WHEN PEOPLE WENT DOWN TO MORRIS AVENUE, THEY KNEW they’d gone back—not to the trappings of an earlier time, but back in a way you can never go back. Paved with brick, Morris Avenue didn’t want any modern asphalt. It had warehouses, wholesalers, a black nightclub or two. It might have had a cathouse or two, who could say? When you came to Morris Avenue, dark in spite of the old-fashioned streetlamps, the whole street slung low, sort of under the viaduct that rumbled overhead with automobiles, you were getting past brick streets and gas streetlamps. Back to some destination. Back inside, to someplace in yourself you wanted.
THERE’S MAGIC HERE, Christine thought. Not the temporary relief of the Athens Cafe and Bar. Permanent magic—it was always there, if you just thought of the Gaslight nightclub. If you just thought of the throng of people, and you in the midst of it, a whole community ready for a good good time. And Gloria was beside Christine; Gloria trusted Christine to introduce her to the world of the nightclub.
Better than church, Christine thought. Better than preaching. Something wild here. Something that cost more money than Christine wanted to pay, but worth more than it cost. She knew the name of the magic. It was music, and her body was already singing, her feet wanting to tap, but they could only shuffle now ’cause the crowd was so large and moving slow to get in the door.
Everybody so well dressed and pleasant. Not like church. Not like Sunday clothes. Here you show a little cleavage, give out with the glitter. Wear bright and tight. Gloria’s face—bright and eager. Christine loved the excitement on the women’s faces. Giddy. And the proud glow of the men. Night out. Celebrating big.
But Christine didn’t need any man. No, not her.
But wasn’t that Lionel Parrish over there? Mr. Boss of the H.O.P.E. night school? And that woman in emerald green, rhinestone pin on the wide shawl collar. That wasn’t his wife. Never see Jenny dressed up that stylish.
Lionel jumped when he saw Christine and Gloria. Rose up off his feet from the soles of his no-doubt well-polished shoes three inches straight up in the air. Him in the air, like hair levitates itself if you see a ghost.
He hurried to them, oh soooo friendly. Left his pretty lady standing, looking like nothing but cool and pretty in emerald green.
“Evening, girls.” Big, overpuffed smile. “Didn’t know my teachers was part of the nightclub set.”
“It’s my second time,” Christine said. My, he did smell good.
“First time, here,” Gloria said shyly. But then she looked up and her eyes darted round, reflecting the happy excitement. “I like it,” she declared.
Lifting his eyebrows, Lionel Parrish said to Gloria, “Girl, I believe this place good for you.” Pleased with her, pleased for Gloria.
“You come alone, Mr. Parrish?” Christine asked.
“Well.” He shrugged his shoulders. Nice dark-striped suit. Touched the knot of his tie, smoothed down the length of the sapphire blue tie. “My cousin Matilda in town. She said she sure would like to hear the Man play the piano.”
“He something,” Christine answered.
“But she don’t want Jenny to know we come. Jenny got no use for night-clubbing. You wouldn’t mention this to Jenny, you happen to see her.”
“I don’t ever see Jenny often,” Christine said. But she didn’t like his request; it had the power to blight her good time—pollution in her blue sky.
“Gotta run,” he said. “Thanks, girls.”
He pecked Christine on the cheek, and oh my, she did stretch out her neck, did lean to meet that kiss, whiff in that good-smelling man. She embarrassed herself.
The crowd pressed toward the entrance.
“Must be several hundred us trying to get in,” Gloria said.
“We’ll get in,” Christine reassured. “Just relax. Enjoy the crowd.”
“You see anybody else we know?”
“Just Mr. Parrish.” Christine watched him regain his lady, whisper in her ear, saw her face light up. She was extremely pretty, tall and thin, straightened hair, beautiful eyes and teeth. But mostly it was the glad expression, the flash of her.
EVEN DON FOUND IT hard to push his sister’s wheelchair over the cobblestone brick of Morris Avenue. Stella would find it impossible to manage the chair, Cat had said, and he ought to come along, therefore, to help them. Besides, he’d enjoy it. Get to hear a truly famous man. An intimate nightclub. In Birmingham. “You won’t have to go to St. Louis or New York City to hear him,” Cat had told her brother.
Won’t the audience be mostly colored? Don had asked.
That’s the point, his sister had replied. We’re integrating.
Don was surprised that Stella had jumped at the chance. Such a bookworm. But he liked her. She admired his paintings. Stella had asked for four and had hung one on each of the walls of her bedroom. He’d asked her, What do your aunts think of them? And she’d laughed to show herself risen above the opinions of others:Aunt Krit says she likes pictures of something, a scene. And Aunt Pratt hollers from her room, “I think they’re pretty,” and Aunt Krit says, “You haven’t even seen them,” and Aunt Pratt lies and says, “Yes I have. I peeked when Stella brought them home.”
It was slow work and tough going to get the chair wheels over the humped bricks.
“Got any teeth left, Sister?”
“One or two,” she answered.
“These heels are killing me,” Stella answered. “But I thought everybody’d be dressed to kill.” She grumbled about how all the weight of her body (which wasn’t much) was funneled down on her toes and how her ankles were wobbling because of the stiletto hells.
“You look nice, Stella,” Don said, in his self-conscious, semiembarrassed way. It was hard to look an overdressed woman in the eyes, even harmless Stella, and give her a compliment. Now he just glanced at her. So thin. She wore a white sheath dress with a very wide pink satin cummerbund. The dress had a few sparkly moments and some small pink, silk-covered buttons up on the left shoulder, with a companion decoration on her flank just below the cummerbund on the right side—diagonal interest. Her shoes were pink satin, dyed to match. Don hadn’t imagined Stella owned such a getup. The pink silk buttons and the silver dashes on the shoulder were set right into the fabric, probably took a grommet setter to embed the decorations into the fabric that way.
“Your dress from Fielding’s?” he asked.
“No. Pizitz.”
Women thought Pizitz’s line of clothes was more dashing than those of the other big stores, more New York, but Don thought Stella looked like the Gainsborough pink girl elongated, with accents on the diagonal, and set up in high heels.
“How do I look?” Cat asked her brother and the air in general.
“You both look awfully white,” Don answered. He made it a point to tease Cat about her feminine vanity.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have worn white,” Stella said anxiously. “I didn’t think.”
“Nobody cares,” Cat answered authoritatively.
Don saw they were ignored by the crowd for the most part. Despite the spectacle of a wheelchair bumping along a dark lamplit street in the warehouse district where it had no business trying to go, despite two young white women and a white man in a crowd of well-dressed Negroes, they were almost transparent. A few people glanced at them, inspected their faces.
Don noted one perfectly beautiful woman in emerald green had turned her head back as she and her beau passed by, had turned her head back to look Don in the eye and smile. Completely friendly and at ease. Probably visiting from the North. A rhinestone pin of a leaping fish with a ruby eye glittered on her half-turned shoulder. She moved over the bricks as though she were floating, though her shoes were just as ridiculous as the hobbling Stella’s. She swung her high hips like a dancer, as though she were in an opera—Carmen.
Don thought he’d almost never seen a beautiful woman look so happy.
“I like being here,” his sister said, glancing back at him behind her wheel chair.
Stella said nothing, and Don knew that she had come because his sister asked her to. Stella was too bookish to enjoy a club scene.
From time to time, Don took it on himself to caution Cat not to ask Stella to do too much for her. “You don’t want to drive her off,” he’d said, and Cat had answered, “But she’s my friend. She wants to.”
Just in front of the entrance, they rolled onto some smooth pavement. People were polite, gave them room to maneuver through the doors, stood back while he tilted up the chair, lowered it, reared up, down five stairs. This was the part Stella really couldn’t have managed. He wished the soles of his dress shoes weren’t slick leather. He hardly ever took Sister anyplace that required being dressed up. When he dressed up, Don claimed the outing for himself, his own time.
By himself, he visited the artificial worlds: the Birmingham Civic Ballet, Town and Gown Theatre, the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the lovely Temple Theatre. He’d never met any of the orchestral musicians, but he’d learned the names of some of them from the program while he waited for the crowd to flow in. The faces in the crowd, like those in the orchestra—Herbert Levinson, concertmaster;Robert Montgomery, principal cello; handsome John Davis, principal French horn, who played the most exposed passages with perfect, piercing confidence—were becoming familiar. He wanted to know the people in this world, those up there on the stage, purified by bright light.
One time when Don had looked up from studying the concert program, there in the audience was Stella’s dear friend Nancy and her friend Lallie, who was married. Nancy and Lallie had crossed the theater to come over to speak to him. Nancy was always at ease, and Lallie was like her and said, I often have tickets to things and Bob doesn’t want to go. I’ll call you sometime, and Nancy said, She invited me this time;you’d enjoy it.
After the precipice of steps, Don steered his sister’s chair to a small round table nearby in the back of the Gaslight. Their table for three had a “reserved” sign that sat up like a little paper pup tent:RESERVED—CARTWRIGHT PARTY. Two folding chairs, nothing at all fancy, snugged up to the table, and a chair had been removed so that the wheelchair could fit. Except for the polished wooden dance floor, the floor inside the club was brick. The nightclub was a cellar with a low ceiling, probably a warehouse above, and many ceiling supports interrupted the view of the performance area. The piano was pulled up to one side of the dance floor. No stage. Spotlights were already focused on the piano, but it was just a big upright, like a vault.
The place was full and already buzzing with joy. Don looked to see if he could locate the woman in emerald green again, but instead his eyes locked for a moment with those of an older black man, whose face was wrinkled in a scowl. Immediately, Don started his eyes moving again, and he saw two other white people. Two young men—he might have seen them on the college campus, when he picked up Sister occasionally. The college boys each had a beer and were smoking cigarettes, trying to look suave. Not dressed up enough; short-sleeved cotton shirts, one plaid, one striped. Everyday clothes that didn’t show enough respect. You respect celebration, celebrities. Don adjusted the collar of his tan sports jacket to make sure it was lying right; he touched the knot of his woven tie that almost matched the color of the coat but added a new texture.
This was a loud group at the Gaslight. Women’s voices screeched high and penetrant. Men’s voices suddenly boomed on recognizing a friend. Laughter bounced up and down the scale.
These people let go, Don thought. Not bohemian Paris, not the Village (he’d been there), but the South letting go, at its best. Unafraid. And the energy all flowed around their whiteness or went right through them, made them nonexistent.
TJ FELT HIS wife’s gentle hand covering his, her kind lips right at his ear. “What you looking all scowled up and worried bout, TJ? Relax.”
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “And just look over there, at the steps.”
“White girl in a wheelchair.”
“Yeah, and over there. Two white boys. Smoking like they own this place. We don’t want no trouble here.”
“Do you see trouble?” she asked in her soothing, sugarcoated voice. “Once the lights down, you won’t be able to tell black from white. They all right. Let it go.”
“Not a month gone by, and four black folks beat bad. Who they think they are, coming here?”
The kid at the bus stop—he thought, but did not remind his wife—why had the white boys got him? He wasn’t demonstrating. Just wrong place, wrong time. They didn’t have nothing against that boy. And the newspaper! Hardly acted like anything happened. Assault, murder! That’s what white folks did and got away with. The newspaper needed to scream.
Underneath his wife’s warm hand, TJ’s fingers twitched. At the demonstration, his fingers had picked up first a rock, then a chunk of brick. He remembered the thunk the brick made against the side of the policeman’s helmet. The man had stumbled forward, but he hadn’t fallen; he’d regained himself and kept running. Like a soldier, his buddy running beside him had reached out to steady him.
TJ had snatched the bottle from the wino next to him, thrown it dead at the back of the buddy, but the man hadn’t flinched. And then a dog was at TJ’s elbow, pulling off a patch of his denim jacket with his teeth, but TJ had jerked away from the snarling teeth, melted into the mob running at his left.
“Look at all these pretty clothes,” Agnes said. “There’s Matildy Jones with some handsome man. Look at his tie. I believe I’ll get you a pale blue tie like that.”
Agnes was always trying to get TJ into a long tie. He smiled at her, patted his bow tie. “I so used to wearing bow tie to work, I don’t think I’d feel right something hanging down my chest.”
“That’s why you need one, man. So you know you off work. Would you please order me a 7UP?”
TJ turned to get the attention of the young waiter. Lord, he was skinny. Skinny as a girl, not a muscle on him, long curled eyelashes. He most made TJ sick to look at. He wished there was a sassy young girl waiter he could call to come get their order.
“I can’t miss my music man,” Agnes bubbled on, voice as pretty as a clear stream, “even if I have to come to a nightspot.” She leaned toward him confidentially again. “Now you have that whiskey like you like.”
JUST GLANCING THEIR WAY, Cat thought nobody would know Don was her brother. He might be her date. Or possibly Stella’s date, but just as likely her date. Don was sitting closer to her than to Stella. Don was looking good. Cat could tell he was glad she’d made him come. They were integrating a public facility, and it was perfectly painless. Nobody gave a damn. People accepted them as though they were just like anybody else.
Everybody was sitting down at their tables, except the waiters, and unless you looked close you wouldn’t even notice she was sitting in a wheelchair.
The lights pulsed again, and Cat’s heart pulsed high in her throat, seemed to jump with little feet off the top of her stomach and hit the back of her throat. She hoped she wasn’t going to get sick with excitement. This would be entertainment like they had in New York, first-class, famous entertainer, but here in Birmingham, here on Morris Avenue. And most white people were too stuck-up to notice who’d come to town. They were missing out. But not Cat, no, she was here with her group. She loved jazz, and she loved the blues.
When the electric lights of the Gaslight started to flick off and on, the voices rose in excitement, as though everything was transposed up a half step. Cat used to love that moment, when they lived in the country, when on the next-to-the-last hymn verse, the Baptist piano would crank up a half step in religious fervor. Now when the lights flickered, her heart transposed up a half step and she thought I’m here, I’m really here. I’m sipping beer, I’m wearing a low-cut dress, I’ve got on a choker necklace, and I look like an adult.
A thin waitress, no it was a waiter, came swivel-hipping through the chairs right to them. He had the most beautiful eyelashes Cat had ever seen.
The waiter looked at Don and said, “Last chance, you want anything extra?”
“I think we’re fine,” Don answered rather stiffly. He held his beer glass with both hands, barely glanced at him.
“Once the lights go down,” the waiter said, looking sideways, “that’s it.”
The lights flickered again.
“See what I say,” he said. “Y’all sure handsome.” But he wasn’t looking at them. “We glad you here.”
“This is my sister,” Don suddenly said.
“And who she, elegant lady with the pretty pink cummerbund?”
Cat heard Don snuff through his nose. He reached over and picked up Stella’s left hand, displaying her little diamond. “She’s my fiancée.”
“Excuse me,” the waiter said, and he turned around to leave, then looked back. “Y’all enjoy.”
When Don let go of her hand, Stella thought, Don’t.
Because he’d touched her, her hand felt atomic, like radium throwing off magic. Maybe her hand had turned green, like the painted numbers of a radium watch dial, maybe her hand resting on the table was glowing green. She couldn’t move it. She didn’t want to move it. But he had let go.
What would it hurt if she and Don held hands? Would Cat care? Would Cat feel left out? What about Darl? He’d never know. Cat wouldn’t tell. It would be just for tonight, in the Gaslight. Why not?
Stella knew she was panting, her breath too quick. Don had only touched her. That was all. No, he had said “She’s my fiancée.” Those thrilling words. And Darl had said them in the cemetery. And then he’d gotten her a ring, a little diamond, the next day. They hadn’t had time to think. She and Darl had looked at each other and were glad that the other was whole and untouched. Alive. Stella and Darl. Without a scratch. Out of danger. Darl had sold the Vespa and gotten her a ring. But she’d never liked little diamonds. She’d wanted an opal, a large opal full of mysterious blue and red. An opal like a window into the heart of things.
The club lights crashed into total blackness.
Quickly, Stella felt her left hand, inert on the table, with her right hand. Would it be extra warm? Not glowing green but somehow warmed to an abnormal temperature. No. Her left hand was like a lump of ice.
A spotlight jittered crazily across the dance floor. It swooped around, searching. The room held its breath. Suppose it was Don she was engaged to and not Darl? Darl seemed remote, as though he didn’t exist anymore.
Don was an artist. Darl kissed her and kissed her, but he never said he loved her. He never touched her breasts, as though he was ashamed that they were small. Darl wouldn’t be caught dead in a colored nightclub, but he’d taken her to a cemetery. What was there to love about Darl except his body? Plenty.
When Darl played the organ, his left foot reached down the foot pedals to unleash a sound that hooked the base of her being. That was where he was coming from—a glory so deep that it made Stella’s body vibrate. But that sound was hard to remember here in the Gaslight.
The spotlight found a black man, wearing dark glasses, standing beside the piano. The room shrieked, erupted in applause as thunderous as a rock slide. Maybe the building was coming down on them. The spotlight widened and narrowed, widened and narrowed like a crazy eye pupil.
Darl might think he could read her mind. But he had no idea of who she was.
Stella let out a little yelp.
There was enough diffused light, so she could see Cat, grinning from ear to ear like a Cheshire cat, slowly clapping her feeble, noiseless hands. Making the gesture of normal. But Cat was enjoying herself; yes, Stella thought, she truly was. Her handicap might be visible to Stella, but Cat had forgotten it. At the Gaslight, you forgot who you had become; you reentered the old cave of the essential self; you knew your defining desires.
The musician held up just one hand, like a cop stopping traffic. A hush fell, total quiet.
He seated himself, and with what seemed a hundred hands, out tumbled a spiritual so raucous it was like the eruption of a volcano: Joshua fit the battle of Jericho. Jericho, Jericho—
And the crowd leapt to their feet, clapping, dancing in place.
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho.
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,
AND THE WALLS COME TUMBLIN’ DOWN!
They stamped, and clapped, threw back their heads, yelled it out, closed their eyes, sang with all their might, faster and faster, stretched hands held high shimmying down the air till suddenly it stopped—they all stopped. No more piano. They dropped breathless into their seats. They’d won. They’d done it. Fit the Battle.
Walls down, broken stone at their feet.
Then low and slow, quiet and heartbroken, the pianist played “Blueberry Hill” and sang. His raspy voice, so raspberry sweet, made love to the world.
Uh-huh, un-hum. That was all Stella heard, uttered so low. Uh-huh. So low so as not to interfere with anybody’s hearing. The listeners each wrapped their arms around themselves, rocked themselves. Stella could see tears squeezing from some of the eyes, men and women.
Then they were safe. Their spirits had walked into the shade. Time to loll. Time to let go all the tension, just loll on back in the chair, sprawl. Relax and enjoy. Ecstasy, regret, pain, yes, they’d visit there again while he played and sang. Again and again, all through the night. Already they yearned for the yearning. How a body did want.
Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih: Stella remembered her mother singing unaccompanied to an ancient black woman at Helicon. Blessed girl, the old woman had said, her hand light as a wisp on Stella’s head. But she had not been blessed.
The houselights gradually returned to low, so a person could see the drink on the table, maybe order something to eat. A light snack.
From the dim light the shapes of people emerged. There were two college boys—Freddie and Marshall—from Birmingham-Southern across the room. There was the handsome black couple: he with an opalescent blue tie, she in Irish green. Of course he was not Martin Luther King, but he resembled him, only taller. After studying the handsome man and the beautiful woman, Stella knew: that was what it looked like to be in love.
Maybe she wasn’t in love with Darl, but she had promised. You do what you say you’re going to do. Especially about a serious matter. About marriage. And when Darl reached with the toe of his left shoe for the low notes of the organ, he raked her soul; those notes harrowed hell and found the buried silver box where her soul was imprisoned.
She glanced at Don, but he was totally absorbed in the music, a faint flush across his skin. He had such nice hair, loose blond waves, fluffy hair. Cat’s was straight as a stick and simple brown. Don had beautiful posture, even when he was relaxed. Don was here, but where was Darl—just a thought, a memory, a little ring like a manacle on her weakest finger.
People had started to dance. Some with a cushion of space between their bodies, hands and arms cocked high. Some plastered against each other;a man’s hand practically on a woman’s high ass. There was an older couple, dancing as close as anybody but with their hands above the waist, he in a bow tie, she in a flowered jersey skirt—purple—and matching overblouse. The woman could have worn the purple-flowered jersey to church, but now it was embellished by big drooping, glittery earrings. The couple moved in perfect synchrony, he steering. Stella thought she had never seen such sure, quick feet as those of this ordinary, aging black man. Ah, a fancy pivot, and his wife followed in purplish perfection, though her feet were already swelling out of the pumps, rising like bread where the smooth, black shoe left off across the front of her toe.
Cat leaned toward her brother. “Ask Stella to dance,” Cat said in a stage whisper.
But Stella wasn’t embarrassed. She was glad. Perhaps they would look as glamorous as the handsome man who looked like Martin Luther King and his beautiful partner in emerald green. Perhaps she and Don would seem as perfectly paired as they of the aging expert feet.
Don looked at her. “Would you like to dance, Miss Silver?” He spoke with just an edge of irony, as though to suggest he would now play the role of Ashley Wilkes, in Gone with the Wind. But there was always a twinkle of kindness behind Don’s irony. His eyes invited her to play the roles with him.
“Sure,” she answered, but she knew she was a poor dancer and felt afraid.
Since Don stood up, she stood, too. Suddenly the music slowed and the lights lowered again. The effeminate waiter was coming toward them.
“Let’s dance,” Don said to her, almost urgently, and held out both hands.
As soon as they were on the floor, it was as though he had walked onstage, as though he were acting a part and knew it perfectly. With his back held beautifully straight, he pivoted and took her as a partner, moved her, all in one gesture, so that she stepped back without a thought. They were dancing to perfection. She closed her eyes. How was he holding her? Appropriately. It couldn’t have been better—she followed, and he made her graceful.
Blessed was how she felt. And she remembered Helicon again when the old black woman—Aunt Charlotte!—touched her head and blessed her. She had never imagined that all four members of her family would be taken, and soon. When the ghost comes, Boo-hoo-hoo. Don’t be frightened, Boo-hoo-hoo. But of course she had been frightened, and for a very long time. In the woods at Helicon, she had fired a pistol. She had run through the woods with her arms stretched up, saying, “Who, who, whooooooooo?” Never imagining that death never stopped for only one.
But here they were, dancing on Morris Avenue, living, this moment alive, on a down-low street while the traffic rumbled above on the viaduct, dancing at the Gaslight, dancing among colored people. An inclusive world. Birmingham healing. Birmingham swaying into the future, tremulous as a soap bubble. Engaged.
Maybe she could heal, with her city, too.
THE LIGHTS WENT LOWER. Cat willed her brother to kiss Stella. Just on the cheek would be fine. Just a little brush of the cheek. But she felt sure he never would. As surely as she would never rise up from her wheelchair, he would never let his lips brush Stella’s sweet cheek.
Maybe Stella could be her sister, closer than a friend. While she watched them dancing, Cat wished hard.
The table seemed desolate without them. Cat wanted there to be a candle on it. But candles would be a fire hazard. Once the Baptist church had had a banquet in the basement and there had been a big brouhaha over whether to have candles. Cat and Don had voted For. “A vote for romance,” her brother had said to her, looking into her eyes with that mixture of irony and affection that she so much adored. As though choreographed, they had raised their hands to be counted:yes, for romance. And their side had won, but the minister had overruled the majority. “It would look like a honky-tonk,” the minister pronounced. Just once. And the matter was settled.
Honky-tonk, a word heavy as a club and needed like a club to smash down onto the Baptist table just once: honky-tonk. No discussion. “No candles,” the plump, clean-shaven minister had said, and part of Cat’s religious life had grown dimmer. Naively, Cat had thought the argument had centered on whether candles would be a fire hazard before he blurted out:honky-tonk. The word had shocked her as much as if he had said masturbation. Or, miscegenation. She had seen her brother flinch.
Sitting in the Gaslight, Cat loved the sway in the music, so soothing. Her brother looked like a movie star. The perfect affect—slightly aloof—of a handsome star. Stella was a little clumsy, but the way Don looked at her! Like a star looking at the leading lady. The lights lowered again. Cat swayed her upper body with the music. It was “Blueberry Hill,” again, slower, full of gravel, sung more seductively than ever. The pain of the world was in that man’s throat, and the remedy for it, too.
WHEN LIONEL PARRISH HELD forbidden Matilda Jones, beautiful Matilda come south from Newark, New Jersey, to be with him, he asked Is this sin? Lionel Parrish prayed while he danced, her long body against him. His prayer was sincere, shimmering and deep as the color of his tie:Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Most Holy One, for letting me live this moment.
THEN A VOICE WAS in Cat’s ear. Somebody was releasing her wheelchair brakes.
“Le’s you and me dance,” said a voice at her ear, and it was the thin waiter, his cheek beside hers. “Want to?” His face so close. She could see the mascara on his eyelashes, curled back in a perfect roll.
She nodded. She couldn’t speak.
He bumped her over the bricks—she could tell it was hard for him—and then onto the smooth polished floor. She’d never rolled over such a surface, like gliding. Like a table knife gliding through a plate of warm fudge candy, she moved. He pushed her, riding in the chair, away from himself, out at arm’s length, brought the two of them back close, moved the two of them together in perfect rhythm to the music. It must be like ice-skating, Cat thought. He arced the chair to the left, to the right, tried to put a curve in the movement. People gave them space. No pity, no scorn in their faces. He was finding out what the chair could do. Sometimes the waiter put a snazzy quick check in her gliding, when he reeled her out or pulled her in.
He left her still and danced his thin body around in front of her, reached out his skinny wrists, took her hands and pulled her to him, pushed her back. His face was impassive, masklike, impersonal.
But she sailed; she closed her eyes and sailed.
Don couldn’t believe what he saw beyond Stella’s shoulder, beyond the elderly black man, who had scowled to see him, now embracing his plump wife as though she were a cumulus cloud streaked with purple: transported beyond anger, the man was dancing with his wife. Beyond them, beyond everyone, Don saw Cat. His sister, seated, was gliding among the dancing couples. His sister out on the floor in her chair, moving, being moved to the music. Her eyes closed, her face, bliss. Suddenly, her partner twirled the chair, beautifully, in a slow circle, the spokes of the wheels throwing out spangles, the crowd giving room. Eyes closed, oblivious to spectacle, Cat was smiling. Dancing the impossible dance, on Blueberry Hill.