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“Go, Miz Dunhill,” one of the girls said. “We want to see it.” And two of her friends pushed Sadie
toward me.
She hesitated. I did another spin and held out my hands. The kids cheered as we moved out on the
floor. They gave us room. I pulled her toward me, and after the smallest of hesitations, she spun first
to the left and then to the right, the A-line of the jumper she was wearing giving her just enough
room to cross her feet as she went. It was the Lindy variation Richie-from-the-ditchie and Bevviefrom-the-levee
had been learning that day in the fall of 1958. It was the Hellzapoppin. Of course it
was. Because the past harmonizes.
I brought her to me by our clasped hands, then let her go back. We separated. Then, like people
who had practiced these moves for months (possibly to a slowed-down record in a deserted picnic
area), we bent and kicked, first to the left and then to the right. The kids laughed and cheered. They
had formed a clapping circle around us in the middle of the polished floor.
We came together and she twirled like a hopped-up ballerina beneath our linked hands.
Now you squeeze to tell me left or right.
The light squeeze came on my right hand, as if the thought had summoned it, and she whirled
back like a propeller, her hair flying out in a fan that gleamed first red, then blue in the lights. I
heard several girls gasp. I caught her and went down on one heel with her bent over my arm, hoping
like hell that I wouldn’t pop my knee. I didn’t.
I came up. She came with me. She went out, then came back into my arms. We danced under the
lights.
Dancing is life.
7
The hop ended at eleven, but I didn’t turn the Sunliner into Sadie’s driveway until quarter past
midnight on Sunday morning. One of the things nobody tells you about the glamorous job of
chaperoning teenage dances is that the shaps are the ones who have to make sure everything’s picked
up and locked away once the music ends.
Neither of us said much on the way back. Although Donald played several other tempting bigband
jump tunes and the kids pestered us to swing-dance again, we declined. Once was memorable;
twice would have been indelible. Maybe not such a good thing in a small town. For me, it already was
indelible. I couldn’t stop thinking about the feel of her in my arms or her quick breath on my face.
I cut the engine and turned to her. Now she’ll say “Thank you for bailing me out” or “Thanks for a
lovely evening,” and that’ll be that.
But she didn’t say either of those things. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Hair on
her shoulders. Top two buttons of the man’s Oxford-cloth shirt beneath the jumper undone. Earrings
gleaming. Then we were together, first fumbling, then holding on tight. It was kissing, but it was
more than kissing. It was like eating when you’ve been hungry or drinking when you’ve been thirsty. I
could smell her perfume and her clean sweat under the perfume and I could taste tobacco, faint but
still pungent, on her lips and tongue. Her fingers slipped through my hair (one pinky tickling for just
a moment in the cup of my ear and making me shiver), then locked at the back of my neck. Her
thumbs were moving, moving. Stroking bare skin at the nape that once, in another life, would have
been covered by hair. I slipped my hand first beneath and then around the fullness of her breast and
she murmured, “Oh, thank you, I thought I was going to fall.”
“My pleasure,” I said, and squeezed gently.
We necked for maybe five minutes, breathing harder as the caresses grew bolder. The windshield of