House of Dance (3 page)

G
RANDDAD TRIPLE STACKED HIS BOOKS
, and in peculiar places between his books he’d stuffed papers and ribbons and things. He said it was his personal filing system, and when I asked him how I was supposed to know what to keep and what to toss, he said, “When you get to be in my condition, you don’t keep things for yourself. You let somebody else decide what should be held in trust.” He had asked me to focus on the in-between things. The books we’d get to later.

“We should ask Mom,” I said.

“You’re here,” he said. “She’s not.”

“But how am I supposed to know what any of it means?” I asked, shaking an old envelope out of a book of Shakespeare sonnets. A crust of something flowerish plopped out from some fat textbook: crunchy, old, and gray. A package of seeds slipped from a dictionary. An old ketchup bottle label dropped out from
The Old Man and the Sea
. “I read this book,” I said, holding up the Hemingway so that Granddad could see.

“A classic,” he said. “Built to last.” He was sitting upright on his couch with Riot asleep on his lap. He had put on his glasses, which made his eyes look even bigger than they were, more watery, like pools.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I forget your question.”

I punched my free fist into my hip and turned back to his shelves. From between the pages of poetry slid a feather, red and puffy. “How,” I said, saying each word slowly, “am I
supposed to know what any of that stuff
means
?”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s simple. Ask.”

I stared at him. I waited. I was learning about Granddad that he could be 100 percent exasperating, and maybe he liked being that way, or maybe that came from the cancer. The front part of his pure white hair had fallen down across his face. With his hand he pushed it back. I could see all his finger bones, as if there weren’t even any skin, and I thought about what Mom had said about the cancer’s starting in a place that nobody could see, and how it was his back that had ached at first, how it had hurt to work his garden, to ride his old bike with the basket, but he’d ignored it. Ignored it and then, when he’d found out what was wrong, done what he could to fight it, something called thalidomide, another thing called corticosteroids. But that had been three years ago, and the cancer had come back, and now it was too far
gone to catch it. “I’m all through fighting,” he had told my mother, but that didn’t stop her from arguing with him or from trying to hide her sadness.

“That feather?” he said at last. “That feather has meaning.”

“Yeah?” I turned back toward him and shifted on my feet. “What kind?”

“It was a feather on a dress.”

“A dress?”

“Not my dress.”

“Couldn’t have been Riot’s.” The Maine coon opened her eyes when she heard her name. She stood and padded Granddad’s khaki pants, then wrapped herself back up into a fur ball.

“Red,” he said softly, “was your grandmother’s color.”

I tried to imagine the sort of dress to which such a feather might belong. Tried to imagine a woman with feathers for a neck, or for a hem, who said red belonged to her, tried
to picture Granddad with that woman, young.

“Aideen had such style,” Granddad said, drawing circles over the head of Riot with his hand. “She was always the star of the show.” He said nothing else, just sat as if he’d forgotten I was there: I, his one and very only granddaughter. The windows in his living room were open. A mellow breeze was blowing through, and also the zoom of cars and the sound of someone across the street, whistling some tune. The feather felt like nothing in my hand. I had to keep my eye on it to be sure that it didn’t disappear. I waited for Granddad to tell, but his mind had traveled and I was still stuck in a room full of things that were old and mysterious.

“I’m putting the feather In Trust,” I said, after a while, placing it on the coffee table beneath a book of poems. I left a puffy corner sticking out, so that I would not forget it later.

“Good decision.” He didn’t open his eyes.

“Are you getting hungry?”

“Tired more than hungry.”

“You can sleep, you know.”

“I’m becoming a champion sleeper,” he said.

“Do you want the windows shut?”

“I’m starting to like the sound of that guy’s whistle.” He let his head fall back against the cushion. His hand stopped drawing halos over Riot’s puffy head. The point of his chin dropped low toward his neck. His head began to bob, then stilled. The only thing alive about him was the coming in and blowing out of his breath.

I spent the rest of the afternoon shaking the pages of all those volumes loose, sorting the fragments and bits. A lot of the time a book had been made thick with a tear of newspaper that cracked when I tried to unfold it. I wondered whether Granddad even remembered any of this stuff. I thought maybe he
was like a squirrel, burying the green walnuts in autumn so that they could rot come spring.

But he had left the sorting up to me; that was my job, and after a while I had a system involving three of the baskets that had been stacked up by the TV. One was for In Trust. One was for Toss. One was for Deciding Later. A whole wad of stuff showed up in the D.L. at first, to buy me thinking time. I tossed old newspaper stories because news belongs to anyone. I tossed old labels, the buds of flowers that had turned brown, bookmarks that seemed to have been set aside for their usefulness and not for any kind of beauty. Into In Trust I put the feather and a stash of antique coins and braided ribbons and buttons and even embroidered collars taken from old clothes. I put decks of photographs that had somehow melted, one picture into the other, photos I’d one day steam apart. I put postcards and letters that someday I’d read. I put pressed leaves when the leaves still
looked like nature. I put recipe cards on which were written the secrets to favorite pasta sauces, lists of exotic spices, best-sounding desserts from foreign places, a list of favorite herbs. I put whatever looked like something I could hold on to later, whatever I thought might tell a story about a man who had loved and lost and dreamed adventure but never traveled far.

Outside, the day got warmer, and inside, the sun changed places in the room. The triangle of heat that had been spilled against the floor was now spilled across the couch where Granddad sat, turning the tallest fuzz of Riot’s fur gold and pouring a splash of almost orange across Granddad’s chest and chin. He had hardly moved since he’d fallen asleep. The whistler was gone, and now there were so many different sounds outside that I couldn’t tell one from another. It wasn’t silence, but it felt like silence. It felt like being alone.

I needed a chair to reach the shelves that held the highest stuff. I grabbed the nearest one, stood up there, and collected my balance, and now I shook the past out of the books up high, until I got to the stash of old black vinyls—records inside cardboard sleeves that spelled the names of artists. I’d heard of some. Frank Sinatra. Charlie Parker. Sammy Davis Jr. Benny Goodman. Duke Ellington. The Count Basie Orchestra. Ella Fitzgerald. Johnny Mercer. Irving Berlin.

The cardboard sleeves were beat up, and the pictures were faded, and if I was ever to free the songs on them, I’d have to fix the old record player. Still, I knew that these were In Trust treasures. That music was part of my granddad’s mystery. That this music could bring back parts of his past. I pulled the records from the shelves, three and four at a time. I piled them beside the coffee table. I felt sweat roll down my neck, saw Riot give me one of her most suspicious looks.

Granddad never woke back up that day; he was still sleeping when I left. I poured a tall glass of water over lots of chunks of ice and put it right where he would find it. I set a bowl of pretzels beside the water, in case he changed his mind about food. I wrote him a note that said, “Coming back tomorrow.” Then I kissed the tallest two fingers of my right hand and pressed them to his forehead.

“Mom?” I called when I got home.

But there wasn’t any answer.

O
NCE
I
FOUND MYSELF SPYING
on Mr. Paul and my mother. It wasn’t done on purpose. I’d gone to Leisha’s house, seven blocks and a better neighborhood away from mine, to work on some social studies project called Seeing. This was in our ninth-grade year, and Leisha and I were project partners. The purpose of the exercise was to gather evidence about the so-called human condition, to come up with a list of things that make us one connected species. Leisha and I sat around for a while, eating extra-hot
Doritos, and then we set off for a walk up and down the streets of Leisha’s neighborhood. Being tall and model thin, Leisha’s not afraid of strutting. She has a spray of freckles over milky chocolate skin, wears hats to keep her color fast. When you go walking with Leisha, you walk with style. You know she’ll tell you what she sees from where she sees it, which is up high.

So we’d gone out that day, for the sake of Mr. Marinari’s class. We’d gone through streets of old houses scrubbed up to look like new and down a short, squat strip of beigeugly condos, and we had a lot of things on our list that we’d seen: gardens, little Do Not signs, fences, rocking chairs on porches, and big TVs, all of which said something or other about people’s needs.

It was a good-enough list, but not a great one. By then we’d gone maybe five blocks north of Leisha’s house to a street of mismatched architecture: turrets on some
houses; cinder blocks for some garages; a brand-new mini McMansion faced with stucco between two old-time ugly ranches. Leisha was doing her reporting from up high, tattling out random sights, as if she were peering in through so many frosty snow globes:
Woven doilies over couches. Posters in thin frames. Cat on sill. All-alone boy playing with toy. Old man and even older woman in total-vomit red-plaid room. Empty flower vase.
All of which I was taking down in the notebook we’d brought along for that purpose, until Leisha said, “Oh, my God,” then nothing.

“What?” I said, but Leisha was stuck on the sidewalk, saying nothing else, just staring.

So I stared where she was staring, toward a perfectly ordinary house: brown brick, black shutters, concrete square of a stoop, no real doodads I could see, nothing for our Seeing list. Then I looked through the afternoon glare past the window into the ordinary
living room, and that’s when I saw what Leisha had seen: my own mother and Mr. Paul, taking a break from window washing. My mom in her overalls and Mr. Paul in his, mashing his fat lips to hers. My mom still had one of her tangerine-colored gloves on. She had herself so up against him that there was no air between them.

“I thought,” Leisha said, “that Mr. Paul was—”

“Yeah,” I said, “he is.”

“I thought your mom was—”

“Don’t ask me about my mother,” I said. “I don’t have the first idea.”

“I thought—”

“Forget it, Leisha. Forget it, okay?” I started walking fast, but Leisha just stayed put, staring and staring. I went back and yanked at her skinny arm until she started moving. “We’re a whole honking lot of out of here,” I said. “Got it?”

“But—” she said.

“And you didn’t see that, right?”

“Whatever. Sure.”

“No buts,” I said, “and no whatevers.” And don’t even ask me what I never wrote down on that list that cataloged our shared human condition.

S
OMETHING YOU CAN RELY ON
is Pastrami’s water ice. Cherry and lemon and Welch’s colored grape, for a dollar fifty, sold middle of May straight through September. They scoop it like ice cream into a paper cone, and they give you a spoon and three totally recycled napkins, and if you need to change the flavor of your day, you order yourself up one. It was getting past five in the afternoon. I’d been at Granddad’s forever. Mom had put ten dollars on the kitchen counter before she’d left for work in the so
much earlier morning, saying, “Don’t count on me for dinner.” That’s it. Period. Not even an “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” I didn’t say back.

Granddad had been getting tired. He had told me several different versions of how I should be on my way, but I had nothing and nobody to go home to and nothing to lose by savoring every single spoonful of Pastrami’s grape ice. Mr. D’Imperio himself had scooped out my cone, giving me extra for free, telling me how you had to feed the corporation, which was his fancy way of designating the stomach. “How’s your grandfather?” he’d asked me, and I’d simply said, “Fine,” and he’d said, “You tell him Mr. D. says hi,” and I’d said that I would, tomorrow.

“You won’t forget now, will you, Rosie?”

“I forget nothing,” I said, which was hardly a lie.

“A chip off the old block,” said Mr. D.

“Which block?” I wanted to know.

“Grandfather’s block on your mother’s side,” Mr. D. answered. He was holding his stomach as he sometimes did, as if it needed the bracing of his hands to keep it high. “We go back,” he said, “a very long time.”

I nodded.

“I never knew your grandfather to forget a thing,” he said.

“Doesn’t throw much away either,” I said. I felt my face go hot, despite the ice, but Mr. D. was not offended; he just laughed his big it-all-begins-at-the-stomach laugh.

“You’re all spice, Rosie,” he told me.

I nodded again, as if I were sure that spice was the best possible thing you could be. “Good batch of grape ice,” I said, backing up toward the door.

“We have it all summer long at Pastrami’s.”

By now I was out in the late sun, standing with my back against the redbrick wall that divided Pastrami’s from Whiz Bang. The road was rush-houred over with cars and trucks.
Peak-hour trains came and went. Sidewalks on either side were overwhelmed with walkers. I was nothing to anyone passing by, as see-through as an early shadow, and I was thinking of Leisha at the shore, and I was thinking about Nick working the innards of cars, and I was thinking about Rocco on his ten-step program to get smart. I was thinking as well about how I myself was not having what you’d call a typical teenage summer, but then again, I thought, how many summers actually are? How many summers aren’t in some secret way lonely?

The grape ice had sent a fist of cold to the right side of my head. I twirled what was left with my spoon and drank it down. Time, I thought, to be on my way. Time. I tossed the paper cone and the plastic spoon into a trash receptacle and found my place inside the rush-hour crowd, which was mostly streaming the opposite way, back toward Granddad’s, making a hot burst of wind.

I began to focus on the little in-between places inside the commotion: the single halves of strangers’ cell phone talk; the wedges of nothing in and around people’s shoulders; the mini puzzle pieces of undisturbed air; the things that didn’t move set against all the things that did. I remembered my envy of Leisha’s height, her special way of seeing. And then I tilted my own eyes high, to find a slice of sky. That was how I discovered the cluster of balloons—the bobbing silver, white, and pink with the sunbeams trapped inside.

They could have been clouds, scraping close to earth. They could have been poppies after they’d bloomed or tears on the face of the moon. They had that gleam inside them, and there were maybe eight or ten, knocking softly against one another above a pair of legs that I noticed only after the legs had left the crowd and crossed, a diagonal northwest, to the other side of the street. The legs, the balloons went west. They stopped at the door
to a studio above and cut in away from the street.

I followed the white, the silver, the pink. I came to the studio door. I pushed through. There was a flight of stairs up: very long, very narrow. There were brownish-reddish–colored walls. There were photographs of dancers—aquamarine and yellow and red gowns, men in black tuxedos—on every available wall. “House of Dance,” a bright painted poster said.
House of Dance.
I stood there undetected, listening to the music and the throb, the very slight and very sweet bobbing together of balloons.