Dancing Lessons by Olive Senior

Author:Olive Senior
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dancing Lessons
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1719-9
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2011-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

50

EIGHT YEARS LATER AND Lise was living with him, in his nice posh house on the outskirts of town, where the rich people lived, with his new woman. Lise left home as soon as she finished her exams. She didn’t wait on the results, probably because she knew she had done so badly. She stayed in the town to get a job for the summer, she said, sharing with Shirley, who by then had a little apartment of her own on the side of someone’s house. Lise used to come home for weekends quite often, for I insisted, and then it got less and less. She was such a liar that it was some time before I knew that she was no longer living with Shirley but had moved in with her father. It wasn’t “a big ting” as she put it, she had her own room and she wasn’t paying rent, and though it was a bit out of town Dad—as he had become—drove her to and from work for she had no intention of going back to school.

Next thing I knew, she was having a baby. Some married man she had taken up with. Lise always worried about her looks, considered herself ugly, which is probably why from an early age she was so determined to attract attention from boys. I could see it in the way she sexed up her clothes, puffed up the hair, dyed it, pouted her lips, invested in looks rather than books until she did become in time quite glamorous looking, in the way of teenagers then, tight skirts, little tops, cleavage, and endless costume jewellery and makeup. An earlier version of my hairdresser Morveen. But what the hell was she doing at eighteen with this hard-back businessman even though he drove a Mercedes-Benz? His wife rammed her car into their apartment building at one time and grabbed Lise on the street one day and gave her a good box, though of course Lise retaliated. Next thing she’s up on an assault charge, though I guess wiser heads prevailed and the charge was dropped. Ostrich-like, I kept my head down and pretended it had nothing to do with me each time a new scandal reached my ears. Millie or someone else in the district would be sure to bring me the news. They all professed sympathy at those times, but I could see their eyes glittering with the excitement of the scandal, hoping to get some extra tidbit from me. They never did, for my only reaction was, “I don’t business.”

That was only the beginning. Lise got into any number of scrapes and ended up having two other children by two different men. She had moved to some other part of the island and for a long time I neither saw nor heard from her. Junior told me she had settled down and taken some business courses and had gone into real estate and was doing quite well. That part didn’t surprise me.

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