In the senior citizens’ class it was hard to concentrate. One of the women there, Pat, had stained and streaked her legs orange with Q-T or something. Barney kept having trouble with his hearing aid. Lodeme spent a lot of time in the back row taking everyone’s pulse the way I had shown them: two fingers placed on the side of the neck. “Holy Jesus,” she shouted at them. “You must be hibernating!”
This was my fear: that someone would have a stroke in there and die.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s begin with the ‘Dance Madness’ routine. Remember: It’s important not to be afraid of looking like an idiot.” This was my motto in life. I slapped in the cassette and started up with some easy lunges, step-digs, and a slow Charleston.
“Are we healthy yet?” yelled Pat over the music, her legs like sepia sunsets, her face the split-apple face of an owl. “Are we healthy yet?”
“Let me feel your breast again,” said Gerard. “Is this the lump?”
“Yes,” I said. “Be careful.”
“It’s not muscular?” His fingers pressed against the outside wall of my breast.
“No, Gerard. It’s not muscular. It’s floating like fruit in Jell-O. Remember fruited Jell-O? There’s no muscle in Jell-O.” Although of course there was. I’d learned that long ago from a friend in junior high school who’d told me that Jell-O was made from horses’ hooves and various dried bones and muscles. She had also told me that breasts were simply displaced buttocks.
Gerard slipped his hand back out from beneath my bra. He leaned back into the sofa. We were listening to Fauré. “Listen to the strings,” Gerard murmured, and his face went beatific. The world, all matter, I knew, was made up of strings. I had learned this on television. Physicists used to believe that the universe was made up of particles. But recently they had found out they’d been wrong: The world, unsuspectedly, was made up of little tiny strings.
“Yes,” I said. “They’re lovely.”
The women in the class were suggesting that I get my face sanded. I had had acne as a teenager, a rough slice of pizza face, and it had scarred my skin. Gerard had once said he loved my skin, that it didn’t look pitted and old, but that it looked sexy, a tough, craggy sexy.
I sunk into one hip and fluttered my eyelashes at Betty and Pat and Lodeme. “Gee, I thought my face looked sort of scrappy,” I said.
“You look like a caveman,” said Lodeme, her voice half gravel, half gavel. “Get your face sanded.”
In bed I tried to be simple and straightforward. “Gerard, I need to know this: Do you love me?”
“I love being with you,” he said, as if this were even better.
“Oh,” I said. And then he reached for my hand under the covers, lifted his head toward mine, and kissed me, his lips outside then inside, back and forth like polyps. The heel of his hand ran up my side beneath my nightgown, and he moved me, belly up, on top of him. His penis was soft against my buttocks and his arms were clasped tight around my waist. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, offered up to the ceiling like that. So I just lay there and let Gerard figure things out. He lay very still beneath me. I whispered finally: “What are we supposed to be doing, Gerard?”
“You don’t understand me,” he sighed. “You just don’t understand me at all.”
The senior citizens’ class was only eight weeks in duration but by about the sixth week the smallness of the class, and whatever makeshift intimacy had sprung up there, became suddenly oppressive to me. Perhaps I was becoming like Gerard. Suddenly I wanted the big, doughnut-faced anonymity of a large class, where class members did not really have faces and names and problems. In six weeks with Susan, Lodeme, Betty, Valerie, Ellen, Frances, Pat, Marie, Bridget, and Barney, I felt we’d gotten to know each other too well, or rather, brought to the stubborn limits of our knowability, we were now left with the jagged scrape of our differences, our unknowability laid glisteningly bare. I developed a woodlands metaphor—“swirls before pine,” I told Eleanor. Aerobics in front of a forest took much less courage than the other way around, aerobics before a few individuated trees. A forest would leave you alone, but trees could come at you. They witnessed things. When you could see them, they could see you. They could see there were certain things about you. You were not a serious person. You were not a serious dancer. I didn’t want my life to show. At a distance, I was sure, it couldn’t possibly.
Moreover, it was hard being close to these women who, I realized, had exactly what I wanted: grandchildren, stability, a post-menopausal grace, some mysterious, hard-won truce with men. They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
And so the sadnesses started to ricochet around and zap me right in the heart, right in the middle of the Michael Jackson tape. I was, I knew, unconvinced of myself. I wanted to stop. I wanted to fall dead as a leaf. Which I tried to turn into a move for the rest of the class: “One-two and crumple, one-two and crumple.” Once in Modern Dance class in college one sunny September afternoon we had been requested to be leaves tumbling ourselves across the arts quad. I knew how to perform it in a way that prevented embarrassment and indignity: One became a dead leaf, a cement leaf. One lay down on the dying grass of the arts quad and refused to blow and float and tumble. One merely crumpled. One was no fool. One did not listen to the teacher. One did not want to be spotted fluttering around on campus, like the others who were clearly psychotics. One did not like this college. One wanted only to fall in love and get a Marriage Equivalent. One just lay there.
I looked up into the mirror. Behind me Lodeme, Bridget, Pat, Barney, everyone was stiffly though obediently crumpling. I loved them, in a way, but I didn’t want them, their nippled fist-faces, their beauty advice, their voices old, low, and scratchy. I wanted them to recede into some lifeless blur. I didn’t want to hear about Zenia or about how I could use a good pair of hips. I didn’t want to be responsible for their hearts.
We got back up on our tiptoes. “Good! Good! Punch the air, three-four. Punch the air.” In the mirror we looked as if we had melted — puddles that shimmered and shimmied.
Afterward, Barney came up and told me more about Zenia. I tried to be minimally attentive, packing up the cassettes, waving good night to the other women who were leaving. Barney’s voice seemed to have a new sort of gobble and snort. “I saw a program on child abuse,” he was saying, “and now I realize I was an abused child myself, though I didn’t know it.” I looked at him and he smiled and shook his head. I didn’t want to hear this. Christ, I thought. “My sister Zenia was fourteen and I was six and she climbed into bed with me once and we didn’t know no better. But technically that’s abuse, that. And funny thing is is that I …” He wanted badly to be telling someone this. He followed me around the studio as I switched off lights and locked windows. “I never would have watched that show but for the committee she’s heading. She’s my sister, I’ve got to love her, but—”
“No you don’t,” I snapped at the old man. The world was a carnival of fiends and Zenia was right in there with everyone else. “Good night, Barney,” I said, locking the studio door and leaving him standing at the top of the stairs. “Good night,” he mumbled, not moving. I did a fast bounce down the three flights, the cassettes rattling in my bag, out into the cool drink of the night. If only this were some other city, I would go exploring in it! If only this were someplace, if there were someplace, new in the world.