Dancing on the Edge (12 page)

Grandaddy Opal was awake when we came into his room. He had an IV needle stuck in his hand and an oxygen tube running into his nose. He looked pale, and even his hair looked sick, all matted down against his head and face, but his eyes were open and alert.

“Well, well, well,” he said, lifting his free hand off the bed a little.

I hurried to his side. I wanted to be in front of the others and not pushed out of the way. I wanted to see him. Gigi stood on his other side and didn't say anything.

I touched his arm, and he took my hand. His hand was cold like mine, and shaking; his hands were always shaking. He told me once it was because he drank too much cola, but Gigi said he had nerve problems. Was that why he'd had a heart attack?

“Miracle.” Grandaddy Opal's voice was hoarse. He removed the oxygen tube from his nose and coughed, then replaced it.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Hooey! We're all okay, ain't we?”

I shrugged.

“Well, sure we are. It ain't like you had anything to do with it. Now,” he looked at the others, “how long am I supposed to stay in this here hoosegow?”

“Just a few days, I think,” Miss Emmaline said. Gigi stayed quiet and studied the IV needle going into Grandaddy Opal's hand.

“And then what? Have you thought about where we're all going to stay? Y'all been talking it over?”

“We're heading home in the morning,” Uncle Toole said, squeezing Aunt Casey with his arm around her shoulder. “Once we're sure you're okay and all, I mean.”

“Opal, you can stay with me for a while,” Miss Emmaline said. Uncle Toole let out a hoot. She ignored him. “Miracle and Gigi, too.”

“Miracle isn't staying with you or him,” Gigi said, stirring herself and backing away from the bed. “All this behind-my-back doings with the dancing lessons. No, we'll go stay with Mrs. Hewlett, that way I can be close by for my Other Realms meetings. And if she doesn't have room in her home, we'll stay at her gift shop.” Gigi twisted around to look for Mr. Wadell. He was standing by the door drinking down his Sprite and staring out into the hallway.

Then Grandaddy Opal said to me, “Girlie, run on and get me a Coke, my mouth is desert dry.”

I lifted the unopened Coke can I held in my other hand. “You can have mine,” I said.

“Nah, I want one of them.” His eyes shifted to the doorway and Mr. Wadell's can of Sprite. “Get me one of them.”

I looked around at everyone, then back to Grandaddy Opal. “But will they let you . . .”

“I don't care what they'll let me do or not. Get me one of them danged sodas!”

Gigi handed me some money, and I handed her my Coke and ran out of the room. I knew when I got back everything would be decided. I feared Gigi and I would end up staying with Mr. Eugene Wadell, and I had the sneaking suspicion that he lived with his ninety-year-old mama who still helped him get dressed every morning. He always wore his pants belted way up over his jiggly waist and his shirt looked like his mama tucked him in real good every day before he stepped out the door. Besides that, I didn't trust him. Even though Grandaddy Opal seemed to be okay, I wasn't so sure he could predict the future. I had the feeling everything was not going to turn out all right the way he said it would.

Aunt Casey once said the channeling and mystic vibrations he was always feeling were phony baloney, and I agreed. She said Mr. Wadell just hung around Gigi to pick up her secrets. “He thinks she's got a bag of tricks stored away somewhere and he wants at it,” she said. “Wait till he finds out she's for real.”

Then Uncle Toole had said, “No, wait till Gigi finds out he's a phony, then we'll see the gunpowder fly.”

I dropped the money in the soda machine and pressed the Sprite button. On the way back, I imagined what it would be like to live with Miss Emmaline all the time. I pictured her living in a broom-swept house, with everything in its proper place and all her furniture stuffed fat with feathers. I pictured her singing while she cooked, the rich-smelling sauces and gravies bubbling and dancing merrily in their pots.

It was real quiet when I got back to the room. Everyone turned to look at me. I brushed past them and set Grandaddy Opal's soda on his bedside table. He looked at it as if it were arsenic. When I turned around, Aunt Casey was there holding her hands out to me. She had just put on a fresh coat of red lipstick, red for fire and rage, and she was smiling at me with such a funny smile, a fake, distorted smile, it scared me. I backed away from her.

“Well now,” she said, her voice pitched high and strange, “what do you think about staying with your aunt Casey, girl? Won't that be a hoot? Why, it'll be just like a slumber party.”

Aunt Casey kept smiling and Uncle Toole joined her, wrapping his arm back around her shoulder like he was thinking of having it glued there.

“You, me, and Gigi?” I asked.

Gigi and Grandaddy Opal exchanged a look, and I knew I was going alone. I nodded my head. I understood. They knew it was all my fault.

I
SAID GOOD-BYE
to Grandaddy Opal the next afternoon. He was sitting up in his hospital bed looking more like himself without the tube running up his nose. Miss Emmaline sat in a chair next to him.

“Hey, girl,” he said, “I ain't contagious, come up close where I can see you.”

I inched closer and leaned against his bed, touching the blanket right near his hand.

“You got Etain with you?”

I shook my head. “I didn't know I could take her with me.”

“'Course you can. You think I'm going to ride her? Now you have Casey and Toole stop by the garage and pick her up, you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Miss Emmaline stood up and patted my shoulder. “You'll come see us, won't you?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

Grandaddy Opal tapped his hand on the bedside rail. “Hey, it ain't permanent. Once I get me a new house built, we'll be back together again, same as always.”

Gigi said almost the same thing when I said goodbye to her.

I met her back at Grandaddy Opal's place. She was in the garage picking up the bits and pieces that were hers.

“This will just be for a few weeks,” she had said. “Just till things get settled. Here's Mrs. Hewlett's number in case you need anything, and you have the gift shop number, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“Now, you make sure you come see me often and wear your purple. You make sure you wear your purple. I'll send you some money and you go shopping and get yourself some new things. I'll make sure to send you extra for your birthday. My gift—all this stuff's ruined.” She waved her hand at our belongings stacked in wet piles in the garage.

I turned my head and searched the piles, thinking I'd see her gift crushed and wet and wrapped in Mrs. Hewlett's trademark angels wrapping paper—an idea suggested by the late Mr. Hewlett through Gigi. I saw Dane's bathrobe instead, and as soon as Gigi had said her final good-byes, I ran over to the pile of wet clothes, pulled out the robe, and wore it shivering in the back of Uncle Toole's pickup all the way to Alabama.

The last time I'd been in Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey's house had been about two months before Dane melted. It had been Uncle Toole's birthday and we were having a pig roast in their backyard with all of Uncle Toole's mover buddies. Dane had stayed in the house with Gigi and some of the other women who were cooking the butter beans and collards and other vegetables. He claimed he no longer ate pig and sat in a chair in the corner writing stuff down in the notepad he carried with him whenever he left the house. Gigi told him it wasn't the pig keeping him in the house but the company. She said he had always just naturally preferred the company of women. He slammed down his notepad and said if she wanted to know the truth, he preferred no company at all, especially hers. Then he stormed out of the house and sat in the van in one-hundred-degree heat and refused to come back in the house.

Nothing had changed in Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey's house since that last visit. The stale odor of cigarettes still permeated the house—the curtains, the carpets, the furniture, the clothes, even the dishes. My first glass of water brought it all back. Everything tasted like ash.

The living room and dining room were still jammed with Uncle Toole's junk, stuff people moving out of their homes no longer wanted. They gave him broken fans and heaters, and toasters and televisions. Chairs with their backs broken off and sofas with the stuffing popping out like newly sprouting bolls of cotton were all heaped together, waiting for repair. I saw the familiar pile of shoes—Aunt Casey's same old high heels in silver and gold and shiny black and white, and Uncle Toole's same old work boots, all of them clumped together just outside the hall closet. The only thing different at all was the mess on the kitchen table. It used to be cluttered with old newspapers and the Confederate mugs and dishes and miniature cannons Uncle Toole had collected. These had been moved to the countertops to make room for Aunt Casey's psychology course work. Now the table was covered with books and papers, a typewriter, and a giant overflowing Confederate ashtray.

They gave me Aunt Casey's wig room for a bedroom. She kept all her sewing and cutting supplies on a long table that looked just like the one at the back of my old dance studio—the one at the church with the thirty-two-cup coffee pot on it. She kept her wigs on plastic heads that lined the shelves across from the broken-backed couch that became my bed. The wig heads had no faces, just indentations where the eyes should be and a mound where the nose was supposed to be and no mouth at all. At night those heads stared at me, watched me sleeping, whispered nightmares into my ears. I didn't sleep much anymore. I figured it was only for a few weeks. I could go without sleep for a few weeks. But those weeks turned into months and I was still struggling to sleep, still in Alabama, still living with Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole.

In school, I got in trouble for erasing my name off the blackboard. The English teacher had put our names in groups up on the board. I was in the Wednesday group. On Wednesday, my group had to read their short stories to the class. I didn't like seeing my name up there, separate from me. I didn't like going home knowing that my name was still there on the blackboard, and I feared returning to school in the morning and finding my name gone. I erased my name. I took it back. The English teacher put it back up. I erased it again, and he sent a note home to Aunt Casey.

Aunt Casey was too busy. She worked all day at her beauty salon and went to college three nights a week. When she was home she was either arguing with Uncle Toole or in my room sewing on her wigs. I couldn't bother her.

I gave the note to Uncle Toole. Ever since the tornado, he spent his free nights lying on his bed watching TV and looking like some kind of vice dispenser. He always had a beer resting on his chest and a spare cigarette in his belly button for when he stubbed out the one hanging in his mouth into the empty beer can resting in the pit of his arm. He could spend hours smoking and drinking and pushing on the TV set's remote control buttons.

Uncle Toole read the note.

“Says here you're erasing your name off the blackboard.”

“That's right.”

“So?”

I shrugged, and he shook his head.

“Go find me a pen so's I can sign this thing.”

I brought him my pen and he wrote at the bottom of the note, “So What!!!” and signed it.

I gave my English teacher the note before I went home that afternoon, and I erased my name. I heard the teacher sighing behind me. The next day was Wednesday and my name was back on the board. The teacher had me read my story first. I had written a story about a ballerina who loved to do pirouettes. She did them all the time—morning, noon, and night—and she got so good at doing them and so fast that she began to spin like a tornado. She spun so fast she couldn't stop. She got thinner and thinner until she was as thin as a needle. Still she spun because she couldn't stop. She spun until she disappeared.

The teacher reminded me that the story was supposed to be about a fantasy vacation not just a fantasy, and I told him it
was
about a fantasy vacation. The kids laughed.

At the end of the class, the English teacher erased my name off the board. He just rubbed it out, took it away. I asked him to put it back up so that I could erase it. He refused and told me he had had enough of my nonsense. I stopped signing my name on all my papers after that and the teachers gave me zeros. They said they would give me a real grade if I signed my name and turned the papers back in. Zero is a real grade. I didn't sign my name. At the end of the year I got all incompletes on my report card. I didn't show it to Uncle Toole or Aunt Casey and they never asked to see it.

 

U
NCLE
T
OOLE
wanted a baby. That's what their latest fights were all about. That's all they talked and argued about. Uncle Toole said the tornado had made everything clear to him. He said we all could have died. He wanted a baby to carry on the Dawsey name.

At night, he followed Aunt Casey from room to room, even coming into my room, if that's where Aunt Casey had settled, and argued again and again about having children. And every time they argued I closed my eyes and drifted away to my safe place, the place with the green fields and butterfly blanket. The place where I used to talk to Dane. He wasn't there anymore; his voice had gone. I knew he felt too disappointed in me to speak and that my trying to bring him and Mama back, willing them to appear on my thirteenth birthday—and thirteen a very bad luck number—only sent Gigi and Grandaddy Opal away, and Dane and Mama were no closer to me. I'd lost them all. All I had left were Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole, and they were fighting about having children.

“Children!” I remember Aunt Casey shouting, breaking into my fairy dream. “What do I need with children? I've already got one child, and I'm not talking about Miracle. Besides, you know we agreed long ago we weren't going to have any children, that I had done all the raising up I was going to do.”