House of Dance (4 page)

A
FTERWARD
,
WHEN IT
was getting past dusk and my mother hadn’t yet come home, I picked up the pink Princess phone my father had once sent me with a note, “Call anytime.” Yeah. Right. I carried the phone to the center of my bed, sat down, and dialed Leisha’s cell, even though she was what she called an emergency cell phone user, which no girl in Somers High or perhaps the whole world could understand except for me. Leisha’s an in-person kind of friend. She’s a big hit or miss on the phone. But I was lonely,
and I took a chance, and after five long rings she answered, a little out of breath.

“Leisha,” I said, “it’s me.”

“Hi, you.” I could picture her with her hair falling down around her shoulders, a T-shirt on, a pair of silky shorts cut high on her long, lovely legs. She might have been smoothing after-sun butter lotion on, or polishing her toenails with her signature color, which is dark purple tending toward black. She might have been finishing a bowl of orange sherbet, which was something she had almost every night and never gained an ounce.

“How are the little terrors?” I asked.

“Rotten,” she said. “Want to know
how
rotten? Jake managed to get his head stuck in a sand bucket today. Yanked the thing on like a marching-band hat and then couldn’t get it off. Had to take him back to the house to cut him free, and he screamed every step of the way.”

“Pretty,” I said.

“Totally Jake,” she said. “Thank God no one I know is down here.” She was whispering, so I had the phone pressed hard against my ear. I imagined her turned away from where everyone else was, curled around the secret of our conversation in a house at the beach where the air outside smelled like breeze and the air inside was all damp towels and little-boy screams and clumps of sand. “Lucky for you,” she said, “that you’re cousin free.”

“I guess,” I said.

“Then again,” she said, “there’s this lifeguard. Totally and completely hot. Take Nick and times him by a hundred.”

“Do you talk to him?”

“No, I don’t talk to him. I just look at him, and that’s enough.” I pictured Leisha down at the beach with her perfect model body. If she’d seen the guy, then he’d seen her. There was no doubting that.

“So what’s with you?” she said. “What’s up?”

“I wanted…” I began, and then I didn’t know where to start, how to explain how my summer was going, what it was that I felt, why I’d called in the first place when I had to know that she would be busy, that she wouldn’t have the time to talk. “My granddad’s been sick,” I said fast. “And my mother’s my mother. And Nick is never home. Stuff.” I wanted to tell Leisha about the House of Dance and the balloon bouquet. About the dancers I’d seen through the window. About my grandfather reading magazines on places he would never ever get to. “Music and throb,” I wanted to say, but that would have been stupid, so I still kept hunting for words, and then, before I knew what words to use, all hell was letting loose.

“Oh, my God,” Leisha said, whispering no more.

“What?” I could hear crashing and scampering, someone bawling his eyes out.

“I think Jake’s just flushed his brother’s
swimsuit down the toilet.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. I’m not. Oh. My. God. It never ends. I have to go, Rosie. I’m sorry.”

“Eight more weeks and we’re juniors together,” I said.

“Heaven,” she said. “Compared to this.” It was getting louder and louder where she was. As if she were taking a walk in a zoo right around feeding time.

I hung up the phone, and the skies were dark. I lay down and hoped that I would fall asleep sooner than I could start to cry.

T
HE VERY LAST TIME
I saw my father, he was standing in the shadows. There was the bigness of a moon shining in through my bedroom windows, but all I saw was half of his face and the thumb that he was pressing to his earlobe. He thought I was asleep, and even though I was pretty sure he was leaving for good—I had heard what he had said; I had heard my mother crying—that’s what I let him think, that I was asleep, because he didn’t deserve to know how much I was going to miss him.

My father was a big, tall guy and half Italian, and he was more celebrity than anything else, made you feel as big and special as he was when he was in the room. Then he’d leave and wouldn’t come home for days, and he’d make you feel forgotten. When I was little, I told Nick, Leisha, and Rocco that he was an astronaut. I told them that he rode elephants in India. I told them that he was digging up a new Egyptian mummy. I told them that he was far too famous to spend much time at home. But when he left for good, I told them nothing except that life was better without him. “More room for me in my house” is what I said, and my very best friends made like they believed me.

The first year was the hardest: the first birthday of mine, the first birthday of Mom’s, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas. Granddad would come, but my mother still was crying or about to start crying, tears streaking down her face and globbing her
mascara. I think it was after Christmas when Granddad started to say that it was time that Mom moved on, that life was to be lived, that there was a big wide world to see, and maybe, he said, my father’s running off had been some kind of hidden blessing. My mom didn’t appreciate that, not at all. “You never liked him,” she would answer, “so don’t pretend you understand.”

“I know something about loss,” he’d say, “and I know something about not living.”

“Mom never stopped loving you,” Mom would say. “My loss is bigger. My loss is learning that everyone else is loved more than you are. Don’t think you know what I’m going through or that you can make it better.”

“You’re young, Jeanine,” he’d say. “Trust me.”

“I’m all through trusting,” she’d say. “He left. He didn’t want me.”

“Where are you going to get, feeling sorry for yourself?”

“Where did you ever get, Dad? Think about it. Where did you ever go?”

She’d stomp upstairs, her little body making hippo sounds, her crying avalanching down from the top of the stairs, from her room. She’d leave Granddad with me, and it was like a scene in a show that you could count on happening until Granddad just plain stopped coming by. He made like he lived a million miles away, even though he’s been walking distance since forever.

The next day, when I came home from Granddad’s, I was betting on the house’s being empty, betting that Mom would be somewhere with Mr. Paul, holding on to her new idea of happiness. I put my key into the lock, but the lock was already popped. I pushed wide the door, and the lights were on. I heard low talk, and guessing now what I was about to find, I followed its sound. I found them together in the kitchen—he stirring something with a spoon in a pot on the
burner, she standing beside him with her chin on the ledge of his shoulder. Mr. Paul was not a big man, and he wasn’t handsome either. He had overalls on over a navy-blue T-shirt, sandals on his feet. On the parts of his head where hair still grew he had buzzed it short.

“Have a good day?” I asked, louder than necessary, so I could freak out my mom, who had not heard me come in.

“Rosie,” she said when she turned. “Well. Hello, Rosie. Mr. Paul is making pasta.” She scuttled away from him as if she were stacked on crab legs and touched a finger to an itch beneath her chin.

“Uh-huh.” I folded my arms across my chest and stood there solid, looking straight into her eyes, which were, I suddenly noticed, a lot like Granddad’s. She combed one hand through her long black hair and stared back at me, practically pleading.

“You hungry, Rosie?”

“Nope.”

“You want to sit with us?”

She didn’t mean it, and I didn’t budge: “I’m busy.”

“Did you say hello to Mr. Paul?” Mom asked, because now he had turned too, was stirring the pot behind his back, as if pasta couldn’t be left for just one minute.

“How’s the window-washing business?” I asked very fake politely.

“It’s our busy season,” he said.

“I bet.”

“Couldn’t keep up with all the demand without your mother.”

“Yeah. She’s something.”

“Really, Rosie. There’s plenty of pasta. If you want to join us.”

“Ate already.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess.”

“It was more than good. It was delicious.”

My mother gave me a look that said “Please please please don’t mortify me, Rosie,” begged me with her eyes. But the
mean part of me was already loose, and I was fighting a little urge to ask Mr. Paul about his wife. “Is she waiting on you for supper?” I wanted to say. “Is she thinking she’s forgotten? Does she even have any idea that you’ve stopped loving her?” I had a million ways that I could ask it, but I held my tongue. I took my time walking over to the pantry and pulling myself out a box of saltines and a jar of peanut butter. “For later,” I said, and I turned on my heels and took the stairs, two by two, up to my room. I slammed the door behind me, as loud as a door can be slammed. I sat down on one corner of my bed. I inhaled and exhaled, inhaled and exhaled so my heart would stop beating so fast. I didn’t know at whom I was maddest—my dad for leaving, my mom for needing, or Mr. Paul for taking advantage. I didn’t know for whom I felt sorriest: Mrs. Paul or me or my mother, all being messed with by a loser.

I unscrewed the lid on the peanut butter
jar and dug the shovel of a saltine in, dug in another and then another, letting the crumbs snow all over my bed. I tried not to listen to the putting down of plates and the pulling out of chairs for the dinner down below.
Whatever,
I thought.
Whatever.
Because it was not like anyone was asking me if I wanted the bald one around.

After a while my mouth was peanut glue and the saltines were like cardboard. I stood to check on the moon, which wasn’t that full and wasn’t that close. I opened the window and closed my eyes and tried to hear the music from the House of Dance, but in between me and the dancers there were cars and trains, and houses and people and their sorrows, and coughing and silence, and TV and romance, and things lost and stolen. I couldn’t hear the throb at the House of Dance. But I could hear Mr. Paul and my mother laughing, puffs of sweetened ha-ha stuff inside mumbled conversation. My mom
was laughing, but she didn’t mean it. I knew precisely how her laughter sounded when she felt glad or lucky.

Back when he was ours, my dad had a knack for making Mom and me feel lucky. Because we’d been chosen by him. Because he was so handsome. Because nobody told his kind of stories. We didn’t have to have anything else if we had him, that’s how lucky he made us, and if he carried me on his shoulders, I could touch the sun, and if he said “RosieRosieRosie,” I knew the melody of my own name, and if I did something that made him smile, then I was blessed and lucky, both. But lucky, Mom said, after he’d gone for good, was no kind of blessing. Lucky was the taste of something sweet that had already been swallowed.

Mom wanted nothing lucky from right then on, which is the best way I have of explaining Mr. Paul. She’d answered an ad: “Window Washer Wanted.” Good with rags
and a bucket, I guess. Good with breakable things. Good at coming and going, not being noticed, good at standing on top of a ladder, nothing, I’m telling you, nothing the least bit lucky about it. “You take what you’re given, and when nobody’s giving, you take what you can get,” she’d said. I remember that because I was eleven. Because lucky for me had become Leisha and Nick, and also Rocco, when he wasn’t being stupid. Lucky was having my mom all to myself before she fell for Mr. Paul. I’d just thought that she’d gone off to make some money. I didn’t know that she was about to achieve her own brand of leaving too, that it would be up to me to fix my family’s sorrows.

You want to know how I know how long I’ve been abandoned by my celebrity dad? I keep a running count of all his twenties. That night I had 385, no more, no less, which, in money speak, equals $7,700. The week after that I’d have 386. One week more, and—the
math could not be more no-brainer; even Rocco, his mighty self, could do it. The shoe box behind the crate of toys was getting explosively full.

What difference could it possibly make if I dug in to relieve the pressure?

Who was going to notice?

T
HREE DAYS LATER
, approaching Granddad’s, I heard voices that I deciphered at first as coming from TV. But then again, I thought, Granddad’s clunker didn’t work; besides, the closer I got, the plainer it was that one of the voices was Granddad’s. I could hear him clear as anything as I walked through his kitchen door. I could hear him talking about cranberry juice, the newest best drink, he was saying, for morning.

“Granddad?” I called.

“Right here, Rosie,” he answered, as if I
wouldn’t know by then where to find him. I walked through the kitchen and into the dining-living-bookshelves room, and there he was, and there was Riot, and there she was, a stranger. She had big brown eyes, and a braid of color on one wrist that could have been a tattoo; her white shirt made her skin seem darker. Her hair was long and like my mother’s hair—the color of black ink and silky—and she was standing much too near my grandfather, holding a tall glass with a little stain of cranberry color at the bottom. She’d stuffed a pillow into the place beneath one of his arms—a bigger, fatter pillow than the one he’d had before. “This is Teresa,” Granddad finally introduced her.

“Teresa,” I said.

“And this,” he said, indicating me with his chin, “is Rosie.”

“Your granddad’s been telling me about you,” Teresa said, her words coming out decorated with some kind of lacy, sweet accent.
Indian? Turkish? Moroccan?

“Teresa is here to help,” Granddad said, and as if to prove it, she fitted the new pillow to the place behind his head, patted it down until he settled against it. Riot, in her wicker basket, stood up, stretched, and mewed.

“I thought
I
was here to help,” I said, looking at Granddad and then at Teresa; knotting my arms tight across my chest. All of a sudden I was feeling fierce inside, because wasn’t I just starting to figure things out, and did I really need this, some other kink in my messed-up family system? Defense or offense? What was called for? Who was whose, and what was I?

“There are different kinds of help, Rosie,” Granddad said. He was looking fresh, with a pair of clean pants on, a clean white shirt, fresh-shaven face. Better—okay, I admit it—than he’d looked with just me around.

“I’m your granddad’s nurse,” Teresa said. “To help”—she nodded toward him—“your
granddad.” She said it in her up-and-lilting accent, looking at me steady as a nurse is steady, not the tiniest, speckiest dust of self-confidence lacking, even though she’d told me nothing new.

“You need a nurse?” I said to Granddad, through tight lips that stopped me from saying anything more. I knew it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, I knew that he was dying, but I also knew that he couldn’t die soon, that we had plenty of cleaning and sorting to do, that I needed time, that we were granddaughter-grandfather, and that came—had to come—first. I didn’t like what I was seeing.

“Rosie.” Granddad said my name, real quiet, in a warning way.

“I was just finished,” Teresa said, smiling her extremely white smile. She snapped shut the black vinyl case that had been sitting on the dining room table. She told Granddad she’d see him soon enough. He said he wasn’t
absconding. “Absconding?” She didn’t know the word.

He said, “Absconding. Running off.” She laughed. Then she told me to have a good day, and I did not return the favor, and I waited until I heard the kitchen door close. I beamed my most peeved look at Granddad.

“Teresa is doing her job,” he said. “There was no reason to be rude.”

“You could have told me.”

“You’re earlier than usual. I thought that she’d be gone before you got here.”

“Is she supposed to be a secret?”

“No. But she’s not supposed to concern you.” He settled even more deeply against his pillow and closed his eyes for a spell.

“What country is she from?” I demanded.

Behind closed eyes he answered: “Teresa was born in the south of Spain.”

“Is that a real tattoo on her wrist or a fake one?”

“Well, that’s something to ask her.”

“How many words doesn’t she know?”

“You’re full of interesting questions.”

“Did you tell her about In Trust?” I asked.

“That’s for you to do, if you want to.” He opened his eyes and gave me the look that said he was done with talk for a while. I looked past him, toward the pile of things that I was supposed to be sorting. Truth was I had hardly made a dent. I’d been sitting around, mostly, talking mostly, and there were still piles of things on windowsills, tabletops, shelves, still big old parts and pieces of whatever sitting on his floor, still a lot of stuff in the old D.L. Maybe my lack of doing had made a nurse like Teresa obligatory. Maybe if I’d done a better job, I’d still have Granddad all to myself.

“How’d you get yourself a southern Spanish nurse?” I asked.

“The gods of fortune, I guess.” He smiled behind his eyes, still closed.

“How often will she be coming?”

“When I need her, which will be often, Rosie. And those are just the facts.”

“You still need me, though, right?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know if your stereo works?”

“My stereo?”

“That thing. I mean, all the pieces of that thing. On the floor beside you. Here.” I pointed to the mess.

He didn’t lean over the couch to look. He didn’t even open his eyes. He just nodded, slowly. “That’s an antique, Rosie. They don’t even make those anymore.”

“Yeah. But does it work?”

“Well, I can’t say that it’s broken.”

“When’s the last time you used it?”

“When I put a song on for Aideen.”

“So I can mess with it? You don’t mind?”

“Whatever’s mine,” he said, “is yours.”

He slept then, and I sat on the floor near him, pulled the turntable and the amps and the
speakers and the cables out to where I could get a better look. The clear plastic lid on the turntable had a thick, snowy layer of dust that I half blew off, half rubbed away with the bottom of my old Dippy Don’s T-shirt. Beneath the lid was the round, flat part that you put the records on, also some knobs, a long silver arm with a needle that I could only hope still had sufficient scratch, and a name: Sansui Automatic Return/Shut-off. The speakers were the size and shape of a Cheez-It cracker box. The cables had yellow ends, red ends, white ends, prongs. The amp was pretty much just a black box with holes in the back that had been shaped to fit the cables.

The first thing that I had to figure out was what connected to what, which wasn’t going to be easy. I tried every combination I could think of until I found the working one, until the speakers seemed to hum when I held them to my ear and all the dust there had
been had been blown off the silver needle. I didn’t know what time it was or whether Granddad was still sleeping. I didn’t know whether the records in those sleeves could still give up their songs.

“Here goes nothing,” I said to myself. I made my way to the album pile, chose the one with the cover that had lots of brightly colored squares and a name that seemed right for the day:
What Kind of Fool Am I.
I tipped that record out of its sleeve, fitted it onto the turntable, and dialed the turntable to on. Like a dinosaur bird waking up from sleep, the arm with the needle lifted and, slowly, slowly, shook toward the spinning record, hung above it creakily, and then dropped. There were a couple of seconds of absolute fuzz, the sound ginger ale makes after it’s poured over ice, as the needle slid from the slippery black edge in toward the grooves. And then there was music and a man singing, little pops and crackles, but mostly a song and
the record still spinning and the needle still riding the grooves. I fell back against the side of Granddad’s couch, 100 percent amazed by what I’d done.

“Sammy Davis Jr.,” I heard Granddad say after a while. “Voice of an angel.”

“Brought to you,” I said, still on the floor below him, “by Rosie, the one and only.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” I said. “That
is
right. It wasn’t going to play all by itself.”

“You watch your language, Rosie,” he said, but hardly meant it.

Granddad didn’t say anything more until the first song was through. “Pick up the needle, will you, Rosie?” he told me then. “The next song has a scratch straight through it. Used to drive your grandmother crazy. ‘Once in a Lifetime,’ one of Sammy’s best, and we always had to skip it.”

“Fine,” I said. “But how do I find the next song?”

“Smooth bands between grooved ones. Shows the spaces in between.”

I lifted the needle arm and pushed it sideways, to where the bands were smooth again. As carefully as I could, I lowered the needle back in. “‘A Lot of Livin’ to Do,’” Granddad said, giving the next song its title. “Another classic.”

The song was crackly and soupy but had a nice blue ribbon of a tune running through. “How old is this stuff?” I wanted to know.

“Dark Ages,” he said. “Born and bred in the year nineteen hundred and sixty-two. Same year as your mother was born. Music like this kept her from crying. Instant cure.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to bring to mind my mother, small. Tiniest thing in a white wicker basket. Blanket wrapped around her tight. Little squints for eyes. Whole life ahead of her for real. No lousy celebrity husband in sight. No me. “Who was this guy?” I asked Granddad.

“A Rat Packer. One of Sinatra’s good friends. What are they teaching in school these days?”

“Not learning this,” I said. “For sure.”

“The world’s on a downhill slide.”

By now Sammy Davis Jr. was singing about something called the beguine. Whatever that was, it made Granddad happy. He stayed quiet, but it was a different kind of quiet. I stood up, so that I could see his face. “Why don’t you sit right here beside me, Rosie?” he asked, smoothing his hand over the empty part of the corduroy couch. But I was worried about sitting down so close. Worried I could hurt him.

“You want something to drink?” I asked.

“Not now,” he said. “Not thirsty.”

“Not even cranberry juice?”

“Not even.”

“You mind if I get something?

“What’s mine is still and always yours.”

He smiled a funny, crooked smile and
pulled on one of his very large ears as I went off to the kitchen. By the time I came back, his eyes were closed again, and a song he said was called “Someone Nice Like You” was playing. I stood where I was and closed my eyes too, trying to picture Mom in Granddad’s arms, listening to this music, trying to picture the house before it got so crampy with things whose meanings were hidden. Tried to imagine where the music took my granddad in his mind.

“Listen to the words,” Granddad said, and I did, listened to Sammy Davis Jr. of 1962 singing about
if
:

“Aideen knew every word,” he said when the song was over. “She was always singing.”

“Must have been nice,” I said.

“She was something,” he said.

“Pretty, I bet.”

“Oh, yes. She was. And always, always, in motion. Would walk around and around when she was cooking. Would sway side to
side when hanging clothes. Was always a couple of steps ahead when we’d walk down to Pastrami’s.”

“Mr. D. says hi, by the way,” I interjected.

“In the beginning was Pastrami’s.” Granddad smiled his funny smile. Then he went on with his story. “You know what Aideen would do?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“She’d roll back the carpet right about where you are and jitterbug the shine off the floor. She’d fox-trot in circles, with the moon as her man. She’d dial up her music loud.”

“Sounds like something,” I said.

“She could make the porcelains and the paintings tremble. She could dance. Oh, Aideen could dance.”

“Red was her color,” I said.

He nodded. “You get an A plus, Rosie.”

“And you were her very best man.”

“I was privileged, Rosie. Despite everything, she liked me. She’d had her other chances,
don’t you think she didn’t. But she stuck around for me.”

“You’re a likable guy,” I said.

“I’m an ordinary guy.”

“You’re better than fireworks.”

“You’re a top-drawer liar.” His voice was weary.

“I’m putting all the albums In Trust,” I told him after he didn’t say much more.

“I always took you for a smart one,” he answered.

“I’m putting the albums In Trust, even if they all sound like Sammy Davis Jr., even if not one of them, not even one, is nearly as good as Usher.”

“Faster or slower. More or less. They’ve got the Sammy Davis style. Besides,” he said, “
usher
is a verb.”

“It’s also a noun.”

“Let’s call it versatile.”

He had used up most of his voice. There were dots of sweat in the creases on his brow.

“I think you could use a nap,” I said.

“I’m getting too tired not to be tired,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

I came to him, and I settled his pillow. I sat back down to watch him sleep. He closed his eyes and sighed and turned. I listened for the music, then, from far, far down the street. I tried to find my mother in my mind: in a house somewhere, in her overalls, listening to the squeaks of rags on glass. Did she ever think of her growing-up music? Did she ever remember the old-time songs or the feel of the moon on her face?