There Should Be More Dancing by Rosalie Ham

planet apart from Margery’s husband who had seen Margery naked, and even then he might not have actually seen her completely naked. She felt humiliated sitting there like a thawing chicken, a stranger patting her bottom dry and holding panties for her to step into while she steadied herself on the handbasin like a drunk. But Margery let Anita sponge her down with warm water, and as Anita eased her knee-high stockings over her dressing, Margerysaid, ‘Just have a look and see if Mrs Parsons’ blind is up, will you? You can see through the lounge room window.’
    Cheryl had also told Anita about Mrs Parsons, that she could just let herself in, if needed, since Mrs Parsons would be waiting in her chair, and since the blind was up, Anita declared she would pop in and ‘say g’day’.
    â€˜No you won’t. You’ll give her a fright.’
    â€˜That’s okay, she’ll be sitting down when she sees me.’
    â€˜You don’t know what to do.’
    â€˜Tie her laces. I’ll tell her you’ll be in later, as usual, okay? I need to meet her, introduce myself. Cheryl always popped in to see her, didn’t she?’ She left Margery to finish dressing, arriving back just in time to help her comb up what was left of her set and rinse. Then she buckled Margery into her car and drove to her own doctor, Doctor Kosztadinov.
    â€˜What sort of a doctor has a name like that?’ Margery sniffed.
    â€˜What’s his name got to do with his ability?’
    â€˜Nothing, I suppose, since they’re all sorcerers and thimbleriggers.’
    â€˜Didn’t you work for one for forty years?’
    â€˜Forty-four, but I never imagined he’d be able to cure me of anything.’
    Doctor Kosztadinov studied Margery’s skin tear through the Tegaderm, gave her a routine examination and asked a lot of questions.
    â€˜When was the last time you needed to see a doctor?’
    â€˜Fifteen years ago, I had a little turn.’
    Doctor Kosztadinov prescribed new medications, told her she’d feel so much better she wouldn’t know herself, said Anita would put her tablets in a dosette and all she had to do was take the tablets according to the day of the week. Anita would show her. Then he asked how long she’d lived alone.
    â€˜My husband was killed twenty years ago.’
    â€˜How was he killed?’
    â€˜He was careless,’ Margery said.
    â€˜Was it a happy marriage?’
    â€˜I raised three children. Of course I was happy,’ she snapped.
    On the way home, Anita stopped at Union Square, and while the chemist filled Margery’s prescriptions Anita smoked a cigarette, watching across to Margery, a small, unhappy woman sitting low in the front seat, scowling at the world outside. It was Anita’s first week on the job, and she’d already had one near miss with Mrs Razic. This was the first job she’d ever had that didn’t involve serving beer or taking orders, and she understood from her brief, accidental brush with incarceration that life was not a practice run; she was halfway through her only chance at it, and she didn’t want to spend the rest of her time cleaning other people’s houses, nor did she want to end up alone, a cantankerous nuisance, or in a nursing home. It was now certain that she didn’t want to get to eighty and wish she’d done things another way, better .
    She found her bankcard, slid it into the ATM and checked her savings account. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark , she told herself. Then she resolved to give up smoking, save eighty dollars a week, travel – a trip to Disneyland with a stopover in Hawaii. If Skye, her twenty-one-year-old daughter, could save enough for a deposit on a house just from working in a bank, she could start a business, her own business. She knew about cleaning houses; she would set up a business cleaning other people’s houses, branch out to