The Waltz I Could Only Feel

The Bench by the Bass

In June, Wesley said I had to go out more. He is forty-nine, a thoughtful man, and he does not say much, but when he says it he says it twice. “Dad, you can’t sit in the kitchen with the lights off. Go to the hall.”

I went on the twelfth of June. I did not dance. I sat on the bench along the wall nearest the stage, where the stand-up bass is, because I could feel it through the board.

Then on the first Friday of September a short woman in a gray skirt and good shoes sat down by the door with her purse in her lap, and she sat there for two Fridays and did not dance, and I knew exactly what that was. I had sat there myself.

I knew her. In a town of six hundred you know everyone the way you know your own fence line. Her husband Clifford drove a green pickup with a bent mirror and once pulled a calf out of a ditch for my father, and Gerda had made a rhubarb pie for Dolores’s funeral lunch, though I do not suppose she remembers it. I had thanked her at the table with a handshake and could not have told you one word either of us said.

On the third Friday I walked across the floor. I can tell you it was the longest walk I have made since I followed Dolores’s casket out of the church. I stood in front of her and tipped my good ear toward her and asked if she would care to waltz.

She said yes. I do not believe I heard the word. I saw her mouth make it.

We went out on the floor, and it was a waltz, and halfway round the first turn the band came in with something behind us that I lost completely. My feet kept going for a few steps from habit. Then I was standing there with a woman in my arms and no beat in me, the way I had stood in 1996, and my whole body went stiff with the old shame.

A hand came up and tapped three times on my shoulder blade. I did not hear it. I felt three small taps through my shirt, in the exact place, at the exact weight, and I turned and looked down at a woman I did not know, and she looked up at me as if she had done nothing at all.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s it.”

I have never told Gerda that Dolores did it. I have never told her that I stood there that night with my feet going and my eyes shut. I did not know how to say it without breaking something.