Chapter 14 The Boy Could Dance
The Boy Could Dance
Olivia was adamant that there was no way on God’s green earth we would be going to her house if her mother was home.
But her mother wasn’t there, she was with Olivia’s kid sister doing some back-to-school shopping.
And so we walked back to Mindy’s Mix-Ins, retrieved my car, and drove to the Fosters’ house that afternoon.
The room wasn’t musty because the windows were open.
It was also immaculate, as if a realtor had staged the room in preparation for selling the place.
When Olivia had said that her father had jammed books onto the shelves, I’d envisioned the sort of chaos you see in used bookstores in converted carriage barns, some of the tomes vertical and some horizontal, many laid flat upon the spines of others.
In fact, the books were impeccably shelved on three tall bookcases, the novels alphabetized by author and the nonfiction moving chronologically.
I spotted the AP European history textbook we’d both read in class and was impressed by some of the other books he’d read on his own.
On the shelf with it, there was a book on the Napoleonic wars, a primer on Renaissance art, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
It had never crossed my mind to go beyond the textbook. Never.
“He must have done very well on the AP exam,” I observed, running my fingers down the spines.
“He got a five. That’s the highest you can get,” she said.
“I got a four,” I volunteered.
“That’s good, too.”
There were posters on the wall of the Bee Gees and Elton John and for the movie Jaws.
“Those were the posters he had in his room in Miami, too,” said Olivia.
“He didn’t get new ones here? When you all moved north?”
“Back north,” she corrected me. “No. He really liked it there. In Miami. He would have been happy to stay.”
“What did he like about it?” I asked.
“He had a girlfriend there,” Becca said, and Olivia nodded.
“Yeah. Anna Reyes. Her family was from Cuba. He was very good at disco.”
“Kenny?”
“You are, like, totally surprised.”
“The boys in Tallmadge can’t dance. I assumed no teenage boys could dance.”
“He could. He practiced in secret when we lived in Miami. When he wanted to get good at something, that’s what he’d do. Did. He’d work forever in private until he was totally excellent at it. He and Anna taught me how to do the hustle.”
Becca poked her friend in the ribs and said, “Show her his leisure suits and those Huk-A-Poo shirts.”
The other girl rolled her eyes but opened the closet door, and there were the polyester leisure suits, one the color of a robin’s egg and one the green of a lime.
There were polyester shirts with the sorts of tropical birds and flowers you might see on baggy Hawaiian shirts, but these were long-sleeved and slim-fit.
“He got all new clothes when we moved here. We all did. You know, Lacoste. Or what my mom called knockoff Lacoste. It looked like Lacoste but didn’t have the crocodile. ”
“He kept his old clothes from Florida?” I asked. “Wouldn’t he have outgrown them?”
“Probably. My dad used to say he was getting bigger just from caddying. But he wanted to go to college in Florida someday, and he just never got rid of them.”
“He liked Florida that much?”
“I guess. But, to be honest, last summer, before he died, he started talking more and more about maybe going to school up north. The really good colleges in Massachusetts and Connecticut and Vermont.”
I looked at the stereo and the record albums. “May I?” I asked.
“I don’t care. You’re here. I just want to be sure we leave before my mom gets home.”
“I get it. I understand why she hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you. She just thinks you’re, I don’t know, bad luck.”
Becca nodded with great histrionics, adding, “But we know you’re not. As my own mom says, it’s just—”
“Really, Becca? You’re going there?” her friend snapped, cutting her off.
“Go ahead, Becca,” I murmured.
She was hesitant now, but I urged her on.
“Okay,” she said carefully. “Not bad luck. Bad parenting. But please don’t be insulted, Mira!
It’s not like my parents know your parents all that well.
I mean, they all saw each other at the club, that was it, and my parents don’t even completely agree on the bad parenting stuff, because Spencer turned out great, so how bad could they be? I mean, Spencer…”
Her voice trailed off because she realized she was only making this worse.
“Don’t worry, Becca,” I reassured her. “Obviously, I’m bad luck. And I know my parents aren’t Mom and Dad on Happy Days.”
“My mom really doesn’t hate you,” Olivia repeated. “And, this is weird, but…”
“Tell me.”
“My mom says the settlement will pay for my sister’s and my college educations. So, as my aunt said, Kenny didn’t die in vain. That’s the expression she used.”
“You and your sister would have gone to college even if he hadn’t died,” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
I began thumbing through the records. God, South Florida was such a different world from Tallmadge, and it was evident in the vinyl.
You would never have found the Miami Sound Machine, KC and the Sunshine Band, or Donna Summer played at the keggers in my little suburb or on the turntables in the smoking room or cafeteria at the high school. “These were his favorites?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. It’s what he listened to here. In his bedroom.”
“I knew he liked the Bee Gees,” I said.
“Yeah, but he would never have played the Bee Gees in the school cafeteria. He wanted to fit in,” his sister told me, and it was as if he had hidden this part of his soul with the same determination a gay student might have stayed closeted back then.
“But he thought you and Marie and your friends were cool.”
“I…I thought he was, too,” I told her. I turned to her from the records.
The truth was, before August 3, 1978, I had been cool.
Very cool, very popular. “I’m sorry we didn’t hang out together all that much.
We did a little in class and at the club that summer before, you know.
But…” I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t like where it was going.
“You were always nice to him in that history class. You and Marie. On his first day at the school, after that class, you showed him the smokers’ lounge and where the records were in the cafeteria, and which muffins were least gross in the morning.”
“Avoid the bran ones and the blueberry ones,” said Becca knowingly. “One is dry and gives you the farts, and one is mushy and slimy.”
“He didn’t smoke,” I murmured.
“No. But you didn’t know that. He just thought it was awesome that this golf whiz kid and super-popular senior—you—were nice to him.
I mean, you were the best athlete in the school.
He told us about you and Marie that first night at dinner.
Later, he told us about the time you three worked in study hall together on some Renaissance stuff. Some crazy Italian politician.”
“Machiavelli,” I said.
“Sure. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I was good at golf. But I never thought of myself as an athlete. The girls who play field hockey and soccer? They’re something,” I said, and I heard the quaver in my voice.
I recalled taking fifteen minutes nearly two years earlier now and showing the new kid some of the ropes.
It might have made me hate myself a little bit less, but then Olivia inadvertently gutted the memory.
“He thought you and Marie and him were going to be friends,” she added, and she meant nothing by it. She was too young. But I sat on the bed, on the perfectly flat duvet, my head in my hands, and mortified the two younger girls by starting to weep.
After I gathered myself, the three of us went downstairs.
He thought you were going to be friends.
As we passed through the kitchen, I saw a small chalkboard hanging on the wall near the phone, and on it were a few grocery items—bananas, cat food, Instant Breakfast—and a couple of phone numbers. One I recognized instantly: Theo Catton’s. Or, to be precise, the Catton family’s home phone number.
“That’s Theo’s number,” I said before I could stop myself.
“Nah,” Olivia corrected me. “It was. Mr. Catton moved out long ago.”
“Right. Of course.”
“Now it’s just Mrs. Catton’s—and her kids.”
“Are your mom and Mrs. Catton friends?”
She scrunched up her face: of all the things we’d talked about, this was the one that was making her uncomfortable. “Sort of? Kind of?”
“Olivia, they are or they aren’t.”
“They are, I guess. But they’re working together, mostly.”
“They have jobs together?”
“No, they’re starting this, like, group. This organization thing. It…I don’t know…I don’t totally get it.”
“What does it do?”
“The group? They’re working with Father Whitlock at the pisky church and some social worker in Mount Vernon. It’ll help, somehow, girls like you.”
“Girls like me?”
“I don’t understand it all, but it’s supposed to keep girls like you out of trouble or help girls like you after you’ve been…you know. Girls who’ve been with married men, I guess.”
Becca, ever helpful and filterless, corrected her. “Not just married men. Older men. Girls who’ve been—and here’s how they talk—used by an older man. Or men. You know, messed up by them.”
I considered defending myself and saying it had just been one. Theo. A man, not men. But, of course, that wouldn’t be true. I’d sworn off married men, but not older men.
“See,” Olivia elaborated, “they wanted something good to come from Kenny’s death, other than my sister’s and my college education, and you kind of brought my mom and Mrs. Catton together.”
“Someone had suggested a golf scholarship,” Becca added, “but this seemed like a much better idea.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Whatever your mom and Mrs. Catton are starting, it probably is better than a golf scholarship.”
Then we were silent a long moment. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Cattons’ phone number, and looked away from it only when Olivia said, “You should probably go now. It wouldn’t be cool if you were still here when my mom gets home.”