Dancing Lessons (3 page)

For a long time, I was haunted by my own ugliness, yet I took a perverse pride in it too, for it gave me a reason why no one could love me. To this day I have no idea if as a child I was really ugly or beautiful, for I had no one to tell me. And I have nothing to look at. No one ever bothered to take a picture.

Here's something funny when I think about it now, funny to anyone who believes in signs. The wedding as non-event. The photographer who was hired to take our wedding picture messed up and the pictures didn't come out. We were supposed to dress up in our wedding clothes again and go to his studio. For years the poor man kept trying to make an appointment with us, for he was mortified, but it just never happened. Well, within a few months of the wedding it would have been impossible for me to get into that dress anyway, for my first child—She—was on the way.

I don't know if such pictures matter, because I am forever haunted by all these other pictures in my head, so clear to me even now I could print and paste them into an album, though they are not all pictures I would keep if I had a choice. Except for the one of my father laughing and singing, the one time he danced with me.

THIS HAPPENED DURING
A period when my father was at home for a good long while. Since he never went to church, I got it into my head that I would stay home that Sunday, pretending to be sick, even though I knew it would mean castor oil and no Sunday dinner, when Aunt Zena came home. But even if nothing happened with my father, it would give me a chance to read the book I had borrowed from the school library and hidden under the bed. They went off and left me, to an empty house, for Dulcie too went to church, eleven o'clock service. All the respectable did. Except for my father.

I was lurking in the doorway of my room, looking down the hallway to where his was, wondering what to do, when from his room came the most marvellous sounds. I knew it was from the gramophone he had brought from his latest time away. I hadn't heard him play anything on it, though he must have done so when I was at school, for at the dinner table Miss Celia called what he played the devil's work and asked why he couldn't have brought home some hymns. But now the minute her back was turned this noise started up and what he was playing certainly sounded like the devil. It was the strangest cacophonous music I had ever heard, though I had never heard anything more than hymns and school songs. It was raucous and loud, with a driving rhythm like horses galloping overlaid by discordant gawps and boops and bleeps. It shocked me so much, I felt tilted into another world. Without thinking I walked down the hallway to his room and peeped in.

He was standing by the window overlooking the veranda, facing into the room where the windup gramophone stood, conducting this music with one hand and moving his head and shoulders to the beat, with a smile on his face that I had never seen before. It was some time before he noticed me, and I had time to study him and to wonder anew at what a handsome man my father was. He was tall and well built, his limbs gangly and loose, with the triangular face and straight nose of his mother, for her parents had come over from England, Miss Celia was always proudly saying. Which is probably why she hated me. My mother's family had come from out of the canefields, I once heard her say. But where her husband came from, I don't know. All I ever saw of him was a picture in a large oval frame of a fierce-looking man with bushy hair and a moustache and skin that was very much darker than the young Miss Celia, who sat primly in a wicker-work chair with her legs crossed at the ankles while he stood behind her beside a small wicker table with a vase of artificial-looking flowers.

But while Miss Celia and Aunt Zena's skin was white and mottled with freckles, my father's was logwood honey. And while their hair was brown and dead straight, both the same, his was rich dark brown with lots of kinky waves and red highlights. He wore it longish, swept back from his broad forehead. The more I looked and admired, the more conscious I became that I was nothing at all like him, except for the long legs. This day he was wearing what I thought of as his uniform when he was at home, his cream linen pants with cuffs, his red suspenders, and a pale blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows that brought out the blue in his hazel eyes and reminded me that mine were dirty brown.

When he saw me, he didn't look surprised, he smiled but didn't stop moving to the music. A curl of his hair that had been plastered down with pomade came loose and flopped about in time to his movements. I couldn't believe anyone who looked so young and carefree could be my dad.

“Hey, Girl,” he said when the record stopped. “Know what music this is?”

“No, sir.” I shook my head, suddenly feeling my body shrink with shyness.

“Well, this is the greatest music in the world. Jazz. American music. This is ragtime. The devil ripping it up.” And he threw back his head and laughed, showing his beautiful teeth. He picked up the record sleeve and started to read from it, “Harry James and His Orchestra ‘One O'Clock Jump' composed by Count Basie; Louis Jordan ‘Choo Choo Ch'Boogie'…”

After that, it was talk, talk, so much talk in a non-stop stream. He'd put on a new record and smile and move his body until the record stopped and then he'd start talking again, getting almost as fast and frenzied as the music, his eyes bright, his face and body mobile, the lock of hair dancing to its own syncopation. At first I was simply entranced, so happy to be there, alone with him, feeding on his energy, as if he were an incandescent spark. But this went on for so long, this talk about things I knew nothing about, it drained me until my chest tightened so much I could hardly breathe. I wanted desperately to go back to my room, but having put myself into the picture, I didn't know how to pull away. I didn't want to go without getting what I'd come for. I so desperately wanted him to talk about me, us, my mother, him, that I exerted all my mental faculties. Please, please, I remember saying silently to him, please, please talk to me.

I don't know what I actually conveyed, but as if he sensed my mood, he took a record from a different album when the music stopped and said as he wound up the gramophone, “Listen to this!” As soon as the needle touched the record, I was lost in the most joyous, raucous sounds I had ever heard. This one had a beat I could understand and a woman's voice like a razor blade. My father sang along with the chorus:

That's YOUR RED WAGON
just keep dragging YOUR RED WAGON along
.

I had no idea what the words meant, but the beat, the mood, transported me out of that room in that country house to another world and my head was still spinning when the record finished.

“Like it?”

I nodded, and he played the record again.

“Come, Girl, sing with me,” he said. At first I felt small and my throat dry as I tried to follow the words.

If you're gonna play horses and blow your dough
Don't you run to me if they don't show
That's YOUR RED WAGON …

He kept putting on the same record, and repeating the words, and soon I could belt them out as good as him and we were singing along at the tops of our voices:

… just keep dragging YOUR RED WAGON along
.

So when he said, “Let's dance” and took hold of my hands, “Like this,” I didn't feel awkward and clumsy as he showed me what to do. I felt careless and free. How easy I found it to follow him. He nodded in approval as I caught the beat and soon we were dancing to that music as if there were devils after us, inside his room and into the hallway, where we galloped up and down, into the dining and living room and back down again. Each time the record stopped he would go and put it on again and we would resume our dance through the house, singing at the tops of our voices, stomping for emphasis, getting wilder and wilder:

So you fell for somebody who pinned your ears
Baby don't be bringing me your tears
That's YOUR RED WAGON
—

Badoom! The loudness of the mahogany front door crashing against the wall as it swung open with force stopped us in our tracks, at the far end of the hallway. We froze together, my father and me, hands clasped, each with a foot in the air ready for another round, the words dying on our lips:

So just keep dragging …

Miss Celia stood in the doorway, Aunt Zena behind her, and the maid Dulcie: I remember still the quivering of their churchgoing hats like the tips of windswept palm trees. They were deadly silent, the entire world had hushed, but for the scratchy music that played on: we were caught red-handed with the evidence hot as the devil. I could feel my father's hand tighten, grow cold. Suddenly his body slumped, like a child's. Aunt Zena brushed past Miss Celia into the hallway. That terrible tightness in my chest came back for I knew exactly what she was going to do. My father knew it too. He didn't move. The words “No. Don't.” broke away from him. But it wasn't from the smiling man of a moment ago. It came out high-pitched and anguished, like a child's. His hand still held mine, but it was as if he had suddenly become the child and he was holding on to me, not the other way round. I could feel his hand, then his whole body shaking. I felt as if I wanted to faint. My head started to grow big, for I knew something terrible was about to happen.

As Aunt Zena scuttled into my father's room he moved, down the hallway, in quick strides, but she slammed the room door just ahead of him and turned the key in the lock. I closed my eyes tightly then so everything came to me as sound: my father pounding on the door and bawling out, then howling, then sobbing as he beat against the wood. Miss Celia yelling at him, “Fabian, stop it! Stop it at once! I won't put up with it one more time. You hear me! Stop it!” Dulcie calling in the feeble voice she always put on for Miss Celia, “Come Mass Fabian . listen to your mother.” And then, from inside the room, the sound of the needle ripping across the record, a sudden silence followed by the breakage of records smashing on the big rock outside the side window and, not long after, the sound of an almighty crash, and splintering, the tinkle of metal on stone. I knew the gramophone had gone too.

At that sound, my father went quiet, but I could hear him throwing his entire body at the door which finally burst open and hit the wall just as the front door had. I could hear the sound of objects thrown and Aunt Zena in his room sliding around the polished mahogany floor in her Sunday heels and screaming, “Murder! Mama, do something.” And finally the heels beating a staccato as she fled from the room back to where her mother and Dulcie still stood in the front door for I hadn't heard them move. Then the front door slamming and the sound of their Sunday heels clattering across the wooden veranda and down the steps, fleeing. Fleeing from what, I didn't know, for I was still frozen in the hallway, pressed against the wall, my eyes squeezed tight. When I opened them there was nothing to see but the empty hallway, the closed front door, my father's room door, which was slammed shut by Aunt Zena in her flight. From behind this closed door came the sound of whimpering, of words babbled and broken off. From the front yard came the noise of women shouting, of male voices, and above it all, Miss Celia calling across the fence to our neighbour whose son had a buggy, “Miss Mirrie, please ask Jacob to go to the station as fast as he can and ask them to bring the Black Maria. Mister Fabian gone off again.”

I couldn't stand it then. I stumbled into my room, which was right there at that end of the hallway, closed the door, threw myself on my bed, and willed myself to sleep. Sleep is what I did then when I didn't know what to do.

That's one of the things they have against me here, isn't it, that I'm such a good sleeper. Not that I boast about it, but it must gall them to hear me snoring away all night when their own sleeplessness is all they ever talk about. I mean, how much conversation can you get out of that topic? My table-mates, each taking her turn to narrate her tale of nocturnal woe. Though they always seem bright enough in the daytime to me. Too bright, perhaps.

It usually starts with an ostentatious yawn from one of them as she slowly unfolds a snowy white napkin and places it on her lap. This morning it's Birdie, sweet and ditzy, short and pigeon-chested, with her tits hauled up to her neck, the most likeable one of the lot because she seems the least threatening; everything she does is slow. She looks just as outrageous as the others, though, coming in to breakfast at 8:00 a.m. wearing a delicate, frilly, white organdy blouse over white linen pants, high heels, a huge string of pearls, and purple lipstick. Hair upswept and stiff and held severely in place by a whole can of spray. Face powdered and made up. It's not because she is going anywhere, that's how they dress all the time.

“Wazzamatta gurl, you didn't get your beauty rest last night?” This from Ruby, the skinny one who dresses like a macaw and speaks the way I imagine a macaw would speak. Raspy. Her throat lining etched from the cigarette she always has burning. Like now. At the table. I'm glad I sit farthest away from her, but even so, every few minutes I wave my hands about to indicate my disapproval. Not that it matters to this woman, she is a law unto herself down to her bright blue eyeshadow and the spot of rouge covering each cheekbone, the only part of her face that isn't creased. I guess the eyeshadow is meant to pick up the colour of the amazing sapphire ring she wears on her right hand, the one she never takes off while the others keep changing, for she seems to have an endless cache of jewellery. Ruby's sapphire is as large and splendiferous as Princess Diana's engagement ring, and as she waves her cigarette hand about, I can hardly take my eyes off it, though of course I don't give the slightest hint of my interest.

“Ruby, it's not a joke you know. I never closed my eyes all night.”

“Oh, that wasn't you snoring down the place at midnight then?” This is Babe, who looks over at me and winks.