Dancing for Harry

The first time I danced for Harry, he would not look at me. His eyes stayed fixed on something just over my shoulder or above my head, so that though it seemed he was watching me as I moved, he really wasn’t. I really, really wanted him to watch. I was wearing the mid-calf indigo tulle, which I had found in the upstairs hall closet, between a strapless violet satin that looked homemade and a blue voile with wide grosgrain halter ties. Harry hadn’t got around to giving them away.

Harry hadn’t got around to giving anything away. Not even his mother’s Royal Albert teapot, which leaked every time Harry poured water into it. And certainly not the prom dresses, all in a row on satin hangers in rainbow order, except for orange and yellow. Matching satin shoes in clear plastic shoeboxes were lined up beneath.

They were my sister‘s. She was tiny, like you. The indigo one was the last one she wore, right before she moved away.

We were in the living room, Harry slouched on the couch with his feet propped on the coffee table. The furniture had belonged to his parents and had the mildewy grey cast that things get when you forget to care for them. A little like Harry, who reminded me of a kangaroo, with his short thick legs and paunch, longish nose, and the white scruff that never quite made it to beard. Nothing special to look at, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Harry always made a space for me and didn’t expect anything in return. We just had a rhythm that felt natural.

The dress stood a little out from my body in layers that swirled around my legs, giving every step a grace it would otherwise not have. Underneath it, my legs were silhouetted until I kicked high and the tulle fanned out, the layers separating and floating down one at a time like the furred petals of a peony. It smelled of Harry, a smoke and coffee scent that wafted around me through the swirls of netted fabric. The rhinestones sewn amid the folds of the bodice caught the last rays of sun coming under the window shade—at Harry’s it was perpetual dusk, the shades always lowered, the curtains always partly drawn, the rooms themselves painted in dusky creams, grays, mauves. My arms floated above me as I arched my back and spun the way I imagined a ballerina would right before the prince leapt onstage to lift her to his shoulder.

I guessed that Harry was too polite to stare. Or thought he was being polite, polite probably being his intention. I’ve never known Harry not to be polite. But after a while I got to thinking, he is doing this to cover up, to make it seem he is watching but not when I would happen to notice. To make me think the dulled expression on his face is his attempt to hide a desire so intense that he cannot politely reveal it. In fact, what I thought he felt was embarrassment, and I began to wonder if I looked foolish. Pretty soon, foolishness and embarrassment began to pull at the dress, the way a man will when he doesn’t know how else to get your attention. I slowed things down, not leaping or spinning anymore, instead stepping side to side, until I was just swaying in place, until I was standing still in front of him.

Nice. You have a flare.

I smiled but to tell you the truth, I was a little pissed at Harry. I wanted to impress him, and “nice” didn’t cut it. But I smiled and curtsied, and Harry was never the wiser.

Maybe next time you‘ll watch.

Maybe I‘ll get a jukebox for the bar. You can dance there. You can get everyone to dance.

It‘s not that kind of dancing, Harry.

It was time to stop anyway, the sun having slipped below the sill, making it harder to see what was shadow and what was ski socks or an I ♥ Vermont mug with a dried teabag at the bottom or the red-lacquered humidor where Harry stored his baggies, blades, and scale.

The second time was better. I wore the silver. His head tilted back, Harry sang along softly to Chet Baker’s “Dancing on the Ceiling,” scat and all. I twirled the length of the room, timing my movements so that we would wind to a neat, simultaneous conclusion.

After, that, the red voile, so delicate it was almost pink. Mostly, though, I wore the blue, which had the widest skirt and lightest boning. I could do a full arabesque in the blue, my back almost in an arc as my hand reached out behind me. It would have impressed Harry if he’d seen it, but he was always doing that thing with his eyes. One day I did a triple pirouette into a perfect fifth position. He missed it.

Watch me.

I am.

You‘re not.

I tip-toed over to sit next to him, to pull his head down against my shoulder while I took two quick hits on the joint he’d set on the edge of the ashtray. His hair tickled my neck, not an itch but a pleasant feeling that made me smile wide.

* * *

Harry grew an awesome weed, his own hybrid: organic, almost as strong as afghani but more mellow. People respected him for it.

Don‘t think for a second that organic makes this shit any good for you, he’d say to them. But, hey, if you‘re smoking it, you probably don‘t care what’s good for you.

Harry owned a bar in town called the Brown Bag, but that’s not how he made his living. For that he sold that hybrid strain, which he’d spent years developing: rich green in color flecked with purple, not so potent that it hit hard and fast, a clean burn, and a scent on the earthy-fruity spectrum, so it mixed well with any of the recipes that Harry included with each sale. It was enough to draw customers the two miles over the ruts on his dirt road, even after the dispensaries by the highway began to sell the stuff legally. The road to Harry’s always was messy—pitted in dry weather, haphazardly plowed in winter, boggish during mud season. Every year, Harry called the town’s road maintenance office to see if he could get on the paving schedule, and every year he’d hear the same thing: That‘s not a road, that‘s a cow path. If it‘s not on the mail route, we don‘t fool with it.

Harry could have argued his case in front of the town council, but it didn’t matter that much to him. People want to see me, they find me at the bar. They want to buy my weed, they find a way to get up Jones Hill Road. Which really was the better arrangement because paved roads invite new housing and Harry enjoyed his solitude—no one around to wonder about the comings and goings on Jones Hill Road. Not that any of the town cops would bother Harry. They liked the Brown Bag too much. And his grass, which he provided to them free of charge in zip-top baggies labeled oregano, or, if he’d added some CBD flower, basil, always in a fancy script. A little something for the wife, Harry would say, as if all their wives were gourmet Italian cooks.

I drove real slowly, so the alignment didn’t get loose and Jared, my husband, didn’t say, Hey, didn’t you just have the alignment done? But the road wasn’t my only concern. It was also the smell—the fish emulsion and compost Harry used to fertilize his plants, which during the short summers he’d tend in the small clearings in the woods around his house and during the rest of the year in the Brown Bag’s basement, an ideal grow environment. How come no one ever steals your grass? I asked him once, standing in the woods with him on a warm, damp afternoon, swatting at no-see-uns. Because come winter, they‘ll regret it, he said.

* * *

Grass had never been my drug of choice. I would start to visualize the cells in my lungs charred to charcoaly bits as I held in the smoke. My preference was a little smack, snorted so I wouldn’t turn into some kind of addict. For me Harry kept some in a baking powder tin. I didn’t ask where he got it, and it didn’t matter. He doled it out carefully, no more than two short lines a visit, and not every visit either. Harry liked being my go-to guy.

I rubbed his belly, a lucky Buddha rub that overlapped his soft hips, the hidden edges of his ribs. I could feel the swell of his liver, or thought I could. He was taller than Jared. Strong, too, the way people in this town tend to be strong if they had no one to take the garbage to the dump for them, no one to call when a tree needed chopping down. Harry put his hand over mine and gave it a squeeze, as if he were about to pull me close. I sighed, turning my head toward him, so that my nose brushed against his ear, imagined how his weight would feel against my thighs. His eyes were closed.

None of that now. No sense taking risks or adding complications.

Harry could be very upright, which I suppose is what made him at good business and a good friend to Jared.

* * *

A few years ago, the first time Jared asked me to his house dinner, I brought a pot of trailing geraniums, which within weeks became leggy from a combination of neglect and sub-optimal weather conditions. If you‘re going to give me plants, you‘d better move in and take of them, he said. I never left anything at Harry’s. If I brought even a bar of chocolate, I made sure we ate it all before I left, then folded the wrapper and put it in my pocket.

Harry had been Jared’s friend, the way that men are friends: wary of competition, rigid about what each considered his. It was months before Jared brought me to the Brown Bag and introduced us. I hope you get along, he whispered as he held the door. He worried we wouldn’t, dreading boundaries he might feel obliged to obey. After a while, he worried that we got along too well. He didn’t say that. What he said was, How was your day? Did you pick up the mail? Do you wish you hadn‘t come here?

* * *

As he chopped my lines, Harry said that three days ago, he saw Jared pull into the driveway, only to back out and drive away, like someone who’d made a wrong turn. Harry, thinking at first it was a customer, watched from the window. It was a day I’d spent in my bed with a migraine.

He was checking on you.

He could have come home, if he was curious. Or called.

Not that. He was looking for some trace of you, something to show you‘ve been here.

I doubt it, I said. Jared doesn‘t have that much imagination. Which made Harry smile.

Just when I thought he was about to fold his arms around me and lay me back with him, he reached under the sofa cushion for a piece of plastic straw, put it on the coffee table, and nudged my neck.

Dance again, a little more.

Sleepiness slurred his voice. I got up carefully, so that he wouldn’t fall over until I stuck another pillow under his head. This was his chance to grab at my hand and bring it to his lips, to coax me onto his lap, and kiss the flat area between my breasts, where the dress didn’t quite cover, then up my neck to my lips, where my kiss already would be waiting. Instead he let his head droop and tweezered a roach out of the ashtray, which he lit with a kitchen match.

Dance for me.

Some other time. Tomorrow, maybe.

Suit yourself.

I thought about taking the dress off right there, to see what Harry would do as he heard the zipper inch down my side. But I had to leave. Harry had to get to the bar so his day manager could cash out and, besides, Jared would be home soon. The evening would go better if I got home first and washed my hair—washed out the scent of fish emulsion and sweet mossy smoke, of Harry’s closed rooms. Or so I told myself.

It did not occur to Jared to ask me what I did all day, and it did not occur to me to tell him  because I didn’t do much of anything and that wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. Jared ran a real-estate agency, the biggest one in town. The only thing I did was go to Harry’s, and that wasn’t something I wanted to talk about either. Maybe it was because Jared had so much that he did and I had so little. Maybe it was the smack. But after a while, I thought of my life as Harry and me, with Jared on the periphery, a shadow I caught out of the corner of my eye, too vague to make my head whip around.

Which is ironic, because Harry was the vague one, the one you couldn’t describe in six words or less. In the weeks after I moved into Jared’s house, I would drive into town to imprint the layout of the streets on my mind, but also to make the day disappear. I’d see Harry walking down the street or getting into his truck or sitting on the steps in front of the Brown Bag, and I’d wonder what it was that that drew Jared to each of us. The three of us were so different, I thought. Maybe Jared just wanted the pieces of his life to interlock like, on a good day, the shards of pottery he sometimes liked to analyze at the historical society.

Why don‘t you see what Harry is up to? Why don‘t you invite him over for dinner?

I didn’t bother. One day, there he was, in front of me on the check-out line at the Price Chopper. He had waited for me, then carried my bags to my car.

You should come by the house before the road ices up.

Oh?

Got some stuff you might like.

I’d pictured old sweaters, tire chains, a set of cross-country skis—things that someone might be ready to get rid of, that someone new to snow could use.

That was when it had started: me stopping by his house casually, as if it were on my way home. One day with a book Jared thought he might like. Then another day, to drop off some leftover bread pudding, which Harry had mentioned he liked. Then for no reason I needed to explain. Harry would bend over the coffee table, where he sifted, cut, and weighed his product, scraping it into the sandwich bags I’d decorate with red Sharpies. I made ginger tea, which Harry said was good for the lungs. I could do a few lines and watch South Park on YouTube till I pushed the mute button and sat swaying to the music that smack got playing in my head. Then one afternoon Harry asked me to dance for him.

So gradually that at first I didn’t realize it, life became a matter of prelude and epilogue, the passing time either bringing me closer to Harry or taking me further away, the markers checked off in my mind: four more breakfasts, three more loads of laundry, one more trip to the grocery. Then, afterward, getting into the car to drive home, setting the trip odometer to zero, watching the miles accumulate over the next days.

I was always careful to hang the dresses back in the closet.

* * *

Jared’s house was chilly when I got home, like a house that no one had lived in for a while, the wood stove giving off the dank smell of old ashes. I pushed in three logs, wadded sheets of newspaper between them, and waited till I heard the crackle that meant the logs had caught. I did not want Jared to walk into a cold house and wonder where I’d been. Before I got into the shower, I turned on all the lights—from the road it would look like a whole family lived here, occupying every room. In fact, it was just my husband and I, and sometimes it didn’t even feel like that many.

I had a sweet potato casserole in the oven when I heard Jared come through the door. Package for you at the post office, he said right off. You have to sign for it, so it’s still there. He kept looking at me, trying to figure out if it was my birthday and he’d forgotten or if there was some other reason that someone would send a package to me. Because it wasn’t like me to order anything.

Any ideas?

About what? I was setting the table, centering each plate on its placemat and aligning each knife and fork on its napkin.

About who would send you a package that requires your very own personal signature on the delivery form, he said. Not hostile or anything. Just curious. Just making conversation.

I‘ll find out tomorrow, I said, thinking that whatever it is I’ll tell him it was a mistake, meant for somebody else. I’ll prop the box on the post office counter, write Return to Sender on the label, and ship it back.

But it was addressed to you, he’ll say.

No, it wasn‘t, I’ll say. It was a mistake.

What was in it, that you‘re so sure it wasn‘t for you?

Riding boots, I’ll say.

For the moment, however, he seemed content to let the matter lie and went to change into a pair of old sweatpants and a jersey whose slogan had long ago peeled off in the wash.

I think I‘ll run the track at the high school. Maybe stop by the Brown Bag, see what Harry‘s up to. Meet me there in an hour?

Dinner is in the oven.

Put it in the fridge. It will keep.

The next morning I went to the post office, in my pocket the yellow slip that conferred upon me and only me the right to press the bell at the pick-up window. The box was light for its size, and now that I held it I wanted to know what was inside.

I carried it to my car, laid it on the passenger seat, and carefully maneuvered a fingernail under the tape, so the cardboard wouldn’t tear.

Inside was a dress of pale gold. Bits of glitter sprinkled the skirt like frost on an autumn field: when I shook it over the sides of the box, a brilliant cloud floated up with it. The skirt was tulle lined with silk and I guessed it would fall just above my ankles. I knew immediately who sent it, just as I knew a few minutes later, sitting with the bodice crushed against my chest, that it was Harry calling when my cell phone rang.

Did you get a package yesterday?

Today, actually. And you know I did.

I bought it for you. It‘s new. You‘ll be the first to wear it.

Glitter fell everywhere—on the sleeves of my jacket, on my gloves, on the floor of the car. I would have to stop at the gas station to vacuum the seats and car mats. Even still, the next time Jared and I go out together, he will comment on the shiny specks he’ll have to brush off his pants.

Bring it over, Harry said. Show me how you look in it. Show me how it moves

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