[last revised 12/1/2009 7:20 PM]
Not so long after Al, I lived for a few years on dance time: live bands on a corner stage at The Saloon, two- and three-stepping the broad, sanded floor in circles, rail fencing with ungated openings to tables and booths, followed by winding drives on back roads with ravines and climbs, double-yellow lines that multiplied and crisscrossed to my home, my room, my bed. Then sleep, more like a coma, up again in the dark, the only item of wear thus far removed one cowboy boot, sometimes two.
I went on like this four and five nights a week—watching neon signs come into view, seeing the Silver Bullet whiz past, replaced by Budweiser’s draft horse crew, a perpetual waterfall lit from inside—
It’s The Water—moving in script on the screen while I whirled to the triggered motions of partners—some urban, some real. After weeks, maybe months, I suspected a lie: I was not living hard and fast to sate what Al missed and I no longer had; I was trying to die. Occasionally, I brought strangers home, but somehow they knew and didn’t fuck me. No curtains to draw, no neighbors to hide from, all the air at my windows was raw—winter, spring—it didn’t matter. Once, I felt the sheets tucked under my chin, a peck on my cheek. Al seemed a phantom my dawn-hour partners could see. He was riding me, or I him—one dark, moving, muscular machine, and the prairies of loss were wide. Endless.
From upstairs, our bedroom large enough for a banquet, I heard the steps creak, the door creak and click shut. Boot heels on the cobble walk, a truck door whine open, an engine fire. The gravel under wheels as they rolled the circular drive; the sound of no sound once the tires found the smooth chip-sealed road again. Sometimes I stirred, if my head didn’t spin, if the nausea wasn’t there, and went to the end window facing east, watched for the light to come up. I could put away the stars, nod them off, witness their fade. Downstairs, the bedrooms were empty, the hall, the kitchen. Children grown, no yammering for bathroom-mirror time, no buses to miss. No anything.
Eight hours later, I was in the parking lot of a municipal building in Anderson, unsure of who my partner might be for dance classes, for a waltz routine the Country Gold Dancers would stage at a planned mall event in Redding. My skirt was mint green, long to nip the top of short, white, low-heeled cowboy boots; my shirt was white eyelet, pearl snap buttons, western yoke—front and back. Inside, Brooks and Dunn crooned the lyrics of
Neon Moon over the audio system. They were synchronized, the Country Gold Dancers; I was doing my best to learn the steps, how to turn, and when.
A little time against the wall—mint green and white against municipal ecru—I was picked by a Sheriff named Dave who moonlighted as a country-western dance instructor. Tall and thin, he wore a white hat, cradled me in his arms, moved me softly through the line, maneuvered each pirouetted turn—one-two-three, one-two-three.
Dave, with a sure palm at the small of my back, made me believe I had grace. I was a swan, my neck lithesome and long, I belonged in this world. It was full of real people who made real mistakes and all around us and us with them there was lightness, whispers, laughter, stumbling, no beer—the only neon was in Ronnie Dunn’s lyrics.
He was a middle-aged Henry Fonda in looks, a quiet sureness and sloped shoulders inside a white pearl-snapped western shirt. No phantom in sight—no corpse on the hospital bed, my bed—and we waltzed through every replay as if every replay were new. Conference hall fluorescent lighting made long swathes on the tan asphalt tiled floor. It was magical—a lake of light at the center of the world. Yesterday was a different planet.
I danced and danced through the months, though never on stage at any mall or exhibitions at county fairs. At some point, Dave asked me out. We dined at the Moose Lodge where a live band played. Everyone knew him, men and women, many of whom he’d taught—the men how to lead, the women how to follow. I stiffened, my twenty-two years as a wife and a certain instinct telling me this was a “misstep.” But it was a date, my first “date” after Al. I was giddy, playing the girl when over forty; the girl with a first kiss waiting out there to happen in a parked car on a side road more than likely overlooking the Sacramento River. Around us other couples spoke to him and he to them, questions and answers about people and places I did not know, and I, who had not kissed a man, not felt another man’s tongue in my mouth since 1966, tried, the best I knew how to stay in step—one-two-three, one-two-three—heart missing beats with worry about how a strange tongue might feel and whether or not my denture fixative would hold.
Before—on that last night of Al’s life—we’d spooned, his chin nestled between my shoulder and ear, his easy body curved against mine, bodies as separate as a single back road through the hills with no dividing lines. If we dreamed, I don’t recall—nothing was shared in the morning but the swelling in his leg. The grumbling over his stump. We each had our prostheses—lower leg, uppers. Another two hours, at the office, he dropped the coffee carafe in sync with a blood clot ending its circuitous route at his lungs.
I’d never seen a corpse except in a coffin at funerals. Al’s hard rubber foot made a small tent of the sheet. He never cared much for dancing; after Vietnam, not at all.
On the side road after the dance at the Moose Lodge, Dave pulled his white pick-up truck to nose-in toward the river. He cut the motor. The moon was real here, a still glimmer of blue-white light on a wide expanse, the Sacramento’s current moving dark and whole, as if one massive, sleek creature of night on an endless journey home.
My denture fixative held. An owl called over and over again. Another woman might remember frogs, crickets, the rush of water over stones, while this one does not: only awkward half-steps and blundered undoings.
I could be in limbo again, I suppose. An ex-pat in a border town where standing in the slick surf can get tricky. Certainly I feel the decades since The Saloon and the Moose, recall an accepted marriage proposal, other loves, other dances, other close encounters of the passionate kind. Now I watch days come into being while facing the west. When the light comes from the east to rise over the hill behind the house, there’s a gentleness to this sky, this friend, who tells me I am a swan, this lake of a day is my ocean.
“Hello,” I say. Even when a marine layer muffles the movement, I hear earth’s response: she is waiting, patient, her palm firm at the small of my back.
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