Ballroom by Alice Sherman Simpson

Author:Alice Sherman Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 28

Sarah

Never press your society upon persons who seem indifferent to you.

—Rudolph Radestock, The Royal Ball-Room Guide, 1877

Did you forget that we were going dancing last Tuesday?” Sarah asks.

Tony, his expression vague, is standing in the doorway of the Ballroom with his buddies. He shrugs and turns to talk to his friends.

Harry leaves around nine, and no one asks her to dance for the rest of the evening. Jimmy J the DJ isn’t there, and a substitute is playing too many quicksteps and hustles. It seems, at one point, he plays mambos for forty-five minutes.

When he finally plays two rumbas, she is so eager that she asks a stranger to dance. He leads her so tightly that she stumbles over his feet.

“Could you try to follow me?” The song is “Beautiful Maria,” her favorite rumba.

“Sorry,” she responds, even though she isn’t.

“You’re not following,” he repeats.

“You’re holding me too tight.”

“What are you doing?” he demands. “International?”

She counts six corrections he makes, which infuriates her. She wishes that you could walk away from a partner. Then again, it’s only one song. If there is one dance she knows, it is the rumba. The next man she asks dances off beat and keeps his distance, with a limp lead.

“Having trouble with the tempo?” he asks. “Follow me.”

“I am.”

“You’re leading.”

“Am I?” Will the song ever end? she wonders, as he repeats the same turning step until she feels dizzy.

“Count the rhythm. That should help you. Want to sit down? Can I get you a lemonade?”

“No, thank you. Will you excuse me?”

Meandering around the edges of the dance floor, she jealously watches as Tony D dances a rumba with Rebecca Douglas and more than a few fox-trots with Tina. It seems as if he dances with every other woman in the Ballroom—even Andrea, who is wearing the ugliest skirt and blouse Sarah has ever seen, but still laughing and having a grand old time. Sarah feels humiliated. Trips to the ladies’ room to fix her hair, put on lipstick, or cool her feet, which feel swollen, help pass the seemingly endless hours. It is clear that Tony D isn’t going to offer her a ride home. At ten o’clock, in complete misery, she thinks about her long subway ride home to Brooklyn and the ten-block walk in the February chill from the subway to her house, on dance-weary feet.

“Can I say I told you so?” Tina says as they sit out a quickstep. Tina is always telling her what to do. “Look. You had a few wonderful weeks. Get over it.” Tina Ostrov looks as ditzy and redheaded as Lucille Ball, but she isn’t. Sarah observes that she’s had plenty of cosmetic surgery, making it difficult to determine her age. Tina has the face and body of a young woman, but the crepey skin and brown spots on her hands betray her. She’s too familiar with all the men at the Ballroom, particularly the older men.

A small, stooped elderly man limps over and asks Sarah to dance a mambo.

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