Dancing with the Dead Read Free Page B

her nose to the corners of her thin, set lips. She’d borne Mary when she was thirty. She was sixty-five now; the skin beneath her jaw had become mottled, and fine veins had ruptured in her nose. Pain had moved into her eyes to live permanently.
    Mary nodded a hello and edged past her into the apartment. The place was cheaply furnished but clean. A sofa draped with a pale green slipcover squatted against one wall on the imitation oriental rug. K-mart sheer curtains softened the illumination from the evening sun as it angled through the slanted Venetian blinds. The walls were bare except for a dime store print of two men playing cards at a table—a segment of a Rembrandt painting, Mary thought, but wasn’t sure—and a square, plastic frame containing a collage of black-and-white snapshots, some of which were of Mary as a child. Though the evening was cool, the window air-conditioner was humming away, blowing only neutral air. Angie had forgotten to turn it off after the heat of early afternoon. Angie often forgot things.
    She closed the door and followed Mary into the tiny kitchen. “Been dancing?”
    “Had a lesson,” Mary said, placing the White Castle bags on the Formica-topped table. She carefully drew the waxy, damp Pepsi cups out of their bag and poked straws through their rigid lids. The straws squealed on the plastic as they penetrated.
    Angie said, “I dunno why you spend so much on that kinda thing. You got a good job, but it’s still too expensive. Go to work every day so you can learn how to put one foot in front of the other on the dance floor. Don’t make sense.”
    They’d had this discussion before. “There’s a lot more to it than that, Angie.” Mary hadn’t called her mother anything other than ‘Angie’ for years. She glanced around the apartment. No bottle in view. No indication that Angie drank. And drank. Good. Though Mary knew about Angie’s ingenuity in hiding bottles, it was still nice not to see the trappings of alcoholism lying around. Their presence suggested a certain laxity, a hopelessness that was contagious.
    Angie claimed not to have touched a drop of liquor before Duke Arlington, her husband and Mary’s father, died drunk in an auto accident speeding the wrong way on a Highway 70 exit ramp. Mary knew that wasn’t true. She remembered lying in bed as a child, listening to her mother and father in drunken, senseless arguments. She’d heard the slurred insults, heard Duke use his open hands on Angie, then his fists, his belt. She’d seen the welts and bruises on Angie. Angie occasionally talked about Duke abusing her. Her alcoholism, and Duke’s other familial indiscretions, she wouldn’t acknowledge at all, despite two stays in detoxification centers, despite the gin bottles tucked in the backs of the kitchen cabinets or in the bedroom closet.
    Angie lived now on her Social Security checks, a small pension, and the interest from Duke’s insurance policy.
    And she drank.
    “I sure like these little bastards,” Angie said, dropping into a chair and picking up one of the greasy cardboard folders that held the aromatic hamburgers. White Castle hamburgers were inexpensive, small squares of beef and chopped onions on square little buns. They tasted like no other hamburgers and, for South St. Louisans, were addictive. Sometimes they were affectionately called Belly Bombers. Sometimes not affectionately.
    Mary sat down opposite her mother and took a sip of Pepsi, began munching her crisp and salty french fries.
    “Arlington women don’t have to worry none about their weight,” Angie said. “We can eat what the fuck we want.”
    Mary thought, I dance it off, you drink it off. But she said nothing and chewed. Boris, Angie’s tiger-striped gray cat, padded silently into the kitchen, attracted by the scent of food. He glanced at Mary, then away, and passed out of sight. Mary could hear him purring as he rubbed against one of Angie’s legs. Or maybe he was licking her bare