All stories › Humor › Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick › Episode 2
Box Step
Episode 2 of 3 of Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick by Ron Esposito · free to read
By the fourth Tuesday I had not gotten out of it, and the coffee can held eighteen wing nuts.
“You could just walk up,” Mr. Bixby said.
“I’m a customer.”
“You’re a customer of one item.”
He had a point. I bought six more anyway.
I had also bought shoes. Real ones, with suede soles, from a dance supply place that mailed them in a box with tissue paper.
I had not told Glenda. A man has to keep some secrets, and mine was that I now owned shoes for the foxtrot.
Bernice looked at them when I came in.
“Those will do,” she said.
From her, that was a speech.
Week three had been the box step.
“This is the first thing in the class that matches the music,” Harold had said.
Forward on a slow, side on a quick, close on a quick. Then back the same way. Slow, quick, quick, slow, quick, quick.
Eight beats. Two bars. Everything lined up.
“Finally,” Bernice said, “something with a perimeter.”
I could do the box. Not well. But I could do it with Bernice counting, and she always counted.
That was the problem, Harold said. He took us aside on week four, gently, the way you tell someone their dog has been digging in your yard.
“Bernice,” he said, “you’re leading from the follow.”
“Someone has to.”
“In ballroom the leader decides. The follower responds. Leon has to lead.”
“Leon is lost,” Bernice said.
“I’m standing right here,” I said.
“Lost while standing right here,” she said.
Harold called it backleading. He said it was common and fixable. He did not say how, because Bernice was looking at him the way she looked at my old shoes.
Then he clapped once and told the whole class about the recital format. The class would dance a group routine together. Then each couple would get eight bars alone in the middle of the floor while he announced their names.
“Eight bars is four boxes,” he said. “That’s all. Four boxes, and you’re done.”
The married couples nodded. One wife squeezed her husband’s arm. I did the arithmetic on four boxes in front of two grandsons, and I decided to quit for real.
Wednesday, Glenda called at seven, and I answered.
“You picked up,” she said.
“I was near the phone.”
“You sound out of breath.”
“I was walking.”
“Dad, were you counting? I heard you say quick, quick.”
“I was counting wing nuts.”
She let that sit.
Then she said she’d dropped off a new brochure. This one had a fountain and a man fishing in it. I had used it to level the kitchen table, which was the first useful thing a brochure ever did for me.
“Four more weeks,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”
Glenda had not said she was proud of me since before her mother got sick. I didn’t know where to put it, so I said good night.
Week five, I waited for Bernice in the parking lot. My speech was down to two sentences. I had cut the semicolon.
She came around the side of the hardware store with her purse held in both hands.
“Bernice, I’m not cut out for this,” I said. “You deserve a partner who can lead.”
She stopped. She looked at me for a long time, which for Bernice was about three seconds.
“My grandson is getting married on the twenty-fifth,” she said. “Saturday after the recital.”
I waited.
“His mother was my daughter. She died when he was nine. I raised him from then on.” She held the purse a little tighter. “He asked me to do the mother and son dance. In her place. I said yes before I thought about it.”
“That’s the deadline.”
“That’s the deadline. I can march. I can’t dance. Eighteen years I’ve known what to do with that boy, and I don’t know what to do with this.”
Nobody said anything for a while. A truck backed up to the loading dock, beeping.
“You picked me because I’m the only one here who isn’t married,” I said.
“I picked you because you came back,” she said. “You didn’t want to, and you came back. Every Tuesday.”
“That’s the wing nuts.”
“I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to.”
I looked at the stairs. Nineteen of them. My second sentence was still in my mouth. I put it away.
“Same time next week,” I said.
She almost smiled. I did not mention it, for my own safety.
Then the smile went.
“He’s coming to the recital,” she said. “He wants to see if I’m ready. He won’t say it, but if I’m bad, he’ll quietly drop the dance from the wedding. To spare me.”
“And if we’re good?”
“Then I dance with him in four days.”
He would decide at the recital.