The Waltz I Could Only Feel

What I Did Not Hear

Gerda stepped into my arms, and her right hand found my shoulder blade. We went out onto the maple.

I want you to understand what a waltz is when you cannot hear it. It is a floor. It is a hand on your back. It is the weight of a woman shifting into the turn a half second before her body tells your body, and a bass note rolling up through your boots. The bass player that night was a heavy man who leaned into every first beat as if he were pushing a stuck door, and I rode every one of those beats up through my shins.

For a few bars it was the old thing. Then the band changed, as it does, and the bass stepped back, and I lost the count.

Gerda tapped. One, two, three. One, two, three.

Over her shoulder, I saw Sheryl.

She had not moved. She stood against the wall with her arms folded and her eyes on her mother’s right hand, and I watched her face go through a number of things in the time it took us to go once around the floor. First it was suspicion. Then it was puzzlement, because a sharp woman looking for a con man does not expect to see a woman patiently tapping time on a man’s back. Then her eyes went from the hand to my face, to my eyes, which were shut, I will admit, and which I opened.

She saw that I could not hear the band. I saw her see it. Her arms came unfolded, and her hands went down to her sides.

Then her lips began to move. She was counting. One, two, three. She did it without any sound, the way you do when you are alone at a kitchen sink.

The Table by the Pies

At the break Gerda took her daughter by the elbow, led her to a folding table by the pies and sat her down. She had her purse open and an envelope in her hand. I stood twenty feet away with two cups of coffee, one for each of us. I had meant to bring the second one to Sheryl.

She read the papers. She read them a second time. Her lips went around a word that looked like “Wesley.” She looked up. Gerda’s shoulders moved in a way that said she was answering.

Then Sheryl said something I read plain, because she was facing me and her lips were round. “Mom, I said a hard thing.”

I could not read Gerda’s answer. I saw Sheryl laugh. It was a short, surprised laugh, the kind a person gives when she has been holding her breath without knowing it, and she pushed her hair behind her ear.

I reached into my shirt pocket and found the fourth copy, folded in thirds, warm from my own chest. I did not need it. She had already been given the whole set. But I felt it there, and I understood that I had carried it nine days because I did not trust anyone to take my word, and that I would not need to.

Then Sheryl stood up and walked straight across the hall at me.

“I’m sorry,” Sheryl said.

I did not catch it. I caught her face. “Pardon?” I said.

“I’M SORRY,” said Sheryl, so loudly that the bass player looked up. I heard that one. It came straight through the good ear, a round woman’s voice, and it was a lovely sound to hear.

“Ah,” I said. “Then I am glad you came. Will you have some coffee?”

She took the cup. She took it with both hands, like her mother, and she looked at me over the top of it for a long moment.

“Mom told me you can hardly hear,” she said, louder than she needed to.

“I can’t.”

“Then how do you dance?”

I told her about the bass, and the floor, and the hand on my back, and the fan on the grain dryer.

“And hearing aids?” she said.

“I have a pair,” I said. “$3,800. They are in a drawer by the stove.”

“Ivan.” She said it exactly the way her mother says it. “That is the most expensive pair of rubber bands in Nebraska.”

I laughed so hard that the coffee went over my wrist.