Dancing in the Dark Read Free Page B

you have a special shelf for them? How many bedrooms were there? Did you and Harry share one? Did you have twin beds or a big one? Did you and Harry sleep together in the same bed? Did you like to be in bed? What colour were your sheets?”
    I tell him nothing. Not even the colour of the sheets. It’s not his business. I like the sound of my pen scratching across the page. Sometimes I hear it so clearly it almost drowns out his voice, with his endless questions.
    Still, here they are, all written down.
    Yes, our house was quite big; foolishly big for just the two of us, although it was early when we bought it, and we thought there might be more. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an enormous basement for laundry, storage, furnace, Harry’s hobbies, if he had had any—a gaping dark space beneath us. And on the main floor, brightness and big rooms, stairways to the up and down, a gleaming, a shining, and pastels on the walls. Lightness and solidity. A magazine could have come and taken photographs and would have called it typical, but it was more to me: the place, haven, where our lives were led, disregarding Harry’s life outside. Should I not have seen how much of his was beyond that small and narrow space? That for all its size, it in no way contained him? It contained me, and I could not imagine, although he told me so much, that truly he existed when he left the house. He went out in the morning and came back at night, and all that was a mystery, while I prepared for his return.
    I might have known, for he talked about his days, of deals and negotiations, labyrinthine relationships of office politics and promotions. He said, “Damn, Edna, I love to win,” and hewould be flushed and trembling with his passion. And me, I thought (how stupidly) that that could not really be his passion; that truly it must be in our home. I could not imagine any other passion but my own.
    I listened and encouraged, but I did not hear. There are two faults of mine: that protective deafness, that failure of imagination.
    I ramble, and that’s dangerous.
    Yes, there was a garage attached to our house. Room for a single car. I have not learned to drive. I walked to the convenience store nearby, took taxis downtown when I was to meet Harry for an evening out, and for the rest he drove me, in the evenings or on the weekends, when there were errands to be done. He did not seem to mind. I liked those times when we were together doing the small things that were necessary; so that our household was more firmly ours and he had something to do with it. I could sit beside him in the car and watch him, his profile alert to other drivers, other cars, watching for spaces in the plazas, handling so easily, as he did so many things, the steering wheel, casually one-handed, the other hooked to the chrome ledge above the window, flicking turn signals. My confident, capable husband. Saturday expeditions for food, paint, even merely lightbulbs, an outing, and I could sit beside him in our closed steel car and wonder at his ease, catch my breath at his daring, his risks with the body of the car and our own bodies as he nipped in and out of narrow spaces, cursing but not disliking the chores by any means: relishing the challenge of defeating another driver, racing, beating him to a small goal, the entrance to a mall, a parking spot in front of a store, his weekend challenges. A restless, pacing man; he wanted to be active, doing, and so I did not feel it was a burden that he had to drive me to these places.
    Difficult, however, in a store, where he was impatient, did not care for careful choosing, wanting to be done and on to the next thing. While I, humming to the piped music, dazzled by fluorescent lights and people, crowds, could happily drift among the aisles picking, comparing, discarding, watching.
    Harry used to say, “Christ, do we really spend all this on food?” Well yes, we spent a great deal on food. It’s neither inexpensive nor simple to buy for