Dancing Lessons (9 page)

The road was usually empty of people at that hour, but I didn't care if anyone saw me, I only cared that he wasn't there. When I was almost at the shop, about to step onto the piazza, I turned my head to the right and through my tears I saw a dark shape under another tree beyond the shop, at the crossroads where the school, the post office, and the church were located. As I stared, the shape coalesced in my sodden eyes and I saw that it was him, Charlie Samphire, sitting there on his horse, a smile on his face, for me. It was as if he was challenging me then, daring me to take that step. I had to be the one to do it. I didn't hesitate. I held up my skirt and ran towards him. He held out his arms and I flew into them. He hoisted me up. And I flew away from my old life. Just like that.

I'LL ALWAYS WONDER WHAT
Charlie Samphire ever saw in me. Why he did what he did. I always think of it that way, as if I had no say in the matter. He did marry me, after all. He didn't touch me until after the wedding. What if he had done the expected, taken me and got me pregnant and abandoned me? The nightmare in those days of every decent girl. Whatever would have happened to me then? Yet every time I reflect that he treated me with decency, I run headlong into the other consideration that he only married me because his mother blackmailed him into doing it.

I have this secret thought that will never find an answer. I think Sam's mother, Ma D, and my father had something going at one time, which is why she cared so much for me. To her, I was always “Fabian's girl.” Why can't I, even to this day, believe she simply liked me for myself?

I DON'T THINK ANYONE
ever liked me for myself. Whatever that means. Liked me unconditionally, without barriers and hesitations. Maybe I'm not likeable. Maybe I need to grow some tentacles that will reach out and pull people in. Like that Ruby. She just doesn't care, does she? A hundred if she's a day, yet she does exactly as she pleases and says anything at any time to anyone. It is so embarrassing. She gets away with it, too. You can see that Ruby is a favourite with everyone. Well not with me, for I pay her no mind, not even when I know she is throwing words at me. It kills her, doesn't it, that I won't say anything. Not even when she teases.

“Hey, Mrs. Samphire. When are you going to give us dancing lessons?”

This is at the dinner table. I want to reach over and strangle her, for I'm sure the whole dining room, the entire world, hears. I feel my face grow hot. I know I should get up and leave, walk out and keep on walking, back to my own yard. But they are clearing away the soup dishes and I'm dying of hunger. I'm smelling the roast chicken with stuffing and I'm rooted to the spot. My plate is put in front of me and I keep my head down and tuck in, glad of something to do, knowing that Ruby is there looking at me with that little smile on her face. She moves her eyes to exchange looks with the other two. But I am saved by Birdie, who never seems to know what is going on and so can be relied on to change the subject by introducing something irrelevant and confusing. Something that she's seen on television, for Birdie is a great consumer of talk shows.

“Did you see this girl on Montel who was adopted and found her real mother and ended up killing her?”

“What, what?” Babe crows in a slightly irritable tone. She can be counted on to miss half of what is being said because she is too proud to admit she is deaf and a hearing aid would clash with her gaudy diamond earrings. This table talk follows the usual pattern: Birdie in full flight, talking nonsense, Babe clucking “What, what?” throughout, and Ruby adding the multicultural chorus that punctuates Birdie's recital as if she is paying attention to it all: “Mama mía!” “You don't say!” “Caramba!” “Santa Caterina!” “Rahtid!” “Rasta-far-I!” “Je-sús!” All of which amuses me so much by the end of the meal I've usually forgotten to be annoyed.

I don't always listen because not much of what they say makes sense. Sometimes I like to let my eyes rove around the rest of the room, without being too obvious, studying the body language at the other tables, and at one particular table in recent times. But right now my ears are practically waving “over here.” I want to hear all about the adopted girl who kills her real mother. I really do. But to my intense annoyance, Birdie nimbly switches in mid-sentence to something else. I'm dying, just dying to ask her to tell me more about the story of the girl, but I can't get the words out of my mouth and I sit there stewing in frustration, willing her to find her way back to it. But she doesn't, and I spend the rest of the night trying to work it out for myself, creating my own scenario.

I know it is nonsensical, for my daughter is a good girl who takes care of me, doesn't she? What relationship she had with her adopted mother I don't know, for I met her only a few times and she is dead now, so I'll never find out. Him too, the Reverend Doctor Whatever. Him of the booming voice and the crewcut and the argyle socks and the black string tie. Things I'll hate for the rest of my life. Well, we never meant to hand her over to them, did we? It just happened, the way you can set off down the road one morning intending to carry on with your regular life and find yourself on a different path, not knowing how you got there.

That's how it was, wasn't it? They came and borrowed her for a few weeks, then for the long holidays, then it was for a school year, and then forever. I did see her from time to time. She came home, though less and less as she grew older. She wrote to me. Letters that are engraved on my heart.
Dear Mama
, she started out, for that is what my children called me. Then it got to be
Dear Mother
, and then
Dear Mummy
, and finally,
Hello Mum
. What did it all mean? I spent more time wondering about the salutations than I did the body of the letters, for these were always short and to the point, only her spelling and handwriting changing over the years. The letters didn't say anything really, not what I wanted to hear.
I hope you are well
, she always said.
I am fine
. After that it was a recital of things learnt, goals attained, places visited.
I am learning to play the piano. I got 99 per cent for my English. Lots of love. XXX
. Did she really mean that, the love bit? Or was it cancelled out by the Xs that she started to put in after a year away? Those Xs seemed so artificial to me, as if they were part of a sophisticated lifestyle I knew nothing about, and I came to hate them, especially when in some letters they blossomed into a whole line. A reproach to me, that's how I read it, like crossing your fingers to ward off the evil eye.

Even more perplexing was her name. First she signed as
Junie
, which is what we called her at home, then it was
June
, her proper name, and by the time she entered high school
June
disappeared and
Celia
appeared in her place. It was her middle name, but I was confused. Where had my Junie gone? After that, I could call her that name only in secret, for when she came home she insisted that her name was Celia and refused to answer to anything else.

Signs, all signs that I was losing her. I kept those little letters and read them over and over and they broke my heart every time. For they never said what I wanted to hear:
I love you more than anyone in the world. I miss you. Please come and take me home
.

I should know about letters, for I wrote them to my own mother. Hundreds I am sure. In my mind. A letter a day in my childhood, pouring out all my longing. I had no mental image of her, so I created one, a beautiful white-skinned Madonna with a mass of wiry black hair who hovered over me as I wrote, slightly to the left of my shoulder, her cinnamon breath warm on my neck. She always answered my letters, poured out her love and words of consolation even as I was sending my words to her. The funny thing is, she spoke in languages I had never heard, none I could decipher. But it didn't matter. From some deep well of connection we understood each other perfectly. There were no cross XXXs between us.

WHO PUT THOSE CROSSES
between my children and me? Was I the Bad Mother? Maybe I was, but my plea is I didn't know how to be a mother, good or bad. There was no one to teach me. I had babies, tried my best. Washing the nappies. Keeping them clean and fed. Rolling along. How do all these other mothers manage, the ones who produce these children who live good and productive lives and in turn fuss over their mothers and love them dearly? What did they do that I failed at? Where are all these fine children who should come by and love their mothers and fathers at Ellesmere Lodge? How come I never see them? Most of the children seem to be living abroad, and the ones who do drop by are like mine, hurried and frantic, juggling their old parents along with everything else in their busy lives.

I DID GO, ONCE
, to bring her back home. She was my child after all. We hadn't signed any papers. It was when he first started to sleep out. The first time he stayed out all night, I sat up, sick with worry, imagining an accident, all the terrible things that could have happened. He came home at daybreak. He washed and changed his clothes and left again for work. Not a word to me. He came home that night, but stayed out a few nights later. Soon it became a regular thing. Sometimes the children and I wouldn't see him for an entire weekend. I didn't ask him where he'd been, the smell was all over him. I wanted to smash him then, beat him to a pulp, but the impulse was all in my mind. I remained quiet as a mouse, asked no question, showed nothing on my face. Spoke only if spoken to, did as I was asked. Perhaps that is what infuriated him after all, my compliance. Who wants to sleep with a doormat? What would have happened if I had stood up for myself from the start? But that was something I had never learnt to do, not until he left me there with the children, all on my own. I wanted to hurt him, get back at him in some way for this final insult. His rejection of me was plain for all the world to see. His current sweetheart lived only a few miles away. Everyone in the district knew her. They all laughed at me, I could feel it. I don't know if this is what made me get it into my head one day to go and bring her back, take her from those people once and for all. To replace what had been taken from me.

As I did with everything else, I made no plans. I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea coming to me, fully blown, and by daybreak I was walking down to the crossroads to catch the bus. He hadn't come home yet, but this time I didn't care. He was the last thing on my mind. I got up, washed, and put on my one good dress, a blue and white polka-dot cotton shirtwaist with a sweetheart neckline and three-quarter sleeves. I put my change purse and a letter I had with the people's address and a clean handkerchief into my purse and jammed my hat on my head, a little cream leghorn with a narrow rim and a wide band, like a schoolgirl's as I recall now. I was being borne up on such a wave of the rightness of my mission that I was out the door before I remembered the other children. I hesitated for a moment, unsure what to do. Then I went back in the house and woke up the youngster Ken who had been living with us on and off from when Celia was a baby. I told him that I had to go somewhere urgently and would be gone all day and to tell the Mister when he came he needed money to buy food for them. School was out, so I didn't have to worry about getting the children ready. By the time I reached the road, though, I was feeling a twinge of conscience and I turned back and asked Ken to give them breakfast and to ask Millie to keep an eye on them. Ken was a good boy and I knew I could rely on him, but he himself was young and not entirely bright. He'd been abandoned by his mother and his grandmother was too poor to care for him, so he adopted us. First he would come for meals, then I was sewing him clothes, then he more or less moved in with us before we even noticed. Ken was a bit of a wanderer, though, and came and went between his grandmother's place and ours. At this time he was probably fourteen, and when he was around, a real help with the children and the yard.

Looking back, I am appalled at the self I was then, the one who could walk out the door and leave the children. Lise was just a toddler. But I truly wasn't thinking of anything else but the duty—as I saw it—that I had to perform, one that couldn't wait. The one action that would put everything in my life to rights.

I had no idea how long a journey it would be. I had not eaten and had brought no food. At one or two stops on the way, vendors came to the window and I remember I bought a roast corn from one, which made me so thirsty that I bought a cream soda at the next stop. But soon I was nauseated from the drink, the food, the heat, the fumes from our bus and everything else on the road, the bone-shaking ride. I took off my hat and fanned my face until I suddenly remembered that in my haste I hadn't combed my hair. I looked around quickly, shamed in case anyone had noticed, and jammed the hat back on. I concentrated on breathing deeply to settle the turmoil in my stomach.

After what was beginning to seem to me like a whole day's driving, I was dying of thirst, but I dared not use up any more of the money I had with me. It was a weekday and the bus was not overcrowded. At least there were seats for everyone. The other passengers chattered as they passed the time, but I spoke to no one. I had only been to the city a few times before, and then I had travelled with people who knew their way around. On my own this time, I got more and more frightened as we got onto the main highway and the traffic steadily increased. Our driver seemed to get manic with his driving, and the heat inside the bus, even with the windows down, was almost unbearable. I wanted to faint, to pull on the bell and ask the driver to stop and let me off so I could catch a bus to take me back home. But I checked the impulse each time for I would conjure up her face, moonlike, upturned and beseeching me. By now I had convinced myself that she knew of my coming, was packed and standing with her little suitcase at the door waiting for me, ready to leap into my arms.