Step-Ball-Change (9 page)

I
AM SIXTY-TWO YEARS OLD AND ONE OF THESE DAYS
I’m going to have to buy myself a new left hip. Maybe, a couple of years after that, I’ll need a right one, too. I will buy myself a set of dazzling plastic joints to replace the ones I’ve ground down over the years. I will reward my body with state-of-the-art technology, the very best that money can buy. It still surprises me that some mornings this body, which has been so strong and flexible that I could make a living off of it, lies in bed and doesn’t want to go anywhere. But then it does. I stretch over one leg and then the other while I brush my teeth in the morning. I roll up onto the balls of my feet and stay there while I floss. It still works, it just takes a little longer to get it going. Tom will watch me down a couple of ibuprofen and suggest that maybe it’s time to sell the school to Peggy, one of the teachers who works for me, who is saving up her money to buy it, but I’m not quite ready to let it go. And when the cars start driving up and the wave of little girls pours through the front door all decked out in their pink leotards and white tights, I know that I’ll do this for as long as I possibly can. I never get tired of seeing them. Sometimes a few of the older ones will wear me out, but the little ones are my joy. Not every girl is going to grow up to be a dancer, and God, let us be thankful for that, but even the
ones who will grow up to be physicists and heart-transplant surgeons are better off for having danced. Dancing puts you squarely inside your own skin. It teaches you that your body is yours, yours to move and bend and stretch. Dancing makes you listen to music with more than your ears and know that the music can be felt and applied. All of the little confidences of balance and grace, the pleasure of watching your own hand arc above your head in the mirror, the camaraderie of moving in a perfect line with others—I teach those things, and I like to think that somewhere the lesson lodges in the subconscious. I believe these girls are made better for having danced, even if it’s only for a year. I believe that boys are made better for it, too, but in the forty years I’ve taught, I’ve probably had only two dozen boys come through my school. Maybe somewhere there’s a football coach lamenting the lack of girls who signed up for practice in the fall.

Mother-daughter tap was started several years ago by a woman who would wait in the car and read while her daughter took class. When the weather turned cold, she brought her book inside, and when she found she couldn’t concentrate on her reading with all of those clattering shoes, she bought herself a pair of taps and took up a spot in the back of the room.

“They’re six,” I said at the time. “I think it’s going to be a little slow for you.”

She shrugged, a pretty young mother with brown hair and blue eyes. “I don’t know a thing about dancing,” she said. “I would never try to take a class with adults.”

And so she danced. She danced pretty well but no better than her daughter. Soon the other girls told their mothers and the other mothers started coming with tap shoes of their own. It was all such a big success that I had to move the girls whose mothers didn’t
come into another class because they felt so horrible about the whole thing.

“God,” Taffy whispered. “You forget how cute they are. And how little. Was Holden ever that size?”

“Probably so.”

“I never wanted more than one child. I think that’s because I always wanted to be an only child.” She said it without any consideration of what that might have meant for me. “Now I think I should have had ten. Except not with Neddy. I should have had ten children born from illicit affairs.”

I clapped my hands and the room went silent, all the mothers and daughters waiting and watching. It was better than being a lawyer. I was jury and judge, it was all my show. I put a record on and we started. “Has everyone been practicing?”

“Yes, Mrs. McSwan.”

Taffy found an inconspicuous spot on the side of the room away from the mirror. She reminded me of that first mother who came to tap-dance. She was respectful but unself-conscious. Twelve little girls put their right foot out and tapped. Twelve mothers put their right foot out and tapped. Taffy put her right foot out and showed them all how it was done. They did a brush right forward, striking the pads of their big toes, and then a brush right back, brush right forward, brush right back. I called out the time but it looked for all the world like Taffy was leading them. They raised their rounded arms into third position a half beat behind her. Her steps were fluid, her tapping was impeccable.

Taffy could dance.

Had I known this before? She followed every step. She turned in the right direction every time we turned. She did not watch her feet. Not that it was hard, it was a kids’ class, but it could be hard
to do anything for the first time. This class had been going on for a while, and even the most uncoordinated children had memorized the routines. Taffy got them instantly. Her ankles were loose, her feet were quick. She knew how to work the top and bottom halves of her body together at the same time, a concept that some people are never able to grasp at all. It made me want to send the rest of the class home and throw routines at her all afternoon, real dance routines. I had a suspicion that she would be able to keep up.

“Let’s do it slow the first time,” I said to the class. “Shuffle ball change, shuffle ball change, then step ball change, step ball change. Good, perfect. Now speed it up, double time.”

Taffy blinked her eyes and her feet started to fly. I could separate out her taps from all the other tap sounds because they were balanced, perfectly timed. Some of the children and mothers who had noticed a woman coming to class without a six-year-old were staring at her now, but they never would have put it together that we were sisters, Taffy with her chic blond hair in a swept-back cut, me with my brown hair gone impossibly gray and pinned to the back of my head like every other aging dance teacher I knew. Taffy in her careful makeup and me with a little Vaseline smeared over my lips. I was taller than my sister. She had a straighter nose, though that hadn’t always been the case. I had taken good care of myself all my life, but I looked like what I was: a very fit sixty-two-year-old. Taffy, on the other hand, would soon be sixty and looked more like she would soon be fifty. It could be said that the only way anyone would have known we were related is that we were the two best dancers in the room.

“When did you learn how to dance?” I asked her as I waved good-bye at the window. The last of the little girls had come over
to hug me, the last of the mothers had dropped off their checks for next month, we had the place to ourselves.

Taffy shrugged. “I always danced, I guess. Neddy was a terrible dancer. You couldn’t get him out on the floor. I was always dancing with somebody else’s husband at weddings.”

“I’m not talking about that kind of dancing. I’m talking about this kind of dancing.” I picked a little pink pullover up off the floor. There was always one left behind, no matter how many times I reminded them to take their things with them.

“I danced some.”

“When? You hated to dance when we were kids.”

Taffy leaned back against the barre and stretched her arms out to either side. “No, I didn’t hate to dance, you loved to dance. There’s a difference.”

“You refused to go to dance class. Mother used to beg you.”

“My refusing had nothing to do with my not liking it. I didn’t go because dance was your thing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was always a competition with us.”

“How could it have been a competition if you didn’t even dance?”

“We were so competitive that we wouldn’t even try to do the same things. I took some dance classes, but you were too far ahead of me. You were already too good at it and I couldn’t win, so I quit.”

“At six? You figured all of that out when you were six? That’s not possible.”

“It’s not only possible, it’s true.” Taffy was relaxed, conversational. For her this was the friendliest exchange we had had in years. “We divided everything right down the middle: I was popular,
you were smart. I jumped horses, you danced. I got Mother, you got Dad. If I was good in something, you never even went near it. If you were good at something, I gave it up.”

“You got Mother, I got Dad?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

It was, but for the life of me I’d never thought of it that way. Little Henrietta, so named to be the son my father wanted, never interested my father a whit. I was the one who went to basketball games, who sat beneath his desk and read books when he had to go into the office and work on Saturday. Somehow I managed to be both a ballerina and the son he’d always wanted. For my mother, however, I was a colossal disappointment and my sister was the bright and shining star. “How did I miss that?”

“I have no idea.” Taffy stretched up her arms and tapped out a little combination—hop left, flap right, flap left, flap right, shuffle left, shuffle right. She threw in a couple of double/triple-time steps. Without anyone else in the room, without the music, her feet made a beautiful, startling noise.

“So you took dance classes?”

“For a while, when I was in my forties. My therapist told me to. She said it was the only way to take back what you had stolen from me. Those were her words, not mine. I didn’t actually think of it that way. But I liked the classes. I dropped them after a while—you know how it is. You get busy and then later on you pick up something else, water aerobics or something.”

“How long did you take the classes?”

She shrugged. “On and off, about ten years.”

“You danced for ten years? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I wasn’t dancing. Not like you were dancing. I guess the therapist didn’t solve the problem. I never thought she was very
good anyway. Whenever I took a class, I just felt like I was trying to imitate you, and that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Anyway, who cares? This is all ancient history. I only came today because I was sure I had forgotten it all.”

“Your feet betrayed you.”

Taffy laughed. “First Neddy, then my feet. It makes me wonder what’s coming next. Maybe Stamp will bite me.”

“Never happen.”

“Really, that would be the end.”

“So you’ll come back for another class, an adult class.”

“I like the little girls.”

“So come to both. Come to all of them. You can dance your heart out.”

Taffy walked across the empty studio, her shoes clicking loudly with every step. My taps were off. I never could walk around in tap shoes. “What difference does it make now? I’m a little old to take up dancing.”

I could see it all as if it were in front of me, Mother and Taffy heading out to shop, their hair curled, their sweaters matching, and I never cared because that meant I would be with my father, whose company I in every way preferred. “Everybody with any sense would like to be able to dance. It makes a difference because after Tom and the kids, there’s nothing in my life that’s made me as happy as dancing. I think dancing is just about the greatest thing in the world, so if I kept you away from that, even if I didn’t know I was doing it, then I want to make that right.”

“Oh, you knew you were doing it all right. And I knew when I was doing it to you.”

“Fair enough,” I said. We stepped outside into an early-evening drizzle and I locked the door behind us. “Fair enough.”

W
E STOPPED OFF
on the way home and picked up Chinese. I felt guilty about not making dinner on Taffy’s first night in town, but it was already too late to start cooking. When we got back to the house, our arms full of take-out bags, Woodrow was sitting at the kitchen table with Stamp lying on the floor near his feet. Stamp was attached to a leash, the handle of which was tied around one of the legs of the table. When we came in the door, he sat up and barked once but Woodrow held out his hand.

“Ah,” he said. Stamp put his head back on the floor and whined, the stump of a tail beating time against the floor. He was desperate to jump on Taffy.

“Why is Stamp tied up?” Taffy said.

“Because he tried to bite me,” Woodrow said.

I put down the Chinese food and rubbed my eyes. I had forgotten to shut the bedroom door. “Oh, God, Woodrow. I’m sorry.” I gave Stamp a sharp look but he only wagged.

“He didn’t bite me,” Woodrow said. “He tried but did not succeed.”

“See,” Taffy said, bending down in front of her dog. “He doesn’t bite.”

“Oh, he bites. He bit Kevin who does the drywall. That’s why we’re having a little training session.”

“Is Kevin all right?” Maybe I was lucky to be in a family of lawyers. I pictured lots of lawsuits during Taffy’s visit.

“He’s fine. Stamp here only tore up his jeans.”

Taffy rubbed Stamp’s ears. Woodrow asked her politely to stop. “He’s thinking about how it’s best not to bite people right now. He needs to focus on that.”

“You can’t just train another person’s dog,” Taffy said.

“I can if he’s biting the men on my crew. We’re in and out of this house all day. We can’t do that if there’s a dangerous dog here, and if we leave the job, then, your sister’s living room is going to wind up in her basement pretty soon.”