Tiny Dancer (15 page)

A
carload of customers was caught up in yelling at their kids. One couple was making out. A group of college boys parked next to us laughed and snorted, passing around a dirty magazine. No one paid any mind to Calvin ambling up to the take-out window. I was relieved for Ratonda’s sake.

Then I
was doubly relieved when a black boy appeared at the take-out window. He must have known Calvin for he joked around with him. Finally Calvin placed their order.

I told Billy, “I’ll have a hot fudge sundae, nuts, whipping cream and all.”
I handed him my money, but he wouldn’t take it. I closed my eyes and relaxed, the electric bug light becoming a pleasant rhythm in the night air.

“I’ll place our orders. Then I want to ask you something,” he said.

I kept my eyes closed in order to appear calm, but especially, oblivious.

“Hey, you,
nigra girl!” The voice came from the car parked to the right of us. The top was rising on the youth’s white convertible. He came up from behind his steering wheel, pointing at Ratonda.

The five white students packed in the
Plymouth Fury still seemed caught up in the magazine, all but the driver in the front passenger seat demanding Ratonda’s attention. She turned her attention away, ignoring him. But he would not shut that big mouth of his.

“Is that
your colored boyfriend?” he asked her in an accusing tone. “At the whites-only window?”

I
              lifted out of my seat looking up at the order window. I said through the open window, “There’s no sign saying anything of the sort.”

             
Billy stared at me, wide-eyed.

             
“Who are you anyway to be asking me?” Ratonda asked him, peering over her steering wheel.

             
“I’m saying it, that’s enough,” the guy with the blond hair said, smirking at Ratonda.

             
“No, but it’s not your business,” said Ratonda, not at all acting afraid.

             
“It’s my business because I make it mine,” he said. His door came open, the hinges in need of oil for they creaked harshly for lack of grease.

             
Calvin was now leaning against the concrete posts in front of the take-out window. If he turned and saw Ratonda was in trouble, he would come at this boy with both fists, didn’t I know.

             
“Say, I know you,” said the white youth.

             
“Let’s just forget this,” said Ratonda.

             
“You was the colored girl pulling a gun on me and my brother.” His voice turned quickly from mocking to hostile.

             
“Oh no,” I whispered. “Billy, we have to do something.” That was why he looked so familiar. “Those Billings’ boys got it in for Ratonda and me.”

             
“It would have been nice to know sooner,” said Billy.

             
The boys were already piling out of the Fury whooping and strutting like barnyard cocks.

             
Ratonda slammed down her door lock and rolled up her window fast. She reached across to the passenger window and quickly locked that door.

             
“Here comes trouble,” said Billy. “Flan, please stay in the car.”

             
“What’ll you do?” I asked.

             
He got out of the car.

             
“Billy,” I said. “I know her. She’s my friend. Wade Billings, he’ll kill her.”

             
He let out a sigh. “Then I guess she’s my friend too.”

             
Wade led his intolerant pack, the whole lot of them, clambering over the center island between our car and Ratonda’s.

             
Billy’s trunk came up and then closed with a thud.

             
Ratonda was already locking the doors, so Wade lunged for the back door. He turned in such a way that I could finally see his ugly face. I seethed at the sight of him. I slowly opened my door.

             
Wade threw open Ratonda’s back door and then unlocked her front door. The white youths piled into her backseat, laughing wildly while idiot Clay yanked open her front door.  He lunged for her until his head got jerked back by his oily yellow hair.

             
A scream rose up so piercing I thought it was coming from my own throat. It was Clay, though. Billy laid him flat on the ground, thrusting a tire iron into his fat gut.

             
Being as how it was Ratonda’s only opportunity to run, she jumped out of her car now filling up with the white students. We made eye contact as I ran toward her.

             
Not happy seeing his brother knocked to the ground, Wade lunged at Billy.

             
Billy shoved him backward, yelling, “Get out of here, punk!”

             
I threw my arms protectively around Ratonda and we held onto each other.

Calvin
finally turned upon hearing a commotion. That was when he ran at Wade and the others.

Before the boys co
uld gang up on Billy, he yelled at them, swinging his tire iron at them. “Get out of here, Wade, and the rest of you! I know your daddies and they’ll all get a call from me tonight.”

Calvin
came up behind Billy. He wielded a big wrench and shook it at them menacingly.

The youths clambered back into the
Fury and then peeled out of the parking lot, gravel showering the paint jobs of the other parked cars. Wade hollered one last threat out his window before disappearing down the road. “You’ll pay, nigra lovers!”

I
could barely speak, but managed to say, “I’m so glad we decided to come out late tonight.”

R
atonda wiped her eyes with the tail of her blouse, but managed to thank Billy, now standing beside me. “Do I know you?” she asked him.

“This is Billy Thornton,”
I said, introducing them. “He was my dance teacher.” Billy smiled at me, and then I said, “A long time ago.”

                                                                      * * * * *

I decided it was best to return with Ratonda and Calvin. I thanked Billy. I felt I should catch a ride home for convenience, but also for Ratonda’s sake. Ratonda needed a female along. That, and I didn’t want to risk Billy confronting me about what happened on Wrightsville Beach.

Once we arrived back at the Millers, I
sat cross-legged in the blue chair with my sundae. It came to me that I was sitting in the Story Chair. Reverend Theo would say nothing to me about taking a turn at a story tonight, not since we had come back with an awful story about being rescued from the brink of death at the Twistee Treat.

Calvin
listened while Ratonda paced in a tirade. “It’s bad enough we can’t order a burger at a diner, now they running us off from the ice cream window.” Finally Dorothea ushered her off into their bedroom so her little girls would not be afraid.

Calvin assisted me as we passed out
the ice creams from cardboard holders. Billy would not let us leave, as he put it, “without the goods.”

“Who is this Billy?” asked Calvin.

“A friend,” I said.

“He your boyfriend?”

“No. Dance teacher.”

“Don’t act
like no dancer to me,” said Calvin.

“Billy’s not afraid of anything. I wish I could be like him.”

“You are.”

“H
e is sure a good one to have around when you’re scared,” I said, giving credit where it was due.

Calvin
told Ratonda’s girls, “Come get your ice creams, alley rats.” He gave them their cones and took them inside.

Rever
end Theo whispered to Calvin, “She’ll be fine.”

I was still waiting for my
heart to stop pounding, but as usual, Reverend Theo had a knack for knowing just what was needed. He sat there for what seemed like a whole half hour saying nothing. I finally felt my shoulders relax when he spoke.

“I killed off the cutworms in the rose bed this morning.” After another pause, he said, “Supposed to be a
meteor shower tonight,” he told me, as if the worst thing that happened all day was battling cutworms and waiting for the sky to fall. “I got my telescope stationed right behind my reading chair.”

I
knew that was true. He had been reading poetry for two weeks straight. I knew he would station himself right in that reading chair saying out loud every line of poetry, one eye on the sky.

I
felt more tender than usual. I had felt a good cry coming on and now it seemed to be welling up and spilling over. Each day, after being invited back into the Miller’s lives, I grew more relaxed, but also more prone to feel like a great lake was about to break loose its banks inside of me. After Billy and I had pulled up to the ice cream diner and saw those awful Billings brothers grabbing Ratonda, I had no more reserves left for constraint. “I don’t know what to say,” I said, my lip quivering in a way that embarrassed me to pieces.

“Maybe you need a woman’s ear,”
said Theo. He must have read me as well as he did poetry for he patted my head gingerly and then went inside. “Dorothea, Little Sister needs your company,” he called out.

Dorothea appeared right away, sit
ting in a chair next to me, finally able to enjoy her dip cone. She sat placid yet expectant.

I dabbed my mouth with a
Twistee Treat napkin. Then I said, “I noticed people tend to spill their guts to the both of you, so that’s why I never like to say much. You carry too many peoples’ problems on your shoulders.”

“Everybody needs someone to listen to
them,” said Dorothea, her usual sympathetic self.

I
agreed, but tonight was not the night. “Later, Miss Dorothea, after Ratonda’s had a chance to get herself together.”

“If not us, then you need to find someone you trust,” said Dorothea.

“I trust you,” I said, not intending that she would believe otherwise. “What I meant was that so many people burden you, no regard for what you’re going through.”

“We roll it off so it doesn’t set up housekeeping in us,” said Dorothea, not aware of the hard chocolate sliver stuck at the corner of her mouth.

I re-crossed my legs and settled back against the chair. “Why do I always feel like I’m about to cry when I sit here?” I listened to the quiet of crickets and the little girls laughing inside while waiting for Dorothea’s answer.

She sometimes gave one, but
other times just waited for me to figure things out on my own. Finally Dorothea laughed. “It’s not really the chair.”

“I beg to differ,” said Reverend Theo coming through the door again. He was never one to sit back and let Dorothea take the floor for long.

“No more than those aunts laying hands on everyone heals them,” she said so defiantly Theo backed off.

I
teared up and started talking but it felt as if I was off to the side listening, my words spilling out of me without any forethought. “I have no idea where my mother is or if she’s even alive. We’re awfully messed up, our family. I put it out of my thoughts, you know, until things turn bad.” I looked at Dorothea. “And things do seem to turn bad quite often. That’s when you need your mother around, you know?”

Dorothea did not look at me
but down at the porch floor as if that would ease the pain spilling out of me.

“Vesta, she wanted to be my mother. I do believe that
.”

Dorothea
sat quietly.

“
I’m not the daughter to Vesta that Siobhan was.”

“
You are the daughter she needs,” she said. “You are enough.”

After I said my
good-nights to the Millers, I stood at the front of the sunflower forest looking down a row before heading home. A thin shower of meteors streaked overhead just like Reverend Theo said would happen. One trailed a long streaking comet tail, like a missile aimed straight into Lake Sequoia where the Johnsons moored their boat. I walked through the row allowing the leaves to wipe my face just as surely as Dorothea tried to wipe the tears from my past.

When I
got home, there on my nightstand was the dance trophy, the top glued back in place. A pink note card lay next to it, so I picked it up and read it. Vesta was apologizing for accusing me of breaking it.

I
tucked the note into Siobhan’s special box that lay under her bed. I had been hiding the box from Vesta so she would not keep finding things that made her cry. I decided to place it back on the closet shelf where Siobhan had left it. I pulled the chair next to the closet, putting the special box back onto the shelf. When I stepped down, Vesta waited in the doorway.“I’m getting help,” she said. “For my issues.”