Dancing Backwards in High Heels

by Christine Darcas

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

At forty-two, Madeleine Huchinson is in a rut. Newly arrived in Australia from America, she is struggling to cope with two children, a flagging marriage and an overwhelming sense of invisibility. One winter evening while trying to get her sick son to a GP, she glimpes couples dancing, touching and laughing in a warmly lit studio. Attracted to this new world and reminded of her younger self, she decides to join a Latin American dance class. Maddy starts reclaiming her identity on the dance floor - facing choices that threaten her marriage and tempations that could see her lose everything.

Release date: July 1, 2010

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 243

Sample

 

To dance is to be out of yourself, larger, more powerful, more beautiful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.

Agnes de Mille

Men’s cologne. It wafts down the studio steps and settles there in a cloying fog ready to engulf anyone brave enough to enter. Soft-focus photographs of dancers line the stairwell. I stare at the first one, a woman wearing a sea-green, two-piece number laden with diamantes, her dark hair slicked back. Her face is man-eating leer under Barbarella eyelashes. This really isn’t the female model I want to emulate and, for an instant, I’m tempted to run. But the prospect of grocery shopping, or researching the least expensive repair place for my car – the next activities on my ‘to do’ list – stop me. Harry Connick Jr’s voice croons upstairs and a gentle thrill ripples through my gut that no grocery store or panel shop could match. Forget Barbarella; the instructor I spoke with on the phone insisted that I could dance for the sake of dancing. No expectations. No pressure. Nothing outside my comfort zone.

Still, as the music, chatter and laughter intensify with every step, I feel myself disintegrating into an eighteen-year-old entering a college fraternity party for the first time. Except back then I was flanked by girlfriends. But there’s no one and nothing here to cover my awkwardness. No alcove to hide in, no counter or large potted plant full of plastic cups leaking cheap beer to linger behind. I’m here and there’s no way I can hide it. I hover by a poster of a young man in a black bolero jacket, his arm arched in flamenco pose with Strictly Ballroom scrawled across the top. Then I swear I hear my name, the splinter of ‘Mad –’, but no one seems to have noticed I’m there.

A tap on my shoulder. I swing around.

‘Madeleine?’

A scar, wide and freshly shaved, cuts across the jawbone. He’s short, not much taller than me, with sandy-coloured hair gelled up in front. His gut is edging over his belt. I stick out my hand to shake his.

‘Yes. David?’

He seems surprised at my handshake offer and hesitates before taking it. ‘You found us okay?’ Rough hands.

‘Yeah, I’d already driven by.’

Truth is, four days earlier I was practically marooned outside. Desperately lost and more than a little bit late for an appointment with our new GP in our newly designated home of Melbourne, I had swung the car over to the side of the road and yanked my thirteen-year-old son, Josh, out of the passenger seat in time for him to retch on the sidewalk. Behind him, I wrapped my arm around his stomach and stroked his hair off his face. He heaved, then heaved some more, deep and empty. Then he started to cry.

‘My ear hurts so much!’

‘It’s okay, honey. Really, it is.’ I drew a Kleenex from the stash in my coat pocket and attempted to mop the spittle from his mouth and jeans. For a couple of seconds he let me do it before jerking away.

‘Stop it, Mom.’ He grabbed the tissue from my hand.

I thumbed the GP’s phone number on my mobile only to be told by a voice recording that the office was closed. Josh would have to go to an emergency room, to an unknown hospital in yet another unknown location. Cars charged by, the reds and whites of their lights reflecting off the rain-wet streets. Some of them honked at us, the noise all sharp irritation that we were blocking a lane. So many people, yet no one I knew to reach out for.

Pull yourself together, Maddy. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

I sucked in my breath then, steered Josh back to the car and began searching through the cumbersome book of Melbourne maps for the nearest hospital. It was then that I spotted the dance studio. Peering through the windshield for a street name, I saw the sign for ‘Body Rhythms’. In fluorescent blue, it flashed through blackened wetness above the shop fronts across the road. Couples, their arms raised in partner hold, rose and swayed in the warm wash of yellow light behind a glass panel. Laughing, a woman released her partner’s arms. The man, all cheeky grin, said something and she giggled again as he spread his hand over her shoulder blade and drew her back in position. The music must have stopped because the group suddenly changed partners. Some shyly, some beaming, they each entered another’s physical space to dance again.

And, for the first time in a long while, I was touched by the possibility of joy.

Now, standing here and facing David, I think I must have been imagining that whole ‘joy’ thing. After all, anything would look appealing next to your son puking on the sidewalk. David gestures towards two wooden chairs beside the dance floor. He’s holding a pen and a clipboard. ‘You said on the phone that you’ve danced before. Was that in America?’

‘Yes.’ I don’t know what to do with my hands. I cross my legs and use them to grip my knee. ‘A long time ago.’

‘What brings you to Australia?’

‘My husband’s job.’

I hate saying it. Hate it. It sounds like I’m some kind of kept woman, someone who exists solely for the benefit of her mate and the children she’s spawned with him. The rest of the time I’m obviously floating on a cushy raft buoyed by my husband’s money.

‘Did you dance any medals?’

These sound important. Very official. The fact that I’ve never heard of them before in my life must mean I have a huge gap in my training. ‘Medals?’

‘Bronze, Silver, Gold – exams. I think the system is international. I thought it was international.’

He’s sitting, legs slightly apart, leaning his elbows on his knees. Out on the floor, a woman about my age is following her instructor’s lead through a rumba. She’s chattering as much as she’s dancing, her steps loosely marked. But another woman, younger, is at the far side of the studio. Her body is taut, her legs all long toned muscle in short black skirt and fishnets, her steps precise in two and a half inch shoes as she winds and spins through choreography with her partner. And, despite myself, I can’t help measuring what I was against her. Then I wish I hadn’t because I’m sure I was never that good, even when I was seventeen, strong, fit, and danced every day after school at Lucinda’s.

Shit. This was a bad idea.

I feel David watching me, waiting for me to speak. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Yes, I took tests. I don’t remember anything about medals, though.’

David follows my gaze to the young dancer. ‘That’s Felicia. She’s been dancing for years. She’s off to San Francisco to dance in a pro-am comp with her instructor, Gavin.’ He nods at her partner, who is standing in front of the mirror showing her different options for styling her arms. For a dancer, he’s surprisingly stocky. Like a ball of muscle, he exudes strength and the confidence of entitlement. Chest hair curls around the worn neck of his navy blue tank top.

‘How old is she?’

‘Twenty-two, I think. No wait. Twenty-one.’

Panic must be all over my face because David starts speaking to me quickly. ‘I’ve known dancers as young as six and as old as eighty-five.’ His smile for me is sympathetic and I find some comfort in the possibility that he’s seen my kind of dancing insecurity before. ‘I don’t think about the age of my students. It’s just all about the dancing.’

He’s watching me curiously now. I press a lock of hair behind my ear then remember my grey roots will show more that way. I’ve had my hair coloured once since moving here, at a hairdresser’s within walking distance of my house. But they went too brassy, transforming my hair to a shade of cherry wood. Now it’s just too red, hanging frizzed out and shapeless around my shoulders, grey roots sprouting.

I nod towards Felicia. ‘Well, she really is amazing.’

‘Not bad.’ He stands and reaches out for my hand. ‘Shall we?’

No we shan’t. I’m suddenly a birthday party donkey. Someone has found my tail and nailed it, along with my backside, to the chair. Pulsing Latin music swells, and the room fills with Felicia’s spins and the other woman’s chummy banter with her instructor. ‘No, wait.’

He looks at me, our held hands suspended between us.

I’m blustering. ‘If you think she’s just “not bad”, you’re going to think I’m a disaster area.’

David drops his chin to his chest and laughs. When he looks back up at me, he’s obviously struggling to stay serious. ‘I doubt it.’ With that, his grip tightens and he yanks me out of my chair and takes me in his arms.

Compact muscle, the whiff of cigarette on cotton. He’s holding my right hand in dance position, waiting for me to commit my left hand to his body. His shoulders are lower, his back broader, than Geordie’s. I lay the fingers of my left hand on his arm, over his bicep.

‘Do you know the box rumba?’ he asks.

I’m wishing I’d brushed my teeth one more time before I left the house. ‘Vaguely.’

He draws back and holds my upper arms and tells me to do the same with his. ‘Back right, side left, forward left, side right. Like a box.’

I get the step pattern quickly but my movement feels disjointed, as though my hips and legs have atrophied from disuse. He leads me through a slow three-step side spin. I get that, too, but the emphasis of my rhythm is wrong. I’m walking, not dancing, stiff and rusty like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.

‘Listen to the beat,’ David coaxes. ‘Slow, quick, quick, slow. Hold that slow step. Lean into it just a bit longer. Hear it?’

‘I think I do.’

Raising his arm, he leads me in a small walk around him. I follow, chanting the ‘slow, quick, quick, slow’ mantra under my breath.

‘Too easy,’ he says, and stops. He steps away from me, arms crossed. ‘How about a cha-cha?’

‘Sure.’

I startle when he takes me by the hand to lead me to the stereo system. As a wife, I believe I should repossess my fingers, deliberately keep my grip loose. Eight-year-olds hold my hand. My sons. My husband. Before then, boyfriends held my hand, or men who had some kind of interest. The last man who held my hand tried to slip his other up my skirt. When was that? Ten years ago? Fifteen? Back in the days when I had a career, a nanny, a wardrobe full of tailored skirts and high heels and some semblance of a figure to go with them. For a fleeting second I wonder if David is running some kind of gigolo service on the side. It’s legal in Australia after all. Just the other day I drove by a billboard that said, ‘Sex. No champagne or flowers required.’

But David is holding my hand naturally, his reach so casual as to suggest habit. Looking around the studio, I see the other instructors in constant contact with their students, clasping fingers, grasping a wrist. Touch so frequent that it’s meaningless. And really, why would his touch have been intended otherwise with me?

David puts on a Paul Mac track, the sort of tune which, at the age of eighteen, I would have cranked up in my car radio on a summer day with cigarette blazing.

Truth is, I loved the cha-cha.

He turns to hold me. Instinctively, I pose my left foot to the side in a cha-cha stance. Seeing it, he rests his hands on his hips. He wears a thick gold and silver ring on the middle finger of his left hand, a design of intertwined vines etched in the metal. His eyes are a laughing grey. It occurs to me that I may not have noticed either one of these things had I not held him in my arms within the first ten minutes of meeting him.

‘Are you taking the piss out of me?’ he asks.

Visions of urine samples flood my brain. ‘What?’

He doesn’t respond and breaks into the cha-cha – two, three, four and one, two, three, four and one . . . He counts again, then again, but my feet are lagging behind, wading through Latin mud. He keeps going – two, three, four and one . . . He’s pulling me through it, his grip strong, confident, coaxing dormant muscle memory. My feet start following. Back right, front left, side, side, side. Front left, back right, side, side, side, side. I’m getting it and suddenly I know it’s there, a foundation hidden beneath cobwebs spun and layered over twenty-five years of adult life.

‘That’s good!’ He seems genuinely pleased. ‘Do you know a fan?’

‘I think so. I did once.’

He’s watching my legs – or what he can see of them under my jeans – as he pulls me in. I’m supposed to lock my right foot in front of my left while I move backwards, but I don’t remember until it’s too late and stumble. He doesn’t say anything, just starts me again. This time I get it right, remember to lock, then forget what’s next. But he fixes that, his wrist and hand communicating through mine to draw me forward, leading me. A tiny mental door flies open and I know to lock again.

His lead tells me to step back into the basic step again. We stop in that pose. ‘Shift your weight to your back leg,’ he says. I do and teeter. ‘Good. Now, a hockey stick.’

I don’t know what the hell he means by a hockey stick. He doesn’t stop to explain but draws me towards him again. ‘Fan, forward lock, step, now step across me.’ Suddenly, he whips me around so that I face him from arm’s length. ‘Now lock back.’ He’s drawn me through the shape of a hockey stick.

He pats my hand, smiling. ‘Good. Feel familiar?’

‘Yes. Yes, it does.’ Like sunshine.

‘Shall we do it again?’

‘Yes, please.’

We spend the better part of the next fifty minutes identifying what I know and what I’m clueless about. By the end of it, I’m damp with exertion and beads of sweat have gathered along David’s hairline. The fact he’s had to make such a physical effort to dance with me gives me special satisfaction. He declares that I’m functional in the cha-cha, rumba, samba, waltz and English tango. He’s a bit surprised by the English tango and I tell him how we used to fly around the studio after school performing it. Someone would play a record full of sweeping drama and we’d grab a partner, shove out our arms and twist and stomp with all the flair we could muster. For the first time I mention Lucinda. While she poured juice into paper cups, she’d call out to us to remember to step with our heels first. She’d yell, ‘Heel leads! Now crab-walk! No, not that way, you ding-a-lings. Like this!’ Then she’d flick her red braid over her thick shoulder and manoeuvre into the centre of the floor on the inside edge of her shoes in what was, presumably, a crab’s walk. I start mimicking her, darling Lucinda teaching us to walk like crabs for the English tango. David, bemused, watches me wide-eyed. And I’m laughing.

He picks up the clipboard with my details from the counter. ‘That’s all for today, Madeleine.’

‘Oh.’ I glance at the clock on the studio’s wall, then at my watch, and could swear the clock is five minutes too fast. ‘Thank you. That was fun.’

‘Shall we book another lesson?’ He flicks through the pages of his diary. ‘I can take you again next Thursday at one.’

‘How much are the lessons again?’

‘Sixty dollars an hour. But you can buy them in blocks. They come out to a bit less per lesson that way.’

Sixty-five dollars an hour. Dear God. And we’re supposed to be saving.

I’m not sure. Not sure. Pending guilt at spending this kind of money, plus Geordie’s certain disapproval, clash with my temptation to have fun. It all creates an acidic boil in my gut.

David taps his pen on the counter. ‘You think it’s expensive?’

‘I’m not sure I can really justify it. It seems a bit indulgent.’

His face opens in a smile. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile fully and I’m startled by its warmth. ‘This is dancing. It’s for you to do for yourself. How much do people spend on a ski trip, sailing, even golf? You have to ask yourself how much it’s worth for you.’

I stare at him. He hands me the clipboard. ‘I just need you to sign by the date and the notes showing what we did today.’

The memory of a paper airplane glides into my thoughts. The night I’d decided to call the studio – the same night I’d sat in the emergency room with Josh – Geordie had arrived home to find me sipping a glass of wine. A dinner that comprised of a Big Mac and fries awaited him, the best I could offer at that point. After glaring at the food, he asked about Josh, then announced: ‘You got another speeding ticket, Maddy. That’s two in one month. You’re lucky you’re not driving on an Australian licence. At this rate, they’d have you off the road by the end of the year. Imagine how you’d cope then.’

He lifted up a paper airplane, wiggled it at me, then launched it with such precision that it sailed across the room into my lap. I unfolded it to find the speeding infringement. I’d been driving at 65 kilometres an hour in a 60 zone on my way home from dropping the boys at school – a $138 fine.

‘Oh my God. They get you coming and going here.’

‘Speed cameras. They’re the things that look like rusty old bird houses at intersections. Did you make an appointment to put your car in the shop?’

‘It’s going in next Monday.’

‘What’s the estimate?’

‘I don’t know.’

He placed his unwrapped burger on a plate. ‘You didn’t ask?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

He wasn’t going to like my answer; I knew it. ‘Because the car needs to be fixed and I only know where one panel shop is. So that’s where my car’s going.’

‘Regardless of the charge.’

For God’s sake, leave me alone. I swung my feet off the sofa, put down the wine glass and pressed my fingers to my mouth. ‘I don’t want to talk about this now.’

‘Maddy . . .’ He came over with the wine bottle. ‘More?’ I nodded, neglecting to mention he was pouring my third glass. He sat next to me, his suit pants folding in crisp creases as he leaned over and clasped my hand in his. A strand of hair, his thick, chestnut brown hair that he gels back during the workday, had escaped and dangled against his forehead. He always smells so clean, never releasing more than a slight tang even after hours and hours in the office.

‘You need to look into other places,’ he was saying, ‘shop around for the best price. If you’re going to keep messing up the car, you’d better figure out where we can get a deal.’

‘It was once, George.’ Calling him by his formal name was a sure sign I was getting totally pissed off. ‘I’m still getting used to the driving on the opposite side.’

‘I understand that.’

‘Really?’

For a moment he was still. I ignored his gaze, savouring the lightness in my head, the growing floppiness of my limbs. I released his hand and pulled my legs under myself in a pretzel pose and rolled my head back, then up again.

‘I’m just trying to say that we have an opportunity to save here.’ I hated him like this, like a terrier with a bone. ‘So let’s try to save.’

‘That sounds like a fantastic way to spend a day, George. Phoning panel shops and trying to figure out where the hell they are. Getting lost again to save a hundred dollars on a bill.’

‘You could do it. If you wanted to.’

I had folded the blanket on the couch and stood up. ‘Yes, I could. If I wanted to.’ But I didn’t.

It was then I decided to call the dance studio. They’d be open late, I suspected, giving lessons to students who worked during the day. Gripping the bulk of yellow pages, it occurred to me that I could also search for panel shops. Then I could grab the God-blessed Melbourne map book and determine where they were. But I didn’t, of course. Refused to, actually. Wine glass in hand, I closed the bedroom door and found the number for Body Rhythms.

I take David’s clipboard, sign my initials and hand it back to him. My decision is so clear that it feels sharp. ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘another lesson would be great.’ I even want to ask if I can come back sooner then next Thursday, but then I hesitate. It seems such a brazen admission, practically saying: ‘I like doing this with you, this thing with our bodies. Can we do it again?’

‘How often –’

He’s still writing. He wipes his brow with his fingertips and doesn’t look up.

‘How many times a week do people usually have lessons?’ I want to sound casual, like I’m just trying to understand how the whole dance lesson thing works and not really, really wanting to dance again as soon as possible.

He snaps his diary shut, leans on it against the counter and settles his gaze on me. ‘Why? You want to schedule another time for this week? I have Wednesday afternoon at two o’clock free. Would that suit?’

Would that suit? It’s a term I haven’t heard before. My brain, a clutter of nerves, fumbles on the meaning, then clicks. With an absurd surge of joy, I recognise the rare sensation of genuinely grinning.

 

Dancing’s just a conversation between two people. Talk to me.

Hope Floats

I don’t tell Geordie about my dance lesson right away. I’m not hiding it from him. Well, not exactly.

The completely unanticipated intervention of magpies leads me to the admission. The birdsong is different in Australia. I thought I’d done my homework, had gleaned enough general knowledge about how daily life would feel different from home. It all sounded delightful really: the plethora of marsupials, the lower crime rate, barbecues and beer drinking, warmer climate, stunning coastlines. The toilet water would flush in the opposite direction, the seasons would be reversed and the stars draped differently across the night sky. There might be some lethal creepy-crawlies, a few poisonous snakes, but they weren’t supposed to have much presence in Melbourne. But what I didn’t expect was the disorienting impact of birdsong. Gone are the familiar tweets and chirps. In their place are the muffled calls of magpies, loads of them, like the hollowed blows of South American pipes. Large, aggressive, black and white birds that swarm and swoop about the trees and in the streets. And every day they remind me that I’m somewhere different.

I arrive home with the boys to find one of their babies perched on a rock outside the house. Small, shivering, it is obviously terrorised. As we approach it, the tree branches above explode in piping flaps. Eight-year-old Robbie screeches and I hurry both my children inside.

We stand in the lounge room, staring out the window at the tiny bird who is managing, single-handedly, to blockade a family of human beings.

Robbie kneels on the couch and peers at the baby. ‘Maybe it will fly away.’

‘It can’t fly,’ declares Josh. ‘Something is wrong with it.’ He looks at me, waiting for me to provide a solution.

Defenceless baby bird. Belligerent Mommy and Daddy birds. Trapped in house. Never heard of this before in my life.

Birds. Animals. Vet. I rush for the Yellow Pages and find a vet in a suburb with a name that sounds vaguely familiar.

‘Oh,’ says the. . .