weapon-like in the black cowboy boots he had insisted on buying.
Bobby had pared his fingernails, and forced a comb through his hair. He appeared to have abandoned boots in favor of simple black sneakers.
He was always polite to me. More than polite, really: he was courtly, in his way. He inquired after the particulars of the dinners I made, and asked me how my day had gone. Answering wasn’t always easy, because I was never quite sure to whom I spoke. He stubbornly retained his foreign quality, although with time he did a better job of simulating the clean-minded normality of a television character. He polished his act. He took to trimming his hair, and even turned up in some new clothes that had not originally belonged to Jonathan.
One night in May I was passing by Jonathan’s room when I heard music less shrill and raucous than what the boys usually played. I had grown accustomed to the endless noise of their music, the way one does to a barking dog. Electric guitars and bass drums had become a new kind of silence for me, but this particular music—a single, sweet female voice accompanied by a piano—was distinctly audible.
I hesitated outside Jonathan’s door. Then I knocked, and was surprised by the timid little mouse-like sound my knuckles made against the wood. He was my son, living in my house. I was entitled to knock on his bedroom door. I knocked again, louder.
“Yeah?” he called from within.
“Only me,” I called back. “May I come in a minute?”
There was silence, filled with the tinkle of piano keys. After a moment, Bobby opened the door.
“Hey,” he said. He stood smiling, looking rather peculiar—miscast—in a pin-striped dress shirt and jeans. I could see Jonathan within, sitting sulkily in his black boots and T-shirt.
“I didn’t mean to bother you boys,” I said, and was annoyed at the craven sound of my own voice. I might have been a poor relation, come for her annual duty dinner.
“It’s okay,” Bobby said. “It’s fine.”
“I just, well, I wondered what that music was. It sounded so…different.”
“You like it?” Bobby asked.
It seemed a trick question. Would I open myself to ridicule? Then, brushing aside my own girlish fears, I answered like a woman of thirty-five. “It’s lovely,” I said. “Who is she?”
“Laura Nyro,” Bobby said. “Yeah, she’s good. It’s an old one, you want to come in and hear it for a minute?”
I glanced at Jonathan. I should of course have said no. I should have gone about my offstage business, folding the towels and sheets. But I said, “All right, just for a minute,” and stepped gratefully into the room to which I had previously enjoyed free access. During the past year, Jonathan had all but covered the walls with posters of scowling long-haired rock singers. The woman’s voice, soaring and melancholy, filled the room rather tenuously, surrounded by all those hard masculine eyes.
Jonathan sat on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest and his hands clasped over his shins. He had sat in just that way since the age of four—it was a sulking posture. I saw, perhaps for the first time, how the nascent man had always been folded up inside the boy. He would carry those same gestures with him right into adulthood. It surprised me a little, though it was the most ordinary of insights. I had rather imagined Jonathan transformed as an adult, appearing one day as a kind, solicitous stranger. I saw that I had been both right and wrong about that.
Bobby picked up the album cover and held it out to me, as if I had come to consider buying it. “This is it,” he said. When I took it from him his face flushed, either with pride or with embarrassment.
The album cover was dark, a murky chocolate color. It depicted a rather plain-looking woman with a high, pale forehead and limp black hair parted in the middle. She might have been a poetic, unpopular student at a girls’ school, more an object of pity than of ridicule. I’d known such girls well enough. I’d felt in danger of becoming one myself, and so had forced myself to change. To speak up and take risks, to date boys you couldn’t take home to mother. Ned Glover had driven down from Michigan in an electric-blue convertible, a suave, humorous man far too old for me.
“Lovely,” I said. “She has such a pretty voice.”
It sounded exactly like the response of a prim middle-aged woman. I handed the album cover back quickly, as if it cost far more than I could afford.
“She quit singing,” Bobby said. “She got married and, like, moved to Connecticut or something.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We stood there awkwardly, like strangers at a party. I could feel the force of Jonathan’s desire impelling me from the room. It registered physically, a pressure on my forehead and shoulders. “Well,” I said. “Thanks for letting an old lady barge in.”
“Sure,” Bobby said. One song had ended and another begun, a faster number I thought I recognized. Yes. “Jimmy Mack,” once sung by Martha and the Vandellas.
“I know this one,” I said. “I mean, I’ve heard it before.”
“Yeah?” Bobby said.
And then he did something peculiar. He started to dance.
I can only think that language ran out on him, and he resorted to what he knew. He did it automatically, as if it were a logical extension of the conversation. He started swaying his hips in rhythm, and shifting his feet. His sneakers squeaked on the floorboards.
“Yes, indeed,” I said. “This is an ancient one.”
I glanced at Jonathan, who looked startled. He returned my glance, and for a moment we found our old complicity again. We were united in our consternation over the habits of the local people. I half expected that once we were alone together, he might do an imitation of Bobby—dancing big-shouldered and dim-faced—just to make me laugh.
But then Bobby took my hand and pulled me gently forward. “Come on,” he said.
“Oh, no. Absolutely not.”
“Can’t take no,” he said cheerfully. He did not let go of my hand.
“
He turned with me gently, moving in rhythm. He was a better dancer than his ordinary manner let on. I’d been quite a dancer myself as a girl—it was one of the resolutions I’d made, a salient feature of the person I’d meant to become—and I recognized the signs. There were boys you knew you could trust on the dance floor; you knew it almost instantly, more by feel than by appearance. Certain dancers imparted to the air itself a sense of confidence and inevitability. They had a generous grace that took you in; they told you just by the touch of their hands that you were incapable of making a wrong move. Bobby was that kind of dancer. I could not have been more surprised if he’d snapped a flock of live pigeons from under his pin-striped cuffs.
I responded. I took his other hand and danced with him as well as I could in that cramped room, under the disapproving eyes of my son and the sullen stares of the rock singers. Bobby smiled shyly. The woman’s voice ran through the notes with sorrowful abandon, like somebody’s gawky cousin set briefly, deliriously free.
After the song had ended I took back my hands and touched my hair. “Lord,” I said. “Look what you drove an old lady to do.”
“You’re good,” Bobby said. “You can dance.”
“Used to. In the early Pleistocene.”
“Naw,” he said. “Come on.”
I looked again at Jonathan, and saw what I expected: all sense of complicity was burned out of his face. He stared at me not so much with resentment as with nonrecognition, as if I were someone who only resembled his mother.
“Stroke of midnight,” I said. “Love to stay, but I’ve got sheets to fold.”
I got quickly out of the room. In less than a minute the melancholy woman had been replaced by a driving male voice and a cacophony of electric guitars.
Ned came home late that night, after I’d gone to sleep. I awoke and found him beside me, breathing deeply and frowning over a dream. I lay on my side watching him for a while. Ned had once been a boy. Perhaps the fact had never quite impressed itself on me, though of course I’d seen the pictures: little Ned grinning under an
