Three-Quarter Time

Two Left Feet

The flyer had hung on the refrigerator for nineteen months, pinned by a magnet shaped like Italy, and Sam Ferro had read his dead wife's handwriting on it so many times the words had stopped meaning anything — until tonight, in the truck, in the dark, when they meant everything.

He had peeled it off that afternoon. The magnet had given a little, the paper had come away with a sound like a bandage, and the corner stayed behind, a small white triangle stuck under Italy's boot, the way a thing you love leaves part of itself when you take it down. He'd carried the flyer out to the shop and back to the house and finally out to the truck, where it sat now on the dash, curling at the edges, the cheap blue ink gone the color of a bruise.

COMMUNITY BALLROOM, the printed part said. TEN WEEKS TO THE WINTER SHOWCASE. NO PARTNER, NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY. And under that, in the diagonal slant he could have picked out of a thousand hands, Diane had written: US. This year. No excuses. —D.

She had stuck it up in February two years gone, back when this year was a year she still expected to be in. He had said sure, sometime, when the Hollis kitchen was done, when the weather turned, when. He had been good at when. It was a carpenter's word; you measured, you waited for the glue to set, you came back to it. He had come back to a hospice bed and a list of things he'd said sometime to.

The dashboard clock read 6:54. Class started at seven.

He turned the ring on his finger. He did it without deciding to, the way some men crack a knuckle; the gold had worn thin on the underside, and his hand had thickened around it over thirty-one years, so that it no longer came off without soap and a fight. He had not tried to take it off. He was not going in there to take anything off. He was going in to set something down — to walk that floor once, badly, so that the next time he stood in the kitchen and the flyer wasn't there, he could tell her, in the way he still told her things, that he'd done the thing she asked. Then he'd leave at the break. He'd be home by eight-thirty. He'd never have to do it again.

He looked at the lit windows of the community center, the old Oddfellows hall, brick the color of dried blood under a sky going the same. Through the glass, women moved. A lot of women. He almost started the truck.

He turned the ring once more, put the flyer in his coat pocket where he could feel its corner against his chest, and got out into the cold.

---

The ballroom took up the whole second floor, and it surprised him, the way it always surprised him to walk into a room he'd driven past for fifty-eight years and never entered. High pressed-tin ceiling, painted over so many times the rosettes had gone soft as old soap. A bank of tall windows down one side, black now, throwing the room back at itself. And the floor.

He felt it before he understood it — a give underfoot, the smallest spring, the way a good staircase tells your knees it was built right. Maple, narrow boards, the honey worn off them in a long pale river down the center where a century of feet had gone. He crouched without thinking and put two fingers to it, reading the grain the way he read a board on the bench, and a voice above him said, "It's older than both of us put together, so be kind to it."

He stood up fast. The woman was small and seventy-something and dressed like a struck match — black, and then a scatter of something that caught the light at her ears and throat. Silver hair pinned up hard. She looked him over the way he looked over lumber.

"Nineteen twenty-six," she said. "Sprung maple, on a frame of cleats and felt, so it gives when you land. They laid it for the Oddfellows and it has held a wedding a week for most of a hundred years." She smiled, brisk, not entirely warm. "This floor remembers every dance it ever held. It'll remember yours. Try to give it something worth keeping. Vivian Sotelo. You're new."

"Sam." His own name came out rusty. "Ferro."

"The cabinet man. Diane's husband." She said it plainly, no hush dropped over the name, and something in his chest unlocked a quarter-turn and then locked again. "She signed up once. Never came. I wondered."

"She was going to," he said, and didn't know why he said it.

"Most people are." Vivian was already turning away, clapping her hands twice, sharp as a starter pistol. "Seven o'clock, my darlings, the floor is waiting and it doesn't get any younger and neither, God knows, do I."

---

There were maybe twenty of them, and Vivian was right about the arithmetic: women, mostly, in good slacks and the kind of shoes you buy for one purpose. The men he could count on his hands and have fingers left over. A bald sweating fellow near the door kept checking the exit like Sam was. Two younger men stood close together by the window, one tall and easy, one narrow and laughing, and the laughing one was saying, "Babe, we have nine weeks, I am not walking down any aisle doing the — what is it — the box," and the tall one said, "It's called the box step, Ray," and kissed his temple, and Sam looked away from them the way you look away from a fire that's too bright.

A barrel of a woman in a green cardigan had clearly come with the elderly man beside her; they were arguing in the comfortable register of the long-married. "You'll lead from the wrong foot," she was telling him. "I've led you forty years, I'll not stop now," and he said, "George leads," and she said, "George thinks he leads," and patted his chest. A wisp of a younger woman stood alone near the radiator with her arms crossed over herself, jumping a little every time Vivian clapped, like the sound came from inside her. And off to the side, on a folding chair, an old man sat with both hands stacked on the head of a cane, watching Vivian and not the floor, his face folded into so many dry creases it looked like a glove left out in the sun.

"Hal," Vivian said, not looking at him. "Are you dancing or judging."

"Same thing," the old man said. "From here it's cheaper."

A laugh went around. Sam stayed by the wall. He had his hand on the flyer's corner in his pocket, his thumb finding the worn place, and he was doing the math on the break — half an hour, maybe forty minutes — when the doors banged and a loud woman came in on a knee scooter, one foot up in a boot cast, swearing cheerfully.

"Don't anybody help me, I've got it, I've got it — Iris! Iris, I'm here, I made it, I am wounded but I am here —" She rolled to a stop and threw out her arms. "Vivian, I sprained the hell out of myself walking the dog like a fool, but I brought my friend, she's the one you want, she can sew anything, she's just shy about—"

"I am not shy," said the woman behind her, "and I am not a thing anyone wants, Dolores, and I am going to kill you," and Sam looked, because everyone looked, and that was the first he saw of her.

She wasn't tall. She held herself tall, which is different — squared at the shoulders, chin set, a woman braced against being looked at while standing exactly where the light fell. Dark hair going handsomely gray, cut blunt at the jaw. A coat she hadn't taken off. She had the still, contained hands of someone who worked with them; he clocked that, the way he clocked the floor. She did not want to be here. It came off her like cold off a window. He recognized it the way you recognize your own face in a store glass and flinch before you know it's you.

"Wonderful," Vivian said, into the chaos, in the tone of a general who has just been handed exactly enough troops. "Now I can fix my numbers. We are short of men, as we are short of men in every arena of life, and so." She moved through them like water finding level — George to Birdie, of course; the two young men to each other, "you'll thank me at the wedding"; the sweating man to a kind-faced grandmother who took his slick hand without comment; the wisp by the radiator gentled toward a tall girl — and then she was in front of Sam, and her bright eye went from him to the woman in the coat, took the measure of the two most reluctant people in the room, and made the only decision arithmetic allowed.

"You," she said to Sam. "And you." To the woman. "Iris, isn't it. Penhallow. Your mother hemmed my first competition gown in nineteen sixty-eight, God rest her. You'll do beautifully together. You're both furious to be here, which means you'll work."

"I don't—" Iris started.

"He won't bite," Vivian said. "Will you."

"No, ma'am," Sam said, and his voice came out steadier than he was, and he put out his hand because that was what you did, and Iris Penhallow looked at it the way you'd look at a tool you didn't trust, and then she took it, and her fingers were cool and very precise in his, and he gripped them like a man grabbing a board before it falls.

She winced. "You can let go of the rope," she said. "I'm not going overboard."

"Sorry." He loosened. It felt wrong to loosen, which told him how wrong he'd been holding it.

"All right." She unbuttoned the coat at last, folded it once over a chair without looking, came back. Up close she smelled like pressed cotton and something green. "Let's get this over with. I'm only here because she—" a jerk of the head at Dee, who blew her a kiss "—signed me up and then broke her ankle out of spite."

"I'm leaving at the break," Sam heard himself say.

Something flickered across her face — not warmth, but a fellow-feeling, two prisoners passing in a yard. "Good," she said. "Then we won't have to do this twice."

---

"The frame," Vivian called, "before anything. Before you take one step. Gentlemen, your left hand up, so, palm to her — you offer, you don't grab. She puts her hand in yours because she chooses to, not because you've caught her. Right hand here, on her shoulder blade, firm. Firm, Sam Ferro, not a death grip and not a wet noodle, you're holding a door for her, not closing it. Ladies, your left hand on his arm, light, you can feel where he's going before he goes. That's the frame. It's not a cage and it's not a cuddle. It's two people agreeing to hold a shape between them. Everything else is just walking."

Sam got his hand up. Iris set hers into it, light as she'd promised, and laid her other hand on his arm, and for one second the shape between them held — and then he thought about where his right hand was, on the warm plane of a stranger's back, the first back his hand had touched in nineteen months, and his whole arm went to wood.

"Box step," Vivian said, and Hector — a quiet man at a card table in the corner Sam hadn't noticed, surrounded by milk crates of records — dropped a needle, and music came up scratchy and bright. "Forward, side, together. Back, side, together. Slow, slow. There. Gentlemen forward, ladies you go back, trust him, he's not going to walk you into the wall — Sam. Forward. Your other forward."

He went the wrong way. He felt his heel come down on the toe of her shoe, the small bones of a stranger's foot under his work boot, and she made a sound through her teeth.

"Sorry — God, sorry—"

"It's a shoe," she said. "It's had worse." But she'd pulled back half an inch, and the half inch was a wall, and now he was steering her like a wheelbarrow with a flat, too much arm, no count, his eyes on his own feet so he wouldn't have to look at her face going stiff.

"Eyes up," she said, low, just for him. "If you watch your feet you'll never know where mine are."

He looked up. It was worse. She had a small scar at the corner of her mouth and gray eyes that gave away nothing and were, right now, embarrassed for both of them, and he stepped wrong again and felt her steel herself not to wince. They went around like that — a carpenter and a seamstress, two people who built true things with their hands, making the worst, most untrue shape in the room — while George and Birdie revolved past serene as planets and the laughing young man whooped at getting it right.

"You're counting in your head," she said.

"I'm not counting at all. That's the problem."

A breath that was almost a laugh, against her will. "No," she said. "The problem is you're holding me like I'm a load-bearing wall."

He almost laughed too. He felt it come up, and then — he didn't know what. The flyer's corner against his chest. The give of the floor under his bad turn, the floor that remembered. Diane on this exact floor, never, not once, the dance he'd said sometime to. The laugh died in his throat and turned to something he had no name for and no business feeling with a stranger's hand in his, and his ring caught the light when he turned, and Iris saw it — he watched her see it, watched her file it, the gold band, the married of it — and her face closed another inch, professionally, the way you'd close a drawer on something private.

"Last dance," Vivian called, and the box steps wound down, and people drifted apart and then, at her gesture, came back together looser, softer, the way a class does when the work is done. "Every week we end the same. It's a tradition older than I am in this hall. Hector—"

The old man at the records lifted a 45 from a sleeve gone furry at the edges, held it to the light a second like a man checking a coin, and set it down. A waltz came up through the hiss, a woman's voice from some year before Sam was born, low and unhurried, a song about staying up past the dark for someone. Late Light, Vivian said, half to herself, and a few of the older ones smiled like they'd heard it a hundred times, and Hal, in his chair, closed his eyes.

"Three-quarter time," Vivian said, gentler now, moving among them. "Slow, slow, quick-quick. You don't chase a waltz. You wait for it. The whole secret of the thing is patience — you trust that the next beat is coming, so you don't grab for it." She came past Sam and Iris where they stood not quite together, and her glittering eye softened a hair. "It's only ten weeks, my dears. Give it three classes. Anyone can survive three of anything. After that you can hate me with my blessing."

The music turned. Around the room they began to sway, even the bad ones, even the box-step casualties, the song forgiving them all. Iris lifted her hand and her eyes to him — not warm, but willing, one more time, three-quarter time, slow, slow — and Sam looked at her offered hand and could not lift his own.

He stood on the floor that remembered everything and his feet would not move. The needle hissed. The woman's voice climbed. Somewhere far off George was murmuring the count to Birdie. And all Sam could feel was the corner of the flyer over his heart and the ring grown into his hand and the enormous, specific wrongness of swaying to a love song with someone who was not, would never be, the one he'd promised this to.

"I'm sorry," he said. It came out wooden. "I can't — I have to—" and he didn't finish, because there was no end to the sentence that wasn't a confession.

Something in her went hard and bright and hurt, fast, before she put it away. "No," she said. "Of course." She stepped back out of the shape between them, and the shape was gone, just air. "Don't let me keep you."

She turned, and got her coat off the chair in one motion, and put one arm in it as she walked, the way a woman leaves a place she's decided not to feel anything about.

He watched the woman — Iris, Vivian had called her — walk out before the last note faded, her coat half on, and he told himself he'd be doing exactly the same thing by Thursday, and would never have to learn the second step of anything.

Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick

In the gravel lot Iris Penhallow sat with both hands on the wheel and did not start the car, because starting the car meant she had a place to be, and the truth was she didn't, not anymore, not since the last of the children's beds went cold and quiet down the hall. The engine ticked, cooling. Through the windshield the Oddfellows Hall threw its yellow light across the gravel, and the lit windows fogged at their lower edges where the warmth inside met the cold coming off the lake, and a few last cars pulled out around her with their headlights swinging like the beams of slow searchlights, and still she sat.

Her hands looked older on the wheel than she thought of them being. That was the trick of bad light in a parked car: it found the knuckles. She turned them over and studied the palms instead, which told her nothing she wanted to know either.

She should not have come. She knew exactly whose fault it was that she had.

Three weeks ago Dee Marchetti had been on Iris's couch past midnight, both of them into the second bottle of the cheap red Dee swore by and Iris pretended to, and Dee, who could not let a silence lie there unbothered, had asked her when. When what, Iris had said, and Dee had said, you know what, when, and Iris, loosened by the wine and the dark and the particular safety of a friend who has seen you at your worst and stayed, had told the truth, which was that she could not remember. That no one had touched her — not the hand, not the small of the back, not the cheek, none of it — in longer than she would say out loud. That she had gone so long unhandled she had begun to think of herself as something kept behind glass, like the good cups her mother never used.

And Dee, instead of being kind about it, which Iris would not have survived, had gone very still and then said, that's a damn shame and we're fixing it, and had signed them both up the next morning for ten weeks of ballroom dancing at the community center, ninety dollars apiece, no refunds, because Dee Marchetti had never in her life believed a feeling was real until she had spent money on it.

Roy would have laughed. That was the thought Iris could not keep out, sitting in the cold car. Roy would have found the whole thing very funny — Iris at fifty-seven, in a borrowed pair of heels, learning to be led around a room. He had a way of laughing that made you laugh too, right up until you understood you were what was funny. Near the end, before he went off with the woman from his office who was thirty-four and brand new and not yet worn anywhere, he had stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her at the stove and said, almost gently, that she'd let herself go, hadn't she, as if it were a small sad thing that had happened to her like weather, nothing he had done, nothing he need stay for. She had spent fourteen years learning not to flinch at the phrase. She had not entirely succeeded.

A knuckle on the glass.

Iris started so hard her elbow hit the horn, one short ugly bleat into the dark, and there in the window was Vivian Sotelo, seventy-four and glittering even in a parking lot, miming the rolling-down of a window with one beringed hand.

Iris rolled it down two inches.

"You're still here," Vivian said.

"I'm leaving."

"You're sitting." Vivian's eyes went over her once, kind and merciless. "Thursday, dear. Seven o'clock. Give it three classes." And then she was gone, clicking away across the gravel in shoes no one her age had any business in, leaving Iris with the cold air coming in the two-inch gap, and Iris rolled the window up and started the car at last, because now, God help her, she had a place to be.

---

The shop smelled like it always did, like steam and clean cotton and the faint machine smell of oil, and that was the first good thing about Thursday morning. Penhallow Alterations took up the narrow front room of a building on Bridge Street that had been her mother's before it was hers, and the window faced the street, and in the window stood Mavis.

Mavis was a dress form, headless, armless, patient. Iris's mother had named her, and Iris had kept the name out of a sentiment she would have denied under oath. This morning Mavis wore a half-pinned skirt for Carol Dietz's daughter's rehearsal dinner, and Iris knelt at the hem with a mouthful of pins, working her way around the circle the slow way, the right way, the way that took twice as long and never showed a pucker.

She set a pin. Reached for the next length of fabric. And there it was — a twinge in the meat of her right hand, low at the base of the thumb, a small hot wire of it that ran up into the wrist and let go.

Iris took the pins out of her mouth. She set them in the little magnetic dish. She rubbed the place with the thumb of her other hand, two slow circles, and breathed, and did not name it, because naming a thing gave it the run of the house. It had been coming for a year now, this twinge, arriving more mornings than not, leaving by noon. Her mother's hands had gone the same way at the end and her mother had sewn a button on the day before she died, slow and stubborn and swearing, and Iris intended to do exactly the same, so there was nothing to discuss. She picked the pins back up. She went on around the hem.

The phone rang at ten, the shop line, which meant business, except it was Mari.

"You sound out of breath," her daughter said.

"I'm at the form. What is it, sweetheart, I've got Carol's girl at noon."

A pause, the particular pause Mari used to load something. "Dee told Aunt Sandra you signed up for a dance class. Ninety dollars?"

"Dee should mind the shop window she's got." Iris tucked the phone against her shoulder and kept pinning, because she could do both, she had always been able to do both. "It's ten weeks. It's exercise."

"It's ninety dollars to be thrown around a room by strangers, is what Dee made it sound like." Mari was thirty-four and ran a daycare and had watched, at twenty, her father pack a car in the driveway while her mother stood very straight at the window and did not cry, and Iris understood, she did, that everything Mari did since had been a kind of standing between her mother and the next car. But it sat on Iris like a hand pressing her shoulder down. "I just don't want you spending money to be made to feel — I don't know. You don't owe anybody a dance, Mom."

"I owe Dee ninety dollars and a sprained pride if I quit," Iris said. "How's the man at the daycare, the one with the truck."

It worked, the way it always worked; Mari sighed and went on to the man with the truck, and Iris pinned the last of the hem one-handed, agreeing in the right places, and when she hung up she stood and pressed her lower back with both fists and looked, by accident, at the long mirror on the side wall.

She looked away before she had finished looking. She always did. It was a thing she had taught herself so thoroughly she no longer caught herself at it — the eyes sliding off her own reflection the way they slid off the sun, the light snapped off in the fitting room a half-second early, before the whole of her resolved in the glass. Her clients she could see entire, every line of them, where to let out and where to take in, what to flatter and what to forgive. Herself she saw in pieces, a hem here, a collar there, and the rest she left in the dark on purpose, and the dark, she would have told you if you were rude enough to ask, was a mercy and a management strategy and none of your business.

She turned off the shop lights at six. She did not look at the mirror going out.

---

She almost didn't go.

She got as far as her own porch in the good coat with the heels in a tote bag, and the cold came off the dark lake down the street and into her collar, and she thought, very reasonably, that a woman of fifty-seven had earned the right to a quiet house and a single glass of wine and a book she'd read before. Three classes, Vivian had said. She'd done one. Surely one of three was enough to satisfy honor.

Then her phone lit on the hall table. Dee. A photograph, badly lit, of a foot propped on a pillow, swollen to the size of a small ham, the ankle a furious purple.

Stepped off the Anchor curb wrong, the text said. DOCTOR SAYS SIX WEEKS NO DANCING. you have to go for both of us. swear to me.

Iris stood in the hall and laughed, one short astonished note, alone in her own house. Of course. Of course Dee had marched them both to the cliff edge and then turned her ankle on the way. There was a kind of person who started fires and then could not stay to watch them burn, and Iris loved one of them.

Six weeks, she typed. I'll have a partner and no one to suffer with.

you'll suffer fine on your own you always do, Dee wrote back. GO.

She went.

---

The hall held the same warmth as Tuesday, the same lit windows, the same big floor that Vivian had told them on the first night was the original 1926 maple, sprung underneath so it gave, a little, when you walked it — the floor that remembers every dance it ever held, Vivian had said, and Iris had decided privately that this was the sort of thing dance teachers said. But the boards did give under her heels, soft as a held breath, and she felt it, the small live yield of them, and did not entirely hate it.

"Now," Vivian said, clapping once, the rings flashing. "We are short, as we are always short, of leads. Mrs. Marchetti is — where is Mrs. Marchetti?"

"Ankle," Iris said. "She sends her regrets and a photograph I won't show you."

"Then you are short a partner, and Mr. Ferro is short a partner, and the arithmetic is not subtle." Vivian's eyes moved across the floor and landed, and Iris followed them, and there he was — the carpenter from Tuesday, Sam, standing at the edge of the boards in a flannel shirt with his sleeves turned up over forearms a younger man would have envied, looking, if anything, even less pleased to be here than she was, which she would not have thought possible. "Mr. Ferro. Miss Penhallow. For the duration, dear. The math demands it."

For the duration. As if she were being assigned a cellmate.

Iris crossed the floor because there was nothing else to do, and stood in front of him, and he looked down at her, and she looked up at him, and neither of them said anything that a teacher would have wanted to hear.

"I don't like being led," she told him, very quietly, because someone had to say the true thing and it might as well be her.

"I don't much like leading," he said. "So we're even."

It was not nothing, that. It was, in fact, the first thing anyone had said to her in some weeks that did not feel like a hand on her shoulder pressing down. She filed it away to resent later.

Then Vivian put on the music, and for forty minutes Iris was led, badly, around a room, by a man who held her right hand like he was checking the level on a doorframe and stood close enough that she could smell sawdust and soap and something underneath that was just warm skin, just a person, and she counted under her breath and stepped on his foot once on purpose and once by accident and could not afterward have told you which was which.

---

The break came as a mercy. Vivian sent them to the folding table for weak coffee and stale shortbread, and the room broke into its little knots — the married couple bickering by the window, the engaged men laughing at something on a phone, the dry old man, Hal, saying something to Vivian that made her turn her back on him with great ceremony.

Iris stood apart with her bad coffee and watched, over the rim of the cup, the carpenter do a strange thing.

He had gone to the corner where Vivian's record cabinet stood, the old oak cabinet that held the turntable and the boxes of 45s, and it had been rocking all night, she'd noticed it, a quarter-inch shudder every time Hector the DJ leaned on it to change a record. Sam crouched in front of it. He didn't ask anyone. He took out a matchbook from somewhere, the Anchor diner's by the look of it, and he folded it twice and slid it under the short leg with two fingers and rocked the cabinet, testing, and frowned, and Iris understood that the matchbook had been a temporary thing, a stopgap a man like that could not leave standing.

He stood, dug in his back pocket, and came out with an actual shim — a thin tapered wedge of pale wood, planed smooth, the kind of thing only a person who fixed broken things for a living would have simply on him, the way another man carried a comb. He swapped it for the matchbook, tapped it home with the heel of his hand, and rocked the cabinet again, and it stood like it had grown there.

Iris found she had come a few steps closer. "You carry those," she said. "Around. In your pocket."

He looked up at her from his crouch, and there was something at the corner of his mouth that on a less grim man might have been the beginning of a smile. "Found out a long time ago," he said, "the world is mostly things that wobble." He stood, slow, a hand briefly to his own knee. "And mostly nobody's brought a shim."

She did not laugh. She wanted to, which was worse, and she covered it with the coffee, and he saw that she'd wanted to, which was worse still, and he had the decency to turn away and pretend he hadn't, and they stood for a moment side by side in front of a record cabinet that no longer moved.

---

She drove home less angry than she had come, which annoyed her more than the anger would have. The lake was black on her left the whole way, the porch lights of the houses spaced far apart and small, and the heater ticked, and somewhere around the turn at the boat launch she caught herself doing it — slow, slow, quick-quick, the count moving in her under her breath, her right hand keeping the time against the gearshift without being asked, the bad hand, the one that twinged. She caught herself halfway home humming three-quarter time — slow, slow, quick-quick — and turned the radio up loud enough to drown it out, and was almost sorry when it worked.