Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

I staggered from bed.

I was wide awake except for my brain and my feet.

I stubbed my toe on something hiding as only things that aren’t supposed to be there can hide. Things like a dresser. My toe, now wide-awake, alerted my mind and I did the traditional owie dance and sang the song. You know it. It goes, “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”

It reminded me of the day my mother had suggested that I take dancing lessons. That was surprising for a woman who’d been raised a Baptist. I was entering junior high and moving to a new school. A new lunch program would be enough of a challenge. I didn’t need dance lessons, too. Mother suggested that a bit of artistic prancing would enhance my basketball moves. I was at a loss for words. I retreated to my room and wrote something down on a piece of three-holed notebook paper and presented it to her. I thought then as I do now that adults learn best from stories. Here is what I’d written as I remember it.

“We’ll call him Bob. He probably won’t answer, as it’s not his real name.

One day, his mother asked, ‘What do you think about taking dancing lessons?’

Bob preferred not to think about dancing lessons.

When he did think about them, he didn’t think much of them. His mother would find it easier to stack greased marbles while wearing mittens in the dark than getting him to take dance lessons.

Bob thought about going to the Navel Academy (he was an innie) one day. Or to the Naval Academy where swimming would be more important than dancing.

‘Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to be a great dancer like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly?’ his mother said.

Bob wasn’t that curious.

His mother had seen an ad in the newspaper for discount dancing classes.

She told him that dancing would make him a better basketball player.

He bought that. In a moment of weakness he agreed to take dancing lessons.

The dance teacher seemed nice. He stepped on her toes, sometimes intentionally, in the hopes of discouraging her, but she countered with a limp and a pained smile.

It turned out that while he was no Kelly or Astaire, he was a good dancer. His instructor, wanting a successful business, called him a natural.

He went to his first junior high school dance. That’s where he met her. She shared the first name of his dance instructor on whom he held a mild crush.

With that familiar name as an incentive, he mustered the courage to ask her to dance. He expected her to throw rocks at him, but she agreed to trip the light fantastic with him.

They hit it off at that dance and at many other dances so well, teachers had to remind the couple constantly of the need to maintain a proper distance between their bodies during slow dances. Those dances moved like glaciers from here to here. He was happy with that. She seemed to be, too. They weren’t even bothered when the record player skipped or a record became stuck and repeated itself.

In a couple years, they began going steady. Several more years passed, and she wore his class ring on a petite chain around her neck.

He broke training rules by dating her during the week. He’d been captain of the football and basketball teams. He was kicked off both for repeated training rule violations.

Five years later, they married. They had three children, Billy, Sally and the other one. She became a duck bill painter at a local sporting goods manufacturer. He had trouble finding a job he liked, so he started his own business, a dance school, and it was hugely successful. He worked 26 hours a day because his watch was slow.

The couple still danced, but it was about all they had in common. They stopped talking. The marriage was in peril.

He began working 27 hours a day. His watch had gotten even slower.

She filed for divorce on the grounds he loved dancing more than her. The business was sold as part of the divorce decree. She took the kids and moved to Albuquerque. He never danced again.   

His mother didn’t get to see her grandchildren because Bob didn’t know which state Albuquerque was in. The end.”

Now that she realized the heartache dancing could bring, I asked my mother to refrain from signing me up for dance lessons.

She replied, “New Mexico.”

Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Saturday.