House of Dance (10 page)

“G
O AHEAD
,” I said, and Teresa began with color. Color in the skies, color in the earth, color in the marketplaces, where she would go, she told me, as a little girl to help choose the hard green tomatoes and the not precisely ripe yet plums and the Manchego cheese that was more than three months old and also the youngest partridge, the pinkest pork, the white-bellied sea bass, the red mullet. But the brightest colors, Teresa said, were the flamenco colors, flamenco being more than a dance, more of an
invention performed in black boots and dresses that looked like animals no regular body would for one minute trust. Flamenco was back there, back then. It was home.

Teresa’s father had been a banker. Her mother had been a beauty. There had been a cook named Stella and a garden of yarrow, aster, chive, marigold, and in that garden there’d been butterflies—wings, Teresa said, like so many stained glass windows. There had been places to sit in the garden. There had been birds.

But what happened to Teresa when she was ten was the reason she had come to be in my country, in my grandfather’s house at the time of his dying. She had been sitting with her mother on the couch one day. She had been sitting, looking outside at the flowers. Both of them wearing silky white pajamas, both of them just resting.

Then Teresa’s mother had gone upstairs and, after something more than the usual
time, had not returned. There was, Teresa said, something wrong all of a sudden blowing through the house, and now she was up off the couch and running across the floor and through the kitchen and up the curving marble steps of that big white house, calling for her mother. And then there she was, her mother on her back, on the black-flecked marble of the bathroom floor. Teresa had turned the water off in the shower stall and cried out for help until Stella had heard, but there was nothing for it. Her mother had been alive. Next, her mother was gone. One thing, then the other.

After that, Teresa said, she would let no one touch her mother, no one. It was Teresa herself, ten years old, who buttoned her mother into her burial gown and tied her hair in a ribbon and powdered her eyelids with a lilac color and blew the dust from between her lashes. It was Teresa. Afterward there was only sadness in the house and her father
working longer hours at the bank. Stella stopped making gazpacho, stopped peeling cloves of garlic, stopped putting the old bread in water to soak, stopped going to the market for clams. The garden grew knotty and cold. The butterflies went elsewhere. Teresa herself woke every morning thinking maybe she would go downstairs and find her mother, dressed in white.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said when her story was done.

“There is time,” she said. “Still. With your grandfather.”

“I have been planning something,” I said.

“What precisely is it?” she asked.

And I told her.

O
N THE WAY-OPPOSITE
end of the strip from where Granddad lived are the places people go to get things fixed. The shoe guy, quick with new soles. A strange wrinkled woman who won’t say much but is purely brainy, people say, with messed-up jewelry and clogged-up clocks. It’s where the town’s big banks sit, and also the fast-serve burger joints and the three gas stations facing off on a single corner, one of them the station where Nick works with his dad in the summer, the two of them scurrying around like crabs on their
backs, going face to belly with snagged autos.

The day after Teresa’s stories, the morning after I had danced well, at last, with Max, and before I got to Granddad’s, I went to see Miss Marie—swung up and around and beneath the tunnel, beneath the too-early-for-action House of Dance, and headed west, paralleling the train tracks until I got to where I was going. There was a thick bracelet of jingle bells pinned to the inside of Miss Marie’s door, and when I walked in, that thing rang, a bizarrely winter song in summer. It wasn’t long before Miss Marie appeared, broke through to the front of the store from the back, where she’d been working behind a pair of thick paisley curtains. Miss Marie was like a walking time capsule, stuck in back who knows when, with her dyed brown hair tied up high on her head with a little purple bow. She was wearing a white blouse with a pointy collar and a dark-purple pleated skirt—had on black tights and gray ballerina-
style slippers. She looked precisely the way she had looked all those Christmases ago.

“Why, Rosie Keith, hello,” she said, after she had squinted at me through her magnifying glasses. “Have you ever grown,” she said, taking her glasses off and setting them aside. Not a question, so I didn’t answer.

Her shop was long and narrow, like a coffee bar, which is what it was in the old days, my father had told me once, before she took it over. It had two pink chairs at one end, like dollhouse chairs, and a mirror straight between them, and on three round tables with scratched glass tops there were mounds and mounds of fabric samples. A bunch of magazines was flopped on the floor, some teal-green binders, and on the wall opposite the mirror and chairs was a poster of Princess Diana. If anything had changed since I had been there years before, I didn’t see it. Even the tomato pincushion that Miss Marie wore on her wrist was the same; so was the little
pair of silver scissors that hung from a ribbon like a necklace.

“Busy, Miss Marie?” I asked.

“Always,” she said. “And always a pleasure to help you.” She sized me up with her eyes, as if she were halfway toward making me some floaty, boy-eye-catching summer dress, and of course I stopped her right there.

“What I need,” I said, “is a wheelchair cushion. Something to take the edge off the hard, thin plastic.”

She frowned for a moment, a thousand pleats closing in around her eyes.

“Everything okay at home?” she asked.

Ha,
I thought.
Don’t even go there.
“It’s for my granddad,” I said. “He’s not been well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked at me hard, waiting for more, but I was here on a business call and wasn’t about to explain about the apocalypse cancer—the calcium, the kidneys, the bones, the running short of time.

“It’s a troll-ugly wheelchair,” I said. “And
it’s hard as stone to sit on. I was thinking of something soft and fancy.”

Miss Marie brightened. “Tassels?” she asked. “Piping around the edges?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Something fabulous. Gallant.” I liked that word,
gallant
. I had seen it in one of Granddad’s books.

“It won’t have to cost much,” she told me, touching the purple ribbon that was pulled so tight at the top of her funny, pointed head. “I’ve got fabric ends, won’t even charge you for them.”

“Money,” I said, “is not an issue.”

“Size?” she said.

“Got it.” I pulled a crumpled piece of paper from the pocket of my shorts. I had measured the day before, with a twelve-inch ruler I had found in one of Granddad’s kitchen drawers.

“You don’t mess around,” Miss Marie said, “do you?”

“Not when there’s so little time, I don’t.” She put her glasses on now, to look at me
again. I let her look as long as she had to.

“I’ll make this a priority,” she said after she’d satisfied herself.

“Thank you. And also?” Here I got shy and a little self-conscious, stumbling a bit.

“Ah,” she said. “Something for you?” she asked.

“A dress,” I said, searching for words. “Something special. Something pure and simple and soaked with color.” She took out her measuring tape, and I lifted up my arms. She brought spools of things from the room behind her. She showed me pictures, patterns, threads. I asked if she worked fast.

“Fastest anywhere,” she said. “Come back in three days, and you’ll have a dress.”

“Don’t forget the wheelchair cushion,” I said.

“Four days,” she said.

The bright-red digitals on the bank read 84º F and 9:46
A.M
. when the jingle bells rang me
out of Miss Marie’s. Early still in Granddad’s world. Teresa would be wanting him to herself; that’s how she’d put it. For baths, for medicines, for talking to. For whatever nurses do, their secrets.

Already the heat of the day was roofing over everything—the buildings, cars, and sidewalks, the people and the trains. The heat was there, and above the heat was the sky, and in between the heat and the sky a few birds flew. At the gas stations across the street the air was bleary. People looked like water drops. The asphalt leaked away from itself.

The light turned, and I crossed the street on the diagonal. JB’s Automotive, the auto shop where Nick worked summers, was the nicest one of the corner three, with a white, blue, and green striped outside and a brand-new painted inside. You had to walk past the pumps to get to the repair shop, and I did, weaving between two fueling-up SUVs and over the hump of the island and in through
the wide-open doors of the shop, where a shiny red Ford Focus was suspended above the concrete floor, like a ladybug on someone’s finger. On the long back wall a row of tools and cans sat arranged, it seemed to me, by size and color, and there was a steel table piled high with catalog stacks and tubes and things, and above the desk there was a bunch of hooks and dangling sets of keys. The place sounded like air being sucked in and cranked out and wheezing. I called for Nick. From out behind the Focus his dad appeared. He was short and muscular with tree-trunk arms. He had a movie-star mustache and thick graying hair, a
JB
sewn onto his uniform pocket. He took his time remembering.

“Rosie?” he asked after a while. “Rosie Keith?”

“Nick’s friend,” I said. I shifted in my tennis shoes. Pulled a loose strand of hair behind one ear. “From next door.”

“All coming back to me,” he said, tapping
one side of his head with a blackened index finger. Then he said: “Just kidding with you, Rosie. I didn’t forget.”

“Nick around?” I asked.

“Placing parts orders in the back office,” he said. “You want him?”

I felt my face turn red.

“Hold on.”

I stayed put. Watched Nick’s dad disappear into a back room, watched Nick come out behind him a few minutes later. He was so much like his dad, only taller: the same wide arms, the same thick hair, the same gray-blue cotton shirt with the
JB
sewn onto the pocket, the way of standing there, looking me over, a slow smile crawling up his face.

“Hey,” he said, in the sleepy voice that makes teachers think he’s not listening.

“Hey,” I answered. He put his big arms out to hug me. I hugged his bigness back.

“What’s up?”

I shrugged. “You busy?”

Nick looked at his dad, who also shrugged. Nick heaved his shoulders. “Just the Focus,” he said, looking at me, then turning toward his dad. “Until eleven o’clock, when a Wrangler’s coming in. Right, boss?”

Nick’s dad flicked one big-thumbed, greasy hand toward the town’s center. “Just be back,” he said, “for the Wrangler.”

We walked out of the shade of the shop into the heat of the day, which had sunk down even lower. The commuter traffic was gone, and in its place were all the midmorning moms. “You hear about Rocco?” Nick said when the light turned green.

“What about Rocco?”

“Parents sent him to some college prep boot camp. Can you picture it?”

“No,” I said, thinking of Rocco’s square face and crooked class-clown smile. “I can’t, actually. He’s probably stolen everybody’s socks by now.”

“Probably.”

“Probably tried to flirt with one of the teachers.”

“That would be Rocco.”

We had crossed over to the other side. Mr. D’Imperio was down the street a ways, putting up some ribbon of a sign, and there was a burst of balloons tied to Whiz Bang’s glass front door. Three of the bleached mannequins from the everything store had been dragged outside and dressed with ancient bathing suits, to advertise some summer sale of garden tools and beach rafts. I walked so that a part of me was tucked inside Nick’s shadow. “How’s the auto-repair business?” I asked.

“Same.”

“Anything good about it?”

“You’re funny, Rosie. Real funny.”

“You like Sweet Loaves cinnamon buns?”

“Haven’t had one for forever.”

“Weird,” I said.

We’d gotten as far as Sweet Loaves, and I pulled open the door. Nick stood behind me,
held it. “Well, if it isn’t Miss Keith,” said Jimmy Vee, the proprietor’s son. He was twenty-three, tall and sweet, with that blond-brown hair color that doesn’t go by much of a name, and he had raisin eyes that squinted to tiny when he smiled. Jimmy Vee worked for his dad in the summer. The rest of the time he was getting his Ph.D. He had graduated number one from Somers High, and his picture had hung in the valedictorian display case ever since, the teachers still speaking of him as if he belonged to them, as if they had made him who he was. “One?” he said. “Or two?” He gestured toward the wedge of glass case that was devoted to buns.

“Two for now,” I told him. “One to go.”

“You expanding your repertoire?” Jimmy asked me, bending down to half his size to pull a tray of buns from the case. I didn’t know how he could stand it, working summers alongside such sweets. I’d have had to eat three buns a day at least. I’d have had raisins
for ears and a snout.

“You know Nick?” I asked.

“Seen him around,” Jimmy said. The two nodded at each other over the counter.

“JB’s Automotive,” Nick said, as if that explained him.

“Rosie here is one of our VIP customers,” Jimmy said, speaking directly to Nick now, as if I weren’t even there. He put two of the buns on plates, lowered the other into a crisp white bag.

“She’s something else,” Nick said, and I felt my face blush. Dug into my pockets for cash.

“My treat,” Nick said.

“Nope,” I said. “I invited. I insist.”

“Get her next time,” Jimmy said, taking my dollar bills and my change.

My face was a furnace getting hotter and hotter. I grabbed our stuff and moved it to one of the round tables with the ice-cream parlor chairs. Nick sat down across from me. I smiled stupidly. He reached for his plate.

“You eat these with your hands?” he said.

“Leave nothing behind,” I said.

We sat for a while eating, not talking. We watched some customers come and go, moms buying bread for their families, dads buying doughnuts for themselves, one funny-looking man with too-long hair in a Hawaiian shirt requesting a custom cake for later that week. “Vanilla,” he kept saying, “with pink doodad flowers. A girl’s cake. Real sweet. That’s what I want.” When it got too busy, Jimmy’s dad would push through the silver doors that divided the customers from the bake shop. He was as wide as Jimmy was tall. Jimmy, we all thought, had been adopted.

“Nick?” I finally said.

“Yeah?”

“I kind of have a question.”

He lifted his broad shoulders, let them fall back down. He looked at me, straight on, eyes in my eyes. It was like a fishhook dropping down my throat and snagging my gut. It took
me a second or two to remember what it was I’d meant to say.

“My granddad”—finally I got it out—“is dying.”

“Oh,” Nick said. His eyes hooked even deeper into mine. It felt as if I’d fallen straight through sky.

“And my mom—”

“I know.” He stopped me to save me from having to say. “I’ve seen her.” He looked at me, looked at me so hard I heard myself swallow, fishhook in the gut and all, nerves from toes to ears.

“Remember the girl from the train?” I said.

He thought a second: “The performer? With the barrettes?”

I nodded. “Remember you dancing?”

“I wasn’t dancing.” He looked away from me, out through the glass door, to the street, which had quieted down now that the trains had gone off peak. He turned to look at the counter where Jimmy Vee was standing, but if
Jimmy had heard me talking dance, he didn’t let on. He was using glass cleaner on the counter and cases, making room for the bread.

“Your feet were,” I said, soft as I could.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”

“Your feet were good.”

“I wasn’t watching my feet.”

“I was.” I knew I was trespassing deep into the danger zone. I kept trespassing. “I’m dancing now, Nick. I’m—” I sort of turned in my chair and made a gesture toward the vicinity of the House of Dance.

“Well, that’s cool,” he said, but I could tell he was confused. I could tell he was mostly worrying about what this had to do with him.

“Yeah. Well, I’m kind of having a party.”

He looked at me, quizzical. He pushed back against the ice-cream parlor chair. Crossed his arms over his chest and his JB’s Automotive logo, let his eyebrows drop low, and waited, while I sat pinned to my seat, hunting for words.

“My granddad,” I said again, “is dying.”

“I know,” he said. “You told me.”

“Dancing is the opposite of dying,” I said.

He looked at me strangely, a look of wonder on his face. A look that said, “Come on, Rosie. Say it.”

“Dancing is going somewhere without packing your bags. Like you did on the train when the girl sang. Dancing is the thing I’m giving Granddad.”