by Kat Meads
West Coast
Friday, June 21
Dear DeeDee,
Your grandmother, watching TV, used to lend her arm for me to yank about in my attempts to dance the bop. At some point, because of the wrenching or because she wanted her arm back, string looped around a doorknob stood in as my partner. In the earliest home movies, I twirl and twist for the camera, having fun, showing off. Then came a growth spurt, self-consciousness, frame after frame of me squirreled away in corners, face turned, shoulders hunched, victim of some traumatic body snatch. Although I don’t recall any filmic immortalization of your struck-dumb misery, there is a video of you ferociously kicking a fence. Fortunately you grew out of tantrums and my dancing revived with the assistance of terrific hoofer Larry B. Together he and I worked out an elaborate routine to preview among the Casino’s elbow-to-elbow Saturday crowd, our daily practice sessions rewarded the night a total stranger ran up to our sweatiness and gushed compliments. Later, Larry B. and I enjoyed a certain notoriety for slow dancing to the Showmen’s “39-21-40 Shape,” my acute self-consciousness evidently on the wane. (Yes: in your aunt’s heyday, notoriety could be achieved with marginal effort and less than marginal imagination.)
Love,
Aunt K
West Coast
Saturday, June 22
Dear DeeDee,
Before we hooked up, Larry B. dated the enviable Christine, she of the low-pitched, gravelly voice and white-blonde locks, sole female in a rock band that performed across three counties. She could be a bitch but had the license to be (to repeat: she sang in a band), so no one truly held it against her when she gave herself airs. Despite her limited vocal range, her solos of “Stand By Me” and “96 Tears” did those songs more than justice. Like her band mates, Christine’s onstage outfit consisted of a white shirt, black vest, black slacks and black tie. Androgyny suited her. In her twenties she became a nurse, married a doctor. Surely she kept scrapbooks? Surely some cozy night at the beach house, in front of a roaring fire, she revived one of her old standards, minus the Oxford shirt, for the hubby? When a rock ‘n’ roll gal quits the biz is it with sorrow or relief? I was never tight with Christine; she didn’t confide in me then and wouldn’t, on demand, divulge those details now. All very disappointing. And you, darling niece? Does the enormity of what you wish you knew but never shall, big stuff to piddling, dispirit? I hope not; I hope not yet.
Love,
Aunt K
West Coast
Saturday, June 22
Dear DeeDee,
Why two notes in one day? Pre-midnight memory of an eighth-grade “talent contest” featuring baton twirlers, piano pounders and two separate renditions of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The surprise addition: cousins Diane and Frieda Banks’s cover of “Da Doo Ron Ron.” Decked out in voluminous skirts, shiny belts cinched tight, they performed with panache, and they were good, exceptionally good, for our little nothing of a show. Not that talent actually mattered. Popularity—and only popularity—counted, which the Banks cousins knew in advance and still went ahead with their act, putting themselves out there to be judged by a smug, already-decided audience. That took guts. A lot of guts. Once they finished, applause was weak, scattered. A pointedly tepid response. Regardless—and this is the part of the memory with the sharpest teeth—Frieda and Diane looked well pleased with themselves, thoroughly satisfied with what they’d accomplished. As they bowed, they squeezed hands, grinned at each other. Sitting down to this second scribble of the day, I didn’t realize I’d be writing about cruelty and courage or deliberating how often those two conflate or reanimating occasions about which to feel ashamed. But such is the consequence.
Love,
Aunt K
West Coast
Wednesday, June 26
Dear DeeDee,
And now I’m remembering a stretch of post-college nights that started with dancing and ended in punches thrown by the many or the few. Someone bumped into someone else who was sleeping with another someone the first someone wanted to be sleeping with and the second someone couldn’t let that act of aggression go unchallenged and on from there. A dog pile of testosterone. It rekindled my dance phobia for a while, that dick demo, because once bouncers are involved, where’s the fun? Then again, I was never the someone fought over, so perhaps exclusion colored my judgment. Nothing explains why or how I managed to live for so long with a dance refusenik. Equally puzzling: how he lived with me, recreational discord rather low on our list of incompatibilities. Your dad and mom, consistently friendly to whomever I dragged through the door, behaved in their usual cordial manner to his drag-in, but their dogs at the time, Swampy and Sundance, felt less compelled to welcome a stranger into our midst. A long first evening it was, that get-to-know dinner. You helped out with the diversion of puking up your applesauce.
Belated thanks,
Aunt K
Kat Meads’ essay collection 2:12 a.m. received an Independent Publishers’ Gold Medal (IPPY) and was a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year finalist. Her prose has appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika and elsewhere. Her newest, Miss Jane: The Lost Years, is just out from Livingston Press.