“Lower!” Nancy shouted. “Guess lower!” The stage announcer’s voice boomed, “…brand NEW barbecue grill!”
I reached for the door, my hand on the knob, ready to bolt, but something held me. The truth was—I had nowhere else to go. Kelly was gone; Uncle Dan was at the Jaybird; Amy was at work, selling underwear to the stay-at-home Moms killing time at the Mall with their strollers and sippy cups. I had no desire to make pizza or hang around the boardwalk or lie on the beach. Back at the B&B there were twenty inside-out pizza boxes covered in manic script, the new scenes I’d written the other night at the Jaybird, but I lacked the energy to deal with those, either. A movie seemed the best idea, but first there was Nancy, only a few feet away in my childhood bedroom. There’d been times in my life when I’d wanted nothing more than my mother’s reappearance, yet wasn’t it too late for her presence to have meaning?
From the bedroom the TV volume dropped, the game show clamor yielding to music, guitars and a flute, piano chords in a simple rhythm.
I walked down the hallway. “Nancy? It’s me, Donatello …” I peered through the bedroom door.
“Hush!” she said.
In the center of my room, her room, Nancy stood facing the television, her one arm close against her side, her posture straight; her gaze intense. She wore the same floral housecoat she’d worn the other day and, strangely, a pair of black high heels at least one size too small for her feet, her massive ankles spilling over the tight leather straps. The bed was pushed against the wall, and I leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the screen.
“My favorite show,” Nancy whispered. Dancing with the Stars. “You can watch, too.”
“That’s okay. I’ll…”
“Hush!”
She wobbled toward me, knees shaking, and I waited for her to go down, contemplating the hopeless comedy of my trying to lift her without pulleys and a rope. But her legs steadied, and she found her equilibrium, her hand clamping onto my wrist, pulling me toward her.
“Look, there’s Valentin!”
On screen a sleek, sinewy dancer bowed toward the audience, his black shirt open to mid-chest, black pants fitted closely to his waist before flaring out below the knees. He had a black beard and mustache, his teeth electric-white, and Nancy smiled as he gracefully spun in a double-circle, his arm extended at his shoulder as a blonde woman in a short silk dress glided across the stage. They clasped hands, and the orchestra began playing.
“I watch at night, too,” Nancy said. “I’m learning. Look—the foxtrot.”
On screen the two dancers began sweeping across the stage in continuously flowing movements, Nancy shaking her head in rhythm to their elegant steps.
“Slow, slow, quick-quick,” she said, and her feet started moving, two steps forward, two toward the side, and then back again, only to repeat the steps—slow, slow, quick-quick—as she lumbered back to her starting point.
“I was a dancer once,” she said. “Not like this. Naked stuff, but I was pretty good. I know the tango, the meringue. Danny won’t dance with me. I always ask, but he doesn’t watch this show.”
On screen Black Pants lowered Silk Dress into a dip and the crowd roared. Nancy, too-she patted her hand against her shoulder, the nearest she could come to clapping, and I thought about that Zen koan: what is the sound of one-hand clapping? Apparently, this was it: Nancy tapped her shoulder-stump with her open palm, her ghost sleeve dangling. Why doesn’t she just cut off the extra sleeve and sew up the opening? It made me sad that no one had bothered to do this, but she seemed not to care. She moved her big body around the room in a one-woman foxtrot—her feet moving in shaky rhythm, forward, forward, side-side, slow, slow, quick-quick—spinning around and even dipping herself once, timing it with the dip on the screen, as if Black Pants were dipping her instead of Silk Dress, her knees buckling in tremors but holding steady, her sloped neck angled toward the ceiling with a child-like grin.
“Do you want me to teach you?” she asked.
“That’s okay. I’m not much of a dancer.”
“Sure you are,” she said. “You take after me.”
No, I don’t, I thought, instinctively, ready to flip, ready to testify on a stack of Bibles that I was nothing at all like her—but I stopped myself, because what did I really know about her that mattered?
In the corner, on the bureau, was her photograph, a high-school yearbook shot of her pretty, eighteen-year-old face, her blonde wavy hair corralled around her shoulders, pink lips posed in a smile, her eyes bright and intelligent, ready to take on the world. Beside it, in a second frame, was a six-by-eight of a newborn swaddled in a hospital blanket, a shock of brown hair sticking up at the crown of his head, his eyes open, wide awake.
“Is that me?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. I walked to the bureau and lifted the frame. It was the first time I’d ever seen my baby picture.
“They give it to you at the hospital,” she said, and belched. “You don’t even have to pay for it. I kept telling the nurse ‘are you sure it’s mine?’ and she said, ‘He looks just like you’.”
I compared the two photographs, the resemblances hard to spot. Maybe there was something in the shape of the face, but I couldn’t be certain.
