THE PRETTY PEOPLE DANCING by Gretchen Comba

After my brother Teddy passed, I got married and moved straightaway into the brand-new condominiums across Highway 17. It is damn cold walking up the five flights of stairs in winter, but I am really very happy here. It is a nice place, and easy to keep clean. I push the vacuum up into the corners and it fits neatly there in a perfect square and pulls the dirt right up from the plush. There were wood floors in the old house. I swear to God I spent the days sweeping up the dirt that collected in the corners and tracked up and down the stairs. On the day I moved I swept that dirt up for the last time and then stood the broom up in the corner of the foyer. I took my coat from off the hook and pulled the front door closed behind me. I let the screen door slam and left that house where it was standing and walked straightaway across the highway and up the brand-new stairs hugging the outside of the building.

It’s been a year since the condominiums started going up. The day that the cement trucks came Teddy and I were out in front. I was standing on the porch, scraping at the polish on my nails. Teddy was in the yard, the sun shining on his head that was almost bald although he was only forty-six, pruning the ligustrums that were already growing wild. The lot across the highway had been cleared the month before, the hole dug just as soon as the earth turned soft. When the trucks came barreling down the highway, Teddy stopped his pruning and put his hands on his hips and watched.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “By the time they get that hole filled, I’ll be long gone.”
“You will not,” I said. “You’ll still be pruning those ligustrums. Silver says in condominiums they do all the yard work for you.”
Teddy turned back to the hedges, clipping off the new shoots that if left alone would creep up higher than the porch floor in no time at all. It was only April, but already we had the house fans going in the bedroom windows. Teddy said it had to do with global warming. I said he sounded like the old folks at the home who were always saying winter would be cold just because they saw an opossum thick about the middle outside on the green. Teddy said that that was horseshit, that you couldn’t tell a thing by the size of an opossum, that it could just be that it had gotten in the garden once too many times.

When I think back on that day I can’t help but look at Teddy’s words as a sign. All that talk about being long gone by the time the hole was filled seems like the first of many signs that I can only add up now from here across the highway. Teddy would think me a fool for thinking such a thing because he was a practical man, not believing in signs of anything and certainly not in God. “When you’re dead,” he used to say, “you’re dead a long time.” The truth is I believe him, have always believed him, although in my heart of hearts I wish it wasn’t so. Prettier to think things happen for a reason that has nothing whatsoever to do with me, that God is up there moving things around and that if it isn’t God then it is nature, because to tell the truth I’m not one for the church.
I can’t remember the last time I sat in a pew, although it must have been the day we laid Mother and Daddy in the ground after the wreck. All I remember about that day though was Teddy standing there in the rain and looking down into the graves and then walking away after throwing in the first shovelfuls of dirt. I was just a kid then and Teddy, fifteen years older, almost twenty. He was wearing a sport coat he had got up at the state college, the only one I’ve ever known him to own, and when we got back home he stood a moment in the kitchen with all those chicken casseroles in all that Corningware, and then walked straightaway up the stairs to his room. When he came down an hour later he was in his shirtsleeves and his jeans and walked up to me where I was sitting at the table in the straight-back chair. “Okay, Lena,” he said. “You and me are going to waltz around this big oak table for just a little bit and after that we are going to sit down and have ourselves some chicken casserole.” He picked me up and with my arms around his neck and his voice counting out the steps in my ear he spun me around the kitchen table to the sound of the cicadas. After that he set me down in the straight-back and stared for just a moment out the kitchen window at the two tall pines that edge the side yard.
I never once saw him again in that sport coat, not even on a Sunday when we would go up to the cemetery. Those times Teddy would walk along the long row of family, starting at the far end where he and I would go, making his way past Uncle Vic and Aunt Tildy, and then Uncle Edvy and Aunt Jane, and then Aunt Iva, who went crazy and died out at the state institution that is now the old folks home where I work the desk, all the way down to Aunt LaVerne’s empty plot. He would stop there and put his hands on his hips and say, “Damn that LaVerne, the oldest one and still living.” Then he would walk straightaway to the old Chevy and I am sure that it was on a Monday after one of those Sundays that he called Silver down in Freeport and willed away his plot to some distant cousin twice removed. When Teddy passed I had him cremated and spread the ashes and the chips of bone that were bigger and more human than you might think in the garden out in back of the house. Teddy always said when he was dead he’d like at least to be doing something, doing something to make things grow.

That cement went down right quick, though, and just as I had thought, Teddy lived right through it to curse the two-by-fours they were hauling in on flatbeds then. They would arrive in the morning, stirring up the dirt from the lot so’s it floated right across the highway and through the screens on the front windows. I got sick of taking down the curtains to wash in the old washer-dryer in the shed, especially since it was spring and Teddy had his seedlings in the trays, making it hard to get at them. He would set the trays on the windowsills, the trays of Early Girls and Better Boys and Beefsteaks, of peppers, green and yellow and red. Teddy was always at them in the morning, poking his fingers in the pocketfuls of dirt, while I was upstairs, fixing up my hair, because Silver was in the habit of stopping by in the mornings to check on the progress of the condominiums.
“They got the two-by-fours,” said Teddy one day in May as I was coming down the stairs. He was standing at one of the front windows, his hand holding back the curtain.
“I just washed those curtains,” I said.
Teddy let the curtain drop and went back to watering the seedlings. Through the lace I saw the men with the tall two-by-fours and it occurred to me that the condominiums were going to be something of a high-rise, at least as far as high-rises go on the mountain where nothing goes above two stories, and that they might keep the light from coming into the front room.
“Hey. Do you think those condominiums will block the light?”
Teddy moved to the second window and poked his fingers in a tray of dirt. “Now, Lena,” he said, “the buildings are going up just north of us.”
“But it looks like they’re going straight across the way.”
“You’re looking at them from an angle.”
I walked across the floorboards then and stood at the window trying to see as Teddy saw because he was always good at seeing things as they are and not as they seemed to be. He was good at seeing lots of things, like the places in the yard where some things would grow and others wouldn’t and when the rain would come or just miss us by a hair. He could tell this by just looking at the sky, though as soon as I bought the computer for the back room he took to sitting in there in the mornings reading the maps off the NOAA site as he drank his tea. Teddy had stopped drinking coffee a few years before, said it made him agitated, and was in the habit of leaving the tea bag in the sink so’s it always stained the porcelain. After the tea and the maps he would check the seedling trays, or if it was summer go out back and walk along the long rows of his garden. In winter he would just wander around the yard. Sometimes he would stand underneath the two tall pines he planted at the edge of the side yard back when he was just a boy. They were so tall it seemed a miracle to me that he had started with just some saplings he had found out in the woods. But Teddy said it was only natural, that pine trees grew and grew, and that someday after he was long gone someone would cut them down because they blocked the light into the kitchen. Teddy was that way with things, always seeing forward to the end without once turning away, while I hated the idea that those trees would ever be anything but standing. Seemed to me that it would go against God to take them down, or at least against the natural order of things.
I couldn’t see things in the way that Teddy saw them, although he did his best to explain his way of seeing to me. So many nights at the big oak table he would explain the weather patterns and I would pretend to listen but I was not listening, really. I was thinking about the new clothes that I would buy, or a new way to fix my hair, and always, always, about first the boy and then the man that I was going to love with all my heart and that would love me back in the same way. I don’t know if Teddy knew I wasn’t listening. I’m almost certain that he did. But then again, when Teddy got to talking about his weather or his plants his eyes would shine and he would lean forward over the big oak table and his shirt would gape open just a little bit so’s I could see the thin pink scar on his chest from the wreck. He never spoke of it, never spoke of that summer he had been home from the state college where he was studying mathematics; he never spoke of the old Volkswagen Daddy bought for him and how we had all gone out for a Sunday drive down the side of the mountain, Teddy and I sitting in the backseat, our hands wrapped around the vinyl loops that hung just above the doors. He never spoke of how the car had flipped the rail and rolled all the way down the mountain. Or of how afterwards, after the hospital and then the burial that they put off a week so’s Teddy could attend, he had not gone back to the state college, but instead stayed with me in the old house, and began delivering the mail for the mountain. What I know of this I only know from old Aunt LaVerne who wrote letters from Lubbock, Texas, every month to make sure that Teddy and I were still living.
We were deep into July by the time the frame was up. Teddy and I would sit out in the evenings on the porch snipping beans from the garden and watching the sun angle itself through all those upright two-by-fours. Teddy had cut back the ligustrums so that the thick leaves spilled just a little over the boards and I stuck my toes in under them because the floor was cooler there.
“Silver’s coming over,” I said.
Teddy stopped snipping the beans and then started up again. His metal bowl was halfway full and the newspaper beneath his feet was covered with the nubs. “You know,” he said, “at first I didn’t think things would work out with you and Silver, thought you and him were just too different. But now I’m thinking you and him might be okay.”
I leaned forward in my chair and began chipping paint from off the rail. I liked Teddy saying that Silver and I got on all right although in my heart of hearts I wasn’t quite so sure we did. Silver is a lawyer and on the town council and had voted in favor of the condominiums because, as he said, it was time our mountain moved on ahead into the new millennium. Silver liked the word millennium, liked saying it like it was something special, letting the air fill his mouth on the second syllable and float there like a weather balloon.
“Well, I’m not marrying him,” I said.
“What do you have against marriage?”
“What do you have against marriage?” I said, although I knew. I knew it was because of Ellen Brooks, the girl he was all set to marry up at the state college. Teddy had told me all about Ellen Brooks, about how she was dark-haired pretty and worked in a hair salon and about the night they had gone out waltzing on the college green, just the two of them, her heels sinking in the earth that had just turned soft. He told me all about her, all except the part about how she didn’t marry him and come over to the mountain because at seventeen she was just not ready to take on raising me. That I pieced together on my own, me and Aunt LaVerne, in the letters Teddy sent out and brought home but never wrote or read, and some of it may be wrong, but mostly I think it’s right.
Just then Silver’s brand-new Ford came barreling down the highway. It slowed so’s he could look out from his window at the progress on the condos. Then he was turning into the drive and blowing up the dirt and I smoothed down my skirt over my knees and began again to snip the beans. I didn’t want Silver to think I was just sitting there doing nothing but looking out across the evening and God knows why I cared but something in me said I should look like I was doing something and not just cooling my feet underneath the ligustrum leaves waiting for him to show. He got out of the truck and strutted up the walk, his new suit jacket flapping open to show the button-down tight against his belly. On the porch he stuck out his hand to Teddy and Teddy wiped his own on his pants leg and then shook the hand without getting up.
“Looks like those condos are going up real good,” said Silver. “Be finished before the year is out.”
“Looks like,” said Teddy.
I got up and went into the house to get Silver a beer. Silver is a big man, a big man who likes his steak and likes his beer and on certain evenings likes a Scotch although Teddy and I never kept it in the house. Likes to go down into Freeport and sit at the J. Bar and talk it up with all the boys. He is the plain opposite of Teddy, who preferred his plants and his weather maps and his one glass of wine a night out on the porch in the evenings. Teddy would sit out there in all kinds of weather, never minding much the cold or the heat, and I would sit out with him no matter how I minded, all wrapped up in an afghan or with a paper fan going in my hand. He would talk on Daddy’s stories, stories I never got to hear because I was too young to listen back before the Volkswagen went down the side of the mountain. He would tell about how our land had once been fields and how there used to be a barn with horses and cows out in the pasture. He would talk on how back when Daddy was a boy his own Daddy would make him and his brothers and his sisters hoe the corn and how Aunt LaVerne, being the oldest, would always finish her row first and then sit down in the shade and tease the others, calling them slowpokes for not being done. He said how Daddy’s Daddy got so mad at her that he made her hoe two rows to all the others’ one, and that was why when Aunt LaVerne turned seventeen she drove off with Arthur Steele in his Ford all the way to Lubbock, Texas. But he said how our own Daddy never blamed her none, said she was just doing what she thought needed being done. And that there were plenty of others to hoe the corn and sometimes when Teddy was telling this story his eyes would shine just like they did when he was at the big oak table talking about the weather or his plants, only these times I was always listening.
When I came back from the kitchen Silver was sitting in my chair. He took the can of beer from off the tray and Teddy took his glass of wine and mine and set them on the porch rail. I went back inside and got the straight-back from the kitchen and dragged it out onto the porch. Teddy handed me my wine and I took a sip.
“Yes. It looks like those condos are going up right nice,” said Silver. “Already got some leases signed, too.”
“Lena’s thinking about leaving this old house for the condos,” said Teddy. “Says she’s sick of doing all the yard work.”
“They’re going to be right nice,” said Silver. “All the modern amenities. Dishwasher. State-of-the-art garbage disposal. Brand-new washer-dryer. Carpeting too. Nice soft plush.” Silver reached over and put his hand on my knee. “I’m going to the kitchen,” he said. “Can I get you anything, Lena?”
I shook my head but stood up then so’s I could get Silver another beer. Silver stood up with me and caught my wrist with his big man-hand and the next thing I knew he was waltzing me around the porch floor in a box step.
“Silver, let me go,” I said.
“You let me go,” said Silver, grinning so his teeth shone.
Silver lowered me down into the straight-back and after the slam of the screen door Teddy and I sat quiet, looking at the frame across the highway. He set down his wine glass on the rail and began to snip the beans he had picked that morning from the vines that were twining around the poles in the garden out in back of the house. The tomato plants back there were heavy too, but the peppers hadn’t made a show. Teddy said not to worry, though, sometimes they made a comeback in September. These were the kinds of things that Teddy knew and I didn’t, and even now I wonder if I heard him wrong and those peppers didn’t have a chance. Because now those peppers seem like another sign that I had missed and can only add up now from across the highway when I sit down at night in the straight-back chair and stare out the bedroom window at the pines.

In September the foundation was set and the frame and then the trucks came with the siding. The garden was done but for the pumpkins and the gourds and the pepper plants Teddy had left standing beneath the last of the cut grass that he had spread out over the dirt. Already it was growing colder and in the evenings when we sat out on the porch, I wrapped myself up in an afghan. Already it was dark when I brought out the wine and set the glasses on the rail. But one night Teddy wasn’t in his chair, and so I left the glasses standing there and walked down the steps and around the side of the house. Just as I turned the kitchen corner I saw Teddy standing beneath the two tall pines that edged the lane that cut up the way to where old Aunt LaVerne had been made to hoe two rows of corn instead of one. That field was nothing now but wheat grass gone to seed, but it was wheat grass that belonged to Teddy and to me. I saw the wind moving through the branches of the trees and then through the hair that Teddy still had left on top of his head. And as I stood there watching him beneath the pines I saw him take his glasses off and clean them on his shirttail and then put them on again and he looked so small against those two tall pines that I did not call out to him. Only now I wish I had called out to him, called out to him that I had wine sitting on the rail and that he should come and sit with me. And in my heart of hearts I know I didn’t call not because he looked so small but because I knew that Silver would soon be barreling down the highway in his brand-new Ford and I wanted him to find me alone on the porch just staring out across the evening like I was doing nothing but waiting for him to show.

It was usually after the Sunday trips up to the cemetery that Teddy got to talking on the old stories. The one I liked best to hear was the one about old Aunt Iva who had gone crazy at nineteen and was put out at the state hospital that is now the old folks home where I work the desk. Aunt Iva was Daddy’s youngest sister and when Teddy was a boy he and Mother and Daddy used to make the drive down the mountain on a Sunday to go and visit her. Teddy said she used to like to get an ice cream cone, didn’t matter how hot or cold it was outside, and how she would sit in the backseat of the Chevy with him while our Daddy drove her up and down the mountain for a little air. Teddy said she didn’t seem crazy at all, not at all like those other people at the institution with their hollering and their strait jackets and their rocking in the chairs, that she just licked her chocolate ice cream cone and stared out through the window. He said one day, though, they were driving down the side of the mountain when she turned to him and touched his shoulder. “Teddy,” she said, “Teddy, look here.” Teddy turned and looked out through her window. “Teddy. Teddy, do you see?” she asked. “That’s sure a lot of corn, Aunt Iva,” Teddy answered. Teddy said she looked him full on in the face and then turned back to the window. “That’s not corn, Teddy,” she said. “That’s people. Look. Look at all the pretty people dancing.”

It was November when they brought the carpet in and the old folks down at the home were saying how the winter would be cold because the opossums on the green were thick about the middle. The ground had turned hard and Teddy said how they should have laid the sod back in September because now the lot would be plain dirt until spring came around again. Teddy was wearing his winter coat then as he made his rounds delivering the mail, and when he got home in the evenings and hung it on the hook it smelled of a sickly sweat that I had never smelled before. But I put it from my mind because Teddy was still Teddy, looking at his weather maps in the back room in the mornings, and after that wandering around the yard. And because Silver and I were hot and heavy then, and I was thinking that just maybe God had put Silver in my way for a reason. I was turning thirty-one that month and it suddenly seemed strange to me that I was not married and had no kids and it didn’t help that Aunt LaVerne was writing all the time from Lubbock, Texas, asking when the wedding was and when I planned to get with child. So I was thinking that it just might be time to get it done and over with and so’s to get it going I started talking all the time to Silver about those condominiums across the highway and how they had dishwashers and state-of-the-art garbage disposals and brand-new washer-dryers. Silver took the hints and grinned at me, saying he was working on it, he was working on it.
Teddy and I were out on the porch, me wrapped up in an afghan and he in his winter coat, the night that Silver came to pick me up to go down the mountain to the J. Bar. We watched his brand-new Ford come barreling down the highway, only instead of swinging left into our drive, he swung right into the condo lot, his headlights swinging out the angle and lighting up the building.
“Looks like our mountain is finally moving into the new millennium,” said Teddy.
“Looks like,” I said, and mouthed the word millennium, letting the air fill my mouth on the second syllable and float there like a weather balloon.
Silver left his Ford in the lot and walked straightaway across the highway and up onto our porch. He put out his hand to Teddy, who shook it without getting up.
“They don’t have the locks on yet,” said Silver. “We can go right inside.”
“Come on, Teddy,” I said. “Let’s go see how nice it is.”
“You go on,” said Teddy. “It’s getting a little cold for me.”
Teddy stood up then and opened the screen door and then the front door to the house. He stopped and turned and looked at me and then past me at the condominiums across the highway all lit up with the headlights on Silver’s Ford. “You all let me know,” he said and went inside.
Across Highway 17 Silver and I opened a door on the bottom floor and went in with a flashlight we had gotten from his glove compartment. There was sheet rock clean and white and carpet soft and new and my heels sunk down into the plush. In the kitchen the sink was metal-basined instead of porcelain and I thought how easy it would be to clean the stains of tea that I was always scrubbing down with bleach. There was a switch on the wall above the sink, and even though there was no electric yet, I flicked it up and down and heard the state-of-the-art disposal grind. Silver and I walked down the tiled hall and opened up the folding doors and when Silver rapped his knuckles on the brand-new washer-dryer it made a hollow sound. In the bedroom my heels again sank down into the plush and Silver took me in his arms and I was saying yes although in my heart of hearts I still can’t tell you why. Maybe it was the clean new smell of possibility, of the new millennium, that made the last century seem old and out of order. Or maybe it was the way that Silver waltzed me around the room, turning me and turning me. With each turn I smelled the bright clean smell of his cologne and caught sight through the window of the two tall pines across the highway and it seemed to me that God had put that plate glass there so’s I could see the hand of nature ordering itself.
It was in January that Teddy passed, right after the new year. A month later Silver and I married and even though it is damn cold walking up these stairs in winter I am really very happy here. This spring they put down the sod and I quit my job out at the old folks home to cook and clean for Silver – maintenance men take care of the yard. Some nights Silver goes down the mountain into Freeport to talk it up with all the boys but really he is very good to me. The truth is I like it when he’s gone at night. I sit in the bedroom that will be the baby’s bedroom when he comes. I move the straight-back from one corner to the other so’s to see from every angle the two tall pines that are still standing. And I think of Teddy. Mostly I think of that one night last summer when Silver and I got him to come down the mountain to the J. Bar. It was ladies’ night and Silver had the girls lined up to dance with Teddy but that night Teddy only danced with me. I still remember us out on the floor, my arm around his neck and my hand held high in his and all the space between us. He counted out the steps for me and I followed his lead and afterwards Silver had laughed at us, saying how we had no rhythm, neither one of us. But what I most remember is that the steps that Teddy counted out in my ear had matched the quiet counting in my head and it had been so easy to move my feet to the low sounding of the beat.

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Gretchen Comba’s stories have appeared in The Greensboro Review, New Orleans Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The North American Review.