Tyler Keevil - No Good Brother

‘Your body is.’

A dancer came up to the bar beside Jake and ordered a vodka lemonade. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, so you could see where the roots tugged at her scalp, and she still had sparkles and stage make-up on her face.

Jake glanced sidelong at her, then down at her feet.

‘This is one of the real dancers,’ he said to me. ‘She’s done ballet.’

She looked at him, startled, still holding a ten up for the bartender.

‘How’d you know that?’

‘You’re standing in third position. Only ballet dancers do that.’

Jake said all that without looking at her. He said it in a calm and certain way that is difficult to describe and unlike how anybody else talks – at least unlike how they would talk to a stranger, off-the-cuff. She might not have liked it, but he had her attention, all right.

‘Did you enjoy the show?’ she asked.

‘I liked your dance, and a few of the others. But you want some advice? You need to work on your arabesques. You bend your back leg too much.’

She turned to face him more fully, almost as if she were squaring up to him.

‘It’s not ballet. Modern isn’t as strict as that.’

‘An arabesque is an arabesque.’

‘I can do a proper arabesque if I want.’

‘That’s what I’m saying.’

Her drink was ready, and she took it without thanking the bartender, as if it was an inconvenience or a distraction. She looked about ready to dash the vodka in Jake’s face.

‘You sure know a lot about it,’ she said.

‘Our sister used to dance. She used to dance here.’

The dancer put her drink down. She looked hard at Jake’s face, and then over to me.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You’re Sandra’s brothers, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right. Jake and Tim.’

‘I’ve met you. I danced with her. It’s Denise, remember?’

Without waiting for a reply, she hugged Jake, and then me. She started tearing up, so I patted her forearm, in a way that felt awkward, even to me.

‘It’s so good to see you. It’s been so long.’

‘Ten years,’ Jake said, tonelessly.

‘I still think about her.’ She was wiping at her eyes, now. All her mascara had run down her cheeks in black streaks and it was hard as hell, seeing that. I don’t know. It was as if she were crying for all three of us. ‘I was younger than her. She was the one we all looked up to. She was the dancer we all wanted to be.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

‘Oh – you wanted to be a dancer, too?’

Jake started laughing, and I had to explain that no – I meant I’d looked up to Sandy.

‘Of course. Everybody did.’

Denise took the straw out of her drink and threw it on the bar top and drank most of her vodka lemonade straight from the glass, knocking it back. When she finished, a little breathless, she asked, ‘What are you guys doing here, anyway?’

‘Just came down to see the place, again.’

‘Are you coming to the after-party? We’re going to the Alibi Room, I think.’

Jake said, ‘I got to take my brother somewhere. But we should meet up later.’

‘For sure.’

She pulled a pen from her purse, jotted down a number, handed it to him. Then she hugged Jake again, and me, longer this time – really squeezing the breath out of me. I could feel the strength in her body, thin and lithe as a wire cable, and she still smelled of sweat and activity, of a body in motion. All of that was so familiar, like hugging a memory or a dream.

‘I should mingle,’ she said. ‘But I’ll see you later.’

She took another look at us, not quite believing it, and moved off. We swivelled back to the bar and drank our beers in silence and after about five or six seconds Jake said, ‘Jesus.’

‘I know.’

I motioned to the bartender: two more whiskies. When he brought them this time he treated us with a kind of deference, his eyes downcast. He’d overheard some of it, I guess. I gave him another twenty and waved away the change and Jake and I knocked back the shots. I felt the belly-burn, that old familiar smoulder.

I said, ‘You said you wanted to take me somewhere.’

Two months before Sandy died, she auditioned for a dancing job in Paris with the Compagnie Cléo de Mérode, and landed it. At first I didn’t understand the significance of that. I just knew it meant she would be living in Europe for a while. But the full extent of her achievement was made clear to us at the celebration party. It was held at the house of one of Sandy’s dancer friends and all the people there were either dancers or choreographers or artistic types of one sort or another, aside from me and Jake and Maria, who he was still with at the time, and who has her own part in this story.

Jake and I were working the bar, mixing cocktails and pouring drinks and generally acting like jackasses. It was magical and heavenly to be surrounded by, and serving, all of these lean-limbed, long-necked women with perfect posture, who seemed to float from room to room and every so often stopped to order from us and teasingly flirt with us because we were Sandy’s little brothers and in that way were little brothers to them all.

At one point Sandy and Maria came up together, and Maria ordered them both a Bloody Mary. This was a unique opportunity because Sandy hardly ever drank, due to the demands of being a dancer, and even when she did it was seemingly impossible to get her drunk. Our sister was always focused, severe, in complete control – both of herself and us. She was the only one who could keep Jake reined in, seeing as our old man was no longer around, and our ma, well, she’d had it tough for a while. And since Sandy took care of all of us, she never relented in what I would call her vigilance.

That night we made a good go of it. Jake mixed the Bloody Marys and dumped a good splash of vodka in both. He served them the real way – over ice, with salt around the rims – and Maria scooped hers up and raised it high to toast and passed on what some local hotshot choreographer had just told her: he’d said that Sandy getting in with the Compagnie Cléo de Mérode was the same as if she’d won the gold medal of modern dance.

‘Gold medal winner,’ Maria repeated.

‘Solid gold sister,’ Jake said, and kissed her on the cheek.

Sandy laughed it off, but the phrase stuck with me, and the memory of the night. Sandy had two more Bloody Marys and sat Jake and I down, very solemnly, and laid out her plans for moving the whole family to Europe so we could stay together. Jake could make his music and I’d apprentice to be a carpenter and Ma would sit on our balcony and have coffee and croissants every morning. Maria claimed she wanted to come too and Sandy said that was fine, but she – Maria – would have to marry Jake and when they had kids Sandy would be the godmother. Then once Sandy hit thirty she would retire and marry a French plumber and start a family of her own and we would all move back home and buy an acreage in the Okanagan, and I could build houses for each of us and her husband would fit the plumbing and together we would set up polytunnels and vegetable fields and start our own farm.

She had all these plans, crazy but brilliant enough to believe in. At the time, we had an unquestioning faith that Sandy could shape our future through her force of will, and even now it doesn’t seem to me as if that faith was naïve.

Later in the night, when Jake and I had abandoned our posts at the bar, we built this makeshift sedan out of broomsticks and a kitchen chair. We put Sandy in that and hoisted her up on our shoulders and carried her around the party, with Maria clearing the way in front of us. When we passed everybody cheered and applauded, and Sandy played her part perfectly: sitting upright, looking stern and commanding as Cleopatra, our golden queen and champion.