Selected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

her large bosom under her folded arms. “You’re crazy,” she says. “That’s all you are.” She sees my brother peering into the gramophone and she jumps up and goes over to him. “Here’s us sitting enjoying ourselves and not giving you a thought, isn’t it terrible?” she says. “You want me to put a record on, don’t you? You want to hear a nice record? Can you dance? I bet your sister can, can’t she?”
    I say no. “A big girl like you and so good-looking and can’t dance!” says Nora. “It’s high time you learned. I bet you’d make a lovely dancer. Here, I’m going to put on a piece I used to dance to and even your daddy did, in his dancing days. You didn’t know your daddy was a dancer, did you? Well, he is a talented man, your daddy!”
    She puts down the lid and takes hold of me unexpectedly around the waist, picks up my other hand, and starts making me go backwards. “This is the way, now, this is how they dance. Follow me. This foot, see. One and one-two. One and one-two. That’s fine, that’s lovely, don’t look at your feet! Follow me, that’s right, see how easy? You’re going to be a lovely dancer! One and one-two. One and one-two. Ben, see your daughter dancing!”
Whispering while you cuddle near me, Whispering so no one can hear me.…
    Round and round the linoleum, me proud, intent, Nora laughing and moving with great buoyancy, wrapping me in her strange gaiety, her smell of whisky, cologne, and sweat. Under the arms her dress is damp, and little drops form along her upper lip, hang in the soft black hairs at the corners of her mouth. She whirls me around in front of my father—causing me to stumble, for I am by no means so swift a pupil as she pretends—and lets me go, breathless.
    “Dance with me, Ben.”
    “I’m the world’s worst dancer, Nora, and you know it.”
    “I certainly never thought so.”
    “You would now.”
    She stands in front of him, arms hanging loose and hopeful, her breasts, which a moment ago embarrassed me with their warmth and bulk, rising and falling under her loose flowered dress, her face shining with the exercise, and delight.
    “Ben.”
    My father drops his head and says quietly, “Not me, Nora.”
    So she can only go and take the record off. “I can drink alone but I can’t dance alone,” she says. “Unless I am a whole lot crazier than I think I am.”
    “Nora,” says my father, smiling. “You’re not crazy.”
    “Stay for supper.”
    “Oh, no. We couldn’t put you to the trouble.”
    “It’s no trouble. I’d be glad of it.”
    “And their mother would worry. She’d think I’d turned us over in a ditch.”
    “Oh, well. Yes.”
    “We’ve taken a lot of your time now.”
    “Time,” says Nora bitterly. “Will you come by ever again?”
    “I will if I can,” says my father.
    “Bring the children. Bring your wife.”
    “Yes, I will,” says my father. “I will if I can.”
    When she follows us to the car he says, “You come to see us too, Nora. We’re right on Grove Street, lefthand side going in, that’s north, and two doors this side—east—of Baker Street.”
    Nora does not repeat these directions. She stands close to the car in her soft, brilliant dress. She touches the fender, making an unintelligible mark in the dust there.
    O N THE WAY home my father does not buy any ice cream or pop, but he does go into a country store and get a package of licorice, which he shares with us. She digs with the wrong foot, I think, and the words seem sad to me as never before, dark, perverse. My father does not say anything to me about not mentioning things at home, but I know, just from the thoughtfulness, the pause when he passes the licorice, that there are things not to be mentioned. The whisky, maybe the dancing. No worry about my brother, he does not notice enough. At most he might remember the blind lady, the picture of Mary.
    “Sing,” my brother commands my father, but my father says gravely, “I don’t know, I