Dance Real Slow (16 page)

“Oh, now stop that,” I say, lifting my head to assess the damage. “Didn't I ask for a high chair? Didn't I tell you the food was too far?”

From the corner of my eye, I can see Zoe wants to say something, to intercede. Maybe she wants to tell me that I'm doing this all wrong, that I should not be so hard on him. Maybe she wants me to wait until I get
home to chastise him, wait until then to explain tables and height and the length of a little boy's arms. But finally she is only quiet, taking a small, quick mouthful of her meat loaf.

“Let's take you to the bathroom to get cleaned.”

He does not want me to come along, saying he can do it himself. Tonight he is suddenly feeling very independent.

“You'll see,” I say to Zoe in a sarcastic tone. “Someday you'll have kids of your own.”

She smiles and we both watch Calvin disappear around the corner as a busboy begins cleaning the scraps of spilled cheeseburger.

“This must be something that feels nice to you,” she says. “I mean tonight. The game. Having Calvin with you to see it all.”

Indeed it does, although it's not something I had given much thought to until now. Zoe leans back and the orange, muted light sets her hair ablaze.

“You're good with him,” I say.

“Really, he's good with me.” She pauses to take a bite of mashed potatoes. “I like watching the two of you together. Like the other day, after we were finished riding, he came right up and buried his head in your stomach. But not because he was unhappy or embarrassed or tired or anything like that—just as sort of a greeting. And then after, I watched you both walk to the picnic table and you reached down and handed him the napkins to hold, to carry. So he would feel as if he was making a contribution. We never had that in our home. There was only a lot of tension.”

“There was a lot of that when I was growing up, too.”

“My mother was an alcoholic—she died when Noah was thirteen. My father just didn't know how to deal with her, or us. He still doesn't, for that matter. He's a good man, good at heart, but he doesn't understand …” She trails off, rubbing her chin with her napkin while she thinks of the right words. “I guess what he doesn't understand is
life—
or a life when it's different from his own. That I could want to be a veterinarian and not a housewife. Or that Noah might actually want to go away to college to study business or law or literature or anything other than growing goddam corn and wheat.

“Sometimes it seems so peculiar to me that a man could live fifty-eight years and know nothing else of life, of the world, than what's in his own back yard. But other times I don't think it's odd at all. When I was young I used to lie in bed at night and wonder, Who's gonna save
me?”
Carefully, she places her fork down at the left side of her plate as if it had not yet been moved. “Forty-five minutes after my mother's funeral, my father went back to working his fields.”

Pursing my lips, I prepare to tell her how three years after my father's funeral my mother still hasn't gone back to work. Not because she is weighted by grief, but quite to the contrary. She has spent a good deal of that time traveling, painting, reading. Shortly after my father's death, I found my mother sitting on her bed with her back to the door, making delicate yelping sounds. I came up from behind and laid my hand across her shoulder, telling her things would be all right. But when she
turned to face me, I could see she wasn't crying at all. She was laughing.

She apologized, saying she could not help herself, and, truthfully, she had never been happier. Really, she said, reaching for my arm, she never thought she would feel this free, this liberated again. She stood up and held me for a long time, not like a mother holding a son, but with her body pressed close, tight against mine, and a stranger's sour breath on my neck. Then, before we went back downstairs, she told me that my father was not a bad person, he was simply someone who should not have been a husband.

This I do not tell Zoe, though, because rather suddenly Calvin returns, not much cleaner than before. He climbs back on his chair and I give him half my hamburger, telling him to be careful.

“Is there mustard on this?” he asks.

“No, there's not mustard on it.”

“I want it.”

“No, you don't want it. You don't like mustard on your hamburger. You never had it before.”

“I want it now.”

“Calvin, just eat the burger.”

After he begins I grab some fries and place them on a butter dish, sliding it between us.

“You want to come over to our place for Halloween?” I ask Zoe. Calvin glances up, but he is not quite sure what Halloween means. This will be his first season trick-or-treating.

“Oh, I'd love to. But I'm working at Cale's.”

“Maybe we'll stop by there.”

“That'd be great. What's he going …” She stops and leans down toward Calvin, inhaling a heady breath through her nostrils. “Do you smell anything?” she asks me. “Kind of like piss.”

“Now …” I take a sniff. “Yeah.”

Zoe peels back the front of Calvin's shirttail, revealing a damp, tennis-ball-sized stain on his upper thigh.

“Jesus!” I say. “Calvin, did you go to the bathroom in your pants?”

“No.”

Still holding his half of the burger, he twists his body to free Zoe's grip.

“Then what's that?”

He does not answer, instead laying the burger directly on the Formica table.

“Get up,” I say, pulling him off his seat and around toward me. “Let me see this.”

Touching the stain, I can feel a hard lump beneath the cloth of his trousers. I reach into his pocket and pull out a thick, waxy urinal puck. Oddly enough, I am relieved.

“What are you doing with this?”

Zoe is trying hard not to laugh, but she is not having much success and she walks over to the front counter for a toothpick.

“It was in there,” he starts, pointing back to the bathroom. “And we don't have one, so I jus' …”

He is sincere. Taking the puck, I wrap it in a napkin.

“What is with you and toilets?”

Of course, he does not know the answer to this. He
is picking at fries over my shoulder as I kneel, diluting the stain with water.

As we drive down Mercer, Calvin sitting tall and odorous on Zoe's lap, the windshield fills with droplets of icy rain. But after one wave of the wipers it is clear again for the rest of the ride, for the rest of the evening. Zoe lives on Hillside, in an apartment above a record store. We park on the street and I leave Calvin in the car, lying across the front seat, while I walk Zoe to her door.

“Really, you don't have to do this,” she says, pulling her keys from the breast pocket of her jacket.

We step together the ten or so feet from the curb to her doorway, arms locked. Nervously, she tugs at the waistband of her sweater, bunching it above the hemline. My hands run down past her elbows, past her forearms, past her wrists before letting our left fingers lock together. She is holding the keys in her right hand, jagged and cold, pressed awkwardly between our palms. Laying my forehead on her shoulder, I push her flush against the building and then lift up to kiss her square on the mouth.

At first her lips are stiff and dry as chalk. It doesn't take long for them to moisten, slick with saliva. Holding her face in my hands, I trace the outline of her mouth with my tongue and slowly, cautiously, I move it along the inside of her lower lip. Then we both pull back, ghosts of breath dispersing above our heads.

“That was nice,” she says.

“It's been awhile.”

We hug and as she slides the bridge of her nose down my jawline, she says, “I'd better go.” But before
we part, she leans in close, the linty fuzz of her cheek brushing my earlobe.

Lying against our back screen door is a large padded envelope with four dollars' worth of 20-cent stamps pasted on its upper right corner. The parcel is from my mother and I am slightly encouraged by the fact that I did not have to sign for it. I allow Calvin to take it upstairs with him, but I tell him he must get ready for bed before opening it.

When I enter his room he is sitting on the floor wearing one of my white undershirts and his pajama bottoms, the torn package at his feet.

“This,” he says, holding up two colorful leather belts. “It's just this.”

The belts have geometric Native American beadwork sewn into their backsides and I take the larger of the two and pull it around my waist.

“Looks like it fits,” I say, turning to model it for Calvin.

“There's no manna-war or nothin',” he says, pawing through the ripped remains of the envelope. “But hey …”

He grabs his belt and walks over to the window, futilely trying to pull it open.

“We could use them for the roof,” he says.

“Maybe.”

“Yeah. Let's use 'em now.”

“No, now is time for you to go to sleep.”

“I'm not tired,” he says, letting the belt dangle so he can kick at the buckle. “Could we …”

I am prepared to say no, until I think about what Zoe said earlier, about how this night must feel good—especially to have Calvin with me. Someday I will never want it to end.

“Okay. But only for a few minutes.”

What my son is anxious for is some time on the roof, sitting on the long, wide ledge outside his window, staring off into the horizon. The first time the two of us climbed out there, a week or so after we moved into the house, it was completely by accident. He had pushed one of his toy cars onto the ledge and had gone out to retrieve it when I came into his room. Frantic, I climbed out after him, but instead of yelling, I hugged him against my rib cage, like a football, and the two of us sat there looking at the vast spread of land as it climbed and dipped. On subsequent trips, I had fastened two belts together and slipped them first through a handle on the shutter and then around Calvin. Although he didn't quite understand, I told him it was like a window washer's rig.

After we get settled, Calvin closest to the window, with the two beaded belts slung tightly across his chest and beneath his armpits, I push a pair of socks onto his fingers so he will stay warm. In the short time since we have been home, a light dusting of snow has fallen, making the ground glow white and the trees resemble coral.

“We didn't see this,” says Calvin of the snow.

“I know. It happened while you were getting ready for bed.”

He lets out a sigh of approval and I reach across him, pointing at a runaway band of wheat that wanders from Speck Beattie's field, crossing behind our dirt basketball
court before stopping dead at the toolshed beside Mrs. Grafton's porch. The sprained stalks reach up from underneath the patchy snow, appearing almost auburn in the darkness.

“From up here it looks like a river,” I say, more to myself than to Calvin. Again I remember something Zoe mentioned this evening: how as a child she used to lie in bed at night and wonder who was going to save her. “I have those thoughts, too,” I murmur into the side of Calvin's head. But he is no longer listening, instead pressing his sock-covered hand into the snow and then placing its surface against his cheek, just to feel the coldness.

Sitting cross-legged atop my desk, Meg Cooper and Calvin use yellow crayons to color a bowl of cornflakes I have drawn in pencil on a large sheet of white cardboard. This is going to be the front side of Calvin's costume. Meg is dressed as a princess, wearing a plastic-and-rhinestone tiara that has slipped down toward her forehead, now resembling a visor. On the floor at their side, Joyce Ives has spread out several pages of newspaper and is carving a pumpkin with a grapefruit knife, saving the seeds in two coffee mugs. Across the room, Rob silently leafs through a magazine, occasionally looking up to see if we're all still here.

As I shield a legal pad on my lap, I consider devising a payment schedule to Gooland's that Rob and Joyce can handle, but instead sketch out several basketball plays from memory, plays that were my father's. My highly trained attorney's mind descends to a scribble of dashes, zigzags, and arrows across faded blue notebook lines reserved
for deep thoughts—deeper, anyway, than run, catch, shoot.

“See, you bake these and then you can eat them,” Joyce says to the kids. Meg nods, reaching for another color crayon.

“Meg, honey,” I say, “there are no green cornflakes.”

“What about rotten ones? Those could be green.”

“We don't want any rotten ones on Calvin's costume. Let's just stick with the yellow for now.”

“They're not really yellow, either,” says Rob.

Both Calvin and Meg look up, worried expressions crossing their faces.

“Yeah, I know,” I whisper to Rob. “But this box of crayons didn't come with a cornflake color.” Then I turn toward my desk. “It's okay, yellow is close enough.”

The two continue their work and Joyce flips a shiny seed into Rob's glass of soda, shaking her head and saying something about his lacking sensitivity. Rob is leaning over, adjusting the tuner on a transistor radio, trying to get a country-and-western station from Manhattan.

“The reception in here is the pits,” he announces, lifting the radio to his ear.

“Maybe you'd have more luck if you went outside,” says Joyce. “Try standing in the street.”

He doesn't respond, and then, after a minute, he tells her that this morning, while she was still asleep, he did two loads of laundry. He says it's folded in baskets beside the dryer and he will carry it upstairs when they get home. Then he rises and leaves the room.

“He's trying,” Joyce says softly, to me. “He made me oatmeal for breakfast. It was bad,
really
bad. Lumpy. And he didn't mix it enough, so there were still dry flecks of oat. But … lots of women don't have men who will make them oatmeal when it's cold out.”