Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

Vera placed the record on the turntable. The first selection was an instrumental rendering of “The Tennessee Waltz.” “Now watch me,” said Vera, “as I do the steps. You’ll pick it up in no time. Just remember whatever I do backwards you’ll do forwards and whatever I do forwards you’ll do backwards. Got that?”

Daniel was uncertain but he said he thought so. As his mother sailed over the linoleum he studied her movements with fixed concentration. His feet twitched while he tried to commit the steps to memory. The tune ended and his mother reset the needle at the beginning of the waltz. “Now together,” she said, offering herself to be held. They began to edge their way around the floor. “Don’t stick your bum out like that. You look like you’re afraid somebody is trying to burn a hole in the front of your pants. Stand normal. Relax.” Daniel found that her criticisms seized him up even more; his joints started to lock like burned-out bearings. “Don’t jerk your arm up and down that way. You’re not pumping water. Hold it steady. Loosen up. Glide, don’t clump. You’re not walking on railway ties.” She started to count time in a loud emphatic voice, even more emphatic than the pounding of the piano. It threw him off more.

Vera saw this was going nowhere and mercifully brought the curtain down on the waltz. “I think maybe we ought to start with something livelier, something that has a stronger rhythm,” she suggested, “just to get the music into your feet. How about we try a polka?”

Daniel was agreeable.

“First, let’s walk through it slowly,” said Vera. Humming, she deliberately guided Daniel through his paces, pausing to allow him to mark each transition. He moved as if in a trance, head bowed to the floor, eyes shifting from his mother’s feet to his own as she languorously stepped, turned, kicked her heels in a slow-motion dream polka. “Ready for the real music?” she inquired after they had practised for a time.

Daniel nodded.

“Now remember,” said Vera, lowering the phonograph arm on the appropriate number, “this’ll be a little quicker, in step with the music.”

She found herself snatched into frenzy. They were off. Plunging and lunging, galloping and dizzily whirling at breakneck speed. Daniel led her in a side-long charge directly at the television and then veered sharply off at the very moment that collision seemed an inevitability and bore down on the lamp-stand, feet slithering on the slick linoleum, heels tossing high in the air as they spun into a hairpin turn. The violence of the expression on his face rather alarmed her. The speed at which he swung her, the joint-cracking centrifugal force exerted on her, made Vera wonder if this wasn’t an act of revenge. But for what?

“Dear, not so…” she began to say, but lost the rest of her sentence when a wide, looping turn brought the coffeetable hurtling toward her legs. Only a severe, impromptu correction saved her from a kneecapping. Around and around the room they careened, flushed and gasping. Vera could feel her heart pounding like a trip-hammer. There was a look in Daniel’s eye which she associated with runaway horses. Whenever he spun her, crane-like legs thrashing the air in the wake of a reckless change in direction, his tie streamed over his shoulder like a prize ribbon flying from the bridle of a show pony.

It hit her. This wasn’t revenge. He was simply and completely in his glory, believing himself master of the polka. Daniel the Polka King. There was nothing for it but to pray they escaped a wreck and last it out.

That was what she did. The polka ended and they came to rest, bent over, panting, palms planted on their knees. Both felt oddly exhilarated for having survived an ordeal. Then the sound of clapping swivelled their heads to the doorway where Alec Monkman stood, smacking his hard palms together, laughing. “I believe I just saw a fight to the death between two dust-devils,” he declared.

“We were polkaing,” explained Daniel.

“You don’t need to tell me,” said his grandfather. “I know them all. When I was young I used to be a dancing fool.”

“I think I got the hang of that one,” confided Daniel, “but that waltzing is something else.”

“Nothing nicer than a waltz,” stated his grandfather. “It’s easier than rolling out of bed. Let me give you a few tips.” He made a perfunctory, mocking bow to Vera. “May I have the honour, daughter?”

Vera didn’t answer. She looked doubtful.

“We’re well-matched,” her father cajoled. “You’re winded and I’m old.”

“All right,” she said.

“Find us a waltz,” the old man said to Daniel.

“Turn it back to the beginning,” Vera ordered. “There’s one there.”

Strains of “The Tennessee Waltz” once more filled the room. The old man took his daughter in his arms, stood stock still and very upright for a full count of ten, drinking in the music. Then he launched them. Very decorously, graciously, he began to dance.

Vera had the strangest feeling. He was just as her mother had always claimed, an excellent dancer, miraculously light and easy on his feet for a big man, startlingly deft and spry for his age. But that was not the strange part. The strange part was how the two of them moved together, effortlessly. Vera had no recollection of ever having danced with her father before, yet it was as if they had been partners for years. She had no sense of being led, or of following, but they danced as if they had one mind.

He was speaking over her head to Daniel. “Dancing is like swinging an axe. The man’s the axe and the music is what swings him. Once you accept that and stop fighting it – battle’s over. All you got to do is enjoy being swung.”

Daniel nodded solemnly.

“Another pointer. You steer your partner as much with your hands as your feet. Always give her a little warning as to where you’re headed. Just the least pressure on the small of her back means come this way – relax it a little means go that way. But light, Daniel, light. No pulling and shoving. Easy so they don’t realize they’re being steered. There’s the trick to it.”

Having delivered his advice the old man fell quiet. Father and daughter revolved about the room. How gentle it all was. Dusk stood at the windows and shadowed the room. When the waltz finished, Vera stepped back and curtsied ironically. Daniel, imitating the actions of his grandfather earlier, noisily clapped his hands and then threw the light switch.

Every year it happened. With the arrival of November, Vera felt her mood going sour.

It had taken her a long time to realize that it wasn’t just the dreary, zinc-coloured skies, the listless spatters of rain, the necessity of switching on the kitchen light at four o’clock in the afternoon that was to blame for turning her temper sharp, dark, short, like the days themselves. It wasn’t weather that was at the root of her irritability and heaviness of spirit.

She knew it wasn’t fair to anyone around her, but she couldn’t help herself. Maybe what she had was catching. Her father had gingerly risked a comment just the other day.

“You and Daniel make quite a matched pair, one as glum and cranky as the other. You two eating something I’m not?”

The old man was right about the boy and her worries over Daniel had done nothing to improve her disposition. Two months into the school year and there were still no signs that her son had made any friends. Vera had hoped that the much anticipated Hallowe’en Dance might mark some kind of breakthrough, but the way Daniel moped around the house the next day, she had gathered the occasion had not been a success. But being Daniel, he had not given much up under cross-examination.