"Let"s kick-start this party with a blast from the past, a rock n roll relic from the grooveyard of cool, a golden ga.s.ser, a platter that matters, move your feet to the real gone beat of Danny . . . and the JOOONIERS!"
"At the Hop" nuked the gym. The dance started as most of them do in the early sixties, just the girls jitterbugging with the girls. Feet in penny loafers flew. Petticoats swirled. After awhile, though, the floor started to fill up with boy-girl couples . . . for the fast dances, at least, more current stuff like "Hit the Road Jack" and "Quarter to Three."
Not many of the kids would have made the cut on Dancing with the Stars, but they were young and enthusiastic and obviously having a ball. It made me happy to see them. Later, if Donny B. didn"t have the good sense to lower the lights a bit, I"d do it myself. Sadie was nervous at first, ready for trouble, but these kids had just come to have fun. There were no invading hordes from Henderson or any other school. She saw that and began to loosen up a little.
After about forty minutes of nonstop music (and four red velvet cupcakes), I leaned toward Sadie and said, "Time for Warden Amberson to do his first circuit of the building and make sure no one in the exercise yard is engaging in inappropriate behavior."
"Do you want me to come with you?"
"I want you to keep an eye on the punch bowl. If any young man approaches it with a bottle of anything, even cough syrup, I want you to threaten him with electrocution or castration, whichever you think might be more effective."
She leaned back against the wall and laughed until tears sparkled in the corners of her eyes. "Get out of here, George, you"re awful."
I went. I was glad I"d made her laugh, but even after three years, it was easy to forget how much more effect s.e.xually tinged jokes have in the Land of Ago.
I caught a couple making out in one of the more shadowy nooks on the east side of the gym-he prospecting inside her sweater, she apparently trying to suck his lips off. When I tapped the young prospector on the shoulder, they leaped apart. "Save it for The Bluffs after the dance," I said. "For now, go on back to the gym. Walk slow. Cool off. Get some punch."
They went, she b.u.t.toning her sweater, he walking slightly bent over in that well-known male adolescent gait known as the Blue-b.a.l.l.s Scuttle.
Two dozen red fireflies winked from behind the metal shop. I waved and a couple of the kids in the smoking area waved back. I poked my head around the east corner of the woodshop and saw something I didn"t like. Mike Coslaw, Jim LaDue, and Vince Knowles were huddled there, pa.s.sing something back and forth. I grabbed it and heaved it over the chain-link fence before they even knew I was there.
Jim looked momentarily startled, then gave me his lazy football-hero smile. "h.e.l.lo to you too, Mr. A."
"Spare me, Jim. I"m not some girl you"re trying to charm out of her panties, and I"m most a.s.suredly not your coach."
He looked shocked and a little scared, but I saw no offended sense of ent.i.tlement in his face. I think that if this had been one of the big Dallas schools, there might have been. Vince had backed away a step. Mike stood his ground, but looked downcast and embarra.s.sed. No, it was more than embarra.s.sment. It was outright shame.
"A bottle at a record-hop," I said. "It"s not that I expect you to stick to all the rules, but why would you be so stupid when it comes to violating them? Jimmy, you get caught drinking and kicked off the football team, what happens to your "Bama scholarship?"
"Prob"ly get red-shirted, I guess," he said. "That"s all."
"Right, and sit out a year. Actually have to make grades. Same with you, Mike. And you"d get kicked out of the Drama Club. Do you want that?"
"Nosir." Hardly more than a whisper.
"Do you, Vince?"
"No, huh-uh, Mr. A. Absolutely nitzy. Are we still gonna do the jury one? Because if we are-"
"Don"t you know enough to shut up when a teacher"s scolding you?"
"Yessir, Mr. A."
"You boys don"t get a pa.s.s from me next time, but this is your lucky night. What you get tonight is a valuable piece of advice: Do not f.u.c.k up your futures. Not over a pint of Five Star at a school dance you won"t even remember a year from now. Do you understand that?"
"Yessir," Mike said. "I"m sorry."
"Me, too," Vince said. "Absolutely." And crossed himself, grinning. Some of them are just built that way. And maybe the world needs a cadre of smarta.s.ses to liven things up, who knows?
"Jim?"
"Yessir," he said. "Please don"t tell my daddy."
"No, this is between us." I looked them over. "You boys will find plenty of places to drink next year at college. But not at our school. You hear me?"
This time they all said yessir.
"Now go back inside. Drink some punch and rinse the smell of whiskey off your breath."
They went. I gave them time, then followed at a distance, head down, hands stuffed deep in pockets, thinking hard. Not at our school, I had said. Ours.
Come and teach, Mimi had said. That"s what you were meant to do.
2011 had never seemed more distant than it did then. h.e.l.l, Jake Epping had never seemed so distant. A growling tenor sax was blowing in a party-lit gym deep in the heart of Texas. A sweet breeze carried it across the night. A drummer was laying down an insidious off-your-seat-and-on-your-feet shuffle.
I think that"s when I decided I was never going back.
6.
The growling sax and hoochie-coochie drummer were backing a group called The Diamonds. The song was "The Stroll." The kids weren"t doing that dance, though. Not quite.
The Stroll was the first step Christy and I learned when we started going to Thursday-night dance cla.s.ses. It"s a two-by-two dance, a kind of icebreaker where each couple jives down an aisle of clapping guys and girls. What I saw when I came back into the gym was different. Here the boys and the girls came together, turned in each other"s arms as if waltzing, then separated again, ending up across from where they had begun. When they were apart, their feet went back on their heels and their hips swayed forward, a move that was both charming and s.e.xy.
As I watched from beside the snack table, Mike, Jim, and Vince joined the guys" side. Vince didn"t have much-to say he danced like a white boy would be an insult to white boys everywhere-but Jim and Mike moved like the athletes they were, which is to say with unconscious grace. Pretty soon most of the girls on the other side were watching them.
"I was starting to worry about you!" Sadie shouted over the music. "Is everything all right out there?"
"Fine!" I shouted back. "What"s that dance?"
"The Madison! They"ve been doing it on Bandstand all month! Want me to teach you?"
"Lady," I said, taking her by the arm, "I"m going to teach you."
The kids saw us coming and made room, clapping and shouting "Way to go, Mr. A!" and "Show him how you work, Miz Dunhill!" Sadie laughed and tightened the elastic holding her ponytail. Color mounted high in her cheeks, making her more than pretty. She got back on her heels, clapping her hands and shaking her shoulders with the other girls, then came forward into my arms, her eyes turned up to mine. I was glad I was tall enough for her to do that. We turned like a wind-up bride and groom on a wedding cake, then came apart. I dipped low and spun on my toes with my hands held out like Al Jolson singing "Mammy." This brought more applause and some pre-Beatles shrieks from the girls. I wasn"t showing off (okay, maybe a little); mostly I was just happy to be dancing. It had been too long.
The song ended, the growling sax fading off into that rock n roll eternity our young DJ was pleased to call the grooveyard, and we started to walk off the floor.
"G.o.d, that was fun," she said. She took my arm and squeezed it. "You"re fun."
Before I could answer, Donald blared out through the PA. "In honor of two chaperones who can actually dance-a first in the history of our school-here"s a blast from the past, gone from the charts but not from our hearts, a platter that matters, straight from my own daddy-o"s record collection, which he doesn"t know I brought and if any of you cool cats tell him, I"m in trouble. Dig it, all you steady rockers, this is how they did it when Mr. A. and Miz D. were in high school!"
They all turned to look at us, and . . . well . . .
You know how, when you"re out at night and you see the edge of a cloud light up a bright gold, you know the moon is going to come out in a second or two? That was the feeling I had right then, standing among the gently swaying crepe streamers in the Denholm gymnasium. I knew what he was going to play, I knew we were going to dance to it, and I knew how we were going to dance. Then it came, that smooth bra.s.s intro: Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . .
Glenn Miller. "In the Mood."
Sadie reached behind her and pulled the elastic, releasing the ponytail. She was still laughing and beginning to hip-sway just a little bit. Her hair slipped smoothly from one shoulder to the other.
"Can you swing?" Raising my voice to be heard over the music. Knowing she could. Knowing she would.
"Do you mean like the Lindy Hop?" she asked.
"That"s what I mean."
"Well . . ."
"Go, Miz Dunhill," one of the girls said. "We want to see it." And two of her friends pushed Sadie toward me.
She hesitated. I did another spin and held out my hands. The kids cheered as we moved out on the floor. They gave us room. I pulled her toward me, and after the smallest of hesitations, she spun first to the left and then to the right, the A-line of the jumper she was wearing giving her just enough room to cross her feet as she went. It was the Lindy variation Richie-from-the-ditchie and Bevvie-from-the-levee had been learning that day in the fall of 1958. It was the h.e.l.lzapoppin. Of course it was. Because the past harmonizes.
I brought her to me by our clasped hands, then let her go back. We separated. Then, like people who had practiced these moves for months (possibly to a slowed-down record in a deserted picnic area), we bent and kicked, first to the left and then to the right. The kids laughed and cheered. They had formed a clapping circle around us in the middle of the polished floor.
We came together and she twirled like a hopped-up ballerina beneath our linked hands.
Now you squeeze to tell me left or right.
The light squeeze came on my right hand, as if the thought had summoned it, and she whirled back like a propeller, her hair flying out in a fan that gleamed first red, then blue in the lights. I heard several girls gasp. I caught her and went down on one heel with her bent over my arm, hoping like h.e.l.l that I wouldn"t pop my knee. I didn"t.
I came up. She came with me. She went out, then came back into my arms. We danced under the lights.
Dancing is life.
7.
The hop ended at eleven, but I didn"t turn the Sunliner into Sadie"s driveway until quarter past midnight on Sunday morning. One of the things n.o.body tells you about the glamorous job of chaperoning teenage dances is that the shaps are the ones who have to make sure everything"s picked up and locked away once the music ends.
Neither of us said much on the way back. Although Donald played several other tempting big-band jump tunes and the kids pestered us to swing-dance again, we declined. Once was memorable; twice would have been indelible. Maybe not such a good thing in a small town. For me, it already was indelible. I couldn"t stop thinking about the feel of her in my arms or her quick breath on my face.
I cut the engine and turned to her. Now she"ll say "Thank you for bailing me out" or "Thanks for a lovely evening," and that"ll be that.
But she didn"t say either of those things. She didn"t say anything. She just looked at me. Hair on her shoulders. Top two b.u.t.tons of the man"s Oxford-cloth shirt beneath the jumper undone. Earrings gleaming. Then we were together, first fumbling, then holding on tight. It was kissing, but it was more than kissing. It was like eating when you"ve been hungry or drinking when you"ve been thirsty. I could smell her perfume and her clean sweat under the perfume and I could taste tobacco, faint but still pungent, on her lips and tongue. Her fingers slipped through my hair (one pinky tickling for just a moment in the cup of my ear and making me shiver), then locked at the back of my neck. Her thumbs were moving, moving. Stroking bare skin at the nape that once, in another life, would have been covered by hair. I slipped my hand first beneath and then around the fullness of her breast and she murmured, "Oh, thank you, I thought I was going to fall."
"My pleasure," I said, and squeezed gently.
We necked for maybe five minutes, breathing harder as the caresses grew bolder. The windshield of my Ford steamed up. Then she pushed me away and I saw her cheeks were wet. When in G.o.d"s name had she started to cry?
"George, I"m sorry," she said. "I can"t. I"m too scared." Her jumper was in her lap, revealing her garters, the hem of her slip, the lacy froth of her panties. She pulled the skirt down to her knees.
I guessed it was being married, and even if the marriage was busted, it still mattered-this was the mid-twentieth century, not the early twenty-first. Or maybe it was the neighbors. The houses looked dark and fast asleep, but you couldn"t tell for sure, and in small towns, new preachers and new teachers are always interesting topics of conversation. It turned out I was wrong on both counts, but there was no way I could have known.
"Sadie, you don"t have to do anything you don"t want to. I"m not-"
"You don"t understand. It"s not that I don"t want to. That"s not why I"m scared. It"s because I never have."
Before I could say anything else, she was out of the car and running for the house, fumbling in her purse for her key. She didn"t look back.
8.
I got home at twenty to one, walking from the garage to the house in my own version of the Blue-b.a.l.l.s Scuttle. I had no more than turned on the kitchen light when the phone began to ring. 1961 is forty years from caller ID, but only one person would be calling me at such an hour, and after such a night.
"George? It"s me." She sounded composed, but her voice was thick. She had been crying. And hard, from the sound.
"Hi, Sadie. You never gave me a chance to thank you for a lovely time. During the dance, and after."
"I had a good time, too. It"s been so long since I danced. I"m almost afraid to tell you who I learned to Lindy with."
"Well," I said, "I learned with my ex-wife. I"m guessing you might have learned with your estranged husband." Except it wasn"t a guess; it was how these things went. I was no longer surprised by it, but if I told you I ever got used to that eerie chiming of events, I"d be lying.
"Yes." Her tone was flat. "Him. John Clayton of the Savannah Claytons. And estranged is just the right word, because he"s a very strange man."
"How long have you been married?"
"Forever and a day. If you want to call what we had a marriage, that is." She laughed. It was Ivy Templeton"s laugh, full of humor and despair. "In my case, forever and a day adds up to a little over four years. After school lets out in June, I"m going to make a discreet trip to Reno. I"ll get a summer job as a waitress or something. The residency requirement is six weeks. Which means in late July or early August I"ll be able to shoot this . . . this joke I got myself into . . . like a horse with a broken leg."
"I can wait," I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wondered if they were true. Because the actors were gathering in the wings and the show would soon start. By June of "62, Lee Oswald would be back in the USA, living first with Robert and Robert"s family, then with his mother. By August he"d be on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth and working at the nearby Leslie Welding Company, putting together aluminum windows and the kind of storm doors that have initials worked into them.
"I"m not sure I can." She spoke in a voice so low I had to strain to hear her. "I was a virgin bride at twenty-three and now I"m a virgin gra.s.s widow at twenty-eight. That"s a long time for the fruit to hang on the tree, as they say back where I come from, especially when people-your own mother, for one-a.s.sume you started getting your practical experience on all that birds-and-bees stuff four years ago. I"ve never told anyone that, and if you repeated it, I think I"d die."
"It"s between us, Sadie. And always will be. Was he impotent?"
"Not exact-" She broke off. There was silence for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was full of horror. "George . . . is this a party line?"
"No. For an extra three-fifty a month, this baby is all mine."