Dancing Lessons (12 page)

Millie came over and acted surprised when I told her. She had all the right responses, she screamed, she groaned and moaned, she raised her hands to high heaven to think my daughter could be dead and buried without my knowing. But I remember that I had the same feeling that I had had with Celia and Herman, that there was something here that other people knew that I didn't and that Millie was one of those people. It was as if she was acting out a performance just for me.

“You hear anything from Junior?” she asked. I shook my head. “Well, if anybody should know anything it's Junior.”

I was taken aback by her tone, how aggressive she sounded when she said this, for Junior was a favourite of hers. She knew me and my family better than anyone else.

Then she asked suddenly, “Them catch the boy them yet?”

“Who?” I asked. “What boys?”

“The ones that shoot her.”

“How you know they are boys?”

“Then how! Don't is shoot them shoot her? Right there in cold blood! Don't is pure little youth them use to do that sort of thing?”

“What sort of thing? Celia said it was an accident, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Oh! Is so?”

Millie's tone was so skeptical I looked hard at her, and she looked away from me. To my eyes she had a guilty look.

“Millie, tell me the truth,” I pleaded. “You always know everything. You know something I should know? Please tell me if you hear anything.”

“Me, Miss G?” This in her self-righteous tone. Millie was protean in her reactions and expressions. “Why you think I would know something and not tell you? Believe me, my heart really grieving for you. Little Shirley! Lawd. Ah can't believe it. Ah can't believe it.”

Instead of making me feel better, Millie's presence was making me feel worse. I could not stop myself walking up and down, ceaselessly. I felt hot and cold at the same time. My hands seemed to take on a life of their own, holding on to my body as if for warmth, clutching each other. Millie took hold of me and led me to my bed. She sat with me for a long time that day, sopping Bay Rum on my forehead to cool me down and brewing fever grass tea. She made me sit up in bed and sip the tea. After a while I began to take hold of myself. But I felt haunted by that great gap of my ignorance. What had really happened to Shirley? I remember saying over and over, “Millie, I have to know. I just have to know. Oh God, what am I to do?”

Millie didn't answer, but I already knew it was a useless question for it only made me feel my poverty more acutely, recognize my lowly place in the world, my inability to act. I had never travelled. I didn't have a passport. I didn't have money. What could I do? Nothing but wait on Celia to bring further news. Or for Junior to turn up. I thought of turning to Sam then, but my pride held me back. After all, he was the one in touch with them all, he probably knew long before I did. He hadn't contacted me.

The funny thing is I did get a letter from Sam, the day after Celia's visit, so they must have stopped at his house too. It was a nice letter, and it touched me for it seemed sincere, though it failed to yield any information. He said he knew Celia had told me the news and he just wanted to let me know he was thinking of me. He wanted to come and see me but he wasn't able to drive at this time, nothing serious but he had just had an eye operation. But if I needed anything or if there was anything he could do, I should let him know. He signed it,
Yours ever, Sam
. Well! I turned the letter over and over, staring at it as if I could force it to yield some meaning beyond the bare words. It was the first letter of a personal nature Sam had written to me, one in which we were not dryly exchanging information about Junior's schooling, and it woke in me all the complex feelings I had ever felt for him. Instead of comforting me as I am sure he intended, it just added to my overall misery. My sense of everything that mattered slipping away from me.

I HAVEN'T SEEN MUCH
of Celia recently, but that might be a sign that I'm behaving myself at last and Matron has no need to summon her to report on my bad conduct. I have to admit I did miss her phone calls. So I was pleased when she called to say she was back from a trip and would I like to go for a drive. Instead of saying no as I usually did, I remembered I wanted to buy notebooks. I said I would like to go into town to the bookstore. In her typical way, she didn't ask questions, she just said, “Sure.” She knew that I didn't like going into the city. It was hot and crowded with people, noisy and dirty, something I wasn't used to. But I had to go to the bookstore myself to get exactly the right kind of notebook; I couldn't leave it up to her.

Once we were beyond the fancy cast-iron gates of Ellesmere Lodge, I was amazed at the world beyond those gates. It shocked me that I had so easily left it behind. For that was a world where lawns weren't always manicured and hedges not always trimmed, where sticks and the bare earth and cardboard were home for many in a city that was full of poor people, people who looked like me and acted more like me, I'm sure, than that little corner of the Empire that I was leaving. The world outside these gates was full of dark-skinned people, while back there Matron and I and now Mr. Bridges were the darkest people, and we were more brown than black. All the domestic staff were dark, so was the gardener, the workmen who came to fix things, the drivers, the deliverymen, the little hairdresser and manicurist, all the people who did the hard, heavy, low-paying work.

I don't think I really noticed these things until I came to Ellesmere Lodge, which was like taking me back to the world of my childhood. Some of the people inside acted like that too, like Miss Celia and Aunt Zena, as if their pale colour gave them a right to lord it over everyone who was darker than they. Which is probably why I so wanted to get my own back at them. For now I was grown up and not scared. I had a physical advantage, too. I was younger than most of them, except Miss Loony if she is to be believed. I was taller, too, and now that I had taken to eating most heartily, I was bigger as well. No shrinking with old age for me. I had no idea being big could give one such a sense of being formidable, but that is what it was doing for me. I could feel them shrink away if I sat down on a couch beside them, shrivel up if we had to pass in the corridors or squeeze through the same door. Big. Silent and big was even better.

But big and a murderer was even worse. Months later Matron was still going on about my almost killing Mr. Bridges. I heard her remarking on it to someone on the veranda the other day, though I couldn't see who it was from the other side of the latticework. So it's still there, that feeling of being in the wrong hanging over my head, though Mr. Bridges is looking more and more like an upstanding gentleman to me. He likes his food, and I admire someone who does, and he cleans his plate at every meal. He likes to walk briskly around the grounds, as I do, and he has taken to playing music again in his room, though now it's classical stuff. When he plays dance-type romantic tunes he makes sure to lock his door. The key turning in his lock is like a dagger in my heart. I'm really sorry I started out on such a wrong footing with him, for of all the people here, he is the one I would like to get to know.

I already know a lot about him, from listening to the talk. He's a retired director of a very big firm; his wife is dead, his children all live abroad. He used to keep racehorses and was a noted tennis player. Nothing bad about him so far, but give them time. He's brown-skinned, darker than me, and well set up financially. Much discussion about how much he is worth. Quite respectable, thank you. Most people here seem to have already known him so he's settled in quite well, unlike some of us. Mr. Levy and Miss Pitt-Grainger and old Mr. McNab are overjoyed to have him, for he makes up a fourth at bridge, the other player having recently passed on, as Matron describes death. He and Ruby knock their heads together over the racing form. I've seen him in earnest conversation with Mrs. Holier-than-Thou Humphrey, with Miss Loony looking as if she is about to warble at him, and at the chessboard with Heathcliff, so a most versatile gentleman is he.

He reads books too, and has similar tastes to mine as I have sussed from checking his titles. This gives him something in common with me, the only other reader at Ellesmere Lodge. I assume we are ignoring the Pancakes and their Mills and Boon and Harlequins and Mrs. Humphrey with her Daily Word and her bodice rippers disguised in hand-sewn book cover. Even Miss Pitt-Bull with her crosswords and even crosser books, for I am sure she chews them up and eats them when she's done. But how will I find a way to get into his good books when I am sure by now the rest of them have defamed me?

I lean back in Celia's lovely car and smell the leather. Think of all the paper and pencils I will buy. Maybe a book or two, a special, desirable book, perhaps one on the bestseller list that I will wave around like a hook, to bring him around to me. I know exactly which one he would like.

IT'S A LONG DRIVE
, and after a while I am no longer with my thoughts at Ellesmere Lodge, I am increasingly conscious of being in the car, alone with Celia. I look at her sideways, at her thin, manicured hands on the steering wheel, at her face, all bones and angles, her beautiful hair that is honey coloured and crisp and crinkled like her father's, but which like her skin now looks dried out as straw. I can tell she is trying to think of something to say to me, for I am trying to think of something to say to her. The way it always is between us. My throat is dry as I try to speak and I know the same things will be uttered. Me: “Are you okay, dear?” “How is work?” She: “Is everything okay?” “Need anything?” I am sad that all we ever do is go around in these circles. I'm angry too that she makes me feel inadequate. Even as a small child she would just stand her ground, her little legs braced, and stare me down. She was a sturdy little girl and her feet seemed to take root when she didn't want to do something. Now I wonder where this sturdy little girl has gone, as all of a sudden she seems so brittle to me, so delicate, as if a light wind would blow her over. I know she works too hard and probably doesn't take care of herself, but is something else the matter? Is her thinness saying something else?

Perhaps I wouldn't have been so conscious of this if I hadn't had imprinted on my mind all these years the image of that gaunt-looking Shirley in the photograph taken a few weeks before her death. Although I knew it was a gunshot that killed her, that last image made me feel as if she was already facing death, the thin body under the baggy clothes, the starkness of her facial bones, her shadowed eyes. I didn't conjure these thoughts up, they forced themselves on me. Which is why I can't stop worrying about Celia now.

I wouldn't have thought Celia's thinness was anything if I hadn't seen this headline and the awful picture staring at me from the cover of a
TIME
magazine someone had left on a chair in the lounge. It's the sort of thing that sets us all off nowadays, isn't it, seeing something in print or on TV and allowing it to percolate in our brains until it embeds itself there and refuses to let go. The latest thing to worry about. So I suppose I am getting as bad as everyone else. I was caught by the cover picture and garish caption, so I picked up the magazine and started reading the article then and there. I became so engrossed that without thinking I walked with it to my bedroom and shut the door and sat on the bed and finished reading. Which of course brought another charge against me, for the magazine was the Pitt-Bull's and I forgot to return it, forgot I had it even, when she was turning the place upside down in search of it. Well, to show I hadn't stolen it, as she was to allege, hadn't I left it right there on my bedside table, to be found by Matron as she stalked the corridors, doing her daily checks as she called them. I normally keep my room door closed, and locked, not that that would stop her with her bunch of keys, but that day I had left it open and gone off, to show the state my mind was in, having just read the article again. She didn't have to go inside to see it on the bed.

I did try to apologize to Miss P, but it came out the same as all my other efforts at communicating with that formidable lady, “Sorryididntknoitwuzyursmeanttoreturnsorry,” which made her toss her head and walk away from me. She didn't speak to me, aside from a curt greeting, or a mini-lecture now and then, in that upmarket English voice of hers, so her withdrawal of speech wasn't very noticeable. It made the Pancake Sisters ever so nice to me, for a day or two, since they disliked the Pitt-Bull even more than I did. On one thing I could agree with them, that we were ever so thankful we were never at her school.

Of course the Pancake Sisters don't believe I ever went to school. “What school?” was the first question they barked at me, the day Matron seated me at their table and introduced me. From the way they pulled back from the table over which they were leaning and sat up straight in their chairs, I could tell they were shocked to see someone like me there. But it was the only vacant place at the five round tables that served the Home's twenty current residents. The gentleman who previously occupied it had just passed—Matron's word. Never having heard that expression before, I looked around to see where he had gotten to and couldn't understand how he could have passed so quickly. The three women at the table mumbled hello in various tones and smiled with their teeth and looked me up and down.

On approaching, I had thought they were much younger for it seemed like a table of colourful, noisy birds. But up close I could see they were not only old, like me, but very old. Not that they were like any old ladies I had ever seen or heard; clearly someone had forgotten to give them their age paper. I mean, they were so made up and dressed up and loaded down with jewellery—rings and things that were jangling and earrings and bangles and bracelets and ropes of pearl necklaces. I thought maybe they were dressed up for a party, but I soon realized this was their normal gear. They wore the most extraordinary colours too, especially the one I came to know as Ruby.