Dancing Lessons (11 page)

“I'm glad I've got to know Celia now we're older. Otherwise I would have gone through life hating her. She's my best buddy now. But how do you think I felt, all of us felt, when we were growing up to have everything we did compared to her? Knowing there was room in your heart for only one person. Have you any idea what that did to us?”

I was trying to think, having no recollection of ever calling Celia's name aloud, once she left home. Where did Shirley get this from? Maybe when I got a letter I would read it out loud to the others, and her father of course would tell us all about her after he'd been to visit. But me holding up Celia as a model to them? How could I have done that, since I hardly saw her? I suppose I might have mentioned how well she was doing when Shirley or Junior failed something in school. Or what new things she had just accomplished. But it wasn't as if I was going on about her all the time. That was unfair and I told Shirley so.

“Ha,” she said, “not to mention you sneaking off to visit her all those times and leaving us alone in the house. With nothing to eat all day. Me and Junior and Lise. Alone in the dark. What kind of mother is that? And you carry on about Pops leaving us.”

“Me?” I said. For I was truly confused. I never “carried on” about their father leaving. Never. That was untrue. As far as I recall, I left them only the one time. I never tried to visit Celia again. At least, I don't think I did. So how did this get multiplied in Shirley's mind to the point where she was recalling several visits so many years later? And how could she have known of that one abortive visit when I hadn't told anyone? She soon answered that question. Millie—to whom I had given a not very truthful account of my day, since I had to tell her something. As far as she was concerned, I had gone to take Celia something, something she urgently needed. Millie for once didn't ask questions, and I could see she didn't believe a word of it, but I didn't care. The whole experience left me feeling so ashamed that I vowed never to tell anyone.

“I heard you talking,” Shirley said, “the first time you left us. Talking the next day to Millie. So I knew you had gone to Kingston. To see her.”

“But that was the only time.”

“Mama.” She turned to look at me fully and spoke extra slowly as if to an idiot. “It wasn't one time. It was many. You just left. You never said where you were going. Never. But I knew, didn't I? Where else did you have to go?”

That shut me up then, for it so encapsulated my narrow little life. The woman with nowhere to go and nothing to do but beat herself against the cage holding a daughter captive. Only to return defeated time and again. I was so busy with that thought that I never got around to challenging Shirley about all these other phantom visits she had me making. She no doubt took that belief to her grave. I have thought a lot about this, don't think I haven't. But I can truly recall only the one time.

MAYBE IT DID GRIND
us down as a family, after all, caused the first fracture that broke us apart. Shirley's strange behaviour the day they drove off with her older sister should have been a sign. This was meant to be just another visit with those people, it had been going on for a year or two now, their taking her for the holidays. She always came back for school. But after this time, she never came back, for they offered to send her to boarding school, and paid for it, so it seemed natural that she should spend most of her holidays with them and often the holidays were spent abroad. How could we deny her the opportunity? And so it went. I never saw her as property, no I never did, but they came to own her more and more.

On this occasion the Reverend Doctor and his wife came in their jolly way, all charms and smiles and lollipops and colouring books for the other three, sometimes more substantial gifts, clothes, shoes, and games. Gifts for the ones they hadn't chosen. Celia as usual was packed and waiting, as if she couldn't wait to leave.

The goodbyes were said. He opened the back door of his big American car and she got in without a backward glance. He shut the door. She was so tiny she vanished from sight. He went around to the other side to open the door for his wife. The wife looked over at us and smiled and got into the passenger seat. He returned to the driver's side, got in, and started the car. They both stuck their hands out the windows and waved to us—me, Shirley, and Junior and my husband with Lise on his shoulder.

The car had already started to move slowly down the road when I heard a wail from behind me and saw this little figure running after it, crying out, her arms outstretched. “No no no,” she was calling, “Junie, Junie,” as she stumbled along, her little feet pumping as she tried to keep up, calling her sister by the name we used at home. Suddenly through the rear window I saw Celia's face, she must have climbed up onto the seat to look out. She wasn't waving or smiling or anything, just staring at Shirley running after the car, her round face getting smaller and smaller as it picked up speed. As it disappeared round the bend, Shirley threw herself down in the middle of the road and howled with sorrow. I hardly noticed as her father picked her up and tried to comfort her, the blood beginning to ooze from her cheek where she had bruised it on a stone. For all my consciousness was travelling in that car. It was dragging me along until I felt stretched to breaking.

Why Shirley was so upset this time I did not know. Whenever Celia left in the past I would tell the others “Soon come” until “soon come” became a kind of mantra for anything promised. Did Shirley pick up subliminal signals we missed? It took us a while to get her to calm down. I guess I did not understand her heart was breaking. The thing is, Shirley in turn broke little Junior's heart, you might say. I can see that now. For up to then they were inseparable, almost like twins. But from that day she began to turn against him, showing him an angry face more often than not, choosing to ignore him or show her impatience, for no apparent reason. You could see the boy's bewilderment, the hurt at these times. He, too, became withdrawn. But after a while this period of estrangement seems to have worn off, and I heaved a sigh of relief that everything was back to normal.

I WANT TO TELL
her—tell Celia—some of this for she never knew, did she? At least about that one time I went to take her home. Maybe we could have a good laugh about it, for my actions seem so silly now. I could tell her about Shirley lying in the middle of the road and howling when she left. Does she have any recollection of such things?

Here at Ellesmere Lodge, displaced and far away from everything I have known, the past rises in front of me like a hill to be climbed, for there is no other way through. I'm thinking there's so much I would like to tell her. We have never talked about the past, she and I. Though now I'm wondering if she never spoke about her other life because she didn't want to hurt me. Did she sense how much I resented the Reverend Doctor and his wife? It must have been clear to her even when she was little that I didn't want to hear about them. But did I actually say that to her, in so many words? I don't remember. But I didn't have to, not really. Children pick up these things easily, don't they? The clever ones know just what to do to survive.

In my saner moments I long to tell her, “I did love you. I do love you.” That would be something, wouldn't it? But it's probably too late. I wouldn't know how. I see it on TV all the time, people doing that sort of thing, flinging their arms around each other and bawling and begging each other's forgiveness, saying “I love you” over and over. But is it real? How does one just come out and say a thing like that?

SHIRLEY WOULD HAVE, THOUGH,
wouldn't she? Shirley was like that. The expansive one in a family where we didn't much show our feelings for each other. The good feelings, that is. She was the one who would hug and touch and say “I love you” and throw her arms around you. The one who would come into my room at night when I was reading, when they were supposed to be sleeping, and throw her body across mine. Just for the contact, I think. Just for the warmth. She would say nothing and fall asleep there, her head on my bosom. She hugged her father when he came home and twined her arms around him. She always had her arms around Junior's shoulders or those of her chums. She walked arm in arm with her girlfriends to school. It was as if she was perpetually thirsty for human contact, in need of love and reassurance through touch. Eager to give, too. I don't know, though, maybe I misread Shirley and her needs. I think it is so sad that in the last picture I have of her she is standing in a street all by herself. Just herself and some tall buildings behind.

Shirley in the picture is not herself. She is gaunt, with an underwater smile and wild looking hair, and she is squinting as if the sun is in her eyes. She does not look like the Shirley I know. Shirley came out the darkest of the children with hair that was thick and hard to comb, like mine, so she was glad when it became stylish for her to chop it off and she continued to wear it short and curly like that for many years. I didn't know this Shirley with the wild hair. The short style suited her, for she had a beautifully shaped head and well-defined features with my high cheekbones. And though she was not beautiful—she was the one who looked most like me in every way—she had her father's light coloured eyes, which gave her an exotic cast. She was the kind of girl who attracted second looks wherever she went, as if people were perpetually trying to figure out what combination of parents could have produced her. She had lots of personality too, too much perhaps, because she had a big mouth she was not afraid of using.

IT WAS CELIA WHO
brought me the news. Stale news, as it turned out, but I didn't know it then. It was the middle of the week. Her husband drove her. As soon as Celia stepped out of the car wearing huge dark glasses, I knew right away something was wrong. Herman quickly went around to her side and put his arm around her and gave her a hug and said something. He kept his arm around her shoulder as they walked towards the house. All this I saw as I watched from behind the curtain. I was moved by the tenderness he always showed towards her, even though they had been married almost four years by then. I felt anxiety as to what had happened to bring them down in the middle of the week and immediately thought it was something to do with one of their children. I never thought it could be one of mine.

We greeted each other and Celia smiled and tried to look normal, but I couldn't hold my own anxiety in.

“Celia, what's wrong?” I asked as soon as they sat down.

“It's bad news, Mom. It's Shirley.”

“Shirley! What happened?”

Celia started crying then, and it was Herman who told me Shirley was dead, shot to death on a New York street.

At first I didn't even take it in, for there were so many questions to be asked. But not many answers were forthcoming, for they didn't seem to know much themselves.

“She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” was the only explanation I got.

“So, what are we going to do?” I asked. “When are we bringing home the body?”

And this was the most painful part of the whole thing, when Celia told me Shirley was already buried. The shooting had happened some time before.

My anger overcame my grief then, because I couldn't understand how my child could be not just dead but buried without my knowing. I probably took my anger out on Celia, for I can't remember all that was said. It was only later that I understood why she had brought Herman, for he was the one who managed to calm things down, explain as best he could. Shirley seemed to have been caught in crossfire between two rival gangs, he said. He and Celia hadn't known anything about it for a while because they had been away in Europe on holiday and it wasn't until they returned home that they'd found out. By this time, Shirley had been buried. Her friends over there had taken care of everything.

“Friends?” I remember crying. “What kind of friends that they couldn't inform her own mother? Where is Junior, why didn't he tell me? Where is Lise? Does she know? She couldn't tell me?”

I could feel tears welling up, but they weren't tears for Shirley. Her death hadn't sunk in. They were tears for what I saw as the indignity done to me. A reversal of the right order of things. What kind of friends did Shirley have, in truth, that they knew so little about proper conduct? I was raving, but not so I didn't see the looks passing between Celia and Herman all this while, looks that were both embarrassed and wary. I felt that they knew far more than they were telling.

“Why didn't Junior tell me?” I asked again, for Shirley and Junior had always been tight. Celia and Herman had no answer to that either, they just looked more uncomfortable.

“I don't know, Mom, I don't even know where Junior is at the moment,” Celia said, her voice flat and dull. She suddenly looked incredibly weary to me.

I felt guilty then that they had travelled all that way and I had treated them so badly. I remember bustling into the kitchen, offering them food and drink, trying to act normal, but apart from coffee none of us could take anything. By the time the coffee was ready, we seemed to have run out of things to say. We sat there in embarrassed silence until Herman stood up and said he was terribly sorry but they had to go, he had to get back to the office. They promised they would let me know everything as soon as they found out. Celia hugged me and I hugged her back. I'm afraid I must have felt cold and unyielding to her, for I was already blaming the bringer of bad news, angry with her, with myself, with everybody.

After they left I couldn't keep still, couldn't focus on any thing. I remember that I kept walking up and down, up and down like a mad woman, feeling stunned, as if I had been hit over the head and was no longer fully conscious. After a while, I called Ken and asked him to go get Millie, as I had to talk to somebody.