Danceland

Mum was a dancer. Dad was a tree trimmer. My mother, I never knew. My father, I knew.  His truck climbed the hill early, while the night sweat still soaked the field. The clouds changed shape and passed by all day long. A sickle moon poked through the blue sky. He came back.

My room was up the stairs, where my father’s room was down the stairs and down the stairs again. In the middle was the woodstove, cast iron pans hanging from the brickwork, a sandy rug that the cat, Nosey, had her seizures on. Our rickety cottage, its shingles all loose, was all that was left of Danceland; we were Danceland’s survivors.

Each day I was to do a number of things: haul the stumps from the bed of Dad’s truck and keep the woodpile shoulder high, peel and boil the meal, mend the knees and toes of our garments, and read aloud from the yellow and brittle pages of The New Yorker and other dog-eared arts journals, reviews of my mother’s performances.

Many years slipped away.

I lay in bed, the muscles in my lower skipping as if to music, bringing the first day of curse, blood stick on my thighs. Downstairs, Dad’s boots thumped from stove to faucet. The kettle became hot and bawled. Two drawers opened and closed. The cabinets shut. The front door locked. I knelt by the window and watched him sip his tea in a takeaway mug and pump the truck’s engine before bouncing over the heaves and shallows of the dirt road toward the gate.

I grew too fast, my pant cuffs now hanging mid-calf, the collar of my fisherman’s sweater choking me. Instead of asking again for a change of clothes, I descended the steps, down and down again. On his bureau my father collected greasy wire and antennae. His room smelled like pennies and very old cold stone. I slid into a pair of his oldest trousers, the knees soft as my cat’s paw. Clothes I could run in, but not bloody if I intended to return them.

After my breakfast of toast and tea, I opened the porch door to the field. Every morning I followed the first low flying airplane, wading through the grass in the direction of the white trail that appeared and eventually disappeared from the sky. It did not take long for the rush of a plane to fill the atmosphere. I let the porch door creak shut.

Mid-morning snakes whispered through the grass and the early insects zipped from one wheaty tip to the next. Nosey followed me to a point, but then she slowed, lagged behind whisking her tail, until I knew she’d given up. Once the vapor trail brought me to the woods, it was often difficult to see past the treetops so I followed my intuition.

I had spent many days walking. I’d found a brook, a standstill pond green with lily pads, an early burying ground, and a minor collection of pear trees dropping diseased fruit. I walked for some time, past the sun’s height before resting in a warm dale.

The previous night, as I read, my father had corrected me. “Revival. Re-vive,” he said.

“Re-vive,” I repeated. “Revive. Sorry.”

“That’s OK,” he said.

I read on before asking, “Why haven’t you corrected me before? I must have read this piece more than one hundred times, always pronounced wrong.”

“Never occurred to me,” he said, sipping tea.

“Did you teach me to read?”

“Your mum did.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said.

“And you don’t remember Danceland either.”

“I know. Remind me why.”

“A high fever. Higher than natural. It changed your mind and took away your memory.”

Dad was right about my mind. Some days it was so dense, so pressurized, so filled up with loud nothing. I wished things would come clear, but I was so lost for what was real. I wouldn’t know it if I saw it.

My mother’s name was Carolyn Brody Taylor. Her legs were made of coils. Her arms were made of sand through an hourglass. Her fingers were made of dust that floats in the sunbeams. These were things I’d learned about Mum from reading.

Arabesque. Pirouette. Cambré.

I would have liked to dance, to energetically shake free of the pressure, but my legs wobbled. I was as inelegant as the song birds drunk on poison berries, flying into the time-warped glass. No, dancing was not something my mother had taught me, unless the fever took that too.

Any other day I would have turned back: to peel the vegetables, to change into clothes of my own, to care for Nosey quivering on the rug, but that day the force was strong. I was like air behind a cork. I continued on, past the burnt-down homes of Danceland, their stone foundations breaking down. Up the climbs and down the trails. Whoever lived here must have loved my mum.

Dad was a tree trimmer. He worked the odd job. No one in town knew him personally. He bought donuts from the machine in the airport lobby. He trash picked. He had a gentle and remorseful manner. He came and went.