Clock Dance Read online

  When their father was in charge of dinner he didn’t bother with the frills, like completely clearing the table of its clutter before he set it; or folding the paper napkins into triangles under the forks; or lowering the shades against the cold dark that was pressing against the windowpanes. This gave Willa a hollow feeling. Also, he seemed to have run out of steam as far as conversation went. He didn’t say much during supper and he barely touched his food.

  After they were done eating he went into the living room and turned the news on the way he always did. Usually Elaine went with him, but tonight she stayed in the kitchen with Willa, whose job it was to clear the table. Willa stacked the dirty dishes on the counter beside the sink, and then she took the saucepan from the stovetop and went out to the living room to ask their father, “What’ll I do with the beans?”

  “Hmm?” he said. He was watching Vietnam.

  “Should I save them?”

  “What? No. I don’t know.”

  She waited. Behind her she felt the presence of Elaine, who had trailed her like a puppy. Finally she said, “Would Mom maybe come home later tonight and want to eat them?”

  “Just throw them out,” he said after a moment.

  When she turned to go back to the kitchen she bumped smack into Elaine; that was how closely Elaine had been following her.

  In the kitchen, she dumped the beans into the garbage bin and set the saucepan on the counter. She wiped the table with a damp cloth and draped the cloth over the faucet, and then she turned the kitchen light off and she and Elaine went back to the living room and watched the rest of the news, even though it was boring. They sat close on either side of their father, and he put an arm around each of them and gave them a squeeze from time to time, but still he was very quiet.

  Once the news was finished, though, he seemed to gather himself together. “Anyone for Parcheesi?” he asked, rubbing his hands briskly. Willa was sort of over Parcheesi, but she said, “I am!,” matching his enthusiastic tone, and Elaine went to fetch the board.

  They played at the coffee table, the two girls on the floor and their father on the couch because he was too old and stiff, he always said, to sit on the floor. The theory was that Parcheesi would be good for Elaine’s arithmetic; she still counted on her fingers when she did addition. Tonight, though, she didn’t seem to be trying. When she threw a four and a two she announced, “One-two-three-four; one-two,” plopping her token down on each space hard enough to rattle the other tokens. “Six,” their father corrected her. “Add them together, honey.” Elaine just settled back on her heels, and when it was her turn again she counted to five and then three. This time their father said nothing.

  Elaine’s bedtime was eight o’clock and Willa’s was nine, but tonight when their father sent Elaine upstairs to get into her pajamas Willa went with her and got into her own pajamas. They shared a room; they had matching single beds along opposite walls. Elaine climbed into her bed and asked, “Who will read to me?,” because most nights it was their mother who did that. Willa said, “I will,” and she slid under the covers next to Elaine and took Little House in the Big Woods from the nightstand.

  Willa always thought of Pa in this book as looking like their father. This made no sense, because a picture right on the cover showed Pa with a lot of hair and a beard. But he had that quiet, explaining manner that their father had, and whenever he said anything in the story Willa tried to read his words in their father’s furry voice, dropping her final g’s just the way he did.

  At the end of the chapter, Elaine said, “Another,” but Willa snapped the book shut and said, “Nope, you have to wait till tomorrow.”

  “Will Mom be home by tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” Willa said. “What did you think? She’ll be home tonight, I bet, probably.”

  Then she got out of Elaine’s bed and went to the door, planning to call down the stairs and ask their father to come tuck them in, but he was on the phone; she could tell by his extra-loud voice and the silences between sentences. “Great!” he said energetically, and then, after a silence, “Seven fifteen will be fine. I have to be in pretty early myself.” He must be talking to Mr. Law, who taught algebra at the high school, or maybe Mrs. Bellows, who was the assistant principal. Both of them lived here in Lark City and occasionally gave him a ride if Willa’s mother needed the car.

  So she would not be home by tomorrow, was what it sounded like. She had never stayed away a whole night before.

  Willa turned off the light and padded over to her own bed and slipped under the covers. She lay on her back, eyes wide open. She wasn’t the least bit sleepy.

  What if their mother never came back?

  She wasn’t always angry. She had lots of good days. On good days she invented the most exciting projects for the three of them—things to paint, things to decorate the house with, skits to put on for the holidays. And she had a wonderful singing voice, clear and sort of liquid-sounding. Sometimes, when Willa and Elaine begged her, she would sit in their room after bedtime and sing to them, and then as they drifted into sleep she would rise and back out of the room still singing, but more softly, and she would sing all the way down the stairs until she faded into silence. Willa loved it when she sang “Down in the Valley”—especially the part where she asked someone to write her a letter and send it by mail, send it in care of Birmingham Jail. It was such a lonesome song that it made Willa ache just to hear it now in her mind. But it was the sweetly heavy, enjoyable kind of ache.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, her father whistled his special wake-up whistle in the doorway. Tweet-tweet! he whistled—like the first two notes of “Dixie,” Willa always thought. She had been awake for ages, but she made a big show of opening her eyes and stretching and yawning. She already knew that their mother wasn’t back yet. The house had an echoey sound, and it seemed too exposed in the flat white light from the windows.

  “Hey there, sweetheart,” her father said. “I let you sleep as long as I could, but I’m going to have to leave before your bus comes. Will you be able to get the two of you ready for school?”

  Willa said, “Okay.” She sat up and looked across at Elaine, who lay on her side facing her. Elaine opened her eyes just then and blinked. Willa had the feeling that she hadn’t been asleep either.

  “I’ve put the key on the kitchen table,” her father said. “Hang it around your neck, all right? Just in case you have to let yourselves in when you get home this afternoon.”

  “Okay,” Willa said again.

  He waited to make sure she was actually out of bed, and then he gave them both a little wave and went back downstairs. A moment later a car horn honked outside and she heard the front door opening and closing.

  They dressed in what they’d worn the day before, because Willa didn’t feel like making a bunch of choices. Then she yanked a brush through her hair. Elaine’s hair was still in its two skinny braids and she claimed they didn’t need redoing, but Willa said, “Are you kidding? They’re falling apart.” She unbraided Elaine’s hair and brushed it, with Elaine squirming and wincing away from her, and braided it again. As she snapped the second rubber band in place she felt capable and efficient, but then Elaine said, “They’re not right.”

  “What do you mean, not right?”

  “They feel too loose.”

  “They’re the same as Mom always makes them,” Willa said.

  This was absolutely true, but Elaine went over to look in the mirror on the closet door and when she turned back her eyes were filled with tears. “They’re not the same!” she said. “They’re all floppy!”

  “Well, I did the best I could! Gee!”

  The tears spilled over and rolled down Elaine’s cheeks, but she didn’t say anything more.

  For breakfast they had Cheerios and orange juice from a carton and their chewable vitamin pills. Then W
illa cleared the table and wiped it. The counter was crowded now with dirty dishes, the ones from last night and the ones from breakfast, and they were very depressing to look at.

  Their father had made himself coffee, she saw, but he hadn’t left a bowl or a plate so he must not have eaten anything.

  She worried they might miss the school bus—she wasn’t used to timing this on her own—so she hustled them both into their jackets and mittens and they hurried out of the house and up the road to the bus stop and got there way too early. The bus stop was a lean-to with an old snuff ad peeling off it and a bench inside, and they sat close together on the bench and hugged their book bags for warmth and breathed out miserable rags of white air. It was better when the others arrived—Eula Pratt and her brother and the three Turnstile boys. They all crowded into the lean-to and jiggled up and down and made shuddery noises, and Willa started feeling halfway warm.

  On the bus Elaine usually sat with Natalie Dean, but this morning she followed Willa to the rear where Sonya was saving Willa a seat and she settled in the empty seat across the aisle from the two of them. It was true that her braids looked kind of draggly. And the tails at their ends were too long. Their mother only left about an inch of tail.

  Sonya said she’d been thinking it over, and she believed that if they sold their candy bars just to family they wouldn’t have to go around ringing strangers’ doorbells. “I’ve got four uncles on my mom’s side,” she said, “and an uncle and two aunts on my dad’s side, except my aunts live far away. But that’s okay; they can mail me the money, and I can keep their candy bars for the next time they come to visit.”

  “You have a way bigger family than I do,” Willa said.

  “And then my grandma Bailey: well, that goes without saying. But my other grandparents are dead.”

  Willa’s grandparents were still alive, both sets, but she didn’t see them much. Well, her father’s parents she didn’t see at all, because Willa’s mother said she had not one thing in common with them. Besides, they were country people and they couldn’t leave their animals. Her mother’s parents did sometimes come down from Philly for holidays, although not that often and not for very long, but her mother didn’t really like her brother and sister and they hardly ever visited. She said her brother had always been the favorite because he was a boy, and her sister was a favorite too because she was the youngest and cutest; her sister was spoiled rotten, she said. Willa was almost sure that if she suggested selling candy bars to either of them, her mother would make a snorting sound. Anyhow, they would probably say no if they were as awful as all that.

  “Maybe I’ll just go around to the people in my own block,” she told Sonya. “That’s easier than strangers, at least.”

  “Okay, but Billy Turnstile’s on your block, remember. You better hurry or he’ll get to everyone first.”

  Willa sent Billy a slit-eyed look. He was tussling with his brother, trying to wrest some kind of cellophane-wrapped snack from his hands. “Billy Turnstile’s a back-of-the-room boy,” she said. “What do you want to bet he doesn’t even bother.”

  “Oh, and I have a godmother, too,” Sonya said.

  “You are so, so lucky,” Willa told her.

  When she grew up she was going to marry a man who came from a big, close, jolly family. He would get along with all of them—he’d be the same kind of man her father was, friendly and easygoing—and all of them would love Willa and treat her like one of their own. She would have either six children or eight children, half of them girls and half boys, and they would grow up playing with their multitude of cousins.

  “Your sister’s crying,” Sonya pointed out.

  Willa glanced over and saw Elaine wiping her nose with the back of one mittened hand. “What’s the matter?” she called across the aisle.

  “Nothing,” Elaine said in a small voice. The back of her mitten had a shiny streak now like a string of glue.

  “She’s okay,” Willa told Sonya.

  * * *

  —

  But halfway through the school day, just after Willa’s lunch period, the nurse came to the classroom and asked the teacher to excuse Willa Drake. “Your little sister’s got a tummy ache,” she told Willa as they walked to her office. “I don’t think it’s anything serious, but I can’t seem to get ahold of your mother, and your sister asked if you could come sit with her.”

  This made Willa feel important, at first. “It’s probably all in her mind,” she said in a knowledgeable voice, and when they reached the office Elaine sat up on her cot looking glad to see her and the nurse brought over a chair for her. But then Elaine lay back down and covered her eyes with one arm, and Willa had nothing to do. She watched the nurse filling out some papers at her desk across the room. She studied a brightly colored poster about the importance of washing your hands. Somebody knocked on the door—Mrs. Porter from sixth grade—and the nurse went out to speak with her, leaving the door partly open behind her so that Willa could see the seventh-graders crowding past on their way to lunch. One of the seventh-grade boys elbowed another and caused him to stumble, and Mrs. Porter said, “I saw that, Dickie Bond!” Her voice rang out in the hall as if she were speaking from inside a seashell, and so did a seventh-grade girl’s voice saying “…weird pinky-orangeish shade that made my teeth look yellow…”

  Did all these kids come from perfectly happy families? Weren’t any of them hiding something that was going on at home? They didn’t seem to be. They didn’t seem to have a thing on their minds but lunch and friends and lipstick.

  The nurse came back in and shut the door, and the sounds from the hall fell away. Still, Willa could hear when orchestra practice started. Darn. She loved orchestra. They were learning “The Gliding Dance of the Maidens” by Borodin. The first few notes were so soft and uncertain—weak notes, she always thought—that it took her a moment to sort them out, but they grew stronger on the main melody. It was the “Stranger in Paradise” melody, and the back-of-the-room boys always crooned, “Take my hand, I’m a strange-looking parasite…” till Mr. Budd tapped his baton against his music stand. Mr. Budd was very handsome, with longish golden curls and bulging muscles. You could mistake him for a rock star. If Willa sold the most candy bars and got to go to dinner with him, she would be completely tongue-tied. She almost didn’t want to go to dinner with him.

  The orchestra broke off and started over. Same weak beginning, same “Take my hand…” but growing louder now and more sure of itself.

  “Is Mom going to be there when we get home today?” Elaine asked.

  Willa glanced at her. She had lowered her arm and was crinkling her eyebrows worriedly.

  “Of course she is,” Willa said.

  * * *

  —

  Of course she was going to be there, but even so, Willa told Sonya on the bus that she couldn’t go home with her after school. “I have to babysit my sister,” she said. She said it just in a murmur, so that her sister wouldn’t hear. Her sister was sitting all by herself across the aisle from them again.

  It was hard to tell from the front of their house whether anyone was inside. True, the windows were dark, but it was daytime, after all. The grass had a flattened, beaten-down look and the leaves of the rhododendron bush by the porch were rolled up tight as cigars; that was how cold it was. Willa fished for the key on its string inside her jacket. She could have tried ringing the doorbell first, but she didn’t want to make her sister stand waiting and then have nothing happen.

  In the foyer, there was a ticking silence. In the living room the only motion was the stirring of a curtain hem above a radiator. “She’s not here,” Elaine said in that small voice of hers.

  Willa threw her book bag onto the couch. “Give her time,” she said.

  “But we already gave her time! We gave her all last night!”

  “Thinking time,” their father called it. Their
mother would shout at him and stamp her foot, or slap Willa in the face (such a stinging, shameful experience, being slapped in the face—so scary to the person’s eyes), or shake Elaine like a Raggedy Ann, and then she would grab her own hair in both hands so that even after she let go of it, it stayed bushed out on either side of her head. Then next thing you knew she’d be gone, with the house standing shocked and trembling behind her, and their father would say, “Never mind, she just needs a little thinking time.” He wouldn’t seem perturbed in the least. “She’s overtired, is all,” he’d say.

  “Other people get overtired,” Willa had told him once, “but they don’t act the way she does.”

  “Well, but you know she’s very high-strung.”

  Willa wondered how he could be so understanding when he himself never lost his temper—had never even raised his voice, as far as she could remember.

  She wished he were here now. Generally he was home by four, but they couldn’t count on that today because he’d be riding with someone else.

  “You want a snack?” she asked Elaine. “How about milk and cookies?”

  “Well, cookies, maybe.”

  “No milk, no cookies!”

  That was what their mother always said; Willa used their mother’s merry, singsong voice. It was an effort, though.

  In the kitchen she poured a glass of milk and set it on the table along with two Oreos. She didn’t take anything for herself because she had this weird feeling that something was stuck in her throat. Instead she fetched her book bag from the couch and carried it into the dining room, where she always did her homework. Before she’d even started on it, though, Elaine arrived, bringing her cookies but not her milk, and settled opposite her. First-graders didn’t have homework, so Willa asked her, “Want to color in your coloring book?”