Previously – Chapter 3: Where the Weight Goes
She did not tell him for six days, and she was clear with herself about why: she wanted to have the whole thing before she put it down in front of him, and that was a lie, and the truth was that she wanted six more days of the building being a nice place to go.
She went in on Tuesday and the Thursday and the following Saturday.
By the second Saturday she had a system. She arrived at twenty past nine and got sat down. She stood for the second hour in ten-minute stretches with the barre in reach, because Sasha had said twenty and Mia had privately negotiated herself down to a series of tens. She was aware that this was cheating and she did it anyway.
She learned eleven names in a week and got two of them wrong for two weeks. Tori Dorsey she had known since the first morning, having asked, and Tori had turned up on the second Saturday having done the turn four hundred times in a space the size of a bath mat, and got it, and cried about it in the changing room where she thought nobody could hear.
Adam cut his warm-up to fourteen minutes, which was not twelve, and put the difference into the center, and by the third week the standard of the Saturday class had gone up by an amount that would have been imperceptible to any parent in the lobby and that Mia could have measured with a ruler.
He was a good teacher. That was the thing she had not expected and could not stop noticing. He knew every single thing about all of them: whose mother had left, who had not eaten, who needed to be sent out of the room for two minutes and told it was for a job.
On Thursday she watched him teach the four o’clock, eleven children between five and seven, and it was the best hour of teaching she had seen since Detroit.
He never once said the word left. She noticed it about twenty minutes in and then could not un-notice it. He said the window side. He said the side where Marcus is. Every instruction he gave was expressed in terms of an object actually present in the room, and at the end of it eleven five-year-olds performed sixteen counts of choreography in unison, and their mothers, watching through the glass, believed their children had done it.
He also invented a second good spot, so that the war between two six-year-olds about the first one could end, and let a boy called Theo cry for four minutes for no reason available to adult understanding, and a girl called Rosalie spent the first twenty minutes underneath the piano bench and the last thirty being the best dancer in the room.
“Does she always do that?”
“Every week.” Adam was stacking the little chairs. “She comes out when she’s ready. Her mother’s mortified about it and I’ve told her four times it doesn’t matter.”
“Does it?”
“Not even slightly. She’s six.” He put the last chair on the stack. “She’s under there working out whether she’s going to be brave, and when she’s finished she comes out. That’s the whole of it. I’d rather have that than a child who’s never had to decide.”
“Where did you get that?” she asked him afterwards.
“Get what?”
“The window side.”
“Oh.” He picked the stack up and carried it to the wall. “Heather. They can’t do left and right at five, they can do where the window is. She worked it out in about the first month.”
“That’s genuinely good.”
“She was genuinely good,” Adam said, without heat, and carried the chairs out.
* * *
On the second Thursday he asked her to take the four o’clock, because the plumber was coming and because there was nobody else.
“They’re five.”
“You’ve been watching them for two weeks.”
“Adam, I have taught professionals and I have taught fourteen-year-olds and I have never in my life been in a room with eleven five-year-olds and I would honestly rather do a matinee on this hip.”
“Window side,” said Adam. “That’s the whole of it. Window side and the side where Marcus is,” and went off to meet a plumber.
It was the worst fifty minutes of her autumn.
She lost them inside four minutes. She lost them because she said turn to your left, and eleven children turned in six directions, and one of them, a small girl called Ada, simply sat down on the floor where she was and stayed there for the remainder of the class as a matter of policy.
Theo cried. Marcus told her, at some length, that this was not how they did it. Rosalie went under the piano bench at eight minutes and Mia, who had been told exactly what Rosalie was doing under there and had decided to be helpful about it anyway, spent four excruciating minutes trying to coax her out in front of eight mothers watching through the glass.
At twenty-eight minutes she abandoned everything she had planned and sat down on the floor, at a cost of about ten seconds and a good deal of dignity, and said, “Right. I’ve made a mess of this. Who wants to tell me how it’s supposed to go?”
Eleven five-year-olds told her how it was supposed to go, simultaneously, for six minutes.
It turned out they knew the whole thing. They knew the order, the counts, where the window was, whose spot was whose, and the entire vocabulary of a syllabus that a man had built out of the furniture of one room.
At forty minutes she got them doing it, badly.
At forty-eight, Rosalie came out from under the piano bench of her own accord and joined in at the back and was, immediately and effortlessly, the best of them.
When Adam came back at ten past five, Mia was still sitting on the floor with her leg out straight and could not have gotten up in front of a plumber.
“How was it?”
“Never ask me to do that again.”
“That bad?”
“They were magnificent,” Mia said, “and I was a disgrace, and I have taught in three countries, and a six-year-old called Marcus took me to pieces about my counts.” She put her hand up. “Help me off this floor and never mention it to anybody.”
Adam Lockwood mentioned it to everybody for five months.
* * *
She told him on Friday, in the office, because she had run out of days.
“There’s a flyer going around the schools.”
“Crestwood.” He didn’t look up from the ledger. “Diane Coyle showed me hers two weeks ago.”
Mia stood in the doorway.
“You’ve known for two weeks.”
“I’ve known since June.” Adam put the pen down. “There was a planning notice in the paper in the spring. I drove out and looked at the site in July. There’s about eleven thousand square feet of it and a parking lot for sixty.”
“And you didn’t say.”
“To whom?”
That was, Mia thought, a genuinely unanswerable question, and she stopped being angry about halfway through it.
“What do you know?” she said.
“Her name’s Danielle King. She’s got two other studios, one in Everett and one down near Mount Vernon, and she bought both of them out of trouble.” He shut the ledger. “She does six days. She’ll do a pre-professional stream. Nobody in this county has ever offered anybody that. And she’s spending money on a guest artist for the opening, which tells you she intends to be talked about.”
“Derek Raines.”
“You know him?”
“I know of him. He’s very good.” Mia sat down on the arm of the spare chair, as close to sitting as the room allowed. “He’s better than very good. He’s the real thing and he’s past forty and he’s doing regional openings. That means he’s near the end of it, and he’d rather be near the end of it in a nice building than in nobody’s building.”
Adam was quiet.
“How many will I lose?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“Adam.”
“Mia, I’ve been sitting in this room since June doing this by myself. Guess.”
She thought about a lobby with four chairs in it and eleven mothers with a flyer in their bag.
“Twenty,” she said. “Maybe twenty-five, by March. Not the ones you’d expect. You’ll keep the babies, because nobody’s driving a five-year-old twenty minutes on a Tuesday. You’ll lose the middle, the ten-to-thirteens, because their parents are ambitious and they’ve got cars.” She made herself finish it. “And you’ll lose your best ones last and worst, because the good ones will go where the good ones are, and they’ll be right to.”
Adam nodded slowly, as if she had confirmed a figure he had already written down, which she suspected she had.
“So what do I do?”
“You be the thing they can’t build,” Mia said.
“Which is what?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But it isn’t a floor.”
* * *
Sylvia and Don Wilcox came on the last Saturday in September, at half past eleven, while the class was still running.
Mia knew who they were before Adam said anything, because he went straight through the doorway into the lobby without excusing himself. He had never once done that.
They stood by the reception desk: a woman of about sixty-five with gray hair cut well, holding a Tupperware box, and a tall man in a jacket with his hands behind his back.
Adam hugged Sylvia. He shook Don’s hand.
Through the glass panel Mia watched Sylvia say something and then look, quite deliberately, into the studio, at the chair by the mirror.
“Class,” Mia said. “Take five. Water.”
She got herself up.
* * *
“Mia Chambers,” Sylvia said.
“Mrs. Wilcox.”
“Sylvia, for heaven’s sake.” She put the Tupperware down on the desk. “Adam’s told us. Well, Adam’s told us nothing, Adam tells nobody anything, Mrs. Fletcher told us.”
“I did tell you,” Adam said.
“You told me two weeks after Beverly Ann told me at the church.”
Don had not moved. He was a big man, well past seventy, with a farmer’s stillness, and he was looking at Mia’s cane with an expression she could not read at all.
“You’re helping out,” he said.
“A bit. On Saturdays.”
“For nothing.”
“For nothing.”
“Hm,” said Don Wilcox.
There was a pause that went on about a second too long.
“We brought a box for the children,” Sylvia said briskly, “and I want to see the little ones do the thing with the arms, and Don wants to talk to Adam about the roof, so.”
“The roof’s fine,” Adam said.
“The roof is not fine, there’s a stain in the corner of the office the size of my hand,” said Don, “and I’ve told you twice,” and the two men went off down the corridor, and that was that.
Which left Mia and Sylvia Wilcox in a lobby.
Sylvia opened the Tupperware first, and made her take a shortbread cookie, and watched her eat some of it, and after about thirty seconds Mia understood that this was not hospitality but reconnaissance.
“You’re thinner than you were in the photographs.”
“I’ve had four months of doing nothing.”
“You’ve had four months of not eating properly in somebody else’s kitchen,” Sylvia said. “I had a daughter in a hospital for sixteen months and I know exactly what it looks like when a person has stopped organising their own meals.”
“My mother cooks.”
“Your mother cooks and you sit at the table and move it about, and she doesn’t say anything, because she’s frightened of you.” Sylvia put the lid back on the box. “That’s not a criticism of Patricia. Everybody’s frightened of you. You’ve been on a stage in Seattle.”
* * *
“Sit down, dear, I can see you standing.”
They sat, in two of the four chairs, with the corkboard above them and eleven teenagers through the wall making the noise teenagers make on a water break.
“I saw you dance,” Sylvia said. “Twice. Once in the school thing when you were fifteen and once in Seattle, in about 2019, in the Christmas one.”
“You came to a show?”
“Heather brought me.” Sylvia set her purse on her knees. “She got the tickets. She drove us both down and back in a day and she wouldn’t let me pay for the parking.”
Mia looked at the carpet.
“I didn’t know she was there.”
“No, well, she wouldn’t have said, would she.” Sylvia’s mouth did something. “She was funny about you. Not unkind. Funny. She said once, in this building, in about the first year, that she’d have liked to see what you’d have made of a room like this.” She looked around the lobby. “Which I always thought was a slightly complicated thing to have said.”
Mia had absolutely no idea what to do with that, and so she did nothing.
“Right,” Sylvia said, “because I can hear my husband coming back down that corridor in about four minutes and he’ll say it much worse.”
“All right.”
“How long are you here for?”
“Until my hip’s better.”
“And when’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“No,” Sylvia said. “You don’t.”
She said it without any edge at all, and it went in about four inches.
“He’s had two years of people helping,” Sylvia said, looking at the studio door. “The church did the meals. The Fletchers did the desk. Beverly Ann Wicklow did the accounts until she got confused and Lucy Henshaw took over. And every single one of them was very kind and very good and about nine months in they all went back to their own lives. That’s what people do. It’s right, and I’m not saying a word against any of them.”
“I’m not the church.”
“No. You’re better.” Sylvia turned to look at her directly. “You’re better and you’re cleverer and I watched you through that glass with those children for four minutes and I could see what you were doing, and I’m sixty-eight and I don’t know anything about dance. That’s the problem. That’s exactly the problem.”
Mia’s hands had gone still.
“He’ll build on you,” Sylvia said. “He can’t help it, it’s what he does, he built on Heather for thirteen years and it worked because she wasn’t going anywhere. And you’re going to be here until your hip’s better, and then you’re going to go back to Chicago, or somewhere, or wherever it is.”
“That’s not.”
“Is it not?”
Mia opened her mouth and found that she had no sentence.
“That’s what I thought,” Sylvia said, without triumph, and patted her knee, and got up to start the coffee in a building where she did not work.
* * *
Don came back down the corridor with Adam, and stood in the middle of the lobby, and said, to the room in general:
“He should sell it.”
“Don.”
“I’ve said it to him and I’ll say it in front of company.” Don’s voice was perfectly level. “That building wants twelve thousand dollars spending on it. He’s thirty-five years old and he’s got no wife and no children and he works six days a week to keep a business open that made four hundred dollars last month, and there’s a woman coming into this county with money who is going to eat him alive by Easter.”
Sylvia had gone very still by the coffee pot.
“He should sell it,” Don said, “and take whatever he gets, and go and be a person.”
“It’s Heather’s,” Adam said quietly.
“Heather’s dead,” said Don.
The lobby went silent enough to hear the water running through the pipe.
“Don Wilcox,” Sylvia said.
“I’m not being cruel. I’m the only one who isn’t.” He turned to his wife and his voice cracked straight down the middle for one syllable and then went level again. “She’s dead, and he’s not, and I have watched this man carry a building for two years, and every time I come in here I think, that’s my daughter’s, and she’d be ashamed of what it’s doing to him.”
Nobody said anything.
Don picked his hat up off the desk.
“That’s all,” he said. “The roof’s got two weeks in it, three weeks if it stays dry. I’ll bring the ladder Tuesday.”
He went out. The bell over the door did what it did.
Sylvia stood with the coffee pot in her hand.
“He’s been saying that since June,” she said, to nobody in particular. “He’s said it to me every Sunday since June. And the thing that nobody in this room is going to say, so I’ll say it, is that he might be right.”
* * *
Don came back in for his hat about four minutes later, having left it on the desk, which everybody in the building understood to be a lie.
He stood in the doorway of the lobby with it already in his hand.
“Miss Chambers.”
“Mia.”
“Mia.” He turned the hat around. “I’ve not got anything against you. I want that said. My wife thinks I have and I haven’t.”
“I didn’t think you had.”
“Good.” He looked at the corkboard. “My daughter used to stand where you’re sitting and tell me the same things you’d tell me, and she was wrong about the money and right about everything else, and I never once said so to her face because I thought there’d be time.”
The lobby was very quiet.
“That’s all,” Don Wilcox said. “You’ll say it to him. The money. You’ll say it because you’ve not known him twenty years and you can.”
He put the hat on.
“And when you do,” he said, “he’ll listen to you. He never did to me. And I’d rather it got said by somebody than not at all.”
Then he went out, and Sylvia, from the coffee pot, said, “Forty-one years,” to nobody in particular, and did not elaborate.
* * *
Adam sat on the floor of the studio at half past twelve with his back against the mirror, and the eleven teenagers were long gone, and there was a Tupperware box of shortbread cookies on the desk that nobody had opened.
Mia did not sit on the floor, because she could not have gotten up again. She sat in the considered chair.
“Is he right?” she said.
“Yes,” Adam said.
“Adam.”
“He’s completely right. That’s why he can say it in my lobby and I can’t answer him.” He had his forearms on his knees. “It made four hundred and six dollars last month. That’s after I paid Mrs. Fletcher and the Wednesday woman and not after I paid myself, because I don’t. I’ve been living off the insurance since March and the insurance runs out in about fourteen months.”
Mia had not known that. She sat with it.
“Then here’s the question,” she said.
“Go on.”
“Do you want to keep it because it’s hers, or do you want to keep it because it’s good?”
Adam looked up.
“Because those are different,” Mia said, “and everybody in this county thinks it’s the first one, including Don, and possibly including you, and I’ve been in that room for three weeks and I don’t think it is.”
He didn’t answer for a long time.
“Say the second one,” he said. “Say why it’s good.”
“Because there are ninety-one children in this town who have somewhere to go,” Mia said. “Because you taught eleven five-year-olds sixteen counts of choreography on Thursday by telling them where the window was. Because there’s a girl in your Saturday class who is going to dance professionally and who would not have set foot in a building like this if somebody hadn’t let her in for free when she was twelve.”
“Heather let her in for free.”
“And you kept her.” Mia leaned forward. “That’s the bit you don’t count. You’ve been counting the building. Nobody in this town cares about the building, Adam, there’s a perfectly good building going up at Crestwood with a parking lot for sixty.”
Adam put his head back against the mirror and looked at the ceiling for a while.
“So what do I do,” he said, for the second time in a week.
“You put it in front of them.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that in about six weeks a flyer is going to land in every school bag in this county with a photograph of a building on it, and the only thing that beats a photograph of a building is a room full of people who have actually seen the thing.” Mia was aware that she had sat forward and that her hands had started moving. “You do a show. Not a recital, not the end-of-year thing in June. Now. October. Before they open.”
“We’ve got no money and no theater.”
“You have got a room with five windows in it and eighty folding chairs somewhere in this county, and ninety-one children whose parents will come to anything with their own child in it.” She was talking faster than she meant to. “You put every single one of them on that floor. The babies, the adults, all of it. You charge five dollars and you sell it out and you let two hundred people in this town stand in this building and watch their own children, and then let the flyer come.”
Adam had not moved.
“When did you think of this?” he said.
“About fifteen seconds ago.”
“You’ve been thinking about it for two weeks.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for two weeks,” Mia admitted.
He got up off the floor. He went and stood at the window, the way he did, with his hands in his pockets, and looked out at Main Street for long enough that Mia started composing a version where she had not said any of it.
“We’d need a name for it,” he said.
Mia let out a breath.
“You’d need about nine things,” she said, “and a name is the ninth.”
“Heather always named them first.” He was still looking out of the window. “She said if you can’t name it you don’t know what it is.”
“Then name it.”
“Harvest something.” He shrugged. “Harvest Fest. It’s terrible.”
“It’s extremely terrible.”
“It’ll be on a photocopied flyer in about four hundred school bags by Wednesday,” Adam said, “and about seven people are going to say it’s charming,” and he turned around, and for the first time since March sixteenth somebody in a room with Mia Chambers looked like they had woken up.
One thought on “The Last Dance – Chapter 4: The Window Side”