Come Dancing

Back when things still felt arranged by someone who at least appeared to care, even if just enough to throw a lace curtain over the ugly parts (i.e., the past), there existed — on the corner of Heart Attack and Vine — a sort of nexus of memory and misused civic planning, a spot of ground that has been paved, razed, erected, celebrated, neglected and eventually strip-lit into oblivion. I remember it, or at least I seem to remember remembering it, as a supermarket (the old kind, before everything became a gleaming cold aisle of self-checkout existential inertia), and before that, a bowling alley with neon gutters and the sour scent of rented shoes that somehow also smelled like cafeteria pizza, spilled cherry cola and floor wax.

But what it really was — or rather, what it meant, and yes, there’s a difference, and yes, that’s important — was the Palais. The name itself now feels ridiculous in its aristocratic pretension, like naming a two-bit dance hall after the Palace of Versailles, but back then, the name was just what it was, just true, in that way things are when you’re young and unqualified to doubt them.

It was the sort of place where brass echoed off the walls and sweat mingled with Brylcreem, and — this I know because she told me, often and with something between wistfulness and weary triumph — my sister would go every Saturday night, hair lacquered into a sort of steel helmet of romance, petticoats bouncing like echoes off the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet. Sometimes it seems that long ago.

Her boyfriends (plural, performatively) would arrive and ring the doorbell like it was some rite, some act of cultural sacrament, and she, always running late — not in the lazy sense but in the engineered, strategic sense, the way one delays not to waste time but to manufacture it, to stretch it taut with possibility — would descend the stairs with an air of practiced surprise, as if the night were spontaneous and not already composed in the mirror upstairs.

I, being younger, was left to the cruel intimacy of overheard arguments while lying awake in my bed. My mother waiting by the window, arms folded in that generational posture that connotes worry, judgment and maternal martyrdom. My sister always came home late, smelling of smoke and possibility, her lipstick half-faded, her heel scuffed. First, the screen door creaking open on its unoiled hinge. Then there’d be shouting. Then silence. Then the television — something banal and unconvincing.

And outside, sometimes, I’d see silhouettes framed by moonlight, backlit against the garden gate like something from a movie that had the decency to fade out before things got awkward. She’d kiss the boys goodnight. Just that. Just a kiss. And the poor bastard would walk away broke, spiritually and literally, having blown a week’s wages on tickets and drinks and the futile calculus of youthful desire.

And then one day, in the blunt, bureaucratic logic of blind, ignorant, inexorable progress, they knocked it all down. The Palais. Flattened it like it had never contained music or dancing or declarations of love and/or libidinous aspiration shouted over trumpets. My sister cried. Openly, I mean. I remember being surprised by the transparency of it — how the thing you lose is never just that thing but all the things that hung off it, like ornaments off a Christmas tree that someone throws to the curb in January.

That’s the day a piece of my childhood dissolved into the air, too. Not dramatically. More like evaporation. Just died.

Now I play guitar in a band that does weddings and corporate events and, yes, the occasional ironically themed retro night at the new bowling alley, which is itself a kind of theme park homage to its former self (only now you can order a hard seltzer via QR code). My sister lives on a tidy cul-de-sac on an estate with a pretentious gate that cost more than our parents’ house ever did. She has daughters of her own now — teenagers. They go out, come back late, apply eyeliner with the same hopeful aggression she used to. And she waits up for them, arms crossed at the same window. Zaftigally, to coin a word, just as our mother was at that age. She knows they get away with things she never could. Still, the whole cycle’s become a closed loop. Recursive.

But I wonder — sometimes, when I catch her humming something under her breath, something syncopated and too swingy to be modern — I wonder what she’d say if I asked her:

Come dancing?

Not in the literal sense (she has arthritis now, and bad knees, and I’m not naive), but in that strange metaphysical way of time-travelling through feeling — of remembering not just what happened, but how it felt to be the person to whom it was happening. How it felt to be alive.

Because back then, they came dancing.

And it wasn’t stupid.

Only natural.