Greedy Little Eyes (10 page)

I knew. In a scrapbook she’d shown me once, there were black and white photographs of her when she was a kid, and two newspaper clippings, one at eleven years old, the other when she was a teenager, blonde hair in
a swinging ponytail, trophy in her hand. She won the district tap finals when she was eighteen years old. She met my father right about then, though, and they were married soon after she’d graduated high school.

Tap dancing became sort of silly at that point, a stunt performed by fools and people who delivered singing telegrams. So she dropped it.

My mother and I made our way over to Broadway, where she took me into The Dance Shop and had me try on four or five pairs of tap shoes until she declared, “Yes, that looks like it.” She stepped back and took me in from another angle, head to toe, corners of her eyes crinkling with pleasure. “What do you think? Are they yours?”

I tried to clack around the floor a little, dance the way I’d seen kids do on a talent show I watched Saturday mornings, but I had a nervous stomach all of a sudden, what with all this delinquency, hers and mine. In her case though, she wouldn’t have an excuse; if she didn’t quit Bobby Gordon’s car lot, she’d get fired again. But still, at that moment I couldn’t help feeling like a brand new car myself, she was so pleased with my feet.

When we got home, she had me put on some play clothes and she did the same. She got me to help her move each piece of furniture out of the spare room, which as of last year had become her sewing room. She’d seen some celebrity on television boasting that she made all her own clothes and my mother decided she could easily make all our clothes and save us hundreds of dollars—not to mention make us into one stylish family
with her knock-offs of designer outfits spotted in magazines. She made an apron.

Once the room was clear of furniture and sewing paraphernalia, she went and grabbed any tools she could find in the garage and we set to work ripping up the carpet.

“You can’t dance with no floor,” she said.

Freeing up a corner of the carpet, she had a look at the hardwood underneath and declared it to be in not-too-bad-a-shape. But she wanted it to glint. We’d get it resurfaced, she said.

I helped her rip free the rest and roll it up while she muttered about its colour.

“
Beige.
Why did I ever let him talk me into a beige carpet anyway? It’s enough to bore me into a coma …”

Dad drove up just as we dragged it the last foot or two into the garage. His face dropped when he saw the long tube of short shag being pushed against the wall. He asked what was going on.

“We’re making ourselves a dance studio,” she told him and her voice had a choppy, defiant quality. As if she were a brat and she knew it.

He looked from her to the rolled rug, took a breath and closed his eyes a moment. As he composed himself, he appeared odd to me, suddenly out of place. Opening his eyes, he gave me a stiff sort of smile and asked if I could go make us all some tea, which is when I noticed the tail of his shirt coming out, spitting up over his belt. I was so used to the button-down quality he normally possessed, the assured crispness, that this minor
dishevelment made him look to me as if he’d lost a battle he hadn’t begun to fight.

He took my mother’s arm and led her into the house and up the stairs. I followed quietly, hanging back a little, waiting until their bedroom door closed before I made my way nearer.

Their voices were low—his growling, exasperated, hers hissing and quick.

I heard: “Marion, that carpet’s … six months! … What are you trying to prove?”

“Oh for god’s sake … woman’s prerogative … Would it kill you … ?”

“Woman’s what? Just because … and why are you home from work?”

“ … shysters anyway. I want to teach Mitzi to tap dance …
my own money
!”

“ … you work, it’s your money, but when I work, it’s ours … you think it’s boring just because it’s not about you!”

His voice was getting closer. I snuck back down the stairs as the door opened, her words suddenly clear and sharp.

“Hardly! But I sure as hell think it’s boring when it’s about
you
.”

After school the next day, I brought home Nancy Donner. She was in my class and wanted in on these tap lessons.

My mother was tickled to have a second pupil. Not only that but “Donner? Is that your last name? Isn’t that a riot, my last name used to be Donner! Wouldn’t that be funny if we were related!”

She told Nancy to call her Marion; she’d never liked “Mrs. Adler.” Was never really her. I hadn’t heard her say that before. I knew Donner was her family’s name but it had never occurred to me that she might miss it.

She had bought two black leotards for me the day before and suddenly she was in my room, rummaging for the second so she could give it to Nancy. “You’ll match,” she said, a thrill on her face. “It’ll be adorable.”

As we changed into our outfits, Nancy whispered about how pretty my mother was, that she was beautiful like a movie star. I yanked at my underpants, trying to tuck them back under the leotard, and stared at my bedroom door as though I could examine my mother on the other side.

“How old is Marion anyway? She looks more like your big sister.”

I could feel my face screwing up at the sound of “Marion.” Seemed like Nancy was just showing off now. Both of them were.

“Old,” I told her and glared at the door again. “She must be thirty.”

When we came into the spare room,
Marion
had set up an old record player from the basement. She had scrubbed the floor and it wasn’t looking too bad, not shiny exactly, but not bad.

She put us in the centre of the room and stood before
us, trim in her own woman-size black leotard and tap shoes. Nancy apologized for not having proper taps.

My mother told her it wasn’t too important right now. Maybe we could get her some later. In the old days, they just slapped some coins on the soles of street shoes anyway, to get the sound.

“The sound’s what makes it come to life!” She grinned at Nancy and began her instruction with
heel-toe heel-toe heel-toe
.

I picked up the move right away, but Nancy’s feet insisted on toe-heel toe-heel.

My mother came and stood next to her, demonstrating slowly. Once Nancy’d caught on, Marion stepped up the pace with a shuffle demonstration, then a double shuffle, then the grapevine. By now, Nancy was getting it all down fast and she and my mother laughed at their feet as they shuffled and snapped the floor. My feet weren’t in on the joke. Marion went to the record player and set the needle down on a 45 of Sammy Davis Jr. singing “The Candy Man.”

“Wait, Mom, wait for a sec, I don’t get it.”

I could swear she sighed when she came over and showed me again, a little more slowly, the shuffle and the grapevine. Meanwhile, Nancy appeared to be ad libbing on her own, new little grooves in the standard steps, and my mother gave her a small ovation. I rolled my eyes.

“
The Candy Man” played and reset itself over and over, and by what had to be the forty-seventh time that Sammy Davis asked us who could wrap a rainbow in a sigh and make a groovy lemon pie, Nancy and Marion
were side by side, dancing up a storm, my mother interjecting “Good girl” and “Nancy, look at you go!”

I was beginning to feel like a six-month-old beige carpet.

I slipped out of the room, telling them I needed a drink of water.

A few days later, I came home to find my mother in the kitchen, laughing and red-headed. Her hair was still long but it looked thick now, wavy, and Ann-Margret flaming, high at the crown with a few long bangs brushed off to the side.

Nancy Donner was already there, as if she’d cut class. She and I hadn’t talked much the last few days. I was sick of looking at her; everywhere I turned, there she was.

They were laughing, as usual, Nancy at the kitchen table, my mother at the counter making sandwiches. My mother grinned when she saw me and spun around. “Ta-dah!”

I looked at her.

“Well! What do you think? Do I look like Ann-Margret or what?”

So, it was intentional. I didn’t know if I wanted some big-haired Kitten with a Whip for a mother. Nancy’s face split wide in a grin. They were waiting. Some sort of uplifting and generous response was in order.

“Kind of. Why would you dye your hair that colour? I thought you said you wanted to keep it blonde and cut it to look like Grace Kelly.”

“What would I want to do that for? The chick can’t dance.” She smirked and snapped her fingers like Sammy
Davis. The two of them cackled. My mother made a face at me, mimicking the one I wore. “What are you so sour about?”

“Nothing.”

She glanced at the ceiling and sighed, then said, “Oh, and guess
what
! I’m taking driving lessons. Took my first one this morning. My instructor thinks I have a natural instinct for traffic.”

I looked from her to Nancy and back. “Aren’t you a little old to be learning to drive? Aren’t you s’posed to do that when you’re a teenager or something?”

“Oh, piffle on that—where do you get these stodgy old man ideas, Mitzi? You’re as bad as your father.” She sounded a little clipped. At least she’d knocked off the gushing though.

She walked over to the table and set sandwiches down for Nancy and herself. “There’s another one on the counter if you want it, but I’m sure you’ll turn your nose up at that too.”

Nancy bit into her ham-and-cheese and grabbed a magazine lying on the table. She set her sandwich down and folded the magazine open, then turned around in her seat to show me an old picture of Ann-Margret. She swallowed as much as she could and said, “Your mom’s gonna get an outfit like this and run away with Elvis Presley!” and laughed. She wore on her feet the tap shoes my mother’d bought me.

I was in the living room watching a program about a guy who swallowed an entire Volkswagon Bug piece by piece, when my mother pulled up alongside the curb in the Shining Star Driver’s Ed car. Watching over the back of the couch, I could see her smiling wide and holding up a pink sheet of paper, then laughing and shaking her head, smoothing the page down against her steering wheel.

A man sat in the passenger seat, his hands resting on his own steering wheel; he was too shadowed for me to make out any expression. I assumed the way she was laughing and prattling on, though, that he must be doing the same. After two or three minutes she got out of the car, and he got out of his side and came around the front end to hers. She left her door open, stepping out from behind it as he came close, and threw open her arms. He walked into her embrace and squeezed her back, his bald head smothered in her long red hair. She took a couple of gleeful hops as she held him. He stood back from her, smoothing his shirt front, fingers of one hand dancing to his breast pocket, touching his pens and then fluttering down to his sides. He folded his arms and unfolded them.

My mother kissed the pink paper in her hands, blew him a kiss and walked back to the house, waving over her shoulder. He watched after her with a moony sort of smile, started back to the passenger’s side and then stopped, shook his head, and came back toward the driver’s.

I turned from the window as the front door flew open and my mother breezed into the living room with
another one of her
ta-dah
’s and screamed, “I passed!” Then she put her arms in the air and danced a Broadway musical to the tune of “I passed I passed I passed!”

“You don’t have to tell the whole world, already.”

She froze in mid-flounce, dropped her arms and looked at me, face blank. Her head wobbled a little, her eyes growing watery, fixing on mine. She made a tiny sound as though she were about to speak, then walked out of the room.