Dancing on the Edge Read online

  “I was born from the body of a dead woman,” I said, holding my chin up, daring him to say that wasn’t special.

  “Were not.”

  “Were too. My mama was hit and killed by an ambulance rushing to the scene of an accident. She was dead when they cut her open and pulled me out.”

  “Impossible,” he said, shaking his shaggy head.

  “No, it’s not.” I shifted my weight to my good ankle.

  “Is too.”

  “Is not.”

  “Child, if your mama was dead when you were born, then you was never born. It’s as plain as plain as that.”

  He said it, and I knew it was so.

  Chapter 4

  GRANDADDY OPAL’S WORDS played inside my head all the time, working their magic on me like one of Gigi’s incantations. I even heard them in my sleep, in my dreams. If your mama was dead when you were born, then you was never born. I’d wake from my dreams and I’d be shivering and sweating at the same time. I’d look across the room at Gigi and watch her chest rising and falling, and I’d wait for my heart to stop racing. I’d try to push the memory of those words, dark and threatening in my dreams, out of my mind.

  Sometimes I’d see Gigi twitch in her sleep or smack her lips or roll over mumbling something and I’d know she was dreaming. I’d rise up on my elbow and study her, the strips of light and dark that lay across her body transforming her into some other being. She’d be bald and her chin would be missing. I’d see only her nose and her mouth. Her forehead, spotlighted by the streetlight that slipped between the window blinds, always looked white and huge. Behind it was where the dreams came from. That’s what she said. I asked her about dreams one morning while she was putting on her makeup. I asked, “Are dreams real? Are they real life?”

  She said, “Dreams are sending us messages. You understand, baby?”

  “No,” I said.

  She turned to face me, one eye wearing false eyelashes and the other looking bald, blind. “Well, it’s like this,” she said. “Things go on during the day and it’s just a lot of this and that happening. Then we go to sleep and our minds dig through all the stuff that’s happened to us, even pulling out old stuff that happened long ago, and scrambles them into a dream.”

  She turned back to her mirror and, with her mouth wide open, applied the other row of lashes to her bald eyelid. Her ritual of applying makeup could take all morning. She used it to hide things, her age, her missing lashes, her unshapely brows and thin lips, whereas Aunt Casey wore makeup to enhance what was already there. This, I decided, was the main difference between the two of them, and back then I prefered Gigi’s more flashy and exotic look. She finished applying her lashes and returned to the dreams.

  “Now, if you think about your dreams and figure them out right, then you discover that they are giving you answers. They’re giving you the truth about what’s going on.”

  “But what about bad dreams?” I asked. “What do they mean?”

  “Oh, bad dreams are warnings, or they’re your fears. Or sometimes"—she looked at me through the mirror—“sometimes they’re a sign of madness.”

  “Madness? Like a crazy person?”

  Gigi nodded and lifted her eyebrow pencil to her brow. “Only cure I know is to hang dried orange peels above your bed and sleep with five cloves under your pillow.”

  “But how do you hang orange peels above your bed?”

  Gigi gave me the instructions and I followed them exactly. I cut an orange into eight triangles, ate the insides, and threaded the triangles by poking a needle through their tips. Then I tied the orange peels to a coat hanger, screwed a hanging plant hook I’d found in one of the kitchen drawers into the ceiling above my bed, and hung the dangling orange peels on it. I slipped the cloves under my pillow and went to sleep. I dreamed a shadow was chasing me, trying to run me down. When I awoke, I found my shirt soaked in sweat. I remembered the shadow and I knew the shadow was mine. It was me, unborn, the truth about who I really was, an unborn child who had accidentally slipped out of place—a mistake. That’s what I knew: I wasn’t real, and this thought scared me so much I wanted to jump out of bed and run away somewhere. I wanted to run away from my own dark thoughts. I climbed out of bed and ran to the top of the basement steps. I stared down into the darkness and told myself, “Here’s where I fell. Here’s where I got real bruises and a real cut on my elbow. Grandaddy Opal had come to see. He heard me fall and had come to see if I was all right. Shadows don’t bruise.” Then I remembered what Grandaddy Opal had said about Mama. If your mama was dead when you were born, then you was never born. I changed it, right in my head I changed it, so that Grandaddy Opal said to me, “Welcome to my home, young lady, glad to have you stay.”

  I remembered the fall that way from that night forward, and I stopped having the nightmares.

  I wondered though, why, after such a nice welcome, Grandaddy Opal stayed hidden away in his bedroom. We had been living with him over three months and still I rarely saw him, almost never spoke to him, and I wanted to see him. Something about him reminded me of Dane. I thought I could remember Dane better, hold his memory closer, if I could see Grandaddy Opal again.

  Gigi said I wasn’t missing anything by not seeing him. “Anyway, he’d make you dull witted,” she said, “the way he’s always got to be looking something up in a book. Reading all the time locks up your brain so you’re always thinking one way, and that way is never your own way. You understand me, sugar? It keeps you from perceiving and intuiting things. If you want to know something, you don’t go look it up in a book. You put your question out there, out into the universe, and then you wait, and sure enough the information comes to you. Remember that, baby. You’re better off without the attentions of that old man.”

  I always looked for him, though, hoping to see some hint of Dane in him, wondering what it would be like the next time we met.

  One day the school bus pulled up in front of our house and I got off as usual, but this time Grandaddy was outside planting his vegetable garden. A large maple tree hid him from me and the other children on the bus. When I climbed down the steps to the sidewalk, some of the kids stuck their heads out the windows and shouted at me.

  “Hey, girl, bet you’re naked under that bathrobe.” “Come on, what you got under there?” “Come on, sleepwalker, show us what you got.”

  Grandaddy Opal came jogging around the tree with a trowel in his hand, and he held it up and shook it at the kids hanging out the windows. The bus rolled away and the kids kept shouting, “Show us! Show us! Show us!”

  Grandaddy Opal looked at me. “They doing that every day?”

  I shrugged and looked away.

  “Hey!” Grandaddy Opal tossed down his trowel. “You ever seen an old man walk on his hands before?” I turned back to him and looked up at his craggy face. His hair was white and long, like angel hair, only it stood out from his head as if he spent most of his time standing on his hands.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never seen an old man walking on his hands before.”

  “Well, just look-a here at this.”

  Grandaddy Opal put both hands on the grass, kicked up his legs until they were in the air bent at the knees, and he started walking on his hands. He walked like a mutant duck around the trunk of the maple tree and then waddled back to me, dropped down onto his feet, and stood up. His face had turned red and a large vein had popped out on his forehead.

  “Now how about that?” He grinned, and I noticed he had Dane’s mouth—small, thin lips that hinted at shyness. He had his eyes, too—the shape and the color were exactly the same—only Grandaddy Opal’s eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled and Dane’s eyes looked flat, blank. I couldn’t remember Dane ever really smiling.

  “Hey, girl, you thought I couldn’t walk on my hands, didn’t you?” Grandaddy Opal said, pointing his finger at me. His grin got wider, exposing his brown teeth.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

&n
bsp; “No, I didn’t, and anyways, I can do it, too.”

  “Cannot.”

  “Can too. I do it all the time.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do too. Watch.”

  I tossed my backpack on the ground, tightened the sash of my bathrobe, and kicked up onto my hands.

  “See?”

  “You ain’t walking.”

  I walked around the maple tree and, then instead of coming forward on my feet to stand, I went into a back bend and stood up.

  “Well, look at that! You’re a springy little thing. You take gymnastics?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want gymnastic lessons. I want to learn to dance.”

  “So learn already. What’s stopping you?”

  “I mean really learn, with real lessons and all.”

  “So do it!”

  “Gigi says dancing is a waste of time.”

  “Maybe she don’t know how good you are, huh?”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but I did that day, standing beneath the sun in my grandfather’s yard. I thought how dancing could be my special talent, the one Gigi always said she would discover, my prodigy talent. But how could she discover it if she never watched me dance, if she never let me have lessons?

  “Gigi would be angry if I took lessons,” I said, still going over the new thought in my mind.

  “Is that so?” Grandaddy Opal said, leaning away from me and staring at me as if he’d never seen me before.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe not. You really think you’d be any good?”

  “Sure! If I had lessons I could dance even better than I can do gymnastics.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, that’s so,” I said.

  “We got dance places here.” Grandaddy Opal picked up his trowel and walked back to his garden. I followed him and stood behind him while he dug into the ground. The way he hung his head way down so his neck looked extra long reminded me of the times Dane would sit at his desk with his head bent low over a book, and I wanted to touch him, close my eyes and touch his sun-hot neck, and remember Dane.

  “So how ’bout you taking lessons here?” Grandaddy Opal broke into my thoughts.

  “Well, I don’t know. Gigi wouldn’t want me asking her about things like that.”

  “Hooey!” Grandaddy Opal tore open a packet of seeds and poured some into his dirt-dusted hand. He held them cupped at first, but then his hand started shaking so he had to fold his crooked fingers over them to keep them safe. “Tomorrow you and me’s going to go looking for a dancing school. You like to dance, don’t you?” He peered up at me through the strands of hair floating in front of his face.

  “I love to dance!”

  “All right then,” he said, nodding. “All right, we’ll find you a place.”

  I was so pleased about the idea of taking lessons, I danced around the edges of the garden while Grandaddy Opal huddled over his dirt and planted his seeds, one by one. I imagined myself a famous dancer, a prodigy at thirteen like Dane. I imagined Gigi so so proud of me, whisking me off to the seaside and feeding me tuna and tomato sandwiches, and watching me dance, dance, dance. And Dane would be there, too. I just knew he’d be there to see his great prodigy daughter perform. Maybe that’s what he was waiting for. Maybe he’d come back when I was real, a prodigy.

  I noticed Grandaddy Opal watching me, and I gave him my best arabesque, dipping my torso way down low where I could smell the dirt.

  “Like a little spirit, you are,” he said nodding. Then he went back to his seeds and I kept on dancing, just like a little spirit.

  The next afternoon Grandaddy Opal told me that he’d done some calling around and he’d found a dancing school not more than a half mile from the house. “Cheap enough, too,” he said, scooting along the sidewalk with me tagging after him trying to keep up. Grandaddy Opal walked or biked everywhere. He didn’t own a car. He said he didn’t trust them. “Best way to get anywheres is on your own steam,” he told me. “Them automotives, trains, and planes, all of them can act up on you, even horses will give you a bad turn. No sir, I’ll take walking or riding my Old Sam any day.” So we walked, because I didn’t own a bicycle.

  The dance studio was in a church. It was in the fellowship hall, a big, square room. Folding chairs had been stacked on one side, and a long table with a large coffee pot in its center stood in the back. I liked to think about all the people dressed in their Sunday best, smiling even if they didn’t know you, and serving coffee and juice and cookies. I went to church a couple of times, back when Gigi listened to what other people told her, and they told her I needed religion. We stopped going, though, because Gigi said there was more to it than the preacher was letting on. She said it was like the way the government doesn’t admit that there are aliens from other planets roaming the earth. “That preacher’s hiding too much up his puffy sleeves is what I think,” she said. “He’s got cards he ain’t showing.”

  So we only went those two times, but I always remembered the nice preacher man and all the smiling faces and the smells of powder and perfume and coffee and polished wood.

  The dance teacher’s name was Susan. She told Grandaddy Opal and me to grab a chair, sit down, and watch her teach a class, then we could decide whether or not we wanted to sign up.

  Just looking at all the girls lined up in their colorful tights and their pretty pink slippers—pink for femininity—made me want to jump up from my seat and join them, even if I didn’t know any of the steps yet. Susan clapped her hands and all the girls got quiet. She demonstrated a plié and a grande plié, turning her feet out with her heels together and bending her knees. When she did the grande plié—a deep knee bend—her arm circled in front of her like a hair ribbon caught on a breeze.

  Everything Susan did, I wanted to do. She kicked her leg up in the air and it went up past her head. She did leaps across the floor, springing high in the air with her legs split the way my Barbie doll’s legs could split, and you could hardly hear her when she landed. The rest of the class sounded like a herd of elephants stampeding after her, but I knew I would be like her. I would be soft and light, and leap and spin just like her. I couldn’t wait. I looked over at Grandaddy Opal to see if he liked it, too.

  At the end of the class Susan called us over to explain her classes, when they met, and how much each one cost. Up close I could see she didn’t wear makeup or shave under her arms, and she sat on the linoleum floor to talk to us with her legs spread out and her feet pointing and flexing, pointing and flexing.

  Grandaddy Opal signed me up to go four afternoons a week: two ballet classes, one modern dance class, and one improvisation class.

  Susan said that maybe I should just try one class at a time to see if I would like it, and Grandaddy Opal chuckled and said, “Oh, no need to worry about that, she’ll like it all right,” and he was right. Soon I would be a great prodigy, and Dane would come back and the two of us would go live by the sea.

  I wanted to skip and leap my way down the sidewalk on our way home, but Grandaddy was dragging along, his hands dug deep into his pockets, his mind somewhere far away. I tried talking to him, telling him he wouldn’t be sorry, telling him how good I was going to be, and then he just stopped dead and grabbed my hand. “Hey,” he said. “There ain’t no dance classes.”

  “Huh?” My mouth dropped open.

  “You understand? As far as Gigi knows, there ain’t no dance classes.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, nodding, not really sure if I understood, but wanting to keep the dance lessons.

  “Okay then.” He started walking again, faster, still holding my hand, dragging me with him along the sidewalk. “So we’ll just say to ourselves there ain’t no dance classes, then we won’t make a slip and talk about them.” He squeezed my hand tighter. “You go on over to that church every day, and I’ll just think you’re upstairs doing your homework. You’re just doing your homework,” he repeated, nodding to himself.

  And that’
s how it was. My dance didn’t exist. Every day I walked to the church. I did lunges and leaps and turns, and listened to Susan’s voice correcting us over the sound of the music, and then I forgot it, because it wasn’t real. While I was walking home, I knew a giant eraser followed behind me, erasing the dance class, rubbing it into dust and brushing it away, leaving behind an empty sidewalk, an empty past. Later, I started to run home every afternoon, afraid the eraser would catch up to me and erase me, too.

  Chapter 5

  GIGI LOOKED RELIEVED when I told her I wouldn’t be able to help out down at the gift shop except on Fridays and Saturdays. She didn’t even ask me why. Ever since we’d moved in with Grandaddy Opal, she had been like that, keeping to herself, sleeping late, working long hours at the shop. She even forgot my eleventh birthday.

  I knew it was because she blamed me for Dane’s melting. That’s why she couldn’t look at me or be both ered with caring for me anymore. She had figured out the truth about me, just as I had. She knew that I was a mistake, nothing special at all, not even real, and Dane had melted from the shame of it.

  Back at our old house, when things were good and right and Dane still lived with us, Gigi used to get up in the mornings and fix me breakfast, and the two of us would tiptoe around and whisper so we wouldn’t wake up Dane, and we always found something funny that we Were just dying to laugh out loud at but couldn’t because of Dane. Now, when there was no reason to be quiet, there was nothing funny, and Gigi didn’t get up until after I’d gone off to school. If I wanted to see her at all, I had to go down to the gift shop.

  She worked in a small room clouded with incense at the back of the shop. Mrs. Hewlett, who owned the shop, was a widow, and when she found out Gigi could contact the dead, she hired her right away. The first time Gigi contacted Harold, Mrs. Hewlett’s dead husband, the woman cried for days afterward. “It was so real,” I heard her tell someone in the gift shop once. “He was there, I saw him. And he said things, things that only he knew. And he was happy. That’s what I needed to know, that he was happy. He’d had such a miserable death, you know.”