To Dance Again - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2001 by Kate Blackwell

It was spring again and nothing had changed, except that Carolyn had put on more weight. The extra flesh padded her thighs with a soft silkiness and her upper arms felt pillowy where they touched her breasts, as though she wore a life jacket that was permanently attached. Sometimes when she walked she had the feeling of floating, though she wasn't really that huge--a size sixteen the last time she stopped at Razook's and the saleswoman showed her a purple muumuu and praised her "mature figure." But her face was still hers. There, in the blue eyes and ever-so-slightly tipped nose and petal-like lips, she could discover traces of the girl who had been her college's May Queen twenty years ago and danced barefoot on the grass with her court, slender pretty girls all laughing and glancing brightly at the crowd of onlookers, fathers and mothers and boyfriends riotously applauding.

The extra weight made dancing less desirable now, even if there had been the opportunity. In all ways, she seemed to move more slowly through her days, which was why, this morning, the yardman caught her still sitting at the breakfast table in her yellow robe. He was a county boy named Alan Turner who had worked for her the summer before. She had looked forward to his coming back in spring.

"Didn' scare you, did I, Miz Martin?"

He stretched one arm up and propped it against the doorjamb. He was lean-limbed and narrow-hipped. A Confederate flag bandanna held back his long mud-colored hair.

"Well, yes, you did a little, Alan." She smiled and peeped at the bright fur in his arm pit.

"You didn' hear the truck?"

"I didn't hear a thing." A lie: His truck would wake the dead. "Don't tell me it's time to mow already."

"Nope," he said. "Time to seed."

They both turned and looked out the window at her large troublesome lawn, a broad pine-studded swathe of patchy grass straggling down to a small lake. The lake was communally owned by the residents of Wilde Woode Estates, an exclusive development of a dozen houses out in the middle of nowhere in piney sandy eastern North Carolina. All the houses had enormous yards, but it was hard to grow grass in any of them. Only bushes and weeds did well, though Alan had tried. Azaleas ran along two sides of the yard, their leaves still dark, no hint of the pink and scarlet glory to come. Little crowds of daffodils bloomed against the fence and, down near the lake, the forsythia had produced the first of its sunny yellow fronds.

"Everything seems to be coming out early this year," she said. "Or is it just me?"

"It's that warm winter we had. Dogwood and redbud gonna pop at the same time. You don't see that too often."

He pronounced the word "of-ten," the way county people did. Alan lived in a community called Sandspur, a collection of small houses and trailer homes hugging the road halfway between Wilde Woode and the town of Carthage. She had driven past those houses a million times without dreaming they actually had a name until Alan mentioned it last summer: Sandspur. One of the houses, a blue frame, sported a sign, "Sharon's Beauty Saloon," that made her smile every time she passed it. It wasn't Alan's; he lived in a trailer and his wife's name was Melody.

"There're some worn spots down by the fence," she said, thinking of Melody but not wanting to ask about her yet. Melody drove Alan crazy with her smoking and other self-destructive habits.

"I seen 'em," he said, meaning the grassless spots. "I'm gonna start down there. I'll stake off the places where I have to seed so nobody'll walk on 'em."

"Oh, don't bother staking. Nobody walks out here but me."

She gave a little laugh. It wasn't a convivial neighborhood. Everybody residing in Wilde Woode, except her, left every morning to go to work in Carthage or else stayed home behind closed drapes all day. Even on weekends she rarely saw neighbors out in their yards. It was a lonely existence for someone used to living in town with friends running in and out and a hectic schedule of club meetings, PTA, and church events, most of which she had had to drop since they moved out here, though maybe had to was too strong; she just had. Her husband, John, the one who said he wanted a little peace and quiet when he came home, was hardly ever at home. And their children seemed to her to have evaporated overnight. Her son was at Carolina now and her daughter, a high school junior, was off in the Richmond girls' school Carolyn herself had attended.

"Well, I guess I'd better get dressed," she said, glancing down at her large ruffled front. She wished Alan would go on out in the yard before she had to stand up, though perhaps it was vain of her to think he would notice how much heavier she had become. But Alan didn't show signs of going outside yet. He was digging something out of the pocket of his jeans.

"You remember that project we talked about last summer, Miz Martin? Have you given any more thought to that?" He spread a wrinkled sheet of paper on the ruble in front of her. "I drew a picture of one you might like."