Richard Ford - Wildlife

‘Do you have any children,’ I asked.

He looked at me strangely. He must’ve believed I was thinking about what he’d been saying, but I wasn’t.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I never did. I don’t much like them.’

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘I never knew any, I guess,’ he said.

‘Where is your wife now,’ I asked. But he didn’t answer me because my mother opened the bedroom door, and he looked up at her and smiled as if she was the most important person in the world.

‘The pretty lady’s back,’ Warren Miller said. And he got up and went limping across the room away from me and toward the hi-fi set sitting on top of a big chest of drawers against the wall. I had not even noticed it, but it stood out from everything else once you saw it. ‘I forgot all about the music,’ he said. He opened one of the drawers and took out a record, still in its sleeve-case. ‘We’ll play something good,’ he said.

‘You keep everything very neat in here,’ my mother said. ‘You don’t need another wife. You’re enough of one yourself.’ She put both her palms to her face then and patted her cheeks as if she had washed her face in the bathroom and it was still damp. I had seen her do that before. She was looking around as if the room looked different to her now. Her voice sounded different. It sounded deeper, as if she was catching a cold or had just waked up. ‘It’s such a pretty little house, too,’ my mother said. She looked at me and smiled and hugged her arms.

‘I’ll die in it one of these days,’ Warren Miller said as he was bent over reading the record label.

‘That’s a happy thought,’ my mother said, and shook her head. ‘Maybe we should dance before that happens. If you’re already thinking that way.’

Warren Miller looked at my mother, and his glasses caught the reflection of the ceiling light. ‘We’ll dance,’ he said.

‘Is Warren going to get you into Dartmouth or whatever it is?’ my mother said to me. She was standing in the middle of the room, her lips pushed out some as if she was trying to decide something.

‘We haven’t discussed that subject,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I was getting him interested in the DeMolay.’

‘Oh, that,’ my mother said. ‘That’s just a lot of hooey, Joe. My father was in that. Warren needs to get you into Dartmouth. That’s better than Harvard, I’ve heard. Anybody can get in DeMolay. It’s like the Elks.’

‘It’s better,’ Warren said. ‘Catholics and Jews aren’t in. Not that I care about them.’

‘Are you a Democrat?’ my mother said.

‘When they run anybody good,’ Warren Miller said, ‘which is not the case now.’ He put the record down onto the hi-fi table.

‘My family favors the working man,’ my mother said. She picked up my glass of wine and took a drink of it.

‘Well, you should think that over again,’ Warren said, and then he set the needle arm down onto the record, and there was a lot of music all at once in the little living room.

My mother put the wine glass back on the table and started to dance all by herself then, her arms in the air and a look on her face that seemed like a determined look. ‘Cha-cha-cha-cha,’ is what she said, because it was that type of music, music you could get on the radio from Denver late at night and that I knew she listened to, music with drums and a trumpet and a whole band in the background.

‘Do you like this?’ Warren Miller said over the music. He was standing there smiling while my mother danced by herself.

‘I certainly do,’ she said, and she was snapping her fingers and saying ‘cha-cha-cha’, in time to the music. She grabbed my hands where I was sitting. ‘Come on, Joe, and dance with your mother,’ she said, and she tried to pull me out of the chair and up onto my feet. I remember her hands were very cold and felt small and thin. I stood up, though I certainly did not want to and couldn’t dance at all. My mother pulled me and pushed me back away, and said ‘cha-cha-cha’, and looked down at my feet, which were moving in confused ways, stepping up and back. Her arms were stiff, and mine were stiff too. It was a terrible thing to do — and to have to do — with your mother, in a strange house, in front of a man I didn’t know and didn’t like.

When I had stepped forward and back at least ten times I just quit altogether, and let my arms go rubber and stood still, so that my mother just stopped herself and looked at me with disgust.

‘You’re a terrible dancer, Joe,’ she said to me over the music. ‘You have anvils for feet. I’m ashamed of you.’ She let go of my hands and just stared up at the low ceiling, right into the light globe as if she hoped something or somebody would appear in my place when she looked back.

‘You have to dance with me, Warren,’ she said. ‘My son won’t dance with me, and there’s nobody else here.’ She turned around to Warren Miller and held out her bare arms toward him. ‘Come on, Warren,’ she said, ‘Joe wants me to dance with you. You’re the host. You have to do what the guests want. No matter how silly it is.’

‘I’ll try. All right,’ Warren Miller said. He came toward my mother, across the room. His big limp made him look like a man who could never dance and would never want to. He walked, in fact, as if he had a wooden leg.

My mother started dancing by herself again before he even started to try. She was saying ‘cha-cha-cha’, and when Warren Miller got in her arms’ reach, she took his big hands and started to push him backward and then pull him forward the way she’d done with me. And Warren Miller kept up. Every time he moved backward, he went down into his limp, and it looked like he was going to fall, but then my mother would pull his arms hard and he looked ready to stumble forward into her. My mother kept saying, ‘cha-cha, cha-cha-cha’, with the music, and going forward and back on her toes, and telling Warren not to watch his feet but just to move the way she did, and Warren was limping and ducking his head, but staying up, and after a few times, he was on his toes, too, and seemed light on his feet somehow, the way a big animal can move. He had a smile on his face, and he began to say ‘cha-cha-cha’ with my mother, and to look at her face and not at his feet, which were scuffing the floor in his boots. My mother let go of his hands after a minute and put hers on his shoulders, and he put his hands on her waist, and they danced like that, then, together — my mother on her toes and Warren with his limp.

‘Look at this, Joe,’ my mother said. ‘Isn’t this wonderful? My God, Warren’s a man who can dance. He’s one in a million.’ She threw her head back and let hair hang off her shoulders while she kept on dancing, letting her head sway from side to side with the drumbeats. And it seemed to me she probably did not want me to watch her. I felt, in fact, like I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing, so I got up and walked into the bedroom where my mother had gone, and closed the door.

Through the wall the music made a sound as if something was hitting the floor. I could hear their feet shuffling, and both of them laughing as if they were having a wonderful time.

I had nothing to do in the bedroom. All the lights were on. The windowpanes were shiny and through them I could see into the house next door. An old man and an older woman — older than Warren — were sitting side by side in chairs watching a television in the dark. I couldn’t see the screen, but both the man and the woman were laughing. I knew they could see me if they looked around, and maybe they could even feel me watching them, and would think I was a burglar and be afraid if they saw me, so that I stepped away from the window.

It was Warren Miller’s bedroom. The walls were pale blue and there was a large bed with a white cover and a curved headboard, and a matching bureau with a TV set on top. A lamp with a yellow globe, like the one in the front window, was on the bed table. A fat wallet and some change were on top of the bureau, beside a folded piece of paper that had my mother’s name and telephone number written on it. My father’s name was underlined below that, and below it was my own name — Joe — with a check beside it. There was nothing wrong with that, I thought. My mother worked for Warren Miller now. He wanted to give my father a job in the future and put me in the DeMolay club.