Hug Dancing Read online

  After lunch, which was always sticky, squashy peanut butter and banana sandwiches, we had run-and-touch. In this game they lined up in a row, with their feet all exactly even, which took a lot of pushing and shoving and squealing about who was out of line, and usually one or all of them had to stop and go to the bathroom, and then we’d have to start all over again. By this time I was a heap on the sofa, my feet propped up on its curved arm, and I’d call out the name of some spot or piece of furniture and they would all run to it, to see who could touch it first. “Front door.” “Big table.” “My tummy.” “Fridge.” “Back door.” “My feet.” It didn’t matter what it was as long as the object wasn’t something likely to be destroyed when the four of them ran the length of the house and crashed into it.

  We ended, the last thing in the afternoon, after their naps on mats on the floor, with nice totally indelible grape Popsicles which could drop and melt and mess all over the place. For this we sat back in our circle, on sheets of newspaper, with bibs made of ScotTowels pinned on with paper clips. And everybody laughed when everybody else grew fat purple lips and mustaches.

  Why was that all so wonderful?

  Maybe because my life, already beginning to stretch the tightly fitted skin of the preacher’s wife, felt ground-bound and constrained, every muscle longing to peel out and let go.

  Or maybe I simply wished that I were one of those babies, holding hands, bouncing in place, doing “Ring Around the Rosy Rag,” over and over and over again.

  WHEN, THREE WEEKS after she’d come up to me at church, Lila Beth invited us all for Easter Sunday—yellow and purple straw baskets for the children lined in a row on the dining table, crinkly pretend grass and a stuffed bunny in each—I thought I’d found myself a real family at last.

  Although we gathered at her house after the eleven o’clock church services, ours and Mary Virginia’s, she served us breakfast: mounds of apple crisp and peach coffee cake, platters of deer sausage, special oven-scrambled eggs with cream cheese, homemade biscuits no bigger than half-dollars, a bowl of fresh strawberry butter. She’d decided against the traditional lunch because I’d confided to her that the only thing church, the church life, had taken from me was the leisurely Sunday breakfast. (Actually, my daddy had always been up at Lake Travis bait fishing and my mother off working the birth control clinics in south Texas. It was the imaginary Sunday mornings I’d missed that Lila Beth provided.) She’d said graciously that it had been the custom when she was a girl to have the Easter breakfast and egg hunt after church, and that I’d simply reminded her of it.

  The daddies of Play School had not joined us before, and by then I was really curious what sort of man could be at one and the same time the husband of a Dallas girl and the son of a dedicated church elder. I imagined, to be fair, that Mary Virginia was also wondering what sort of person could be married to someone like me and yet so charm her formidable mother-in-law.

  Then, just after we’d all arrived, through the archway into the dining room appeared this familiar-looking redhead on long cranelike legs whom I’d last seen in high school. I looked around at everyone, wondering how on earth he’d got here: someone from the wrong town, the wrong time in my life.

  “This is my son, Drew,” Lila Beth said.

  “Andy?” I stared in astonishment.

  “Cile.” He stared, too, as if seeing a mirage.

  “Lord,” I said, laughing in disbelief.

  “God,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

  We started to fling our arms around each other, then stepped back, embarrassed.

  Mary Virginia said, “I changed his name. I wasn’t going to be Mrs. Andy Williams all my life.”

  I hadn’t seen him since we’d been crazy mad sweethearts twelve years before. The May of our senior year my mother had got swept away in the flash flood south of Wimberly, and by the time that got settled and I’d looked around, come back to life, Andy’s family had picked up and moved to wherever they’d come from. But in those days that seemed the way the world turned: people you loved to pieces vanished; you grew up.

  “How do you do, Pastor,” Andy/Drew introduced himself to Eben, still looking at me, scratching his head, trying to find me under the church clothes. He said, “Hey, you were going to be a schoolteacher. What happened?”

  “Something changed my mind.” I couldn’t take my eyes off him. “How about you? A man of property now. Who would have thought it? You were going to run a weather station. Whatever happened to all that stuff? ‘Birds fly lower before a storm because the barometric pressure hurts their ears.’ ” Lord, just thinking about that, our big dreams, made me homesick out of my mind. “Bugs—what? Slow down? Speed up?” I grinned at him.

  “Bugs are more active,” he said, grinning back, “just before a storm. They like the moist tropical air.”

  “That’s it.”

  We stood, our feet here, our heads back there.

  “I was sorry about your mother,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Whatever happened to your dad?”

  “He remarried.” I wasn’t about to mention in that rarefied company that my father, who ran a hardware store, had married my least favorite high school English teacher. That she’d all but walked him down the aisle the week after the funeral, and that she was the one who’d made wanting to be a schoolteacher seem like a really trashy idea.

  Lila Beth came and stood by her son, slipping her arm through his. “You were Celia Guest?” she asked me, dismayed.

  “I went by Cile; my mother was Celia.” I wondered if her finding out I was the old girlfriend was going to be the end of our Easter Sundays, just when they’d begun.

  She made a gentle smile, as if it cost her a lot. “The one who liked to go dancing?”

  “That was me.” I’d never met her or even been to their house in Austin; Andy’d been scared to death of her. We’d planned that we’d “run into each other” at graduation, so he could introduce me then.

  “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, dear,” she said in a kindly tone. Then, still recovering, she’d taken Mary Virginia’s hand and introduced her daughter-in-law to her esteemed pastor.

  The kids had a glorious hunt. Wonderful eggs dyed in primary colors easy as pie to find lying right out on the lawn for the two-year-olds, who got a head start. Harder ones tucked in the monkey grass and flower beds for the three-year-olds, whose fat baskets dragged the ground. Ruth found the golden egg hidden in the low branch of a tree; Martha got a prize for finding the most; Trey got a special birthday egg; and Jock got the chocolate one with the rabbit inside.

  That was eons ago. By now, the Williams boys had grown into polite tennis players, already working on their manners and grades against the day when they had to make the choice between Princeton and Baylor. My athletic girls, bent on saving the planet, were already making plans to go to Texas A & M.

  The reason I’d wanted to wait until after Easter to tell everyone our news had nothing to do with the church, everything to do with Lila Beth. I hoped that in time, after Mary Virginia had gone back to Dallas, and one of the many widows in the church had started courting Eben, Drew and I could have our egg hunts and those wonderful breakfasts at her house again. But I’d wanted one last Easter with nothing changed, one more of those special family Sundays that stretched all the way back to Baby Days.

  MY WHOLESOME GIRLS sat in the dining room with me, eating an early supper of potato soup and warmed-up corn bread. They were poised on the edge of their chairs, waiting for their friends the Bledsoes to show, so they could all go out and hang around. I had someone else on my mind, too, and was wishing I could tell them my news.

  I’d named them for dancers (Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham), wanting to embed in their very bones from the start the lightness and grace that I’d longed for myself. Then watched, bemused, as—generously overshooting the mark—they’d grown instead into towering, leaping athletes. I had also, missing my mother so terribly when they were small, felt
it my bounden duty to pass on to them her fervent social consciousness, aware that in some way I had not been what she wanted, my passions too private, too personal, too local for her. So that they, her graceful granddaughters, had learned to soar into the air to score, to spring across the courts, all the while carrying the world’s worries with them. Runners bearing the torch. The result was that they were stuffed with the dreams of two lifetimes, packed with the bulging hopes of two generations. No wonder my fair daughters were larger than life: they’d been raised on the anabolic steroid of wish fulfillment.

  As usual, I felt dwarfed and plain in their company. It reminded me how my mother used to say—when I complained about being so short and about how my mouse-brown hair was always blowing in my face—that she’d given me the best heredity she could manage and to be grateful for my straight hair, straight nose, and straight teeth. My girls were a more robust and vibrant breed than I. Not dark like their father, having my lighter coloring, they took after him in height, being already, at twelve and thirteen, five seven and five eight. Ruth, the older, my serious ecologist, wore her sandy hair in two thick clumps, one sticking out over each ear, and over ample breasts which her sports bra failed to bind wore a green T-shirt that urged SAVE THE WETLANDS. Martha, the younger, my animal lover and future vet, had a fat French braid down her back, two deep dimples she tried to ignore, and a chest message proclaiming FUR IS DEAD.

  As usual, they were talking cows.

  Today, N’Damas.

  Martha, looking milk-fed herself, and to my motherly eye as if she should still be wearing pajamas with feet in them, was arguing with the stubbornness of younger siblings. “We’re mapping their genes. To increase milk production. They’re tsetse resistant, even though they don’t give much milk, the N’Damas are, their cows. But ours, that do give milk, they die like flies from those flies over there, the same as people. So we’re mapping their genes, see?”

  Ruth tugged at her clumps of hair, holding them out like antennae. “That’s evil. That’s really evil, Mart. You know that, don’t you? That it’s evil? There are already two billion cows in the world, plus one and a half billion goats and sheep, plus one million pigs. What they ought to be doing, instead of using stuff like bovine growth hormones to engineer cows for bigger burgers and better cheese spread, is to get rid of them all. Do you have any idea how many people in the world could be fed on the grain that livestock eat?” She leaned across the table and waved a spoon at her sister.

  Her kind face crinkling in frustration, Martha raised her braid and her voice. “You don’t even listen. You never pay any attention to what I’m saying. What we’re doing is mapping genes, and that’s good. I’m writing a paper on it. So those starving people in Africa can have milk. The reason they don’t have protein over there is not because the cows are eating the sorghum in the Sahara, Ruth”—she leaned forward, her earnest dimpled face intent—“since there isn’t any, but because the cattle they have, the N’Damas, don’t give enough milk.”

  “What you need to be writing a paper on, Mart, is on plans for a livestock eradication project.”

  Martha stood up, looking as if she might burst into tears. “You’re like those farmers in the dairy states objecting to everything. To gene mapping the same way they objected to the steel plow and barbed wire and the mechanical hay baler. I did a paper on that—”

  “Do a whole Ph.D. on it. Or on your fly-proof N’Damas. Or on that wrinkled old Asian cow you love with the lousy meat.”

  “The Wagyus, for your information, have the kind of meat that if you eat it, it actually lowers your cholesterol. For your information, that happens to be a very important scientific research idea. I may do a—”

  Ruth sighed, stuck her spoon behind her ear, made a face.

  How beautiful she was with her deep-set eyes and wide mouth, growing to look more like my mother every day. How proud she, Celia, would have been of these girls, with their passion for the whole world, their unflagging concern for every mouth unfed, every avenue of rescue unpursued. They must have got it straight from her, by a sort of osmosis in the womb, as if she’d implanted an incubator just for the likes of them in me, a nest destined to produce her heirs.

  “The trouble with you, Mart”—my eldest tried to wrap up the argument; it was time for the Bledsoes to show—“the trouble with you is, you just parrot what you read. Don’t you know that all that gene mapping stuff is just McDonald’s financing bovine somatotropin McBurgers?”

  “You thought it was a big deal, last year, when they were mapping corn genes—”

  “Because it was. It is.”

  “Well?”

  It made me happy to listen to them, thinking that soon, so very soon, I would be able to offer these daughters of mine a farm where they could have their daily debate surrounded by the very four-stomached, ruminating milk cows they so adored/abhorred. Nice rich pastureland filled with live slow-moving, cud-chewing, shade-loving specimens to study.

  And it rushed over me to tell them about Drew. Girls, I’m running off with this dear gentleman farmer that I’ve known since before you two were born or even thought of, and we’re going to live out there on the land, happy as Herefords at the State Fair. And you can come anytime and have Cow’s Party in the bluebonnets. You, Martha, can stuff long stalks of bluestem into the gentle rubbery-lipped mouths of heavy-lidded Holstein, lay your dimples against their thick necks, and you, Ruth, can breed hybrid maize in rows behind the barn, where the soil has been turned and furrowed for a hundred and fifty years.

  And if I’d already talked to Eben, I might have told them then and there. I had a need to reassure myself that although I’d be leaving them on weekdays until they could drive, I’d still have them in my life. More, that I’d have something new and fine to offer them; someplace that they, in their easy independence, might grow to love and consider home.

  I must have looked at them with the words near my lips, the wishing on my face, because both girls turned to me.

  “What do you think, Momma?” Martha asked, trying to read my expression. Wanting to keep peace.

  “I wanted to say—”

  Ruth held her clumps of hair straight out to receive my message. “Attention,” she said, with her tolerant elder-child smile, “a bulletin from the short people.”

  I caught my breath; my news would have to wait. It wasn’t fair to their father to tell them first. “While you’re having this cow fight,” I said, lightly, my throat choking slightly, “don’t forget you’re eating soup that has half a cup of milk and a pat of butter per bowl. Not to mention a secret spoon of Parmesan cheese.”

  “Momma!” Ruth made a strangling sound, staring at her bowl of white liquid in horror, as if she might have recently contracted bovine spongiform encephalitis. “I thought this was potato soup?”

  “It is. But if it didn’t have anything else in it, it would be mashed potatoes.” I laughed.

  Ruth’s debate over whether to push her bowl away and get up from the table or finish her meal was solved by the sound of the Bledsoes’ car, honking out front.

  I walked them to the curb, waving at the departing mother behind the wheel of the big new Olds.

  The Bledsoe girls, in racing shorts and running shoes, with their amazingly long legs and high behinds, were taller even than my girls. The older, named Rosa by her mother but called Sugar at school, was five ten at least, and the younger, named Phillis but known as Baby, looked to be five nine. It was hard to tell for sure, because their shoes seemed to have lifts and they wore their hair, cropped close in back, in high wiry tiaras in front, adding at least three inches to their height.

  The two pairs of siblings had met during their sixth-grade year when all the schoolchildren in the city were bused to separate and equally inconvenient schools. The older girls now played basketball together; the younger two, volleyball.

  The Bledsoes’ nicknames, Sugar and Baby, had been dreamed up by school paper sportswriters who needed a good tag. In the case o
f mine, their last name provided a wealth of leads concerning what one or the other had done to the opposing team in citywide games: devasTAITed, irriTAITed, decapiTAITed. (Or, when the writers were reaching, obliterTAITed, annihiTAITed, elimiTAITed.) I could see that in a couple of years when my daughters were playing on the same teams in high school, the headlines would herald their rat-a-TAIT-TAIT offense and their TAIT-à-TAIT defense.

  In a couple of years, also, these four would all be taking Japanese, a new course that had come into the curriculum without a murmur, giving a new twist to the term bilingual education, which once had meant English as a second language for Spanish-speaking students, and now meant Japanese as a second language for English-speaking students. The earth turns; Waco had become part of the global village. The school district wanted our youth to be ready to deal with the Pacific Rim, which, in this case, meant the corridor of scientists settling along the interstate. Baylor University, that Baptist bastion which still offered a vigorous course of studies in the separation of church and state, had led the way and now taught—in addition to Japanese—Chinese, Thai and Indonesian to its fresh-faced, drug-free students.

  In response to this same brave new world, the district was also putting into effect an accelerated prep school imbedded right in our existing high school. And although the Bledsoes did not live in Lake Shore but in Oak Hurst (on Oak Wood off Wood Oaks off Forest Oaks off Oak Forest), they went to school with my girls because Barbara, their mother, taught gym at the middle school. They were eligible for the program anyway, because selection was to be city wide. Modeled on the best preparatory schools in the East, it was going to give every student a shot; there was to be no test screening or teacher selecting. Those who can take it can take it was the slogan.