The Night Grandpa Harold Danced

Grandma Mae

Next to me, my grandmother had her hands folded on her purse, and she was crying. Not loud. She wiped her eyes with the cuff of her coat because she had forgotten her hankie.

“Grandma,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Do you know where we’re sitting?”

“In the gym.”

“We danced in this gym,” she said. “Your grandpa and me. In 1955. It was the high school then.”

I knew they met in high school. In thirty six years, nobody had told me they danced in this room.

“The Sweetheart Dance,” she said. “I was fifteen. He was a senior and had never said two words to me. I had on a blue dress my mother made from a Sears pattern, and the hem was crooked, and I was sure everybody could see it.”

“The band was four boys from Dunlap, and they played the Tennessee Waltz, and Harold Bauer walked across this whole floor in his brother’s sport coat and asked me. I said yes before he finished.”

“Grandma.”

“He stepped on my foot twice,” she said. “Don’t tell him I said that. He thinks he was very smooth.”

She took a folded note from her purse, written in her careful, slanted country school hand. It said: Tennessee Waltz. Patti Page. For Harold and Ellie.

“Would you take that to the young man?” she said. “My knees aren’t good on bleachers.”

The slow song

I gave Mr. Peterson the note between songs. He read it, looked up at the bleachers at my grandmother, and nodded once.

“After this one,” he said.

He found it on his laptop and turned off the big overhead lights, so it was only the disco ball and the red exit signs and the white Christmas lights wrapped around the bleacher rails.

The gym went soft and gold. All the kids said “ooooh” at once, the way kids do. The first notes came out of the speakers, a fiddle and a lady’s voice from a long time ago.

Every dad in that gym turned to see what the old man would do. My grandfather reached out and gave the walker a little push with one hand. It slid about a foot away from him on its tennis balls, squeaking a little on the varnish, and stopped.

Then he stood there with nothing to hold on to. I came up off the bleacher before I knew I was doing it. My grandmother grabbed my wrist and held on hard.

“Kristin,” she whispered. “I know what he’s about to do. Let him.”

My grandfather held out both his hands to Ellie, palms up. Ellie looked at his hands. Then she looked down at his shoes. And I watched her understand.

She stepped out of her new silver flats, right there on the gym floor, and left them sitting side by side. Then she took his hands and stepped up onto his church shoes in her white tights, one foot and then the other, and stood there holding on.

My grandfather pulled her in close so her cheek was against his tie, and he started to sway.

He did not move his feet. He could not have, with sixty some pounds of fourth grader on them. He just rocked, slow, side to side, the way he used to in the farm kitchen with me when the radio was on top of the refrigerator.

It was the exact same thing. I had forgotten it until I saw it. The gym went quiet. There was music playing and sixty people on that floor, and it went quiet.

The dad closest to them, a young guy from the bank, bent down and said something to his daughter, and she kicked off her shoes and stepped up on his.