Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood Page A

the lights go down and the bridal pair starts the inaugural waltz, in which they are to dance until some signal allows a tide of couples to rise around them. Alone on the floor they dance slowly and beautifully. She is proud of her daughter’s dancing. On the porch of the house by the river, she had been the teacher, dancing with a thirteen-year-old stiff with grief, as she had danced with her husband in the evenings in summer before he was sick, with the record player lifted through the window and lightning bugs in the hedge, up and down the pine boards they had stripped and varnished themselves, around the corner and back, laughing and carrying on while the boys, joining in, jumped on and off the glider, bouncing the needle on the record, and the baby girl tried to climb up after them. Tipsy parents—waving to the neighbors. Tipsy, that unknowing pair, yes, but not drunk. There was no need to be drunk.
    Over by the bandstand she can see her second son, the shyer, less successful one who pays her rent, but he’s looking at the band and listening carefully to something his wife is saying. He’s a big man, tall, but not handsome like his father; he has a disappointed, fallen face. She thinks, I did favor your brother, just like you said. I did. I’m sorry. I’m sorry but he was so much ours. The first. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything that could happen.
    Finally after a long time during which she can see only the bountiful rafts of stemmed glasses sliding among the shoulders—for they are not going to hoard the champagne for toasting, they
are going to drink champagne all night—a few couples venture onto the floor and step carefully into each other’s arms, and begin to rock slowly and move their feet in small squares, with concentrating smiles. As she watches them she feels a familiar sinking that means she needs a drink immediately. She will have to leave. Now. She’s trying to retreat, but slowly, feeling behind her with one hand as if she’s already had a few too many, or backed into one of the dreams she used to have, when each slow step led a few more inches back from some cliff or animal. She is suddenly so played out and heavy in the arms and legs that she thinks she might actually have to go to her room and fall down and sleep.
    She plays with the idea. She thinks, Then if I wake up it’ll be morning and I’ll hear the river. I’ll wake the kids. I won’t have this life on my hands. But of course she’s playing a game, a game of tempting herself. She knows she wouldn’t wake up in her old house but she thinks in stubbornness and perplexity, If I can’t I’ll die .
    But someone is asking her to dance. It’s the tall, thin man, the wedding consultant. He crossed the room to her, shook hands, told her a name like Rodney or Sidney. He must have identified her as a member of the bridal party because of her gardenia and seen that no one has spoken for her. Perhaps that is his function.
    She has not danced in years. When she gets out on the floor with him she is surprised at her memory of it, the alert that runs through her forgotten muscles. Some of that might be the man’s doing. But here are her limbs stretching themselves, giving up some of their weight. In one of the smooth turns he executes, something catches, attaching her to his dark suit. At first it seems to be the corsage pin, but then she sees it’s her other lapel, it’s the brooch, her daughter’s gift. Her daughter insisted that she
take it, wear it, a big thick cluster of pearls in a setting the shape of a vase or basket with handles. “Lands,” she says, “my daughter gave me this pin and it catches on everything.”
    He holds her away to look. The bruised eyes don’t match his elegance. They seem to mock something, whether himself or her she can’t tell. He says, “Looks like a loose prong. My mother wore one of those and