“Well, Linda,” he rehearsed, “how do you like the band? Yeah, I think they’re pretty good too. Do you have a television at your house? Our reception is awfully poor, so much snow. What’s your favourite program? Mine too. Yes, I like Connaught very much – everything but the teachers. Just kidding.”
He went over all his invitations.
“Bernadette, would you like to dance with me?”
“Doris, might I have this dance?”
“Would you care to dance with me, Lynn?”
By the time he had completed all his dry runs he had sweated clean through his pants.
What was he going to do? There were no books in the library devoted to dancing, he’d checked. He joined his grandfather to watch Lawrence Welk but a lot of good that did him, the camera was always scooting from feet to faces so that it was impossible to follow what the dancers were up to.
Sometimes, when he was really desperate, Daniel braced himself to ask his mother’s help. However, the prospect of being cross-examined as to why it was necessary for him to learn to dance would set him to writhing on the spot and drain him of resolution whenever he allowed himself to imagine the scene. Besides, he wasn’t even sure his mother could dance. He had never seen her. The occasion to dance had never presented itself. His mother did not seem to be what he took to be a dancing sort of woman.
It was on October 23, with scarcely more than a week left before the Hallowe’en Dance, that Vera came face to face in the Rexall with her obligations. She really ought to volunteer to teach the boy to dance. What she faced was a rack of those record albums that old-time dance bands paid to have pressed in vanity sound studios in Winnipeg or St. Paul, Minnesota, and then peddled at the weddings they played, or twisted the arms of small-town merchants – druggists, grocers, hardware dealers – into carrying on consignment. This album was called The Fedorovsky Family Plays For You Your All Time Favorites, and on the jacket there was a black and white photograph of three fat middle-aged women, two of whom were seated at drums and an upright piano, the third with an accordion slung over her shoulders. The remaining two orchestra members were slightly older and more enormous men, one armed with a guitar, the other with a fiddle. Vera purchased the record, knowing for a certainty that every variety of dance Daniel would ever be called upon to dance in Connaught would be represented in the Fedorovsky Family album: waltz, polka, foxtrot, butterfly, schottische.
Vera returned home with the record at two-thirty. Her father was out so she was free to set up the phonograph, push the living-room furniture to one side, and stow away the throw rugs. That done, she sat down to wait for Daniel to come home from school. She sat with an impatient look on her face for five or ten minutes, then she got up and fetched the blazer and trousers she had hidden on the top shelf of her bedroom closet. She had ordered them from the Eaton’s catalogue when Daniel first mentioned the upcoming dance. Vera laid these clothes on the chesterfield, in plain view, and smoothed them pensively with her hand.
Shortly after three-thirty she heard Daniel come into the house and called him into the living room. “You washing floors again?” he said, when he saw the disarranged furniture.
“I bought you some dress clothes,” announced Vera. “They’re there on the chesterfield. Take them upstairs and try them on and then come back down here so I can see if they fit. Wear a white shirt and tie,” she added, as an afterthought.
A few minutes later Daniel presented himself as ordered. The black and white runners he had worn to school were still on his feet.
“Go and put your good shoes on, lame brain,” his mother said when she saw him.
“Why?”
“Because you can’t expect to learn to dance in rubber-soled shoes. They stick to the floor.”
Daniel wondered if the woman really could read his mind. It was eerie.
When he was finally properly shod, Vera judged that her son was a looker in his new outfit. Of course, a navy blue blazer was a classic and never went out of style and the colour of the jacket suited his complexion and rusty hair. “My, my, what have I wrought?” teased Vera. “Could it be a genuine heartbreaker? Wait until the girls set eyes on you. You’ll have to carry a big stick to beat them off, you ask me.”
“Funny, funny, it is to laugh.”
“Now don’t get all huffy,” cautioned Vera. “I was just having a little fun. Seriously, you look very nice. Very grown-up.”
That he looked grown-up was not necessarily what he wanted to hear. Being told you were grown-up somehow suggested you weren’t.
Vera placed the record on the turntable. The first selection was an instrumental rendering of “The Tennessee Waltz.” “Now watch me,” said Vera, “as I do the steps. You’ll pick it up in no time. Just remember whatever I do backwards you’ll do forwards and whatever I do forwards you’ll do backwards. Got that?”
Daniel was uncertain but he said he thought so. As his mother sailed over the linoleum he studied her movements with fixed concentration. His feet twitched while he tried to commit the steps to memory. The tune ended and his mother reset the needle at the beginning of the waltz. “Now together,” she said, offering herself to be held. They began to edge their way around the floor. “Don’t stick your bum out like that. You look like you’re afraid somebody is trying to burn a hole in the front of your pants. Stand normal. Relax.” Daniel found that her criticisms seized him up even more; his joints started to lock like burned-out bearings. “Don’t jerk your arm up and down that way. You’re not pumping water. Hold it steady. Loosen up. Glide, don’t clump. You’re not walking on railway ties.” She started to count time in a loud emphatic voice, even more emphatic than the pounding of the piano. It threw him off more.
Vera saw this was going nowhere and mercifully brought the curtain down on the waltz. “I think maybe we ought to start with something livelier, something that has a stronger rhythm,” she suggested, “just to get the music into your feet. How about we try a polka?”
Daniel was agreeable.
“First, let’s walk through it slowly,” said Vera. Humming, she deliberately guided Daniel through his paces, pausing to allow him to mark each transition. He moved as if in a trance, head bowed to the floor, eyes shifting from his mother’s feet to his own as she languorously stepped, turned, kicked her heels in a slow-motion dream polka. “Ready for the real music?” she inquired after they had practised for a time.
Daniel nodded.
“Now remember,” said Vera, lowering the phonograph arm on the appropriate number, “this’ll be a little quicker, in step with the music.”
She found herself snatched into frenzy. They were off. Plunging and lunging, galloping and dizzily whirling at breakneck speed. Daniel led her in a side-long charge directly at the television and then veered sharply off at the very moment that collision seemed an inevitability and bore down on the lamp-stand, feet slithering on the slick linoleum, heels tossing high in the air as they spun into a hairpin turn. The violence of the expression on his face rather alarmed her. The speed at which he swung her, the joint-cracking centrifugal force exerted on her, made Vera wonder if this wasn’t an act of revenge. But for what?
“Dear, not so…” she began to say, but lost the rest of her sentence when a wide, looping turn brought the coffeetable hurtling toward her legs. Only a severe, impromptu correction saved her from a kneecapping. Around and around the room they careened, flushed and gasping. Vera could feel her heart pounding like a trip-hammer. There was a look in Daniel’s eye which she associated with runaway horses. Whenever he spun her, crane-like legs thrashing the air in the wake of a reckless change in direction, his tie streamed over his shoulder like a prize ribbon flying from the bridle of a show pony.