, not a success center or an asylum for those with pounding glands. Cheats are cheats, destructive teenage drunks are just that, and we ought to throw the injurious little bastards all the way back to their mother’s tit and let ’em suck on it or boot their asses right down the street to the cops and press charges.’ That’s what I said. I also said I couldn’t stand all the transactional bullshit you people seem to believe in. That was after someone from counseling services called me a fascist.”

  Sweet Fellow, the veep, turned red while Pat lay back against the sofa cushions, trying to suppress her laughter and failing, and that cooled him down. Michael was glad she was there. He’d shot his mouth off at a little member of the central administration who didn’t know what it was like in the gullies of the world, and it could have ruined Thanksgiving at the Bradens, which was the last thing he wanted to happen.

  “Oh, Michael, will you never be tamed?” Pat was still laughing, holding her stomach.

  At that moment Jimmy Braden came out of the kitchen, daintily ringing a small silver bell. “Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served.”

  The crowd straggled off toward the dining room. Michael brought up the rear, wondering what the seat
ing arrangements were and whether they’d be such that he could look at Jellie now and then, preferably often. After all, that’s what he’d come for, not to deal with smart-ass little brats from the administration building.

  Place cards were on the table, but he decided to let everyone else find their seats and then sort through the residual. The seat assignments gave the appearance of having come out of a random-number generator. But he knew Jellie too well to doubt there was an overall plan designed to get certain people away from their wives and dates and husbands and next to certain other people. Sort of a turkey-centered mixer. Michael watched people seat themselves, the chairs dwindling down to a precious few. Jellie caught his eye and pointed to the second place down from the head of the table, near the kitchen. He walked over and looked at the name card, which had Possible Dean printed on it in Jellie’s handwriting. The card at the place next to his read Jellie.

  James Lee Braden HI carved, Jellie’s mother poured, Jellie ran back and forth to the kitchen, and everyone else talked nonsense. Michael sat there watching Jellie move, feeling, for the first time, something beyond hibiscus and a waterfall in the Seychelles, thinking that maybe the old Darwinian shuffle had some steps to it he hadn’t known about before. The physical attraction he felt for her was somehow being melded with deeper and quieter feelings of a higher order, a turn of events he hadn’t counted on. And he became a little sad then in a way he couldn’t grasp. Sad for her, for him, for Jimmy, and for where this might all lead or probably wouldn’t. The voice of the Absolute sounded less certain, the mantra was beginning to waver. Some things were better left alone, he thought. He, and perhaps Jellie, if he was reading her correctly, were mucking around in a dangerous place where they had no business going, a place that was not as harmless as it first appeared. And, for a moment, he wanted to run, to ride the Shadow somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere that had a warm sun and simple ways.

  The great turkey dance went on for nearly two hours. Wine and more wine, food and more food. Eleanor Markham told a funny story about Jellie’s growing years, and everybody laughed, especially Jellie.

  The female sociologist on his right rattled on about her life and times, touching his arm occasionally when she made what she considered a significant point. That left him feeling cramped and a little aggravated, since he was bound by the circumstances to be polite and couldn’t look at Jellie out of the corner of his eye while he was talking with this expert on women’s contributions to early American frontier life.

  Somebody mentioned the afternoon football game between Dallas and Seattle. The sports fanatic from operations research moved into the opening and began citing yardage gained by various running backs, along with other related junk serving only to clutter up people’s minds and keep them from thinking about anything that really matters. Jellie’s mother was filling her in on what her old high school friends were doing now.

  Jimmy was carving—he never ceased carving, it was his life-way. Jellie’s father was talking to the vice-president of student services about fishing for brook trout in Connecticut. And the sociologist on Michael’s right was asking him if he ever attended the lecture-concert series, saying she always seemed to go alone and didn’t like going alone. He said he didn’t go because, as far as he could tell, it was always the same person on the bill—a “scintillating new” (usually pubescent) Korean violinist who flawlessly executed memorized scores. The sociologist was all right, though, lonely in the way most of us were or are, and Michael continued to feign interest in lectures, concerts, and frontier women, once or twice feeling Jellie’s hip against his shoulder when she got up to make a food run to the kitchen.

  The operations researcher was still talking about the game coming on in less than forty-five minutes and said he hoped nobody would mind if he watched it. Several others said (not directly, of course) they also wanted to see young black men from the coasts have at one another on the plains of Texas, so that was settled. The sociologist straightened her glasses and said quietly to Michael, “All this attention given to athletics is just another capitalist plot to keep the masses occupied, don’t you think?”

  He really didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about anything except the next touch of Jellie’s hip against his shoulder. But he nodded and said, “You’re probably right. On the other hand, it beats having the proletariat out there stealing hubcaps or sniffing bicycle seats.” She turned her attention to the accountant’s wife a moment later.

  During a pause while the jock expert was wetting his throat and summoning up more good Sports Illustrated wisdom to tell everyone, Jim Braden said, “Michael, you used to be an athlete, didn’t you? That’s what somebody told me.”

  Jellie followed up. “Michael, is that true? You’ve been holding out on us.”

  Trapped. He hoped the subject would pass, but it didn’t. Jellie’s father pushed it along. “What did you play, Michael?” The operations researcher, who wouldn’t know how to pull on a jockstrap if it was required of him, had a hunk of turkey halfway into his mouth and was obviously in a state of complete surprise, since Michael seldom mentioned his athletic history.

  Everyone was looking at him, particularly the sociologist, as if she’d suddenly discovered the real reason why he didn’t attend the lecture-concert series and why he seemed a little barbarous overall. There was nowhere to go. He would have continued to look for a way out, but Jellie said, “Tell us about it, Michael.” She seemed genuinely interested, and he couldn’t refuse Jellie.

  He took a drink of wine and began. “The short version is this: I grew up in a small town in South Dakota—“

  The accountant’s wife interrupted him. “Where was that?”

  “Custer… just outside of Rapid City in the Black Hills.”

  “It’s pretty out there, isn’t it?” With a mind like chaff in a high wind, she was now into travelogues.

  The sociologist came out of her corner with a hard leftist jab: “It’s where we stole the Native Americans’ land in the nineteenth century.”

  “Yes, it’s very pretty,” Michael said, looking at the accountant’s wife. “Though unfortunately my parents’ small house sat on land stolen from the La-kota Sioux.” He waited a moment for additional questions about the Black Hills. There were none.

  “By the time I got to eighth grade I was totally bored with school and small-town life in general. So I started shooting baskets in the city park. Then my father helped me put up a basket in the backyard of our house. He took a real interest in the whole affair and installed a yard light so I could practice in the evenings. I seemed to have a knack for the jumpshot and got pretty good at it. My high school coach had graduated from Wichita State and sent them films of two or three of my better games. They offered me a scholarship, which was about the only way I was going to get to college. I played there for three and a half years until I banged up my knee pretty bad. That’s it.” He took another drink of wine and waited for the assemblage to move on to matters of greater importance, but they wouldn’t let it go.

  “What position did you play, Michael?”

  “Guard.”

  “What are you, about six three?”

  “Six two, in my socks.”

  “Were you an Ail-American or anything?”

  “I made the All-Missouri Valley Conference Team my junior year.”

  Jellie put her hand on his and squeezed it. “Michael, you were a star, then!“

  He couldn’t tell if she was being genuine or mildly sarcastic. He hoped it was the latter and decided it was, with just a little bit of the former mixed in. “I never thought of it that way. I was just earning room and board, books and tuition.”

  “I’ll bet your parents were very proud of you. Ever think about turning pro?” The operations researcher had found a real live veteran of wars that mean nothing, right at the Thanksgiving table.

  “My dad pasted pictures of me from the Wichita Eagle all over Tillman’s Texaco. My mother was more concerned about my gra
des. She always thought athletics was a pretty dumb way for people to spend their time.”

  The operations researcher had batted only one for two and was troubled by that. He plainly wondered how any mother could not love her son enough to applaud his exploits in short pants under the lights of several hundred gymnasiums during his formative years and felt sorry for Michael, believing he’d been deprived of maternal affection.

  “As for becoming a professional, I had no interest, plus my first step wasn’t quick enough for the big leagues. The phone from the pros never rang, and I wouldn’t have answered it if it had.”

  “Don’t you miss playing, Michael?” Jellie’s mother was looking at him.

  “No, I don’t, Mrs. Markham. I truly don’t. In fact, I couldn’t wait for it to be over so I could get on with my life. Somewhere around my sophomore year in college I discovered I didn’t like playing basketball and never really had. I just liked fooling around with the art and physics of the long-range jumpshot. It was a boy’s tool for a boy’s game, and I haven’t touched a basketball in twenty years.”

  Jelly said, “That’s an interesting point of view… the art and physics of the long-range jumpshot is all that really mattered. Michael, you ought to do an article on that sometime.”

  If Jellie had put her hand back on his at that moment, he’d have written an essay about now-fading jumpshots on the linen tablecloth with a turkey bone. But she didn’t and changed the conversation by listing the selection of desserts available. Michael went for sour cream raisin pie. Jellie had made it from her grandmother’s recipe, and it was a knockout.

  Over coffee and brandy, someone asked Jellie about her name and where it came from. Her parents laughed, and Jellie pointed at both of them. It fell to her mother to tell the story.

  “When Jellie was about seven years old, she went through a plump stage. Her father started calling her his ‘little bowl of Jelly.’ The neighborhood children picked it up and teased her by calling her Jelly-Belly and Jellyroll and Jellybean and just about everything else you could imagine. She used to come in from playing with tears streaming down her face. As soon as that began happening, Leonard quit calling her Jelly and felt bad he’d ever started the whole business. But the kids wouldn’t drop it.”