All-Season Edie Page 9

  “Dance,” I say.

  “Not ballet,” Dexter says urgently, speaking only to Mom now. “Please, Mom, not ballet. She’ll embarrass me.”

  “What kind of dance?” Mom says.

  I don’t know.

  “Mommy!” Dexter yells. “You’re not listening to me!” She’s almost in tears.

  “You can’t choose!” I yell suddenly. “It’s my spring activity!” I feel close to tears also. We stare at each other, startled and confused. Tears come quickly these days.

  “Maybe, Dexter,” Mom says, gently stroking Dexter’s hair back from her forehead to calm her down, “you could recommend a dance class you think Edie might like. Since you’re the dance expert in the family.” She says this in a straightforward way, almost like she’s talking to another adult instead of to her daughter. I find this infuriating, but also intriguing. Why should it be Dexter’s choice? What will Dexter choose?

  Dexter takes the rec center catalog and starts turning the pages. She bites her lip. She reads one page for a while and then turns it and starts to read the next one. She’s frowning, but it’s a concentration frown instead of a frustration frown.

  “This one,” she says finally, holding the catalog so I can’t see and pointing something out to Mom.

  “What is it?” I ask while Mom reads the page, nodding slowly.

  “Flamenco,” Dexter says. “You get to stamp your feet.”

  “Flamenco,” Mom says slowly, trying out the idea.

  “Flamenco,” I say. I have no idea what that is. It sounds perfect.

  “No smile,” the instructor says. “Little girl. No smile.”

  The girl next to me, who’s been whispering and tittering with the girl on her other side, stops abruptly.

  “First, I show,” the instructor says. “Little girls watch.”

  The instructor, whose name is Senora Ruiz, presses a button on the CD player that sits on a chair at the front of the room. Nothing happens.

  “Ah!” Senora Ruiz says, looking peeved. I wonder if she’ll have to cancel the class now that there’s no music. I remember once at Madame Elenskaya’s when the elderly man who played the piano started to cough only ten minutes into the class. At first he coughed delicately, his fingers still poised over the keyboard, and then he coughed harder, his hand over his mouth, and finally he turned away and hacked into a handkerchief, leaning far over the side of the bench, while we all fidgeted and looked at Madame Elenskaya. Finally the old man got up and left the room, still coughing, and Madame Elenskaya followed him, and when she came back she told everyone to put their street clothes and shoes on because class was over for that day. I assumed that was because there was no music for us to dance to. At the next class the pianist was a serious young girl with funky glasses and a long brown turtleneck dress, and we never saw the old man again. I think of the other bed in Grandpa’s hospital room, the one with the shower curtain all the way around it, and can’t shake the idea that the old man is there.

  Senora Ruiz, though, does not appear fazed by the failure of her CD player. She points to a tall girl in the front row and says, “With me.” She starts to clap, and the girl claps along with her. “Yes,” Senora Ruiz says, and the girl continues clapping on her own, slow and steady, as she’s been shown. When one or two other students start to clap too, Senora Ruiz shushes them impatiently, waving them off with her hands like they’re flies buzzing over her salad. I decide I’m a little bit afraid of Senora Ruiz.

  The tall girl claps; the class watches. Senora Ruiz stands very tall at the front of the room and suddenly stamps her foot. Everyone flinches. The clapping continues, and Senora Ruiz slowly raises her arms over her head and begins doing something complicated with her wrists and fingers, weaving and winding them in tricky patterns, like she’s pulling invisible threads out of the air. Slowly, while her hands continue to work, she brings her arms back down to her waist, and then she stamps again and begins to dance in time to the lonely clapping. With one hand she snags up her long skirt so we can see her feet, in uncomfortable-looking black boots, as they tap and stamp and make patterns.

  What fascinates me even more, though, is her face. Sure enough, she doesn’t smile. She frowns as though she’s concentrating very hard on hearing a sound that’s very faint and very far away. Her eyebrows knit intently, and her eyes seem to go more black. You could say she seems angry, but that’s not quite the right word. My own face makes a mirror of Senora Ruiz’s, the intense frown of someone trying very hard to understand something just out of reach. It feels so much like the way I’ve been feeling lately that I find when the dance is over I haven’t erased the look from my own face, and Senora Ruiz is staring straight at me.

  “Little girl, very good,” Senora Ruiz says. She sounds surprised.

  Practicing. I practice all over the house, but particularly in my room, in the kitchen and in the bathroom, where the floor has no carpet and the echo makes my stamping sound especially forceful. Mom, surprisingly, doesn’t mind me practicing in the bathroom; she thinks I’m studying myself in the mirror and Polishing My Technique. Nothing is further from the truth. Though my eyes are open, I’m like a sleepwalker when I dance; I am aware of very little. I dance by the feel of it: the stomp of my feet, the click of my fingers, the sway of my hips. I only have to imagine that lonely clapping and I can step into the dance like stepping onto a train and be carried away out of myself.

  The clapping and stamping are not as comprehensible to Dex, who claims I’m doing it just as an Edie-thing, to annoy her personally. Mom points out that it was Dexter who chose that particular class for me, because of the stamping, and now she will just have to Live With The Consequences Of Her Decision. Ordinarily this would be quite satisfying, but lately I’m more and more distracted and only want to get back inside myself, into the place where there’s nothing other than the rhythm in my body.

  More distressingly, Dad doesn’t seem to appreciate my new passion and more than once asks me if I would mind dancing more quietly because he has a headache. He often has a headache lately. Once, when I was practicing fairly quietly (I thought) in my room, he stormed upstairs and snapped at me to stop. I started to cry, and he hugged me and called me his pumpkin and apologized for being short-tempered and said he was just worried about some things, that was all. Finally Mom comes up with the solution, which is to send me to dance down in the laundry room, on the cold concrete floor, where I won’t be stomping over anyone’s head or getting in anyone’s way. Mom offers to bring my sister’s big body-length mirror down to the room, igniting major protest from Dex. But I tell her I like to dance with my eyes closed; it’s not strictly true, but it doesn’t really feel like a lie. Once, when Mom comes down and interrupts me by accident with a basket of laundry, she finds me winding my hands over my head with the lights off, in almost complete darkness.

  “Why dancing, Edie?” Mom asks me one night a couple of weeks later as she’s tucking me into bed. I can’t explain that it’s because of Grandpa in his hospital bed, unable to move, and the machine that beeped so quietly and steadily behind him, as lonely as the sound of one single, frightened girl clapping just exactly the way she’s been shown.

  Value Village is an Edie store, not a Dexter store. It’s not pretty or trendy or expensive. You don’t often bump into your school friends there so that you can all rush into the change rooms and try on the exact same shirt or skirt at the same time and all come out posing like models in a magazine, or girls in a movie, with your arms in the air and your hips cocked, saying Ta-da! for your mothers. (I saw this once with my own eyes and told Mom at the time, discreetly I thought, that it made me want to puke. The other mothers smiled, but I wasn’t given any dessert that night for using a rude word about my sister.) No, Value Village is fluorescent lights high, high up on the dirty ceiling, and tables of pots and pans with burnt-on crusts that can’t be removed, and chipped plates and mismatched cutlery, forks with bent tines, spoons without shine, dull knives. Value Village is shelv
es of used books with broken spines and covers curved double and children’s books I’m not allowed to touch because they’re warped by food and drool. Value Village is lonely-eyed men and women picking through racks bulging with used clothes that have been sorted by color into rainbows of uselessness: acid-washed blue jeans, fluorescent orange T-shirts, tie-dyed purple vests, cracked and scaly red vinyl jackets that once passed for leather, tea-green sateen ball gowns with sweat stains under the arms and loose threads where the beading has torn away. The change rooms have dust bunnies the size of real bunnies on the floor and no mirror, so that you have to step out in front of everyone in whatever you’re wearing. The cashiers all seem sleepy and depressed. But Value Village is where I found my Arabian Nights sandals with the gold straps and the rhinestones and the upcurled toes, and my dark green cape with only a tiny moth hole near the collar, and my floppy velvet Shakespeare hat with the matching feather, and my blousy white pirate shirt from two Halloweens ago.

  Value Village is where Mom and I go to find a skirt for Senora Ruiz’s flamenco class, because Senora Ruiz says you can’t dance flamenco in gym shorts and bare feet; whoever comes to the next class without leather-soled shoes and a long skirt won’t be allowed to take part. I have patent leather Mary Janes with leather soles that make the right click-slap-stamp sounds on the concrete in the laundry room, but I don’t own one single skirt, and Dex’s are all too big, even if she were willing to loan me one, which is highly, extremely, utterly doubtful in any case.

  “This is nice,” Mom says, pulling out a flippy, deeply pleated, red and white cheerleader’s skirt that would barely reach my knees. I say, “OH MY GOD,” and shove the skirt back into the maw of the rack before anyone might see. “Longer,” I say, trying to make up for this meanness, because Mom hasn’t sat in on one of my classes yet and can’t be expected to understand that this particular skirt is all wrong. I want a skirt that frowns like Senora Ruiz, not angrily, but darkly and seriously. I will know it when I see it.

  “Longer,” Mom repeats thoughtfully. Next she pulls out a long skirt in a crinkly fabric with a busy blue and ivory Indian pattern. This skirt is momentarily distracting because it reminds me of the hippie girls on the island last summer, and I can tell Mom likes it too. “This must be from the seventies,” Mom says, which I know was the time when Mom was a young girl and probably wore clothes like this. I’ve seen old photographs of Mom before she knew Dad, when she had long, straight hair parted in the middle and wore embroidered blouses and long skirts sort of like this one. But it’s still not quite right, and I have to shake my head. Mom strokes the skirt once or twice and puts it back on the rack.

  The search is slow and tedious, and nothing seems right. I get discouraged. While Mom continues to sort through the racks, occasionally pulling out some inappropriate item and holding it up for my dark, serious frown, I drift farther and farther away. I become interested in the conversation of a couple of teenage girls, older than Dex, whose pale faces look even paler in contrast to their dyed black hair and black lipstick and head-to-toe black clothes. I know from Dex that these girls are called Goth, which is more a city-girl than a Coquitlam-girl thing. Dex, I know, has no time for Goth. They, and a few other subcategories of the terminally weird (as Dex refers to them), are about the only teenagers you ever see in Value Village.

  “This,” one of the Goth girls says to the other, holding up a black T-shirt with the word succubus across the chest in ornate white script. I don’t know this word.

  “These,” the other Goth girl replies, holding up a pair of heavy brass candlesticks splotched with verdigris, which is a word I know and love. It means the greeny blue sheen old brass gets when it hasn’t been cleaned in a long time.

  “Edie,” Mom calls, and I look up to see her waving a blue taffeta skirt with a crinoline that sticks out about three feet on each side. “It’s long!” Mom calls. I shake my head, No!

  The girls smile at each other and at me, pityingly.

  “Shopping with your mom is such a drag,” one of them says.

  “Ew, don’t even talk to her,” the other says.

  “This is cool,” the first one says, stressing the word in a way that suggests she’s using my vocabulary, not her own, because she’s too, too cool to use a word like cool. The skirt she holds up is long and black and plain, with a long slash up one leg showing a blood-colored lining. At the top of the slash is stitched a black fabric rose.

  “Aw!” the second girl says jealously, having already forgotten me. “I get to try it on after you.”

  To my surprise, the first girl doesn’t head for the change room but simply pulls the waistband wide and steps into it, over the long black skirt she’s already wearing. She can’t get it over her hips.

  “Too small,” she says, and the other girl eagerly tries the same move and gets stuck at the same place. They toss the skirt over top of the rack, not bothering to put it back on its hanger, and move on. The first girl glances back at me and says, “Good luck,” in a small shy voice that’s probably her real voice when she’s not being a tough scary Goth.

  “Ew!” the second girl says again, and they link arms and go away, laughing loudly.

  I snatch the skirt off the rack and pull it on right there in the aisle, over top of my jeans, just as the Goth girls did. It fits. I snag up the hem of the skirt, bunching the material up all along the slash and pinning it with my hand where the rose is so that the blood color shows through the black, and stamp my feet a few times. I know Mom will hate it, and that makes me frown. I’ll offer to pay for it from my own money and maybe, just maybe, Mom will understand that this is very, very important. Frowning intensely, still holding the long skirt up in one hand, I walk back to Mom, planning the words I’ll say. But Mom takes one look at my face and says, “Is that it?”

  I stamp my feet, still frowning.

  “I guess that’s it,” Mom says and doesn’t even make me take it off when we go up to the counter to pay.

  At my next class, I anxiously examine the other girls’ skirts—long and short, patterned and plain, some obviously resurrected from the dress-up bag (a black skirt from a witch costume with a fluorescent yellowish white spider ironed on the side) or the back of the closet (a private school kilt)—but I see none I prefer to my own. I seek Senora Ruiz’s glance, hoping for another private gesture of approval, just between the two of us, but her eyes merely pass over her class with faintly glazed distaste. Two girls in running shoes are sent to sit out the class on a bench by the side wall, which is all mirrors. The smaller one snivels a little, but Senora Ruiz shoots her a stern look and she immediately goes quiet. The other one glumly rubs her sneakered toe into the hardwood dance floor until it squeaks, and then Senora Ruiz gives her a look too; after that she sits very still.

  “How was it?” Mom asks as we wait together in the rec center lobby for Dexter’s Advanced Ballet class to let out.

  “Exceptional,” I say.

  Mom looks at her watch and sighs. In theory our classes end at the same time, one of the reasons she’s so pleased I’m enjoying myself—it makes the driving that much easier. But Dexter can’t be rushed, particularly through the removal of her pink ballet shoes, with their long silk ribbons and stained points where her toes have bled.

  When Dexter finally comes out, wearing a gray hooded track suit over her leotard, Mom says, “Where’s Megan?” Usually we give Mean Megan a ride home on Saturdays, which is bad because it means spending time with Mean Megan, but good because it guarantees me the front seat so the older girls can whisper and giggle together in the back.

  “She doesn’t take ballet anymore,” Dex says. “She switched to jazz and hip-hop.” She says this so carefully, so neutrally, I know they must have had a raging argument about it and perhaps aren’t even friends anymore.

  At supper, I practice my steps under the table until Dexter kicks me to make me stop.

  “Mom!” I say.

  “Mom!” Dexter says.

  The pho
ne rings. Dad answers. He listens for a moment, starts to say something, then screws his eyes up tight and stays that way for three, four, five breaths. His shoulders shake once, and then he turns his back to us.

  “Girls,” Mom says, “I want you to take your suppers and go finish in front of the TV.”

  We do as we’re told, chewing slowly and staring at the TV’s dull black eye, which neither of us has made a move to turn on.

  Grandpa’s funeral is a week later. First will be the church service; then there will be an afternoon and evening at Grandma and Grandpa’s house—now just Grandma’s house—that Dad calls a “reception” and Mom calls a “wake.” They decide that Dexter and I can’t come to either the church or the house because we’re too young and will get too upset. The night Grandpa died, Dad went out and brought Grandma home with him so she wouldn’t have to spend that first night alone. We cried with her then. The funeral and what comes after, Mom explains, are for people who knew Grandpa but weren’t as close to him as his own two favorite girls. At the last minute, though, Dex throws a fit, crying and begging to go with them to say good-bye to Grandpa. I, who have cried so much in the past few days I feel scoured out, am unable to produce one tear more. I watch numbly while our parents struggle to calm the now near-hysterical Dex.