#shortdance

That particular afternoon, she stood in front of the mirror in her bedroom.  She was wearing a red bikini with a white paisley pattern.  Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing her boney shoulders and still-slender upper arms.  She stood up straight and considered what she saw.

When looking at herself in the mirror, Jane frequently got the sense that she was studying something incomplete.  Not incomplete as in lacking, but as in unfinished.  Her eyes, in particular, gave the sense of a work in progress.  They were slightly, almost imperceptibly, too large for her face.  For years, she had been waiting to grow into them, but no spurt in height seemed to manage it.  She was a caricature of her future self, not fully formed.  Her reflection was in the middle of something, but what, Jane couldn’t have said.

Carter knocked on the door and Jane pulled a white t-shirt over her head.  She picked a pair of pale blue cut-offs from the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed and unlocked the bolt.  Carter opened the door a crack and poked his face into the room.

“Almost ready?” he asked, gesturing toward the bag and towel on Jane’s desk chair.  “The Red Rider is parked in the Colophon lot.  Should I come pick you up or do you want to walk with me?”

“I was born ready,” Jane said.  She was pretty sure they both knew she was lying.  “Let’s walk.”

They crossed the street below their building, heading in the direction of the store.  Jane and Carter lived six and three-quarters blocks from The Red Colophon, somewhere between four-hundred seventeen and two-hundred eighty six steps.  Jane had been counting off steps since she was five.  They’d proved to be a less-than-stable unit of measurement.

Parked in the lot behind the bookstore was Jane’s father’s red Astro van with its slightly dirty grill and marginally rusted bumper.  “The Red Colophon” was printed on the side in large block capitals.  Beneath the store logo was the telephone number, “312-695-2324,” undersigned by the description “Rare and Out of Print Books.”

Carter climbed into the driver’s side and Janey into the passenger’s seat.  The Red Rider was never locked; Carter said even the parts weren’t worth some thief’s efforts.  Sometimes, Jane suspected he hoped they would get robbed.  Then, at least, he could collect on the insurance.

The motor roared into life and the Parkers exited the parking lot.

“Big night tonight, huh?” Carter asked as they turned on to 170th Street.

“You have a date?” Jane deflected.  As she spoke she re-tied her ponytail in the rearview mirror.

“I mean,” her father added, completely ignoring her, “Everybody must get invitations to these parties of Corina’s.”

“Because I’m invited?” Jane asked pointedly.

“That’s hardly fair,” Carter said, sounding hurt.  “You’ve known Corina Williams since you were in the second grade.”

“That doesn’t mean she wants me at her pool party,” Jane observed.

“Or,” Carter said realistically, “That you want to be there.”

“I don’t even like pools,” Jane groaned.  She laughed and threw up her hands.  Carter laughed too.

“Stop making excuses,” he said, “It’s good for you to get out of the house, whether you like it or not.  How else am I supposed to have a social life?”

“You’re right,” Jane said and smiled, wishing that she believed it.  “I’ll have fun.”

At seven twenty six, the Parkers pulled up out front of Corina Williams’ house.  The Red Rider mad a quiet puttering noise to fill the space of their unspoken words.

Carter leaned across the gearbox and kissed Jane on the cheek. 

“Have fun,” he said.

“I will,” Jane promised.  She slammed the door and Carter pulled away.  Jane sighed deeply and turned to face the house.

When she rang the doorbell, Corina’s older brother, Carl, answered it.

“Hey,” Carl said.  “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I’ve been busy, you know,” Jane said.  She set down her bag and kicked her shoes into the pile on the landing. 

“Yeah,” Carl said.  He closed the door and turned wordlessly down the stairs.

Jane headed to the kitchen, where she knew the refrigerator would be stocked with cold soda.  It was quieter on the second floor than downstairs, where the stereo was blaring and the foosball table would be crowded around by throngs of people.

By the foosball table, Jane discovered Sam and his friend from baseball camp, Peter McGinn.  They had met a couple of times where she and Sam hung out at the record store on 23rd Avenue.

“Hey, Jane!” Sam said when he saw her. 

Jane smiled.  She was glad to find a friend.  “Hiya, Sam,” she replied.

They hugged.

“So, Jane,” Sam continued, smoking his ubiquitous cigarette, “I was just telling Peter about a book I was reading.”

“What book?” Jane asked.

“Thoreau,” Sam said. 

“What book?” Jane asked again and grinned.

“Civil Disobedience,” Sam replied.  Someone scored a goal in foosball.  The table rattled and Jane was jostled by a celebratory elbow.

“We read that for class in the ninth grade,” Peter said.  He went to a magnet school downtown.  Jane thought maybe his mother was a professor or something.

“Well, we didn’t,” Sam told him.

“Is it any good?” Jane asked.

“The only place for a just man in an unjust society,” Sam quoted, “Is a prison.”  He laughed.  “Or something like that.”

“You have to be willing to accept the consequences,” Peter added.  “You can’t just talk about it.  You actually have to do it.  Like in the 60’s.”  He stole a drag from Sam’s cigarette.  “Nobody does anything anymore.”

“And you?” Jane asked.  “What would you go to jail for?”

Peter looked at her in surprise.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, it’s like you said,” Jane explained, trying not to breathe in too much of the smoke.  “If you’re going to believe in disobedience, there’d better be something you’d be disobedient for.”

Sam gazed on in amused admiration.  Peter took a moment to collect his thoughts.

“Religion,” he said at last.  “I think I’ve always felt this way about religion.”

“Go on,” Sam said.

“Well, Hell’s a sort of prison,” Peter reasoned.  “Wouldn’t you rather spend eternity there than in Heaven with a vengeful God?”

Sam and Jane looked around the crowded room.  For a moment, no one said anything.

“Heaven for the weather,” Jane agreed at last, “Hell for the company.”

“Yeah,” Peter said.

After class, Janey would climb down the fire escape, through the backdoor of Lloyd’s Hardware, into the stockroom.  She had always thought “Lloyd’s” was a strange name for a hardware store, especially considering her uncle’s name was Richard, after her grandfather.  Uncle Ricky had bought the building from a man named John, who’d run a mechanic’s shop there for the better part of four decades.  John had inherited the store from his own father, the eponymous Lloyd, and Uncle Ricky said he didn’t see the point in ruining a good thing. There had been a Lloyd’s on the corner of Hanshaw and 182nd for over one hundred years; it was a part of the neighborhood history.

Janey didn’t come to Lloyd’s for history.

    When she danced, the thoughts inside her head moved more slowly. They became stately and grand, like boats gliding down a wide and gentle river.  Ideas were vessels, waiting to be hailed and boarded. They would ride together all the way to the sea, where Janey would scuttle them—in all their majesty—before giving herself up to the deep, calm waves.

But by afternoon, when her shoes and leotard were tucked away, the river succumbed to winter and froze back over. Her thoughts sped along the surface on sharpened skates. She watched them as they darted above her, separated from her clumsy body by a thick wall of cloudy ice.

But there were a few precious hours, an enchanted autumn, in which the world stood still around her. 

  Life draped around her and announced itself.  It was fragile, trembling, miraculous.

  Janey had a ritual.  There were seven rows of merchandise in Lloyd’s stockroom, each organized according to ascending serial number.  Every week, she picked a row according to the number closest to the date of the month.  She would stand patiently in front of it, then close her eyes and run blindly down the aisle until she couldn’t take another step, for fear of the darkness.

When she stopped, eyelids flung open, it was like looking at the world through new eyes.  She stood in the musty half-light, heart throbbing from the adrenaline of the dash.  In what lingering clarity surrounded her, even the mundane artifacts of Lloyd’s backroom seemed fresh and full of mystery.

Carefully, she would remove the cardboard boxes from the highest shelf of the place where she had stopped.  Pulling open the tape, she would excavate the contents like a grave robber, greedy in a pharaoh’s tomb.  But after she had extracted them, memorizing their surfaces and grooves with covetous hands, she laid the pieces out on the floor—washers or nails or gaskets or bits of copper tubing—and she examined them.

Like God upon the seventh day or Noah in his ark, she surveyed her collection and set it in order.  She beheld the wonder and simplicity of the tiny parts, each fashioned for a singular purpose, each perfect in its intent.  Sometimes she sat on the floor for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour—however long it took for the ecstasy to dim—until she was alone, in the dark, with the lackluster contents of a torn plastic bag that read “Made in China”.

    But one afternoon in August, just a few weeks before school began, something was wrong.

Jane came into the stockroom, only to discover the lights were on, a lone bulb flickering in the corner above the entrance to the storefront.  She was flustered for a moment, but she told herself that someone must have forgotten to turn it off after he had gone back to the front register.  She set down her bag by the workbench and took a deep breath.  Feeling her shoulders rise and then fall back comfortably around her spine, she shook off the shock.  Like falling back to sleep in the early hours of the morning, she recognized the warmth of her recent dreams and slid back into them.  Jane closed her eyes, standing in front of the aisle closest to the door.  The light vanished, her concentration returned, and she ran headlong down the space between the shelves.

Until halfway down the aisle, when she crashed into a boy who had walked in from the front of the store. 

They fell into a jumble on the floor.  Jane opened her eyes, flat on her back.  Gingerly, she lifted herself up on her elbows to get a better look at the sweater sprawled out alongside her.

The boy in the sweater was Mark Reynolds. He lived most of the year with his parents in some prim, respectable suburb north of the city. She had seen him get off the bus across the street from his grandmother’s building, but she hadn’t spoken to him since the previous summer. Every August, Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds left him with the old lady while they escaped what adults liked to call “the pressures of city life”. Jane seemed to recall that they went to Michigan, to a resort town with a boardwalk and taffy shops; it was a summer place, full of summer people.

But not Mark.

Mark blew into the neighborhood like a crisp, golden maple leaf; his arrival was an omen of expectant autumn, building in the wings, watching impatiently as the dog days of August staunchly refused to relinquish the stage.

  Her concentration ruined by the intrusion of Mark Reynolds, Jane headed south on 182nd Street toward The Red Colophon.

The Red Colophon was her father’s bookstore.  It occupied the corner shop on the intersection of Harding Street and 23rd Avenue.  Growing up, it had been her geographic pivot point, the center of the neighborhood.  Like most children of urban areas, Jane knew her corner of the city by heart.  It was bounded on the east by 168th Street and 185th Street on the west.  The north and south borders were measures of how far she was willing to comfortably travel on her one-speed bicycle: the public library on 38th to the north and the record store on 23rd Avenue to the south.

  Jane came and went from The Red Colophon as she pleased.  There she could always find her father, Carter, should she need him.

Most days, he would be behind the back counter, organizing new books on his cart.  The Red Colophon always had more books in stock than it could sell, but this was true of most bookstores.  Carter had an eye for pieces that his customers would love.  When he could bear to part with them himself, they made a fine living.  Enough, at least, for their little apartment, Janey’s college fund, and Friday night dinner at Anthony’s.  It was a good life for two, and Jane and Carter with happy in it.

Jane had never known her mother.  It was a thing that people she’d just met liked to feel sorry for her about, but to Jane it didn’t make a difference.  She was curious about her, sometimes, but she had died of breast cancer when Jane was only a baby.  Jane had no memory of her.  Still, people liked to feel sorry, as if it made them superior.

Except for Sam Thomas, because Sam didn’t have mom, either.  He had two dads.

Jane was old enough to know what that meant, and it didn’t bother her in the least.  At age seven, when she and Sam had me, what had mattered about the situation was that people felt sorry for Sam too, and he didn’t like it either.

Together, they had formed a coalition of motherlessness, only to discover they had significantly more in common. 

Sam had a much older half-brother in New Jersey who was a musician.  The fascination with his brother, who sometimes sent him letters, had elicited in Sam the rather eccentric hobby of collecting concert posters and fliers from around the neighborhood.  His room was covered in his favorites, and he scoured the territory between twentieth and thirty-second avenues with a devotion bordering on the obsessive to keep the collect current.  When he wasn’t playing baseball, his other great love, he was making the rounds and Jane was at his side.

For her part, she wasn’t interested in concert posters, but Sam, she had learned early on, knew all the best places in the neighborhood.  Where ever he went, beautiful things happened.  So she rode her bike beside him while he walked.  They talked about the small things they saw.

Jane always kept a Kodak disposable camera in her back pocket.  While Sam kept on the lookout for a new band or maybe an old favorite, Jane would take pictures of curiosities they passed on the sidewalk: yellow Juicy Fruit wrappers, red “For Rent” advertisements; the shadow of an airplane on the pavement, a child peeking from behind the blinds of a third-story window.  She would take pictures, he’d peel posters from telephone poles, and they’d forget for a while about being the motherless kids of 182nd Street.

On her way to The Red Colophon that afternoon, Jane knew she would find Sam hitting ground balls against the wall of Warren Harding High School, on the corner of 182nd and 21st Avenue.  Janey stuck her hands into her coat pocket as a cold breeze blew around the corner from the blacktop.  She crinkled her cheeks to keep the dust from her eyes.

When she opened them again, there was Sam and his baseball bat.

Sam was tall for their age, taller than Jane by almost a head, and she had already gone through her growth spurt.  Sometimes, if she thought about it too hard, it made Jane angry to know that she would never any bigger, but Sam would keep on growing.  It was like a great secret, told in strictest confidence, that you discover everyone knows.

“Hi, Sam,” she said, leaning against the school wall and sticking her hands deeper into her pockets.

“Hiya,” Same said and pitched himself another grounder.

Jane watched in silence as he chopped his ragged baseballs against the wall.  They bounced off and rolled to rest against the fence on the other side of the blacktop.  When all the balls had been hit, he slung the bat over his shoulder.  Jane picked up the canvas bag and handed it to him.  They walked across the blacktop and Sam stuffed the balls in the bag, one by one.

“I heard that Two Doves gave a concert last night at The Rain House,” Sam said.

“I don’t know where that is,” Jane told him.  The chain link creaked melodically as she leaned into it.

“It’s a dive bar on 16th,” Same said matter-of-factly, as though he were an expert in dive-bars.  “There might be some posters on 21st .”

Jane nodded.

“Do you wanna check it out?” she asked.

“You busy?” Sam wondered.

“No,” Jane told him.  “I have some things I want to drop off with Carter, but then…”

“It’s on the way,” Sam said and slung the bag of baseballs over his shoulder with the bat.

  A few blocks later, the unlikely pair pushed through the glass door of The Red Colophon.  Carter Parker’s life’s work gleamed in the Sunday afternoon sunlight.  The regulars were curled into the overstuffed second-hand chairs with their overstuffed, second-hand books.  At the coffee bar, the frothing wand whistled shrilly for a college-aged couple waiting on a pair of cappuccinos.  Everything smelled faintly of musty paper and high-adhesive glue.

Jane waved at the regulars as she and Sam made their way through the stacks and shelves toward Mr. Parker’s office.

Carter was behind the sales counter at the back of the store.  In the large glass case resided the treasures which were, in theory, for sale for the right price, but with which everyone knew Carter Parker would never part.  They were minor treasures, but to Carter they were priceless.

Jane cleared a space between the books destined for repair and put her dance things on the counter.  Sam set his bag of baseballs at his feet.

“Hello, Mr. Parker,” he said.

Carter looked from the spine of the book he was repairing.  Mr. Parker was an excellent restorer, and a good deal of the revenue from The Red Colophon was due to book repair.  And, of course, the coffee.

“Hello, Sam,” he said.  “Hit any home runs today?”

“Nope.”

“Next time,” Carter suggested.  He turned his gaze to his daughter.  “How was dance class?”

“Good,” Jane told him.  She had all but forgotten the incident with Mark Reynolds.

“Sam and I were going to walk over to 21st Avenue,” Jane continued, “Is there anything you wanted from the library?”

The neighborhood branch library was on the corner of 179th and 23rd, next to Carter’s preferred barber shop.  The head librarian knew the Parkers on sight.  Carter got a lot of used merchandise at reduced price from the library.  Even in the used book business, it paid to buy in bulk.  Sometimes, things were set aside specifically for The Red Colophon.

“I was just in yesterday,” Carter told her.  “But thanks for the offer.”