Alligator - Lisa Moore [48]
If there must be skylights, it will have to come out of her own producer’s fee, she thinks. Let there be light. She balls up the spreadsheet and prints another one.
FRANK
FRANK HEARS SOMEONE say her name and she turns on the dance floor, her long hair flying off her shoulders. Her name is Colleen. She’s dancing with her arms over her head, biting her bottom lip, her eyes are closed and her face tilted down and to the side. This is a look; men will bow down for this look, this slow undulation, this is a look of concentration and abandon. Her hips swing and he sees she has a rhinestone in her navel the size of a dime. The band plays “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” nostalgic and embittered.
She’s wearing low-slung jeans and a black halter top. She’s doing a slowed-down hip swivel that’s erotic and full of self-satire and her figure is skinny and her hips are pale in the blue spotlight. The rhinestone winks lewdly at him. What he wants is to put his hands on her while she dances.
He had been a St. Brendan’s tap dancer, back when he was ten, in black pants and pink cummerbund, white shirt and bow tie. His mother slicked his hair down and he had a solo in a spot of light on the stage of the Holy Heart auditorium.
He could not see the audience but he could hear them in the dark. He was told, from behind stage, to step into the spot of light that spanked the scuffed floor.
The spot was animate and neurotic.
He stood transfixed, terrified, gripping a fistful of velvet curtain, convinced that if he stepped onto the spot, it would fly up the curtains and the audience would bellow with laughter.
He’d peeked at the audience while herds of children, choirs from all over the island, moved on and off stage throughout the concert. Then he’d been given a hard push right between his shoulder blades and found he was on stage.
His taps made loud clicks and he moved over the floor to the edge of the spot of light. He stood on the periphery of the light and it blinded him, but it remained utterly still. The audience was — he felt a breathing mass — engulfed in a dark with so much depth and texture he felt in him the urge to hammer the spot of light down to the floor.
What he remembers: he willed himself to dance. He did not want to dance. He refused to dance. But his mother was in the audience and he would dance.
She had switched shifts as a greeter at Wal-Mart, had traded Christmas Eve so she could come to the concert. It wasn’t her turn to work Christmas Eve but she wanted to see Frank on stage, so she traded Christmas Eve for the night of the concert with another mother. They were mostly single mothers or teenagers or older men who had suffered some version of emotional collapse that made them incompetent at their previous jobs. They were working at Wal-Mart because other options hadn’t panned out. Nobody wanted to be there on Christmas Eve.
Frank’s mother, besides cleaning people’s houses, stood at the door of Wal-Mart and said hello to people and put lime green or orange stickers on the parcels they brought in with them.
She was on her feet all the time and she had varicose veins, zigzagging veins that were raised slightly above the tight, shaved skin of her calves. Her legs were as white as bread, and peppered-looking where she shaved, and the veins were lumpy and blue as ink.
In the evening she put her feet in a Tupperware bowl full of hot water and Epsom salts because her feet were swollen. When she took off her shoes, her feet held the indentations of the cotton ribbing of her socks, and the mark of the tongue of her shoe.
Frank watched her dip her feet into the steaming water. She put one foot in and lifted it up and crunched her toes and put it back in the bowl and did the same with the other foot, her face wincing each time, because the water was so hot. Frank watched her feet get red up to the waterline.
His mother was in the audience by herself on that evening when he was ten and he could not move and the music had already started and Frank had missed his cue.
The music started and it stopped.
He would