Dance Lessons Read online

  But she didn’t. No, not Jo.

  She stops, leans on the cane and fumbles in her coat pocket for the packet of Benson and Hedges and a white Bic lighter. She angles her head and chip-chip-chips at the lighter, then inhales deeply.

  For the past two weeks, three o’clock in the morning and the pain sets her fumbling for the lamp and the brown jar of tablets that they gave her in the hospital. She spills one out in her hand and bites it in half, the taste bitter, poison. She always spits the other half back. Spare it, she promises herself. Spare it for again.

  Then she shifts herself in the bed like an old cow in the manger, the bones scraping against each other. Waiting. She thinks of mad things, days long ago, things and people and songs and the dances they used to go to. Then at last, she dozes to the sound of the dawn birds outside her window.

  The pain would go faster if she took the whole tablet. But she’s afraid of what’s ahead. So she rations them out, saves them up for that one night, the night when the pain will strike her blind.

  But for now, today, she can still walk her own land, stand and smoke a fag in this summer stillness, listen to the pigeons hoo-hoo-hoo-ing.

  It’s almost a year since she first woke to the wind roiling in her chest, the pain creeping out her arm. She coughed up blood on the hankies beside her bedside. It was the height of hay season, the meadows cut, and Ned had the usual meitheal of men cutting, reaping, bailing. So it was only dust and hayseed that made her cough like that. She told herself this. She believed this.

  Then, when the men were gone and the hay crop saved in its round, sealed bales, she rang the young Dr. Fitzgerald down in the village. Up the hill came that big station-wagon car of his. He stood in her kitchen wagging his finger at her like she was a bold child. Said she was sick longer than she was actually admitting. How she should have come down to the village to his surgery for tests. Listen, Mrs. Dowd, would you not think, even now, about giving up th’oul fags? There are skin patches and chewing gum and herbs for your nerves.

  An operation, he says one day. Maybe not, he says another. Mediastinoscopy and lobectomy. He said those words, medical words, right there in her own house. And he said the cancer word. Cancer of the lung. Tom Fitzgerald is full of hot air and big talk, just like his father before him.

  At night she dreams of things floating, swarming. She dreams of frog spawn, squishy, runny little bubbles that grow and spread like a rash.

  The young Fitzgerald sent her to the hospital in Galway, where everything was white, all white, like a butcher shop. She hated the nurses with their trilling little voices and silly chat: How are we this morning, Mrs. Dowd? You must tell us if you’re feeling any pain? Then here came those foreigners wheeling the tea trolleys, delivering her porridge and toast.

  That first day there, she woke to a face over her bed: a pert little nun in a white blouse, a gold crucifix around her neck and the communion host in her hand. All that seafóid about her spiritual well-being. Put your trust and faith in the Lord, missus.

  Jo cursed her from the bedside, told her she could keep all those old pisreógs for all those holy types in their beds with their rosaries. “The Lord has nothing to do with it,” she said to the little nun’s startled face. “The whole religion thing’s nothing but a bloody hoodwink.”

  They marked her chest with a biro, then wheeled her into a machine like a giant toilet paper roll. They told her to talk into a microphone. Are you all right there, Mrs. Dowd?

  Later, she woke to lights and noises and another woman patient who screeched into the night like the bean sí. They gave Jo tablets galore. Tablets that made her sleep so heavily that she dreamed of mad things.

  She’s eighty-two, you know. The nurses whispered across her bed. Little bitches.

  When she came home, Dr. Fitzgerald wanted her in some kind of rehab place, a nursing home. “And what?” Jo demanded. “Just what would I do with my cattle and land and everything here?”

  So he sent a visiting nurse up the hill who moved Jo downstairs to Mother’s old bedroom off the parlor. The room Jo’s mother had died in, over thirty years ago now. It hadn’t been used since.

  After the hospital, she slept nearly all day. When she woke, she saw Mother’s face above her, an old woman staring down at her daughter lying there. Mother. Daughter. Musical beds.

  You can give her soft, runny things, she heard the young Fitzgerald telling Ned. They won’t hurt her throat, won’t scrape the radiation burns. And I’ll give you extra tablets for the pain. Now, make sure she takes them. You know her form, how she is. Poor Ned. He’s a stock man, not a bloody nurse!

  Now Jo stops on the avenue, leans on her cane to count the cattle: fifteen heifers, seven yearling bullocks. She stands there listening to that tearing sound as they graze the summer grass. She takes a last drag and stubs out the cigarette on the avenue.

  The evenings, nights, she’s spent out here in these fields, searching for straying heifers, their torchlights bobbing ahead of them, her and the boy’s. Their voices echoing each other’s Bess, bess, bess, bess as they tramped through the wet grass. Listening for hoofs crashing through the undergrowth. The boy always frantic—not for the missing beast, but mad for the homework he’d left behind on the kitchen table.

  So here he is now. Again. God blast him. He comes whenever it suits him—stands here on the avenue or slips into her room, standing there at the bedside on those nights when she’s awake with the pain. Or she wakens from a dream of him—not as a man, but as a garsúin, a young lad, himself and that bloody dog chasing through these fields.

  The letter from America was waiting for her when she came home from the hospital, sitting there on her kitchen table where Ned had put all her post. A white envelope and an American stamp. She let herself hope. A letter at last. After sixteen years. So someone must have told him, told him about the sickness, the hospital.

  To the Dowd family . . . I regret to inform you . . .

  It was signed by a woman, claiming to be his American wife, but she had some foreign surname, not Dowd.

  Once, there was a man who lived down the hill between here and the village of Gowna. He caught his arm in a threshing machine. For years afterward, they said he still felt it—the arm still throbbing, in an arm that they’d sawn away. A ghost pain.

  And so it is with the boy’s death—a son she hasn’t seen since he left for America sixteen years ago. Never answered her letters. Never rang his own house. Never came home.

  After the first few years, she cursed him to hell. Told herself she was a damn sight better off—a grown man to hold grudges, silences, just like his father before him. Briseann an dúchas. Nature, breeding follows on from one generation to the next.

  The years went on: hay season, harvest, winter fodder, the men she hired to come and clear the land, excavate the rocks and the bushes. It all went on just dandy without the likes of him.

  Then here came that letter. Her son’s death is the man with the cut arm. It’s someone squeezing her heart. And here he is now: a boy running across these fields, a ghost boy and his sheepdog, Rosie.

  She feels the strength waning from her legs, her whole body. The wind feels trapped, guttered in her chest.

  The hazel rock. You will. You must. She forces herself on, tap-tap-tap with the cane, her breaths coming hard and loud in the summer evening.

  The hazel rock stands three-quarter way down the avenue—a single outcropping in her cleared fields. Even from here she can smell it—that whiff of damp moss, the musky bluebells between the limestone rocks.

  Last winter she got better. The grass turned white and hoary with frost, and all that dry freezing air did a powerful job of cleaning out her lungs. For days and days, she hadn’t a whit of pain. I’m good as new, she told herself. She believed this, too.

  Christmas Day, she took her first walk out here again, out across the yard and out the gate, then down the silent avenue. So they were all wrong. The young Fitzgerald and the whole bloody lot of them.

>   Once she felt better, she decided to ring her, that American woman that wrote the letter. She read the phone number on the top of the writing paper—some sort of a university, an academy, the name in curly gold letters. Jo was going to give her a piece of her mind for sending a letter like that, cold as ice, sent to the Gowna post office instead of directly to a man’s own house, making a holy show before the whole parish.

  So many nights, she held that phone in her hand, listened to the taped voice: You must first dial the country code . . .

  Then she’d drop the phone again. What to say? Oh, yes, what the dickens to say to a woman like that? The woman was probably already divorced from her son. Sure everyone knew they were all divorced—some of them two and three times—beyond in America. And money is their God. So she’s looking for her money, this young one, her pound of marital flesh.

  Jo hears a car engine behind her. Ned. Sure, who else? Here’s the red Ford Fiesta with the dried mud and cac bó spattered along the doors. He’s pretending he’s knocking off early for once, just on his way home. But she knows that he’s been watching her from the upper meadows beyond the house. He’s sure she’s going to fall and break something.

  He pulls alongside her now, leans across the car to set the passenger’s door open. Ping-ping-ping. That car noise that’d wake the bloody dead.

  “They said on the radio there might be a drop of rain in it, ma’am.” Those bushy eyebrows, those hooded eyes. Ned McHugh is a discreet and careful man. From discreet and careful people. “I’ll turn the car ’round and drop you up and you can sit within at the telly and rest yourself.”

  That damn door still ping-ping as he comes around to the passenger’s side. She elbows away his helping hand. Then she eases herself in there while Ned puts the cane in the back seat, sets it among the baler twine and boxes of cattle doses and animal feedstuffs.

  He walks back around and he revs the engine. The pebbles ding off the wheels as they turn back uphill for the house.

  10

  SHE LIES THERE, watching the daylight through the flowery bedroom curtains.

  She sets herself the usual mind test. Day: Monday. Date: The thirtieth of May. Year: 2002. And then, the final test: Pain? No, not so bad today.

  Most mornings, she hears Ned’s step in the back kitchen, then the kitchen presses opening and shutting. He comes, mar dhea, to look for cattle doses or a syringe for a weakling calf. He has started this pretense, this malarkey because he knows that she’s sick again, that the cursed cancer’s back.

  She lies there waiting for him. Not a sound. Or has he come already? Has she slept through it all, his rattling around the kitchen?

  One day last week—was it last week?—she woke to him standing there in the parlor doorway. First, she thought it was a dream, a vision. But there he was, in his stocking feet, the tweed cap scrunched in his hand, like a man tiptoeing into a church. Did he think that she was dead and that he’d have to ring someone?

  She shut her eyes, pretending to be still asleep, but breathing extra loudly so he’d know, so he could tiptoe away again.

  She must bring a clock in from the parlor. What the devil use is it out there on the parlor mantel where no one ever sees it? She never had a bedside clock before. A country woman wakes with the birds, the daylight. Up with the lark and gets on with the work. But these days, she’s asleep when she should be awake. Asleep like a wino.

  Up, up, up. She commands herself. Her clothes are looser now, her body thinner than ever before. But her body feels weighted, ballasted like a bag of drowning kittens.

  Up, up.

  Through the open bedroom door she watches the shaft of sunlight across the parlor, over the brocade couch and the glass-fronted china cabinet where her wedding china sat for years and years.

  Up, up.

  Her eyes flutter shut.

  In this dream, Jo Burke is waiting for her turn at the mirror, waiting among all those chattery and giggly girls who stand on tippy toe to dab at their faces from a powder compact. Jo’s sister, Kitty, stands next to her, spraying her hair. A girl called Rosaleen Dunphy is laughing and asking if there’s any chance of a bit of that hair lacquer. The girls wear cinched dresses and high-heeled court shoes. Everyone knows everyone. They know each other’s parents and sisters and brothers.

  From the ladies’ toilet they can hear the strains of Jack Power and his Sunshine Swing Band. “On a day like today / we’d pass the time away,” the man croons, while another man plays the clarinet.

  Among this group of Saturday-night girls, there is a kind of valiant desolation. These are the Gowna girls who have stayed, waited it out, stayed put in their own parish while their classmates and sisters have taken the boat to England to train to be clerk-typists or hospital cleaners or nurses.

  When their faces are perfect, their hair scooped up into side combs, the girls leave together for the dance floor, some of them hanging back for the final check: Are the seams in my stockings straight?

  When the fellas arrive, the band is in full swing and the girls are dancing with each other. The coy ones watch the door and wink at each other as the fellas parade past in a cloud of fags and a whiff of drink.

  Kitty Burke, Jo’s younger sister, is always among the first asked up to dance. Always swept off her feet. And there she is now, her face flushed under the lights, her eyes wild, her scarlet dress fluttering around her as she does a two-step with yet another handsome, Brylcreem young man.

  Jo is tall and plain. She is only twenty-five years of age, yet she takes her place on a bench along the wall with the older women, the Gowna spinsters who, week after week, sit there with their hopeful smiles, their features set in valiant sufferance. Some are plain—big noses or too tall or mannish shoulders like Jo has. Another has poor eyesight. Four of them are passable in looks, but their families have no fortune or dowry. Or their families’ land is already gone to an oldest brother or as dowry for another, older sister.

  John Dowd never asks any girl up to dance. From the bench, Jo watches him standing there inside the dance-hall door, forty-five or fifty years of age if he’s a day. He stands there with his bicycle clips still on, which makes him look ridiculous, like something that might come waddling across the big screen in the cinema in Ballinkeady. His small, pinched face is scrubbed pink above his stiff shirt collar.

  And now, for the first time any girl can remember, John Dowd is crossing the dance floor, angling around the dancers and excusing himself until he’s standing here. His face is cocked sideways like a begging dog. “Will you dance, miss?”

  Your bicycle clips, she wants to say to him. But then, she looks into those petrified eyes and takes pity. She accepts his dance offer and tries not to look down past his waist.

  They dance a two-step. He is an awkward dancer. He keeps stepping on her feet, her new suede court shoes that make her tower above him. Across the loud, smoky dance floor, she sees people smirking at them. And Kitty. Where’s her sister Kitty?

  After the first set, he asks her for a walk outside. Still she scans those laughing, sweating faces for her younger sister. As if she must get direction, permission. She has never been invited away from the dance hall before.

  Josephine Burke and John Dowd leave the voices and the music and lights behind them to walk across the car park and then down along the lake road, down toward the village of Gowna, where he said he’d treat her to a mineral, a fizzy orange drink, from a late-open shop.

  She listens to their footsteps in the silence, his and hers. Clack, clack, clack along the road. She watches fissures of reflected moonlight on Lough Gowna. She looks up at the moon’s white, dispassionate face. Do something, Jo entreats it. Though she’s not quite sure what she’d like the moon to do. Liven things up a bit, let her life up in Knockduff live up to her girlish hopes, the daydreams that bother her head while she’s out in the byre helping Father to milk the cows.

  His footsteps stop. The lake water laps in the distant as John Dowd steps nearer to her. He’s tre
mbling. When he kisses her, their chins collide.

  I have been kissed, she thinks. At twenty-five, someone has finally kissed me, run his hands up over the bodice of my dress.

  Later, when they are walking back to the dance hall, her mouth sugary and sticky from the fizzy orange drink, John Dowd stops to light a Sweet Afton cigarette.

  He offers her one. She takes it, and he leans in closer, his face suddenly there in the light from his lit match. He looked better in the dark.

  After that first night, the night when he brought her down to the village, he always asked her up to dance. It was assumed that she’d dance with nobody else. And twice more, Jo went walking out along the lake road with him. Now when he kissed her, she shut her eyes and imagined that it was someone else, one of the other men back up there in the Gowna Hall.

  Each Saturday night a voice inside said, Tonight must be the last. I am a laughing stock. Yes, even to the wallflower girls, the girls who never get asked out to dance. So I will get rid of him.

  The house at Knockduff turns secretive and whispery. Mother and Father have got wind of their courtship. At night, when Jo lies awake upstairs in the bed she shares with her sister, she listens to the mumble of voices through the kitchen ceiling.

  A Thursday night, and Father is suddenly scrubbed and dressed in a suit and a starched shirt collar. He never wears a top coat except for Sunday Mass. But now, here he is checking his pocket watch and pacing the kitchen until the car lights arch against the front windows of the house. It’s a hackney car, a car that Father has summoned.

  Two nights later, Saturday, Jo has decided to break it off with John Dowd. When he crosses the dance floor to ask her to dance as usual, she’s ready. All week in the fields and in the byre and while doing the household ironing, she has been practicing the words inside her head. But now the words won’t come. She shakes her head. No. No. Then they lock gazes, his face full of injury. Silently, while the other girls sit there tapping their feet to the music and pretending not to wait and watch, Jo tries to tell him everything in their silent gaze: how she cannot let this man who is almost Father’s age kiss her on the mouth, run his hands around her hips, over her breasts, his breaths coming faster, hotter, more desperate. How, honestly, she had hoped that life had something better for her.