All stories › Humor › Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick › Episode 1
Wing Nuts
Episode 1 of 3 of Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick by Ron Esposito · free to read
The wing nuts were forty cents apiece, and I bought six.
Mr. Bixby rang them up without asking what they were for. He had run the hardware store for thirty years.
He knew a man stalling when he saw one.
“Class is upstairs,” he said.
“I know where it is.”
“Starts at seven.”
“I know when it starts.”
He put the wing nuts in a paper bag and folded the top twice.
“Your daughter called ahead,” he said. “She said you might hide down here.”
Glenda had paid for eight Tuesdays of Beginner Ballroom without asking me. A hundred and sixty dollars, prepaid.
She told me afterward, at my kitchen table, while sliding a brochure for a senior living place under my coffee cup. The brochure had a fountain on the front. Nobody in it was dancing.
“Eight weeks, Dad,” she said. “You finish the eight weeks, and I stop bringing these.”
“And if I don’t?”
She tapped the fountain.
My wife had been gone fourteen months. Glenda thought I talked to the television too much. She was right, but the television never argued.
So I climbed the stairs. Nineteen of them.
I had my quitting speech ready. It was four sentences long, and the third one had a semicolon.
The studio had a wood floor, a mirror wall, and a radiator that knocked.
There were eight of us. Three married couples, who had come on purpose. Then me, and a woman standing by the radiator like she had been posted there.
The instructor was Harold Arnaud, about fifty, in soft black shoes. He clapped once.
“We start with frame,” he said. “Gentlemen, find your partner.”
The husbands found their wives. I found the radiator woman.
She was my age, gray hair cut short enough to pass inspection. She looked at my hand like it owed her money.
“Bernice Szabo,” she said.
“Leon Galloway. I should tell you I’m only here tonight.”
“Fine. Left hand up. Eye level.”
I put it up. She took it.
“Right hand on my shoulder blade,” she said. “That is my belt.”
I moved it.
“Elbows up. You’re holding a beach ball, not carrying groceries. Chin up. The floor does not need you.”
Harold drifted over. “Lovely,” he said. “Bernice, have you done this before?”
“No. I did twenty-six years in the service. Seven of them as a drill sergeant.”
Harold took a small step back. It was the best footwork anyone had shown so far.
“The foxtrot is a smooth dance,” he said. “We travel counterclockwise around the room. That’s the line of dance. The basic is slow, slow, quick, quick. A slow is two beats. A quick is one.”
“So the pattern is six beats,” Bernice said.
“And the music comes in fours. They don’t line up. That’s normal. That’s why people cry in this class.”
“Nobody cries in this class,” Bernice said.
He started the music.
The leader walks forward on the slows, heel first. I knew this because Bernice told me, at a volume meant for the far end of a parade field.
“Slow. Slow. Quick, quick.”
I went slow. I went slow again. On the quicks, I went slow a third time.
“There is no third slow,” Bernice said.
“Again,” Bernice said. “Slow. Slow. Quick, quick.”
By the fourth lap, the married couples were counting in her voice. One husband said “quick, quick” under his breath and then apologized to his wife.
“If you can’t feel it, count it,” Bernice said. “Out loud. Nobody ever died of counting.”
“I could be the first.”
“Not on my floor.”
It was Harold’s floor, on top of Mr. Bixby’s ceiling. I let it go.
At the break, she took a small notebook from her purse. One page had a date circled in red.
Harold passed with a paper cup of water.
“Week eight,” she said. “That’s the twenty-first?”
“The twenty-first,” he said. “The recital.”
I had not been told about a recital.
“Every session ends with one,” Harold said. “Families come. Folding chairs. Each couple dances a short routine. Very relaxed.”
Bernice wrote something under the red circle. Then she shut the notebook like it might get away.
“Why are you here?” I said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Deadline.”
That was the whole answer. She put the notebook away and checked my frame again, though we weren’t dancing.
At the end of class I stood by the door with my four sentences. I got as far as “Bernice, I appreciate your patience.”
“Same time next week,” she said. “Bring better shoes. Those have no business on a dance floor.”
She went down the stairs. I stood there holding three and a half sentences.
At home there was a message from Glenda. The studio had emailed her, since she was the one who paid.
“Dad, there’s a recital,” she said. “I got four seats. The boys want to see their grandpa dance.”
Four seats. Folding chairs. Two grandsons who still believed I could fix anything.
I dropped the wing nuts in a coffee can by the sink.
I had seven Tuesdays to get out of it.