Tilt (9 page)

They drove in the rainy dark. Stan sat in the back behind Gillian. As soon as Janine clicked her seatbelt shut she reached across to Stan and their fingers interlaced again. Stan started to come to a boil from the inside.

Then Gillian coughed so hard her little body shook the car. When it was over she stretched back awkwardly for a moment to view Stan. She smiled when she saw their hands.

The car kept going. Janine squeezed tighter.

Maybe he really was Janine's boyfriend?

“Your mother must be an amazing woman to raise the both of you on her own,” Gillian said.

Was his mother amazing? Maybe. But what Stan ended up explaining was that she could never figure out how to work the TV remote no matter how often he explained it.

“My mom has two degrees but when it comes to electronics —”

Gillian asked about the degrees, so Stan said what he could about sociology and the history of art.

“She's a Vermeer freak,” he said, and he tried to remember the name of the painting — a copy, obviously — that hung in their living room near the fireplace that didn't work.

“
The Girl with the Pearl Earring
?” Gillian said.

“Not that one. But it looks like that one. My mom could tell you all about it.”

Why couldn't Stan tell them all about it? Maybe he didn't pay enough attention to his mother. She was terrifically smart in her own way.

He could feel the pulse in Janine's fingers.

“She used to drag us to galleries all the time. But my little sister is allergic to them. It's like her skin starts to itch from the inside. She just can't stay still. So my mom goes on her own, or else she drags Gary.” The wipers sloshed water back and forth without seeming to clear anything. Could Joe see out the windshield at all?

“Gary's great,” Janine breathed then. “He let me win at silly basketball.” She had the sexiest voice when she was talking quietly.

Let this ride go on and on, Stan thought.

“Did you . . . go to university?” he asked Gillian.

She turned and smiled oddly. “I studied to be an anthropologist, but ended up working in the bank, and then I got sick.”

Joe reached across and covered her frail hand gently with his own.

It was a sticky part of the conversation. Stan wasn't sure what he should say next. He felt like he could spill anything about his own family now, that a rusty door had been knocked open. His mother's purple sweatsuit. Gary and Ron like bulls in the living room. Feldon dripping on the porch in the rain.

The wipers sloshed. Janine withdrew her hand. Was he gripping too hard?

“I met Joe at the bank,” Gillian said. “I was supervising him, actually. He married me to get ahead.”

“I married her to get ahead,” Joe chimed. It seemed to be a family joke.

“There was a rule at the time against office dating, so we had to sneak around,” Gillian said. “That's the thing about those kinds of rules.”

“They encourage the opposite behavior,” Joe said.

“We were illicit lovers.” Gillian beamed at him now. These two middle-aged people — Joe with his bristly head, Gillian with her scarf and the hard lines on her neck, like the flesh was retreating from her bit by bit — looked like they had more love between them in just this car ride than Stan had ever seen between his own parents.

This was what Janine had grown up with.

He wanted to take her hand again, but suddenly felt shy.

—

The rec center was a squat brownish building in a part of town Stan didn't recognize. Were they downtown? He couldn't even guess.

As soon as they walked in, Gillian took charge.

“Put the pop table over there!” she said to two boys fiddling with fold-up legs. “Did you bring the banner?”

It was rolled up in a corner, and Gillian had Stan and Janine hang it on the far wall under the shaded windows.

Dance for Life
, it said.

Families arrived in noisy clumps. The kids seemed to be of all ages, the girls wearing everything from pants to slinky dresses, the boys in probably whatever they'd had on earlier in the day. So Stan wasn't out of place in Janine's plaid shirt and jeans.

Some of the kids were . . . bald, or otherwise sickly looking.

Or they had a parent who was too thin or trembly and pale, lost in the eyes.

“It's for cancer families,” Janine explained. “And guests. My mom just wants everybody to dance their brains out.”

She gave him a nervous glance. A flash of a smile that was a firefly zipping past a window.

Gillian gave him exactly the same smile a moment later when she was wrestling a cooler into place all by herself. Stan hurried over to help her.

“I really like the look of you,” she said. “Janine has never had a boyfriend before.”

That word again.
Boyfriend
.

“For a while we wondered if she would ever get one,” Gillian said.

—

Stan wasn't a dancer. He'd been to a couple of school events, had stood in the shadows shifting his weight from side to side, wishing he were somewhere else. But here everybody danced: parents, kids, old folks, teenagers. The whole crowd wriggled and shook with their hands in the air. They all seemed to be laughing and smiling in the sweaty semidarkness.

So Stan bounced on his heels and let his shoulders jiggle around and his pec muscles — if that's what they were — quiver and his hands flap. It was all by feel. A musician in black jeans bopped between an electric guitar, some drums and the microphone. A skinny girl with orange hair sang and blew sometimes on a harmonica. Most of the words were unrecognizable — “Going to ax my kaleidoscope” was one line that stayed in Stan's head.

“Who are they?” he screamed across at Janine, but she couldn't hear. She danced with her eyes closed a lot of the time, and her body was . . . fluid. Everything melted together, like waves moving in wax that hardened slightly then melted again into something else.

Before too long the band took a break but the music continued — some kid's computer hooked up to the sound system. Stan was taken by surprise when a slow song came on. Couples just seemed to fall together, but Stan felt like he couldn't fall. He was a wooden post stuck in the ground. Janine wasn't standing next to him, anyway. She was a few paces off. Waiting?

Wasn't this what he'd come for? Wouldn't a real boyfriend just walk over and they would cling together and shuffle their feet the way other people did?

Except Joe and Gillian weren't shuffling their feet. They were waltzing. Was that what it was? Gliding. She barely came to chest height on her husband, but how straight they both stood, how buttery their movements looked.

They were really
dancing
.

Stan couldn't compete with that. He stood a bit behind Janine and watched those two dip and glide. Then he clapped with all the others when the song was over.

“Your parents are amazing!” he said. But Janine rolled her eyes. Maybe nobody thought their own parents were amazing.

When the band came back, Stan just started bouncing. Janine shimmied and melted and spun more or less on her own. He tried to bounce in time with the way she was moving her shoulders. But then she would break it off and dance with somebody else — with a tiny girl in a white dress and black shoes who had her own way of moving. She would dip her shoulder and sway back, then throw her hands in the air. Stan threw his hands, too, but thought he probably looked like he was going for a rebound so he stopped. Better to just let his hands dangle at the end of his arms.

Janine had said she wasn't much of a dancer. What an outright lie that was! A fish in a pool couldn't have looked more graceful.

He was the one who didn't know what he was doing.

He bounced closer to her.

“Janine!” he yelled, two inches from her ear.

She vibrated with the girl in the white dress and didn't hear him.

“Janine!” He brushed against her shoulder. She opened her eyes like she was waking up from something pleasant.

“ . . . mini-mega mall mart monkeys,” the singer seemed to be screaming.

“What?”

“You're a great dancer!” he yelled.

“ . . . making like rogue-wing flunkies,” the singer screeched.

“What?”

“You're a . . .”

Suddenly the wall of sound collapsed into rubble and everyone was clapping. Janine hugged the white-dress girl — who gave Stan a bit of a sour look — and Stan's voice broke.

“. . . a great dancer,” he said pitifully.

No reply. Janine and the girl unclenched. Something slow started up. The band was much better loud and rough. They should have left the soft stuff to the recorded music. Stan steeled himself to — to what? He was already close enough to put his arms around Janine. He was so close his arms would have gone around the white-dress girl, too. She and Janine had an eye thing going — a secret message telegraphed between them.

Stan felt something in his belly turn sour.

A boyfriend at this point would just say, “Wanna dance?” And Janine would throw her arms around him . . . 

“Do you want to get a drink?” Janine said to him instead.

What
did
he want?

He wanted to breathe in her intoxication. He wanted her to bury her head in the hollow of his shoulder. She was a little taller than him but it still might work.

He wanted the music to be so much better than this. He wanted to open his eyes slowly and find that her mouth was searching for his. What would that be like?

He wanted . . . 

He wanted to not be standing all alone in the middle of everything — of nothing — while she moved off to get a cup of juice.

—

And then she disappeared. One moment she was sipping from a paper cup and the white-dress girl bumped her elbow and Janine splashed something on her own killer dress. It was black, anyway. How much could show in a darkened auditorium? And then the two of them were heading off to the washroom. So Stan went to the men's room and checked himself out in the mirror. He looked stupid, and the jeans didn't fit. With that belt cinched tight and the cuffs rolled up he looked like a farmer.

He needed to call his mom to tell her where he was. If he had a cellphone he'd call her right from there, in the men's can.

It smelled of wine and someone's cigarette.

Those same muscles that had run out the back door at home now wanted to run out of this suffocating place.

She'd held his hand most of the way on the rainy car ride here.

Why hadn't he just said, “Wanna dance?”

He didn't know any steps. But she would have rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder and they would have clutched and shuffled, welded together for infinity.

—

Back in the dark again, the music still tortured the air. Next slow dance, whatever it was, he'd just grab her and everything else would disappear.

Where was she, anyway?

Stan couldn't see her on the dance floor. The whole crowd was up writhing, wriggling, Gillian and Joe in the middle, clutched like lovers.

Stan didn't know where to stand, what to do, where to put his hands. He shuffled over to the drink table. It was fifty cents for an apple juice and he had nothing in his pockets.

They were Janine's pockets.

He smiled dopily at the guy behind the table and backed away as if he'd planned all along to pick up one of the paper cups and look at it and put it down again without drinking or paying.

No harm no foul.

There she was! Janine exited the girls' room with the white-dress girl.

The girl was welded up against her. Janine took the girl's hand and removed it from her waist.

Stan felt like he was in a movie all of a sudden. Janine dropped the girl's arm and looked around the room — searching for him? — but she couldn't see him. She was real, he was in a movie, this was all happening and it wasn't.

She liked girls. Simple as that. He'd known it and had fooled himself into not knowing it. The truth of it was like a ball bouncing hard off the rim straight down into his face.

She'd dragged Stan to this dance to be a cover for . . . for what?

She was scanning the room, looking for him. But he was turned to nothing.

Janine saw him trying to push through. He felt stopped but his body kept going. Past the writhing, dancing families, out the doors into hard rain but night now, too, and again no umbrella, no jacket.

Where?

Feet slipping on the pavement. It was a drenched street in an unknown part of the city. There was Janine's parents' car parked with dozens of others. Why hadn't he paid attention to where they were going? It was colder even than it had been that afternoon. But he was running.

He was going to cramp up soon. He was going too fast. Lactic acid was crackling his muscles.

He didn't know what the hell was going on.

“Hey!” someone called out miles behind him. So far back he could easily not have heard her.

Breathe,
stride-stride-stride,
breathe
 . . . 

“Hey!” she called from farther back.

He didn't have to stop. He could just have slowed and even then she would never catch him.

She was in her killer dress but she looked like a soggy shadow except for her white boots.

She probably wasn't much of a runner. But she'd come after him.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Why didn't you tell me?” he shot back.

Her shoulders were bare and wet. She had to be bloody freezing.

Her chest was heaving. She had a glorious chest. He wasn't sure she was going to be able to say anything.

He thought maybe she was going to try to lie about what he'd seen.

But instead she said, “I'm sorry.”