“I start you off easy,” Fifi says, and stoops to press play on the CD.
At first, we’re Tin-Man-from-Wizard-of-Oz stiff. I’m hyper-self-conscious and, paradoxically, hyperaware of everyone walking by. I sneak a peek at our potential “audience.” We get vaguely curious glances from tourists. The locals—the people who actually work nearby and are used to all kinds of performances—ignore us completely.
Next to us, Fifi hisses corrections: “Infinity hips! Stronger frame! Eye contact!”
The first song ends, but Fifi doesn’t give us time to rest. She plays three more bachata songs in a row. The tempo increases with each, so that by the fourth I’m concentrating too hard to have time for self-consciousness.
By the time the last song ends fifteen minutes later, X and I are both breathing hard.
Fifi waves us over. “Tell me,” she says. “Why you think no one is watching?”
I don’t answer. I know a rhetorical question when I hear one.
Evidently, X does too, because he doesn’t answer either.
“Not watching because both of you dancing with head, not heart. And too busy paying attention to the people not paying attention to you.” She looks at X. “You are in band. You perform on stage. Where is boldness?”
“Singing and ballroom dancing are not the same thing, Fi,” he says.
“But you have to have charisma, yes? Where is charisma?” she asks.
She turns to me. “Technique is not terrible,” she says. “But you are smoke without fire.”
I’m sure she’s right. Still I want to point out that
smoke is very hot
and
people die just as much from smoke inhalation as they do from actual flames.
However, there’s no way saying any of that will help my case.
Some little kids climb onto the wall surrounding the dinosaur sculptures and start pretending to be dinosaurs. They roar and I kind of want to join them.
“Try again,” Fifi says.
X and I move back into position.
“Let down your braids,” he says.
I touch my hand to my high ponytail and frown at him. “Why?”
“Just say yes,” he says. “We’re letting it all hang out.”
Something about taking my hair down feels too intimate. It makes me shy and unsteady.
“You have to take your dreads down too, then,” I say, trying to get my footing back.
He pulls out his hair tie with one hand. His locs fall around his shoulders and frame his face.
Our eyes meet and there’s a thread of something—an extra awareness—between us. A small, unwise part of me wants to hold on to that thread and see where it leads. The larger, more sensible part of me wants to find huge metaphorical scissors and snip that thread into tiny pieces.
The next song begins. Maybe it’s because our hair is down or because Fifi basically dared us to stop sucking, but for whatever reason, this dance is different.
The singer is a crooner. His voice sounds like he’s just found the meaning of life and he’s about to tell you what it is. Beneath his voice, the 4/4 rhythm is insistent. X throws his shoulders back and smiles into my eyes. His lead is confident. Somehow my hips have unsprung. Infinity hips achieved.
We slip into another song and then another. By the time we stop, there’s a crowd of fifteen or twenty people around us. Some of them even walk over to drop money into our tip jar.
I wait for them to drift away before I count up our earnings. “There’s fifty-seven dollars in here,” I say, shocked.
“Minus Fifi’s twenty, that’s thirty-seven bucks in forty minutes,” X adds.
That’s pretty good, actually.
“So how’d we look, Fi?” X asks.
I know we danced those last songs better than we ever have, but that doesn’t mean it was actually any good.
Fifi is uncharacteristically quiet.
“You’re scaring me,” I tell her.
“Me too,” says X.
“It’s still early stages,” she says.
“Yes,” I agree.
She turns to me. “And hips are better, but still nonsense.”
“Okay,” I say.
She turns to X. “And you couldn’t lead a cow to grass.”
He just laughs.
“But maybe together you might have something,” she says smiling.
“Mostly me, though, right?” X says.
“Definitely,” she says.
“Hey,” I say, “just because he’s hot—”
X’s head whips around. “You think I’m hot?”
Gobsmacked is the word I’d use to describe his face.
In situations like this, most people wish for a hole to open up and swallow them into the ground. But I don’t want that. What I want is to be the hole. I don’t know what that sentiment means, but I’m sure I mean it.
“I meant to say she thinks you’re hot,” I say, stabbing my finger at Fifi.
Fifi cocks her head and stares at us the way you’d look at a piece of art you don’t quite understand in a museum. “Huh,” she says.
“What?” I ask.
“Finally, I understand what problem is.”
“Great. Maybe you could tell me,” X says.
“Never mind problem,” she says. “I have solution. Tomorrow instead of practice, you two go out and get to know each other.”
“We’re fine—” I begin.
“Not fine,” she counters. “One of most important elements of ballroom is chemistry. Go out and get to be friends.”
Put like that, it almost sounds reasonable.
X grins. “Yes, whatever it takes,” he says, because, annoyingly, he says yes to everything.
Of course I have to agree too.
We dance three more dances and earn another eighteen dollars.
Fifi takes a ten-percent cut.
Back at the studio, X and I exchange phone numbers before going our separate ways.
* * *