Meditations. Listening to Music from Boys

Winter Dance, Brian Kershisnik

I'm an incurable audience watcher. Hard core addict. Performance blossoms in rays of sustained directed focus, the built-in difference between talking to yourself and soliloquizing. I love to watch the watchers, covert audience of one, hidden for they mustn't observe my observation and all unwilling find themselves thrust into the performance. So, while my youngest child spent the afternoon trying out for the middle school ballroom team (nervous!!), I give a little bit of my time to watching the dancers and a lot to watching the instructor. Watching him watching them. I have to wonder. I'd know so much about him if I knew what he was looking for in those huge children (or are they tiny teenagers) --polish? eagerness? innate rhythm? ease? I know so little about dance, ballroom in particular, I have no way of knowing who looks good but I know a ton about the horrible difficulty of auditioning children for a project that stretches over months. Being unable to predict how they will grow and alter just between now, the end of school, and the first day they come back in August. Middle school. Hurtling along at breathtaking speed. Easier with adults, we're so...stable. And so seldom delightfully unforeseeable. I hurt for him, and admire his crazy greatness. He looks calm and pleasant. He doesn't look like his stomach aches. I'm taking care of that for him, twisting up on his behalf. I watch him closely, wondering what he is watching closely. Look from him to the dancers. Back and forth. Looking for dancers I think would be interesting to work with because in my work I can be "interested." I don't have a team, don't have to compete so I needn't care about "winning."

And there was this boy.
I'm not going to describe him in any way because while I have no idea who he is or who his people are I'm willing to bet they are alive and can read. Suffice it to say he is already on the team, was there to help out and is older than my still-in-elementary-school daughter.
Like a hundred years older. I think I never want her to be that old.
I'm not sure she ever will be.

She's sort of ageless in a too-young-for-this-world way. There's an otherness to her; she always seems to be playing the dying swan. Even as she trips over swanlike feet that have grown too big too fast. It worries her. Her older sister has always been a dancer, always sure, even though she falls over stuff just as much as the next person. Maybe more. "Am I a klutz?" the youngest asks, "Look what I did to myself. I ran into a wall. A door. A boy." Not a klutz. A water bird on dry land. She looks right when she waltzes, swooping around, head high on a slender, long neck, graceful long arms, proud, sweet face.
She also looks like a swan when she gets funky.

That'd be white. She looks white.
Not that white people can't be funky, some can and they do but some can't and when they can't they look really white. White as the driven snow.
And I don't have to say at this point really all the kids are looking awkward, one way or another. Even the obviously advanced dancers (ballroom's a big thing in Provo) still inhabit bodies changing day to day (or not, let us pause a moment to send silent sympathy to those poor, shortest boys. you remember them). Of course some will hide that better in the waltz, like my girl, while some show to better advantage bopping about and shakin' it. But no one's going to look good all the time.

But there was this boy.
Awkward and gangly too, one more pimply face in a sea of them, hair too long in precisely the way everyone's is too long or just too short. But he understands using music for dancing with girls and when he dances, everything changes.
He never partners with my daughter. He doesn't see her. I have oddly outsized feelings of gratitude about that, and, and, just a small cutting sliver of sadness for her. She doesn't notice him. She's still little, still playing at this, but when he's dancing, he's a hundred years old. It's like watching a fate dance from inside some fey story where destiny rides on the smallest, thoughtless action, take my hand and smile, and part of the spell is that all the dancers look the same while one of them is not. Not the same. Can the dancers see it? Is this the good and golden prince revealing himself? Or is he the dark swan? Nothing for the watchers to do but watch.

Or is it that he just really gets the music.

I had a boyfriend once, once, who did understand music and dancing to it. That was a revelation.

I loved to dance all my life, took dance classes whenever they were available in my little community, but barely danced at all at school dances where the boys I wanted (so badly!) to ask me apparently felt zero desire in that direction; meanwhile, I generally felt compelled to hide from the boys brave enough (or weird enough) to desire and request my company on the dance floor. My middle child is just past her junior prom, the dress that cost me a solid day of my life in the hunting is still hanging on the back of her door in its protective bag (though that's probably less because she's keeping the memory fresh than because she simply can't put it away, which after all would require moving it all of six feet to hang on the clothing rod. Must...gather...strength). That was the first fun and happy high school formal I saw from close to the inside. Boys don't count the same way. They are too nervous, dances in high school seem more defined by what they forget. Polishing their shoes, the tickets, the corsage. "Mom, do you think she'll mind?" Yes, honey, you dork, I think she might. He's a good true boy, not a prince yet, but he's a tin soldier. Steadfast. Waiting for a beautiful dancer to fly into the furnace of the future with him so he can reveal his heart to her. Or some other event not so cheesy.
I only attended one formal in high school. Senior Ball, I was in charge, I had a boyfriend in college, it was just yucky. I was worn out, we made my dress and I really liked what my mom chose but it was just too different, once again, from the dresses I didn't like that the other girls were wearing. And I started truly disliking my boyfriend that night. He had too many rules, how I should act, look, talk to him. At one point I was looking around too much, I guess, wanting to see the decorations I had made from different angles, trying to discern whether people liked them, what they thought of the refreshments, the lighting, the million choices I had made for them. He took my wandering head and yanked it down onto his shoulder (not so comfortable, he wasn't quite (ha!) tall enough) where it was supposed to be snuggling happily. I was so angry I was blind for a minute. I thought about crying but instead I just went to sleep. I was tired. In about six months I would run away to college and break off all communication. Not break up, too frightened of him, of what he'd do to me. Just dissolve, disappear.

College was different for me. Suddenly and strangely. I went to every formal, borrowed dresses, stiff dinners, pictures, the whole bit. This was what I had spent myself longing for? For this? Better were the dance classes I took every semester, jazz, tap, folkdance, everything. And when my best friend and I bummed rides to discos (remember? how old are you?) and clubs, went to every casual Friday stag dance. Those were much more fun. Dance, dance, dance. Boys, boys, boys. Fun, fun, fun. Ho hum.
But. The first time I danced with that one, one boyfriend it was as if, holding his hand, strolling casually onto the dance floor, I turned and saw him standing unexpectedly on the other side of a threshold, through an open door, a door he was holding open and keeping open (true gentleman) for me and only for me, while all the others swirled about us, unaware. And he was powerful there; once through that door we were in his kingdom. I don't know how this story might have twisted had he been at heart a dark swan. At the time I wasn't at all real enough to know anything except how much I liked him. But he wasn't false, he was a golden prince; he felt that weight and took it seriously.

Because I only have eyes for you.

Rules for dancing with boys (these never varied much from seventh grade through college, unless you fell in with an Enforcer. then he would communicate his preferences). Bop around, try to talk or not, look wherever as long as you glance at each other occasionally and don't obviously flirt with anyone else till you are actually off the floor. Slow dances, don't grab too tight. Now here's a true secret. He never looked away from me, from my eyes, from the moment we stepped onto the dance floor till we walked off. I couldn't believe it or figure out how he did it. Like something only in a book, the ending of a certain sort of book, the sort of book you have to put down from time to time and just take a quick little walk around the drab, grumpy, real world to shake yourself out and to remind yourself of things. He never stumbled or stepped on anyone and it never felt forced. I don't know what you're talking about, he said. This was what he understood you were supposed to use that music for, dancing with a girl.

Do I want my daughter to be old enough for this?
And what is this, exactly?

Dance with me,
I want to be your partner...

Wanting.
Focus.
And safety.

The instructor's teaching all the dancers a jive dance now, watching how they learn. Watching them with his back turned because he's teaching while he's watching, he has to do the steps too. I KNOW that place, that watching over the shoulder, and while he still seems remarkably calm I am thinking not till December no auditions for me till December and doing silent internal backflips of joy.

Remembering music and boys.

Only two boys ever made composite tapes for me (cassette. uh-huh). It's such a quotidian, omnipresent action now, everyone gives those to everyone else. Playlists, Pandora. What, really, is an iPod but an enormous composite creation? It may have been common then, more than I knew, but it felt very special and exotic. And it was a heck of a lot of work.

One of the tapes was horrible.

Not the songs, the songs themselves were great, far better than these souped-up eighties songs I'm hearing at this audition, though his choices for me were from the eighties, of course, and before, really good stuff, and set me firmly on the folk rock path I would follow faithfully for years, which was what they had been intended to do. That was the horrible problem. It had been made as an instructional tape, and presented as such. I needed to brush up on my listening library, deepen and broaden my exposure in order to pass muster, to hang with his crowd. And, hey, too true, I was not well educated musically. He was his whole short life ahead of me in the cool music department. This is still a failing of mine. I'm not hip, I'm READING. Busy.

Let's suppose I had done that to him with books.
"Hey dude, here's the composite LIBRARY I put together for you. You get these two or three hundred books under your belt for starters so we can converse in a civilized fashion, 'k? I'll be over here, listening to this tape."
Brother.
But I loved him and never even noticed this particular rotten manifestation till later. When I broke not up but off with him (I have this tendency to dematerialize) it was for what I would have called entirely different reasons. He said, "Have you gained weight?" I said, "What? Um, I think, I think I've been happy." He folded his arms. Started talking about my hair.
Too much wanting.
Too much focus.
On me.
No air.
Such a golden boy. He had everyone duped.

A Good Man and a Bad Man, Brian Kershisnik

The other tape. Ahh. The other tape. Not a hipster, just a rocker, even sort of a metalhead. Which made the tape he gave me all the more shocking and lovely. Unforeseen. A door he opened, for me and only for me, to let me look a little way inside.
An amazing collection of songs about how he felt. About loving people, seeing to them.
I have no idea where he got the songs. Not from his own albums. You couldn't search the net in those dark ages. He must have had to borrow stuff.
It made him embarrassed. Embarrassed but defiant. Watching me narrowly, out of the corners of his eyes, waiting to see what I would think, maybe if I would laugh or tease him (no idea why he'd think that, not me, never). He wasn't my boyfriend, exactly. That would have been too tame, too domestic. He danced with lots of girls. But toward the end of the evening he danced close by, and the last few dances were his. He had an impressive car (I mean, I don't know anything about cars either, I was impressed. he wanted me to be) and he made sure he drove me home. Once to the emergency room. Wanna know what that tape was for, before I got to take it? For playing on his car stereo, for dancing in the garage. He was sort of a bad boy, life had made him kind of hard, he was hiding a hope to find someone to take care of, to watch over. He showed it, just a little.
Wanting.
Focus.
Safety.
And, oddly, freedom.

...dancing with me, cheek to cheek.
There's nobody here, it's just you and me.

Seventh grade. She will start dancing with boys and she's absolutely got to learn to tell dark swans from princes. She can't get it from a book or learn from her sister though all that helps (her brother, now, that's a thought). It's an experiment on real people who may bleed or forget about her. Hurt her. There's one out there right now who already understands about using music for dancing with girls. It'll be magical if he decides to become a golden prince. The instructor's walking around, watching, while they go through what they've learned so far, one last time. My daughter's dancing with a boy she knows, a friend, but he's an awkward dancer, has to concentrate on his feet to avoid disaster and she doesn't want to be there, she's letting her focus slide. I can see her watching another boy, pretty and fancy, but I've pegged him for a false swan. He dances for himself, he's wearing his partner like an apricot scarf. And he keeps looking over at--what?--not mirrors, there aren't any--what then?--oh. That must be his mother. Run, baby, don't look back. He's not interested in a little swanling, anyway, he's of the opinion that he can dance and he can jive and he's chosen himself an accomplished partner with a supercilious expression and super skinny long legs and a hot hot pink short dress. Different plumage altogether. Birds of a feather. They're all watching each other and I'm watching them and the instructor walks around and around.
This isn't dancing, of course, this is a performance.
Now my little girl is thinking about the steps. She wants to get them right, to be good at this, and her focus has shifted again. To just dancing.

She might as well be alone.
Good. Maybe when she's older.

Dance with me,
I want to be your partner.

Painting, Brian Kershisnik