The Unexpected Waltz (5 page)

I didn’t even try to explain this to Mark. He was angry all the time by then and he took my choice of hospice as a major rebellion, some attempt to humiliate him at the club with what he called my Jesus complex. He didn’t like the fact that I spent my afternoons cutting old people’s toenails and driving their spouses to Kmart, or the time I came home smelling of some poor woman’s postchemo vomit. “Why are you wasting your time?” he’d ask me. “Anyone can wash hair and pick up pizza. You should be doing something that matters.”

When I walk into the Dogwood Room—we name them after flowers—Carolina is propped against a wall of pillows with the TV remote in one hand and the bed control in the other. A lumpy red afghan is stretched across her knees and her hair is thin but neatly tucked behind her ears. Her expression is a little expectant, as if she were sitting in a plane on a runway.

I introduce myself and she gives me a big crooked smile and says, “I just love this place.”

Not the most typical reaction to finding yourself in hospice, but maybe this was what Teresa meant when she called Carolina plucky. Because the woman doesn’t seem that sick and certainly not confused. In fact, considering the age of her kids and her general condition, I’m surprised she elected to come in as early as she did, but she seems to be treating the place like a hotel. This may be the first time in her life she’s had a bed, a TV, and a toilet all to herself.

I start toward the chair but she pats the bed with surprising vigor, so I sit down beside her. Or, more accurately, I lie down beside her, because the minute my butt hits the sloping mattress I roll flat on my back, looking up at the clouds painted on the ceiling.

“Tell me all about yourself,” she says.

I’ve never had a client ask me anything about my own life. I sneak a peek to my left. Carolina is also staring intently at the clouds, like they might start moving.

“It’s more important that I understand what you need me to do,” I say. Apparently I’ve just agreed to be her volunteer. “I know you have kids. Do they need help with homework? Groceries brought in? Rides to soccer practice and things like that?”

She shakes her head. “My sister, Virginia, never had her own and she came straightaway and I’ve lived in the same development and worked at the same salon for seventeen years. There’s people fussing over those boys left and right. You don’t have to worry about any of that.”

“So what do you need?”

“I want you to talk to me. When you get sick, people stop talking to you. I mean, really talking. They just keep telling you to try and get some rest now.” She folds her arms across her chest. “I want to be entertained.”

“I can do that,” I say. I’m not really surprised by her bluntness. Death’s just one more foreign country and people begin to speak a different language the closer they get to the border. Sweet old ladies start to curse. Cynics start to pray. And people like this woman, who I bet never asked anybody for anything her whole life long, suddenly come up with a whole list of demands.

“We can talk about whatever you want,” I tell her. “And I can bring movies, if you like them, and whatever food you crave. The stuff that comes out of the kitchen here is nutritious but it isn’t very tasty.”

“I want sugar and salt and fat,” she says. “I don’t know why they’d bother trying to be nutritious now. That just seems mean.”

“Their intentions are good,” I say, although privately I agree with her. Some people don’t have the stomach for working with the actual clients. Soft volunteers, Teresa calls them, and they have odd little ideas about what dying people need. They paint clouds on blue ceilings and show up with grandma gifts like hand-knit afghans and saltwater taffy. And they insist on paying twenty percent of the whole annual budget for a dietician to plan meals full of calcium and roughage and antioxidants, even though at this stage in the game you could probably make a better argument for spending the money on tequila.

“I’ll bring you whatever you want,” I say. “I’ve got plenty of experience sneaking ice cream and barbecue past the guards.”

“What kind of movies do you watch?”

“Old ones,” I say.

“Like
Pretty Woman
?”

“No, really old ones, from the thirties and forties and fifties. Have you ever heard of Bette Davis?” She shakes her head. “Joan Crawford? Katharine Hepburn? I know you know Marilyn Monroe.”

She brightens. “I want Marilyn Monroe and a Meat Lover’s Supreme. Thin crust. Can we do that?”

“Sure.”

“And you still have to tell me something about yourself. You’ve probably got a whole file on me and I don’t know anything about you. Like . . . are you married?”

“My husband died a year ago.”

“Did you love him?”

I force myself to an upright position and look back at her. “Of course I loved him. What kind of question is that?”

She folds her arms behind her head. “Okay, we’ll start with something easier. What are you going to do this afternoon when you leave here?”

“I’m going to let a Russian man teach me how to dance.”

“You’re jerking me.”

“Am not. Just this very morning I spent a hundred and ten dollars on a pair of high-heel dance shoes.”

She looks at me and we both burst out laughing. Her bangs fall forward and she pushes them back again and I think that yeah, you can tell she worked in a beauty salon because although her hair is thin, she’s trying hard to keep it neat. This woman cares what she looks like. The chemo probably broke what was left of her heart.

“See?” I say. “You think you have me pegged but I’m full of surprises.”

“I never said I had you pegged,” she says, and when she grins I see that she’s chewing gum, the kind they give you to help with the nausea. She’s slumped farther down in the bed and her breathing is a little labored. Our conversation has both revved her up and worn her out and I make a mental note to remember this, that she’s sicker than she seems. Without thinking, I reach toward her and she grabs my hand. It’s an awkward sideways grip, but we do a little shake thing with it, like we’re agreeing on something. Working out some sort of deal, the details of which will be determined later.

“Are you scared?” I ask her.

She tilts her head and looks up at the clouds. “Not yet,” she says.

I WASN'T SURE WHAT
to wear to my first dance lesson. It’s the continual conundrum of fashion—you want to look like you tried, but not too much. I remember the old woman I saw in the studio and how, even with her slow and unsteady movement, her dress swayed around her legs. All that furling and unfurling—it was almost as if the dress were a living thing and she was merely riding along within it.

So after digging around in my closet, I find a Lycra dress with a full skirt that I bought to wear on my last and only trip to Europe with Mark, because the salesgirl promised it would pack well. It’s teal blue, an awkward color—awkward because it is a color at all and I normally wear beige or black or gray. It always makes me feel like a stewardess on some airline that went bankrupt in the seventies, but when I turn side to side the dress swishes. It makes what I imagine to be the sound of dance. I pull my hair back too, but loosely, not in an ostentatious ballerina bun, which might indicate that I think I’m better than I am, but in a hairstyle I stole from Elyse, a sort of sloppy French twist.

Even with all the fussing, I still arrive at three thirty for my four o’clock lesson, carrying my new dancing shoes in their little blue sack. Quinn’s not at her desk, but is instead with a student. Surprising. I wouldn’t have guessed she was a teacher as well as a receptionist. I walk to the back of the room, uncomfortably aware of how loud my sandals sound on the polished wooden floor, and sit down on the couch. The studio is a different place without music.

Quinn and the man are not dancing but are rather standing in front of the mirrored wall, frowning at their reflections, holding hands. At first they seem utterly immobile, but then I see that they’re each slowly extending the right foot, tilted with the toe in the air and the heel grazing the floor, and then slowly pulling it back. Quinn does this easily; when her foot slides forward, her body stays relaxed and erect and the knee of her standing leg flexes. She has good range in her step. She must be naturally limber, or maybe the ability to slide your heel like that is more a matter of balance.

The man is a whole other story. He’s tall, with a ruddy face, and something about him is familiar—where could I have seen him? The country club? Some fund-raiser? He’s handsome, I realize, with a belated jolt. What’s wrong with me that I see a man and it takes me a full five minutes before I figure out whether or not he’s good-looking? If this were a movie, he’d be cast as a duke or an earl, perhaps even a king. There’s something haughty in his expression, something aristocratic. Something that implies he rides horses and jumps over fences, followed by packs of yelping dogs. But his face is frozen in concentration and when he pushes out his heel, it doesn’t slide smoothly, like Quinn’s, but rather sticks and then jerks forward as if there are bumps in the dance floor that only he can feel. Worse, when his leg is fully extended, he leans his torso backward to compensate, which makes him look like a vaudeville comedian, someone who is about to stride onstage with a cane and straw hat. It doesn’t make sense. He looks like the lord of the manor but he dances like a clown, and he must know this, so why is he dancing at all?

I bend down to put on my shoes. The woman at the store had talked me through the process, the crisscrossing of the straps, the buckle that rests in the indentation of my heel. I get them on without much trouble, but when I stand, the straps shift a little. Perhaps they should be tighter. The woman said that if they hurt when you’re sitting, that means they’ll fit perfectly when you’re standing, so if you’re in pain, that’s a good sign. Because hey, we can’t have our foot sliding around, can we? Do we want our foot rocking back and forth in our shoes while we’re dancing, do we want our toes slipping out from under us while we’re trying to grip the floor? I’d shaken my head vigorously, like a schoolgirl sucking up to the teacher. No, we certainly don’t want that. But the shoes are a full size smaller than what I usually wear and this alarms me too. The woman had given me one of those little shriveled-up nylon socks to make it easier, and she knelt down to help me turn my foot and insinuate it into the shoe. “A perfect fit,” she’d said.

I refasten the straps, yanking until they hurt, and stand up again. The heels are higher than any I’ve ever worn and as I push off the couch, I feel like I’m unfolding. I’ve never been this tall. I take a tentative step. The suede soles will take some getting used to. Elyse was right, they’re designed to slide smoothly, but still . . . I look at the ruddy-faced man again and wonder if men’s dance shoes work the same as women’s, if they also have suede bottoms and fit too tight. The man’s tongue is sticking out of the corner of his mouth, like that of a child learning to write. Back and forth he jerks his heel, with Quinn standing beside him, leaning in and saying something softly. Telling him that it would be easier to slide his right heel forward if he bent his left knee a little more—at least that’s what I assume Quinn might be saying, since that’s what I’d like to tell him.

Is this a dance lesson? Is this what I can expect? The woman I saw the first day had been glowing with joy, but this man’s misery is palpable. Of course that woman had been terribly old and probably past the point of improvement, and Quinn is clearly trying to teach this man something. They’ve been sliding their heels back and forth now for ten minutes and while it doesn’t look like he’s getting any better at it, Quinn must think he’s capable of more, for why else would she be standing so patiently, speaking so quietly, and holding him steady with the grip of just one hand?

I put my palm on the wall beside the couch and flex my left knee, pushing my right foot forward just a couple of inches and raising my toe.

It isn’t that hard. Well, I did lean back just a little and I was touching the wall. You probably just have to hold your core really tight, that’s the trick. It’s probably more about the muscles in your abdomen than the muscles in your leg. The man and Quinn aren’t aware of me at all. They’re utterly intent, and I slide my foot a bit farther this time, almost on the verge of taking a step. Okay, that’s a little tougher, but by squeezing my whole pelvis and exhaling like in yoga I manage to stay upright. Am I ready to let go of the wall?

“Is called heel lead.”

The man who has come up behind me is maybe three inches shorter than I am, at least when I’m wearing these heels, and almost laughably muscular. His eyes are dark, deep-set, and quizzical, and his black shoulder-length hair flips up at the ends, like a girl’s. He has the same intimidatingly good posture and strange formality that I noticed the first day, in the man who’d danced with the old lady. It must be a particularly Russian type of bearing.

“I’m Kelly,” I say. “I guess you’re Nik.”

He cocks his head. “Is not as easy as it looks, this heel lead. This is where we start?”

“What? No, no we don’t need to start there.”