Andromeda glances across the backyard toward the kitchen window.
The glass is dark, but still—Grandmother might be watching.
Andromeda lifts her teacup the way it’s done if you’re filthy rich, fingers reeking of dollars, the teacup itself costing a father’s fortune.
“These gardens on the Isle of Messina are nothing short of spectacular,” she says faux posh, like Grandmother.
The creature Blunder hums from across a table clustered with delicacies, tight as the grapes overgrowing Grandmother’s garage; corpulent savories like what they ate at the reveling in Grandmother’s Shakespearean play.
There are rare cuts of beef, and flutes of white wine, and cheeses torn, and croissants steaming warm.
Andromeda straightens to pull off what Grandmother calls bien comfaits— “well-behaved.” Her foot won’t stop the tapping that grates Grandmother’s nerves, but that’s fine. If she’s watching, she can’t see beneath the folds of this empire summer dress.
The truth is—Andromeda can pull off an excellent Hero, like in Much Ado About Nothing, casting shy glances. If Grandmother just would look out here, she might change her mind.
“I want a goodbye,” says the creature Blunder, spectacular fangs overflowing his underbite.
“I hate goodbyes.” Andromeda manages the Tuscan Isle accent perfectly. “So do you.”
Blunder swipes away his platter of victuals. “You’re no lady.”
The creature Blunder seems not to be having a nice evening. He heard Grandmother say that Andromeda’s beyond her control; that boarding school is the only machine that can fix her.
Andromeda pounds the table so hard that a basket of napkins goes flying. “I’m a jewel!”
A shade crosses inside the dark kitchen window.
Andromeda snatches her teacup and cradles it. “Creatures are rarely invited to reveling luncheons, you know.”
‘Luncheon,’ another word belonging to Grandmother. It has the right sort of feel, but it stinks of pimento and cauliflower. Andromeda sips tea and tries to think of a better one.
Blunder taps his claws on the table. He, too, seems at a loss for words.
“Keep singing,” she orders him.
Blunder sets into warbling—a mockery of the lullaby sung in that Shakespearean play, ending in everyone dancing. The melody is pleasing, though Blunder keeps having to suck breaths, hunching, as he must, to approximate lady-like sitting. (His spiked tail curled beneath isn’t at all helping things.)
“Sweet creature. You sing like a nightingale.” Andromeda presses the petal-thin rim of her cup to her lips, but not too firmly. Pressing it too hard, even to her full, lady lips, might crack it.
“Here’s to the sunniest summer, to lots of white petals falling from trees in Messina, and to excellent dancing.” She clinks her cup to the claw Blunder reaches.
He lifts his song to a loftier key.
She offers her most pleasing smile. “Looking at you ruins the magic of the evening some.”
Blunder’s singing turns to a snarl. No wonder Grandmother pretends not to see him.
The sun paints silver on the sea-swollen clouds and shoots out, limelight fashion.
“How can I be anything but honest when the summer sun spotlighting our veranda (what’s a veranda?) is piercing us to the soul, and making our hair shine, and our teeth?” She bares her teeth, most of them all-the-way-in lady-teeth.
In the kitchen window, the shadow stops. Grandmother is watching.
Her eyes and Andromeda’s catch.
Grandmother’s face, barely visible through the dinged window seems an odd compilation of regret and relief.
Grandmother backs into the darkness. Her silhouette fades.
Blunder sets his scaly paws on the table, leans in, and roars, showing all his teeth, so much whiter and sharper than Andromeda’s.
“Fine, don’t pretend!” She hurls her cup through his head.
The cup bounces down a stone path and strikes the trunk of a spruce. It comes to rest on a scattering of needles and lies dully in the choked twilight. It’s no longer a teacup, but just a pinecone.
Blunder points his claw at her. “Your mom taught you no manners.”
“I haven’t got any mom!”
The declaration shocks Blunder so bad that he vanishes in a puff of steam, leaving Andromeda alone and breathing hard, the evening fogging before her.
Andromeda’s mom wasn’t really a mom. Real moms want kids, and hers didn’t. (Though she might very well have if she’d known how this little girl can dance.)
Mom had been too young, Grandmother said, but she believed her lover—who wasn’t really a lover—when he told her refusing kids was like avoiding the draft. So, Mom had a daughter and split, and the lover was bones in the earth, leaving the fruits of their dutiful deed to Grandmother.
Andromeda pictures her parents half-turning to see her from their dance floor, then vanishing.
She glances at the wide, shining sky, willing it to be a Messina countryside canopy.
But it fails. It isn’t wide. Only tall neighbor’s houses lean in. And nothing is shining. And everything’s gray.
Quietly growling, Blunder crawls out of a puddle and ambles to her. He settles by her feet, sticks his back claw inside his huge ear and sets to digging. The rain that threatened all afternoon falls.
Andromeda winks as drops strike her eyes. “Will you not play along, sky? This is it. My last chance.”
Though the sky’s bent on storming, it doesn’t have Blunder’s spunk, and it refuses to even growl its defiance. It just falls apart all over her until she’s soaked.
Grandmother’s golden patio bulbs—strung around the fence—zap awake in the artificial dusk of the storm.
“You’ve caught me,” Andromeda shouts, spotlights—stage lights—all around, snapping on.
They turn toward her, as though cranked by an invisible gaffer.
And what can she do but take her place at the center of the stage?
Drills to begin with. First position. Second position. Third. Pirouette.
No, not ballet. Ballet’s a poor pairing for this mud-splattery storm.
Tap dancing, then. The stone path is dotted with puddles and makes a smart catwalk. She clickity clacks down and up it, her hands jazzy and cool. She taps until tapping with no music loses its novelty.
Interpretive dance, it must be.
This feels right. Interpretive dance needs no music, and there is no music because Blunder’s refusing to sing and is just sitting by the teacup-turned-pinecone, sniveling.
Interpretive dancing needs every bit of the body. Andromeda conjures her finest prowl, moving along the fence to share the story of the tiger who spends his days pacing the length of the glass.
She scrambles from one end of the yard to the other, casting her arms at gate handles, trying each exit. But all are forbidden. Even the last gate, hanging open, is unpassable, strung as it is with Grandmother’s decorative lights.
Though a boundary line, the lights are beautiful. Though beautiful, they are a boundary line.
Grandmother seems like a queen laying claim to all things wrapped inside of those lights—clothes to keep nice and a backyard for show and opinions for swallowing.
She claims even a little girl who doesn’t belong to her, and the power to force the little girl to live at a boarding school for at-risk girls.
Andromeda lifts a long, smooth stick and holds it to one of the lights.
It brightly divides Grandmother’s property from what doesn’t belong to her—all that living city and wide world where her proclamations don’t matter.
Andromeda swings. The bulb bursts.
She waits for the flicker and snap of the whole line.
They don’t fizzle, but just go on beaming their filaments, bright and defiant like tongues.
Another, better whack. Another bulb pops.
But the line doesn’t die. The machine is too failsafe.
