Family Dancing Read Online Free PDF Page A

comment. Silence and a nervous laugh indicate that he has not yet mastered the family vocabulary.
    When they get home, the night is once again full of the sound of crickets. Mrs. Campbell picks up a flashlight and calls the dogs. “Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny,” she shouts, and the dogs amble from their various corners. She pushes them out the door to the back yard and follows them. Neil follows her. Wayne follows Neil, but hovers on the porch. Neil walks behind her as she tramps through the garden. She holds out her flashlight, and snails slide from behind bushes, from under rocks, to where she stands. When the snails become visible, she crushes them underfoot. They make a wet, cracking noise, like eggs being broken.
    “Nights like this,” she says, “I think of children without pants on, in hot South American countries. I have nightmares about tanks rolling down our street.”
    “The weather’s never like this in New York,” Neil says. “When it’s hot, it’s humid and sticky. You don’t want to go outdoors.”
    “I could never live anywhere else but here. I think I’d die. I’m too used to the climate.”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “No, I mean it,” she says. “I have adjusted too well to the weather.”
    The dogs bark and howl by the fence. “A cat, I suspect,” she says. She aims her flashlight at a rock, and more snails emerge—uncountable numbers, too stupid to have learned not to trust light.
    “I know what you were doing at the movie,” she says.
    “What?”
    “I know what you were doing.”
    “What? I put my arm around you.”
    “I’m sorry, Neil,” she says. “I can only take so much. Just so much.”
    “What do you mean?” he says. “I was only trying to show affection.”
    “Oh, affection—I know about affection.”
    He looks up at the porch, sees Wayne moving toward the door, trying not to listen.
    “What do you mean?” Neil says to her.
    She puts down the flashlight and wraps her arms around herself. “I remember when you were a little boy,” she says. “I remember, and I have to stop remembering. I wanted you to grow up happy. And I’m very tolerant, very understanding. But I can only take so much.”
    His heart seems to have risen into his throat. “Mother,” he says, “I think you know my life isn’t your fault. But for God’s sake, don’t say that your life is my fault.”
    “It’s not a question of fault,” she says. She extracts a Kleenex from her pocket and blows her nose. “I’m sorry, Neil. I guess I’m just an old woman with too much on her mind and not enough to do.” She laughs halfheartedly. “Don’t worry. Don’t say anything,” she says. “Abbylucyferny, Abbylucyferny, time for bed!”
    He watches her as she walks toward the porch, silent and regal. There is the pad of feet, the clinking of dog tags as the dogs run for the house.
     
    He was twelve the first time she saw him march in a parade. He played the tuba, and as his elementary-school band lumbered down the streets of their then small town she stood on the sidelines and waved. Afterward, she had taken him out for ice cream. He spilled some on his red uniform, and she swiped at it with a napkin. She had been there for him that day, as well as years later, at that more memorable parade; she had been there for him every day.
    Somewhere over Iowa, a week later, Neil remembers this scene, remembers other days, when he would find her sitting in the dark, crying. She had to take time out of her own private sorrow to appease his anxiety. “It was part of it,” she told him later. “Part of being a mother.”
    “The scariest thing in the world is the thought that you could unknowingly ruin someone’s life,” Neil tells Wayne. “Or even change someone’s life. I hate the thought of having such control. I’d make a rotten mother.”
    “You’re crazy,” Wayne says. “You have this great mother, and all you do is complain. I know people whose mothers have disowned