A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
(Another excerpt from my novel, Adventures in Bereavement Land — Rita’s experience with ballroom dancing lessons)
I went to my ballroom dancing class on my day off, feeling like a decadent dilettante whirling around the floor in the middle of the afternoon with Ludwig, the Austrian instructor who was closer in age to my sons than to me. I loosened up and got into the rhythm of the Rumba, Tango and Cha-Cha. I adored the sophisticated cadences of the Fox Trot and the sweeping grace of the Waltz.
“Rita, you are getting so good,” Ludwig told me with his clipped and charming accent. “I am thinking it is time for us to do a number in one of our studio showcases!”
I put him off, laughing. “I just want to polish up my social skills here. Believe me, I have no illusions of becoming the next Ginger Rogers.”
He wouldn’t listen. “But Rita, it vould be so good for your confidence! You could have your family come to vatch you!”
Right. The last thing I wanted was my family to see me dancing, a sure-fire guarantee I would screw up and trip over my feet. Besides, I was a little long in the tooth for a dance recital, wasn’t I? But then I started thinking he might be right. Maybe I would get over being a nervous klutz on the dance floor if I mastered this routine even though the thought of being watched by an audience filled me with fear and loathing. Fear and loathing might be an improvement to the numbing quality of my all-too-predictable days.
The number Ludwig selected for our showcase routine was an elaborate Fox Trot to the tune of Johnny Ray singing “Just Walking in the Rain.” No tune was too moldy for these ballroom dancing numbers, I had learned. We would each wear trench coats from the studio’s closet and twirled umbrellas, which, by the way, I had to buy. We would begin our routine at opposite ends of the dance floor, winding up together before dancing off, arm in arm, under one umbrella, coyly gazing at each other as if totally smitten.
The showcase was to be held at a posh country club a few towns away and I was as nervous as a kid on the way to her first tap dance recital as I drove there on a Saturday morning. Lillian was covering for me at the store but I felt like I should have had my head examined for leaving my post at the cash register for this frivolity.
I snaked the car through the lush suburban landscape, lawns exploding in blinding green as the sun burst through the morning mist. Wild daisies and black-eyed Susans were springing up along the highway, shaking their heads like tots awakening after a long nap. The lush beauty of the late summer season should have made me hopeful but it was just one more reminder of my life lumbering along its course with my loneliness still intact, my unwieldy baggage thumping along behind me.
I finally located the club after whizzing by its hidden driveway three times. Harry would have been apoplectic. Well, shit, if Harry were beside me, I would never be doing this, would I? Damn him anyway for leaving me to start life over in this screwed-up world. As I pulled into the parking area, I checked myself in the rearview mirror. The muggy morning had frizzed out my hair like a dandelion gone to seed.
Swallowing the last of the cold coffee from the donut shop drive-thru, I made my way up the steps, catching the sounds of the band warming up. I was hoping that I looked like the epitome of composure as I scanned the room for someone I knew. Anyone. Where the hell was Ludwig? Most of my fellow students were already seated at tables, all gussied up in evening gowns and tuxes like they were headed for the prom.
Because I had to get up early to get to work on Saturday mornings, I hadn’t been attending many of the studio’s Friday night dance parties lately so I barely knew most of these people. I spotted Margaret, a widow like myself, at a table with some empty chairs. A somber woman who was chronologically older than me by a few years but by light years in attitude, she wore a green velvet frock with a white cotton pinafore embroidered with tiny flowers, something Heidi might have worn as she chased her grandfather’s goats through the Alps. There was something about a buxom sixty-something woman in a smocked pinafore that just tickled me. I had watched her practice her Swiss dance number with her teacher, a rail-thin Czech who was now striding across the floor in short pants, suspenders, lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a jaunty feather. I had never been brave enough to drop acid during the sixties but it occurred to me that this must have been what it felt like to be tripping. But it was any port in a storm and Margaret was the only lighthouse in sight. I had never actually bonded with her but not for lack of trying. Like me, she had started taking dancing lessons after her husband passed away, so one day at the studio I had broached the subject of our mutual widowhood, surfing for sympathy like my dog Ralph working me for a biscuit.
“How long did it take you to feel like yourself again after you lost your husband?” I had once asked her at dancing class as we roughed up the soles of our shoes with wire brushes before hitting the floor.
“My husband was sixty-nine,” she had replied. “They all have to go sometime.”
Today, I would try again. “Hi, Margaret! Are you ready for your big number?” I set my Styrofoam cup down on the tablecloth and pulled up a chair.
“I enjoy competing. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” she answered crisply. “By the way, this table is taken. There are some empty seats over there.” She picked up my lipstick-stained coffee cup like she was handling a dead rodent and rose from her seat, placing it delicately on the table behind us and looking as if she had just caught a whiff of something foul.
I don’t know how I overcame the urge to toss the coffee dregs in her face but eventually I started breathing normally. I struck up a conversation with some other fellow students while picking my way through the chicken croquettes as we waited for the competition to begin. On one of my dozen or so trips to the ladies’ room, I saw a frumpy young woman from my class being assisted into a tight strapless dress by another woman. Her compact white breasts with their upturned rosebud tips hardened by the air conditioning spilled out of her bodice, surprising me with their beauty. Her fingers poked at her upswept hairdo, which looked like it was held in place with superglue. She could have been a model readying herself for the catwalk at Fashion Week in New York City, her perky little bosom just another fashion accessory. If only she could go to class topless, I thought, her dance card would always be full.
Back at the table, I smiled and applauded all the competitors as my stomach bubbled like a witch’s cauldron. I watched a couple execute a Paso Dobles, a sexy Spanish rendition of a bullfight where the woman taunted her partner, glaring at him provocatively and swishing her red dress from one hip to the other as she stomped her high heels. I marveled at the cardiovascular health of an elderly classmate as he propelled his young teacher around the floor, her blonde mane flying, to the swift tempo of the Viennese Waltz as I wondered if there was a doctor in the house. A glamorous African-American woman who had always impressed me with her grace threw herself into a passionate tango with exaggerated leg lifts, wrapping herself around her instructor like Silly Putty and giving the audience a good view of her lacey red thong.
Finally it was time for my big number. My chest was tight and my face flaming as I reminded myself to breathe. I felt supremely foolish but the routine went off without a hitch as I smiled my way through it, twirling my umbrella and silently counting the steps. I didn’t dare look at the audience but Ludwig whispered his encouragement through tight lips like a ventriloquist. After we strode off the floor in syncopated rhythm, I headed immediately for the bar for a double shot of vodka.
When the competition ended, we were treated to an extraordinary exhibition by a pair of visiting European champions; polished pros whose dancing shoes had been their ticket out of Budapest. I’d love to tell you that I won a medal or that someone tall, dark and light on his feet tangoed his way into my heart but I headed home alone, four hundred dollars lighter after entry fees and dancing shoes, not to mention those damned umbrellas. Ludwig gave me two air kisses as I left, telling me the videotape would be available for $29.95. He’d save me a copy.