Dancing

When I was about 10 years old, we all went to my cousin Robby’’s bar mitzvah. I expected that after the temple service there would be a nice lunch, and we’d all sit around talking and eating. But the luncheon turned out to be an elaborate party with music and dancing in an enormous dark room at The Steak Pub. Today I can’t imagine that any restaurant called The Steak Pub would have a cavernous room for parties. But that’s how it seemed to me as a kid.

My aunt had decided ahead of time what tables everyone would sit at. I couldn’t sit with my parents, or with my brother and the cousins who were my age. My seat was with Robby and his friends, who were all older than me. I didn’t know any of them. I asked my parents if they could get me moved to my brother’s table, but they said no. They said I should be proud that my aunt thought I was mature enough to sit with the teenagers. So my brother, my buddy, sat with all the kids we knew, and I was left alone at a table of sophisticated bigger kids who weren’t talking to me.

This was the first party I had ever been to with a dance band. For every dance, from the beginning of the party, Rob’s younger sister and a friend of hers were in the middle of the dance floor. Everyone said, “Look at those two! They’re great!” And almost immediately, my mother sent my father over to tell me that I should dance, too. He said, “Mom wants you to dance with the others.” I told him I didn’t want to, but for the rest of the afternoon, one or the other of them kept coming to my table to nag me to get up and dance. I tried it, reluctantantly, but my mother came over to me on the dance floor to tell me that I didn’t look relaxed enough, or graceful enough, and that I should move my arms this way or shake my body that way and that I should quit worrying that people were watching me and just have a good time. Or else she stood on the edge of the dance floor signaling to me that I should pay attention to her, and then she’d demonstrate how to dance properly.

Even now, when she can barely walk unsupported, my mother remains a fantastic, born-to-perform dancer. But at Robby’s bar mitzvah, I didn’t want to dance. I wanted to watch. The kids at my brother’s table weren’t dancing, but there was no room for me to sit with them. All afternoon, my parents tormented me. My mother made me cry, and then I was even more embarrassed and discouraged. I knew I was too shy. I knew I should talk with the kids at my table even though I didn’t know them, and that I should be lively and sociable and get out there and dance. My brother and my cousins weren’t having this problem. Everybody else was having a good time -- except me, at my lonely outpost at the older kids’ table.

After that, whenever we went to a party with a band, my mother spent the whole event traveling between her table and mine to nag me to dance. When I tried, she scolded me to do it differently. She was determined that I would become as good a dancer as she was herself and that I would enjoy it. I began to try to bargain with her ahead of time, to convince her to leave me alone. And she began to nag me ahead of time, saying, “I want to see you dancing.”

In college, I lived with friends who were great dancers. But they didn’t care whether I was good at it, and they were much more encouraging. Amazingly, they taught me to do the Lindy, and they didn’t fuss at me when I danced free-style dances badly or not at all. The Lindy comes in very handy because it looks so impressive. I’ve actually danced at a few weddings and office parties and not felt tortured.

But in general I continue to hate going out to dance, and I especially hate it late at night when I’m already at home and could stay there. I never go unless I am dragged and pushed, and it takes so much dragging and pushing to get me to come along that I end up going partly because I am touched that people want my company enough to put such effort into it. Once when I was living with my friend Sarah, her old roommates from college came to stay with us for a weekend, and after much coaxing and convincing I was dragged along to a club in Chelsea. I was at least five years older than all of them, and they saw me as really more experienced and knowledgeable. After a while at the club, a few of them were ready to leave and a few wanted to stay. I took the ones who wanted to leave and we went out to eat at one of the hottest of the downtown restaurants. We had a great time and came home at four a.m., and the dancers were already sprawled in sleeping bags across the floor of the apartment, asleep. The next morning, our little break-off group was considered to have had the much more exciting evening. But this story doesn’t really count as a dance success, because I led the deserters.

Over the years I’ve had a few outstanding dance experiences, as well as many that made me sad and uncomfortable. Usually, I’m lucky if I get ten or 15 good minutes out of a whole evening out. The guys who are good dancers occasionally dance with me but they always eventually pair up with the women who are good dancers. And the women who are good dancers are much more aggressive than me about pulling these guys onto the dance floor and keeping them there.

Last week in Chicago I went dancing again. I was dragged by my friend Liese, who dances like my mother and loves it. For the usual reasons, I was afraid to go. We had already been out that evening to a convention event, and then a big group of us sat around the hotel lobby bar deciding whether to go dancing or not. I was very tired. I had to get up very early the next morning to work. I was afraid that if I were unhappy at this dance place somewhere in the middle of Chicago, it would be hard to get a cab and leave alone, and I’d be stuck there until everybody else was ready to go. All the others who were going were real dancers; they could go on for hours. I imagined getting between the sheets in my hotel room bed, propped up against the pillows with a movie on T.V. and a slice of room-service cheesecake, and then I imagined myself out in some dark, loud, smoky dance club, trying to imitate all my talented, well coordinated friends but really looking like someone with chewing gum stuck to her sneakers who’s waving off flies. The comfortable bed in my hotel room seemed much more appealing. I was afraid that if I went on this dance expedition, I’d end up dancing like an awkward clutz and trying to shout a conversation with some drunken stranger, wishing I could leave and feeling like a jerk.

In addition to Liese, the dancers trying to organize the outing were a very-nice-but-married guy named Mike from Omaha who flirts madly with Liese at meetings and by e-mail, a nurse named Anita, and a couple of drug company guys. When we got back from the convention event, Liese and I had gone upstairs to change. I knew that if I wasn’t dressed, I wouldn’t go for sure, and in my ambivalent way I wanted to hold off the decision for the last minute. We came back to the lobby, and I sank way down in the leather couch in the lobby bar and tried to convince people that we should do this tomorrow night instead, when I wouldn’t need to be up so early the next day. Liese whispered to me that she was very tired too and that if everyone agreed not to go, she really wouldn’t mind just going upstairs to bed, and I felt a ray of foolish hope that the whole thing would be called off -- but of course, she had every intention of going. The other dancers continued to urge me to come. I tried to get a non-dancing colleague to come, too, because I was really afraid I’d want to come back to the hotel before everyone else and I wanted to include at least one person who might be willing to leave early with me. But no one else would go.

So in the end, I go anyway. I ride in a cab with Anita and some drug rep, and the drug rep’s been smoking cigars and his breath stinks, and I’m hit by a wave of exhaustion and I wish I were anyplace else. The first place we go to is closed, and there’s a conference between our cabdriver and the other cab and we end up at another place that turns out to be just a few blocks from the hotel. It’s not crowded, which is a relief, and in one section of the place there are pinball machines and basketball games, and we play for awhile. But basically, my comrades are here to dance, and we end up wandering back to tables near the dance floor and ordering drinks.

What may not be clear here is how difficult I am finding it to write all this down. Why am I having such a hard time writing about it? The point is, I’ve always hated to go dancing, but in Chicago last week for the first time I began to see what people like about it. I danced with Liese’s friend Mike, who I know to be a great dancer. He is Liese’s equal, in fact, which means he’s outstanding. He is a real flirt, and I couldn’t tell whether he was being nice to me because he’s like that with all women, or whether he was being nice to me because I am Liese’s friend and she has told him I don’t like to dance. But for whatever reason, Mike asked me to dance and saw I was awkward at it and started trying to help me, to coach me in a flattering, sexy way. He is the kind of dancer who knows how to lead a clueless partner. At one point after a few minutes he said to me, “Just relax and go with your feelings. It’s just like having sex.” And I looked back at him and sort of smiled and didn’t say what I was thinking, which is that I’ve had more fun dancing in my lifetime than having sex. So we danced a few more dances together. Sometimes he would pull me close so that one of his legs was between mine. I had never danced this close with anyone, but instead of being nervous, the only thing I could think of was how much easier this position made it to move together. Sometimes Mike would spin me around, which was very pleasant, but sometimes his moves were so complicated that I would occasionally miss a step and stomp on his feet. He started to warn me and tell me what to do before each fancy move, and I started to feel minimally more comfortable at following, although I was still surely a clutz. I began to wonder whether it was inappropriate of me to be dancing this much with this guy that Liese likes, who’s really the only dancer in our group tonight who’s as good as she is and whom she only gets to see and dance with at these out-of-town meetings a couple of times a year. Liese is dancing with one of the drug reps and I catch her eye on the dance floor, but she smiles at me encouragingly, so I guess it’s OK. She’s lending Mike to me.

Eventually, after we’d all gone back to sit down and have cold drinks, someone from another group came over and asked me to dance. This guy joked about how I was doing him a favor by dancing with an old man, and I joked back that it was dark so I couldn’t see how old he was anyway, and he laughed. He was stocky but not heavy, and seven or eight inches taller than me. He was either slightly drunk, or affecting a slightly drunk demeanor.

So there we were, out on the dance floor doing the usual free-style dances that I feel so clutzy at, although I was feeling minimally less clutzy and slightly loosened up after my short lesson with Mike. The guy and I talk a little. He’s a doctor at a hospital in Omaha, but not the hospital that Mike is at now. He asks me where my group is from. I tell him the name of our hospital in New York. He’s recognized Mike as someone new to Omaha, and he asks whether Mike was with us in New York before he came to Omaha, and I explain that Mike was from North Carolina. We’re still out there, with my partner making skillful dancing moves and me gamely shaking my arms and legs in an uncoordinated fashion. I glance back at Liese and Mike and the others sitting at the table, and I see they’re watching me. I tell my partner that I’m really not a good dancer but that my group had been trying to give me lessons and now I think they’re watching to see how I’m doing. He says, “Well, let’s give them something to look at,” and he pulls me very close. Like Mike, this guy knows how to dance and how to lead. I warn him that I stepped all over Mike’s feet, but he laughs and says it doesn’t matter. The whole thing feels very novel. Once I would have been uncomfortable being pulled this close to some strange, sweating man and I would have pulled back a little, but here I am, for the second time in one evening, pressed up tight against a good dancer, with our bodies aligned in a way that I would never have figured out on my own, and me being spun around the floor. And in fact, it feels OK. Even nice. Certainly I have not suddenly been transformed into a graceful person. I am still missing steps and cues. When the guy dips me, I’m OK, but when he dips backward with me on top of him, it feels to me like we’re going to topple over, and I wonder again how drunk he is. Once, when he spins me out for a turn, he loses his grip on my hand and I fall. After that he holds his grip more carefully. Once when I see that we’re spinning close to another couple, I tell him, We’re going to crash, and he laughs gently and says, We’re not going to crash. I’ve been doing this for a long time.

Gradually, I think, this guy is really getting the idea that I wasn’t kidding about not knowing how to dance. But gradually also, I am anticipating him and swaying with him, and we don’t have to talk as much because I don’t need as much instruction. Finally the DJ announces that he’s going to play the last song of the night. When I hear this, I’m relieved that the night is over and proud of myself for lasting to the end of it without needing to escape. The last dance is a slow song, and everybody comes onto the floor. I am pretty sure that this guy knows he’s been holding someone who was really inexperienced and insecure and that now she’s comfortable and relaxed. And maybe I’m naive but I suspect this is nice for him, and something he might remember. For a few minutes, we just move silently. Liese and Mike are dancing close, Anita and one of the the drug company guys are dancing -- all of us from cities hundreds of miles apart, all of us going back to separate lives and separate worries, but at least for this moment I for one am very comfortable, cushioned up against this guy who’s turning me smoothly around the floor to this peaceful song. When it ends, I just say to him, “Thank you. That was really very nice for me.” And I think he knows that this is true, that I am not just saying it. He thanks me, too, and says it was very nice for him also.

The dancing couples sort of split up. I wander toward Liese and Mike and Anita and we walk to our table together to get our sweaters and jackets, and the guy from Omaha goes back to the people he came with. My group walks back to the hotel together, Mike in the middle and Liese and me on either side, and they’re saying to me, that wasn’t so bad, was it? And I agree that it wasn’t. Mike laughs and says that his feet are killing him from where I stepped on him, and I should get flat shoes for dancing. When we get back to the hotel, I come up to Liese’s room for a few minutes to talk and drink a bottle of orange juice from her mini bar, and then I go up to my room and I’m in bed by two-thirty. But I have to be up at six a.m. to work, and the next night after dinner, when we’re again sunk in the leather couches in the lobby bar and they’re again trying to gather a dancing crowd, I’m so tired and sleepy that I can barely stand, and they let me off the hook. I just want to hang out in the bar for a while with non-dancing colleagues.

The night before, when we were dancing, Liese’s friend Mike had asked me if I wanted to write the great American novel, and I had said no, that I wanted to write nonfiction. Tonight before they all go out, he tells me, When you go home, write about dancing.