Dancing with the Dead (21 page)

“They’re playing a waltz,” he said. “We might as well do that. Can’t work on nothing but tango, or that’s all you’ll know how to dance in Ohio.” He held out a hand for her, palm up, like a beggar imploring for alms. Not a hand that could ever harm anyone.

She followed him onto the dance floor and he led her into some basic box steps to warm her up, then through some balance steps and spiral turns. For a second they swept close to Lisa and her partner. Mary and Lisa glanced at each other, and Lisa suddenly tightened her posture and tilted back her head farther to emphasize a long and graceful dance line. Mary responded, kicking from the hip to follow Mel’s lead. A spark. An instant of rivalry and competition that might not have occurred a few months ago, before the two women had begun grooming for Ohio. Lisa had gone to the in-house Romance Studios’ competition in Miami and returned with a first in rumba and a second in fox-trot. Buoyed by success, however bogus, she’d been expressing grandiose ideas about Ohio.

Mel guided Mary to the edge of the dance floor and they stood for a second watching Helen and Nick waltz past and swirl into a parallel hesitation step. Helen was improving fast, too, and had plans to compete and succeed in November. A few competitive volts had also passed in her glance at Mary. The bulldog was coming out in the ladies.

“What we’re gonna do now,” Mel said, “is practice how to get on and off the floor. That’s important, ’cause when we walk on, it’s the judges’ first impression of us. When we’re gonna dance rhythm, you take my arm”—he extended his right arm and she wound her left through it—“and you look at me while I lead you out onto the floor. Sometimes I won’t be looking at you, ’cause I’m the one watching where we’re going. We walk fast, with a sense of purpose. I’ll choose our spot, probably toward the center of the floor, where the judges are most likely to pay attention to us. Main thing is, we need to seem confident.” He grinned, then bumped her lightly with his hip. “No problem for us, huh? We
are
confident.”

And he was right; she was surprised to feel a confidence that matched his own. Why couldn’t the competition start tomorrow? Or in five minutes?

He led her onto the floor as he’d described, and she almost pranced with eagerness.

As they were dancing, she watched Helen glide through a series of waltz pivots. She decided she could do them better.

For several measures all three whirling couples swept across the floor, rising and falling in unison on invisible waves of sound. It all clicked into place for Mary, as it had been doing lately, and she felt beautiful, whole, and without care. It was what dancing was about, finding oneself by losing oneself.

When they stopped, Mel told her everything would be fine if she danced that way in Ohio.

He walked over to the drinking fountain, and she followed. She felt so close to him at that moment, and had an overwhelming compulsion to confide in him. Right now, he might understand and be interested in her as a person, a woman as well as a student.

“I broke off my relationship with the guy I was living with,” she began. Just making conversation, her tone suggested; how ’bout those Cardinals? Playing great baseball!

“That whatsizname? Jake?”

It encouraged her that he remembered Jake’s name. “Yeah, he wasn’t treating me the best.”

“That so?” Mel leaned down and sucked water from the stainless steel spout’s feeble offering. She waited while he straightened up and wiped his forearm across his wet lips.

“It was what I needed to do,” she said.

“What
we
need to do,” Mel said, “is put our problems aside and practice some more.” He grabbed her hand and led her to the center of the studio, looking beyond her.

They assumed dance position.

Later that night, though she was exhausted, Mary practiced tango before the mirror in her apartment. She was beginning to feel as if the image in the glass were someone else, a very real other Mary whose body she controlled, and whose smoothness and precision far surpassed her own.

She was interrupted by the telephone. She seldom used her answering machine to screen callers these days. There was the slim possibility Rene might call. Of course, it might be Jake on the phone, but she was sure now she could handle that.

She quickly lifted the receiver, hoping as always.

Not Rene. Not Jake. Fred.

“I thought you better know Angie’s back in Saint Sebastian,” he said. Something in his voice. Bitterness? No. Fear?

“Alcohol again?” Mary asked. She knew the answer.

Only thought she knew.

“Cancer,” Fred said flatly. “They removed some polyps or something from her cervix that turned out to be malignant.”

Mary’s insides went cold. This was completely out of left field, the place this kind of news always seemed to come from. “What? Whoa? Are you telling me my mother’s got cervical cancer?”

“I’m afraid that’s what it is, Mary.”

“I’m driving down there,” she said, as distant as if the woman in the mirror had spoken, the other Mary who didn’t have to feel.

“Now, Mary, there ain’t much point in that. Angie might even be asleep by the time you get here. I think they gave her a sedative or something.”

“I’m leaving right now, Fred.”

He sighed. “Room four-oh-five, Mary.”

She hung up, feeling dizzy, and grabbed her blue windbreaker from the closet, hearing the wire hanger ping against the floor. Then she walked directly out the door without bothering to turn off the lights or the music.

Cancer. The dreadful word. She didn’t want to say it, or even to have it unsaid and crawling around in her mind.

With a rush of guilt, she realized her sense of impending doom was for herself, not Angie. Loneliness was gathering around her like a cold fog, affording only glimpses of a terrifying future.

Selfish! she admonished herself.

As she descended the creaking stairs, she repeated Angie’s name softly, each utterance rending her heart. “Angie, Angie. Mother.”

A terrible apprehension had taken form in her breast, an organic, destructive engine racing and fueled by fear.

She couldn’t stop trembling.

T
HOUGH VISITING HOURS
were over, the nurse on duty allowed Mary into Angie’s room.

Angie wasn’t asleep. Her eyes were half closed, but she was propped up in bed, and when Mary entered she smiled at her.

The room was almost exactly like the one Angie had been in for detoxification two months ago—same drab, institutional green walls, same black vinyl chair near the bed, same blood-pressure testing equipment and mysterious, many-dialed gadgetry mounted on the wall. But the other room had smelled of iodine, and this one had a musty scent about it, as if rain had blown in through an open window days ago and nothing had quite dried out.

On the windowsill was a small wilted flower arrangement, probably from the gift shop in the lobby. Fred’s scrawled signature was visible on the card, but Fred seemed to be nowhere around.

Mary sat down in the black chair, hearing it sigh as the cushion was compressed. “So. When’d you find out about this, Angie?”

“About a week ago. One of Doctor Keshna’s tests picked up something was wrong, then I came in and had more tests. After they removed some polyps from my cervix they did a biopsy and it came up positive. I didn’t mention it to you ’cause there was no sense you knowing. Nothing to be done anyways.”

“Nothing to be done? What’s that mean?” Mary asked, with a mingling of anger and fear.

“Means my blood’s spread the cancer and I gotta go through this chemotherapy business.”

“So what do the doctors say? Will chemotherapy do it? Will that cure you?”

“They say it might. I’ll be in here a few days, to start treatment, then it’ll be outpatient stuff till a few weeks pass. They tell me I’ll get weak then and probably have to check in and stay for a while. I tell you, Mary, I’m lucky; thank God for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.”

Mary stared at her. She’d known people who’d undergone chemotherapy. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Cervical cancer. Oh, Christ!
You might be dying, Mother, and your reaction is to thank God for your insurance.

“Don’t take all this too hard,” Angie said. “I told you I got great medical coverage, and it might be nothing.”

“Nothing? Cancer?”

“Don’t say it, Mary. I don’t like hearing the word.”

“I sure as hell don’t like saying it.” Mary wiped her eyes, which had welled with tears the second time that evening. These tears stung. “Dr. Keshna taking care of you?”

“No, not her specialty. Brainton’s my doctor. Yuppie type, looks about twenty-two. Cervical cancer’s his game.” Angie shook her head weakly. “You know, this didn’t have a damned thing to do with my drinking. Ain’t that ironic?”

“That’s supposed to be a comfort?”

“Worth drinking to.”

“I’m gonna talk to Dr. Brainton.”

“Go ahead, Mary. Maybe you can convince him I’m well and they’ll tell me to go home.”

“Don’t be so fucking sarcastic!”

Angie, very tired from whatever they’d given her, sighed long and loud and let her head drop to the side on the fluffed white pillow. She smiled resignedly and not with her eyes. “I was furious, too, when I first found out. Couldn’t be happening to me. Just ain’t goddamn fair . . .”

“Angie, chemotherapy has a lotta side effects, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I’ll feel like shit for a spell. Hair’ll likely fall out, that kinda thing.” She was quiet for a while.

Mary heard people pass in the hall, soles shuffling. A woman laughed.
How dare she!

“Duke went quick, didn’t he?” Angie said with an edge of envy and maybe resentment. “Saw the other car coming and suffered about two seconds, if he was sober enough to know what was happening at all. He was always lucky, the bastard.”

“Lucky when he married.”

“Ha! Tell you, Mary, I was gonna leave your father. Finally gonna take you and go. Then came the accident.” Her voice wavered and weakened, like a radio signal fading.

“Sure you were, Angie.”

“You don’ know . . .”

Mary waited for her to finish what she’d started to say. “Angie?”

Her mother was asleep. An old, old woman whose lips fluttered when she exhaled. Her soul might escape her like a feather.

Mary stood up from the chair. Angie was right; she
was
furious. At cancer, at herself, even at poor Angie. At fate. At the charlatans who assured people there was a reason for things. The parish priest she hadn’t seen in years. The nuns who’d taught her in the sweat-and-varnish purgatory of Saint Elizabeth’s. She paced from one side of the room to the other, faster and faster, whirling at each end of her short journey to prevent herself from striding into the wall.
Stay mad, you won’t be afraid.

Finally she stood still, staring at Angie and listening to her faint snoring. Then she left the green, musty room and asked at the nurses’ station if she could talk to Dr. Brainton.

The doctor, she was told, had left for the day and wouldn’t be back until ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Mary thought of asking for his home number, but she knew the nurses would refuse, angels of mercy protecting a god. It wouldn’t be right, or informative, to try calling the doctor at home anyway; she’d no doubt get only his answering service.

She rode the elevator down to the lobby, walked through a maze of halls to Detox, and asked to see Dr. Keshna. Then she waited in one of the molded plastic chairs by the table laden with dog-eared copies of
Time
and
Newsweek.
A newspaper was folded sloppily in one of the chairs; did it contain something on the murdered dancers?

“You always seem to be on duty,” Mary said, when Dr. Keshna, in a rumpled green surgical gown, had pushed through the wide swinging doors and was standing calmly before her.

Dr. Keshna nodded solemnly, as if yes indeed she did live at the hospital.

“I’ve been upstairs visiting my mother.”

“How is she?”

“Well, other than a little cancer, she’s okay.”

Dr. Keshna had obviously dealt with shocked and angry relatives who were themselves stunned by whatever microbe had attacked their loved ones. She said nothing. Her large dark eyes were kind and knowing. Mary wondered if the doctor was what Hindus called an “old soul,” one who’d been reincarnated countless times and acquired a residue of wisdom.

In the face of her placidity, Mary realized anger was futile, illogical. It could change nothing.

She slumped down deeper in the hard chair, until the base of her spine ached. “Okay, I’m sorry. None of this is your fault.”

“It’s something that happens,” Dr. Keshna said.

“How much do you know about her condition?”

“Some. Not as much as Dr. Brainton.”

“He’s not here to ask. You are.”

“Yes.”

“Will she live?”

“Possibly.”

“What are the chances? The odds?”

“That I couldn’t say.”

“Did what happened to her have anything to do with her alcoholism?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. Human organisms work dependent upon each other. I don’t mean to be flippant, but nothing to do with cancer, or alcoholism, is perfectly predictable.”

“So, is a medical prognosis just an exercise in unpredictability?”

“Always, I’m afraid.”

“You don’t talk like most doctors.”

“Your mother’s not my patient now, and I couldn’t predict the outcome of her illness with any accuracy.”

“I’m only asking for your guess.”

“After she completes chemotherapy, then we’ll see.” The sad, wise smile. Old smile. “Until then, try to be patient.”

Mary felt her sorrow, her rage, rise up in her. And something else—hopelessness. She bowed her head and began to cry silently. The tears tracking down her cheeks felt hot, as if she were fevered. She wanted to pray but resisted. At least she had the courage of her nonconvictions.

Dr. Keshna’s fingertips touched her quaking shoulder. “I’m sorry. Do you want me to give you something to help you sleep?”

She nodded, and the doctor disappeared, then returned in a few minutes with a small brown plastic vial. “Take only one pill, just before bedtime,” she said.