Step-Ball-Change (5 page)

“I didn’t make your problems, that’s what you’ve got to remember. I’m only here to fix them.”

“Thanks for the breakfast,” George said, and waved before Woodrow closed the door. “It’s a shame Kay isn’t marrying Woodrow so that we could keep him in the family.”

“Woodrow is thirty years older than your sister, and besides, I don’t think he’s ever going to leave.”

“So which piece of news is more alarming, that Kay is going to be Mrs. Bennett or that Aunt Taffy is coming to see us?”

“It’s a toss-up.”

George took a long sip of coffee and then stared into his cup for a while, trying to come up with a true likeness of himself. “I wonder if Kay plans to stop sleeping with Jack now that she’s engaged or if she’s going to wait until after she gets married to do that.”

I thought I must have misunderstood him, though I couldn’t identify which part of the sentence could be thought of as unclear.

“Oh, come on,” George said. “Stop it with the shocked-mother face. You knew that.”

“Jack the D.A.?”

“I think he has another last name, but yes, Jack the D.A.”

“Kay’s been seeing Jack?”

“Seeing all of Jack.”

I looked around my kitchen. There were cans of plaster stacked up in rows. There were buckets and drop cloths and rollers. Outside the window there were four men sitting on my patio furniture looking at old architectural plans of our house. It didn’t look like anyplace I knew.

“I always thought she liked Jack.”

“She likes him,” George said.

“I have no idea what’s going on anymore.”

“I guess even Kay has a private life.”

I shrugged. None of this made sense to me. “I should get ready for work.”

“It isn’t a big deal, whatever it is with Jack. Maybe I’m completely wrong about it.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“Okay, I’m not wrong, but I certainly didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset,” I said, and gave his hand a squeeze. “But I should get to work, and then I have to come home and get things
cleaned up, not that this place cleans up very well. I don’t want Taffy sneezing the whole time she’s here.”

“You’re going to have to tell me about that, too,” George said.

“I think after tonight you’ll know as much about it as I do.”

I
TRIED TO
sort it all out on the way to the dance studio. I wasn’t upset about Jack, not in the sense that I was upset about Kay sleeping with Jack. Kay was thirty years old. I knew she wasn’t a virgin. What I was upset about were all of the things I hadn’t known: I hadn’t known that she had any interest in marrying Trey Bennett; I hadn’t known about Jack the D.A. Jack Carroll, that was his name. I felt like I must have been doing a pretty poor job as a mother if Kay didn’t feel like she could talk to me about these things. Then again, maybe when your daughter was thirty, she didn’t really need a mother to confide in anymore, and the thought of that depressed me, too.

When we had Henry and then Charlie, I felt like I was just trying to figure out how to keep them alive: food, shelter, avoiding major head injuries. But by the time Kay came along, I was much better at the job. I was more relaxed. I was the kind of mother I wanted to be, the one you could talk to. And now I was finding out that when it came to the really big stuff, she hadn’t been talking at all.

When I walked into the dance studio, my mind still going in a dozen different directions, a five-year-old girl named Poppy attached herself to my leg.

“I lost a tooth,” Poppy said.

I squatted down on the floor in front of her. Such a gorgeous child, black haired and freckled. “Where did you lose it?”

“Right in my hand,” she said, and she opened the little drawstring bag she wore around her neck and produced the missing tooth, a tiny chunk of ivory.

“How could it be lost?” I said, touching the tip of my finger to the tiny incisor. “It’s right here.”

Poppy looked at the tooth and then looked at me, puzzled. “I lost it out of my head,” she said finally.

And I thought, The world is still full of little girls who want to talk to me, so things can’t be too bad. Some days they rushed out into the parking lot and clustered around my car while I unfastened my seat belt. Their sentences began long before I had the door open. “Mrs. McSwan,” they would say, “look at my new tights, my new shoes. Look, Mrs. McSwan, I cut my hair. I can do the splits today.” And down they would go, legs splayed across the dirty asphalt. I leaned over and hoisted Katie Chundra back up to her feet and she beamed at the touch. They wanted nothing more than my attention, the opportunity to confide in me, to stand beside me in front of the mirror. They raised their hands to speak even when class wasn’t in session. They waved them back and forth like flags of unconditional surrender. Every minute I was there I heard my name spoken with burning urgency, “Mrs. McSwan! Mrs. McSwan!”

Or, I should say, I heard some version of my name. I had given up trying to explain that my name was actually McSwain a long time ago. They were too young for puns anyway, and the idea that they could be attending a school based on a spelling error would have been deeply upsetting to them.

I clapped my hands and they came running, the whole room filled with the slap of tiny feet wrapped in soft pink leather.

Tom was going to be sixty-five in March and he planned to eat a piece of birthday cake and hand in his resignation. He was going to walk away from the public defender’s office the day his first pension check was ready, and while we traveled through Italy he would read all those big Russian novels that he had been lugging around since college. But me, I wanted to be buried at McSwan’s. I wanted to be one of those ancient ballet instructors who shouted for
relevés
from her wheelchair, who tapped time out on the floor with her cane. I knew why the Rolling Stones kept going on tour long past the age when it was appropriate to be a rock star. It wasn’t about the money. It was the love. Once you get used to the adoration and love of a room full of people, even if it’s a small room with very small people, well, there is no giving it up.

This morning it was the bumblebee class, four- and five-year-olds, girls who had yet to be touched by the rigors of first grade. We made like daisies, stretched up slowly toward the sun and waggled our fingers at the overhead lights. I found something graceful and flowerlike in every child there, and if my daughter was marrying rich and my sister was coming to stay with me, for a while I forgot about it completely.

I was on to the second level of the exercise, where the daisies encounter a breeze, when I noticed that one of the flowers was larger than I was. It was George, his black warm-ups rolled at his waist, an old A.B.T. T-shirt with a faded-out picture of Suzanne Farrell on the front. He had managed to sneak in quietly, when all of our faces were thrown back to greet the sun, and when the girls saw him, they let out a high-pitched yell and stamped their feet. Only the very bravest of my students were able to go and throw their arms around George’s legs the way they wanted to. They were all too in love with him.

“Reach, reach!” he said, his voice set to just the right pitch for the four- and five-year-old crowd, enough enthusiasm to make them work, not so much that they simply spin out of control. “Keep reaching!” He went up on his toes and came close to brushing his fingers against the fluorescent lights. My students squealed in appreciation of his height.

I
GAVE BIRTH
to four children and ultimately Tom got every single one. “It wasn’t a contest,” he liked to say with the cool noblesse oblige of someone who’s already won. Henry, our oldest and most practical, was a tax attorney. Charlie, the entrepreneur, was in real-estate law (which almost counted as a failure in Tom’s eyes, though he managed to keep it to himself). Kay, the greatest source of pride, was making slave wages in the P.D.’s office just like her father. And it wasn’t just that they were all lawyers. None of the first three of the children could dance. Despite the nine months of dancing they did in utero, despite the constant sound track of danceable beats that had permeated our home since their first hours of life, despite the fact that they came to every class I taught and were piled in the corner on a high bed of discarded coats and backpacks until they were old enough to take to the floor themselves, they could not dance. I mean, they really could not dance. The second I brought them home from class, they would shimmy up into their father’s big chair, put their arms around his neck, and ask to hear again the story of
Brown
v.
Board of Education
.

Except George. The first time I saw him stand at the barre in fifth position, I thought that maybe the spell had been broken. Maybe I had pushed all of the little lawyers from my body. George
was graceful and strong. He had a great understanding of music. Most of all, he possessed the single quality that allows boys to dance: He was completely impervious to teasing. When he was older and the boys on the football team said he was gay, George only smiled and winked at them. After all, he was dating every girl in town who possessed good posture and a pair of tights. By the time he was sixteen, he was teaching the introductory classes himself. He went to dance camps in the summer. He came to the studio at the crack of dawn to practice. Scouts from the big companies were coming to see him. George was going to be my legacy.

Four children. Four lawyers. He waited a long time to tell me, and when he finally did, what could I say? I would rather see you be a dancer? I would rather see you in a career where you might hold on until you’re thirty-five if you don’t get knocked out by a case of tendinitis or a bad knee?

“It’s not an either-or thing,” George said. “Just because I’m going to law school doesn’t mean I won’t still look great in tights.”

“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound defeated. “You can still dance.”

And he did. He kept on teaching the level-three class on Saturday morning. George loved level three. That’s where you start to relearn everything you already thought you knew cold. He took the prima seventh graders through the six positions over and over again. George was a real stickler for detail.

But today was a Wednesday, not a Saturday, and this class wasn’t a level at all. It was only the bumblebees, and there George was, dancing the role of the grandest daisy in the bunch.

“Aunt Taffy called,” he said to me over his shoulder and then threw in a
grand jeté
just to show off for the girls.

“Roots in the ground, daisies,” I said. “Use your arms.”

“She wanted me to tell you she’s on her way.”

“She’s leaving Atlanta now?”

George swung down from the waist, made a circle with his torso, and rose up again to the light. The girls followed him. I followed him. “No, no, no. She left at five o’clock this morning. She said she couldn’t sleep, anyway. She said the house stank of Uncle Neddy.”

I felt a little chill. “So where was she calling from?”

“She said she was right around the 40-85 split,” George said in an ominous voice.

She was just outside of Durham. That gave me less than an hour if there was traffic, as little as forty minutes if the roads were clear.

“I tried to put the house together. Woodrow said he’d get one of the drywall guys to run the vacuum. He said he’d let her in, of course, if you didn’t make it home in time.”

“I can’t just walk out of here.” I clapped my hands. The girls looked up at me with that expectant expression so often seen on the faces of puppies. “Now your roots come up, all the way out of the ground. That’s right, now stretch up.”

“I’ll cover this.”

“You have school.”

“Believe me, it’s easier to make up a day of law school than it is a day of dance class. I’ve read too far ahead, anyway. It’s hardly even interesting.” He turned his attention to the class. “Skip, daisies! Put your hearts into it! You’re the first daisies on the planet who are able to skip!” George set off in a slow skip and the girls followed him. They would have followed him out of the school, down the street, and into the river.

“You’re saving my life.”

“I’m saving my own life. I don’t want to have to listen to Taffy bemoan the fact that you weren’t even there to meet her. Stretch your stems. Long daisy stems!” George pushed his shoulders down and made his neck into something elegant and the little girls strained to follow his example.

I told the girls I was leaving, but they hardly even blinked at the news. They loved me wildly unless George was around, and then they could barely remember who I was. Such is the fickle nature of the five-year-old. I was grateful to be able to leave without a sobbing daisy pulling at my ankles. It happens sometimes.

I wanted to stop off at the liquor store on the way home and buy the wine that Taffy liked, but all I could remember was that it was white and French and prohibitively expensive. I wasn’t sure what kind of fruit she might want or what she ate for breakfast. As I tried to remember, I forgot that my sister drove me crazy, and instead gave myself over to feeling bad that we hadn’t been closer over the years. We could make lists together. I would bring in whatever she wanted. I would buy flowers for her room and make sure the sheets were fresh. If there had been time, I would have cleaned the oven and rearranged the linen closet and turned over every cushion on every chair and vacuumed it. I was feeling the onset of a kind of nervousness that tended to manifest itself in weird and unnecessary cleaning. After all, my sister was getting divorced, my daughter was getting married. It was enough to make me want to put down new paper on the kitchen shelves.