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Dancing for My
   Mother

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          Grandma Inez divorced her first husband on grounds of abandonment and married a man named Ed Nielson who was wild and crazy. Both of them loved to party. Nielson turned into a wife-beater. After one of the beatings, in which your mother, not more than twelve years old, hit Nielson over the head with a vase and floored him, Grandma Inez packed up her brood and moved to her relatives in Foreston, Minnesota. She placed your mother and uncle with her sister Eunice and brother-in-law Jack Stromwall. They lived on the land that used to be the site of what was called the Deans House, after George Deans, a Minnesota state senator, the girls’ father. That house burned down and burned up Inez’s new shoes. She obsesses on those shoes the way your mother obsesses on her missing daddy. The fire also destroyed the trunk in the attic where, it is said, George Deans kept most of his money. We were rich and then we weren’t, Grandma Inez says. Her father rebuilt, but the new house was more modest than the old one.

          Her story gets fuzzy after she leaves Janice and Dean with Eunice and Jack. She won’t talk about it except to say she worked hard scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, which is why she has such big ugly knots at the top of her shinbones. She also worked as a short-order cook and sent money to her sister for keeping Janice and Dean. A peaceful time in your mother’s life as she tells it. She loved her aunt, whom she called Sister. Dean and Janice stayed there for around five to six years. But then Sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and she didn’t last long. Your mother recalls how horrible it was hearing her aunt screaming in pain upstairs in her bedroom. The word cancer always widens your mother’s eyes with worry and fear. All her life she will expect the same thing to happen to her. Every pain, every lump, every unexplained stirring will have her running to doctors, telling them to operate, cut it out of her. She will have a lot of operations in her life, an appendix removed, a hysterectomy, exploratory surgery because of a chronic pain in her side, another surgery to remove adhesions, another to remove hemorrhoids. None of the operations will find the cancer she was always sure would take her.

          In early fall of 1951 Pappas gets transferred to Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois and Mom rents out the Aurora house and drives you and your sisters and Grandma Inez in the Hudson cross-country to Champaign-Urbana bordering Indiana. You stay in Champaign for three months, where you meet the only teacher you will ever work hard for. Her name is Mrs. Cima. You know what beauty is. Beauty is Hedy Lamarr. Mrs. Cima could be her twin. She’s always smiling, always praising you when you turn in good work. There are many times when you wish she was your mother and you lived with her. You dream about it. You dream about her spanking you and how you would cry and she would hold you in her arms and cry too.

          The house you live in has railroad tracks running close to its back yard. At night when the trains go by, the house quivers. You sleep in the living room on the couch. Grandma Inez and Carol Marie share a bed in one bedroom. Michele Renee sleeps in a crib next to them. Pappas stays up late most nights listening to the radio and drinking beer. One night he turns the fights on. It is Rocky Marciano versus Joe Louis. The date is October 26, 1951. Pappas fights the fight along with what he hears on the radio, Marciano taking it to Louis, knocking him all over the ring. Louis is getting what the announcer calls, A terrific beating! Pappas is saying, Get him! Get that nigger! In the eighth round Louis goes down and the fight is over. Pappas is beaming. He pats you on the back and says, What did I tell you? I told you he was going to kick that nigger’s black ass!

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