All the Dancing Birds (20 page)

I hope you’ll remember your father’s generous hands around your little shoulders, his earnest eyes as they poured over your problems with you and how his face would light with delight when you
got it
. Oh, please remember those things when next you need to balance your checkbook or determine the percentage for a proper tip in a restaurant.

It was your father who taught you those things.

Sadly, I played no part.

With great sorrow,

Your mother

I don’t know where to place the regret that seems to be suddenly spilling out of my heart and splashing to the floor of my soul. So much regret, indeed! From where does it all come? And why should a small letter from my own hand turn my face into a grimacing mask of tearfulness?

I refold the letter and place it back with all the other letters that seem now to be nothing more than a collection of all the regrettable parts of my life. I decide I hate them. I want them, each and every one, burnt until they are nothing more than wisps of blackened ash floating into the sky where the wind can carry them off.

I put my letter box away and go to the kitchen where my woman is making some sort of meal. She is working a knife over a carrot, cutting it into round slices, presumably for the dinner salad.

“I need matches,” I say to her. “Now, please. Matches.”

I pace while I wait for her to accommodate me. She continues to finish slicing the carrot, slowly, carefully, and then maddeningly reaches for a stalk of celery. I march to her side and hold out my hand. “Matches!”

A whisper of a smile enters her face. “I meant to get matches for you, ma’am, but the store was all out.”

“I don’t believe you. Do you know to whom you’re speaking?”

“Of course, ma’am.” A smile continues to curl just at the corners of her lips. “You are Lillie Claire Glidden and you want matches.”

“That’s right. You won’t forget that will you?”

“No, ma’am. I’ll not forget it.” My woman turns to me and allows her smile to unfurl, fully and brilliantly, until I’m bedazzled by its wonder.

“Thank you. I’ll be going now,” I say. I return to my room where I stand in front of my dresser mirror and sway gently to the lingering breeze of my woman’s smiling face.

Sometime later I move to my door and place my ear on its cool surface. My woman’s songs spill into the air while she works in the kitchen. I hear running water as she wipes up, then quiet footsteps in rhythm with her song. It sounds like a gospel hymn, but I’m not familiar with the melody. I decide she’s making it up as she goes, much like a prayer. Through the muffle of my bedroom door, it sounds like she’s singing in tongues.

My woman moves through the house, starting the clothes dryer, straightening magazines, completing her dinner preparations. All the time, she sings. She sings.

She sings.

When at last she softly knocks on my door to announce dinner, I am ready for her. I’ve washed my hands and slid my reddest lipstick over my mouth. I’ve put my hair up in pins and straightened my clothes.

Jewell opens my door and smiles at me. “My, but don’t you look beautiful this evening, ma’am,” she says. “That’s a lovely shade of lipstick. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen your hair up like that. Very beautiful, ma’am.”

I pat my hair and smile. “It’s for you. Because I
love
you.”

“I love you too, ma’am. Dinner is served now.”

Jewell takes me by the arm and leads me to my place at the table. She helps me into my chair and lays a soft cloth napkin across the front of my blouse.

All through dinner and continuing after, when my woman turns on the television for me, I spin out thoughts of love for her. When she readies me for bed, washing my face, urging me to brush my teeth, helping me into my nightgown, I continue to assert my love. I tell her over and over that I love her. I smile into her face. I touch her hands and pull them to my chest.

I love. I love.

I sleep with murmurs of love dripping from one corner of my mouth‌—‌it is wet and slides down my chin and onto the sheets.

Through the night, I sleep and dream the tossing dreams of the forgetful. When my woman comes to wake me in the morning, she stands beside my bed with her hands folded into comfort and helpfulness. But when I open my eyes, I’ve forgotten all about the night’s dreamy vows of love for her. I’m once again soiled with anger. Covered with despair.

My head fills with the heat of fire and remembrance for something very different from the love and dreams that had trailed after me all through the previous night.

My woman leans down to unstick me from the tangle of my sheets. “Where are my matches?” I scream into her startled ears. “I
need
my goddamn matches.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Y
OU FUSS. You fuss until your woman and any neighbor within hearing range are well aware of your displeasure. You thump and stomp and sigh with great heaving puffs of breath. No one pays attention. For all your efforts, the sun continues its upward momentum, opening the morning and bringing you closer to your first half-day at the Golden Years Day Center of Greater Sacramento. You push your woman’s hands away. You stiffen and refuse to let your legs slide into your pants. You fight with the sleeves of your blouse. You twist your head back and forth until brushing your hair is impossible. In spite of your moaning protestations, your woman buckles you and your twisted pants and your wildly combed hair into the car. You proclaim victory over the Golden Center of Whatever-It-Is all the way until your woman spins you into a parking space and you realize you’ve been had. You’ll forever think of her as a clever fox who promises with her grinning teeth and sly winking eyes to swim gullible rabbits to the other side of the river.

My woman steers me through the doorway into a large building; it is bustling with people and bursting with the voices of strangers. They smell of gray hair and muscle ointment. They are a pungent people and I’m terrified I’ll be left with them forever. We approach a woman who smiles from behind a large desk. Her teeth are immensely large for her small face. My woman introduces me.

“Good morning, Mrs. Glidden,” the woman says, looking at a clipboard in her hands to confirm my name. I wish she would stop smiling so her teeth would go back into her head. “We’re so glad you could be here today. May I call you Lillie?”

“No, you may not,” I say. “My name is Lillie Claire.”

“Of course… what a lovely name,” the teeth say.

I narrow my eyes toward her. “Are you a swimming fox like my woman?” I ask.

The teeth disappear for a moment, only to reappear again, more pronounced with laughter sharpening their edges. “No. But I
am
a dancer,” the woman says. “My name is Suzanne. Would you like to see our dance room?”

“What for?” I ask. I realize I’m clutching my woman’s hand with frightening fierceness.

“They would like you to demonstrate how a Southern lady might dance,” Jewell says, her eyes sparkling promises at me.
Such foxes
. S
uch wicked, wicked foxes, carrying me into this river of unfamiliar people.

Suzanne of the Terrible Teeth speaks again. “Oh, yes. Please. We really need you to show us. Will you, my dear?”

“Only if you’ll not call me your dear,” I say.

“Well then… that’s wonderful,” Suzanne gushes. “Follow me, then, and I’ll introduce you around.”

Again, my woman steers me as we move down a hallway teeming with more gray-haired people‌—‌some toddling behind walkers, some bustling on their own steam. One man sits in a wheelchair with a strap around his chest, presumably so he won’t fall out, but more likely so he won’t run off. The dull oak floor is old and scuffed, like the people who shuffle along its path.

We are a great migration of people; we travel mere blocks away, into the craft rooms and dining halls of senior centers and care homes. We’re dropped off by private cars and designated vans with motorized wheelchair lifts and, once inside, we move along a warren of trails that lead us in, but never take us anywhere.

Today, I join the grand migration.

Three-quarters down the hall, Suzanne leads us through a doorway into a large gathering hall. Several rows of folding chairs face an empty area obviously meant for dancing and mingling. Across the dance floor, a man stands behind a folding table, sorting through a stack of CDs. He pulls one out, then places it into a player and presses a button to start the first selection.

It sounds like Appalachian porch music and I suddenly can’t determine if I’m a child or a grown woman. I conclude I’m much too young to be among this sea of gray-headed people.

Surely, I’ve been brought here by mistake.

I inch into a chair next to a window where a swath of light, wide and heavy, falls across my lap; I’m tiny under its weight. Still, the provocative music dives under my skin and lifts me. Lifts me.

Lifts me.

Slowly, I push the sun away from my legs and stand. I shuffle across the dance floor until I’m standing in front of a thumping music speaker. I look for my woman. She stands just inside the doorway watching me. I wave at her while I grab the arm of another woman, a stranger, who seems to be trying to shuffle her feet to the music.

“You’re doing it wrong. Here… here’s how you do it,” I say. I take her hands and together we sway and hop from side to side, trying to keep to the frantic guitar and banjo rhythm. It’s faster than our feet can manage, but we do all right.

When the song ends, I look again for my woman. She’s gone, but a small crowd of people move toward the dance floor as the music-playing man starts a Carter Family song. Slowly, beat by beat, it feels like home. I’m on my porch, swinging my feet to the rhythm of Pa’s guitar. I shuffle and wiggle and jump and hitch until the song ends. Hands touch mine. Faces with frozen smiles float into me.

I’m home. I’m home.

Over the next two hours, we dance to hillbilly jigs and modern country, with the likes of Glenn Miller, Little Richard, and Kenny G tossed in for good measure. Someone brings pitchers of lemonade and a stack of plastic cups for our thirsty mouths. A man tries to dance with me. He’s not my Ivan so I push at his startled chest and turn his gray head away. I don’t want him to look at me. I make a mental note to tell my woman to find my fan. A Southern lady never attends a dance without her fan to fend off approaching men.

I return to my seat several times trying to locate my dance card. It seems to be missing and I make another mental note to tell the woman with the big teeth that there are thieves about.

At noon we’re shuffled to another room where we’re served a hot lunch of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, corn and enough dark, lumpy gravy to drown most of Sacramento. I’m just finishing a piece of lemon cake when my woman taps my shoulder.

“You’re late for lunch,” I say.

“That’s okay,” my woman says. “Are you ready to go home?”

“Home?” I stutter. “I thought I
was
home.”

“No, but you can come back on Wednesday if you’d like.” Jewell’s voice gently pulls me from my chair.

“Oh, I
need
to come back. They’re counting on me to teach them more dancing steps.” I lean toward my woman and whisper into her ear, “They should serve wine with their meal, you know. These people really need to learn hospitality. And they’re such poor dancers.” I shake my head. My tongue tsks behind my teeth. “Terrible dancers, they are.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

N
ight is horrid.

Night is the unwinding of everything known; every memory, every thought, is somehow fastened to the sinking sun and it makes me frantic. I want to run after what the sun drags down with it. I’m awkward and discordant and I don’t know what to do.

Every evening, I wander through the house muttering.
Bring me back. Bring me back.
My woman, the one whose name I now forget a thousand times over, watches me walk endless circles as if I’m a donkey with carrot stick memories dangling in front of me. Round and round I plod my circles, grinding wheat for a merciless master.
Bring me back. Bring me back.

Sometimes she catches my hand up into hers; she walks with me like we’re schoolgirls headed home for the day. We hold hands and she makes up a traveling song which makes me smile as we circle from room to room. After a while, my woman unclasps her hand, leaving me to continue wandering a solitary path, my mouth feeling sad like my school chum is home, but I must continue on alone.

My woman is on the phone, but I’m so busy grinding the wheat to make the bread to feed the memories to grow the grain to make the wheat to make more bread, I pay no attention to what she’s doing. I figure she has her own carrot stick to follow.

Sometime later, when my legs are tired and my brain is nothing but sticky shards stuck together with bits of scotch-taped thoughts, my beloved Bryan comes to the door. He hauls a wooden rocker into the house and places it in the center of the living room. My woman looks on with a smile.

“What’s
this
for?” I ask.

My woman answers. “It’s for the soothing of you, ma’am. For the soothing of you.”

“Here, come sit down, Mom,” Bryan says, an eager smile spreading across his face. He pats the seat of the chair and looks at me like a boy who has just presented his mother with a wooden thing he has labored over for weeks in woodshop class.

The chair has neither a harness nor a carrot dangling from a stick, so I consider it safe. I run my fingers along the polished wood and then let my legs fold into the contour of the chair. It fits me and I fit it. My body rocks in rhythm to the words I still haven’t stopped muttering.
Bring me back. Bring me back.

I slowly rock, allowing the chair to determine the length of each stroke. With this gentle movement, the mantra from my lips seems to melt into the delicate polish on the chair’s arms. John Milton the Cat jumps onto my lap; my hand falls absently across the soft roundness of his head. I look at nothing in particular and think of nothing more important than the perfect shape of a cat’s gray-muzzled face.