Вики Майрон - Dewey's Nine Lives

I retired from the library. I didn’t slouch out a beaten woman; I went out on my terms, having accomplished all my major goals. The library board, God bless them, granted me that. With half the stress and a tenth the daily exposure to germs, I felt better immediately.

I changed my diet. I cut back on my medications. I stopped focusing on my limitations and started thinking about my strengths. I knew I needed to work my body, but I hated exercise. So I started dancing again. At first, I spent a few minutes shuffling around my living room with the music on. Then I’d collapse onto the sofa. Eventually, I started tapping my foot and swaying with the beat. After a few months—and yes, it was months—I started dancing. By myself, in the privacy of my house, but I was dancing.

By Christmas, I was well enough to start thinking about getting out on the dance floor. I wanted, though, for it to be the perfect night. My favorite local band, The Embers, at the best dance hall in the area: Storm’n Norman’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Auditorium.

Storm’n Norman’s was a very cool, almost secret dance club located in a former high school gym in a small town two hours from Spencer. You would never just wander into Storm’n Norman’s by accident because when I say Waterbury, Nebraska, was small, I mean two blocks and one stop sign in the middle of nowhere small. I used to think it was a one-dog town, because I’d always see the same spotted mutt standing in the middle of the town’s one intersection, but I walked the main street one afternoon and realized there were probably as many dogs in Waterbury as people. In a way, it reminded me of my hometown of Moneta, Iowa, which was a hearty five hundred people when I lived there in the 1950s but had since become so small (fewer than fifty people) that it was no longer even incorporated as a town. Moneta died when its heart, the redbrick Moneta School, was shut down by the state of Iowa in 1959. Waterbury hadn’t died when its own school was closed by the state of Nebraska, but it was clearly limping along. There couldn’t have been more than eighty people in town, and the only business (other than Storm’n Norman’s) was the Buzzsaw Bar.

Storm’n Norman’s didn’t look like much from the outside. The former school gym was a squat, gray concrete block building on the edge of town, half hidden behind a clump of trees. The parking lot was the gravel road out front and a strip of grass. A wooden ramp led to the entrance, which was a plain metal door. Inside, a narrow hallway ended at the old gymnasium ticket window. Jeanette, Norman’s wife, was usually collecting entrance fees.

Past the window, through a narrow door, you could look across the dance floor and catch your first glimpse of the stage. It was just a plain wooden auditorium stage, the kind built in just about every schoolhouse in America between about 1916 and 1983, except for the front end of a 1955 Chevy sticking out of the middle. The Chevy was black, with flames on the sides, and when the band hit a button, the engine would rev and the wheels would turn.

The Chevy set the mood, because when you’re stepping through the doorway into Storm’n Norman’s Rock N Roll Auditorium, it was like a gorgeous new world—the world of 1955—exploded into life around you. The room was wide open and windowless, lit by hidden lamps and twenty strings of lights that connected above a disco ball in the middle of the high ceiling. The lights led your eyes down to the walls, where three 1950s American roadsters, two hot pink, sat on platforms twenty feet high. Underneath were signed guitars, statues, and black-and-white photographs of Marilyn, Elvis, and James Dean. Follow the walls around the room and you noticed first, over the entrance door, a vintage Chevy dashboard, then the rows of original, polished wooden gymnasium bleachers, perfect for lounging, along the back wall. There were two plain bars, in opposite corners, but the seating beside the wooden dance floor was neatly aligned and reminiscent of school tables and diner booths. Even the original basketball goals were still hanging from the walls. It was like walking into the idealized memory of your high school prom, but all grown up with nothing to prove. When two hundred people were crammed into Storm’n Norman’s and a great band was belting classic rock and blues, there was no better place in the world.

I was determined to be there. I was determined to hear the Embers play. And I wasn’t planning to be a wallflower, either. I was going to dance. Not to find a man, mind you, but to prove I could get off my sofa, heal my wounded body, and enjoy the rest of my life.

And that’s how on March 15, 2008, sixteen months after Dewey’s death sent my health into a spiral, I found myself riding toward Waterbury, Nebraska, with two of my best friends, Trudy and Faith. I still wasn’t healthy—I was terribly weak, and I had to roll down the window a few times to keep from being queasy on the drive over—but I kept that to myself. I was tired of talking about my illness, tired of people asking how I felt, tired of trying to explain. I just wanted to enjoy myself, and the best way to do that was to pretend that everything was fine. Besides, I had talked Trudy and Faith into driving down from Minnesota, and there was no way I was turning back on them now.

We arrived early (a minor miracle with always-running-late Faith along), since I needed to sit, and tables next to the dance floor filled up fast. I didn’t know what to expect, after a year in bed, but I could feel the energy in the room. As soon as the Embers launched into their playlist, my toes started tapping. By the second band break, I had danced with four men. I’ve always been small—just over five feet tall with a thin frame—but during my illness, I’d dropped to ninety-five pounds. I was too weak to climb stairs and standing made me dizzy. But there was something about dancing. As long as I was moving, and as long as I didn’t complicate things by talking, my body felt strong. It was between songs, when the music stopped, that I started to collapse. When a guy asked for a second dance, I could barely force out the words, “Sorry, too tired,” before wandering back to the table.

It was during one of my breaks, while trying to catch my breath, that he appeared. I don’t remember him approaching. I’m sure I’d never seen him before, not even for a moment. I just looked up, and there he was, standing over me. He held out his hand and asked me to dance.

“Sure,” I said.

He was tall and broad-shouldered but surprisingly light on the dance floor. We moved easily together, swept along by the music. I appreciated that he didn’t try to stand too close, that he didn’t try to push me around the floor, that he didn’t feel the need to say something silly—or anything at all. We just drifted together, in a way that felt as natural as the sun. It must have been halfway through the song before I looked into his face. He was strikingly handsome, with an easy smile and a casual elegance beneath his bald head and well-groomed beard. But it was his eyes that startled me. They were the most gentle and caring eyes I had ever seen. And they were focused on me. Not the generic dance partner, but the real me inside. I knew, just by looking into them, that if he found out how sick I was, he’d take me straight back to my seat.

But for once, I didn’t want to sit down. So when the music stopped, and I felt his arm slide around my waist, I leaned back and let him support my weight. He noticed something was wrong—I could see the concern in his eyes—but he didn’t say anything. He just held me up. When the music started again, he pushed me into a two-step.

“I have to sit down,” I said reluctantly, after four songs.

He escorted me to the table and sat across from me. Trudy and Faith, my protective friends, peppered him with questions. I was in a fog, unable to catch my breath, and his answers seemed to float away on the music, leaving only his good-natured smile. When the earth started to spin, I reached for my water glass, missed, and knocked it across the table. He reached over and scooped it up, found a rag and wiped down the table. We danced a few more songs, I’m not sure how many, because I only remember the music winding down and the crowd beginning to disperse.