Marathon Dancing
By Paul Perry
Hazel Axelrod was sitting on a yellow plastic sofa in the corner of the big, brightly-lit room, chewing her Dentyne gum and feeling bored, when she saw her daughter Tildy come bouncing across the room. Hazel sighed, watching her. Why does she bounce like that? she wondered, remembering the Tildy of forty years ago, a tall, thin teenager with stringy blond hair, getting off the school bus and coming across the lawn, bouncing just as she was bouncing now.
“Mom, you’re not circulating! This is a mixer, for God’s sake.” Tildy flopped down on the sofa, turned her purple-framed spectacles toward Hazel. “There’s some very nice people here, Mom. I already talked to a couple of nice men.” She leaned toward her mother, giving her a whiff of her gardenia-scented cologne. Hazel met her gaze, or tried to-the spectacles were tinted a dark pink-and said, “I told you, Tildy, I’m not here looking for a man. You might be but I’m fine just like I am.”
Tildy sighed. “Dad’s been gone almost four years now, Mom. You have to be a little lonely.”
“A little bit, yeah,” Hazel said, shrugging, “but I got my cats, my garden, my movies.”
“You’ve got to stop watching those old movies, Mom. Lillian Gish, for God’s sake. John Barrymore. Buster Keaton.” Tildy shook her head. “They’re all dead, Mom.”
Hazel raised her chin, gave her daughter a hard stare. “They’ll live as long as people watch their movies, Mathilda. I watch Lilliam Gish and I laugh when she laughs, I cry when she cries. These actresses today, they’re nothing but big busts and bigger bottoms. I don’t-”
“Mom!” Tildy bent forward, said in a whisper, “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. Someone might hear you.”
Hazel shrugged, glanced around the room. “So what? All I see is a bunch of old fogeys. I’ve never seen so many baldheaded men and blue haired women in my life. They should all be home taking their medication.”
Tildy gave Hazel that look, lips pursed, one eyebrow lifted, a look that Hazel was seeing all too often these days. “Maybe I need to remind you that you’re seventy-one, Mom, and you could use a little tint yourself.”
“Listen, my hair’s been white since I was in my fifties and it’s going to stay that way.”
“Well,” Tildy said, “these people aren’t all old, Mom. I just talked to a nice man in his early fifties.” Tildy touched her perm, smoothed a couple of wayward gray-blond hairs. “He invited me to have some punch with him.”
“So go have punch with him,” Hazel said. Then she reached out and took her daughter’s hand. “But no duds, hon. Okay? You’ve had your share of duds.”
Tildy sighed. “Listen, I’ve just had a lot of bad luck, Mom.”
Hazel, who had heard that song before, said, “And two bad marriages and a couple of bad almost-marriages. Just be careful, Tildy.” She patted her daughter’s hand then released it.
“Okay, Mom. But please circulate a bit, okay? I can’t enjoy myself, seeing you sitting over here like a bump on a log.” Then she hurried away, headed for a heavyset gray-haired man who was standing in a corner, looking uncomfortable. She walked staight up to the man and said, “Hi. I’m ready for that punch.”
The man nodded, smiled. “Oh, yeah. Okay. Listen, you stay right here. I’ll go get it.”
When he came back with two glasses of lime punch, Tildy thanked him, then followed him to two orange plastic chairs. ‘So,” he said, after they were seated, “you married, widowed, divorced, what?”
Tildy was pleased by his directness and she also liked his eyes, which were a deep blue, although his face was ruddy, just a little bit puffy. She paused before answering his question, although she had been asked it before and always answered it the same way. “Divorced. Twice.” She shrugged. “I’ve had bad luck with men.”
“Well,” the man said, “I just had bad luck once, but once was enough.” He looked at Tildy and asked, “So did you get a lot of money out of these bad luck cases of yours?”
“Nope. Actually finding work was one of their problems.”
“Huh. Both of them?”
Tildy sighed. “Yep.” Then she squared her shoulders. “But I do okay on my own. I’m manager of a temp office.”
The man nodded, leaned closer. “Well, my ex took me for just about everything I had. We’ve got two kids; she got sole custody plus child support.” He frowned, said through taut lips, “She’s a real bloodsucker, that’s what she is.” Then he grinned. “But I quit my job before the divorce hearing; since I was broke and out of a job, the judge didn’t give her much child support.”
Tildy nodded, smiling at him.
Hazel watched Tildy approach the man standing in the corner, wondering what it was about big, hulking men that attracted her daughter, then she sighed, stood, and wandered over to a table that bore a large punch bowl containing a vile-looking greenish-yellow liquid and a scattering of paper plates bearing an assortment of cookies. She poured herself a cup of punch, took a taste, put the cup down, then reached in her pocket for a fresh piece of Dentyne.
“Pretty good punch, huh?” Hazel smelled him before she looked at him: Old Spice, applied liberally, and something else, stale sweat maybe. She turned and found herself looking at a wig. It was orange-red, looked like it had been used to dust the furniture, and it was perched slightly askew on a large head that was fringed on the sides with skimpy gray hairs. Hazel thought to herself, That is without a doubt the ugliest wig I ever saw in my life. She started to tell him that but pressed her lips together, managed-with considerable effort-to hold back the words. “The punch is lousy,” she said instead, sticking the Dentyn in her mouth.
“Ah-hah,” the man said. “Gum.”
Uh-oh, Hazel thought, I’ve got a genius on my hands. “Yep,” she said. “Gum.” He was shorter by several inches than Hazel’s erect five-ten, had a round, ruddy face, a fat nose, watery blue eyes and very large, almost perfectly white teeth. Dentures, Hazel thought. Cheapies at that.
“So,” the man said heartily, “I haven’t seen you at any of our little gatherings before.” He showed her more of the dentures. “Are you new in town, little girl?” He apparently thought he had just said something funny; he guffawed, grabbing Hazel by the arm in the process. When he finally stopped laughing, he held on to Hazel’s arm.
“Nope,” Hazel said, stepping back and out of his grip, giving him a closer look. Why, she wondered, would anybody wear white shoes and black dress pants with a purple and yellow Hawaiian shirt? Again, she started to say something, managed to say instead, “I’m here with my daughter. This was her idea.”
The man nodded, moved close, asked in a low voice, “So how’s your health? You look pretty good. You got a good health plan?”
Hazel gave him a long look. “I’m fine.”
The man grinned. “Me too. You’d never know I had major surgery just fifteen months ago, huh?”
“I guess not,” Hazel said.
“Prostate,” he said, almost whispering. “I went all the way to Nashville to get it done. There’s a surgeon there that does it so that you don’t have any problems afterward.”
Hazel gave him a quizzical look, glanced around to see if she saw Tildy.
“What that means,” the man said, moving so close she could feel the moistness of his breath-Yep, sure enough, Polident-and grasping her arm again. “That means that I’m still functional. You know what that means?”
Hazel reached down and removed his hand. “I guess it means you don’t pee on yourself.” She started to walk away then turned back to face him. “Listen,” she said, “I’m not going to say anything about your strange taste in clothes, but I’ve got to tell you, chum, that is the godawful ugliest wig I ever saw in my life.”
She was back on the sofa a few minutes later, thinking about making a hasty exit, leave Tildy there with her bear-like friend, when Tildy herself came bouncing over, plopped down beside her mother. “Well,” she said, “he had to leave, but he really seemed very nice. Right now though,” she said, looking over her shoulder, “I’m trying to escape some weird old geezer, looks to be a hundred years old, roaming around the room talking everybody’s ear off.” Then she groaned. “And speak of the devil and up he jumps.”
“Lookie, lookie, lookie,” the old man sang out, bending over in front of them, “here comes cookie.” Then he stared at Hazel, said, “Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll. Can I sit down here and kind of inhale your charms for awhile?” He didn’t even look at Tildy.
Hazel leaned back, looked him up and down. Red beret with feathery white hair streaming out behind it. Red jacket over red T-shirt-she could make out the words “I’m not old, I just had a bad night”-and, of course, red pants. His face was long and lean with a large, bony nose and a chin to match, wild-looking gray eyes topped by bushy silver-gray eyebrows. His back was bent and he was thin to the point of emaciation but he gave the impression of being chock-full of pent-up energy. After glancing once toward the door, Hazel shrugged. The old man dropped into a chair across from the two of them, immediately bent forward. “Sisters, huh?”
Hazel laughed and Tildy gasped, got up and bounced across to the other side of the room.
“The name’s Ingemar ‘Iron Legs’ Abramovich,” the old man said. “You might have heard of me. Southwest Marathon Dance Champion for three years running, nineteen thirty-one through thirty three, lost in thirty-four to a French-Canadian named Pierre Leconte who had these steel bars strapped to his legs, kept him upright for five hundred and forty-three hours and seventeen minutes, just one hour and eleven minutes over my record established in thirty-two at the Golden Globe Ballroom in downtown Houston. I had this assistant that dropped slivers of ice-none of these fancy ice cubes in those days-dropped these long slivers of ice chopped right off a big fifty pound block down the back of my shirt and once in awhile down the back of my pants, dropped that ice in there when I started to doze and knees started to wobble. I used to do that kind of thing but never, not once, did I use anything mechanical like steel bars. Claimed a foul but the National Marathon Dance Committee turned me down. Been trying to get that championship back ever since thirty-three and haven’t even thought about giving up. I been thinking about going to some place like Vegas or Atlantic City, see if I can get some interest stirred up in a little five-day bout, figure that if I can get enough dancers to make a legitimate contest out of it, I can win the thing and then just keep on dancing and maybe, just maybe, win the championship back.” He leaned over and grinned and Hazel thought, Uh-huh, thought so. No teeth.
“Listen,” he said, his gray eyes bright and intense, “do you happen to dance?”
Hazal smiled a faint smile. “I used to. Too old now for that kind of stuff.”
The old man gave her the once-over. “Say, you’re not nearly as old as I am, and I can dance up a storm.”
“And just how old are you?” Hazel waited for the big lie.
The old man frowned. “Well, I stopped counting after I hit eighty but that was some time ago. Anyway, age is all in the mind. In my mind, see, I’m younger than I was ten years ago, maybe even twenty or thirty years ago.”
Hazel had a thought, bent toward him. “Listen, did you used to go see Lillian Gish in the movies when she was young?”
“Did I see Lillian Gish in the movies? Listen, I saw Lillian Gish herself, in person. I was doing a dance marathon in Los Angeles, about nineteen twenty-nine-nope, it was before the Crash-about nineteen twenty-eight, and I went out to the lot where they was making movies, see if I could get some work as an extra, crowd scene maybe. Well, I didn’t get any work but I saw Lillian, saw her standing right there in front of the camera.”
“Listen,” Hazel asked, “was she as beautiful as she is in the movies?”
The old man was quiet for a moment, staring at Hazel, until finally he said in a hushed voice, “More beautiful. I fell in love with her right there on the spot. Fell head-over-heels in love with her.”
Hazel couldn’t speak for a moment, sat there thinking about what he had said, then she asked him, “Listen, do you ever go see any of her movies?”
Later on, walking down the street, Tildy told her mother that the man she had met earlier seemed very nice, had had marriage problems just like she had. “He asked me to go to dinner sometime, said he’d give me a call.” Then Hazel told Tildy that she was going to the theater that showed nothing but old movies, going with Mr. Ingemar Abramovich. “And after the movie,” she said, striding along, “we might even go dancing.”
Tildy stopped and gaped at her. “You’ve got to be kidding, Mom. He’s old as the hills, got to be late eighties, maybe even ninety.”
Hazel kept walking, waited for Tildy to catch up with her, then turned to her and said, “Yep, he’s old all right. But the thing is, he don’t know that.”
Tildy sighed. “Well,” she said, “to each his own.”
“You got that right,” said Hazel.
