2021
Dancing with Bette Davis’s Daughter james provencher
R
ight away I wanted to quit. What did a Westend streetkid like me think he was doing there? That Christmas my aunt had good intentions I guess when she gave my brother and me a year’s course at Dorothy Mason’s School of Dance. We were to be polished up into gentlemen. Something that would not naturally happen on the wrong side of the tracks on the western edge of Portland, Maine. The lines of class and wealth were sharply drawn. West of us was Libbytown and the Libbytowners were toughs who regularly beat the shit out of us along the border line between the Westend and the nether zones that quickly petered into jack-built shacks, and finally ending in cinder-carpeted railyards and claypan hobo jungles. That was our playground where we hopped freights to Rigby Yard or listened to yarning bindlestiffs while they sizzled franks over sputtering fires and spooned beans cooked in cans they came in. In winter we rode ice cakes out into the stinking harbor on the quirky tidal currents of Fore River or skated up the Stroudwater on black pristine ice. You have to know this to appreciate where I was coming from when my mother said you and your brother will be going to dance school. You’ve got to be kidding. We used to hide and ambush Phil Simmonds when he came out of his weekly piano lesson because we saw him as a cultural traitor. His mother wouldn’t let him play football because he might injure the fingers destined to tickle the ivories. Later Phil was allowed to be the kicker—and a good one—on our high school football team, but then he was an affront to our simplistic code. And yet we, unlike the Libbytown Tartars, were caught on the border, we were being pushed over the line. *** Over, under, around—that’s it, and pull tight. Now that’s a perfect Half-Windsor, my father said. This was harder than learning to tie a bowline. Then came the loud sport coat you could play chess on and the freshly shined shoes you had to see your reflection in. The final touch: white cotton gloves, the kind museum archivists use, so as not to soil the girls’ taffeta. My brother and I knew it was to keep flesh from flesh exposed by backless gowns, the flesh we secretly wished to touch. The dance floor was a waxed sheeny parquet that mesmerized my eyes. I was glossed out by it and dreamed of chasing pretty pony-tailed girls and roller-rinking on it. But there 82
The Lowell Review
