The Dance Boots (10 page)

The room was getting noisier, and all that cigarette smoke had softened the yellow light to a gold, swathing and veiling those who hadn't been netted in the kitchen. Somebody who decided to make toast didn't know that the pop-up on the toaster didn't work anymore, and so my eyes began to burn from acrid microparticles of scorched bread. Small bits of red Jell-O that slopped off the spoon as people filled their plates sparkled like rubies on the dining room table until they melted into sticky drops that ran into larger puddles that stuck to the oilcloth. One ashtray, a small tin saucer left by the Stanley salesman, caught fire when Uncle Sonny put out a cigarette against a smoldering empty matchbook on his way through the dining room to look for Uncle George's crossword puzzle book
in the kitchen. Uncle Sonny didn't notice, but Cousin Dennis was young and quick and he put it out by pouring a little beer into the ashtray.

A tall man in wool hunting pants and a sleeveless undershirt came through the kitchen door with a bottle of purple wine under his arm and two thick white coffee cups in his hands. He handed one cup, full of black coffee, to Shirley's husband, Ed, who was on the wagon, and nodded to my mother. “Hello, Poddy Jean.” They were children together, and he was the only person who could call her that besides her sister, Piggie Onn. My mother, who would nurse her one beer all night, said hello to Rollie and no thanks to a Manischewitz. He stood by her, gaunt and quiet, his skinny arms hanging off his bony shoulders, which hunched a little as he talked with my mother about his wife's long sickness. He drank his wine from a mug, sipping carefully like it was scalding hot coffee, as if he was afraid he'd burn his tongue.

The kitchen door swung open again for a mixed-blood James Dean, handsome in his ducktail haircut, muscular, short, with a barrel chest, slender legs, and beefy arms, which stretched the rolled-up sleeves of his white T-shirt. He said hello to Shirley and asked about her mother's broken hip, how was it healing, was she getting around, holding Shirley's hand while he talked, and then for a few seconds more, like she was sixteen years old. His dark hair, navy blue eyes, brown arms, and white teeth were dazzling. His engineer boots made a deep and hollow stamping sound as he walked over to our end of the table. At a powwow last summer, I had watched those boots do a two-step version of that same walk, those shoulders of his dipping slightly first to the left, then to the right, suspended on a separate plane above his forward-facing hips and bowed legs as he danced. Across the powwow circle a fancy shawl dancer in blue and silver had accelerated her hop, raising her knees and lengthening her steps, nearly sprinting to catch up behind him so she could watch.

“Frankie…. Frankie, how you been?” LaDonna jerked her head up and became almost animated, her smile big and fuzzy as her voice. “Frankie, what you drinking there?” Frankie stood behind us and leaned over so that his head was between mine and LaDonna's, resting his upper body weight on his hands, one on the back of each of our chairs. I imagined his chest muscles jumped, inches from the back of my head. “Frankie, you want a rum and Coke?” She folded her hands on the table and leaned forward over them, as though praying, then straightened and swayed into the back of her chair, looking up in further supplication.

Aunt Babe carried in another cookie sheet of hot sandwiches, split hamburger buns with broiled cheese and sliced olives arranged on top, which she placed on the dining room table. Frankie inhaled deeply. “Doesn't that smell great?”

LaDonna shuddered and lowered her head to the table.

“Babe, you fussed. Look at that, Patsy. Daughter, you really fussed,” admired Babe's mother and our family's matriarch from the easy chair that Rollie pulled up to the table for her. Grandma Lisette had stopped frying sliced baloney ring and frybread in the kitchen, turned off the stove, and was ready to enjoy herself. Her plate was full, her shiny face round as the plate and damp from work, unlined and happy. “Patsy, try yourself one of those pretty sandwiches. Look, they're just toasty and crispy looking.”

My mother picked one up between her thumb and first finger and took a small bite, then her third sip of beer of the evening. “Babe, these are the best tuna sandwiches I ever ate.”

“That's because it's chicken.”

Rollie got up from his place next to me, excusing himself, “Forgot to say hello to Sonny,” and Frankie sat in the chair he vacated. “Hi, Artense.”

Artense. My name. He could have said it under so many different circumstances. He pulled me out of the way just as I stepped off the
sidewalk in front of a car, and said it again and again out of relief and gratitude for my life—Artense. He kissed me and was nearly out of breath with the experience—Artense. He asked to spend the rest of his life by my side, where he could watch me adore his dancing—Artense.

“Hi, Frankie,” I smiled, my head down, and thought about what else I could say that could continue this conversation. I was nearly eighteen, almost a woman, and should finally be able to talk with him as a woman would to a man. I raised my head and inhaled, waiting for words to continue.

“What do you do now, you done with school? You working?” The moment had passed me by but Frankie was considerate enough to continue and take me with him.

“She's going to start going to the junior college this fall,” my mother answered for me.

“Oh.” Frankie, his turn to be the tongue-tied one, thought for a moment. I could see him searching for something to say to somebody so impressive and foreign. “Do you like Manischewitz?”

“She doesn't drink,” replied Patsy.

The police had found Louis lying where he had fallen, in a half-frozen puddle in the alley behind the Stevedore Surf and Turf, where Stan and I had gone to eat after the prom. While Louis was still conscious, he was able to tell them my dad's name. Then his lungs congested and filled quickly with pneumonia, what they used to call the Old People's Friend, and he died not long after they brought him to the hospital. Just like she'd thought, my mother had to be the one to identify the body, to tell the police that it was Louis, and she had to be the one to take his wallet from his pants pocket. Inside, there was nothing but my graduation picture. No money, no social
security card. Just a black-and-white wallet-sized picture of me. A high school graduation picture, the first graduate in our entire family, and so a very big deal. I suppose that when he put it in the plastic sleeve we must have looked at one another face to face. Louis, unbroken by twentieth-century America and federal Indian policies, the Indian boarding school, alcohol, jobs hard and dangerous and impermanent, a life's playing field set on the edge of a cliff. Louis, on that day as he would be on the day of his funeral, handsome still in a used coat and green pants from the county work farm. Louis the soft-voiced incorrigible. And his granddaughter Artense in black and white, perching on the photographer's wooden stool the same way my mother sat, ready to fly, in a secondhand sweater, hair shingled and teased on top, smile a mask that almost did the job. Artense, who did as she was told and would graduate from high school. Artense, unbroken but yet untested. He was fifty when I was born. A half-century gap in our experiences. Fifty years. Our lives coincided for less than twenty.

Frankie found something he could say to a girl who would be going to college. “So, Artense, what class did you like the best in school?” He had poured four fingers of purple Manischewitz into a glass decorated with decals of flying ducks and opened a can of Coke for me with the little church key attached to his nail clippers. “Did you take history? I used to like history. Did you study about George Washington? What did you think of him? Do you know that some people think he was a better president than Abraham Lincoln? Why would they think that? What do you think about that, Artense?” I was tongue-tied. Frankie was flirting with me—with me! And he must have been five or ten years older than I was, I thought. A man. He'd been in the navy, and he'd been around the country, and he
worked at the packing plant, and he'd bought his mother a color TV, and he rode a motorcycle. A man. I could see over the neckline of his white undershirt that his chest was smooth, with a few delicately curling damp-looking tendrils of hair, and when he reached across me to pour a little Coke into LaDonna's empty glass (‘Frankie! Frankie, how are you doing? Where's the rum?” she pulled one hand out from under her head to pat his arm, tender-looking skin the color of vanilla caramel), I could see below the stretching sleeves of his clean T-shirt delicately curling damp-looking tendrils of hair in his armpits as well. He smelled like cigarettes, wine, and spearmint gum. I looked down at my lap, then, because he was turned toward LaDonna, over at his. His jeans looked new, crisp dark blue and rolled up on the bottom. I turned around and could see on the front room couch Stan steadying Butchie's hand, the one holding the can of beer, which Butchie was waving as he made a point. Stan had no chest hair. He was still a boy. His pants were chinos, with creases. His sister ironed his shirts, his mother sorted his socks. He would be leaving in the morning to go away to a real college and live in a dormitory. At almost eighteen, how could I know that one day he would be one of us? All I knew at the time was that he was going to leave. At almost eighteen, what I did know was that he wasn't really mine, any more than Frankie was.

Frankie unrolled a pack of Marlboros from his T-shirt sleeve and flicked it toward me with a little snap of his wrist (bone and muscle flexed, knit), and two cigarettes (one for me and one for him!) neatly slid out, just like in the commercials. “Artense, sugaswaa?”

I looked over to my mother's perch, which was empty. I reached for the cigarette.

“Frankie? Frankie, you want … hey, Frankie.” Frankie turned toward LaDonna, who was looking at the ceiling now trying to remember what she started to say, concentrating, thinking so hard that she looked sober. From her point of balance, the balls of her
feet planted on the floor, she tipped her head farther and farther back as she looked up and up at the light fixture then beyond that and suddenly LaDonna, though still in her chair, was on the floor, lying on her back, her plaid skirt flipped up so that her underpants showed, big white ones so loose they looked all creased and dented, above her long skinny white legs, and she realized where she was and looked at Frankie and me, so surprised, and I reached down to pull her skirt to cover those underpants (they're so big, I thought; they must be her mother's). She didn't say a word. Frankie quickly tipped her chair back upright. She smiled then, seeing the room back where it was had been, and laughed just once, a fuzzy blue chuckle.

“Muldoon.” From the windowsill, my dad called her name. “Frankie. Did Muldoon get knocked out?”

“She's good, Buster, just lost her balance is all, didn't you. You're good, aren't you, LaDonna?” said Frankie. LaDonna leaned back into his arm that was across the back of her chair. She was smitten.

“Muldoon,” said my dad, “you're going to be all right.”

Aunt Babe's house was quiet and cold after the funeral, and the air clear, no smoke from frybread or cigarettes, a sharpness of clarity painful to inhale and painful to look through. Louis's sister, Lisette, sat on a chair out in the kitchen; she had waved her daughters and nieces away as she would a flock of seagulls. No, she liked it in the kitchen. She would come out in a little while. Dennis, home from basic training, half knelt at her side, on one knee, holding her hand that rested on his other knee. In his army uniform he looked like Louis when he played the trumpet in the band at Harrod boarding school, Lisette thought to herself. Remember that picture she used to have of Louis in his boarding school uniform, holding his trumpet?
Whatever happened to that picture? It was a picture postcard, remember, that he had addressed to his mother but never sent. He had left it for her under the door to the girls' dormitory, the last time he ran away from school. Above the high collar of his uniform coat with the braid and the buttons his face was stern and serious, so unlike him. He held the trumpet upright on his knee, like a bayonet; she had thought that Louis looked like a soldier. “Like Dennis,” she thought, as she sat holding her grandson's adult hand. They had the same mouth, smooth and full, tender, red lipped, and snub nose, and those dark gray-brown eyes that almost looked blue. The same round moon face, with the same deep cowlick like a whirlwind above the left eye. Dennis and young Louis.

“Want some coffee, Grandma? I'll get you some.” Dennis looked into her face, and she thought how he used to do that when he was small, standing where he now knelt, at the same chair, his feet on the outside of hers, his forearms on her knees, his face so like Louis's as he looked right into hers, that mannerism Dennis's alone, so unlike Louis yet so essentially Louis. She nodded yes and reached to wipe a cake crumb off her grandson's lower lip. He rose gracefully, tall and adult in his army uniform, poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove, added canned milk and sugar, and knelt again next to her chair. He held her soft old hand in his again, and she remembered little Dennis's small, star-shaped hand holding hers while they walked to the store, to the post office, to school on the first day, a little boy's hand that fit inside hers.

Louis's hand had been that same size when he started school. The huddle of children had been herded off the train at the Harrod train depot by the school's disciplinarian, a man who carried a doubled leather strap that he absently, menacingly waved back and forth. He lined them up in pairs, shortest first, tallest last, to get on the wagon that would take them to the boarding school. The smallest boy, Louis, was led by his big sister, Lisette, to the front
of the line, where she gently removed his hand, trusting and damp, from her own and joined it with the hand of the smallest girl. As she walked to her own place at the end of the line, the little boy turned his head to watch, stepping from the line, still holding the hand of the little girl.