Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He pulls into the Women's Club parking lot with five minutes to spare before the departure of the first batch of box-steppers. He's got his best shoes on. They're oiled up and ready for anything short of jitterbugging.

She's waiting for him, swaying softly to herself on the steps. O beautiful for spacious! She's wearing the lightest conceivable summer cotton dress, embroidered all over in magenta and cyan mythical foliage, a weightless drape that hugs her perfect hips, clinging up and down her like a train of little-boy puppy-lovers on market day in some fairy fiesta town from the southerly extremes of magic realist fiction. This woman is half from another, completely foreign country. What does he know about her, about any alien land, let alone his own?

He rests his hands on her cottoned waist, too ephermerally thin. She curls like desert vegetation, the feathered tip of a talipot palm in bloom. What must he do — light a candle, leave a handwritten gracias recibido to the little unwed mother of God, cast a bit of homemade ceramic to hang by the altar in the shape of the revitalized part? She kisses him, takes him by the elbow and leads him inside, where he pays his two-fifty and she shows her receipt. They enter the meeting-turned-dance-hall, and before he can register, turn, and run, they ambush him. Dr. Kraft. Dr. Kraft. We knew you would come.

It's most of the baseball consortium, plus a new cadre of recruits. Some of the tenderfeet, to put it bluntly, will do no dancing tonight. A few are beyond motor maneuvering, beyond torso control at all. Ben, for one, a case Kraft helped on, is beyond a lower torso altogether. But each is grim and determined, demanding lessons to prepare them for some unspecified ballroom showdown.

"We had a spot of trouble at the door, let me tell you," Linda tells him. "Soon as they saw us coming up the walk, they were going to call the police for one of those discreet little arrests, like they slap on folks who heckle the president while he's addressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce?"

She's racing, trying to forestall his mouth from spilling its cries of treachery. "If they could have arrested a dozen kids without attracting attention, they would have. Tried to shag us off, but this is Beginners' Night. There's no other time we could come, and I paid full price for everybody, and isn't it illegal to discriminate by age? Huh? Somewhere?" Linda tugs at his sleeve while lovingly grinding his toe beneath hers. Isn't it, you cradle robber? She cops a feel, smiling like she hasn't had so much fun since college, t.p.-ing the rival sorority house.

The dancing teacher, redder than Moira Shearer's pumps, and her Korean step-modeling partner are both still in the throes of major-league embarrassment at the army of child cripples who have come for the Arthur Murray treatment. Teacher opens with one of those effusively flustered protests of liberal tolerance.

"As I'm sure you've noticed, we have a number of little visitors tonight…" Place is at least packed, which reduces the vulnerability. "And everyone, as always, is very welcome. So will all those who want to dance and who need partners form two lines and pair off." Then to the portable tape player, where the first of tonight's soundtracks lies in wait.

And the first song? A great big American lunar crooner, Bingle or Johnny Fontane, sliding around on "Stalag by Starlight." She plays it to accompany the somber, stricken threading together of the two partner-seeking lines. Kraft, still stunned by the subterfuge, falls into line behind the last male. He watches the mating gears mesh — man in eye patch falling to woman with Parkinson's, man with heavy loop of keys hanging from his belt going to tiny, terrified Filipina who came to dance class seeking the one social activity in this newfound land that she thought would require no English.

He notices how the kids have rigged the line, counting off furiously in tandem, then weaseling into position so as to draw each other as opposites, the lesser of available humiliations. Yeah, it's starting to come back to him. All that lunch-line, recess, sports-field, field-trip, bus-stop practice in positional long division. Numbering backward by fours. Converting hours to the final bell into minutes and seconds and heartbeats. Turning margin inches into inch-and-a-quarters. Figuring necessary goals or runs per period, minimum final exam scores for a passing GPA. Around-the-world flash card drills — the countless calculations of departure. How many miles to Babylon?

All but the most incapacitated join in, grab a partner, spread themselves dubiously across the makeshift dance floor. Joy, who could limp through the calls better than a few of those who grimly but gamely take part, sits out the first set. She takes a seat next to the carved-up Ben, where they whisper and giggle to each other behind cupped hands, pointing out mismatches and clunky practice turns. Across the improvised ballroom, like munchkin cadres infiltrating the Emerald City Residenz, the urban disinherited prepare to stage a naturalist production of Rosenkavalier.

Something more than fear of Nico's wrath compels them, although a few well-timed glares from the boss do their bit to keep the ranks in file. The dance-capable among them pair off with a minimum of foot dragging, with only the Rapparition being dealt to an adult, a blue-rinsed lady in snugly tummy-tucking sequins, completely dazed by the consort that fate's conga line has assigned her tonight.

Kraft reaches the head of the snaking cue, only then discovering that another once-child has remembered the lingering, line-rigging trick of early education. "Hi there, hunk," Linda baits him, taking him by the stethoscope skitcher and hauling him to a corner up near the stage, where they can get a good view of the terpsichorean demo just now getting under way.

God knows how these folks justify billing festivities as Beginners' Night. The pedagogical Ginger, outfitted with a wireless throat mike, begins by chirping, "You all remember last week when we learned…" Well, Kraft doesn't remember last week. He has trouble remembering this afternoon. And trying to isolate the beautiful, liquid steps that she and her Asian Astaire float upon is like trying to parse flowing Arabic script. "Come on, Ahab," Linda implores him. "Shake a leg."

It's either that or become a spectacle, gawked at, even shown up by the same shabby underage irregulars he himself sewed together. You all remember the fox-trot, don't you? The bit from last week? The pogo stick, the frug? Teacher sets the tape machine turning again, heads sensing, speakers singing out a simulation of "Night and Day," a tune that dispels the nonballroom world, consigns its latest flash points to somnambulist thrashings. The song, the woman swaying gently up against him, the kids stumbling through instructed motions on all sides, the pathetic Women's Club two-hundred-watt spot standing in for a harvest moon seduce him, like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom. Okay, let's have at it then. Hum a few bars and I'll fake it.

The songs queue up in what quickly becomes a full-color historical atlas of the dance academy at large. The complete curriculum, fiendishly arranged to lead them from fox-trot to tango to don't-mean-a-thing-if-you-ain't-got-that-swing. A step for everything, and everything its step. They dance to "Blue Skies," to "Stormy Weather," to "Misty," to "Paper Moon," to "April Showers," to "I Can See Clearly Now (the Rain Has Gone)." Oh, how they dance to "The Anniversary Waltz." They samba their way through show numbers of those good, God-fearing, nativer-than-thous, Friml and Romberg. They do these mongrel North American polkas to tunes half Protestant hymnody, half "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

They do a slogging "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," a passel of barn dances, a reconditioned "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," a "When the Saints" packed with imminent expectation, and a resigned boxcar deportation of "Hobo's Blues." As a hat-tip to the Mother Country, they get a buttered-up rumba version of that pseudo-franglaised Fab Four hit (one of Kraft's least favorite of his childhood's Top Forty). This being the Unided Snakes, the tape bears a fair share of ballistics motif, from "Fired Our Guns (but Those Whoosits Kept A-Comin')" to "Pistol Packin' Mama." Kraft watches his recent small-caliber facial-trauma cases prancing to "Put it down before you hurt someone."