Dancing in the Dark (4 page)

No, a good appearance was essential, the first thing people saw and how they judged. It was obvious that it determined, was first cause, of how a life would go. It might be a mask for some other truth beneath the flesh, but people did not look for truth that way. Even a child knew that. Even the child Edna knew that a display of fear or pain would mar the surface.

And there were other things even a child would know. The proper pattern of a life, how it should be led, this knowledge was absorbed. One was a girl and so inevitably would become a woman and the way to be followed was well laid out and obvious. To wander off was failure. I considered my mother a failure in this way, a mutant of a woman. An embarrassment.

Before we were married, Harry tried and tried to make me talk. He’d say, “I’m not going to say a word, Edna. I’m just going to sit here until you say something.” Or he’d ask me questions about myself.

When I met him, I could barely speak.

He said, “Tell me about your family, Edna.” This was before he met them.

What I thought was that they were entirely the wrong way about. Why did my mother buy those magazines, when she obviously had no intention of following their advice?

The magazines and books, the world itself outside our own, showed clearly that the real and normal system was the reverse of the one in our home. My parents’ unaccountable aberrations.

I see my mother. The last time I saw her, some months ago now, I guess, she was a bit stooped, but still angular and hard. As a child I stood below her and looked up her long plank of a body and knew that in a contact with her I would be hurt. Even a hug when I was small and soft and she was tall and hard was dangerous.

She made my father smoke outdoors and would not let him drink. He went out to the porch or the backyard to smoke his pipe. I don’t know where he went to drink, but sometimes he came home silly, and she would slam plates and doors.

But I thought, “Well, why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he be able to do what he wants?” He was so quiet most of the time, except when he was silly. He worked in a hardware store and handed her his pay each week. She gave him back a little for his spending.

He couldn’t have known before they were married. So she must have betrayed him during their courtship with some other face, a lie.

“Sit up straight,” she said to me. (To Stella, too, no doubt.) “Don’t get dirty.” “Clean up your plate.”

I never heard them quarrel, and I also never saw them kiss. It was strange, with Harry, to have him so different; he liked his hands to be touching something.

My mother’s dresses hung awkwardly. She took long strides. She wore my father’s rubber boots outside to hang the wash.

And yet. I admit they grew to fit, whether they started that way or not. Who else, as they turned out to be, could either of them have lived with? And maybe she would have liked sometimes to wear pretty dresses and dainty shoes, to say, “Dear, your supper’s ready,” or “How nice, you got a raise, you must be doing well.” Maybe she would have liked it if he’d managed something. It was sad, her bitterness and his defeat.

It was also an example. I set myself to be quite different. I paid attention to the magazines and not my mother, and pledged that when I married (however that would come about; but it had to), I would cherish the state properly.

And so I did. And now I don’t know how things ought to work, I really don’t.

She must have done something truly strange to make my father so invisible. I imagined her burned as a witch for her skill at transformations. What else might she do?

So I hid my own face from her, for fear that if she saw it, if I displayed a need, she might make me disappear as well. It was a good deal safer to be silent and off to one side. When I fell down outside and skinned my knees, I stopped the blood with leaves and had a quiet, private weep. I did not go crying to her to have her kiss it better. (But such an exaggerating child I must have been, because of course she would have comforted me, she was not so unnatural.)

Then I saw her sometimes with her friends, who would come for tea in the afternoon when my father was at work, and she was somewhat different: smiled and talked and
crossed her legs comfortably and let her shoulders down a little; was this the face she’d used to win my father?

I thought about her quite a lot in those days, and understood my own intentions.

This is not her fault, though, what has happened and where I am. It’s just that that was such a tiny world, our house and that small town. Only the magazines brought news of the outside and I devoured them for clues.

Such a relief and a revelation Harry was, a man who spoke, apparently, all his thoughts, even bits of meanness, so that of course I believed he was a truthful man and showed me everything. The only person I could take at what they call face value. I loved him for that, although I would have loved him anyway, for giving me a life.

It was my mother who said I had to go to university; my father merely acquiesced. “You’re smart enough, Edna,” she said, and it was true my marks were good, or good enough, better than Stella’s, at any rate. I was never stupid that way. “You can make something of yourself.”

I heard the bitterness in her voice, but then, I often heard bitterness in her voice and didn’t pay attention.

I don’t even know if she liked me or loved me. She did seem to want things from me, though.

However did they manage to have Stella and me? Especially the unaccountable Stella, who seemed to belong to another family entirely?

Stella, who cried so hard both of them went to her, who shouted and defied and tossed her head and went freely, not caring, out the door when she wanted to. She bowled them over with the volume of her demands.

I mean only that we were quite different, not that I disliked my sister.

They were my family. When I went away, I expect I missed them. Among all the strangers in the world, they knew me best.

They haven’t come to see me here, nor have they written. Do they hate me now, do I frighten them, or are they just not allowed to come or write?

They must be terribly bewildered and ashamed, I imagine. More than anybody else, except of course for Harry’s parents, they must wonder why.

They must all have wept, and mourned for one thing or another.

“Dear Edna,” my mother-in-law once said to me, patting my shoulder, “you’re so good for Harry.”

I
even practised kissing with that full-length mirror in my bedroom: long, passionate twistings of lips against cool, smooth glass. Trying to see how it might be.

I thought, “Some day, this is really going to happen,” but couldn’t imagine. He was tall and dark but had no face.

I progressed to embraces with my pillow, more responsive. Practising again: one would hate, when the time came, to be clumsy or not know how.

But was it possible the mirror and the pillow would be all there ever was?

No, this could not be possible, however unimaginable it might be, getting there from here.

I experimented with lipstick and mascara, blush and powder. I checked the growth of my breasts, wanting them large enough to mould desirability beneath blouses and sweaters, but not so large as to be vulgar. At a certain point, they stopped growing and I was pleased.

It was all so
difficult.
I watched amazed as Stella, three years after me, moved so gracefully, easily, into all the places that caused me pain.

Standing by a wall in the high school auditorium, waiting to be asked to dance, waiting and waiting. Watching the others, wondering how it worked. I really thought (I still think) they knew some secret, those people with their shining skin and laughter, their swinging hair and flinging arms, their shuffling, leaping feet. There was some secret that they all knew and that nobody had told me and that nobody would ever tell me. And it showed, that I didn’t know.

I smiled and smiled. My face hurt with the smiling. A band of boys, classmates, but they looked different up there on the stage, playing Presley: “Don’t Step on My Blue Suede Shoes.” I moved my body to the rhythm and tapped my feet and kept on smiling, but that was not the secret. Those others, agile on the dance floor, did not step on each other’s shoes (not blue suede but white pumps, or saddle shoes with white ankle socks). When the music turned slow, girls laid their heads on boys’ shoulders and something steamy seemed to rise from the floor.

I couldn’t help watching.

Home, I turned again to my pillow. If I were part of two, I understood, I would be inside and able to look out, instead of the reverse. Being held, that must be something.

I kissed the pillow. “Good night, dear,” I whispered. “Sleep well.”

Ah, Harry was so beautiful. He saved my life.

I never told him that. It would have terrified him.

He used to say, “Edna, loosen up. Nobody’s going to bite.” Not true. I never had faith that someone wouldn’t, gleaming teeth lurching from the crowd, gripping my too-free wrist.

And I was right, after all. Even the most-loved people slash like animals under certain circumstances.

I thought, “Maybe if I watch carefully, I’ll see what the secret is.” This involved not being watched myself. I preferred
in any case to go unnoticed, until I could work it out. Because if people were looking, might I not make them laugh by doing something awkward or foolish? A pimple on my chin would blaze at them if they were looking, whereas if they were not, it would go quietly away. If I stumbled or lost the trail of a sentence when I spoke, was it not better if no one was listening?

Certainly it was better to hold my hands at my sides than to reach out and risk a blow.

It is very peculiar to have done so much in the interests of safety and wind up in this position.

And then, along behind me came Stella. Pretty, assured, and laughing Stella. Oh, weeping and rebellious Stella, too, but so what? It was all simple for her.

However did she manage to become a Stella in that house? That dark, sad house where even the smells were damp and heavy; that house where despair and grimness and disappointment and impatience warred to become the theme of each day. Where the couch and chairs were dark brown, nubbly and cheap, and the curtains were heavy and lined, and all the wood was painted over and as brown as the furniture. Where wallpaper had light colours but heavy designs, great green flowers and ferns slammed onto white so that it was a wonder they stayed up; so cumbersome one might expect to get up one morning and find a heap of paper greenery tumbled on the floor.

We were not so poor. It was not as ugly as my memory conjures it. It was the atmosphere that darkened it, more than wood and walls, the atmosphere that was damp and heavy and sucked away my courage and any words I might have had. I was inclined to creep about it quietly, like a frightened bug.

But Stella came out of the same house. How does one account for that?

How does she remember the house where we grew up?

I watched with amazement the ease with which she met people, the ease with which she found words to fill hours on the telephone, the ease with which her hair fell bouncing into place. Boys knocked shyly on the door and she flung away with them into the bright night on her dates, with just a happy “Good-bye, see you later.” I listened to the radio with my parents.

Whatever the secret was, she knew it.

My parents never said, “Look at Stella, how popular she is, why aren’t you?” They didn’t have to say that: we all knew, spending our evenings silently and helplessly together. I lay on the couch with my eyes closed and the radio delivered music and stories. I breathed evenly and did not move, but in my head I sang songs with the bands and whirled around polished dance floors with some dark and handsome man. I was the singer and the dancer and the heroine of all the stories. With my eyes closed, I could vanish.

I wore long red silk dresses and flowers in my hair, and was much older than I was. But beautiful. Or was a torch singer in a dress of simple black, a spotlight shining on me and all the rest in darkness. I held my hand to my heart in a play and said, “Oh yes, I love you, of course I’ll marry you.” Men wanted my attention and thrust roses at me on the stage. My voice was a miracle, my body filled with grace. I was warm and charming and knew what to say. I was praised and perfect and lovely. And was aware, although it was not evident on the stage, that in my own bright home was a handsome man who loved me and was waiting for me with a glass of wine and long, embracing arms.

Oh, it was a perfect life, with everything. My own days were, in contrast, drab and there were times when I could hardly wait for evening and for Stella to leave (although if I’d been asked, I would have dashed out just like her, off to parties and dances and movies, of course I would have) and for my parents to settle and turn on the radio, to rejoin that perfect life in which people looked at me with such admiration and I was a gifted, lovely, much-loved woman. And said such things with my body and my voice, all the things that otherwise would go unsaid.

And then my father would stretch and yawn, the joints of his jaws and fingers cracking, and that world slammed shut and no matter if I was in the midst of a song there, or if the dance wasn’t finished yet: back I was tossed into that small dark room where I lay still and silent on the couch. “Time to get to bed, young lady,” he always said. “Early day tomorrow.” Because it was always an early day for us, seven o’clock each weekday for school and work, eight o’clock on weekends for chores and church. When could I get out of this, and how would it come about? Who was the person who would find me here and whose eyes would recognize me and who would take me away to some life I belonged in?

Now there are just the two of them. And I suppose they watch television instead of listening to the radio.

And Stella’s life has had its peculiar patches. There are things I would like to ask her about. I missed my chance, when one occurred, but now, for one reason and another, I seem to miss her. I would like it if she were to come and visit.

I go astray too often here, and occasionally too far. What I should be doing is keeping an eye on the carpet, and examining the bedspread.