Dancing on the Edge Read online

  It used to be, before Dane melted, that whenever I saw myself, it was a surprise, a shock. I had spent so many hours studying Mama’s face in the picture Dane had on his writing desk that I expected to see her looking back at me in the mirror. I expected her freckles and brown, almond-shaped eyes, but my eyes were round and blue, and my face long and Elmer’s-Glue white, not one freckle. Mine was the pale, blank stare of a stranger. But now when I looked in the mirror, there was a new surprise, a new expectation, and it scared me more than anything. Because now, I didn’t expect to see my reflection at all.

  Chapter 3

  AUNT CASEY cut my hair in the bathroom.

  “You sit right there on the toilet,” she said. “You’re getting so tall I can’t have you standing anymore. Anyway, I do some of my best work on the toilet.”

  “You sound like Uncle Toole,” I said, sitting on the seat with my back to her.

  “That just shows you, don’t many a man unless you like the way he talks. Now, how are we going to cut your hair? How about bangs? You like bangs?”

  “I want Dane’s haircut,” I said.

  Aunt Casey leaned way over to get a look at my face. “That’s a man’s haircut, sugar.”

  “I know.” I hung my head forward, staring into my lap. Dane wore his hair short, almost buzzed. He said it drove him crazy to feel hair on his neck or creeping down over his ears or on his forehead. Lately, mine had been driving me crazy, too. I was always feeling it on my shoulders or tickling my cheek. I found myself pulling at it in school when I was working or thinking or trying to fall off to sleep at night. I didn’t want to feel it anymore. I didn’t want to know it was there.

  “Please could I have Dane’s haircut, anyway?” I said, twisting my neck to see her.

  Aunt Casey sighed and straightened back up. She sprayed my hair wet, combed it out, and started cutting.

  “Look at you, wearing that ratty old bathrobe of his,” she said, straightening my head. “Gigi says you’ve been wearing it every day. Ever since he melted. Said you’re even wearing it to school. You must miss Dane awful, huh?”

  I shrugged and played with the tie on the bathrobe. “He’s my daddy,” I said, hoping Aunt Casey couldn’t tell, standing behind me, how much I really missed him. I didn’t need her making fun of me.

  Before Dane melted, I used to spend every day after school with him, down in his room. He called his room “The Cave,” and it was long and narrow with walls made of stone. He used the candle bottles to light the room, and they flickered and cast shadows on the walls so that even in our own silence and stillness we had movement, we had something going on.

  Most of the time Dane sat at his writing desk and either stared at his computer, occasionally tapping out words on his keyboard, or he read. I sat on his bed with my homework in my lap, taking my time with each subject so that I’d have a reason to stay down there with him.

  Sometimes he’d say, “Listen to this,” and he’d stand up and pace and read me a part of the story he was writing, the candle lights leaning and straining on the breath of his movement as he passed. I never understood what he read to me, and sometimes he didn’t seem to be reading words at all, just sounds. Still, I listened and watched him pace from one end of the room to the other, six steps each direction, six, the number for creation, and I felt full and happy and complete.

  Now, whenever I went down to the cave, I felt lost—sitting alone on his bed, listening for him, waiting, asking the floor, the walls, the candle bottles to let him come back. I didn’t know how to bring him back. I didn’t even know how to think about his melting. Should I cry? Gigi didn’t cry. He didn’t die, so we didn’t have a funeral. We couldn’t go looking for him, either. Where do you look for a melted person?

  I thought about the candle bottles and how when his work was going really well, or he’d just sent his manuscript off to his editor, he would invite me into his cave for the candle bottle lighting ceremony. We’d set up all the bottles in different patterns on the floor of his room. Then we’d light the candles and sit together on his bed and watch them, and Dane would describe to me the really big celebration we’d have when he sold his new book. And I could see it all. Through the flames of the candle bottles, I could see the magic that shimmered in the room and spiced the air, the kind of magic that gets you believing in miracles.

  AUNT CASEY CUT MY HAIR just like Dane’s, swearing that Gigi would kill the both of us, but Gigi liked it. She said short hair looked very stylish and chic.

  “We should have had your hair cut like that long ago,” she said to me in the car on our way to Grandaddy Opal’s home just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. “It sets you apart. It makes a statement. It says to the world, ‘Look out, ’cause Miracle McCloy is on her way.’ It was the same with your daddy. He had that special something. I knew it from the day he was born, but your grandaddy didn’t believe it, not a bit. He said, ‘Dane needs to learn a trade, needs to learn how to work with his hands and work hard.’” She said this with a gruff man’s voice, imitating Grandaddy Opal. Gigi divorced him because of Dane.

  “If it weren’t for me, your daddy would have been working at a sawmill or something. But that nice Mrs. Lundy let us use her little beach house. Right on the water it was, too. I helped her contact her dead brother, Albert, you know. Some people know how to show their gratitude. I bought Dane a typewriter and fixed him tuna and tomato sandwiches and made sure no one bothered him so he could just write and write and write. But did he ever thank me?”

  I glanced over at Gigi. She was gripping the steering wheel and making faces as if she were having a conversation in her head with somebody. I figured she was going back over the argument she and Dane had had just a few days before he melted. Anytime Dane got upset about his work not going well, the two of them ended up in a big fight. I could always see it coming. First, there’d be several days when he wouldn’t have any work to read to me, then he’d start swearing at his computer, and finally he’d tell me to “run on along” because he needed to be alone. I hated it when he’d tell me to leave because I knew if I had worked it right, steered him away from his worries, he’d be back to writing, and he and Gigi wouldn’t end up saying hurtful words to each other, words that scared me.

  Sometimes I’d get him to read me his favorite story by a man named Kafka. I could never remember the name of it so I’d say to him, “Read me that story about the man who turned into a cockroach.” If I could convince him to read it, in no time he’d be back to thinking about his own story, and I could stay down in the cave with him, and he and Gigi wouldn’t have their fight.

  In their last argument, Dane blamed Gigi for messing up his life, which he did every time they fought. Then he said that Opal should have been the one raising me. He said if I were with Opal, I would have turned out normal, and that Gigi wasn’t fit to raise a child and never had been.

  I could tell by the way Gigi’s mouth twisted down that he had hurt her to the core. She couldn’t even think up a good comeback. She waited until he left the room before she said, “I must have done something right, Mr. Prodigy.”

  Gigi turned off the highway onto a road of fast-food restaurants and we poked along, stopping every minute at the red lights.

  I leaned my head against the car window and tried to forget about Dane. I thought about Aunt Casey standing outside our house that morning, crying and waving good-bye. I hadn’t expected her to carry on so about our leaving, and watching her gave me the uncomfortable feeling that she knew something about the move I didn’t know. Her mascara and eyeliner streamed down her cheeks because she was allergic to everything waterproof, so there she stood, in a puddle of colors that had run off her face, waving a piece of toilet tissue and saying she’d visit when she could. I waved back and slunk down in my seat so that just my eyes were high enough to see out the window. I watched her dabbing at her eyes with the tissue and waving at us again. Then Gigi turned left out of the driveway and Aunt Casey was gone. It left me with a funny feelin
g, seeing her one second standing on the stoop waving, and the next second, without moving my eyes from her, seeing instead the bushes that ran along the edge of our property. I wondered if she was still there, or if she had disappeared. Maybe people existed only as long as you were seeing them, only as long as your mind could conjure them up. Maybe I existed only as long as someone was looking at me, or thinking about me. The rest of the time where was I? Who was I? I stared down at the dirty bits of bubble gum stuck to my fingers. I picked at the old gum and wondered, What happens to a person when no one’s thinking about her anymore?

  “Yes, I devoted my life to him. I made him what he is today,” Gigi said, jumping back into my thoughts.

  I looked over at her and saw her eyes watering and blinking.

  “Now that Dane’s melted, Gigi,” I said, “where do you suppose he is?”

  Gigi leaned forward, her large chest mashed against the steering wheel, and snatched a piece of toilet tissue out of the ashtray. She blew her nose and tossed the tissue onto the floor of the van. “Dane’s where he’s supposed to be, sugar pie. That’s what it’s all about, figuring where you ought to be and who you ought to be and then going and doing it.”

  “But where does melting take you? What place?”

  “Oh, some other place, some other time,” Gigi said, her right hand fiddling with the crystal she had hanging around her neck. “Wish I could tell you more, but that’s the way melting works. It’s a vague kind of thing, one of those mysteries of life scientists and spiritualists and other ists are always trying to figure out.”

  “Oh,” I said, turning back to the window. I noticed people waving and smiling in the next car over, and I slid down in my seat. Anytime we left town in our van people stared or honked or pointed and waved—something. Gigi’s van was a sight to behold. The outside had been painted a deep purple, of course—the most spiritual color—and on it were crystal balls and Ouija boards and tarot cards and hands and stars and a giant Egyptian-looking eye and the words “OPEN YOUR MIND AND TRAVEL BEYOND THE UNIVERSE!”

  We turned into Grandaddy Opal’s driveway, and I sat up straight, chewing on my lower lip. I didn’t think moving in with Grandaddy Opal was such a good idea. I overheard Uncle Toole saying only someone as crazy as Gigi would go back and live with her ex-husband after fifteen years. Then Aunt Casey said they weren’t going to be living as husband and wife. “Why, they don’t even like each other,” she said. “Haven’t spoken to each other except lately, to say she needed to stay at his house awhile until she got back on her feet. But where else could she go? They were only renting that house of theirs, and the landlord told Gigi he’d read the article in the paper and he couldn’t have people like her renting his house anymore. Anyway, it’s just going to be a kind of arrangement.” And she emphasized the word making it sound like she meant to say derangement.

  All I knew was that I didn’t want to be there. Grandaddy Opal’s name always came up in Gigi and Dane’s fights, and so did mine, and they never sounded good together, my name and his—linked together when we didn’t even know each other. Their angry words had always scared me, and I had the feeling now that Gigi planned to leave me there alone with him and go away.

  Gigi got out of the car and said, “If you’re waiting for Opal to come out and welcome us, you’ll be sitting there forever. Now come on, we’ll leave the U-Haul for now and just bring along our suitcases.”

  I waited until I saw Gigi lift her suitcase out of the back before climbing out of the van. Then I grabbed my bag and turned around to face Grandaddy Opal’s house. It was small and squat and sat crowded in a neighborhood of other small, squat houses. Back where we used to live we didn’t have neighbors, just fields and ponds. It was more conducive to Dane’s work, Gigi had said. Gigi called Grandaddy Opal’s house a bungalow. The shutters were all crooked, the way they are on haunted houses, and the porch slanted downhill so much I imagined people spilling out of the house, picking up momentum on the porch, and tumbling off the edge, missing the stairs completely.

  I followed Gigi up the porch hill and into the house. As run-down as the outside was, the inside was tidy and white and smelled of new paint. Our house at home always smelled of Gigi’s incense: of flowers and wet wood.

  “We’ve got four rooms,” Gigi said, setting her suitcases on the wood floor and spinning around, first right, then left, to ward off evil spirits. “This is the great room—living room, dining room, and whatever else—Opal doesn’t use it.” She took a bottle of rose water with a drop of liquid gold out of her pocket and poured some into her hands. Then she sprinkled it on the floor and furniture—for good luck and prosperity.

  It was a large room. She had to use two handfuls of the rose water to charm the whole room. Grandaddy Opal had furnished it with a sectional sofa, an orange La-Z-Boy, and to one side a table and chair set. A double stack of National Geographics rising clear up to the ceiling stood next to the La-Z-Boy. They wobbled and threatened to topple over when we walked across the room.

  “Then here . . .” She wandered out of the great room and I followed her. “This galley is the kitchen. Opal doesn’t use this room much, either.” Gigi did her spinning and sprinkling ritual again.

  I followed her from the kitchen to the hallway. I could hear TV voices coming from behind the first closed door. “Opal’s,” Gigi said, rapping her knuckle on the closed door.

  “Pipe down out there!” Grandaddy Opal growled.

  “Bathroom,” Gigi said, tapping the door on her other side. “And here”—she pushed open the last door—“is our room.”

  I took it all in at a glance. White walls, two cots, and a table between them. I dropped my suitcase, spun around left then right, and ran to the little table. “Look! A TV!” I said. In all my ten and a half years of living I had never seen a television show. Dane said he didn’t believe in television. I remember once Aunt Casey dragged him into her and Uncle Toole’s bedroom, pointed at their TV set, and said, “See? Now you can’t say you don’t believe in TV. It exists, there it is. It’s not like believing or not believing in God. You have to say you either accept TV or don’t accept it; it’s not a belief system, you know. And you call yourself a prodigy.”

  She acted real proud of that one. She always tried to catch Dane, trip him up somehow and make him look stupid. I believe the TV proof idea was one of her finest, because Dane stayed in a sulk all night long, and we had to go home early because he said his teeth hurt.

  I switched our little set on and a gray-white light came up on the screen, nothing else, no sound, no picture.

  “It’s broken,” I said to Gigi.

  “It figures,” she said.

  WE’D BEEN IN Grandaddy Opal’s house for a whole week and I still hadn’t seen him. Then one night I heard him get up to go to the bathroom and I climbed out of my cot and waited in the doorway for him to come back out. I heard the toilet flush and the water run in the sink and my heart raced. Then the door opened and he jumped out in front of me like an ape springing down from a tree and shouted, “Boo!” I squealed and slammed the door in his hairy face.

  I didn’t see him to speak to until one day almost a week later when Gigi left me at the house while she went looking for a real job. Ever since Dane melted, she hadn’t used the Ouija board, and since moving to Grandaddy Opal’s, she hadn’t contacted any dead spirits whatsoever. I learned later that that had been the arrangement she and Grandaddy Opal had made. She would keep all her hocus-pocus outside of the house, and he would mind his own business and keep out of our way. Gigi didn’t want him trying to turn me into a carpenter the way he had tried with Dane.

  The day Gigi went looking for a job, I went exploring, looking through the drawers in the kitchen for the key to the basement door. That’s where we had stored all of Dane’s things. I had thought maybe I could set up a room down there, like Dane’s old room, and light candle bottles and think about him, remember him. Already when I closed my eyes and tried to bring an image of him to my min
d, I couldn’t. I couldn’t see him anymore, and I couldn’t hear his voice. I thought being back in his room might help.

  At last I found the key and I got so excited, I jammed it in the keyhole, flung open the door, and stepped so far out I missed the first step and fell down the others.

  I landed with my head and shoulders on the last step and the rest of my body on the floor. A light came on and I heard Grandaddy Opal’s voice shouting at me from above.

  “What you doing down there?”

  I sat up and my neck felt twisted funny. Blood ran down my left elbow.

  “I fell,” I said, staring at the blood.

  “Well, be quiet about it.”

  “I didn’t say anything.” I struggled to stand. My left ankle felt like my neck, achy and twisted around.

  “You were screaming all the way down,” he said.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Were too.”

  “Was not.”

  “You calling me a liar, child? You come on up here and let me have a look at you.”

  I climbed the stairs, going easy on my left ankle. Grandaddy Opal backed up into the main room and squinted down at me.

  “She said you was a girl.”

  “I am a girl,” I said.

  “No, you ain’t.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Are not.”

  “Are too.”

  Then he walked around me, slowly, like he was examining a sculpture in a museum.

  “You’re just like a pixie girl, ain’t you? Why you wearing your hair all chopped up that way?” He picked up the bathrobe sash dangling from the loopholes around my waist and said, “No wonder you fell. What you dragging around in this old bathrobe for?”

  “Gigi says I’m special,” I said, using the same defense I used in school whenever I came under attack and couldn’t think up anything better.

  Grandaddy Opal moved his face right up to mine and said, “Don’t you believe it, girlie. Don’t you believe anything Gigi says.” He straightened up. “Why, you’re as common as a housefly.” He wagged his head. “What’s so special about you?”