Changing Partners

by John Christmann

I feel terrible. I did something as a father that I never, ever thought I would do. I agreed to sign my son up for dancing lessons.

If I were more dishonorable I would blame this on my wife. After all, it was her idea. As my son entered his teenage years she wanted to prepare him for the various social situations to which he would soon be exposed. I knew it was the right thing to do, so I agreed. And now I am painfully dealing with the guilt of betrayal; because I vividly remember when my mother forced me to take dancing lessons.

I was thirteen, and I just couldn’t understand why I had to learn ballroom dancing. When would I ever need to do the Fox Trot? These were the dances of distant generations inspired by musty music that had no relevance and no beat. At my age no one did the box step to Led Zeppelin just as no one did the twist to The Blue Danube. Everyone just moved to the music.

I knew this to be true because just six weeks earlier I had attended my first school dance. In a dimly lit gymnasium decorated with crepe paper and balloons I gyrated to loud rock music that reverberated mercilessly from the PA system. I shuffled my feet and swung my arms in time with the music as best I could. At one point I accidentally hit my friend in the head with my elbow. He pushed me back laughing, pumping his fist in time to the music. I reeled back and stepped on something hard, which gave way under my foot. I turned around and stood face to face with Susie Murray, the most popular girl in the school. She looked at me like I deserved to be pelted with dodge balls. Then she turned and limped away.

Knowing the Fox Trot would have done little to avoid this situation.

“I am not going.” I told my mom definitively the night of my first dance lesson. I felt emboldened because for the first time in my life I knew without reservation that she was completely out of touch with reality. No one my age danced those dances. No one wore jackets and ties to a dance. This was old people’s stuff. She didn’t get it. But as emboldened as I felt, I still had little control over my destiny. After much wrangling, it became clear that I would be going.
“OK!” I said. “But I am not going to enjoy it.” It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I was enrolled in Mrs. Keenie’s Dance and Etiquette Class for Young Adults. ‘Where Manners Matter!’ said her flyer, which subversively came home in my school bag addressed to my parents. Mrs. Keenie didn’t have her own dance studio; instead she brought her brand of misery to each school in the district so that all children of misguided parents could have the opportunity to suffer equally. Most of the kids referred to her as Mrs. Keenie the Big Fat Meanie. But she was neither fat nor mean. In fact, I secretly called her Mrs. Keenie In Betweenie because she was so hard to characterize. She was neither young nor old, mean nor nice, comely nor homely, warm nor cold. She was somewhere in between, which only compounded the anxiety she struck into adolescents like me who were neither kids nor adults.

On the night of my first lesson, Mrs. Keenie introduced herself politely and formally to each of the students as we entered the gymnasium. It was the same gymnasium where six weeks earlier I had put Susie Murray in a cast with a fourth metatarsal fracture of the right foot. I waited my turn in line and tugged at the tie that was methodically choking off my air supply.

“Good evening. My name is Florence Keenie” she said as I approached, holding her hand out stiffly in front of her. She was wearing a white glove. I looked down and grabbed it in my sweaty palm. It was already smudged, I guess by the hands ahead of me, so I didn’t feel so bad that I still had the dirt of an after-school flag football game under my fingernails. She took her other hand and firmly lifted my chin. “Look me in the eyes,” she said in the corrective voice of a school teacher. And then she warmly added, “I am very pleased to meet you.” My hand moved up and down in her guiding grasp. And then I moved on.

It didn’t get much better after that. Mrs. Keenie spent the next hour instructing us how to greet people, how to shake hands, how to look someone in the eye, how to make people feel at ease. It was a drill, and without a trace of enjoyment, I methodically introduced myself over and over to a line of girls that I already knew. I was completely humiliated to be there, but not as humiliated as the girls appeared to be in my presence. So during a break I ran to the restroom to wash my hands. I tucked in my shirttail and examined myself in the mirror. My hair was standing up in the back. There was food caught in my braces. My ears were too big. I came to the startling realization that I was a dork. I looked around at the other boys in the restroom who were nervously combing their hair. They were dorks too. I remember the discomfort like it was yesterday.

The girls sat in a long row of cold steel folding chairs on the other side of the gymnasium from the boys. They wore soft white gloves and bracelets with charms and fancy sleeveless dresses pinned with fragrant corsages. They sat upright with their feet together and their hands resting still in their laps. Their hair was arranged nicely so that they didn’t look like themselves. I would never admit it to anyone, but the girls all looked pretty. I wondered if they felt as awkward as I did, but looking at how composed they were, I thought not. No one could feel as awkward as I did at that moment. I concentrated on my fidgeting hands which were not allowed to go in my pockets. I could not find a comfortable place for them to exist.

Then Mrs. Keenie did the unthinkable. She directed all of the boys to walk across the gymnasium, and politely ask the girl of our choice to dance. We were to escort our partners to the dance floor where we would learn how to dance a waltz. I was mortified.

I quickly counted the number of girls. Fourteen. Then I looked down our row of boys. Fifteen. Mrs. Keenie released us and I moved as if my shoes were full of concrete. The less timid boys walked swiftly across the room to reach Susie Murray who was now in a walking cast and only limping slightly. But I had a different tactic. By the time I ambled across the gymnasium floor all of the girls were paired and standing with their partners. All I faced were empty seats, and I congratulated myself on my cunning.

But then, like a bad dream, Mrs. Keenie appeared seated on an empty chair. She looked me expectantly in the eye. I could almost feel her gloved hand holding my chin up to meet her gaze. As I approached she whispered instructions that only I could hear. I was to be her demonstration partner she told me. And then, as if I were floating outside my body high above the gymnasium floor where even the dodge balls failed to fly, I heard myself ask Mrs. Keenie to dance. As the other kids snickered, I took Mrs. Keenie’s gloved hand in the crook of my arm and escorted her to the front of the room. She led. I followed. My palms were damp. My knees were cold.

Following her instruction, I held up her right hand and moved my own around her waist to the small of her back. She rested her left hand lightly on my shoulder. We stood neither apart nor connected. And because she was neither short nor tall, I was staring safely at her neck which was neither smooth nor wrinkled. She shifted ever so slightly as I pressed my cold and clammy hand firmly on her back, but she betrayed no sign of disgust. I was nervous and uncomfortable. My legs felt cold all over now. My hands too. Like a window was open. Mrs. Keenie was giving more instructions but I couldn’t hear her. There was no sound. As I stood awkwardly with Mrs. Keenie in my arms, I looked helplessly out on the dance floor. Everyone was pointing and laughing at me. Laughing without a sound. A cold draft whipped up my legs. Horrified, I looked down. I wasn’t wearing any pants.

This is pretty much how this dream ended for many years. When I became an adult it finally gave way to the more pragmatic nightmare where the classroom had moved—the classroom where the final exam was scheduled to take place for the course I needed to complete in order to graduate from college. But as an adolescent who was working his way painfully through confusing social situations, I awoke many nights waltzing on a dance floor in front of a large crowd wearing nothing but my underwear, a blue blazer, and a paisley tie.

Ultimately Mrs. Keenie did not teach me to dance the fox trot. No one could do that. There was just too much adolescent concrete in my shoes. But later in life I learned to waltz in a tuxedo, just as I learned to writhe on the floor at fraternity parties in a toga. I was comfortable doing both.

But I learned something important from Mrs. Keenie: I learned how to survive formal situations. She taught me how to behave as though I belonged in situations where I probably didn’t. Mrs. Keenie exposed me to the ghost world of archaic conventions and unspoken social expectations, and she taught me to negotiate the awkward space in between. She taught me that I would never ever be embarrassed by being too polite. And of course, she taught me to always make sure I was wearing pants when I left the house. It is a different kind of dance that I learned.

This is what I am thinking on the night of my son’s first dance lesson. He is standing on a stool; his face is inches from mine. He is not happy.
“I am not going,” he challenges me. The tone of his voice is somewhere between conviction and resignation, because as he is speaking, I am securing his tie snugly against his neck.
“Maybe you will enjoy it,” I reply, looking him in the eye. The tone of my voice is also somewhere between conviction and resignation, because as I am speaking he is pulling on the tie that will methodically choke his air supply for the rest of the evening.

I want to make him feel comfortable, but I don’t know what to say. I want to tell him what I have come to know, but he will not understand. He wants to say something too, but he doesn’t. He does not think I will understand what he is going through. At this moment, I realize, we are separated only by experience.

I look at his freshly scrubbed face perched stiffly atop adult clothes that he is just starting to fit, and I smile. He is changing.
“Hey partner,” I tell him holding my right hand in the air in front of him, “you look awesome!” He smiles begrudgingly and slaps me five, intertwining his fingers in mine as he jumps off the stool to look in the mirror. His hair is combed. His hands are clean. His teeth are brushed. His tie is loose.
“Thanks, Dad,” he says.

It is our first dance in the space between.