Dancing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

made my father smoke outdoors and would not let him drink. He went out to the porch or the backyard to smoke his pipe. I don’t know where he went to drink, but sometimes he came home silly, and she would slam plates and doors.
    But I thought, “Well, why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he be able to do what he wants?” He was so quiet most of the time, except when he was silly. He worked in a hardware store and handed her his pay each week. She gave him back a little for his spending.
    He couldn’t have known before they were married. So she must have betrayed him during their courtship with some other face, a lie.
    “Sit up straight,” she said to me. (To Stella, too, no doubt.) “Don’t get dirty.” “Clean up your plate.”
    I never heard them quarrel, and I also never saw them kiss. It was strange, with Harry, to have him so different; he liked his hands to be touching something.
    My mother’s dresses hung awkwardly. She took long strides. She wore my father’s rubber boots outside to hang the wash.
    And yet. I admit they grew to fit, whether they started that way or not. Who else, as they turned out to be, could either of them have lived with? And maybe she would have liked sometimes to wear pretty dresses and dainty shoes, to say, “Dear, your supper’s ready,” or “How nice, you got a raise, you must be doing well.” Maybe she would have liked it if he’d managed something. It was sad, her bitterness and his defeat.
    It was also an example. I set myself to be quite different. I paid attention to the magazines and not my mother, and pledged that when I married (however that would come about; but it had to), I would cherish the state properly.
    And so I did. And now I don’t know how things ought to work, I really don’t.
    She must have done something truly strange to make my father so invisible. I imagined her burned as a witch for her skill at transformations. What else might she do?
    So I hid my own face from her, for fear that if she saw it, if I displayed a need, she might make me disappear as well. It was a good deal safer to be silent and off to one side. When I fell down outside and skinned my knees, I stopped the blood with leaves and had a quiet, private weep. I did not go crying to her to have her kiss it better. (But such an exaggerating child I must have been, because of course she would have comforted me, she was not so unnatural.)
    Then I saw her sometimes with her friends, who would come for tea in the afternoon when my father was at work, and she was somewhat different: smiled and talked andcrossed her legs comfortably and let her shoulders down a little; was this the face she’d used to win my father?
    I thought about her quite a lot in those days, and understood my own intentions.
    This is not her fault, though, what has happened and where I am. It’s just that that was such a tiny world, our house and that small town. Only the magazines brought news of the outside and I devoured them for clues.
    Such a relief and a revelation Harry was, a man who spoke, apparently, all his thoughts, even bits of meanness, so that of course I believed he was a truthful man and showed me everything. The only person I could take at what they call face value. I loved him for that, although I would have loved him anyway, for giving me a life.
    It was my mother who said I had to go to university; my father merely acquiesced. “You’re smart enough, Edna,” she said, and it was true my marks were good, or good enough, better than Stella’s, at any rate. I was never stupid that way. “You can make something of yourself.”
    I heard the bitterness in her voice, but then, I often heard bitterness in her voice and didn’t pay attention.
    I don’t even know if she liked me or loved me. She did seem to want things from me, though.
    However did they manage to have Stella and me? Especially the unaccountable Stella, who seemed to belong to another family entirely?
    Stella, who cried so hard both of them