In his late eighties, my grandfather began to dance for me. It was during the time everyone else in our family believed he was dying in the rest home.
I was twenty-nine. The house I rented a room in was old, the floors hardwood. There was a window-seat, built close against the slant of my ceiling, and there I spent my nights gazing into the fields. This was in the county of Modoc, state of California, land of geese and my grandfather’s gun-toting. It was often very cold.
By day, my grandfather feigned emaciation. When we visited him, our insides shook with his and the air grew very thin. My grandmother smiled at us calmly as we cried and slobbered and rummaged around in our shame. She had no need to prove her caring; hers was real. My grandfather had eyes of snow that brushed past but didn’t touch any of us. If there was panic on his face or on our own, we made no comment. The little gurglings of his breath roved on and on.
At night, my grandfather caught me. When I was most gone, he slipped unseen, unheard into my bedroom, tapped the soles of his feet lightly against the wood of my floor. He wore only his boxer shorts, his belly still full. The ring of white hair above his ears had thickened.
“Look at me,” he said. “Look at this.”
As his feet twisted into the air, he slapped them with his hands. “Schuhplattler,”
he said. “It’s German.” There was only moonlight, nothing more. The wide slats of the floor could have been ivory, his belly alabaster or marble. He poked and jiggled
it when he caught me looking.
Then the miracle. My grandfather tumbled backward in the air. I saw knees and, beyond that, the faceless belly wide
before me, hands waving. When he hit the floor on his back and bounced, there was no sound; I couldn’t be sure whether the floor itself was not floating.
My grandfather was on his feet in an instant. He peered at me curiously, looking for a reaction, waiting.
The snow around the rest home was enough only to trace the leaves that had fallen. It did nothing to hide the embarrassing greenness of the grass, the embarrassment for the rest of us of being still so alive. “Patchy,” my grandfather called it. “Patchy, patchy, patchy,” he whispered, and my grandmother patted his hand.
“What’s that?” my uncle asked. “What did you say, Dad? I can’t hear you well.”
“Patchy,” my grandfather, grandmother, and I said in unison.
“The snow,” my grandmother added.
My grandfather shifted tactics. He touched each wall of my house until they all had vanished, looked windowless at the moon, and told me he was ready for bed. “Where should I sleep?” he asked me.
I offered the couch, the floor, even my own bed. Then I was tucking him in.
“You don’t remember the right things,” he told me. “You’re too worried what others will think.”
I pulled another blanket up to his bare chin. His face was creased and blank, just watching me.
When it happened, finally, the last gurgly little breath, my uncle and I were eating Danishes in the cafeteria. A man with a face as bare as an elbow was yelling from across the table, white flecks of his spittle landing all over us and our food.