Always the Proud Dancer
CHAPTER ONE
Only two things I cared about in the candygrocery store . . . the dream books hanging from a piece of dirty string in the side window, all yellow and dry from the sun beating in . . . and Eskimo Pies. Sometimes when no one was around, I’d stand as close to the window as I could squeeze, trying to read what the cover of the dream books promised. Of course, I know your dreams aren’t in those buggy, crumbling pages, but still it is rather fascinating all the same.
“Get us a loaf of white bread,” my mother had blared at me. “Like a good girl,” she added, probably because my face had gone all sour. God, how I hate that fake loveydovey tone of hers. And how I hate going into the candygrocery, mostly because of Fishface Fanny who owns the place. The old gray woman behind the counter is no bargain either. They’re like those figures in the wax museum on the boardwalk, except that at certain horrible moments they suddenly acquire what some might call the power of speech.
Every time I come into the store, Fanny barks at me: SPEAKup! even if I haven’t said a word. And those ghastly popeyes always make the words catch in the back of my throat, make me feel they’re sticking onto me like jellyfish, and you can’t shake them off for your life. This time, when I pulled open the screendoor, hoping the doorspring wouldn’t screech the way it always does, the gambler with the paper face was there in his rumpled brown pinstriped suit.
“Didya hear `bout the kids in the Heights?” he asked. Fanny just laid those popeyes on him. Didn’t say a word. (Exophthalmic . . . that was the term. I had looked it up in the medical dictionary in the library: Abnormal protrusion of the eyeballs said old Webster’s. But the medical dictionary provided much juicer info dripping with chunks of facts like a mars bar, all chocolate-covered caramel and peanuts—overactivity of the thyroid and pituitary glands producing too much fat in the eye socket, therefore forcing the eyes forward. Now that was weird!)
“Didya hear what happened to the kids in the storm?” the paperfaced gambler persisted. I stooped to test a loaf of white bread. If it wasn’t really soft, Mom would snarl at me. As I bent down, I caught from my bare arms the tang of the ocean still on my skin, and I brushed my nose against my upper arm, just for a second luxuriating in the bite of that aroma and the softness of my own skin. I straightened up, the wetness of my hair puckering the back of my neck, and the pink and white summer dress crackled with starch against my bare legs.
“In the water this afternoon. During the storm. Yeah. One kid was struck by lightning—yeah. Killed. Suuure one of the boys from town. You know his father. Sure you know him, he’s got the seafood restaurant off the pier. That’s him—Harry—Harry Miller!”
I felt myself turn instantly cold. Dropped the money on the counter and bolted out of the store, the screendoor snapping back in the door frame, the sound snap-snap-snapping in my mind. And instant numbness. For the minutes it took for me to walk from the candystore to our apartment half a block away, only his name in my mind. Why couldn’t I see his face?
Like a rubber-stamp struck against the blank screen of my mind . . . Ray Ray Ray. I tried to shape the sound of his name. Is it possible, thou dead, Ray? I’d been on the beach myself that afternoon. No one else for miles and miles, the waves surging and boiling. Nothing more exhilarating than hurling one’s self against the breaking waves, the water so icy it set one’s skin to burning. I envisioned myself emerging from the waves like an icemaiden of yore, icicles dripping from hair nose chin. I forced myself to stay immersed, just my head above water, because it was the only way I could prolong my farewell swim. Who knows, I thought, I might not get back to the beach for years now that I’d finally graduated from old Ocean Park High. I rolled over to float, so I could watch cloud masses gathering overhead, the light sifting through gaps of highbanked clouds.
All about me the distant sounding sough of the sea, the shifting kaleidoscope of light, clouds, waves, spume, the curve and swoop of the seagulls. Their dry shout.
Overhead a jagged spine of lightning cracked across the sky. Half-scared, part-defiant, I dove beneath the waves.
Thunder roared: “Go home!”
No, damnyou, I shouted back (amended to damnit instantly). I wanted to stay until the sun began to set, to watch the ocean swallow the nightsky. Another roll of the kettledrums, another guttural rumble.
All of the lights of heaven suddenly burst upon me, as though I were being accused. Not yards away a thin spear of zigzag fire darted toward the waves.
Scrambling through the boiling breakers, I hurled forward, up the mound of damp strand to my blanket. Grabbed my sandals, and dragging the blanket over one shoulder, I tore along the curve of beachland, finally ducked under the boardwalk. So strange a subterranean world existed there, the sand in constant shadow harbored a prehistoric moist chill that made one feel it must serve as the breeding ground for a thousand horrors—of insect life and its morbid mutations.
When the summer tourists swarmed the beach and boardwalk, one could fancy it a mysterious world shielded from the blaze of sun and carnival, for the sun only penetrated in thin, pallid shafts, overhead the muffled scuff and scrape of a thousand ambling feet, shod and bare. Then, as I finally reached the street, I caught sight on the stone wall lettered in flaming red: DANGER, WATCH OUT 75,000 VOLTS!!!
In the street, I straightened up and spun around to take one more last look at the beach, where I had spent my summer days as a very young child, until I was admitted to the Mary Beth. Framed by the boardwalk and its wooden supports, the beach which I had just fled seemed strangely diminished, as though viewed through the narrow lens of a telescope. My last view.
Then the rain came pelting down. As I jogged along toward the thought of home and hot bath, I felt the wet pavement washed clean and smooth beneath my bare feet, the sting of harsh cold raindrops pelting against my bare back. At the corner of Pacific Avenue, waiting for the light to change, I draped the blanket over my head, huddling under its cover, sniffing at the fibrous, close musky odor of damp wool. I took the stairs to our apartment three at a time and made straight for the bath, where I lolled, immersed in Thomas Wolfe’s “The Web and the Rock,” as I soaked.
He heard, far off, the deep and beelike murmur of its million-footed life, and all the mystery of the earth and time was in that sound. He saw its thousand streets peopled with a flashing, beautiful, infinitely glorious jewel, blazing with countless rich and brilliant facets of a life so good, so bountiful, so strangely and constantly beautiful and interesting that it seemed intolerable that he should miss a moment of it. He saw the streets swarming with the figures of great men and glorious women, and he walked among them like a conqueror, winning fiercely and exultantly by his talent, courage, and merit the greatest tributes that the city had to offer, the highest prize of power, wealth, and fame, and the great emolument of love.
When the water was almost too cold to bear, I finally pulled the plug and heaved my dripping self out of the great city through which the author strode like a mythic giant. Afterward I wrapped myself in an extravagant towel, (one of the few we possessed) and watched myself enact various roles in the tri-mirrored vanity in my mother’s bedroom—beautiful, aspiring actress; beautiful, brooding young woman seeking love and romance on shipboard; beautiful young woman pining for her love far away; beautiful young aspiring actress about to be discovered by Charles Boyer on a ship crossing the Atlantic, et cetera, et cetera. Isn’t it time that you gave up such childish indulgences, I scolded myself. But it was comforting to partake of such nonsensical fantasies, safe from the lightning bolts of an accusing heaven.
Hurrying home from the candygrocery store, I pressed the loaf of bread to my side. Ray. I whispered his name. Ray. And dragged slow feet up the stairs. I figured the funeral would be at Schwartz’s on Atlantic Avenue . It was where all the middle and upper class families of the island applied for a decent burial for the deceased. It was at Schwartz’s Funeral Parlor that you dared your childhood enemies to trespass, where you dared yourself to go trick or treating Halloween night, and where you had come to see your high school music teacher laid out in a satin-lined coffin, she who had always been like an oversized puppet peddling furiously on her bicycle, plait of hair thrusting out above her turtle neck shirt, until she got to school and wrapped the long braid about her head, tucking it in with her choral leader’s prim poise, and much as you always muttered you couldn’t stand her, because she drove all of you so sharply and anxiously through the cycles of scales and chords over and over, had you trembling at the piano as you struggled to concentrate, gazing down on her becalmed countenance in the coffin, you could see her lifting her goosey neck high above the standup collar and pinning her eyes on you just before she brought the baton down with that furious downsweep of her arm. And after the funeral suddenly a picture of her as she looked riding her bicycle mornings on her way to school like some mad figure peddling out of an early English film.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow would see beautiful, wondrous Ray in a box. And Mr. Miller stumbling about. Maybe I would meet Ray’s mother for the first time. For the life of me I couldn’t conjure up Mr. Miller’s face, though I could so easily sense his paunchy dominance of the deck as he lumbered along the Mary Beth, in his trunks, his matching terry-lined shirt open on his caved-in chest above that ridiculous preponderance of belly and the equally ridiculous dark glasses such as aviators wear, all wrong on his meaty mug.
Once Mr. Herman the tailor across from my father’s shoe store induced me to run an errand to the funeral parlor. “Are you afraid?” Mr. Herman mocked me gently over his spectacles. “Of course not!” I proclaimed with all the bravado of my seven years and promptly set out across the avenue to Schwartz’s Funeral Parlor.
Once inside I blinked. I had had no idea that the interior was wrapped in such velvety darkness. I could scarcely see my way and blundered into Mr. Schwartz himself in the hall. “Yes, come this way,” his voice boomed, and I followed him like a small blind bat. But when he loomed over me like a frankensteinian creature in the miasmic steam of my imagination, terror erased reason. Forgetting the money I was to deliver back to Mr. Herman, I hurled myself pell-mell along the corridor, toward the door and the daylight beyond!
Afterward, in numerous dreams, I was pursued by a fierce great Dane, myself helpless on roller skates with an ice cream cone in my hand; did I only dream the dog outside the funeral parlor or had he in reality chased me about and about in circles, until I managed to break out of around-and-around and lunged forward across the wide avenue to finally reach my father’s store, weeping hysterically?
Tomorrow Schwartz’s again. And suppose you don’t go, old girl, I said softly to myself. You don’t have to, you know. Yet I realized if I mourned Ray alone, I might never get the old bruises to heal.
I heard my mother calling me to dinner but didn’t answer. What should I wear tomorrow—all my summer dresses were pastels, like children’s frocks. Only then did I recall one incredible barb of lightning that had chopped across the sky and lit the entire stretch of beach and sent me scrambling out of the water. Was that the javelin that had cut Ray down? And if I hadn’t run when I did, maybe I too would have been struck, electricity charging through blood and bone and nerves, burning all the life out, out, out. I saw Ray as he must have looked, standing in the surf some five, six miles away in his blue trunks, poised magnificently, always the proud dancer.
Then I knelt by my window, gazing out at the beam of the lighthouse, watching as my own tears spread the light, smearing it into a shimmering dazzle, until I had to shut my eyes.