Dance Season By Laura J. Oliver

My pretty sister is having a dance party for her birthday, and I want to attend but my dance history is varied at best. Dancing is a boy I like who just won’t ask me out.

My first experience is when Lake Shore Elementary offers ballet lessons as after-school enrichment. I front up in the cafeteria, where the tables are folded into the walls, and the room smells like creamed corn, and get in line with all the other little dancers at 3:00 pm, but I am tragically disappointed to discover we are not to wear tutus or even skirts. We are to wear tights and T-shirts, making us look like half-dressed little boys.

Fast forward to the age of 12, and my mother and sister and I are on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, attending a session of “Camps Farthest Out.”  This organization sponsors moderately religious family camps that promote grace through gratitude. My mother, newly divorced, is trying to preserve a sense of family, perhaps. There are activities, communal meals, speakers, and leafy private knolls in the woods and beside the still waters to restore one’s soul.

There is to be a dance one night. I rummage around in my suitcase for something pretty to wear. I packed myself so the best I can do is denim capris and a tank top sporting red, yellow, and blue horizontal stripes.

That evening, the music is fun and infectious—a kind of barn square dance as I recall, the room alight with goodwill. Dancers fly from hand to hand, twirl back-to-back, come together again. I am younger than anyone else in attendance, but I am watching so carefully, and I will try so hard if anyone, anyone invites me to join in— someone’s father, perhaps (which, of course, I long for), or an older brother, or even a boy my age.

For three hours I sit on a hardback chair along the wall and watch all the families, all the other kids, dance the night away. At the end of the evening, I am still sitting there when the barn lights dim, and it’s time to walk back to our cabin.

But as I head out into the dark New Hampshire evening, one of the camp speakers pulls me aside. There has been an accident, he says quietly. My sister, who is turning 17 that summer, has gone for a drive with a handsome boy she just met. While I sat against the wall watching the fun I could not participate in, my sister and her date were hit head-on by a driver who purportedly looked down to light a cigarette as he came over the rise. She is hospitalized, and my mother is with her.

Eventually, I am told she has a knee injury, and because she involuntarily cried out at the moment of impact, she has splinters of glass in her mouth. The remedy is to chew gum. I am quite taken with this bit of genius, although I am not permitted to see her. Visitors twelve years old and under are not allowed in patients’ rooms. This injustice elicits the composition of a hyperbolic poem back at camp and for the record, nothing rhymes with Jesus.

My sister is released the next day and five years later marries the blond, blue-eyed boy who shared this event. It is a December wedding and now it is I who am turning 17. As a bridesmaid, I wear red velvet and a wreath of holly in my hair.

On Friday nights, my friends and I attend weekly school dances. Of course, slow dances preclude the need for cool moves. The only technique required besides hanging on is a tip my mother has shared. When slow dancing with a guy who knows what he’s doing, always keep all your weight on one foot—that way, you’re prepared to move seamlessly in whatever direction he chooses. This has proven to be excellent advice over the years.

An additional, little-known fun-fact about slow dancing: the chorus of the Beatles, “Hey Jude,” goes on forever. No lie. Forever. If you’re a 5’ 2” ninth grader dancing with a boy who’s already 6 feet tall, you’re going to need a chiropractor because it’s still playing!

Na -na nana, na- na nana, hey- hey,  

it’s all right, already!

A few years ago, I started taking Cardio Dance at the gym, and I finally get to dance with abandon. Leandra teaches this group of cheerful souls, and she’s mesmerizingly skilled. We learn professionally choreographed routines to Ed Sheeran (Shape of You), Taylor Swift (Shake it Off), and NSYNC (Bye, Bye, Bye), all in a room full of mirrors that reflect 20 smiles.

This is a great workout, but the moves aren’t going to translate to my sister’s dance party any more than a cheerleading routine would– except one. Leandra has taught us how to rotate our hips—like J-LO. Like Shakira. Like this!

You missed it.

My daughters—laughing, self-assured, free– talk of nights out dancing, but I married too young to have known this freedom then, but at home, I dance the way I wish I had danced in my twenties, my thirties. At one with joy—an outpouring of unselfconscious love of life, of self, of you, and something greater than all of us. It is just a different expression of the moments alone by the lake or in the woods. Goodness reigns.

I read an advice column the other day that cautioned anyone over 40 hoping to look cool on the dance floor not to wave their hands over their head. Apparently, this is for amateurs.

The only thing worse than waving your hands over your head?

Clapping them.

My two best moves.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.