Dancing in the Dark (5 page)

B
ut there I was, a lump of a frightened child, no way to tell if other people were frightened too, although now I suppose many of them must have been. One of the blindnesses of youth, that one thinks oneself unique, I guess, and fails to see the ways others hide themselves. All I knew was that I had several faces, all of them hidden, and multiple longings and couldn’t tell which was true. And that there was that secret that, had I known it, would have made many things clear and different. It was a dangerous and vulnerable state, wandering about not knowing something others did. Who could tell the menaces of ignorance?

And yet there was something else I knew: that at some point there would be a change. I would be a different person entirely. It would come when I was no longer a child, when I left this house and this town, when I turned twenty.

I have my bits of tough, hard stubbornness. That faith that I would not always be a frightened child was one. I could think, “This will end, so it may not always be important. When I am twenty and different, it won’t be important at all.”

How sweet, and sad, remembering that hope, and twenty now so long ago.

I had no idea how the change would come about. A fairy godmother’s wand-wave? Of course not, but something. It could not always be a matter of that small unpleasant house, or of mirrors and pillows only.

(And when change did come, I was so grateful that I never dared to hope for it again. What is given can equally be taken away, a paralysing possibility.)

It would be a matter of a man. Who would see beyond my plainness, or lack of loveliness, beyond my silence and my fear, to the woman in red singing and dancing on a stage. All the Ednas I contained, he would see and want. He would delight in my shyness, and protect me from my fear. He would hold me in the night and keep away the silence and the dark.

He would also stand up with me in daylight and say to people, “This is my wife.” So there would be no confusion about who I was. Even for myself, it would be sorted out.

All this, which would happen when I was twenty and grown up, was as vivid, and as distant, as the other lives I led in the evenings with my eyes closed.

What magic did that number have for the child Edna? Then, it seemed impossibly old and distant. When I was in my teens, it began to glitter a little way ahead, in and out of view, shimmering on the horizon. From the faceless frightened girl would come the woman, leaping some mysterious gap; who would be the butterfly from the caterpillar, the graceful swan from the ugly duckling, and the heroine of all those other childhood stories.

Some effort would be involved. But while I was not at the time equipped for such an effort, and would probably not
even recognize it, part of the magic of twenty was that then I would be capable of it, and of seeing it.

I saw my life patterned in numbers, a connect-the-dot puzzle in a child’s magazine. A straight vertical line rising from the bottom, from birth to five; then a jog up and to the left to nine; vertical again to twelve; and then a long flat horizontal stretch to be trudged along to twenty. And there the lines might change, go anywhere, a new pattern might begin and who could tell where it might go once the leap was made?

But it must all go somewhere. I was a cherisher of lines and patterns.

And then I was nineteen and my mother was sending me off to university.
“Now
you’ll do well, Edna,” she said, with a surprising kindness, however tactless. I flushed at how clearly she must have seen that I had not been doing well at all.

But I shared her view. Now I would have to do well, because I was nineteen and twenty was very soon. So this was the preparation for the change.

Blind and frightened and anticipating, I stepped into space. There was no direction I could look to see anything at all. Back was painful and would become irrelevant; forward I could not yet imagine. It could be anything. Instead of looking, I hovered on the instant of the change.

My mother and Stella stood on the front porch and we all waved good-bye. My father drove me to the city and my own apartment we had found. “Well,” he said, turning to leave, “that’s it then, I guess,” and kissed my cheek clumsily. I wanted for a moment to ask him to stay, to tell him I was frightened. But I was always frightened, and he couldn’t stay, and if he did, what? He couldn’t help, never had.

So I was finally alone. It seemed such a natural state that I barely noticed. A brief reprieve, a luxury before twenty,
when something, a plunge into the real life I would have, must be accomplished.

I sound so helpless and full of pity for myself. But in fact, along with the frightened child I carried also that bone of determination. What else took me to those dances, to stand smiling and hoping and tapping my feet? What else could have taken me off alone to university, to that apartment where I cut pictures from magazines to brighten the walls? It is some accomplishment to suffer fear, but to plod on nonetheless. There is some pride in survival.

I wandered the city and the campus, watching. Great stone buildings there were, and acres of grass and flows of people like spawning salmon, hugging books to their chests or swinging briefcases. The classes were huge. One could be lost, which should make it easier to be brave. Who would notice?

“Just do well, Edna,” my mother said before I left. “It isn’t easy for us to afford this for you.”

So I studied hard, went to all the classes and wrote essays and dragged books home from the library. But it turned out to be surprisingly easy. I had even then an eye for detail, an eye that picked up something, in those days a piece of knowledge, a fact, and held it for as long as it was needed. I don’t suppose I learned, but I remembered.

And watched. A psychology professor had a laboratory of rats, and it was somewhat similar, seeing which way things ran in this unfamiliar place.

At nights I pulled a chair to the window of my apartment and watched the people passing on the sidewalk, sitting out on their porches for the last late-autumn warmth. They couldn’t see me, sitting in the dark. They wouldn’t have even thought to look. When I smell autumn now, I am returned to that window, breathing leaves.

And then very late, when everything was quiet and there was no more to watch, I shut the curtains and turned on the lights inside. Here I was safe and warm, alone, and although being alone could make me uneasy, it was also pleasant. No one could see.

I turned on the radio then, lay down on my makeshift couch, and became again the singers and the dancers. No father now to stretch and yawn and break the moment, and sometimes I fell asleep lying there and dreamed in the other lives, not my own.

Other lives were also offered up on bulletin boards. They lined the walls of corridors and I stood reading them. From advertisements for typing services to schedules of concerts and plays and notices of meetings, like a detective I tried to see which ones might leap out and offer a reward, a life.

They offered everything. A club for foreign students? The notice said anyone welcome, and I was as much a foreigner here as anyone. Did the round black faces, or the brown and aquiline, feel as removed from this as I did? I walked through the halls and across lawns, changing classes, and it was like someone else watching this.

Oh, the places these people would know, places I would never see except in pictures in my mind. Wild colours and shapes of clothes, strange dances and music. Imagine, I thought, to see a desert. How would an infinity of nothing look? Here the eyes encountered intrusions—trees, or people, buildings. How would it be, seeing nothing?

How would dust be, or jungle? Hunger and the threat of death? One could imagine a black man who would sweep me up and take me home to be a princess. In a different world, I might be beautiful.

But then of course, faced with it, one might find it all quite
different. At a meeting one might hear that seeing a desert was merely dull; that the threat of death only made one snappish; that the politics were small and human; that the life of a princess was confining.

I preferred an exotic, golden Timbuktu to what it more likely was, a hungry, dusty outpost.

Pictures in the mind are not unimportant, after all. I have spent considerable effort in my time, protecting pictures.

What I wanted was some grace, a wealth of spirit that would add, not take away. Some way, perhaps, to say what moved behind the eyelids: the dances and the songs.

And here I was on my own, out of the small, contained town and in a city which must have proportionately greater possibilities; where the right longings might be unleashed.

A literary magazine came out four times a year. One saw these people in the corridors, wearing black, some with wisps of beards, women with long straight hair pressed flat around pale faces, expressions drifting or defiant. The darkness of the foreign faces, the pallor of the literary ones—equally exotic, foreign, and attractive.

The magazine contained sad and gentle stories, outraged and bitter poems. About war, betrayal, pain, and poverty, but different: not politics and facts, but forms. And also about dim bodies, twisting and caressing. It seemed these pale people dared anything, with words.

Here then was a possibility. Magic words, perhaps? Could I transform fear, with an incantation make anything I wished vanish, or the man who would see me appear?

I was a bit excited. And also if my words were printed, I might become important, like a singer or a dancer, but without the flaws: no need to see them staring, no need to meet the audience.

One night, instead of turning on the radio, I sat down and wrote a poem. The only one I’ve ever written, and I can’t remember a word of it. Just that it was to do with fear, my most familiar subject. Fifteen lines of it, etched out late into a night. Like the classes, it was not as hard as I had expected, no need for rhyming or scanning. Just words poured out with a pen, becoming a poem on the paper.

I stared at the words and found they did not dissolve the fear; just made it something that could be stared at.

If I gave them away then? The next meeting of the group that put out the magazine was three weeks away: enough time to prepare for what might be my first step to twenty. I could go out and buy a black turtleneck sweater and maybe write another poem. I could go to the meeting of those people and drop fear in their laps.

I wonder if I could have. I’m curious now if I might have seen my poem in that magazine and how I would have looked in a black sweater and if I might have been some other Edna.

Instead, Harry came one day between the poem and the meeting and there was no need to long for anything again. The swan and the butterfly himself he was, not me.

And I turned twenty, and everything was changed, as I had hoped. Except that I was not changed so much; just what Harry taught me.

Little fluttering hopes of the child Edna, the lost babies of dreams.

But Harry was quite real.

I’d almost forgotten all that, from more than twenty years ago. Now those people are only dark skins and dark turtleneck sweaters in my mind.

And now my words are here, in this blue notebook. I could not manage, I guess, words and Harry, too. Or had no need to.

How mysterious it was, still is, how people laugh and talk so easily, touch and hold hands and clap each other on the back. They pick up telephones and dial the numbers and know what to say after hello. They may read aloud, or tell each other things they know, share recipes or troubles. They pour each other drinks and light each other’s cigarettes and glance into each other’s eyes. In my own living room, with Harry’s arm around me, or even standing across the room, I have been able to do some of this also. I have spoken, asked questions, and laughed at jokes. I have nodded and nodded, listening. Harry would tell me how people said to him, “Edna’s so terrific.” He said they told him what a good listener I was; how kind and some said even saintly. “It’s that beatific smile,” he laughed, “that glazed look you get when somebody’s really boring and you’re trying to be nice.”

People don’t seem to ask for much, or to look too far.

I feel a million words inside, leaping to get out.

And what did Harry see? In what context did he say, “I love you”? Perhaps he saw a reflection. He took me in, in any case, and held me and breathed life into me as if he had rescued a drowning victim. He taught me attitudes and sufficient words, and I adopted them gratefully, if not wholly aware of doing so.

I would say Harry raised me; the way parents are said to raise their children.

Whatever would I have been without him?

There was no need to find out. Instead, I concentrated my small courage on him, my stern bone of will, and he watched and listened on my behalf.

He looked after me in more ways than he knew.

But that we reversed our duties and he became the womb, is that some reflection of my barrenness?

I
heard footsteps running up behind me and turned, startled. One never knew.

“Sorry, did I scare you?” asked the panting boy.

I cannot seem to see his final face, but that one is clear. Intense brown eyes, long narrow nose, thin lips, wide mouth, open and confident and a little breathless. Slim tan trousers, a dark-brown belt, light-blue shirt, darker blue (nylon, I think) jacket, slung back a bit to emphasize his shoulders.

Later I would see the shoulder blades, the broadness narrowing over bones, the ribs, to a waist, and from the front, hipbones guiding flesh down to that other thing I had not seen before. And have only ever seen his. “How do you know I’m any good in bed?” he used to ask, and he was laughing, but I’m not sure if he was really joking. “You’ve only ever been with me.”

This was much later.

He was apologizing again. “I’m sorry, I was trying to catch you but I didn’t mean to scare you. You’re in my English class, aren’t you? Restoration?”

Yes, that was right: his face was a little familiar. But as part
of a crowd, a whole class. Now was different. Now he was concentrating on me as if the street and other people were not there, only the two of us existing. (That was a gift of his, making his object of the moment his only object. I have seen him turn that brilliant probing stare on others, so flattering, a magnet to confession that small device.) “I’m Harry Cormick,” he was saying. “I don’t know your name.”