Dancing on the Edge (6 page)

At the end of the class Susan called us over to explain her classes, when they met, and how much each one cost. Up close I could see she didn't wear makeup or shave under her arms, and she sat on the linoleum floor to talk to us with her legs spread out and her feet pointing and flexing, pointing and flexing.

Grandaddy Opal signed me up to go four afternoons a week: two ballet classes, one modern dance class, and one improvisation class.

Susan said that maybe I should just try one class at a time to see if I would like it, and Grandaddy Opal chuckled and said, “Oh, no need to worry about that, she'll like it all right,” and he was right. Soon I would be a great prodigy, and Dane would come back and the two of us would go live by the sea.

I wanted to skip and leap my way down the sidewalk on our way home, but Grandaddy was dragging along, his hands dug deep into his pockets, his mind somewhere far away. I tried talking to him, telling him he wouldn't be sorry, telling him how good I was going to be, and then he just stopped dead and grabbed my hand. “Hey,” he said. “There ain't no dance classes.”

“Huh?” My mouth dropped open.

“You understand? As far as Gigi knows, there ain't no dance classes.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, nodding, not really sure if I understood, but wanting to keep the dance lessons.

“Okay then.” He started walking again, faster, still holding my hand, dragging me with him along the sidewalk. “So we'll just say to ourselves there ain't no dance classes, then we won't make a slip and talk about them.” He squeezed my hand tighter. “You go on over to that church every day, and I'll just think you're upstairs doing your homework. You're just doing your homework,” he repeated, nodding to himself.

And that's how it was. My dance didn't exist. Every day I walked to the church. I did lunges and leaps and turns, and listened to Susan's voice correcting us over the sound of the music, and then I forgot it, because it wasn't real. While I was walking home, I knew a giant eraser followed behind me, erasing the dance class, rubbing it into dust and brushing it away, leaving behind an empty sidewalk, an empty past. Later, I started to run home every afternoon, afraid the eraser would catch up to me and erase me, too.

G
IGI LOOKED RELIEVED
when I told her I wouldn't be able to help out down at the gift shop except on Fridays and Saturdays. She didn't even ask me why. Ever since we'd moved in with Grandaddy Opal, she had been like that, keeping to herself, sleeping late, working long hours at the shop. She even forgot my eleventh birthday.

I knew it was because she blamed me for Dane's melting. That's why she couldn't look at me or be both ered with caring for me anymore. She had figured out the truth about me, just as I had. She knew that I was a mistake, nothing special at all, not even real, and Dane had melted from the shame of it.

Back at our old house, when things were good and right and Dane still lived with us, Gigi used to get up in the mornings and fix me breakfast, and the two of us would tiptoe around and whisper so we wouldn't wake up Dane, and we always found something funny that we Were just dying to laugh out loud at but couldn't because of Dane. Now, when there was no reason to be quiet, there was nothing funny, and Gigi didn't get up until after I'd gone off to school. If I wanted to see her at all, I had to go down to the gift shop.

She worked in a small room clouded with incense at the back of the shop. Mrs. Hewlett, who owned the shop, was a widow, and when she found out Gigi could contact the dead, she hired her right away. The first time Gigi contacted Harold, Mrs. Hewlett's dead husband, the woman cried for days afterward. “It was so real,” I heard her tell someone in the gift shop once. “He was there, I saw him. And he said things, things that only he knew. And he was happy. That's what I needed to know, that he was happy. He'd had such a miserable death, you know.”

Then when Mr. Hewlett, through Gigi, gave his wife a successful decorating tip for the shop and told her she would be a great success, Mrs. Hewlett set Gigi up with her own special place in the back. In no time, word got around about Gigi and she was in business, holding séances, contacting the dearly departed, and reading tarot cards and tea leaves, but she never used the Ouija board again.

At first I used to go to the shop and stand in the farthest, darkest corner, hidden from her clients, and just watch Gigi. She'd slip into one of her colorful robes, green for seeking knowledge of the beyond, white for ceremonies held on Mondays—moon days—sky blue for love, purple for Sundays. Then she'd dance around the table with circular motions—always circular to keep out evil—and she'd chant her incantations over the anxious client or clients who sat at the table with eyes closed, palms resting face up. She'd sit down then and light the candles, and slowly, with a circular, swaying motion in her torso, go into a trance, letting the spirits enter her body. Her voice would change. Sometimes she was Rasmus, her spirit guide, and other times she was the dearly departed. I would watch the way her skin turned yellow and her eyes rolled slowly forward before she opened them wide and focused on some unseen face.

Later, when Gigi had gotten used to my being there, I became her assistant. She didn't ask me to help her, I just offered to get her coffee one day and she let me. I was so pleased to get a chance to show her I could be useful that I began to rush about, helping her clean up in the evening, running out to the diner down the road to fetch her lunch, and bringing the footstool to her between clients so she could prop up her swollen feet.

I figured she must have been really pleased with me, because after a while she began to let me help her get ready for her ceremonies. I got to select the ingredients for the incense, choosing from rose, cedar, citron, aloe, cinnamon, sandal, camphor, amber, lily, benzoin, mace, saffron—she had so many jars and vials, and each combination of herbs, flowers, spices, and oils had a special meaning, was meant for special ceremonies. I learned them all.

I got to select the appropriate robe from Gigi's closet and help her slip into it, and I brought messages to Mrs. Hewlett at the front of the shop and led clients to their seats in the back.

One time Mrs. Hewlett said to me that maybe I would become a medium like my grandmother, and I thought maybe I would. Maybe that would be my special gift. Maybe if I could do a good enough job, Gigi would see this and declare that I was a prodigy as a medium! Then she would forgive me for making Dane melt, and she would want me again, and Dane would come back, and everything would be right once more.

One day, after months of helping at the shop, I suggested to Gigi that I could do the dances for warding off evil while she concentrated on going beyond and reaching the dearly departed.

Gigi shook her head. “No, I'll do the dances.”

“But I can do it,” I told her. “I can help you. I can do the dances for you so your legs won't get tired. Watch, I can do it.”

Then, before she could say anything, I started dancing around the table. I swept my arms up above my head and circled the table, two times, two representing social communion. My arms swung down, then up again. I leaned over the table, sweeping my torso in a low circle. In my mind I was a great ballerina. I pretended a crowd had gathered in the shop; all the kids from school who teased me about wearing Dane's bathrobe and who slammed dirt balls in my ears were watching. They stared wide eyed, stunned by my beauty and skill. I circled back in the other direction, my arms waving gracefully above my head. Someone was breaking through the crowd of kids. A man. A man was straining to see me over the heads of my audience. Dane! It was Dane! He had come to see my great performance.

“Miracle! I said to stop it!” Gigi caught one of my arms in midilight and gripped it in her hands, pulling it down to my side.

“I do the dances,” she said. “Anyway, you look ridiculous. From now on you had better just sit on that pillow over there and keep out of the way!” Gigi pointed to the large tiger-skin pillow that sat on the floor beneath a fan of swan feathers. “Go on.”

I backed away. I didn't know what I had done, what evil spirit I had conjured up with my dance. I sat down on the pillow and closed my eyes and drifted far away, leaving behind the noise of Gigi's swishing robe, the clinking jars of incense, and Rasmus's murmurings. I went to a special place, a safe, new place. There were green fields and wildflowers there, and fairies and gnomes and distant castles poking through swirls of pink and white clouds. A blanket of butterflies flew overhead to greet me. Then they drifted down and settled about my shoulders and kept me warm and safe No words, no dirt balls, no teacher, no child—nobody could reach me there, except Dane. I talked to Dane in my special new place.

I told him he was the first one to really see me dance, and he said my dance was beautiful. I told him about the dance recitals I could never be in because no one knew I took lessons. He said he understood, and the blanket of butterflies wrapped about me like a hug.

I told him about the giant eraser that swept down the street behind me every afternoon erasing my lessons, and how the other kids in class laughed at me because I couldn't remember the steps from one day to the next.

Dane was very sorry, and the gnomes and fairies nodded their heads; they were sorry, too.

“It's okay,” I told them, shrugging off the blanket of butterflies. “I stand in the back of the room and I become invisible, just like in school. Most of the time I'm invisible.”

Dane said he knew all about being invisible, and I asked him when he was coming back. When would I see him again?

“Soon,” he said. “I'll be back soon.” And I heard my own voice saying aloud, “Soon. Soon.”

N
O ONE EVER
talked about Dane. Not Gigi. Not Grandaddy Opal. When I tried to bring him up, to remember something about him, Gigi would go into a trance and Grandaddy Opal would just say, “Hooey!” But whenever Gigi and Grandaddy Opal got together, they fought, and they fought about Dane. I knew it even though they never mentioned his name. Sometimes Gigi and Grandaddy Opal would head for the bathroom at the same time and they'd see each other coming and race to the bathroom door, both trying to get there first. Grandaddy Opal always won because he was skinny and springy while Gigi was heavy and didn't like moving fast in the first place. It upset the karmic balance, she said. Grandaddy Opal would slam the door in her face and laugh a crazy man's laugh, and Gigi would stand in the hallway, chanting one of her spells at him.

They had other little wars, too. Gigi said Grandaddy Opal's orange La-Z-Boy had to go because it was giving off a bad aura left over from when Grandaddy Opal sat in it. She and I dragged it out to the sidewalk, and she put a big
FREE
sign on it, and it was gone by the next morning. Grandaddy Opal had a fit and a half and retaliated by dumping all of Gigi's fresh-bought macrobiotic food in the garbage. “I ain't having all that yin-yang food in my house,” he said to her, the garbage truck rolling down the drive. “It gives off bad orals all over the durn place.”

“It's aura,” Gigi said. “A-U-R-A.”

“Well, the plural of aura is orals,” Grandaddy Opal shot back, embarrassed that Gigi caught him in a mistake.

That's the way it was. They tried to stay clear of each other, but when they couldn't, it was war, and even though no one said Dane's name, I knew somehow that's what the fighting was all about, because every time they fought, Dane was there. I could feel him. Gigi and Grandaddy Opal faced each other and argued, and Dane was the air between them, the hot angry air each of them breathed out of their mouths when they spoke. And when they stopped fighting and went their separate ways, the Dane vapors remained behind, and I'd stand in the midst of them and close my eyes, waiting for him to speak to me, to tell me that he was coming soon, but soon seemed to be getting farther and farther away. So were my chances of becoming any kind of prodigy, and every day I needed Dane even more than the day before. I needed to sit with him in his candlelit cave again and hear him read to me in his mellow voice, and feel safe and warm and content, because it seemed nothing felt safe anymore. Fear, like a shadow, hung about me, waiting. It wanted in. It wanted to take over my whole self. Every once in a while, I could feel the dark thing hovering, jabbing at me, looking for a way in, and my heart would begin to race and my palms to sweat. And then I'd think, it's that scary fear thing trying to get me. It hid everywhere, waiting for me to let go of Dane, let go of wanting to bring my daddy back, so that it could get inside me, and then Dane would never be able to come back to me. That's what I knew, and I searched everywhere for things to hold on to that would keep me safe, keep the fear away: simple, good things, like Grandaddy Opal's job. He delivered newspapers to all the houses in the neighborhood, and in the early mornings I would watch him from my bedroom window as he pedaled down the driveway on his bicycle, his newspaper bag draped over his shoulder and his long white hair flying like a wing from the back of his head.

I told Grandaddy Opal that delivering papers on a bicycle looked like the most fun thing to do—besides dancing, of course, but I didn't mention the dancing.

Grandaddy Opal said he would get me a bicycle and then I could join him on his route. It wouldn't be a new bicycle, though. He said it would be an old beat-up one picked up at a yard sale. He was good at fixing bicycles. “You fix it up, paint it, and then it's yours,” he said. “You take care of it, grease it up good every now and then, give it a name, and you ride it everywhere. You and that bicycle become best friends. It's a real special relationship.”

I couldn't wait to get one, to own something special, but Grandaddy Opal said it had to be the right one. “Has to be cheap as dirt,” he said, “and it's got to have personality. Don't worry, I'll know it when I see it. Meanwhile, I can teach you how to ride some on Old Sam.”