Not Now

“Miss Jenny.”

“Not now, Susan. Let’s go back to one and try it from the beginning.” 

“Miss Jenny.”

“Susan, we will get water after we do the dance one more time.” 

“No, Miss Jenny. I have a question about the dance.” 

“Let’s just run it through and see if your question works itself out.” 

Miss Jenny starts the music, a piano-heavy instrumental version of an old Radiohead song that none of the kids would have known even in its original form. The speaker in the back of the room dances with color, bursts of green and yellow and purple appearing and morphing into one another to the meter of the song. There are four children – just four – in various positions throughout the room, moving in their prescribed ways, sometimes clumsy, sometimes beautiful. One looks to another to try to remember the dance while the other looks back at them doing the same. They’ll have it down by the holiday recital, but it’s still pretty messy. The lines don’t look right, either. There is a gap that moves through the room right along with the children, calling Miss Jenny’s eye, as much a part of the dance as anyone. She will need to address that. 

Susan moves along with the other kids but reaches an impasse and stops mid-dance. The rest of the kids move around her, but seeing her stop disrupts them and things quickly unravel. Miss Jenny stops the music with a tap on her phone. 

“Miss Jenny.” 

“Yes, Susan.”

“What do I do when we get to the lift part? That’s when Patty is supposed to lift me, but Patty isn’t here and we never really talked about what I’m supposed to do when she’s not here.” 

“I’ll need to think about that. I’m sorry. Everyone grabsome water.” 

It feels like all she does is think about what to do when Patty isn’t there, but she can’t tell the kids that. 

The kids come back from their break and finish out the class, awkwardly marking the place of the infamous lift, pretending it isn’t part of the dance. Pretending the lines aren’t unbalanced and the emptiness isn’t the most visible thing to all of them. 

Miss Jenny gives the kids stickers on their way out, telling them it was a great class and that they all did so well. It’s rote, but the kids don’t see her do it twelve other times all week long, so they don’t know that. Susan’s mom -- whose name is saved in Miss Jenny’s phone as “Susan’s mom,” comprising her full identity in Miss Jenny’s mind -- walks into the dance room. 

“Do you know when Patty will be back?” Susan’s mom asks, oblivious.

The question is unanswerable, so she brushes it aside. “We’re not sure,” she says, though she’s pretty sure. “It could be any day now, or it could be much longer,” she waffles, knowing it won’t be any day now and probably won’t happen after any length of time. The real answer is “almost certainly never and we need to move on,” but that’s not an answer she can speak into existence. 

Classes continue until it’s dark. As the last class begins to wrap up, she calls the pizza place two doors down to order a medium with mushrooms and banana peppers. She gives out the last stickers for the day, and the last verbal pats on the back. The end of the day routine consists of shutting off. Air conditioning off, stereo off, lights off. Not quite everything shuts off, though. She walks past the banner from Patty’s third place overall at one of the previous year’s dance competitions on her way out the door. She locks the banner inside. 

Later she eats her pizza, her choreography notebook on the bed beside her, her phone in one hand, and the television playing an episode of Golden Girls. She could rewrite the lift section of the dance and clean up the lines. It would just take a few marks in the notebook, and she already knew what she would write. It would be the smallest thing. Next week there would be no questions, no ghostly gap. 

Instead, she texts Patty’s grandmother. After a pause the ellipses appear, pulsing. A minute goes by, letting herself become entranced by the ellipses. They leave a shadow in hervision when they go away. There is no message. They reappear. Minutes pass. Finally, a text. It says nothing. It’s a rehash of the same false hope from last week and the week before. The same false hope from when the birthday party got planned and then canceled. 

“Is she safe, at least? Do we know?” she texts back to the grandmother. 

No ellipses form in response. Golden Girls gives way to Friends. The choreography notebook remains closed. 

“Is she happy?” she texts again. 

Still no ellipses. Maybe the grandmother went to bed. It is after eleven on a weeknight after all. 

The next day Miss Jenny has work at her regular job. She checks people in at a neurology office and answers the phones. She’s not “Miss Jenny” there, just “Jenny.” The work is constant and distracting. Most people are there with sad stories of strokes and limbs that no longer cooperate. They shuffle into the office, trying to corral their bodies that have become unfamiliar and traitorous. Many are on Medicaid because they can’t work. Most are quite old, but not all. As sad as the situations are, though, they are the noise of everyday life to Jenny. She doesn’t connect to the patients in the same deep way that she does with the kids. For one thing, she only sees the patients very briefly, but for another thing, the patients are beyond her reach. Really, they are beyond the reach of the neurologist, too. They are cases to be maintained with doses of medication and to be monitored with regular MRI’s and angiograms. With the kids at dance, they are young and trying to become who they are meant to be. They let her shape that process and participate in it. It fulfills and terrifies her. 

She doesn’t have dance that night, so she goes out to a movie after work and grabs some fast food on the way home. She’s still home in time to sit in bed and let the Golden Girls play, occasionally glancing at her notebook. Her phone dings. 

“Her dad says that he may let her come to dance next week if everything works out,” the grandmother’s text says. Now she imagines the grandmother looking at ellipses blinking in and out and she tries and fails to respond. She wants to respond with joy or at least hope. It’s a positive message and she wants to treat it as such. All she can do, though, is to wonder if Patty has a bed to sleep in. Is she getting enough food? Is she being hit, belittled, deprived? In the end, she never manages a response and goes to bed. 

Buzzing fills her head as she navigates the week, smiling at patients whose mouths droop to the side when they return her smile. Looking for something to occupy her during the weekend, and bouncing between myriad activities that she almost participates in. 

Finally, the day comes. The class begins and she assigns one of the kinds to lead the stretches while she peeks out the window. Stretches conclude and she tells the four kids – just four – to get to their beginning places for the dance. They look so wrong standing with that gap in the middle. It’s glaring and all-encompassing. 

“Miss Jenny.” 

She knew this was coming, but she didn’t prepare, because there was still hope. She didn’t prepare at all. 

“Miss Jenny,” Susan says again. 

“Not now, Susan.”