Dancing Lessons
Dancing
Lessons
Dancing
Lessons
a novel by Olive Senior
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
The ladies, in particular, ought to dance with a sort of amiable circumspection and a becoming grace, which, indeed, add to their charms, and heighten their attractions. Gentlemen ought always to be attentive to their partners, and they should all of them move in unison in every step and attitude.
— CHARLES DÜRANG,
The Ball-Room Bijou, and Art of Dancing …
with Rules for Polite Behaviour, 18–
To Earl Senior and Fay Harrison,
who were there from the start.
Dancing
Lessons
1
HOW WAS I TO know he had a bad heart? All I wanted was to dance one more time in my life. I heard the music playing in his room that was right across from mine and something came over me, a joyous feeling that I had had in my life only once before, so I went over and asked him to dance. What’s so wrong with that? It’s true he had just moved in and we hadn’t been properly introduced. But I didn’t “drag him around and assault him and cause him to freak out and have an attack,” as Matron told Celia in this overly dramatic mimsey-mamsey way of hers, all hands and eyebrows and jangling earrings and shoulders working.
She believed it, of course. Not that she said anything, in that lawyer-ish way of hers. Nothing showing on her face. I sat there like a schoolgirl in Matron’s most uncomfortable chair trying to look comfortable. My arms and legs crossed. I didn’t say a word. I never do. One thing I’ve learnt in life is to hold my tongue. Which is why She knows nothing. Though O how I cringe every time that scene pops up before my eyes, the most embarrassing moment of my life, a moment—I might add—totally and absolutely out of character. I truly, truly do not know what made me do it, me, the shyest person on earth. But how will they know that, since I have no intention of confessing?
It was madness! But once that raucous music bounced through his open door across the hallway and snaked into mine, my shoulders started to twist, my hips started to shake, my feet started to beat a staccato across the polished mahogany floor.
“Come, come,” I remember saying to him, arms outstretched as I belted out the words that came back to me after all those years:
If you wanna go crazy and act the clown
Be the laughing stock all over town
That’s YOUR RED WAGON …
I certainly didn’t drag him around, as Matron claims, though I did try on one of my spins to clasp his hands in mine. But I could see he was an unwilling partner and I continued to dance and sing by myself:
That’s YOUR RED WAGON
So just keep dragging YOUR RED WAGON along …
until braps! The music swooped to a sudden stop and I found myself standing in this strange man’s room, with him looking as frightened as a little brown mouse and me hot and red as a pomegranate. He gaped at me, his mouth opening and closing, but what he said I do not know, for I fled to my room and slammed the door. O my Lord!
Maybe I did frighten him, for he’s built on the compact side and I’m a bit taller, but Matron doesn’t have to make me out to be such a clodhopping giant. To be honest, I am a teeny bit bigger than I was before I came here, for I’ve been eating and eating ever since. Am I going to turn down good food prepared and served by someone else at exactly the same time every day? I spend my day waiting for my meals. I don’t understand all these people here complaining and picking at what they are served, but I ignore them and wipe my plate clean. Let them skin up their noses all they want, especially those three who share a table with me.
We sit at these little round tables with lovely china and real linen napkins that remind me of the only thing that was nice about my childhood. It’s like heaven to me. But of course I don’t let them know that, those three Pancake Sisters From Hell. Names of Ruby, Babe, and Birdie, if you can believe it. They are not really sisters, but have been friends all their lives. Killed off their husbands I’m sure so they could end up here together at Ellesmere Lodge gossiping and betting on the races and drinking martinis and playing bridge. They are as alike as gungo peas in a pod. They look like dried gungo peas too, their skin yellow and speckled with brown splotches all over and their hair pulled off their foreheads and puffed up and dyed this wishy-washy brownish blonde like their skin so that their heads look round like pancakes flat on the plate before the maple syrup.
It’s funny, I had never had pancakes before, but it was the very first breakfast that was served to me here at Ellesmere Lodge. I gazed down at my plate that morning and was so struck by the resemblance I nearly died laughing inside. I could tell they noticed the lit
tle smile on my face, for they couldn’t take their eyes off me. I’m good at taking in everything, even when I have my head down. But I just kept on eating and ignoring them. Who are they fooling anyway, thinking they’re so elegant and aristocratic, always on about Daddy and School and Sister-This and Sister-That as if they are still seven years old, not ten times that (at least!), but let’s not bother with them. It’s She I am concerned about. She is now so thin she is almost at vanishing point, and if she vanished, what would I do? I poke that thought down every time it comes to the surface for I don’t even know where the others are anymore, Junior and Lise. I know Shirley is in a cemetery in Brooklyn I’ll never see. Never a word from the others. The odd Christmas or birthday card. A hundred-dollar bill enclosed. She is the only one who cares. Well, not cares really, I don’t think she cares, but she shames easily and so she wouldn’t want anyone to know I’m living on the street, would she?
2
NOT LIVING ON THE street exactly, but I would have been perfectly happy staying down there in the country with the old wooden house collapsing around me, battered and torn apart by the hurricane. It’s what I’m used to, isn’t it? Hardship. Hardship and lies. A pummelling from life every way I turn. O, I’m nicely set up here, everyone would say, Ellesmere Lodge, ha! The Best Retirement Home in the city, in the whole of Jamaica, in the British West Indies, the World! Though from the way Matron treats some of us, well, one of us exactly, you’d think we were in boarding school. It’s certainly the most expensive, the one where all the rich people park their parents. And that’s the trouble, isn’t it? They’re not used to someone like me. From the time I came, I could hear them sniggering behind my back, eyeing my work-hardened hands, my large awkward feet, my brown calico skin coarse as a grater. Inviting me to their stupid teas just to watch my hands tremble as I handle the delicate china cup. Though She tried, I have to give her that, she tried her best to get me fixed up for this place. Threw out all my old clothes and bought me lots of new ones. Everything new: suitcase, underwear, toothbrush, the lot. Not allowed to bring a single thing from my old life. Okay, a lot of it was rain-soaked, but it was she who made me throw it all out. Nothing old to be brought here. Except myself. And that’s the trouble, for it’s really myself she doesn’t want.
She took me to the hairdresser for a smart cut, and this woman, herself sharp as glass plastered with makeup, is going snip-snip and feeding her all the shards of gossip and all the time under her hands I feel her contempt as if she would snip-snip my head off too for someone as unfashionable as me daring to come into her place. I’m not beautiful, don’t think I don’t know it, which is why She also took me to this place to have them give me facials and rub my skin with all kinds of oily gobs and do my nails and put lipstick and eyebrow pencil on. Ha, me, who has never used more than Pond’s Vanishing Cream, well, Jergens maybe, and a little dab of face powder.
Now you see all this expensive stuff She keeps buying me, perfumes and such that I don’t touch littering my dressing table, but it comes in useful when I want to curry favour with one of the girls who works here. Or even Winston, the miserable gardener, who will take the fancy box of soap or the perfume for his daughter, he says, though everyone knows it’s for some young girl he is chasing. But what do I care, if he doesn’t tell about my picking the Bombay mangoes off Matron’s very own tree. She only claims it’s hers because it is by her little cottage, which is on the Ellesmere Lodge grounds. I think she talks to those mangoes at night they grow so fat and beautiful and inviting! For what else does she have to do once she has finished terrorizing us (well, one of us). Winston tells her anyway, the old goat, to save his skin, but by that time I’ve ripened them in brown paper inside the shoebox at the top of my clothes cupboard and they are well and truly eaten. Vanished evidence. It does pay to say nothing. Even when caught in a stickup.
I nearly died laughing inside at the scene played out later right by the mango tree. Me and Matron. The mango caught my eye and she caught me! I admit I was lurking, but what right had she to be going into her cottage at that hour of the day when she is supposed to be at work? There I was, gazing up at the shiny ripe mango right at the top of the tree. A red-gold sun that waved at me as I went for my morning walk. It pulled my feet in that direction. I picked up the crook-stick that was conveniently lying there on the ground and was positioning it properly in relation to the mango when a banshee wail sliced the morning and a fury in acid colours barged into my angle of vision.
“Mrs. Sam-phire!”
The stick could have been a snake, I dropped it so fast. My heart fell clear to my foot-bottom but I kept my head; I stood up straight and looked innocently around as if searching for a lost sheep. To buy myself time. This couldn’t be me, caught in the act.
“Mrs. Samphire … ask you …” I was forced to focus on Matron, who was now waving her arms around and screwing up her face. “… leave my mangoes alone.” Orange-coloured sandals (bronze metallic toenails!) came to a halt inches away from my own feet, which had suddenly attracted my scrutiny. I hoped I looked contrite. Matron paused then, as if she expected me to say something, but I didn’t. Such a long pause took the wind out of the sleeves of her caftan and she finished rather lamely, dropping her hands to her side. “And stop. Asking Winston. Think I don’t know. What’s going on.” Long pause until she managed to fill her sails again and wave her finger at me, but I could tell she was trapped between annoyance and the consciousness that when all was said and done, I was still a Resident. With a capital R, for that’s how the rest of them acted. She ended rather sulkily: “My private space. No right. Out of bounds. Must I put up a sign?”
I shook my head then; this was easy: No.
“Ne-ver,” she said, heaving her not very extensive chest and holding her head high in a facsimile of indignation. “Ne-ver has another Re-sident intruded in this manner.”
No, I wanted to say, the other Residents never get up off their bony asses.
I’m not sure Matron has the stomach for fighting really; she gazed at me some more, huffed and puffed, then turned on her heels and took off like a rainbow streak.
As soon as her back was turned, I took up the stick and touched the mango, which fell right into my outstretched hand. I secured it in my pocket and I continued on my walk, practically killing myself with suppressed laughter as I ran my hand over the smooth skin of the fruit and anticipated the forthcoming feast. Ha, I thought, this one will be blamed on Winston for sure. She won’t believe I could be so bold. And serve him right, too, for having the cheek to accept bribes and not keep his mouth shut.
Still, a little worm of anxiety is eating at me, for I know I shouldn’t be taking chances with Matron, my situation here is still shaky. I will vow to get into no more trouble and do as She commands.
Once a week, when the manicurist and the hairdresser come here to Ellesmere Lodge (not the facety one, this one is much more humble or else she wouldn’t be bothering to come and shampoo a bunch of old people, would she), She pays for me to have “treatments,” they call it. Just like the others. Torments, I say, but I go, just as I go to the doctor who is the other person who gives “treatments,” unwillingly, for I know what She is trying to do. The hairdresser—Morveen, if you please—is like a little overdressed schoolgirl in her tiny skirt, chunky-heel sandals, and skinny top, with blonde highlights in her hair and at least six earrings in each ear. As she eases me down in the chair to shampoo my hair while this other little one—Kyisha—is getting ready to mess around with my toes, she, this Morveen, says, “Relax, Mrs. Samphire, you are much too tense, Miss. Relax and enjoy yourself.”
3
YES, I AM ALWAYS tempted to say, once over fifty years ago I relaxed and enjoyed myself and look what I brought down on my head. Well, that was before yesterday happened. I frown and become even more tense when I think of this because I’m mad at Her, always at her, for I know she is doing all of this not for me, but for her own self, so she won’t be so ashamed of me. Shame, that is a
ll that has ever ruled her life, which is why she is like this dry stick now, all bones and hair. She always had lovely hair, the only nice thing about her, well, nice teeth too and lovely skin, pale as dry bamboo leaves and a manner as brittle as dry bamboo sticks. They love her in here, they love her there, everywhere, for everyone knows her, she is a celebrity, now she even has her own talk show on television. Our Doctor, the guru. Only she isn’t that kind of doctor, the one that can provide us with “treatments,” but the know-it-all kind, spending years studying, now doing something up at the university, always off to conferences and things. I don’t know how her husband and children put up with it, but then I hardly know them. You’d think she would have taken me home to live with them in that big house, rooms and rooms and swimming pool, but O no, not good enough for them. Her children as distant as she is, on the rare occasions I’ve been privileged to see them. Unnatural, all of them. Not that I care. Just to spite her, I no longer ask after them. Up to now I don’t even know what she’s been studying. She’s on every committee and board around. Which is why they treat her like a goddess whenever she comes to visit and why they put up with me. Don’t think I don’t know. You’d expect me to know more about her, wouldn’t you? But it’s always been like that. The one at a distance. With Shirley and Lise and Junior, now, we had some laughs together, didn’t we? Let our hair down. Things we shared. I mean, they were human and though they have turned around and done some things that . well, let’s not go into that now, but at least they didn’t act as if they were so way above the rest of us. But She always did, didn’t she? It was a mistake to let her go and live with those people, that Reverend Doctor Something and his wife, I can see that now, but at the time it seemed such a god-sent opportunity for at least one of them to get a good education and there was never any doubt it would be her. No warmth at all. Never. Her head always buried in a book. At the time I thought it was such a good thing that one of them at least liked reading, for I liked reading and my own life would have been different I know if somebody had bothered to educate me properly.
It is true I was going to St. Catherine’s Academy at the time. They did plan to send me to nursing school. I can still hear it, Aunt Zena’s cackle: “Ha-ha, you made your own bed, girl, you must lie on it,” as they washed their hands of me. Well, he did have his own bed, I’ll say that now, and a lovely horse when I met him, for this was just after the war and there was no gasoline, and he put a roof over my head and food in our bellies, I’ll grant him that. So despite everything, I could still hold my head high every time I passed their house, for they refused to have me back in. And when they passed mine on their way to church, sanctimonious old wretches, I peeped through the curtains to watch how they cast their eyes slant wise at all my flowers blooming. Flowers that annoyed them no end, I’m sure, since I planted the loudest and commonest ones I could find: zinnias and marigolds, Joseph Coat and sunflowers. No pale roses and itty-bitty violets for me. They could keep their heads higher than mine because they lived in a much bigger house, on the hill, the biggest around, and they had straighter noses. Come to think of it, She is so like them, with her powdery skin and straight nose. It is that side of the family she takes after, the ones that are so full of you know what. Except she has her father’s crinkly nayga hair. And his white people’s eyes. Don’t worry, I don’t swear, or use bad language, never have, I’ve always been careful of my speech, was forced to be as a child when I lived with them. Some things are just too drilled into me to lose, though I sometimes think some nasty words to myself. Maybe one day I’ll shout them out loud. If they bother me enough I will. If they try to send me away from this place I’ll grab hold of the veranda posts and hang on for dear life and shout and shout till the petals fall off their bloody roses and shame them all. And She will be standing there, shame tinting her dry bamboo skin. But then I think perhaps I won’t, for suppose she really gave up and abandoned me then. Whatever would I do?