Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“This is my brother Joseph,” she said. “Joseph, this is Mr. Sharp.”

He nodded and looked up at me through the hair. I could just make out one glinting navy-blue eye and three ugly pimples.

A Spanish poster advertising a bullfight was taped to the wall. A stout man, a dancer, frowned from a Lucite frame on top of the piano; he’d autographed his portrait to Jessica in Italian, and though I couldn’t read the words I knew they meant something fond and excessive.

“Well, Mr. Sharp,” Jessica said to me, “what can I teach you?”

“That’s what I’ve come to find out.”

“Let’s see what you know, then.” She put out her hands to indicate that I should step into them, and her brother began to play in waltz time. After a moment, Jessica laughed. “You can dance. Whoever told you that you couldn’t?”

“Whoever told me that I could?”

“I did.”

“Well, then,” I said. I tried to arrange my stupid smile into something suave, and stepped on her foot.

“That,” she said, “I can work with. To the left, dear. You keep wanting to dance me into the dining room. You’re not a clock. You may change directions, if it suits the dance.”

Oh, it suits me, I thought, though mostly it was being called dear. Mostly it was seeing her dining room right there, off the studio, the walls done up in a Polynesian-style paper, somebody’s toast plate still on the table, butter lumped in a cut-glass dish. Mostly it was my hand on her back, her leotard a little rough but lovely: she was a clock, I could tell by her thin black-clad arms and the steadiness of her feet and the ticking in her wrist. (I’d secretly slipped my thumb down, to feel her pulse as we danced. It was perfectly steady, and wreaking havoc with mine.) I could keep time by you, I thought.

“Your feet are fine,” said Jessica. “Now we have to work on your face.”

“It’s the only one I have.” I wasn’t the least bit insulted.

“Who told you that? Any dancer has more than one. First off, keep your mouth closed. You’ve got it hanging open. You look like you’re frightened of something happening in the other room. Concentrate on your partner. Make her think that she’s the one who’s moving your feet. That’s the way it works: she moves your feet, and your feet move her feet, and you’re both in charge of the dance that way.”

I knew who was in charge. I hadn’t felt so deliciously bossed since Hattie, who I missed all over again, but you know? That sorrow was almost pleasant. I missed my father, too, in the same way: look, Pop, a nice Jewish girl I wish you could meet . All mourning should take place in waltz time. Des Moines was not so bad. I loved everyone: Annie, who had pressed my clothing this morning as she cried over my father; my mother, another small black-haired woman who sang under her breath.

Oh, my father would love you.

“What’s that?” Jessica said.

“Just counting,” I answered.

I wrote a check for my lesson, and said I wanted another. She consulted the calendar on her desk. “Next week—” she began.

“I’m much worse than that,” I said. “What do you have for tomorrow?”

My sisters thought my absentmindedness came of grief. Maybe it did. My mother died when I was a child, Hattie died when I was a teenager, and I had mourned like a child and like a teenager, first without understanding, and then with too much. Now I was a man with a job and money, and my father was dead, and maybe that meant it was time for me to take a wife after all.

Because all of a sudden that was what I wanted. I believed in my desire to marry Jessica as deeply as any skeptic converted by a miracle. Problem was, I had to go back to California soon. Rocky wired four times my first day in Iowa, and six times the second, notes full of condolences and information and requests for phone calls when I had time but not a moment before. Jimmy Durante would fill in for me on radio that Tuesday — two days after my father’s funeral — but then I needed to wrap things up. Our latest picture, Fly Boys, still needed its chase scene, though I was hardly necessary, since it involved Rocky escaping from an amusement park in a bumper car and driving down the boardwalk, where every plank made him blink. They needed me for reaction shots, flinging down my mortarboard, trying to get my own bumper car free from the bumper-car rink. I couldn’t dawdle in Des Moines.

You might think a guy like me would never meet a woman and want to marry her so quickly, but I ask you: can you imagine me dating her, me in California, she in Iowa? Can you imagine me waiting? I couldn’t go home with a phone number and a promise. I needed to bring back Jessica herself.

My secret. Nobody else knew. Sometimes I asked myself questions in Pop’s voice, and then in Rocky’s. Was she Jewish? Yes. Her father had been secretery at the same Orthodox shul that had employed my grandfather the rabbi. Cousins of mine had married cousins of hers, in that endless way of the Jews of Des Moines. She was only two years younger than me, but try as we might, we could not manage to come up with a single social event that we might have attended together as kids, not even weddings and funerals of mutual friends and distant relatives, or dances at the community center: she’d only gone to those after the death of her strict father.

Well then, my father would have said, she can work in the store. After all, I was going to stay. I couldn’t take a nice girl away from her home, could I? An orphaned girl, after all. Look after her.

Rocky would get me on the other side. He had told me, when we first met, that I should be ambitious in love, but I could hear in my head his questions, and I didn’t want to have to answer them. No, I hadn’t kissed her. No, I hadn’t asked her on a date. We’d only danced for educational purposes. She might have no idea of how I felt.

I could not wait to see her again; I did not think I could bear to see her again. She flat-out terrified me. She might upset that perfect romantic feeling, a pan of warm water inside my chest almost shoulder high, filled but perilous. It was the balancing that amazed me. Every time I thought of when I’d see her, the pan wobbled, but didn’t spill, and the feat of carrying it astounded me again.

“How did you know you loved Mommy?” one of my daughters asked years later. “I just knew,” I answered, which was not the truth. I realized I loved Jessica the day after I met her, when I mistakenly thought I saw her walking down the street toward me and I wanted to dive into a nearby bush and tremble with happiness, watching her pass.

The day after my father’s funeral, I sat in the kitchen with Rose and Annie, amid the ruins of the neighbors’ offerings. For lunch Annie had simply plunked a pie plate or Dutch oven in front of each of us: I had a chicken casserole, which I would have rather stepped in than eaten. Rose’s adventures with Quigley had made her slightly bawdy, given to elbow nudges. Annie played schoolmarm, but fondly. There were twenty-three years between them; there had only been seventeen between Annie and Mama. Two women of different generations: Annie still wore long dark skirts — she looked like Carry Nation, inconsolable over the loss of her hatchet — but modern Rose wore blue jeans and a western-style shirt. Now they kept house together, and I guessed they would for the rest of their lives. I worried that Rose, raised by a spinster, was doomed to become one.

“He never even saw one of my movies,” I said, running my fork across the ribbed edge of the white casserole dish.

“What are you talking about,” said Annie.

“Of course he did,” said Rose.

I looked at them. “Which one?”