Bigfoot Dreams (18 page)

Vera deposits Rosie backstage, then goes back out to find Mavis. In her white linen blouse, skirt, shoes, Mavis is dressed for a garden party, a croquet match—for anything but a kids’ ballet recital and dinner at Vera’s. Vera wants to run home and dust every surface lest the true extent of her disaffection leave its mark on Mavis’s white bottom.

“Darling!” says Mavis. “Good evening! How was your weekend?”

“Weekend? What weekend?” says Vera, fighting the temptation to tell Mavis everything: last night’s dinner and how, just before falling asleep, she had a vision of herself and Solomon wrapped round and round with celery string like two pale green mummies or some awful conceptual vegetable art. One problem is how to explain this without making Mavis apprehensive about some similar culinary disaster happening tonight. But that’s not what’s stopping Vera.

Sometimes, after a few glasses of wine, Mavis takes Vera’s wrist between her thin fingers. “Passion,” she’ll whisper. “That’s what’s missing nowadays. You girls go from one man to another. In
my
day, you loved a man, and if that man died, you carried that love to your grave.” Now, remembering that and the story about Mavis beating a path to her husband’s headstone, Vera can’t stand to tell her about Solomon. She knows Mavis won’t let her pretend that what came between them was just celery.

“How was
your
weekend?” asks Vera.

“Don’t ask,” says Mavis. “I’m ashamed to tell you. Going home Friday night, I found a book on the subway seat and though it wasn’t the sort of novel I’d normally read—”

“Called what?” asks Vera.

“The Burning Pyre,”
says Mavis.

Vera vaguely remembers an ad for a paperback bestseller, a woman in deep Regency décolletage beside some dark, scuzzy, mustachioed type in a dishrag turban. “India?” she says.

“More or less,” says Mavis. “Sabu the Elephant Boy. I started it Friday night and finished this morning. How’s that for a wasted weekend?”

It’s just occurred to Vera that Mavis has made up the part about finding it on the train. Mavis’s lying to her is disturbing, but less so than the idea that Mavis bought
The Burning Pyre
and read it in one weekend with nothing to distract her.

“And really, what for?” ask Mavis. “At the end of the book, she hurls herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. Eight hundred pages for
that
?”

“Oh, no,” Vera says.

“What’s the matter?” asks Mavis.

“I guess this is kind of a rotten time to tell you we’re having barbeque.”

“You’re kidding,” says Mavis.

“I am,” says Vera. “Pasta.”

“Marvelous,” Mavis says. “Now let’s go in.”

The first person Vera spots is Madame, fluttering stage left, winding and unwinding the yards of chiffon scarf encircling her head and neck. Vera’s afraid she’ll get carried away and her eyes will pop.
DUNCAN DIES AGAIN, DANCER’S GHOST RETURNS, REPLAYS BIZARRE DEATH SCENE
. What a bad night this would be for what’s left of Madame’s brain cells to go. Vera’s looking forward to seeing Rosie dance. She’s nearly convinced that Rosie won’t incinerate herself and that watching her perform may partly undo what damage Vera’s sustained from her dinner with Solomon, her audience with Karen Karl.

Eventually Vera sees that Madame’s watching Lynda, who’s walking down the aisle in a hat that’s a multicolored plastic umbrella attached to a matching beanie. Vera can’t tell if Madame’s panic is esthetic or superstitious. Opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck; it makes Vera nervous, too. She wishes Lynda had left her hat upside down on the floor in the hall.

Lynda catches Vera’s eye and nods. The umbrella swoops wildly. Vera gives her a friendly “talk to you later” grin that feels like something a baboon would do. “Should we get seats?” asks Mavis, but Vera hangs back, looking for her parents. Finally she spots them, sitting down. They turn and wave at her—the smooth, distant waves of people in old home movies, people who don’t intend their waving to
do
anything. It’s the wave of the dead, Vera thinks, remembering a recent movie about a woman who dies and comes back to tell the tale of how death’s like falling down a rabbit hole lined with one’s loved ones and the newly deceased, all waving just like that.

Even from this distance, the tilt of Dave’s head signals one of his famous—and mercifully infrequent—bad moods. Vera’s always envied him the freedom of these moods, the freedom to say anything. It’s enough to make Vera want to be anyplace else, yet she and Mavis have really no choice but to sit down directly behind them. Although they’ve met Mavis several times, Vera introduces them again. Norma smiles, as does Mavis.

Dave smiles the thin, sharky smile that has always meant trouble and says, “I can’t believe anyone but a relative would come to this kind of thing.”

It’s an insult to Mavis and Rosie. All three women look down. Vera wants to take Mavis aside and tell her, It’s just passion, love for his family gone wrong. But Mavis doesn’t need Vera to tell her about passion. Smiling sweetly, she says, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” says Dave.

Dave turns around and Vera’s left staring at his back till, losing focus, she’s seeing the back of Rosie’s neck when Rosie was a baby. That most fragile and lovely and vulnerable part—Vera would stare at it for hours! And now what she wants is to rest her face against Dave’s neck and search for the smell of his sweat, to pretend he still smells of tobacco and that they are thirty years younger.

The house lights blink on and off. Vera sits back in her chair. In the darkness, something pokes her in the head so hard she stands halfway up. This outrage, this pain and intrusion—this is what it must be like to be stabbed. But it’s only Lynda, taking off her hat as she slides in next to her.

“Jesus Christ,” says Vera. “You almost took my eye out.”

“Oh, dear,” says Lynda, dropping the hat and pawing maternally at Vera’s head. “I’m sorry.”

A ragged spotlight comes up center stage, illuminating Madame. The grimy edge of chiffon she’s running through her hands reminds Vera of the washcloth baby Rosalie couldn’t go to sleep without. “Good evening,” says Madame in a sepulchral voice. Down the aisle from Vera, a boy of eleven or twelve—some ballerina’s brother—repeats “Good evening” in a deep, Boris-Karloff
basso profundo
, and his pals fall off their chairs laughing.

“Tonight vee are pleased to velcome you to zee Claseek Ballet Kedemy.” Madame’s accent careens like some manic, desperate tourist through half a dozen different European countries. “Vee veel start tonight veeth zee top.” It takes Vera a while to realize she means tap dancing. Nor is Madame making it any easier. In any language she can barely bring herself to pronounce the hated words. It is the shame of Madame’s existence that for economic reasons she must concede to the uninformed, vulgar little girls and offer modern dance and tap.

There’s a bark of electronic sound, then the unmistakable swooping moan of a tape recorder breaking. “Gott in heaven!” cries Madame, pressing her hand to her forehead. Another blast of painful white noise has the boys down the aisle hissing and booing like a movie audience reminding the projectionist to focus. “Don’t those children have mothers?” whispers Mavis.

Miss Rossen, the pretty former beatnik who plays piano, crosses the stage and whispers in Madame’s ear. Madame brushes her off like a bug. She must be hell to work for, thinks Vera. Not once has she breathed the name of Bonnie Kleckner, the little Sohoite who’s teaching tap. Even Vera gets bylines. To choose this limping reel-to-reel over the rich, woody overtones of Miss Rossen’s upright is madness on Madame’s part, a reflection of her attitude toward anything but classical ballet; the scratchy tape represents both her continuing humiliation and her revenge.

Finally a blare of noise makes the children squeal with joy and the adults’ blood pressure jump. Gradually sounds organize themselves, first into rhythm, then in tune: “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the mo-o-orning.” A double row of girls shuffle out carrying canes, wearing black leotards, tap shoes, white dickeys, bow ties, and black bowler hats. Every one’s a mite awkward, tall for her age, though it’s hard to tell how old they are since they’re all in blackface except two spindly girls in the center who seem to be genuinely black.

Don’t these children have mothers? Vera knows they do. Intelligent, political women who go to peace encampments and evacuate their children when anyone in the neighborhood is having the exterminator in. Though there are lots of space-outs like Lynda, who wouldn’t turn her umbrellaed head if Kirsty came home done up like some nymphette Aunt Jemima.

The audience takes it like a punch in the kidneys. You can practically hear the jaws drop. How could a fairly hip person like Bonnie Kleckner have visited this upon them? You’d have thought she’d sneak in something by the Talking Heads or even, being conservative, from
Fame
.

As soon as the dancing begins, it’s clear that these little minstrels are all at the age when every step in public is torture; electric cattle prods could be driving them in this grim buck and wing. Still, most boys and girls this age are, despite themselves, graceful. These seem
unusually
gangly, uncoordinated, cursed with pot bellies and premature dowager’s humps. They must be a freak cross section of the population, these children who ask to take tap, or whose parents suggest it the way some well-meaning, heartless Mom might suggest a more flattering hairstyle for her homely daughter. Faced with this group, now grinning white-lipped smiles and bravely rolling their eyes, Bonnie Kleckner must have lost her nerve and reverted, as people will, back to childhood, resurrecting instinctively and in perfect detail the long-lost “Carolina in the Morning” recital piece of her own childhood tap school.

At long last it’s over. The dancers go down on one knee. If the applause lasts one second too long, they’ll pitch over on their faces. The girls wobble to their feet and straggle off, and out comes an unbelievably tiny girl wearing glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. From a distance her candy-striped tutu resembles a swirl of toothpaste. Her cane is candy-striped, too, and long before the music starts, Vera knows it’s going to be “The Good Ship Lollipop.” The tiny girl rotates her cane in full circles as she skips to the right, then the left.

Vera thinks back thirty years to
Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour
, to the one-legged vet tap dancer who won for weeks with his two crutches and tap versions of military favorites. His grand finale, “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder,” ended with him standing on his one good leg and raising the crutches like wings. Every time he got to this point, her father burst out laughing. And Vera, young enough to take such things seriously, was shocked. Once more she wants to lay her head on her father’s neck and see if he’s laughing now. Chances are he’s not. He might even be moved by this little girl, having come full circle back to the point at which you take these things as they’re meant.

The little girl’s making her last candy-cane rotations when suddenly there’s a commotion; loud conversation comes from the back of the loft. The house lights flash on and everyone wheels around to see twenty guys in white karate
ghis
stamping their feet and doing warmup maneuvers behind the last row. Madame and Miss Rossen and even little Bonnie Kleckner go back to confer with a small, rather beautiful Japanese man. Vera can’t help noticing how helpless and ineffectual the women look. Some men in the audience notice, too. They stand up and hover about in case the women need them. And maybe the women will. Because the longer Vera looks, the more obvious it seems that what’s just walked in is a karate school for psychotics.

It’s the Baldies, the Bishops, the Young Lords, the Jets, the street gang of your wooliest fifties nightmares, the kind you don’t hear about any more unless they go in for break dancing or graffiti. They’re like the rotten parody of those multiethnic UNICEF cards or one of Dave’s paintings, an all-star dirty dozen chosen for sheer ugly nastiness. All the little ballerinas’ fathers put together are no match for this bunch. Vera’s read the stories: parties full of people mugged by unrepentant crashers.

If the parents survive, they’ll have a story to tell.
ROBBERS ROUT RECITAL. BANDITS BLAST BABY BALLET.
But the children, the poor children. Vera imagines them grown, laughing young women telling their lovers how their first ballet recital was held up at knifepoint. Even the older brothers in Vera’s row have fallen silent. Mavis leans toward her and whispers, “Well, if it isn’t the Bad News Bears!” On her other side, Lynda’s saying, “Don’t worry. I’ve got Mace in my purse.”

“That’s the city for you,” says Norma. How sad and ironic that Norma’s turned into one of those people who criticize the city when what they really mean is blacks and Puerto Ricans. But it turns out that Norma really does mean the city and its blind stabs at social improvement, for there, powwowing with Madame and the
sensei
are three bearded social-worker types, clearly some sort of counselors. So, then. It’s not the ultimate Bad Boys at all, but some pathologically misguided bad-boy rehabilitation scheme. Vera marvels at the ingenuity of the grant hustler who got funding to make those juvenile killers’ bare hands lethal weapons. What little she knows of karate is enough for her to be unnerved by the fact that the counselors are all white belts, their charges brown and black belts.

Perhaps it’s the language barrier—Madame’s accent, the s
ensei’s
Japanese—but there’s an awful lot of discussion going on, when anyone could see what the conflict is: the little girls want to dance, the guys want to kick and punch and scream from the gut. Finally some agreement’s reached; everyone looks at the clock. Then the boys slink out.

Meanwhile the tiny girl has left the stage. “Continue,” orders Madame in a voice like a stick being rapped on the stage.

“Thank God,” says Vera.

“Amen,” says Lynda. The tension of sitting through this is moving them to prayer.

As those first high Sugar-Plum-Fairy harp plucks crackle through the speakers, Vera’s knuckles turn white. She’s Ethel Merman in
Gypsy
, she’s Brooke Shields’s mother: essence of corny stage Mom. Bubbles pop in her chest when Rosie and Kirsty come on. They’re up on their toes, moving smoothly and so slowly it seems less like human motion than like tense, trembling Jello. Their filmy costumes make them look airy, insubstantial, drawn with the finest pastel. Rosie’s gliding and turning is the most graceful and beautiful process Vera’s ever seen. Vera thinks of Barbara Stanwyck at the end of
Stella Dallas
, spying on her daughter’s wedding, every imaginable and many unimaginable human emotions registering on her face. Afraid that something similar may be showing on
her
face, Vera remembers to worry.