The Waltz I Could Only Feel

What I Told Her in the Parking Lot

After practice, Gerda and I stood outside the hall in the bright cold air. Sheryl had gone to get her bag from the car. Gerda had her purse in the crook of her elbow and her good shoes on and the sun on her silver hair.

“There is a thing I should tell you,” I said.

“All right.”

“Dolores did what you do. The tapping. She did it for twenty-six years. I never said so, because I did not want to take it out and look at it. You came across the floor and did the very same thing, on the very same bone, and I have not known how to say it.”

“Nobody works out three taps on her own, Ivan,” she said at last. “I figured somebody had taught you. I was only hoping she would not mind me borrowing it.”

“She would not mind.”

“I think I would have liked her.”

“You would have fought about pie.”

“We would have won,” said Gerda, and took my arm, and there was nothing more to say about it.

I want to tell you what we are, because someone will ask, and I would sooner say it myself. Gerda Stromberg and I are not engaged. We have not discussed marrying, and if we ever do, I have a good idea what her daughter will say, and it will be the right thing. We are a man and a woman of a certain age who like to dance, who need a hand on the back of the other, and who have put it in writing that neither of us wants a thing the other owns.

That is all I want. I want Fridays.

The Drawer by the Stove

That night I drove home alone in the dark, which is all right, because I do not mind the dark any more than I mind quiet. I parked in the yard and went into the kitchen and turned on the light over the stove.

I stood in front of the drawer a while.

It is the drawer where Dolores kept the twine, the rubber bands, the dull scissors and a book of matches from a restaurant in Grand Island that went out of business in 1984. I opened it. The little case was where I had left it, felt-lined, snapped shut.

I took it to the table and sat down. I put on my reading glasses, though I do not know why, and opened the case. There they were, two small beige things the size of a bean, which had cost me $3,800 and fourteen months of silence.

I did not know if I could stand it. I sat there with the case in my hand for as long as it takes to say the Twenty-third Psalm, twice.

Then I thought about a girl with a paper cup, saying one, two, three into the side of my head, and about how it had sounded. It had sounded like something I wanted more of.

I put them in.