Tiny Dancer (3 page)

Vesta
had worked long and hard at delivering me from a state of resistance she said had embedded itself in my genetic make up. The truth sets some people free, I had heard. I hardly saw the use in defying my genetic make up. But showing yourself in 1962 could also get you blamed and I was already carrying about twenty-two fire buckets of blame, more than most fifteen-year-olds will ever carry ‘til kingdom come.

I pondered the quiet blankness that had fallen over us the past year
. Now the early summer days of 1962 slowed to hours that did nothing but pass on by. 

Downstairs the front door opened and slammed shut. Daddy was home.

“Want to play Chinese checkers?” I asked Claudia. The game lay on a stand beneath the window sill.

“I thought we were reading today.” She had brought along a novel from our school’s reading list. We had spent many a day reading in silence. I was too distracted, though.

“I’m leaving the towels for you to fold, Flannery,” Vesta called upstairs sounding tired and dispirited. She must have gotten worn out building her barricade. “They’re in the spare bedroom.” She used the spare room for her projects and chores. Her voice nearly squeaked from sheer force when she said, “Off to bridge.”

Of course, I knew the truth—that Vesta was not the same Vesta I had known these past ten years.
Disappointment’s waters swept Vesta so deeply into its dark river she had even stopped complaining about our new house she said was now too small compared to the town’s old money families who lived all around us in houses three times the size of ours. Until Effie Sandersen’s visit, she had nearly stopped railing about the neighbor whose property bordered our back yard. It was not so much his sunflower forest she hated, although she often called the dense thicket of golden orbs tacky, as much as the fact that the black land owner refused to sell to the neighborhood project developers. The good blacks, those arriving through invitation, had cooperatively segregated themselves in the bordering communities like Lost City and Jackson Hamlet.

I picked up one opaque black marble and held it up to the sun coming through the window glass. No light could come through the black marble. That was how I imagined the sunflower man, refusing to let in the light the town fathers wanted to shed on his stubborn resolve.

The gently hilly terrain of his land was perfect for a golf course, already outfitted with a beautiful pond that was nearly a lake. Vesta was madder than ever when she heard a golf course might have bordered our back lawn. She did not golf but might have wanted the bragging rights among her small gaggle of new bridge friends.

While the blacks were tidily kept out of white neighborhoods by literacy tests, bureaucratic property qualifications and such, the
sunflower man acquired his twelve acres long before the developers ever sniffed out the land as prime suburbia. How and why he came to own it, though, was a mystery.

All kinds of rumors circulated about how he had come by the land. One story told of how a band of
Nigras had killed the original landowner following the Civil War and taken it for their own, leaving the sunflower man as eventual heir. Every time a new story circulated, he was nearly a legend. If only he’d of been white. But truth was, no one knew exactly how long the sunflower man had lived on his twelve-acre spread, except to say that while moneyed whites were moving in around him, he stubbornly refused to recognize the opportunity before him to go and live equitably among his own kind.

We had lived several weeks
in the new house with blue shutters on Cotton Street before Vesta spotted the big black neighbor in overalls kneeling in the tilled garden soil bordering our back yard. She had seen him before then. It was a slow realization that came to her one day—he was nobody’s hired help. That was when Vesta’s anger took on a campaign force; and that led her to the office of Winston Grooms, a local attorney in Aberdeen, and mayor. He advised her that ridding the neighborhood of nuisances like the sunflower man took what he called incentives. But, Daddy could not afford an attorney. Besides, Grooms was running for re-election and Daddy was a fishfly on his windshield.

Even though Vesta claimed she had allies in great proportion, Daddy was not one to take risks on a security guard’s income.

I did not share Vesta’s opinion of the sunflower garden as that of an eyesore. I secretly rooted for the sunflower man when Vesta had little success rallying the neighborhood, although she stood out in the yard complaining to whoever might listen. One day, though, she resolutely shut up about him when she noticed the neighbor woman from Singapore giving her a look in the middle of her rant. Vesta complained to Daddy, “Now I got people judging me for who lives behind me.” That was how she interpreted HuiLin’s grimace anyway.

Claudia stretched out on the floor with a novel. I sat up from my reading and watched the black neighbor curiously through my window. When he wore his bright yellow shirt, he looked like one of his own sunflowers painted into the landscape. Nevertheless, I never admitted my curiosity to Vesta whose list of complaints now included trespassing.

The neighbor sang loudly while running a water hose down through the deep rows, scaring the crows off his roof, another nuisance attracted by his garden, of course. The birds landed dead center along the pitch of our gabled roof making such a godawful rumpus so as to set Vesta off all over again.

She yelled so loud we could hear her upstairs.

Claudia snickered, but did not look up.

Daddy was dropping in for lunch, but made fast up the staircase. Soon Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” trilled softly
down the hall. Daddy played Patsy whenever Vesta lost control of her marbles. He had not played Patsy’s record album in over a month.

Outside, the black neighbor clipped along at a lively pace, whistling so loud it seemed he might have been working a spell to mesmerize Vesta. I had heard of such incantations from North Carolina mountain lore, but could not say for certain this man worked in spells and such.

If it wasn’t the sunflower garden sending her into an uproar, there were the parties he and his little wife hosted on the weekends. By nightfall on certain summer nights, people of all colors would collect in lawn chairs around his backyard picking guitars and slapping bongo drums while an entire pig roasted in the ground. This was an every Saturday event, June through August.

For every colored face stepping foot into the neighbor’s back yard, every pounding drum and bling of a guitar, Vesta paced in front of her kitchen window devising ways to confront the atrocity.

Sure enough, right on schedule, the smell of pit-roasted pig seeped through my open window. The June bugs swarmed earlier than usual so the neighbor appeared from his shed, pumping insecticide. He fumigated his roses and a pretty little plum tree with limbs that spread out wide and welcoming.

I dared not admit, not even to Claudia, how pleasant it was or how often I had opened my window on purpose to let in the neighbor’s delicious pit smoke. I lay flat of my back and let the smoke float over my windowsill, hovering over me like a lovely barbecue-scented spirit.

To hear Vesta tell of her dilemma at church, every summer the neighbor’s company gathered in a circle chanting pagan incantations under the moon while they gutted the poor animal, the pig’s squeals rising and then fading as
those heathens
cheered. My upstairs window gave me the truest view. I never witnessed them slaughtering an animal, just dropping its limp pink carcass into the smoking coal-littered pit. As for pagan incantations, my exposure to life outside our blinkered circle of step dancers left me with few experiences save that of trussed waists and perfectly pointed toes. It was not within my experience to say whether or not the sunflower man and his kin fell into acts of the devil.

One thing was certain though
—a blankness had dropped into the Curry family a year nearly to the day. I felt as if I had held my breath the whole time waiting for my life to start again. By that I did not mean I intended to dance again. Not professionally, anyway. Not that the subject had been brought up. 

Claudia drew her nose out of her novel. “Mother’s off at her club,” she said, “and I wasn’t up to it.” She whispered, “Your house is like a tomb. I’ll bet you’re glad to see me.” Were it not for Irene’s insistence on following polite protocol, Claudia might not have called ahead in the first place. She was not the type to ask if she could drop by but instead considered her presence a great flattery.

I came away from the window. I secretly agreed though I wouldn’t admit it. Our house was like a tomb. But I also did not bring up the fact Claudia and I were supposed to be mad at each other. She did not mean a word of it when she last declared our friendship finally over. She had ended the friendship at least a dozen times. Even Claudia’s mother Irene took my side, calling her a bit of an ego.

Claudia crawled up from where she lay spread out on the floor and dropped on my bed. “We’re going to Wrightsville Beach,” she said, although dryly. She was slow to admit her family came up with any sort of plans that suited her.

“Nice,” was all I could say, barely tolerant of her. I woke up barely tolerant of anyone though.

Claudia turned her face toward me, grinning. “You’re invited.”

“To the beach? You’re mother’s always rescuing me—I love you, Irene Johnson!” I said, dropping next to her on my stomach. “I’m bored sick. Daddy’s been working long hours and I’ve no means to get to a job if ever I find one.”

Claudia did not answer right off, but seemed to mull my dilemma. Finally, she said, nose in her book, “Oh, that’s right, your family only has one car.”

“I hate you,” I said. I flipped onto my back, staring at the ceiling thinking how pleasant it would be to have it fall down on her.

“I only meant that your circumstances are hard on you.”

“Then don’t say anything at all.”

“You’re in a bad mood again. I’ll ignore that,”
she said, coming up onto her elbows. She sniffed the air, then my hair. “You smell like smoke.”

I got up and went to the window, closing it. “Neighbors are cooking out again.”

“Oh, the pagans! I’m so jealous, we only have the lake behind us.” Her treble voice dipped when she said “the lake”.

I wanted to go to the beach so badly with the Johnsons that all I could do was resist the urge for the rest of the afternoon to strangle her.

I got up early the next morning for Sunday was the annual Peach Festival and parade. A summer rain was coming down
. I took it upon myself to make use of the time. The dance costumes still hung in the closet shoved further back with each passing month. I packed them away along with my little sister’s shoes, although I left our last winning trophy from 1961 on the hall stand.

The weatherman this past Friday had predicted many days of sunshine on the way
. I  looked forward to the first summer weekend not spent performing. Not only did I have that hope waiting as a day enjoyed out of the house, but now the Johnsons had planned their trip to the ocean this Tuesday. Irene had even come to the door when she picked Claudia up Saturday to beg Daddy to let me accompany them. She was good to take the initiative often on my behalf. “To keep Claudia company since I’ll be visiting with my friend,” Irene had explained to Daddy. She was visiting an old college roommate who bought a house on Wrightsville Beach. The woman was a college professor teaching at the state university. I was aware of Irene’s kind heart toward me and suspected she had arranged the trip to draw me away from the shadows that had descended upon the Currys. Irene was a funny woman to be around. Funny mothers were hard to come by in the 60s. I often reminded Claudia of her good fortune whenever she complained about how she never seemed to satisfy her mother or her daddy. She was born to privilege and lacked my insight.

Vesta had overheard the conversation and intercepted Daddy once Irene had driven away. “Not now, Flynn. You know what day Tuesday is. How inappropriate! Surely if Irene Johnson will think about the timing of it all, she’ll drop the matter, for crying out loud.”

I for one suspected Irene had kept a careful calendar and timed her beach invitation accordingly.

Vesta
was not the only one skilled at plying her way. I played on Daddy’s sympathies while staying out of the path of Vesta’s brooding. “I haven’t asked to go anywhere in a year, Daddy,” I said, begging his consent.

“It’s the date, honey
, a year to the day” He did not bother to make eye contact. Worse, he left me standing alone at the foot of the stairs.

I wound my way upstairs, close on his heels. Then he closed the bedroom door. 

“I have no life,” I said, but no one heard. I imagined Claudia under a beach umbrella smiling, sanctimonious. Claudia might devilishly pick out a postcard and mail it to me, filling me in on everything I missed. I set aside only a few seconds to hate her all over again.

I did understand Vesta’s side of the matter.
I was not cold hearted as was implied. I simply wanted to be anywhere but here where my guilt took on its own life.

I picked through a box of our dance shoes. Siobhan’s
hairpieces had fallen into a mob of curls. I pulled them apart as best I could. Then my hand struck a small box, one I lifted out of the mess of costume accessories. It appeared fashioned from an old cigar box. Her six-year-old writing scrawled on the lid said only “The Box.”

I opened the lid curious since she had never mentioned it to me. It was mostly filled with little buttons, an earring with no mate, notes passed to her by her school friends. At the bottom of the stack of notes lay a few photographs. The one of the two of us standing on a dock took me back to the summer we spent with an aunt who lived on a lake in the Appalachians. The next photo though was a peculiar picture. Siobhan held out a big pan of hot rolls. She hated kitchen work and often shirked her duties. The grin on her face was one of pride, like she was bursting
with satisfaction. Around her neck hung a heavy ornate cross tied through with a purple ribbon. My eye was drawn to the woman’s dark hand on her shoulder. 

I heard Vesta coming up the stairs so I shoved the picture back and dropped the box into the larger
carton, folding down the cardboard to hide the contents. I would put it away in the attic later.

Then I set to work cleaning up the upstairs. I picked up a dirty towel dropped outside the bathroom door. Vesta’s housekeeping had fallen off these past twelve months.

Thunder snarled above the town, but even the storm could not muffle Daddy and Vesta’s argument brewing down the hall.

Daddy had promised me we would all get up early and reserve a spot on Main to watch the Peach Festival parade. The
Philco radio squawked out the voice of local disc jockey Art Barkley announcing the parade was cancelled entirely.

The rain let go, plummeting thousands of miles from the sky to tumble onto our roof as if our house was an aquarium that needed refilling.

I dropped onto my bed. Summer was supposed to be a wide-open sky of possibilities. The sky over Bitterwood Park had put out a “closed for business” sign.

I tired of eavesdropping
, of hoping Daddy would stand up for me and insist I join the Johnsons Tuesday. I closed and locked my door and dropped on the bed, fixing my eyes on the sunflower garden, the only patch of ground happy about the rain

              
                                                        * * * * *

Billy
Thornton had taught Siobhan and me how to dance from the time we were barely able to complain about our Saturdays all swallowed up in competitions. If it had not been for being under Billy’s tutelage, I might have tried to quit much sooner. But I knew the truth, that I would have climbed the State Capitol for Billy Thornton if it would please him. Siobhan had quit many times, her begging ignored by Vesta.

Billy was supposed to leave town with his friends for Wilmington to stay along the island on one of the quaint hotels on Wrightsville Beach. They’d planned it since March. I had overheard their whole plan when I had ridden my bike to the
village drugstore to get Vesta her sleeping medicine two Thursdays earlier. There I found him and his buddies gathered at the soda fountain. He was explaining how college students from the university often gathered at the ocean every summer. I eavesdropped through a display of OJ’s Beauty Lotion. Their plan was to meet Billy’s college-bound friends at a beach bar called Neptune’s. The trip’s purpose, most of the students told their folks, was to visit the UNC Wilmington campus. Billy promised his friends a local band would be playing at Neptune’s and his coastal friends could save them a spot on the beach that night for a crab boil.

It did not take long to conclude that Billy would not be far from Wrightsville Beach the same week as the Johnsons.
Overplaying my hand with my already angry stepmother would only make her more indignant and stubborn. Instead of knocking on Daddy and Vesta’s door with the two of them in a state of upheaval, I vowed I wouldn’t disturb them the rest of the day. I busied myself straightening my bathroom and washing my hair. Before I slipped into my bedroom  Vesta stepped out into the hall. She was nearly in her room when she said, “Stop rolling up your shorts like that, Flannery. It’s indecent.”

“
Yes’m,” I said, rolling down my shorts. I towel-dried my curly red hair, and then holed up in my bedroom, opening my rear window fully. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Siobhan and those bread rolls. Who was she with? The curious picture of Siobhan gave me pause. I reasoned the notion away. Maybe the woman standing behind her was a domestic from one of her little friends’ houses. Sure, that was it. I dismissed the thought right off as ridiculous that the sunflower people had some secret relationship with my little sister. I stood in front of my window, still drying my soggy strands of hair. Siobhan had not ever mentioned knowing the neighbors behind us. Yet the way the black woman’s hand fell onto her shoulder so intimately, like they knew one another, got my thoughts spinning. I slipped back to The Box and rifled to the bottom pulling out the photo again.

The woman was not wearing a white uniform apron, although everyday chores did not
necessarily require a dress affair for domestics. She wore a dress made out of some lovely purple fabric. She was visible only from the shoulders down, my sister the photo’s subject. An expensive gold bracelet hung from the woman’s wrist. A charm hung from the bracelet, although I could not make out the details of the ornament. Maybe it was a flower. The woman’s nails were manicured and painted. I decided she was not a domestic.

Vesta talked loudly to Daddy coming upstairs. I put away The Box and waited for her to disappear into her room for her Sunday nap.

Then it was if an overpowering influence lured me out of my bed and down the hall, drawing me downstairs and through the house. First a curiosity about my younger sister having a second life we did not know about tantalized me. As intent as Siobhan was in wanting her way, the very idea of making such shocking associations renewed my respect for her. Then there was my secret daydream I had long harbored of crossing the forbidden territory into the thicket of towering yellow heads just to catch a closer glimpse of their wicked shenanigans. It was not the first time my interest about the wrong kind of people had rubbed a raw place between Vesta and me. Yet there I wandered Sunday into the neighbor’s garden, smack dead center.

I entered the garden right as the big church bells of
nearby Vineland set to ringing.

The garden air hung potent and heavy, the flowers dripping raindrops down my neck while the storm subsided. The gardener had left a five-by-six square open space in the garden’s center. A small child’s table and two chairs sat on the black soil, a toy tea setting left carelessly out in the elements, so like a child to do that and something like Siobhan might have done. The little China cups overflowed with rainwater so I emptied them. A pretty pink house built child-size stood next to the table. I wobbled across the sticky soil in my bare feet, knelt, and crawled inside the house. I felt like Alice after she outgrew the magic tearoom. I rolled onto my bottom and stretched out as far as my feet would stretch, my hands cupping the back of my head. The wooden house was balmy, but the floor nice and dry, warmed by the humid morning. I rolled up the soft frayed edges of my shorts again stopping just below the panties line. I admired my legs, still shapely from my years as a dancer. While I disliked my smile, one corner slightly higher than the other, and my curly red hair—frizzy on wet days like today
—I was grateful for nice legs, although I doubted Billy ever noticed them.

Cirrus clouds floated overhead, non-threatening, and enough cloud cover to cool the sunflower sanctuary. I deliberated over why Vesta hated this patch of golden faces so much. I had to admit
seeing it from the inside offered a different perspective entirely. Vesta would never cross into this man’s yard short of leading a band of picketers.

Velvet leaves
and spiny stems surrounded me. The massive sunflower heads attracted finches and wrens into the brown orbs like babies sucking at their mamas’ breasts. 

A sweet smell crawled down the paths of stems and leaves. Peach pie, I decided. I could not see beyond the dense garden forest, but imagined the neighbor’s wife must have been baking for Sunday dinner.

It was here though that I could in privacy plan a strategy. I reaffirmed not to risk igniting my stepmother’s temper again, not after setting her off Saturday morning. I would call Billy casual-like and tell him that Claudia and I were coming to the beach too, even though Vesta flat out refused permission. I would first see if he and his friends might want to meet us. I grinned, overwhelmed by the giddy lightness of scheming.

The garden air soothed me. The fresh scent of the new lumber, like my mother’s old cedar closet, caused me to close my eyes thinking about Mama, wondering where her beautiful wanderlust had led her. I had imagined her in many places, but at that moment pretended she was thinking about me. The thought was so peaceful I drifted off. I did not know how long I slept when I heard, “Excuse me.”

I sat up, startled by the big black man peering through the dainty pink window frame.

The black man’s face, while freckled, was deeply lined as if time had cut small invisible streams into the folds of his skin only to show up when he opened his mouth to speak.

You’d best go,” he said whispering, although his deep voice sounded a bit like the thunder passing out of town. Instead of his usual faded overalls and plaid shirt, the yellow one so familiar to me, he work a dark suit and tie. “Your daddy’s out looking for you.”

I apologized. “I fell asleep.” I sat up, startled, banging my head against the ceiling.

“Your daddy’s been calling your name for a bit.” He kept whatever levity he had practiced in the privacy of the garden in check, or so it seemed, for he was not smiling.

“I’m Flannery,” I said, moving slowly onto my hands, preparing for a fast get-away.

“Reverend Theo Miller,” he said, yet still no hint of warmth. He opened the child-size door and out I came, hands first in the mud. Then he helped me to my feet, not a care for my muddy fingers gripping his clean black skin.

Reverend,
I thought. I brushed small dirt clods from my hands. “I live there,” I told him, pointing to our house. “We’re the Currys.”

There was a quiet pause between us.

“You heard about my little sister, I guess,” I said awkwardly.  Just saying it like that made me feel as if I had stood up in church and yelled it. But I was interested in knowing how he might react if he did know her.

“I heard,” he said, and then, “You’d best go on now
,”  he cautioned me, no hint of recognition, and no implication that he knew Siobhan.