I never did get a horse. Shortly after my best friend got hers, I came to appreciate the difference between fiction and fact. Or perhaps I lacked the skill to form that special bond like Alex and the Black. Perhaps you had to spend several months on a desert island with a horse before that special “click” set in. Whatever it was, I met any number of horses during my horse-loving period before I realized I didn’t really like them.
I’ve had better things to do with my adult life than be rejected by rabbits. I’ve almost always been kept by at least one cat. Cats are very simple. Live by the cat’s rules, or you will hear a muffled little “huff” and you will never see the cat again.
From time to time, however, I have been tempted to own a goat. A small goat: a pygmy goat, perhaps. I like the idea of living lawn mowers (they would be so much easier to start). I understand goats are not hard to feed. And if my goat gets bored, I have more than enough nieces and nephews for her to stand on until the mood passes. I think a goat would work for me.
my mother was a
square dance caller. I have no idea what would possess a woman to subject her children to such abject humiliation, but she was drunk with power and delirious from discovering a whole group of people who willingly paid her to order them around. The fact that all of her children were hiding in deep, self-dug holes in the back yard to avoid public ridicule did not seem to faze her. She may have even suggested we were being silly. Our mother cared more than she liked to admit about what the neighbors might think of us—even neighbors she’d never met—but what our friends thought . . . she advised us we were fools to even think about it. We perceived inconsistency in this: she did not.
I should remember more about square dancing than I do. Perhaps out of spite I’ve repressed its history. Square dancing is what all those people in the funny wide skirts and cowboy shirts were not doing in the movie
Oklahoma!
In all of the square dances I watched in all of the years my mother called, I never once saw her dancers run up the side of a mound of hay and jump off. My mother’s club danced in a little square building on the edge of the 4-H fairgrounds—the nearest hay mound was clear down by the horse barns and it was only there during fair week. The way square dancing was presented in the movies was a big issue for my mother. She knew for a fact that Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was a square dance caller, so why people in Hollywood couldn’t be a hair more accurate in their depictions eluded her.
I don’t know how square dancing came to be. Like most things American it is a little like—but not entirely like—various forms of folk dancing from all over Europe. I assume, from the costumes normally worn while doing it, that at least some of its history was touched by the early West. Very likely some stray Puritan found himself out in the West somewhere (nowhere near Oklahoma) and was challenged to combine religious purity, sexual hunger, folk dancing, and the desire to have just a little fun, all to the same music.
Square dancing requires four couples arranged in a square facing each other, men on the left, women on the right of each couple. The couples respond to a series of “calls,” or instructions from the caller, the most well-known being the “swing your partner,” do-si-do, and allemand left. Done right, square dancing is fun and very precise: done wrong, it is an awkward and miserable experience that involves running into each other on the dance floor and rushing to get where you think you should be. (There is even an official square dance term for a complete snafu in square dancing—it’s called a breakdown.) Gym teachers, in particular, could strip all of the fun from a square dance and turn it into a joyless mess. It must be one of the essay questions on their PE final exam:
describe four ways to make traditional dancing the most hated segment of your students’ entire phys ed experience.
I grew up with square dancers congregating at my house at odd hours of the night, with a mother who went out in public wearing three-tiered gathered skirts fluffed over huge crinolines and fitted blouses with puffy sleeves. And ricrac. Yards and yards and yards of ricrac. (For the unexposed, ricrac is a decorative cloth tape shaped like a zigzag that can be sewn to clothing to make it appear more festive. It has never been fashionable in my lifetime.) And just in case there might be a single individual in town who didn’t know whose mother she was, she wore the nametag
ELOISE PECK
with shadow figures swinging and the name of her club embossed on it. Even worse, there was a certain status to be had (among themselves) for wearing a nametag for every dance club they had ever danced with, so many dancers looked like they could not remember their own names from one tag to the next.
My mother was well suited to be a square dance caller because she loved music, she loved being in charge, and she was entirely comfortable in front of a crowd. Something in my mother needed to rise above the role of everywoman, and being one of very few women callers in her day seemed to help fill that need. In the past few years I have discovered that years of watching my mother in front of groups of people, and remembering what she told me she had learned from those experiences, has gone a long way toward making me comfortable and at ease in front of groups of people myself. And, truthfully, I too enjoy it. This apple has not fallen that far from the tree.
Life between my mother and me was nowhere near as serendipitous when I was in eighth grade. Eighth grade itself was enough to curdle the teenage soul. Exactly at that stage of life when our feet tripped over thin air and our faces broke out when we inhaled, when body parts were growing where nothing had grown before and the most attractive among us looked like we had been stitched together from spare parts, gym became a required course. Hormonal meltdowns in the locker room were not all that uncommon. And forget about gym class itself; most of us had never before had the opportunity to shower naked in one communal room with thirty-five snippy, insecure, hopelessly judgmental peers. The only way to get out of this growth experience was to tell the gym teacher we were having our period—not yet a confession we made openly or easily. This experience was so anxiety-inducing for some of my classmates that their bodies threw them into perpetual menses. They apparently flowed nonstop for the next five years.
The first thing we did in gym class was get publicly weighed and measured, and that pretty much cured me of gym right there. In my recollection I was the heaviest girl in my class (I was also within a quarter of an inch of being the tallest), but I may just have been the heaviest girl stupid enough to admit to what I weighed. Although size had become a serious emotional issue for me by then, photographs of me at that age show a healthy, outgoing adolescent. Not a stick by any means, but also nothing remotely comparable to my mental body image. I survived it.
I survived calisthenics and fitness evaluations. I survived archery, which, in spite of the teacher’s instructions, still resulted in my shaving off the inside of my left arm. And then the gym teacher announced that the next segment of our class was going to be “dance.”
It can be difficult for a fourteen-year-old to equate dance with physical education. Ten years later even a fairly fit individual can see an immediate link, but fourteen-year-olds are fairly loose-jointed and flexible. Even pudgy, rhythm-impaired teenagers are apt to break out in fits of dancing in the course of a normal day—it just comes with the hormonal power surges and a culture that identifies itself through music. Dancing, to a fourteen-year-old, means coming into direct and humiliating contact with the opposite sex. It is also readily apparent to a teenager that nothing cool and socially relevant to them will ever be taught in a junior high gym class. The dance segment in gym meant being watched by everyone you know while you are publicly stumbling through the Hokey Pokey.
It was at that point that the gym teacher pulled me to one side and said, “Your mother teaches square dancing, doesn’t she? Do you think she would come in and teach the class?” Which is a little like asking someone to arrange the details of their own execution.
My mother was a stay-at-home mom until my youngest brother was born and I was twelve. Then in fairly rapid succession my father lost his job and my mother had our Baby Brother and then went to work. I had hoped that my mother would be far too busy with her new job to come teach my gym class how to square dance, but as luck would have it it was considered important for parents to meddle in their children’s education and my mother agreed to come.
Being a caller’s kid had a few quirks of its own before this event. The one that always amused me personally were the little notes we found written on the margins of telephone messages or spare paper scraps. Artists doodle, writers jot down particularly clever phrases, musicians write down sequences of music notes . . . square dance callers scribble the never-ending travels of a couple named L(eft) and R(ight). While there are four sets and eight people in a square, the caller often only needs to keep track of set 1. In traditional square dancing set 1 goes to “visit” sets 2, 3, and 4; in Western-style square dancing, all four sets are often doing the same thing, or sets 1 and 2 are interacting while sets 3 and 4 are doing the same thing. L and R danced all over every spare sheet of paper in our house, little circles drawn around the one who was moving and arrows drawn to show where s/he had gone.
It was not uncommon to walk into our house in the course of our own normal business to find our mother “practicing,” and when we walked by she would grab us, inform us we were either R or L, and then propel us wherever she wanted us to go. We would find ourselves square dancing with six imaginary people, do-si-do-ing around spots in the rug, promenading with empty hands while she determined whether the sequence of calls she was writing would get the “eight” of us where we all needed to be. (She, on the other hand, found it alarming that so many of
my
friends were imaginary.)
Because she was the club caller, she was responsible for providing the sound system and all of the music. She often encouraged at least one of us to go with her if only to help her carry the equipment. Once there, if an odd number of couples showed up, we would be paired off with our dad and shoved out onto the floor. Once or twice a year the club would have a family night when everyone brought their kids and Mom would call a few simple dances so we could participate.
Because square dancing requires people in sets of four, whenever members of her dance club wanted to bring a new couple they immediately needed three more. The club actively recruited new members, eventually by offering classes that my mother taught, but they also dressed their children up in Western dancewear and had us perform demonstrations, whether on parade floats or in booths, for instance, at the county fair. I had several square dance outfits during the course of my childhood, at least two of which were exact replicas of dresses my mother wore. I rarely told friends at school about any of these activities, but I knew a secret about square dancing that I could not have expected them to know.
So my mother, with her turntable, speakers, monitor, microphone, and a case of 45-rpm records, appeared at my school to teach all of my peers how to square dance. The boys’ and the girls’ gym classes were combined, and we were paired off and assigned to our squares. All over the gym floor classmates were glancing at me and then laughing at themselves.
The secret is that, taught right by a caller who knows what s/he is doing, square dancing is fun. Each dancer has exactly enough time to get to the next place s/he is supposed to be. It is precise, it’s smooth, it flows very gracefully, the music is uptempo and infectious, the dancers are moving just fast enough to get the adrenaline going and not so fast they feel rushed. My mother may have had a natural aptitude for math and therefore could not see why math might be hard for her child, but she had been teaching square dancing for years: she knew how to break it down for beginners, she knew how to stay just ahead of her class, she knew when to tell a joke, when to add an encouraging word. The class she taught went quickly, most of my classmates were surprised to realize they had had fun, and more than one of them came up to me later to tell me that my mother was “cool.”
In junior college I was required to take two phys ed courses. I took swimming (I float like a cork, and while I have never been recruited for the Olympics, it would probably require effort to drown me) and a folk dance class. For my class project, I wrote, taught, and called a square dance. I felt, at the time, that I all but cheated, since rather than learning anything new, I simply fell back on knowledge I already had. The square dance went well. My dancers enjoyed themselves. I gave the record back to my mom, and beyond the occasional outbreak of the Hokey Pokey, I have never danced since.
Browsing through the Internet, I discovered that the club my mother called for for twenty-five years, the Coldwater Merry Mixers, still exists. Square dancing seems to be doing well. There are even gay clubs listed under their own heading. Every now and then I’ll hear a song over the radio—most often country and western—and I catch myself thinking,
Mom could use that for a square dance.
recently i heard a
quote that put vanity in a positive light and I promised myself I would remember it—but that was over an hour ago, so it’s long gone now. I’m beginning to believe I’ve been pulling my short-term memory out of my head through the hairs on my chin.
I do remember the first time I glanced at my reflection and discovered a strand of baling wire hanging from my chin. I was horrified. I grabbed a pair of pliers and yanked it out. I spent days worrying over what anomaly in my body might have caused that to occur, but I was distracted by the discovery of another one. And another.
These were not the ordinary fur that we all grow, nor even those wiry, kinky little bits of fencing that sprout up out of moles: these were thick, feisty, virile poles that jut out and scratch unwary snugglers.