Dalva by Jim Harrison Page B

she had met Ted at Eastman. In a panic she had spent a week learning to dance Mexican polka style from her cleaning woman who was overweight but agile. Then at the fiesta they had merely sat at a front table with his well-heeled but stuffy relatives until she bribed his twelve-year-old nephew to dance with her. After that it had been wonderful though the leavetaking at her door had been a subdued embrace.
    My breath shortened and I was holding the phone tightly because I knew what she was going to say. She began with the anticipated “Remember when . . .” And I did remember, in itself a harmless memory of an event that followed an intensely difficult time. She was referring to the County Fair and how three months after I returned from having my baby I won a dance contest with Charlene as a partner. It was a communal effort to break through the aftereffects of the birth, a kind of lassitude or somnolence where I would sit at my upstairs window at first light trying to balance out what my life had been. It began in early August, a few weeks before the fair. Normally I would have been working with the horses to enter several classes at the fair but I couldn’t bear to look at a horse because Duane had come in late May to pick up the buckskin a week before I came home and I had missed him. What happened was that Charlene’s mother, Lena, brought her out to see me on a Sunday afternoon. Charlene’s mother was thin and sharp-featured, shy, an unsuccessful lover of garage mechanics, a clothing-store salesman, the constable, a farm-implement dealer. She had come to Nebraska from Chicago with her husband and the infant Charlene to make a “fresh start.” That day she had told me her husband missed the city but she had refused to go back. Mother persuaded her to stay for dinner. Ruth was just finishing her piano practice in the music room and Lena was curious. She said she used to play the piano in a polka band in Chicago while her husband drank and played accordion. It took some effort to persuade her, including a ginand tonic, but Ruth dragged her to the grand piano whose use had been limited to the classics. It became a strange sight that hot August afternoon with two mothers and three daughters jumping around the house, the mothers drinking gin and the daughters lemonade with a little gin snuck into it. Ruth took over the easy, raucous melodies at the piano and Lena showed us the steps. We rolled up the Persian rug in the parlor for extra room. No one wanted to stop so we didn’t. Everyone seemed to be dancing out their own loneliness, and when that was over, we danced together, separating when the urge took us. I danced before the portrait of my father, and I danced into the kitchen when I began to weep because I didn’t want to upset the others. I danced right through my weeping. I began to see others for the first time in three months. We watched each other as we danced with sweat beginning to moisten our Sunday dresses, then soak them. Lena and Ruth would trade off at the piano, then continue moving at the kitchen sink as they ran cold water on their sore fingers. Naomi tripped and fell, springing back up and nearly falling again as I caught her. Ruth jumped straight up and down, her eyes on some distant imaginary object. Charlene’s steps were intricate and we held on to each other as I tried to imitate them.
    Suddenly we were too tired to go on. We laughed for a while then became strangely silent. Naomi led us out to the car and we drove to the swimming hole where three of us had been baptized the year before. We all lazed nudely in the river, paddling in circles, utterly quiet. I forced out air and sank down to the bottom thinking of Duane’s whistle that had led me away. I stayed down so long that Charlene swam down past me and grabbed my arm, drawing me back to the surface.
    We continued to practice the next three weeks under Lena’s tutelage. Naomi altered Father’s