Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [39]
“I met the woman at the record shop and she told me about you. Said all you talked about was dancing. She gave me your address.
“Some cats from the Local, musicians, straightened me out with the contacts for a few gigs. Scale is twenty-two fifty, but I'll do a few under scale to get some ends together.”
I hadn't the slightest notion of what he was talking about. Scale. Agva. Gigs. Local. Ends.
“More coffee?” I went into the kitchen, walking like a model, chin down and sternum up, and my tail bone tucked under like white women.
I put on a fresh pot of coffee and tried desperately to decide on a role for myself. Should I be mysterious and sultry, asking nothing, answering all questions with a knowing smirk, or should I be the open, friendly, palsy every-boy's-sister girl-next-door type? No decision came to my mind, so I went back into the dining room, my legs stuck together with fine decorum.
“What did you study?”
“Ballet. Modern Ballet and the Theory of Dance.” I made it sound like Advanced Thermonuclear Propulsion.
His face fell again.
“Any tap-dancing?”
“No.”
“Jazz?”
“No.”
“Acrobatics?”
“No.” I was losing him, so I jumped in the gap. “I used to win every jitterbug contest. I can do the Texas Hop. The Off Time. The boogie-woogie. The Camel Walk. The new Coup de Grâce. And I can do the split.”
With that I stood up, straddle-legged, and looked down into his sad face, then I began to slide down to the floor.
I was unprepared for the movement (I had on a straight skirt), but R.L. was less ready than I. As my legs slipped apart and down, I lifted my arms in the graceful ballet position number 1 and watched the impresario's face race from mild interest to incredulous. My hem caught midthigh and I felt my equilibrium teeter. With a quick slight of hand I jerked up my skirt and continued my downward glide. I hummed a little snatch of song during the last part of the slither, and kept my mind on Sonja Henie in her cute little tutus.
Unfortunately I hadn't practiced the split in months, so my pelvic bones resisted with force. I was only two inches from the floor, and I gave a couple of little bounces. I accomplished more than I planned. My skirt seams gave before my bones surrendered. Then my left foot got caught between the legs of Mother's heavy oak table, and the other foot jumped at the gas heater and captured the pipe that ran from the jets into the wall. Pinned down at my extremities with the tendons in my legs screaming for ease, I felt as if I were being crucified to the floor, but in true “show must go on” fashion I kept my back straight and my arms uplifted in a position that would have made Pavlova proud. Then I looked at R.L. to see what impression I was making. Pity at my predicament was drawing him up from his chair, and solicitude was written over his face with a brush wider than a kitchen mop.
My independence and privacy would not allow me to accept help. I lowered my arms and balanced my hands on the floor and jerked my right foot. It held on to the pipe, so I jerked again. I must have been in excellent shape. The pipe came away from the stove, and gas hissed out steadily like ten fat men resting on a summer's day.
R.L. stepped over me and looked down into the gas jet. “Goddam.” He swiveled over to the window and opened it as wide as it would go, then back down to the stove. Near the wall at the end of the pipe, he found a tap and turned it. The hissing died and the thick sweetish odor diluted.
I had still to extricate my other leg from the avaricious table.
R.L. lifted an edge of the table, and my ankle was miraculously free. I could have gotten up, but my feelings were so hurt by the stupid clumsiness that I just rolled over on my stomach, beat my hands on the floor and cried like a baby.
There was no doubt that R.L. Poole had just witnessed his strangest audition. He could have walked down the hall and out the door, leaving me breathing in the dust of the ancient rug, but he didn't. I heard the chair creak, announcing that he had sat back down.
I was sure he was doing his best to