Tiny Dancer (11 page)

She turned her back to me
..

I stopped in the doorway, but said nothing.

“Your little fund is gone anyway,” she said, still not looking at me. “How you think we paid down to build this house?”

I couldn’t stand sight of her
in that instant but felt she was not worth my words any more. I closed her door and holed up the rest of the night in my room. I opened my window wide and lay across my bed.

The sun was setting
and the sound of the banjo was rising from beyond the sunflowers. How so much joy could come out of such a detested bunch of people was beyond my understanding. Somehow the Millers had learned to live above the hatred. How I wished I knew their secret.

                                                                      * * * * *

Daddy lost more hours as a bank guard, demoted to a short evening shift. He had no choice but to accept a full time delivery job with Stan Harkey.

Harkey
was best known for his loud TV commercials. No matter how low Vesta turned down the TV, Honest Stan could be heard shouting all the way to the refrigerator. COME ON IN WHERE THE AIR CONDITIONING IS FREE AND THE DEALS ARE JUST AS COOL!

After Daddy’s first full day, I asked him how his day went. He said, “The only thing lower is crossing a union line.” He sounded lower than the first time the bank had docked his hours. He dragged himself to the couch murmuring about how painful it was to repossess a TV from a family. “
The customer followed me out to the van telling me how her husband had been laid off.  Told me I took away the only enjoyment she had found in their time of need, her soap operas.”

I could not stand picturing Daddy bowing and scraping to a man like Stanley
Harkey part time, let alone every day and double shifts. It pained me worse to imagine him taking away a family’s TV while they stood by helpless to stop him. It wasn’t in him to be a repo man. Daddy had once tested on the high end for MENSA and had twice the IQ of a man like Stanley. I once overheard my mother tell a friend over beers Daddy had been accepted into an Ivy League school but his parents said it was too far away and out of the question. Granny Curry later said Mama had it all wrong, it wasn’t no ivy league, but it was a big university. But, she said, while he continued seeing Alice off and on, he was trying to decide whether or not to move away and accept the scholarship. Mama joined his family in begging him to stay. Then Mama turned up with child. That would be me.  Of course Daddy did the honorable thing.

I felt as bad that Daddy worked for Honest Stan as I had being born and keeping him out of
a school for brainiacs.

I joined Daddy and Vesta for dinner although Vesta still would not look at me. But Daddy made me promise to stop my visits to the Millers.
For real no more getting around it. He thought it best I put an end to being missing in action come suppertime. He commented he was thankful we still paid our bills. He had a friend not ten miles from here on food stamps.

The look in Vesta’s eyes said she was not grateful in the least.

“Daddy, the last time you talked to your boss at the bank they said they might bring you back on, right?” I asked.

Vesta said, “I’m tired of the subject. Can we please just talk about something else?”

Her comment seemed to take all of the air out of Daddy.

“Vesta, we listen to your problems. Shouldn’t Daddy have a turn?” I asked. Of course, I always lost to Vesta but
since the dirt incident was gradually losing my fear of her.

“We don’t solve anything,” said Vesta, “just keep living the same wrong life over and over.”

I felt the words erupting as if they had been stored up to be let out at this moment. “Maybe it feels better to talk about things. Like the Millers, they talk about things,” I said. But if eyes had knives, Vesta put a circle of them right through me.

“Who cares about the Millers?” asked Daddy
, dispirited. “Or my job. That’s enough from you, Flannery.”

I threw down my napkin. My milk glass spilled over and down the table into Vesta’s lap.

“Flannery, get a hold of yourself,” said Daddy, barely raising his voice.

“She’s talking about you,” I said,
hurt he wasn’t standing up for me.

Vesta wiped furiously at her skirt. “Flynn, get control of your daughter.”

Maybe it was the way she called me Flynn’s daughter, or maybe it was the simpering way Vesta cut her eyes back at me, but I erupted like Vesuvius rising from under the floor. “The only thing holding us together was Siobhan! Who are we now?” I pounded the tabletop batting back hot tears.

“I’m not listening to this,” said Vesta. She left us alone at the table, Daddy resting his head against his closed fist and looking at me as if I had set fire to the house.

“Don’t bother. I’m finished,” I said, now more angry than ever. I stormed out, leaving the two of them to fall into pouting and arguing about me behind my back. I locked myself in my room, hating the tears wetting my face. I felt weak and helpless. Mama once made me promise to never be at the mercy of another and now I knew why.

I fully expected Daddy to come into my room and chew me out for my inexcusable display and ruining dinner. But he didn’t come after me at all, leaving me to stew alone.

I rolled onto my stomach and turned on the radio to drown out my thoughts. But I could not wash the troubles from my mind.

I was
disheartened hearing talk of food stamps and repo men around the dinner table. I clearly remembered Vesta and Daddy planning for the day they would leave this neighborhood for a bigger house on the lake. Lake Wylie, they said. Or a house on the golf course or a manor in the village since any of those neighborhoods would please Vesta. Daddy offered her a fine plan. I imagined it was like Dottie moving into the Marina. Mama had wanted to live in a better house too. Come to think of it, I wondered how Daddy had convinced Vesta he could manage such a life for us since he had no actual experience organizing such high plans. Vesta had bought the dream whole hog, though, and married him. The mortgage hanging over their heads had sealed the deal.

But
taking the job as a repo man demoralized Daddy. When I heard Vesta disappear into her room, I slipped downstairs. I found Daddy slumped in his chair. He complained out loud, more like he was talking to himself about the other repo men, the way they were all barely making ends meet. Everyone had taken the job with the idea that it was easier to be hired by someone if you were already employed. But to hear Daddy tell it, Stan’s work crew arrived at the earliest peep of sunlight and went home by dark. They had no time left in the day to find another job. Daddy and the other repo men were Stanley Harkey’s personal slaves.

I made a plate of canapés and took a bottle of Coke from the refrigerator. I excused myself and went back to my room. I pushed the worries about my daddy out of mind and played an old dance record. I still loved
Irish dance music and sat up late nights reliving the old standards. This one was what our sister act had danced to our last performance. I had not played it since then afraid of how it would affect Daddy or Vesta if they overheard. Tonight I needed the comfort of the old Irish tune, the melancholy scratch of the guitar strings, and the ratchet of the fiddler.

I closed my eyes, forcing my mind to escape to the green hillside where I had met Siobhan in a daydream about her.
A thought came to me, one I had not cultivated while running back and forth between home and the Millers. Siobhan was happier there than she had been with us. Maybe heaven draws people into its hills when nothing is left on earth but the sadness.

I heard laughter outside my side window. I sat up and opened the window blinds. Dust sifted down like snow.

I turned down the volume on the old record player, my eyes drawn to the children outside my window.  The school kids often stayed up late in the summers slaughtering fireflies for finger jewelry. Down below no less than a dozen boys and girls were running up and down the easement between our house and the next-door neighbor’s, Hui Lin. In the faint light from the fading sky, the children were trailing what appeared to be long red sashes. I slipped on my pale green eyeglasses, my old cat eye pair I would never let anyone catch me wearing, not even Claudia. The sashes undulated behind them, red and silky, much like Siobhan’s red sash she had lost the day of the accident. 

I was haunted by the lost sash
to this day though I did not know why. The giggling children drew my attention out my bedroom window again. The space between the houses was growing dark, but the sashes were snaking wildly under the moon’s brightness. They were long as a young woman’s wedding train. I tapped on the window glass, mouthing for them to quiet down—it’s getting late. Children should be indoors sitting down to supper or helping their mothers clean up after dinner. The children did not stop laughing or running though.

It was then I detected a familiar squeal, Siobhan’s high-pitched voice rising above the children’s levity. She ran toward the house as the children ran in the opposite direction, turning her face up toward
our window. She lifted her arms and yelled, “Laugh with us, Flannery. Don’t be sad.”

I sat up from my sound but restless slumber. The recording was concluding, digressing into the long quiet scratchy sound made between songs. I turned off the record player and flipped on my table lamp. I stumbled out of my room, past Daddy and Vesta’s room that was dark and quiet. I ran down the stairs and found Daddy draping an afghan over Vesta on the couch where she had fallen to sleep.

Daddy held his finger to his lips not wanting her disturbed. “Join me on the sofa in the den,” he said. I followed him dutifully across the hall to the front living area decorated with the blue sofa they had brought along from their first house. Alice Blue, Daddy had called it since so much of Mama’s decorating incorporated the iron blue tint. I sat beside him under the yellow light of the floor lamp. Strange how two women whose lot it was to be my mother had tastes that melded so well.

Before he could clear his throat and chasten me for my tacky supper show, I swallowed hard and said, “I know I messed up the night.”

Daddy stared ahead as if he were watching one of Vesta’s movies, except no TV in the den. His words then burst open from being too long tamped down into polite subordination. “We started out on the right foot, didn’t we? Happy family and all that? But now look at us, all pulled in different directions. No matter what I do it’s wrong, at least where Vesta’s concerned. And even you and I can’t agree on anything,” he said, plying me for a little sympathy. Daddy reached for my hand clasping it inside his long elegant fingers.

“Vesta, she’s got to have her way, Daddy.” I stopped short of talking about my lost college fund.

“I’ve got more on me than I can manage, daughter. If I have one more weight laid on my back, I’ll snap like a twig. You just wait until you’ve got the whole world on your back plus a child or two as your responsibility.”

My mother had little patience for the way he used his quiet demeanor to lay stones at her feet. Here in the quiet of
our shared turmoil I absorbed trace elements of Alice Curry’s enlightenment. I was coming awake to Mama’s impatience with him, at least in part. When I needed him to speak up, to set wrongs right, he withdrew into that big man shell of his. If I poked too hard, out he came like a snapping turtle.

I preferred our talks when I was younger. Daddy seemed more understanding. But
back then my problems could fit into a shoebox. His skills for bringing up a daughter had hit a peak when I was ten years old. Since then it seemed my teenage needs were stretching him thin, the last four years especially. “I don’t have anyone to talk to, least not at home,” I finally said.

“Talk,” he said flatly.

“Some days it feels like I’m sucking water instead of air.”

“Maybe you’re a mermaid,” he said and laughed dryly, the kind of laugh that used to set Mama off. “What else?”

It wasn’t as if I had made a list for the occasion, so I asked, “Do you ever dream about Siobhan?”

“I do.”

“It seems real.”

“It’s nothing more than a dream, Sis. It’s the heart’s way of bringing her back home for a while. Does it comfort you?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s served its purpose. Don’t read more into it than it is.”

I kissed Daddy on the cheek. He was good to allow bedtime kisses and had done a better job responding with some minor repartee.  Before I left him, I said, “The thing that bothers me the most is that no one has asked me why I don’t dance anymore.”

I left him wiping his eyes on his sleeve. Men don’t like it when you watch them cry.

                                   
                            * * * * *

Reverend Theo waited until sunset to set up four long rows of timber down the sides of his yard. He framed out the boxes for his new garden. I watched him from my window. He hung a work lamp from the cherry tree so he could see.

The work went surprisingly fast and I was enjoying watching him put it in. Reverend Theo finished off the fourth raised garden. Then he walked to his porch.