Tilt - Alan Cumyn [37]
She gave him a nervous glance. A flash of a smile that was a firefly zipping past a window.
Gillian gave him exactly the same smile a moment later when she was wrestling a cooler into place all by herself. Stan hurried over to help her.
“I really like the look of you,” she said. “Janine has never had a boyfriend before.”
That word again. Boyfriend.
“For a while we wondered if she would ever get one,” Gillian said.
—
Stan wasn’t a dancer. He’d been to a couple of school events, had stood in the shadows shifting his weight from side to side, wishing he were somewhere else. But here everybody danced: parents, kids, old folks, teenagers. The whole crowd wriggled and shook with their hands in the air. They all seemed to be laughing and smiling in the sweaty semidarkness.
So Stan bounced on his heels and let his shoulders jiggle around and his pec muscles — if that’s what they were — quiver and his hands flap. It was all by feel. A musician in black jeans bopped between an electric guitar, some drums and the microphone. A skinny girl with orange hair sang and blew sometimes on a harmonica. Most of the words were unrecognizable — “Going to ax my kaleidoscope” was one line that stayed in Stan’s head.
“Who are they?” he screamed across at Janine, but she couldn’t hear. She danced with her eyes closed a lot of the time, and her body was . . . fluid. Everything melted together, like waves moving in wax that hardened slightly then melted again into something else.
Before too long the band took a break but the music continued — some kid’s computer hooked up to the sound system. Stan was taken by surprise when a slow song came on. Couples just seemed to fall together, but Stan felt like he couldn’t fall. He was a wooden post stuck in the ground. Janine wasn’t standing next to him, anyway. She was a few paces off. Waiting?
Wasn’t this what he’d come for? Wouldn’t a real boyfriend just walk over and they would cling together and shuffle their feet the way other people did?
Except Joe and Gillian weren’t shuffling their feet. They were waltzing. Was that what it was? Gliding. She barely came to chest height on her husband, but how straight they both stood, how buttery their movements looked.
They were really dancing.
Stan couldn’t compete with that. He stood a bit behind Janine and watched those two dip and glide. Then he clapped with all the others when the song was over.
“Your parents are amazing!” he said. But Janine rolled her eyes. Maybe nobody thought their own parents were amazing.
When the band came back, Stan just started bouncing. Janine shimmied and melted and spun more or less on her own. He tried to bounce in time with the way she was moving her shoulders. But then she would break it off and dance with somebody else — with a tiny girl in a white dress and black shoes who had her own way of moving. She would dip her shoulder and sway back, then throw her hands in the air. Stan threw his hands, too, but thought he probably looked like he was going for a rebound so he stopped. Better to just let his hands dangle at the end of his arms.
Janine had said she wasn’t much of a dancer. What an outright lie that was! A fish in a pool couldn’t have looked more graceful.
He was the one who didn’t know what he was doing.
He bounced closer to her.
“Janine!” he yelled, two inches from her ear.
She vibrated with the girl in the white dress and didn’t hear him.
“Janine!” He brushed against her shoulder. She opened her eyes like she was waking up from something pleasant.
“ . . . mini-mega mall mart monkeys,” the singer seemed to be screaming.
“What?”
“You’re a great dancer!” he yelled.
“ . . . making like rogue-wing flunkies,” the singer screeched.
“What?”
“You’re a . . .”
Suddenly the wall of sound collapsed into rubble and everyone was clapping. Janine hugged the white-dress girl — who gave Stan a bit of a sour look — and Stan’s voice broke.
“. . . a great dancer,” he said pitifully.
No reply. Janine and the girl unclenched. Something slow started