House of Dance (8 page)

“T
ELL ME
,” I said to Granddad the next day, “about the places you always wished you’d been.”

“The places?”

I was sorting the books now, into Toss, D.L., and In Trust, and also a fourth pile, Library. There were stacks about my feet, and I’d asked Granddad for a basic strategy, but he’d said that if I started, I would know just what to do. “Books can get brittle” is all he’d said, and I took that to mean the old encyclopedias, published in 1962, since there had to
have been new facts since then, even new ways of deciding what facts mean. “We’re pulping the old encyclopedias,” I’d said to Granddad, and he’d smiled, which was his new approach to laughing. I’d gotten myself a system for the novels, too: In Trust the ones that looked mashed with reading, Library for those that looked too clean to have ever been of interest, and D.L. for books I might have wanted myself, though I was having the worst time deciding.

But then I got fixed on the travel books, all the fairy-tale trivia of the 1960s, the prices of places that might not exist anymore. The stuff was ancient and out-of-date, but it was scruffy, too, with handling. Dots on maps circled with green pen. Writing in the margins in blue ink. Pages accordioned in.

So I said, “Tell me about the places,” because Teresa was in the kitchen pulping apples into sauce and Riot was snoring softly in her basket, and because this part of my
Granddad’s past was, like so much else, a mystery. I took the travel books to him and puzzled them out on the bare parts of his bed: Montreal next to Venice, below Barcelona, across from New York, one step down from Verona, sliding to Paris, finally Seville. Country by country, cracks up their spines.

“They still teach geography in school?” Granddad asked when he saw what I’d done. One by one, slowly, he reshuffled the books, restoring, as he said, the world’s quite fragile order.

“So they’re important?” I asked. “In Trustable?”

“They were Aideen’s,” he answered. “They were how she got around in her own imagination.”

“The books took her places?”

“The books were how she traveled.”

I looked at him funny. “Just by reading?” I said, when what I meant was “Just like you?”

“And by looking at the photos, too. The maps. And by telling me about it later, when I got home from work.” He said all that; then he was quiet. I could hear Teresa metal-smushing red deliciouses in the kitchen, striking the cold, hard-sounding bowl with her tool. I could hear the water running. “Money was tight,” Granddad said. “Plus I was cautious.”

“So her telling you was like her being there?” I was just trying to understand.

“The closest she could come. The closest I allowed. Oh, Rosie,” he said, “what regrets.” He stopped talking, and I tried to picture my grandmother in that room at night, moonlight coming in, maybe music riding a tune beneath her words, and the words smoking up like places you could touch and smell and make memories from, because the words were all she had. Both of them would have been younger than my mother is now. The house would have been younger too. The
streets outside. All of it younger, and they just dreaming, my grandmother mostly just dreaming, going from nowhere to somewhere in her own mind, because money was tight and Granddad was cautious. And because she died, now Granddad had regrets.

“I’ve never been anywhere but here,” I said.

“Every day’s for living in. That’s my new say-so.” He asked for the eyeglasses he kept on the sill, and after I helped him pinch them to his nose, I wedged in beside him on his bed behind those bars. Slowly he turned the pages of the book titled
Seville
, running the tip of a blister-colored finger over photos of cathedrals, shops, pig thighs hanging from restaurant hooks like caveman clubs, white horses in dark streets, red flowers bursting out of the tops of roofs, big nests in chimneys, and bulls. Some of the photos had gone blurry with time, and some pages had torn a bit, and one page was missing, hidden some
where, maybe, inside another book.

He traded
Seville
for
Barcelona
, showed me buildings that looked as if they had been built with drips of sand, streets you could play pinball in, a wide and very blue sea. He said, “I’m trusting that you’ve heard of Picasso? They teach him still, in your fancy school?” And when I nodded and he was done with Barcelona, he decided on
Verona
and started down its streets, sat his blister finger on the steps of its amphitheater, tripped it past the ghost of Romeo, until Verona was enough for one day. He slipped the glasses from his nose. I placed them back on the sill, helped him with his pillow, scooted the books off the bed as he straightened his legs. He closed his eyes, but not before I said that his eyes were the color of the Barcelona sea.

“The mistake I made,” he said, “was thinking there’d be time for places later. I was wrong about that. I was a nest-egg man, feeding the bank what money I made, leaving
Aideen to her dreams. Dreaming Aideen’s dreams for her later, but by then it was too late.”

“She had you,” I said. “And Mom. And music. Even if she didn’t have places.” He had started sinking deeper into his pillow, and the sun through the window had pressed a square of white light to his face that made that part of him so see-through that I could see past his skin to the skinny red rivers that rode up and down his nose.

“Your mother’s mad at me,” he said. “I wish she weren’t.” The words came out in ghost whispers.

“Mom can be funky.”

“I tried to tell her, after your father left, about time and what it does, about living and how you have to, but she kept hearing different. She thought that I was criticizing. She thought I could not understand.”

“Granddad,” I said, leaning in so close, because that’s how hard it was becoming to
hear him, “you’re tired. You should sleep.”

“Plenty of time for sleeping,” he said. “Plenty of time for that.” But his fingers around my fingers were finally breaking their grip.

“Wishing you sweet dreams,” I told him, and kissed his forehead, and turned and gave Riot a you-behave look. I sat where I was with him for a very long time. Only after the sun had taken its mark from his face did I slip from the bed and drag the travel books over to the pile of In Trusts.

“He’s sleeping,” I told Teresa, rounding the corner.

“You’re a good granddaughter,” she said.

“I have an appointment,” I told her.

“I know.”

“But I’ll be back.”

“You always are,” she said, with her swervy Spanish lilt. “He trusts you, Rosie. Loves you.”

I stared at the floor. I couldn’t look up.

Outside Granddad’s house time was fast-forwarding. There were birds that weren’t crows on the railroad lines, a skate-boarder on the sidewalk, three cyclists on the street going side by side, making a backup in the right car lane. The closer I got to Pastrami’s and Whiz Bang and Bloomer’s, the more people there were in the way, the more moms with strollers and kids, the more window-shoppers and businesspeople in the bright sunlight, going fast, the better I could smell the cinnamon bread at Sweet Loaves, plumping the air with so much sugar that the air was a sugar high. I stopped for the doggerel at Harvey’s Once Read, the scribble of blue ink on the already sun-faded page:

I looked past the doggerel through the smudged glass door, and there was Harvey, behind his register, sitting on his stool. He had pushed his glasses up on his forehead and was holding a book very close up to his eyes. The hair that he still had on either side of his head was all gray fuzz grown patchy. There were a couple of regulars at the Best in Store table, where Harvey always put his finds. I poked my head through the door and the chime rang. I waited for Harvey to glance up and see me.

“Nice doggerel,” I said.

He did a half bow on his stool.

“It’s your best one yet,” I said. “I like the ‘colors strange.’”

He smiled, and then I got on with my day. Someone had just pushed open the House of Dance windows. I looked up and caught a glimpse of Max and Annette, thought I saw Marissa. People were pushing in both directions. I walked on until I reached the awning
that said Bloomer’s. This was a place I’d only ever gone with Dad. It was dark, as it always was inside, except for way back on the other side of the store, where a bright light shone over a counter and workspace and the proprietor known as Annie Pearl. She was mostly gray with some blond still in her hair. She was wide and wore a gaping apron.

In the store itself there was hardly any walking room. Cut flowers were crammed into buckets and pails, they were leaning out of crates and vases, they had their blossoms caught in nets or were already past budding, and they smelled like the colors they were, like tangerine and grape and vanilla and lemon. I remembered coming once into the shop on my father’s shoulders and looking down while he gathered a bouquet. I remember his saying, “Peonies, only peonies,” and taking each one in the store—the white with the yellow center, the mango that was mango through and through, the burgundy—all just
for Mom. “We’ll tell her that we love her just because.”

But today wasn’t a just-because day. It was a because day, a living-in day, a planning-the-party-that-was-coming-soon day. “Hello, Annie Pearl,” I called from the front of the store.

Annie Pearl looked up and squinted. “That you, Rosie Keith? All grown up, you are.”

“It’s me,” I said. “How have you been?”

“It’s our busy season,” she said, gesturing toward the floor. “And we’ve got lucky with good stock. What can I do for you?”

“I’m planning my granddad a party.” I just came out and said it. Wove my way between all the flowers to get closer to her counter.

“Are you now?” She smiled.

“I am.”

“And what will you be needing?”

“I don’t know much about the names of flowers,” I said. “I just know that I want color.”

“We’re good at color.”

“I’d rather have a few great flowers than a bunch of little ones. I know that, too.” Annie Pearl took notes on a pad that had been sitting on her counter. “And I don’t really care how much it costs, except if it goes past three hundred dollars.”

“You win the lottery, did you?”

“In a fashion,” I said.

She raised one eyebrow. “Your mother know about this?” she asked.

“She will soon enough,” I said. I took out an envelope of twenties.

“I’m not going to want any of that,” she said, batting my dollars away, my proof of my independent wealth, “until I’ve got your flowers.”

I told her the date. She made more notes. I looked around the store and pointed at flowers that seemed special.

“Rosie,” Annie Pearl said when I was leaving, “I got extra dahlias in.” I turned to see her
pointing to a bucket of broad-faced flowers, some of which were orange, some purple. “Do me a favor and take a couple with you. I hate to see them go to waste.” She went back to work on that notepad of hers, made another couple of notes.

“You want me to take these?” I called back. “For free?”

“For the sake of the sunshine,” she said. “For the sake of making the most of the very best of them.” I wound my way back to the dahlia bucket. I stooped down close and did what she had instructed me to do. I chose the very best. Two orange and one purple. I thanked her and walked out into the sunshine.

T
HE WINDOWS WERE
open at the House of Dance. I could hear the music playing as I took the diagonal across the street, met Annette on the steps, she coming down and I going up. “Max is in one of his moods,” she told me.

“Oh, no,” I said, and we both laughed. Annette had agreed to dance for my grandfather. They were working, I knew, on a fox-trot. Max and I had agreed on a waltz. It was what I was best at, what I could learn with the time that I had. “Hey, Annette,” I said.

“Yes?”

“A dahlia for you.” I handed her one of the three I had taken from the bucket of extras at Bloomer’s.

“For me?” she said.

“Of course. For you.”

“You’re something else,” she said. “And thank you.”

Marissa buzzed me in. I laid the other two dahlias across her desk, then joined Eleanor on the couch. She’d just finished up with Peter; she could use a drink, she said: “And I’m not talking about lemonade, either.” She flopped backward on the couch. She had one dance shoe on and one off. She had painted her toenails blue. She was wearing a long white skirt and a white lace tank, and she’d been working on her tan. “So how are the preparations, honey? Going well, I bet. Of course. You got everything you need right here in town. I wouldn’t throw a party anywhere else. And how about your dance—you
got your dance all down pat? You know Max is a genius, Max makes the worst of us look good. Not that you’re the worst, Rosie, I didn’t mean that. I’m just saying don’t you worry. You’re in such good hands with Max.”

Marissa had blown me a kiss for the dahlias by now and handed me the red satin shoes; she kept them behind the desk. “Gorgeous,” Marissa said, about the dahlias.

“Was William here today?” I asked her.

“You just missed him,” Eleanor answered, before Marissa could. “Oh, my God. Those two? Spectacular. You ever see their bolero? To die for, I’m telling you. And oh, by the way, what a terrific twosome of dahlias.”

“William can come for the party,” Marissa said, talking over Eleanor because that’s the only way that anyone could talk when Eleanor was talking. “It’s all confirmed.”

“I don’t even know how to thank him.”

“He wants to do it. He doesn’t need to be thanked.”

“But will you tell him anyway for me? When you talk to him next, will you tell him?”

“Of course.”

“Rosie?”

I turned, and there was Max, halfway down the hall with his arm winged out. I finished putting on my shoes and hurried off toward him. “Time is of the essence,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

We began to dance the waltz as Max had designed it. I had my head pressed back, my posture as right as I could make it. I had this thought in my head that I could finally make my granddad proud, raise up in him the memories of something sweet and good. But then Max broke our hold and stepped back and said, “Now I want to see if you can count it out for me. I want to know what you know on your own.”

“By myself?” I said.

“By yourself,” he said.

Annette, I thought, wasn’t kidding.

I felt silly all alone out there on the floor, with Max leaning against a windowsill while I boxed and whirled. But he was the boss, the nine-dance champion, and all I could do was slim the dance down to what I could actually do on my own.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Okay. You’re doing a lot of things right. You can do more, though; you can do better. I have a few ideas.” He danced with his own reflection while I watched. He traced out choices. “I know what it is,” he’d say to himself. Then: “No, no, no. It’ll be this.” I imagined him imagining the dance with a true partner, with an Annette or a Marissa, with the blonde whose name was Yvonne. I thought of how tiring it must be to dance at my beginner level.

“Okay,” Max said, pulling me into a hold, “so we were here, and now,” he said, elevating my left arm and placing my right hand on his shoulder, “we’re here. And now you’re
walking while I turn, and now you’re running—faster, faster—and now you’re slowing, to a walk. Now you’re planting your left foot, you’re stepping out with your right, shifting your weight.” I had no idea what he was talking about. He made me do it again. It was like running into the wind.

“Your hands are not in the right place,” he said. “And your left arm is supposed to be back. And your count is off. So we’ll do it again. Come on.”

“Is this really necessary?” I said.

“If you want to be good, it is.”

We did the whole thing again, and my head felt slung against itself. There were three of me in the mirror and four of Max in the room, and he was laughing, shaking his head. “We’re going to have to do that again,” he said. “Rosie.” As if he had to remind me who I was.

“I think I’m going to get sick,” I said.

“Try it again,” Max said, and I said, “I
can’t.” He looked at me as if he hadn’t heard me right. I said, “No. Really. I can’t,” and now his next lesson, Julia, was already there, practicing her mamba at the room’s other end. She was the protégée, the studio’s young star. She had less to learn than I did.

“Tomorrow,” I told Max, because I wasn’t joking about getting sick, and because he might have been the boss, but I was the paying client.

“Tomorrow’s your favorite word,” he said.

“Tomorrow. I swear. Tomorrow.”

“All right. Tomorrow then. Keep the moves inside your head, so you can think them through your body.”