A Regular Guy (54 page)

Then the music changed, and they were all hopping, dancing rock
and roll, as Owens and Eve had goonily after Jane’s graduation. Little children jumped on the floor, a boy in a fancy blue satin suit. Eve danced neatly; she told Jane she’d learned from copying black women in jazz clubs. Owens was a goof, his legs far apart, stomping like a bear. Julie and Peter reminded her of Minna and her father on the kitchen floor. Huck was dancing now with her mother, bending her backwards.

But there was no one to ask Jane to dance. Noah and Louise were sitting holding hands. Jane didn’t want to split them. Noah couldn’t dance, and Louise didn’t seem as if she wanted to.

Then a man introduced himself. “I know you,” he said. “You were born on my farm in Oregon.”

Jane had always thought she’d someday meet this man and asked him if he’d like to dance.

“Oh, no, sweetie,” he said. “I don’t dance.” He winked. “I would if I was twenty years younger.”

Maybe she could dance alone, or else grab the hand of that little boy in the blue satin suit.

A waiter came by and handed around champagne in tall swirled flutes. Jane sipped the top and felt froth in her nose.

Finally, she asked her father.

He stood up and took her hand, but then the music changed again, into a circle dance, the vine step. Jane knew that from Bixter; it was easy. She leapt up with her father, then looked over at Louise and Noah and said, “You guys should come too, even if you just clap.”

Then she broke two hands and joined in, around and around, faster and faster. Everyone was rising from the tables, the sky patched in a faceted circle the quicker she went, stumbling a little, her heart heavy but aloft, and she saw people clustering around Noah as he danced with his hands, clapping overhead. Someone tore the chain and led his line under another bridge of hands so the circles intersected and twined inside each other like a seashell. The grandmother across from her was light on her feet, and Eve kicked off her heels to dance in her stockings, while the music kept building more and more, and Jane was sweating but it was a clear blue night and now this was fun. And all of a sudden, two guys stamped a chair in the center of the circle and everyone kept going, frenzied as some kind of pipes or harmonica
burst, high and shrieking, crazy into the music. Jane heard the pop of a champagne bottle just over her right ear and felt some of the froth land on her wrist, wishing she could lick it, the sweet and the salt, but she couldn’t stop now. She was in until it was over, and then in the center her father and Huck and Frank and some men she didn’t know were lifting up the bride in her long white dress and Noah in his chair, and they were raised high in the air by a crowd of tuxedoed men for a long time, Noah still holding his flute of champagne. He threw out a white cloth, a handkerchief, and in the excitement, he tossed the champagne too, which arched up and then rained on them all.

The white cloth had two tiny spots of blood, like a bite. Jane watched her father. If he weren’t down, she wondered, would I be up? It was a question she’d asked herself before. If he hadn’t lost, would he love her? She looked around the night, considering this sliding register. She was becoming an adult.

This was not really the first dress. The first real dress was the uniform for school, when they’d finally let her go. Ruby had patiently hemmed it, while Jane stared at her new self in the mirror. Then, with the wool jumper over a white blouse and knee socks, she’d stood outside the pink-brick public school, carrying a notebook. A bell rang and the front hall began buzzing with footsteps, as she’d imagined for years, and she hurried to get into the crowd.

Acknowledgments

I
’m grateful for the generous intelligence of my friends Allan Gurganus, Rob Cohen, Cristina Garcia, Lewis Hyde, Jeanne McCulloch, Ileene Smith, Ben Watson, Binky Urban and my editor, Gary Fisketjon. I would also like to thank Pamela Bjorkman, of Caltech, Lucila Cordero Nual, Roy Schafer and Mathew Soyster. The MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center offered sanctuary during the writing of this book.

Most of all I want to thank my family—especially my husband, Richard Appel, for his jokes, editing, understanding, patience and the ever endowing wisdom that comes from having fun along the way.