Dance Real Slow (14 page)

Calvin runs to the fence and props his legs up against its lowest rung, as if he is going to climb it. But Zoe grabs him before I can say anything, telling him the fence is loose and it could slip under his weight. She calls to her horse and then so does Calvin, but Willa is uninterested, grazing alone near the middle of the penned-in pasture.

“Let's try this.” Zoe reaches into a paper bag and pulls out several carrots. “Why don't you wave one of these at her.”

“Carrots? Horses like carrots?”

“Sure they do.”

Calvin holds the carrot between the open space of the fence, swinging it back and forth while calling for Willa to come, as he might call for a dog or Moonie the cat or me. It doesn't take long for the horse to trot over, leaning down close and rolling back her rubbery lips to reveal teeth brown and mossy and each nearly as big as Calvin's hand. She takes the carrot directly from Calvin, who seems completely unafraid, holding on until Willa has a good grip. Not dropping it and jumping back. This impresses both Zoe and me.

“That's good, Calvin,” Zoe says. “Most people aren't that brave their first time.”

Calvin nods and reaches for another carrot.

Then Zoe looks to me and smiles. “Welcome.”

My face turns warm and pink with blood—embarrassed, as if she is aware, has been aware of my thoughts about her since our first meeting.

“You look tired,” she says to me, handing Calvin the last of the carrots.

“Good, 'cause I feel tired.”

“You'll relax today.”

She turns back to Calvin and asks him if he is ready to go for a ride, to which he responds with a precocious “Of course. That's why I'm here.”

Zoe prepares the horse, first with a heavy Shetland blanket and then with a saddle, which she adjusts by pulling the straps against Willa's firm belly. Calvin stands at Zoe's side the entire time, holding the bridle beside his foot until Zoe takes it to hook into the horse's mouth. When she does this, Willa struggles slightly and Zoe
leans close and blows into Willa's nose while massaging the underside of her jawline. Calvin is fascinated by this and Zoe explains her actions. She says that when horses are together, in a field or a stable, they will get real near and breathe into each other's noses. It is almost like a greeting, and when people do it, to try to imitate other horses, it usually has a calming effect on the animal.

After some minor adjustments, Zoe lifts Calvin on the horse and then she climbs into the saddle behind him. The two ride slowly for a few minutes with Calvin holding onto the horn at the front of the saddle, until Zoe reaches over Calvin's arms and allows him to take hold of the reins with her. They break into a trot and then a gallop and I can see Calvin smiling as they turn at the edge of the pasture, before a gate leading out to a larger field, the one that Jane occupies. When they ride off, it is at a brisk pace, but I am not worried about his safety. Oddly, I feel as comfortable with this stranger's arms wrapped around him as I would with my own.

This is part of the life I envisioned for Calvin when I moved us to Kansas, to the very solar plexus of the country. That he be able to breathe in the sweetness of the land, so thick with fragrance it scars his nasal passages and lungs. That he have an appreciation for nature and its majesty and what it can provide. And also for its power. During our first few months in Tarent, late one night, Calvin was awakened by a storm and he called me to his bedside. We pulled apart the drapes shielding his window and watched a twister far on the horizon, flicking awkwardly, resembling a heavy strand of saliva hanging from the sky, waiting to break or be knocked free and
fall gently to the ground. The twister never came any closer to us than that, and soon after, Calvin was again asleep, leaving me to roam the rooms of our new house and wonder whether my decision to move us here was the right one.

Zoe and Calvin ride back into the gated corral, their bodies snapping to the rhythm of the horse's steps. Calvin waves when he sees me, but then quickly takes hold again of the reins. Zoe climbs down and reaches for Calvin, who pushes her away, saying that now he wants to ride alone. Before I can tell him he is too young, too inexperienced, Zoe takes the reins around to the front and tells Calvin to hold tight to the horn atop the saddle. Then, slowly, she leads him about the penned-in area. I slide down from my place on the fence and walk at her side.

“It must be hard,” Zoe says, loosening her grip slightly on the brown leather straps in her hands.

“What?”

“Raising a son by yourself. Alone. Moving to a new town like this. Changing your life.”

“Mmmm.”

“You probably don't give it much thought. People never do until it's over. Until afterwards.”

“No, I give it plenty of thought. I mean, this is not the life I planned. It's just what happened.”

In fact, oddly, the thoughts seemed clearest one night in Ann Arbor when I'd taken a pill to help me sleep. Poured into an easy chair, almost logy, I suddenly remembered the oafishness of junior-high dances: huddled against the cafeteria wall until, scratchy with
adrenaline, I mustered the courage to ask some girl to dance the final song;
Stairway to Heaven
, or
Free Bird
. Then, only then, I wanted it to last longer—forever, even. And Calvin's childhood seems the same to me; it's not something I can sneak up on. Soon the song will end … and I will be left with quiet.

“I know things about you,” she says, turning to face me directly. “More things than you think I know. More than you know about me.”

“How? From Noah?”

“No. Well, some. But mostly from Peg Blyth. The two of us take an art class together. Pottery.”

Peg is Richard Blyth's wife.

“Are they nice things?”

“Yes. She likes you very much. She says you make excellent matzo balls.”

I smile. “Calvin likes them. I dot them with red food coloring and he pretends they're baseballs, that he's eating a baseball.”

Zoe takes Calvin around one last time before she leads Willa in to be hosed off, brushed, and fed. While Calvin and I are waiting, we sit at a picnic table shaded by a twisted maple tree, its cross-hatching of branches forming a natural gazebo. Calvin watches as I unpack two shopping bags full of prepared food we bought earlier in the day, after basketball practice. I lay out a cardboard bucket of fried chicken, tin trays wobbly with potato salad and coleslaw, corn bread, carrot and celery sticks wrapped in cellophane, half a blueberry pie (Calvin's favorite), a carton of lemonade, paper plates and cups, plastic silverware, and napkins, which I weight with
three unsliced tomatoes. Calvin makes a face when he sees the tomatoes and I tell him he doesn't have to eat any if he has enough celery.

“If I promise to eat a lot of cel'ree, can I have pie first?”

“No.”

He doesn't press the issue, because he knows the rules. Also, because he is pleased as a puppy after his ride. So excited that his face blazes a comic-book crimson.

After things are set, we take our places on one of the benches, Calvin's feet swinging back and forth behind the newfound heft of his boots. I can feel him staring up at me, hard, and I know what he is going to ask next. He is going to ask me if he can have a horse of his own, like Willa. One that he can ride whenever he wants, without us having to call Zoe to arrange it or without her perched up there on the saddle behind him. But he doesn't ask for a horse. He doesn't ask for anything.

“I'm gonna thank Zoe when she comes here,” he says, turning his attention toward the barn. “I liked riding on Willa.”

I place my hand over the soft muscles of his shoulder and give a gentle, short squeeze—to let him know I am pleased. He wriggles free, leaning back and then sliding across the table, flicking his hand as if shooing me away. At the same time Zoe calls out “Fellas,” and both Calvin and I look up as she snaps our picture with a Polaroid camera. The photograph spits out from the front and she gives it to Calvin.

“Watch it develop.”

“Huh?”

“I don't think he's ever seen a Polaroid,” I say.

“Oh. Keep looking at that and tell me what you see, Cal.”

Zoe makes her way around to the other side of the table and then, before sitting down, says, “This really looks terrific.” She unfastens her hair and shakes it out behind her before tying it beneath a soiled red bandana.

“What can I serve you?” she asks.

“Let me,” I say, standing and taking a paper plate from the stack. She points and I serve her two drumsticks, some potato salad, and coleslaw. As I pour out three glasses of lemonade, she slices up a tomato, using the dull, serrated edge of a plastic knife. For the first couple of strokes the tomato sags into mushy wedges, until Zoe gets the hang of it and begins sawing instead of pushing.

“Hey,” Calvin says softly, almost to himself.

I peer over his shoulder and watch as the photo finishes its metamorphosis from ghostlike shapes, clouded and grainy, to the familiar colors and contours of Calvin's and my body. In the picture, Calvin is nearly horizontal, his arms outstretched and pushing me away. My right arm is raised, and although I know it was because I was reaching for him, it actually looks as if I'm trying to strike him. Sometimes even the truths of photographs can deceive. They can turn anything on itself.

Packed away in a padded envelope somewhere in the back of one of my closets, or in the basement, is a framed picture of my father and me taken shortly after
I turned one. My father is standing on the top step outside our new house in Lakeshire, holding me high on his chest like a priceless vase. We are both grinning and I have imagined, on viewing the snapshot later in life, that people must have thought the two of us were quite close. Not only from pictures, but from certain actions, greasy and slick. In public, my father always stressed how much his family meant to him, how none of his success would have been possible without the support of his loving wife and son. At games, he sat us directly behind the team bench, and although in later years I was often absent, my mother always attended, dressed in a matching skirt and blazer, her hands clutching a stuffed Eagle mascot against her lap. Truthfully, though, we saw more of my father during those two-odd hours pacing the sideline than we ever saw of him at home.

Once, when he and I got into a late-night argument over something I can no longer remember, or perhaps simply something I have selectively chosen to forget, I cornered him on his notion of familial love and he threw an ashtray at me, claiming I was a wise-ass bastard. The ashtray broke into two neat pieces at my feet with a dull snap. I told him I might be a wise-ass, but I most certainly wasn't a bastard. That unfortunately I knew exactly who my father was. Which is something I have tried to keep in mind while raising Calvin: that he always knows his father.

At the moment, Calvin's father is watching Zoe dip her fried chicken into runny white coleslaw broth before she takes a bite. Calvin is sitting quietly at the end of
the table, waving his photo out at his side like an imaginary wing in between bites of food. He very much wants to try the camera himself, but Zoe will not allow it until he finishes his supper. Neither of them even cast so much as a glance in my direction when this decree was made, which pleases me to no uncertain end.

Right now, an outsider might say we have the look of a happy family. Again, I am filled with pleasure. Let my son at least pretend to know what that feels like on this crisp, cloudless afternoon when he dreamed of being a cowboy.

Calvin has hooked his necktie through the window of his toy dump truck and now he is using it like a leash, dragging the truck from kitchen to living room. He is wearing only a white dress shirt, unbuttoned. His gray flannel slacks are lying empty at the foot of the stairs, with one small brown shoe turned over nearby and the other sandwiched between the couch's seat cushions. When I call for him to finish getting dressed he says he is hungry, that he wants a bowl of cereal or some licorice. I'm not sure where he got the idea for licorice, but I tell him he can have a cookie when he is presentable. Upon hearing this, he simply shrugs and leads his truck through the kitchen again and to the back door, where he stands straight-limbed, glaring at the placid land behind our house.

The telephone rings and I adjust my own tie in the phone's silver cradle. It is Kate calling from Dallas. She says she's been back in the States for three days but she is still battling jet lag. Before she can ask, I tell her I
never got around to giving Calvin her postcard, that it is on my dresser and I am sorry, I have no excuse. She sighs, her breath coming hard through the receiver. Then, in a quiet, unexpected tone, she tells me it is all right.

“Really, I just wanted Calvin to know I was thinking about him,” she says.

I am silent for a spell, looking up at Calvin, who is rubbing his nose against the screen door. Cupping my palm over the mouthpiece, I ask him what he is doing. He says his nose itches and that the “scratchy part” of the door feels good.

“Is everything okay?” Kate asks.

“Sure. Sure it is.”

“Gordon, do you think I could talk to him—just for a few minutes?”

I tell her she can, but that we're in a hurry, so she should try to keep it short. Then I call Calvin to the telephone.

“It's Mom,” I say, sliding a chair over for him to stand on while he talks. He is not used to getting telephone calls.

“Gramma?”

“No. Mom—your mom. Kate.”

“Oh,” he says, taking the phone from me as he climbs on the chair. In a very straight, self-assured voice he says, “Hello.”

His dump truck sits below the sink and I walk over and unfasten the necktie, smoothing it out against my chest while he talks. A fine, red line bisects his naked belly and I can see it darken as he pulls the telephone
cord back and forth in a raking motion. He says “Uh-huh” a couple of times and then laughs. After a few more minutes he says, “Yeah, that would be good,” and then, “Well, we have to go to th' game now.” He pitches his shoulder and I wave for him to say goodbye, to hand the phone back to me.