Tiny Dancer (2 page)

One-tw
o-three-two-two-three-three-two-three. . .

Vesta glanced once at me in a manner that said what the blazes do we do now? Since I expected Siobhan would surely pull herself together, I kept my mind on my own steps.

Four-two-three-five-two-three-six-two-three . . .

It was during a spin that I stole another gander at Siobhan’s face. Her entire visage was pink, like Vesta’s fuchsias she grew in the spring. A moist trail ran through her make-up. Dark lines raked thin fingers down her face from her perfectly applied black eyeliner. She looked like a neglected little scarecrow.

Vesta stiffened still standing to the side of the stage. But she was as powerless as I was to stop Siobhan’s meltdown.

Finally, the music ended. The crowd was silent. Then Billy’s hands came up clapping over his head, clapping as if he were chasing birds from a windowsill. A lady in the stands joined Billy, the two of them taking the quiet awkward pause out of the air, filling it with applause. Finally, polite applause gave way to a few whistles.
But, everyone was clapping for my little sister. No eyes were on me, but all were on brave Siobhan, the little girl who kept up her routine in spite of her presumed stage fright. In a way, I was glad no eyes were on me. For all that was going through my head, none of it was something for which I am proud.

For that was our final performance as
the High Stepping Curry Sisters.

It was not because Siobhan did not want to dance again, although that was true. It was because of our accident.
As accidents go, it happened quickly, not an hour after our final number.

I would not be stirred to think about dancing again
for quite some time, for my newest number would be surviving the memories. How does one survive such memories, I often ask myself. But I am a girl prone to ask silly questions, as my stepmother Vesta often points out.

The summer I turned fifteen, I would have sworn the soil in our county whispered a day of reckoning was coming. I dreamed about it, how I could feel our house wheezing and coughing out the reckoning dirt, silt spilling out through the pores of the wood, inv
isible to everyone except me. A drumming sound like thunder drew soil from every point on the compass. I sat as a distant observer from a high, high perch, like a petal queen, golden petals encircling my head and feet. , I was seized with fear watching the tumult and the tide of particles rising up around my people. Yet, my feet reached so deep into the soil, roots sprouted out of the soles.

My eyes opened from such a dream not ten days past my fifteenth birthday. Instead of a dust cloud, a June day’s sunlight spilled in through my upstairs window.

Vesta was in a tizzy. She ran down the hallway calling out to me to get up before the day was swallowed up in sleep. “I got bridge club, Flannery.” Her voice trailed off down the stairwell. My stepmother had been working her way into the Pine Society’s Bridge Club since, well, since she had married my daddy.

Vesta, a woman who had poured herself into me, giving me advice on grooming, on presenting myself with proper decorum, what-have-you, was meek and mild, her graceful stature a picture of elegance in our culture
d small town society. The summer I might best describe as the dirtiest season of our lives, Vesta was herself drawn into a conflict of locality. Of soil. Of boundaries.

As is often the case when the clock strikes one hour before war, the mor
ning started out quietly enough. Ballroom music radiated from our living room. Vesta once talked of nothing else but famous dancers. On this June morning not a few days past my recently forgotten birthday she sat watching an old Gene Kelly film, her sewing in her lap. Her eyes stayed fastened on Gene Kelly as he slid toward the TV screen, arms outstretched as if he might scoop Vesta up and take her off into the sunset.

I trudged into the living room still wiping sleep from my eyes. “Anyone ever tell you
that the sun doesn’t rise nearly as early in the summertime?”

She asked me to join her on the sofa. “Flannery, sweetie, I’m hemming your Daddy’s work trousers.”
I had learned to sew by hand quickly, repairing dance hems on the spot for fellow step dancers before going onstage; or fast-looping a row of dangling sequins back onto my younger sister Siobhan’s hem before we padded onto stage.

Nearly a decade earlier, my daddy, Flynn Curry, had met Vesta Wiggins in my dance class in Pinehurst, a town considered to this day as the queen’s hive of golfing universe. She was the woman in charge of tailoring our costumes.

Vesta did have some beautiful sewing skills, but it was not something she wanted known in this new season of prospects. That was what she called the growing interests and opportunities in Pinehurst, anyway. Before she met Daddy, abandonment by her first husband had left her no other recourse except sewing for the rich and any other jobs she might acquire. She hurriedly held out the already-threaded extra needle while the sound of feet coming onto the porch drew her eye.

“Here, you do the other leg.” She got up to answer the door and pressed her sewing into my reluctant hands. I had other plans
, but plopped back down to finish her alteration.

I accepted it as I often accepted her directives, outwardly
submissive, although I made it clear I had invited company over. “Claudia’s coming over. Don’t forget,” I slid out the straight pin, tugging the folded pant leg and snapping out the fabric edge perfectly straight. The bank guards’ pants came in sizes too long for most of them. Daddy stopped complaining about the disparity in trousers’ lengths, though, when the bank layoffs started.

I sewed extra short stitches to keep the hem in place. If Daddy got laid off, wearing shabby trousers would not be the cause.

Vesta rearranged the vase of flowers near the door.

“Did you hear me?” I asked, repeating my plans to my distracted stepmother.

Vesta smiled in her reticent way without looking at me. She was keen on my friendship with Claudia Johnson. My friendship with Claudia dated back to first grade.

“The Johnsons are good people,” said Vesta, expressionless while she smoothed her tailored yellow dress. “Good
associations open doors. Mark my words.”

Claudia’s daddy garnered an untold income. The Millers owned a modest estate behind Pinehurst Number Two, meaning that they lived on the ninth hole of the second golf course in Pinehurst.

Daddy always said, “You are who you love.” Vesta loved anybody who lived on a golf course.

Real estate developers had long lured gentlemen and lady golfers into the surrounding shady lanes to buy weekend and summer houses. Rumors circulated that movie stars and politicians migrated to Pinehurst for its healing powers. Annie Oakley once lived here, holding shooting exhibitions. Headier rumors circulated that quite a few Presidents once migrated to the local resorts for the healing powers of the aromatic pines. Beautiful Pinehurst, girdled by tall pines and gamboling roads leading tourists past sprawling green lawns and manor houses, offered pretty little pubs and eateries inviting guests to venture off the courses and horse tracks to take refuge from the baking sun under the bright café umbrellas.

Contrary to local culture, we Currys lived in nearby Bitterwood Park or “working Bitterwood” so said the locals, although our wealthy working class was made up of doctors and attorneys. It was a hamlet situated between Pinehurst and tree-shaded Vineland, an equally lovely town known for its fox hunting clubs and the annual Blessing of the Hounds. The Vineland hunters were a hale and chivalrous group whose little girls were off at their riding classes weekends, all but the Curry’s, whose daughters neither attended private equestrian events nor young ladies’ golf outings. The Curry girls were not found to cast about at such gatherings, that is, until my friendship with the Johnsons..

Before Daddy started seeing Vesta, our family had long hung on to a two-acre lot. Daddy had no sooner married her than she set down plans to build a house on our family lot. It was not the biggest house on the street, but it was big enough. She ordered the shutters painted a color “somewhere between the sky at dusk and late-blooming hydrangeas”. She fashioned a sign and hung it out front that said “Periwinkle House.” She said it gave our blue-shuttered house an identity, a sense of history. Daddy had to work two jobs to keep beautiful Vesta Wiggins in the manner to which she was accustomed.

Vesta opened the front door, smiling effusively. I heard a familiar voice, a moneyed neighbor woman named Effie Sandersen. She was the kind of neighbor who exchanged rose cuttings or friendship dough starter, neighborly. And informed. Vesta invited Mrs. Sandersen inside, but she declined. “I wanted you to know I saw a colored crossing through your side yard, sneaking around the back of your shed. You haven’t hired a new domestic, have you?”

Vesta could not afford domestics but would not have admitted as such.
She stiffened when Effie voiced her complaint. I recognized the pain in her face. Vesta had no sooner moved us into her pretty new house on our family’s lot when she discovered our back yard bordered the property of the only black man to own property outside one of the five segregated townships encircling our community. Effie knew too. “I’m sorry, no,” was all she said to the neighbor lady.

“Thought not,” said Effie. “I guess you know he was sniffing around the post office, asking around about registering to vote.”
She referred to neighborhood grocers and post office, Jimmy Banks Corner Grocery.

“I don’t see what I have to do with his issues,” said Vesta, turning red in the face.

“That’s why we keep our coloreds in their own municipalities.” When Effie said it, I imagined the townspeople rounding up the black men and women who had been lured into the Sandhills on promises of resort jobs and herding them into their proper paddocks. That was the initial hope, actually, when the vision to create a golf community necessitated the need for good hired help. Effie continued, “But here, this one, well he thinks he’s sly, I’m sure. He can walk right through your lot and register to vote come Tuesday. Nothing stopping him,” she said, hesitating. “Except you, of course.”

I sighed, but kept my eyes on my stitching. Effie needed a good dosing of spring tonic, at least that was what Daddy said when she got on one of her campaigns.

“What do you expect of me? I can’t get Winston Grooms to do anything,” said Vesta. It was true that she had contacted Mayor Grooms, begging him to do something about the nuisance living behind us, bringing down the property value. But Daddy had little influence in the Sandhills, what with his only asset beneath us and tethered to the mortgage on Vesta’s new house. Truth was, before he met Vesta he never paid much attention to who lived near our family’s land. The land had lain dormant and undisturbed since before I was a bump in my mother’s belly.

“He can’t walk through your property any time he wants, can he?
After all, how would it look, what with Mr. Curry being a bank officer and all?”

Vesta rose up to her full stature. “He most certainly cannot.”
She thanked Mrs. Sandersen and closed the front door. I waited, holding my hands out to her, giving her back her sewing. “Why does she think Daddy’s a bank officer?”

Instead of answering me, she said, “Follow me.”

Daddy kept a big storage shed at the border of our property.  Beyond his shed was an easement, a place where utility companies might access power equipment. It was a strip of land that mostly provided a place for Daddy to back into and drop off things he had picked up for Vesta’s projects, like her new gardens out back of the house. He kept the lawn mowed and fetched her gardening supplies while Vesta decorated the place with a rose garden and a shade garden right under a two hundred-year-old cherry tree rising over our house like a sage. Its long drooping branches hung like vines, breaking out in undulating whips of white flowers come spring.

I had noticed the black neighbor, a couple of kids hanging on his leg, walking through our easement and returning with Push-up pops and Fritos from the corner grocery. He disappeared, same as always, into the big sunflower forest he grew every summer, a garden Vesta despised for its lack of
elegance.

When I hesitated she said, “Hurry.”

“Claudia’s already on her way here, Vesta.” I tried to beg my way out of whatever nonsense had gotten into her head.

“It won’t take long.” She insisted I follow her out to the shed.
The shed was old and had stood on the property years before Periwinkle House was built. She unlocked the padlocks from the door and pushed inside, wading past some of Daddy’s tools and a push mower.

“It won’t do any good,” I said, keeping my voice down
, for the sunflower man was nearly always out in his garden on days like today.

“I don’t know what you mean. Help me carry out these sawhorses.”

One of Daddy’s occasional jobs was painting the interiors of the big houses going up in the village and around the golf courses. He kept more than a dozen sawhorses for the jobs.

“The man can drive around and register to vote,” I said.
“Why don’t you just tell Effie to take a powder?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been meaning to stop those Billings boys from crossing through our yard to hide and smoke behind our shed.” She yanked on one of the sawhorses, but then made a hissing sound, hitting her finger on a protruding screw.

“Daddy won’t want you dragging his painting equipment out in the elements,” I said.

“He won’t mind,” she said, “when I tell him why.”

I helped Vesta heave and shove until we dragged three sawhorses out onto the lawn. No sooner had I set down sawhorse number three than a splinter pierced the palm of my right hand. “Crap!”

“Language,” said Vesta. “Go inside and pour
Mercurochrome over it. Then come back and help me. I’ve about run out of time.” A perfect line of dirt soiled the front of her new dress.

She fumed, backing away.

“I’ve got to shower,” I said, insisting she release me from her scheme. “You’d best go back inside and change or you’ll be late.”

She complained under her breath but I managed to slip away. I ran back inside and upstairs where I showered. I dressed in time to let Claudia in. She minced through the door, flipping her long blond hair and popping gum. She followed me upstairs. Once inside my upstairs bedroom, she said, “What is Vesta building?”

“I don’t think she’s building anything.” I often defended Vesta because she was at least a person who had stuck around, unlike my own mother.

She leaned onto my windowsill and craned her neck, watching Vesta drag a piece of sheet wood out of the shed.

I told Claudia about the Billings boys smoking by our shed, so she finally dropped it. Her nosiness got under my skin quite often.

Only a few yards from our back yard, the black man worked his way down a row of sunflowers. Occasionally a dandelion flew out of the massive forest of tall flowers. I liked watching him tend his flowers like they were his children.
I pretended not to notice.

Fact was, I preferred what Vesta called the wrong kind even though she
stayed on me, training me up in the way of associations, how to meet up with people who might advance our family’s standing. Vesta spelled out the right associations in clear details, a list “any second grader could follow.” Claudia was certainly on Vesta’s yes list.