Family Dancing Read Free Page A

remembers he once hid in this spot when he and some of the children from the neighborhood were playing sardines, remembers the intoxication of small bodies packed together, the warm breath of suppressed laughter on his neck. “The loser had to go through the spanking machine,” he tells Wayne.
    “Did you lose often?”
    “Most of the time. The spanking machine never really hurt—just a whirl of hands. If you moved fast enough, no one could actually get you. Sometimes, though, late in the afternoon, we’d get naughty. We’d chase each other and pull each other’s pants down. That was all. Boys and girls together!”
    “Listen to the insects,” Wayne says, and closes his eyes.
    Neil turns to examine Wayne’s face, notices a single, small pimple. Their lovemaking usually begins in a wrestle, a struggle for dominance, and ends with a somewhat confusing loss of identity—as now, when Neil sees a foot on the grass, resting against his leg, and tries to determine if it is his own or Wayne’s.
    From inside the house, the dogs begin to bark. Their yelps grow into alarmed falsettos. Neil lifts himself up. “I wonder if they smell something,” he says.
    “Probably just us,” says Wayne.
    “My mother will wake up. She hates getting waked up.”
    Lights go on in the house; the door to the porch opens.
    “What’s wrong, Abby? What’s wrong?” his mother’s voice calls softly.
    Wayne clamps his hand over Neil’s mouth. “Don’t say anything,” he whispers.
    “I can’t just—” Neil begins to say, but Wayne’s hand closes over his mouth again. He bites it, and Wayne starts laughing.
    “What was that?” Her voice projects into the garden. “Hello?” she says.
    The dogs yelp louder. “Abbylucyferny, it’s O.K., it’s O.K.” Her voice is soft and panicked. “Is anyone there?” she asks loudly.
    The brambles shake. She takes a flashlight, shines it around the garden. Wayne and Neil duck down; the light lands on them and hovers for a few seconds. Then it clicks off and they are in the dark—a new dark, a darker dark, which their eyes must readjust to.
    “Let’s go to bed, Abbylucyferny,” she says gently. Neil and Wayne hear her pad into the house. The dogs whimper as they follow her, and the lights go off.
     
    Once before, Neil and his mother had stared at each other in the glare of bright lights. Four years ago, they stood in the arena created by the headlights of her car, waiting for the train. He was on his way back to San Francisco, where he was marching in a Gay Pride Parade the next day. The train station was next door to the food co-op and shared its parking lot. The co-op, familiar and boring by day, took on a certain mystery in the night. Neil recognized the spot where he had skidded on his bicycle and broken his leg. Through the glass doors, the brightly lit interior of the store glowed, its rows and rows of cans and boxes forming their own horizon, each can illuminated so that even from outside Neil could read the labels. All that was missing was the ladies in tennis dresses and sweatshirts, pushing their carts past bins of nuts and dried fruits.
    “Your train is late,” his mother said. Her hair fell loosely on her shoulders, and her legs were tanned. Neil looked at her and tried to imagine her in labor with him—bucking and struggling with his birth. He felt then the strange, sexless love for women which through his whole adolescence he had mistaken for heterosexual desire.
    A single bright light approached them; it preceded the low, haunting sound of the whistle. Neil kissed his mother, and waved goodbye as he ran to meet the train. It was an old train, with windows tinted a sort of horrible lemon-lime. It stopped only long enough for him to hoist himself on board, and then it was moving again. He hurried to a window, hoping to see her drive off, but the tint of the window made it possible for him to make out only vague patches of light—street lamps, cars, the co-op.
    He sank into