Once a week the chairs were folded up in the music room, and we had square-dancing and waltzing lessons. ![]() In sixth grade we had to have dancing classes. For a few moments, just that once, I danced in perfect joy and grace, the way Miss Valentine always hoped I would. The music, the other couples on the floor - none of these were there. We were flying, we had risen a few inches off the floor, and we existed somewhere outside the law of gravity. ![]() And I could see in his face that I was, too.īut perhaps I did close my eyes for a few moments, because there was a time when it didn’t seem that we were dancing. I wanted to watch his face because I could see that he was enjoying himself. He was an excellent leader I could have closed my eyes, but I didn’t want to. We started out tentatively, but soon we were making great loops around the room. I didn’t know him and I never saw him again after that evening. The musicians got tired of fiddling fast, and a voice called out, “How about a waltz?” And somebody asked me to dance. The only dancing I did for the next several years was to rock ’n’ roll, and the only time I thought of Miss Valentine was when, at weddings, I’d dance one or two stiff numbers with my father.īut more than twenty years later I went to an old-time music festival in West Virginia. She was decked out in satin and rhinestones, and they floated past us as if the whole world held only them and the music. That night, as always, the Valentines danced the last dance alone. The frames of my glasses slant upward at the outside, a style that was supposed to look glamorous. I hardly recognize that pudgy girl, but the worried expression is mine, all right. In my parents’ album is a snapshot of Eddie and me. Late in the evening, someone slipped an extra record onto the spindle: Chubby Checker. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop thinking of them as Mr. He and Eddie’s mother were as boring as my own parents. What if he remembered? What if he laughed his Santa Claus laugh at the dance? What if - it was unthinkable - what if he came in his Santa Claus suit? Not so many years before, I had perched on his lap and asked him for a Betsy Wetsy. Above all, not the father of my first date. The Santa Claus at Duquesne’s! A Santa Claus! Surely he could not be anyone’s father. “He’s the Santa Claus at Duquesne’s Department Store.” And wasn’t it nice that he could come to the dance during his busiest season? She had known his father for years, she said. My mother mailed the response card included in Miss Valentine’s invitation. For weeks in advance, Miss Valentine drilled us in the arts of making introductions, holding a punch glass, wearing a corsage.Įddie asked me to the Christmas dance, of course. Girls made appointments to have their hair pulled into French twists. Fancy dresses and real suits were required. It was a kind of party and commencement exercise in one. The sheer exhilaration of watching them kept us coming back week after week, kept us trudging and counting and gingerly holding one another’s damp hands.Įvery year, Miss Valentine gave a Christmas dance. The Valentines must have been well past sixty then, but they made dancing seem effortless, joyous, sensual. Miss Valentine’s eyes shone and her rose suede, size-five wedgies flashed. Then they cast themselves off into a waltz or a tango, as if into a wild and thrilling ride on white water. They looked into each other’s eyes, bodies poised. Valentine materialized and took his wife’s hand. ![]() It was the year of Chubby Checker, and we begged to do the twist, but Miss Valentine shook her head.Īt the end of each lesson, Mr. We also learned the polka, the Charleston, and, for some reason, the bossa nova. “One, two, three” for a waltz, “one, two, three, four” for a fox trot. ![]() Miss Valentine showed us the steps - slowly at first, without music, and then faster, to recordings with audible scars from years of service. The girls outnumbered the boys, so some girls didn’t get chosen the first time around. Each boy was to select a partner and request the pleasure of a dance. Miss Valentine flitted among them, birdlike, straightening shoulders and collars. At her signal, the boys began a reluctant march toward us. On a typical Wednesday evening, she arranged us in rows on opposite sides of the room, boys on one side, girls on the other. But “Miss Valentine” was what we called her. Valentine was always on hand to demonstrate the fox trot or fix the leaky faucet in the bathroom. No one enrolled by choice it was an indignity that accompanied puberty, like menstruation or body hair. In my hometown, there was no escaping Miss Valentine’s School of Social Dance.
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