The Unexpected Waltz (10 page)

Elyse was strong. Anyone could tell that at a glance. She’s always seemed at home in her body, owning it in a way few young girls do. When I asked her “Can you catch me?” she said “Ab-so-lute-ly,” slowly extending all the syllables in that way that I would later learn meant that she was annoyed by the question. But I scrambled to the top of her shoulders and when that shaky moment came for me to release her hands and stand, it was like we’d been practicing together since birth. I dropped and she caught me, so effortlessly that the judges wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. They made us do it again, over and over, until it was time to break for lunch.

“If you ever want to drop, I’ll catch you,” I told her, even though I wasn’t totally sure I could do it. It seemed like the right thing to offer, but she had just tossed back her hair and said, “I don’t drop.”

When the two weeks of tryouts ended, they not only picked me and Elyse for the varsity squad—making varsity was practically unheard-of for ninth graders—but they put us in the middle of the formation. We were together so much that the older girls called us “the little sisters.” Come to think of it, maybe Elyse and I became such fast friends because we were both only children, an unusual condition for that place and time, but whenever the other girls would call us sisters, Elyse would just look at me and wrinkle her nose. Based on what we had observed from our friends who had siblings, we sure didn’t want to be compared to sisters. We liked each other.

The first football game of the season was in August. We were sweltering in our woolen turtleneck sweaters with the big blue
B
s on the front, but as I stood there in the gravel outside the stadium, I knew I was incredibly lucky. High school was going to crack right open for me, crack like an egg. When we all lined up to make a tunnel, I stood opposite Elyse and we raised our arms and clasped hands. It was the traditional way our team took the field. The pep band would begin to play and the football players would duck and run beneath the tunnel of the cheerleaders’ raised arms, and just as we were standing there waiting for the music to begin, one of the players looked at me and mouthed the words “pretty girl.”

Pretty girl, I thought. That’s why I’m here. I didn’t make the squad because of my front flip, polished though it was. It was more important that I looked the part, and sometime during that last empty summer before high school I had figured out the formula: straight blond hair streaked even blonder through a combination of peroxide, lemon juice, and Sun-In, a swirl of Heaven Sent perfume, short skirts, long T-shirts, and little pots of Yardley makeup. This was what had really earned me my place in the tunnel.

But at the time it didn’t matter why I was chosen, just as long as I was. As I turned toward Elyse and leaned my weight into hers, I tried to figure out what I was feeling and came up with the word “thrilled.” My mother always described emotion in a collective sense: “We are delighted,” she’d announce, or “This isn’t exactly what we had hoped for, is it?” Elyse used to laugh and say, “Why does your mother use the royal ‘We’—does she think she’s Queen Victoria?” It may have sounded grandiose, but it actually, I eventually realized, was my mother’s way of informing me that every event has a corresponding official emotion: joy for weddings, sorrow for funerals, modesty for compliments, fear for anything new. Whenever I would find myself in an unexpected situation I would unconsciously spin the Rolodex of adjectives in my mind, looking for the one she would deem the most appropriate. And if it’s the first Friday night of the football season and you’re wearing a varsity sweater and linking hands with your best friend as the football team runs through the tunnel of your arms and one of those players notices you—then what you’re feeling is “thrilled.” That must be it. What other word could there possibly be?

THE FOOTBALL PLAYER WHO'D
mouthed the words “pretty girl” to me was named Kevin Pressley, and he eventually did ask me out. The best part was that he had an identical twin brother who decided it would be convenient if he liked Elyse, so we could all double. I still consider this the kinkiest thing I’ve ever done.

Friday nights were for games, so on Saturday the four of us would go to the drive-in, a broken-down sandpit of a place where they showed vintage films. That was where Elyse and I first learned to love old movies. We loved the fact that the women in them were so beautiful, tragic in ways that we would never be, loved the fact that the men all wore double-breasted suits and knew how to kiss, and smoke, and—come to think of it—dance. We sat with a couple in the front seat and a couple in the back and we would watch for a while and then—just when the plot was getting interesting—the guys would begin to do the things that guys do, and at some point, Elyse would make this noise. That’s how I learned what kind of noise you’re supposed to make. That you don’t do it too soon and you don’t do it too big and it’s not a matter of thrashing around and screaming. I was clever enough to realize that I shouldn’t sound exactly like her, so I came up with a response that was a little higher and breathier. Something that I think of as my Marilyn Monroe, in contrast to hers, which I have always suspected was more of an Elizabeth Taylor.

After the first few Saturday nights at the drive-in, we had the protocol figured out. I would make my noise first. It seemed selfish to have everyone waiting on me when Elyse was really the one setting the pace, and this is undoubtedly how the myth was born that I’m an easier come than she is. Because the boys, the poor boys, there was never even a hint or a suggestion that anyone was supposed to do anything for them and maybe that’s why they were always jumping out of the car and running off to the snack bar. God knows where they really went or what they really did, but while they were gone, Elyse would climb over into the front seat and we would watch the end of the movie. I would catch her up on the story, since I’d never fully stopped watching, and she never asked how I knew these things, just as I never asked her how she knew all the mysterious things she seemed to know. We would slump against each other, lost in the glamour of the black-and-white story, and at some point she would say, “Do you think there’s something wrong with me? I don’t know why I’m such a slow come.”

My silence on the subject was cruel. It would have derailed anyone other than Elyse, who was and is the most confident person I have ever known. “I don’t know why I’m such a slow come,” she would say, but she never said this with any particular regret and I suppose I should have learned something, even back then, from her cheerful selfishness and how it never seemed to bother the boys. Not Kevin nor Keith, or whichever one she was with. My memory is fuzzy on this point and besides, I’ve always suspected that sometimes they switched us, both because they liked doing that creepy twin thing and because of a natural desire to find a more equitable distribution of the workload. It seems unfair to think that week after week they could come into the same drive-in and find themselves cast into such different movies—one of them in an Italian Western, climbing over endless miles of sand and rock, without hope, without water, embroiled in an epic quest for Elyse’s elusive orgasm, while the other one, by chance, got the science fiction that was my sexuality, got a woman who only required a couple of clicks to teleport her there.

ALL WOMEN HAVE THEIR
secrets, I guess, and this is mine. Through the years that would follow, whenever I look down to see the heads or hands of men between my legs or put my palms on the sides of their hips and look up into their faces, with those awful pained expressions they always get, I feel guilty. I want to tell them not to bother to hold back. They’re trying so hard and wasting so much time and it’s not their fault, really, it’s just something that failed to grow in me. A therapist once called it an inability to relax, but it’s more, I think, a reluctance to be greedy, to ask someone who is already trying so hard to try even harder, to inform a man who is already waiting that he must wait a little more. To tell him, in effect, that it doesn’t matter if his jaw is aching or his hand has gone numb or his lower back is beginning to spasm, that no, it doesn’t matter at all, he must keep going anyway. In those moments it’s so easy to . . .

I never say “fake it,” not even in my own mind. “Fake” is a harsh word and it’s the wrong word. It’s just that in those moments it’s easy to give him something—a couple of muttered references to religion, a twist of the hips, a moment of held breath followed by a relieved gasp. I’m careful not to overdo it. I think that’s a mistake a lot of women make.

And it isn’t that I don’t like sex. There are parts of it I like very much. I like the beginning, when it’s sweet. I like the sense of falling, of a decision being made so fast that it’s almost like you’re not making it. A decision being made so fast that the next day you can stand in the shower and think words like “inevitable” and “fate.” I like it when I lie back and a man looks at me, really looks at me. Intently, as if he’s trying to memorize something. It would be enough for me if it stopped right there. I know my breasts are good, and my shoulders, and my waist, and so I am confident to be like this. My hips I’m less sure about—there is a low-slung belt of flesh just below my navel that I have never managed to totally lose and so I leave that part covered as long as I can.

I’m quick to cover up when it’s over too, and through the years I’ve created sarongs out of towels and men’s shirts because that’s the other part of sex I like—when it’s over. The middle—it’s okay, I guess, but I sometimes get lost in it, as if I’m flipping through the pages of a very long book. A Russian novel maybe, with strange names and confusing jumps in time, and at a certain point all I really want is to know the end. Do they live? Does he love her? Will God stoop down and set it all right?

And there are times, in this confusing middle, when my thoughts go back to that drive-in and those Saturday nights, when Elyse would make her noises and I would listen, somehow knowing that with every moan and mumble, our paths were diverging. The noises she made were as ugly as truth. She was actually feeling something. She was being carried away to a place I couldn’t follow, and lying there, with the trembling weight of Kevin Pressley beside me, I could see our whole future.
Being real was going to make her life more dangerous. Pretending was going to keep me safe.

“Pretty girl,” the boy in the helmet said, and from that point on, men have, one by one, written the story of my life.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

I
AM THE FRAME,"
Nik says. “Which makes you . . .”

I’m ready for this one. “The picture.”

“Yes. So if we both do our job, then you are the one they see.”

He gets me into the proper dance position in stages. “Bend knees,” he says. “Incline hips forward, settle your pelvis over mine, then tilt . . . No. Not so far. Your back does not bend. Is optical illusion.” I’m surprised he uses the terms “pelvis,” “incline,” and “optical illusion,” but Nik knows a lot of English nouns and verbs. It’s the adjectives and adverbs that give him trouble. I don’t think that as a language Russian has so many. We practiced the waltz last lesson, so before he has to tell me, I remember to extend my arms, trying to keep my elbows high and level and my chin jutting toward the sky. This is the princess dance. The prettiest and the most masochistic.

“This is good?” he says.

He’s incapable of understanding sarcasm, so I don’t bother trying. “I’m miserable.”

“Don’t look to me,” he says. “Not to other couples on the floor. Look to line where the floor becomes the ceiling.”

The scary part is that I’m beginning to understand him when he talks like that. I stare at the seam where the wall meets the ceiling. He spins me once and I drop my chin. This is your natural impulse when you spin, to tuck your head in and tighten your arms to your body and try to make yourself aerodynamic.

He steps back. “What,” he says, “is nature of this dance?”

He asks me this question almost every lesson, so I’m ready. The cha-cha is flirtatious. The tango is passionate. The rumba is sensual and the foxtrot is playful and the jive is energetic. We have discussed all this before.