Dancing with the Dead

5

Mary’s mother, Angie, lived alone in a one-bedroom flat on Shenandoah Avenue in South St. Louis. It was only a fifteen-minute drive from Mary’s apartment on Utah, but Mary didn’t go home before stopping at a White Castle drive-through and picking up hamburgers, french fries, and Pepsi for supper. Home wasn’t a place she deliberately avoided, but also not one she yearned to experience. No home of Mary’s had ever been that to her.

Even the aromatic hamburgers couldn’t overcome the pungent, mingled cooking and cleaning scents of the flat as Mary shoved open the door with her hip and trudged up the wooden steps to the second floor. The upstairs hall smelled as if it had recently been fogged with perfumed insecticide.

Angie had heard her coming and was standing with the door open, waiting. She was barefoot and wearing her beige terrycloth robe, as if she’d just taken a shower, but her hair was dry. Her feet were old, with prominent tendons, yellowed nails, and talons for toes.

Angie was an older version of Mary, with red hair. Her features were haggard, with flesh as delicate and crinkled as worn folding money surrounding her eyes, and dark lines swooping from her nose to the corners of her thin, set lips. She’d borne Mary when she was thirty. She was sixty-five now; the skin beneath her jaw had become mottled, and fine veins had ruptured in her nose. Pain had moved into her eyes to live permanently.

Mary nodded a hello and edged past her into the apartment. The place was cheaply furnished but clean. A sofa draped with a pale green slipcover squatted against one wall on the imitation oriental rug. K-mart sheer curtains softened the illumination from the evening sun as it angled through the slanted Venetian blinds. The walls were bare except for a dime store print of two men playing cards at a table-a segment of a Rembrandt painting, Mary thought, but wasn’t sure-and a square, plastic frame containing a collage of black-and-white snapshots, some of which were of Mary as a child. Though the evening was cool, the window air-conditioner was humming away, blowing only neutral air. Angie had forgotten to turn it off after the heat of early afternoon. Angie often forgot things.

She closed the door and followed Mary into the tiny kitchen. “Been dancing?”

“Had a lesson,” Mary said, placing the White Castle bags on the Formica-topped table. She carefully drew the waxy, damp Pepsi cups out of their bag and poked straws through their rigid lids. The straws squealed on the plastic as they penetrated.

Angie said, “I dunno why you spend so much on that kinda thing. You got a good job, but it’s still too expensive. Go to work every day so you can learn how to put one foot in front of the other on the dance floor. Don’t make sense.”

They’d had this discussion before. “There’s a lot more to it than that, Angie.” Mary hadn’t called her mother anything other than ‘Angie’ for years. She glanced around the apartment. No bottle in view. No indication that Angie drank. And drank. Good. Though Mary knew about Angie’s ingenuity in hiding bottles, it was still nice not to see the trappings of alcoholism lying around. Their presence suggested a certain laxity, a hopelessness that was contagious.

Angie claimed not to have touched a drop of liquor before Duke Arlington, her husband and Mary’s father, died drunk in an auto accident speeding the wrong way on a Highway 70 exit ramp. Mary knew that wasn’t true. She remembered lying in bed as a child, listening to her mother and father in drunken, senseless arguments. She’d heard the slurred insults, heard Duke use his open hands on Angie, then his fists, his belt. She’d seen the welts and bruises on Angie. Angie occasionally talked about Duke abusing her. Her alcoholism, and Duke’s other familial indiscretions, she wouldn’t acknowledge at all, despite two stays in detoxification centers, despite the gin bottles tucked in the backs of the kitchen cabinets or in the bedroom closet.

Angie lived now on her Social Security checks, a small pension, and the interest from Duke’s insurance policy.

And she drank.

“I sure like these little bastards,” Angie said, dropping into a chair and picking up one of the greasy cardboard folders that held the aromatic hamburgers. White Castle hamburgers were inexpensive, small squares of beef and chopped onions on square little buns. They tasted like no other hamburgers and, for South St. Louisans, were addictive. Sometimes they were affectionately called Belly Bombers. Sometimes not affectionately.

Mary sat down opposite her mother and took a sip of Pepsi, began munching her crisp and salty french fries.

“Arlington women don’t have to worry none about their weight,” Angie said. “We can eat what the fuck we want.”

Mary thought, I dance it off, you drink it off. But she said nothing and chewed. Boris, Angie’s tiger-striped gray cat, padded silently into the kitchen, attracted by the scent of food. He glanced at Mary, then away, and passed out of sight. Mary could hear him purring as he rubbed against one of Angie’s legs. Or maybe he was licking her bare feet; Mary had seen him do that. Angie tore off a portion of hamburger and her hand disappeared beneath the table, an automatic, lonely offering to companionship. The purring stopped.

“Boris is scared of something,” Angie said.

“How do you know?”

“He got quiet, and I can feel him trembling up against my foot.”

“Maybe he heard a dog bark.”

“This cat ain’t scared of dogs.”

“I had a good lesson tonight,” Mary said, trying to change the subject. “Tango.”

“I read somewhere the instructors at them studios try to get the students sweet on ’em, so they’ll keep coming in and paying.”

“Some studios are that way, not this one. You’re getting cynical in your old age, Angie.”

“I been cynical quite some time, honey.”

Angie had to smile.

“That studio’s conning you outa your money,” Angie said. “Selling you an illusion.”

“I know it’s an illusion, but I like it. I need it.”

“You want illusion,” Angie said, “buy one of them lava lamps that throw dancing shadows on the walls.”

Mary gave up. She knew Angie wouldn’t understand, but now and then she tried to reach her mother anyway. Angie’s illusion was inside the bottle, but it was one she denied. Life was all about illusion, delusion; Mary had learned that. Reality was nothing more than how people saw things, and there were as many realities as there were people. And didn’t that explain everything? Wasn’t that the only explanation?

Angie was on her second hamburger. Her appetite was good, Mary noted. She must be exercising at least some control over the booze.

Staring at her with bloodshot blue eyes, Angie suddenly said, “Jake popped you one again, didn’t he.” Not a question, a statement. One combat veteran to another. Angie knew the signs.

“No, it was an accident. He was talking and flung his elbow out and caught me in the eye.”

“Bullshit, Mary.” Now Angie was grinning. “I know how it is. Oh, just how it is. We both know your late father sometimes lost his temper with me.”

“And with me,” Mary said, remembering the flushed face, the huge hands that trembled before they flew out of control and struck. She recalled most of all her father’s hands, the crescents of grit beneath the fingernails. Duke had driven a truck and was always tinkering with it, or adjusting something under the hood of the family’s old Dodge in the driveway, as if he might somehow fine-tune the mechanical trappings of his life and so make everything else perfect.

“Every time Duke spanked you, it was because you had it coming,” Angie said defensively. “That was childhood discipline.” After all these years, she still stood up for him. Her wifely duty.

“He broke my nose once, Angie.” Not to mention more intimate and serious transgressions.

“That was an accident.”

“Like my eye.”

Angie was quiet. She sipped Pepsi through her straw, staring down at the cup. Its dark level of liquid was visible as a curved shadow.

“Jake staying with you?” she asked after a while.

“He was,” Mary said. “He won’t be there tonight. I’ll get phone calls from him, maybe even flowers, but I won’t see him for three or four days. That’s the way it always is afterward.”

“Sure. He’s sorry about the eye?”

“Yeah.” And the ribs. For a second Mary thought of Mel Holt, elegant and gentle Mel. She couldn’t imagine him striking anyone.

“I don’t give a shit how sorry or ashamed he is,” Angie said, “he won’t change.”

“I know. This time I’m not letting him come back.”

“That’s good, Mary, because there’s something about Jake. Something that goes beyond how Duke could be sometimes.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now. It’s over.”

“That’s how it has to be. They won’t seek help, Mary. And even if they do, it don’t work.” Angie took another bite of hamburger and chewed very methodically, as if there might be a tiny hard object hidden in her food.

Mary said, “Fred doesn’t always treat you so well.” Fred was Fred Wellinger, the semiretired bricklayer who sometimes spent time with Angie. He’d been a friend of Duke’s and known her for years.

“Fred never in his life hit a woman.”

“Maybe not, but he talks to you like you were his dog.”

“Only sometimes, and not very often. The Lord never made a perfect man, Mary. Nor a woman. Fred’s got his points.” Angie dropped her half-eaten hamburger onto the table.

“So what’s the matter?” Mary asked.

“I ain’t hungry, that’s all.” She finished her Pepsi, making a slurping sound with the straw, then absently pushed the cup away.

Mary sighed. “Okay, let’s not fight. God knows I’ve had enough of that for a while.”

She wasn’t hungry anymore, either. She stood up and cleared the table, stuffing everything back into its white paper sack and cramming it noisily into the wastebasket. Angie wiped crumbs off the table with a damp red dishrag, then rinsed and wrung out the rag at the old white porcelain sink. She folded it over the edge of the sink to dry, letting the tap water run and flicking a wall switch. The Disposall went chunka! chunka! chunka! and whined and gurgled busily until she flicked the switch again and turned off the water.

Mary stood watching her mother’s kitchen ritual; the familiarity was there no matter what kitchen Angie was in, the same posture as she moved toward the sink, the same outthrust hip and elbow as she leaned forward and wrung out the dishrag, the same air of finality as she stopped the flow of water and turned away from the sink. Rhythms and images of childhood that would never leave Mary. The child always lived somewhere in the adult.

She smiled at her mother, but Angie didn’t notice.

Mary followed her into the living room, where Angie switched on the table model TV and they watched yet another “Let’s Make a Deal” rerun, dreams bearing fruit between commercials. Afterward they talked of everything and nothing until Mary was ready to leave.

As she stood up, she noticed on the floor alongside the sofa the newspaper Helen had shown her at the studio. It was folded so the item about the New Orleans murder, with the photo of the dead woman, happened to be visible. The victim, dark hair, sparkling eyes, vividly alive in two dimensions, was smiling up from the floor with an expression that seemed to strike some sort of chord in Mary now, though the woman herself still didn’t look familiar.

Mary said, “I didn’t think you took the paper.”

“I don’t,” Angie told her, still slouched in the threadbare wing chair. She wriggled her toes. “Don’t usually buy one, neither. Fred brought that one by earlier.”

“Well,” Mary said, “I’m gonna get going. I’ll call you later.”

Angie braced with her brown-spotted hands on the chair arms and levered herself to her feet. “You take care of yourself, Mary. I mean, with Jake and all.”

“Sure, Angie.”

As she moved toward the door, Mary found herself glancing back at the folded newspaper. It pulled at her gaze, making it an effort to look away.

She was oddly drawn to it and wasn’t sure why, intrigued by the photo of the woman who had danced and was now dead.