Goodbye To All That (35 page)

She hoped they weren’t listening to this. The singer was nasal and whiny, and the song had a robotic feel to it, the rhythm as regular as a ticking metronome and the instruments all synthesized. Somebody ought to open a club where the DJ played Corelli. Not exactly dancing music, but much kinder to the eardrums.

“Why don’t you two dance?” she suggested to Wade and Hilda, motioning toward the dance floor. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be negotiating a truce between them, helping them mend their relationship. It wasn’t as if she was responsible for their happiness. But the two of them, while both speaking nicely enough to her, kept snarling and snapping at each other. A couple of bouncy dances might erode their prickliness.

“I don’t dance,” Wade told her.

“Sure you do. Everybody dances.”

“Not me.” He gave his head an emphatic shake, causing his hair to tremble. Without his red smock he looked a little less benign. Or maybe it wasn’t the missing smock that gave him a mildly sinister appearance. Maybe it was the snug black shirt, the black jeans and the thick-soled black boots he had on. The thing in his eyebrow was different, too, not the usual modest strip of metal with a tiny ball on each end. Tonight’s piece looked like a twisted barbell, with cone-shaped points on the ends. It had never occurred to her that a person might want to vary his eyebrow jewelry, but she supposed if a woman could have a full wardrobe of earrings for every occasion, a man could have a full wardrobe of eyebrow thingies.

Hilda looked relatively wholesome compared to him, dressed in a ribbed pink sweater and blue jeans, her brassy blond hair rippling loose down her back. Her only jewelry, besides multiple earrings, was a silver ring on her thumb which didn’t seem to inhibit the thumb’s movement. Of course, she was young. In thirty years, when she started sprouting knobs of arthritis in the joints of her fingers, the thumb ring would be out.

“I’ll dance with you,” she said to Ruth.

Ruth’s mouth flopped open and she slammed it shut. She’d suggested the dance to try to get Hilda and Wade interacting, not that it made a big difference to her if they reconciled, but the evening would be more pleasant if they stopped sniping at each other. She had nothing against dancing with another woman, though. She’d done it often, starting back in her high school days, when the gym was transformed, thanks to paper streamers and cheesy murals, into Winter Wonderland or Around the World and all the boys who weren’t going steady spent the entire dance climbing on the bleachers or ducking out onto the hockey field to drink booze. The girls who didn’t have boyfriends wound up dancing with each other.

But she hardly knew Hilda and she had no idea how to dance to this thumping, thudding music. If you could even call it music.

“He doesn’t want to dance,” Hilda said, shooting Wade a lethal look. “Let’s go out on the floor. I bet we can find some guys to dance with out there.”

Wade scowled and Ruth suppressed a smile. Was Hilda trying to make him jealous? Maybe she wasn’t as indifferent to him as she was pretending to be.

“Watch my purse,” Ruth requested as she slid off her stool. Hilda didn’t have a purse, unless you counted the tiny sack on a black velvet cord around her neck. It was hardly bigger than an eyeglass case. What could a woman stick in it? A credit card and keys, maybe. A tube of lipstick. Not much more than that.

She was grateful for Hilda’s bright pink sweater as they wove past tables and clots of people to the dance floor. If Hilda had been dressed like Wade, Ruth would have lost her in two seconds flat.

The dance floor was as crowded as it looked. It smelled like humanity—sweat, perfume, aftershave, liquor. Blue and green lights gave the impression that this mass of bouncing people was underwater, an enormous sea monster that had swallowed her and Hilda without a burp.

Ruth glanced around her. No one was doing a dance she could recognize. They were just bouncing, flailing, swaying.

She started bouncing.

Four songs later, or maybe it was five—one song sounded like another to her—she was still bouncing. More than bouncing, really. She was waving her arms and shimmying her tush. She might have some arthritic bumps on her fingers, but her hips and knees had so far been spared that affliction, and while she didn’t dance as wildly as some of the young people around her, she fit in well enough.

When was the last time she danced like this? When had she
ever
danced like this? The exertion, combined with the heat of all the gyrating bodies around her, caused her to sweat. Someone jostled her. She didn’t care.

She closed her eyes and let the music’s rhythm run up and down her spine. So what if it was awful? It had an infectious beat, and she let it invade her like a virus and take over her body. She was no longer a grandma, no longer a store clerk, no longer a student of Baroque concertos, no longer a wife contemplating divorce. She was no longer a woman who savored her newfound solitude. In the middle of the dance floor—well, actually more on the edge; she had no interest in muscling her way deeper into the crowd—she was alone and united with all these people, all this energy.

When she opened her eyes again, she couldn’t see Hilda. Someone patted her shoulder and she kept dancing. Another pat and she turned to find Wade behind her, smiling sheepishly. “Hilda came back to the table,” he shouted, although the music was so loud she barely heard him. “You tired her out.”

Ruth nodded. She saw no point in straining her vocal cords in an effort to be heard over the clamor on the dance floor.

Wade started to bounce. He was not a good dancer. His movements were stiff and klutzy, lacking fluidity. His hair fluttered around his head, reminding her a little of the way the pile of her apartment’s shag carpet fluttered when she vacuumed.

He shouldn’t feel obligated to dance with her just because Hilda had abandoned her. She was perfectly happy to dance by herself, although it was hard to be by herself when she was surrounded by a hundred other dancers. Wade could be sitting at the table with Hilda right now, without Ruth positioned between them like the Berlin Wall. They could be talking, working things out.

But he remained with her, loosening up a little—although the more he loosened up, the klutzier he looked. Still, he didn’t seem too pained by the ordeal. Maybe Hilda had been lying when she’d said he didn’t dance. And what the heck—dancing with a young guy, even if they weren’t touching, was good for her ego. Imagine if Myrna from the B’nai Torah Sisterhood saw her. All that work Myrna had had done on her face to make her look younger, and she was still stuck dancing with her husband Howard, who looked like a turtle.

Another song, or maybe it was two, and Ruth decided she ought to take a break. God knew how she’d feel tomorrow morning after all this boogying. If Wade wanted to remain on the dance floor, fine, but when she pointed toward herself and then in the direction of their table, he nodded and followed her.

A stranger had planted himself at the table with Hilda. He looked a little older than her and Wade, and his shirt had one too many buttons undone in front. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, either. Despite the contorted little barbell puncturing his eyebrow, Wade was much more handsome.

The stranger stood when they reached the table, although he leaned possessively over Hilda, who appeared bored. “Hey, taking your mom dancing?” he asked Wade, smirking at his profound cleverness.

“She’s my friend,” Wade said, then turned to Hilda. “Who’s this bozo?”

“Just some bozo,” she replied with a shrug.

“Well, thanks for keeping her company,” Wade said, nudging the guy out of the way and sitting next to Hilda. Pleased that she no longer had to hover between them like a referee in a boxing match, Ruth took her seat on the other side of Hilda, sandwiching Hilda and making clear to the bozo that there was no place for him at the table.

“Well, okay,” he said with what appeared to be forced amiability. “So, I’ll see you around.”

Hilda shrugged again. Wade chased the bozo away with his stare. “Who the fuck was that?” he asked Hilda.

“Don’t use that language,” she scolded, shooting Ruth a glance. Ruth shook her head and waved her hand to show she wasn’t scandalized by Wade’s word choice. Hilda turned back to him. “He was just some creep. I could handle him.”

“What a dork. He looked like—who was that actor? The one who made all those stupid movies about moonshiners and redneck sheriffs?”

“Burt Reynolds,” Ruth said. The guy
had
looked a little like him in some of his sleazier roles. She took a sip of her wine, which had warmed up enough to taste like cleaning solvent. She ignored the flavor. All that dancing had made her thirsty.

“You really know how to move out there,” Wade praised her, gesturing toward the dance floor. “You were fly, Ruthie. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“You tired me out, for sure,” Hilda said with a grin.

“Fly? What’s that?”

“Cool,” Hilda translated.

“Me? Cool?” Ruth laughed and took another sip of wine.

“We ought to take her dancing with us all the time,” Wade said. “She’ll keep us on our toes.”

“Literally,” Hilda added.

“No.” Ruth shook her head for emphasis. “You’re not taking me dancing all the time. In fact, I think you should go back over there and dance, just the two of you.”

“Ugh.” Hilda curled her lip. “What are you, a matchmaker? We’re breaking up, remember?”

“
I’m
not breaking up,” Wade said.

“Fine. You don’t have to break up. I’ll break up for both of us.”

Wade sent Ruth a despairing look. If Hilda weren’t sitting between them, she would have given him a firm lecture, ordering him to fight for what he wanted.

It occurred to her that she might have enjoyed doing things like this—going to clubs in Boston, drinking lousy wine and dancing until she was dripping with sweat—for years. But she’d never demanded that Richard take her dancing at clubs. She’d never even asked. He would have considered it out of character for her, and inappropriate. She’d been a suburban wife and mother, for God’s sake, not someone who was fly. And so she’d never fought for what she wanted.

Until now.

Ruth couldn’t say all those things to Wade, so she just gave him a stern frown. He straightened slightly, stood, and closed his hand around Hilda’s. “Fine,” he snapped. “You can break up for both of us. But first, we’re dancing.” With that, he tugged her out of her chair and dragged her back to the dance floor. Not really dragged. She wasn’t resisting him, Ruth noticed.

Alone at the table, she smiled and settled herself more comfortably on her stool. Either they’d break up or they wouldn’t, but at least they’d dance. And that was what tonight was about: not saving relationships, not figuring out the future. Just dancing.