The Nix(79)

Why did she come here? She regrets it now. She regrets summoning Henry under the pale blue flame of the lighthouse. She hasn’t told him, but there’s another reason she calls that thing a lighthouse. It’s because a lighthouse is two-faced, and this is how she feels each time she visits. A lighthouse is both an invitation and a warning. A lighthouse says Welcome home. But next to that, right after that, it also says Danger.





2


IT’S A SATURDAY NIGHT late in April 1968—the night of Faye’s senior prom. Henry picks her up at six o’clock with a rose and a corsage. His hands fumble as he pins the flowers to her gown. He pulls on the fabric near her chest as if he were pantomiming, right there before her parents, all the awkward gestures of teenage groping. Yet her mother takes photographs, says Smile. And Faye guesses this corsage business was invented by parents—very protective parents wanting to ensure that their daughters’ suitors were not too familiar with the garments and breasts of women. Clumsiness is probably the best thing here—it signals little danger of bastard children. And Henry is a man inept with flowers. He cannot get the corsage pinned correctly. He grazes the needle across her skin and leaves a thin red line on her breastbone. It reminds her of the horizontal bar in the letter A.

“It’s my scarlet letter!” she says, laughing.

“What?” Henry says.

“My scarlet dash, actually.”

Everything is easier when they dance. She takes to the floor and does the Twist. She does the Madison. She does the Mashed Potato and the Jerk and the Watusi. Faye’s teenage years have been consistently buoyed by new dance crazes that appear every few weeks on the Top 40. The Monkey. The Dog. The Locomotion. Songs and dances that enact a perfect circle—the song tells you everything you need to know about the dance, and the dance gives reason for the song. When Marvin Gaye sang “Hitch Hike,” she knew exactly what to do. When Jackie Lee sang “The Duck,” Faye could do it even before she saw it on TV.

So here she is, staring at the floor, doing the Duck in a blue charmeuse prom dress—lift the left leg, then the right leg, then flap your arms, then repeat. That’s what goes for dancing these days. Every prom and homecoming and Valentine’s Day dance is like this, the deejay playing a song that tells you precisely what to do. The big new thing this year is Archie Bell and the Drells singing “Tighten Up”—shuffle to your left, then shuffle to your right. “Tighten it up now, everything will be outta sight.” Somewhere nearby Henry is dancing too, but Faye doesn’t notice. These are dances meant to be done alone. When you do the Freddie, the Chicken, the Twist, even on a crowded dance floor, you do them by yourself. They aren’t allowed to touch each other and so they dance alone. They perform the dances that fit exactly what their chaperones want of them. They are told how to dance and they respond like proper bureaucrats, is what Faye thinks now as she watches all her classmates. They are happy, satisfied, soon-to-be-graduates, pro-authoritarian, their parents support the war, they have color televisions. When Chubby Checker says, “Take me by my little hand and go like this,” he is telling her generation how to respond to what is happening to them—the war, the draft, the sexual prohibitions—he is telling them to obey.

But then at the end of the night, the deejay announces he has time for one more song—“This one’s very special,” he says—and so Faye and Henry and the other students move slowly back to the dance floor, feet tired from all the shuffling and twisting, and the deejay puts on a new record and Faye hears the needle catch, the scratch before it falls into the groove, the static, and then comes this song.

It doesn’t even sound like music at first; more like some crude primeval screeching, the dense noise of strings all playing dissonant and muddy—a violin maybe, and some freakish guitar repeatedly striking the same chord—the slow, monotonous beat of a bass drum, the insistent reverb, the singer not actually singing but chanting. Faye can’t make out the words, can’t identify a chorus, can find no beat to dance to. A dreadful sexy moaning, that’s what it is. A phrase pops out: “Whiplash girlchild in the dark.” What does that even mean? Around her, the students move with the music, move as sluggishly and languidly as the music itself: They stagger toward each other, touch each other, grab each other by the waist and squeeze their bodies together. It is the slowest dance Faye has ever seen. She looks at Henry, who stands there worried and helpless while around him dancers wiggle like giant worms. How do they know what to do? The song gives no instructions. Faye loves it. She grabs Henry by the back of the neck and pulls him into her. Their bodies slap together. He stands there bewildered as Faye lifts her arms over her head and closes her eyes and turns her face to the ceiling and sways.

The chaperones, meanwhile, are wary. They don’t know what is happening but they are sure it’s wrong. They force the deejay to stop the song and the dancers groan. They walk back to their tables.

“What were you doing out there?” Henry asks.

“Dancing,” Faye says.

“What dance is it? What’s it called?”

“Nothing. It’s not called anything. It’s just, you know, it’s just dancing.”

Afterward, Henry takes her to the park, a quiet neighborhood park near her house, unlit, private, one of the few places in this small town to be alone. She expects this. Henry is a boy who believes in romantic gestures. He pays for candlelit dinners and buys candy in heart-shaped boxes. He shows up at her house smiling like a jack-o’-lantern handing her fat bunches of lilies and irises. He leaves roses in her car. (That the roses shrivel in the heat and die, she never tells him.) Henry doesn’t know the meaning of the flowers, the differences between red roses and white, between a lily and an iris. This is a language he does not speak. He does not know how to love Faye creatively, and so he does what everyone else in high school does: candles and chocolates and flowers. He treats love like a balloon, like it is all a very simple matter of accumulation, just adding more air. And so the flowers keep coming. And the dinners. And the love poems that appear in her locker from time to time, typewritten, unsigned—