Bridge of Sighs

catch sight of them down there among the trees where they smoked cigarettes and, according to rumor, drank whiskey. During most of the school year it was dark by seven, so we weren’t able to actually see them, but we knew they were there by their eerie, distant laughter and the angry red glow of their cigarette tips. But during the last half hour of those dances, after the person stationed at the top of the stairs closed the cashbox, they began to filter in, cool and casual, as if to suggest they’d forgotten there
was
a dance until that moment. We’d spot one of them across the gymnasium, moving, wraithlike, through the crowd, and when we turned to share this thrilling news with whomever stood next to us, we’d discover that another grinning wraith had materialized at our elbow.
They’re here.
You could trace this knowledge surging around the gym like an electric current. I wonder now what we were thinking. Did anybody imagine that this Friday would be different?
    Even the music changed, or at least seemed to, becoming darker, more dangerous. There was a line dance the West End boys were famous for, called the stomp, which required a particular beat to execute. Certain records, we knew, were stomp songs, and the opening bars were all it took for Borough and East End jitterbuggers to clear the floor so that the stomp lines, exclusively male, could form. Usually, sometime during the first hour of the dance, whoever was spinning the records would give us East End wannabes such a song so we could practice, in hopes we might later join the line and thereby gain grudging acceptance when the real stompers appeared. But the step was intricate, its moves subject to continual innovation, its orders barked out by someone at the head of the line. If the call came too late it couldn’t be carried out, if too early, then the rank broke down.
    What the stomp resembled most was a military exercise, its dancers jackbooted in their aggressive precision, each move executed with a deadpan lack of emotion, fifty or a hundred boys all turning to face in a new direction on the downbeat. Turn the wrong way and you’d be facing an advancing army, then the jeering and laughter of the encircling crowd. At the heart of the stomp wasn’t courtship, the basis of most dancing, but a tightly controlled rage. Its signature move was always withheld until the last few bars of the sequence, at which point every boy in the line, instead of simply turning on his heel in a new direction, brought that heel down hard on the floor in a thunderclap that shook the gym. There was no mistaking its intent. It was a declaration of war.
    The last song of the night, though, was always slow, and the lights always came down, signaling, as if we didn’t know, that time and opportunity were slipping away. Karen Cirillo, ever faithful, got her reward then as Jerzy Quinn, ever cool, would touch her elbow and wordlessly lead her onto the floor. Nan Beverly would already be there with whatever Borough boyfriend on whom she’d chosen to bestow her changeable affections. In my memory, if not in reality, the first verse of that last song belonged to these two most public of couples—the Borough pair radiant, laughing and touching discreetly, Nan tossing her blond head, her new boyfriend as happy as a kid can be who knows his days of grace are numbered, and their counterparts silent, nearly motionless, an angry, emaciated boy, drawing to him a seventh-grade girl who was already a woman.
    How beautiful they were, both couples, and how beautiful this moment we’d been waiting for all week, the pairing off for that last slow dance. Two couples became four, four became sixteen, sixteen became thirty-two, we East End boys alternately eyeing lusty West End girls on one side of the gym and pristine Borough girls on the other, each group requiring a type of courage we didn’t possess. Which was why we ended up asking a girl from down the block, someone we were pretty sure wouldn’t say no. And who among us had any idea what was in that East End girl’s heart? How many times in the last two hours—or the last two minutes—had
her
heart been broken?
    Back outside the Y, the rule of law was quickly reestablished. In the parking lot the parents of Borough and East End girls flashed their headlights or tooted as their daughters emerged. Who was that boy you were with? Nobody. Well, he must be
somebody.
No, nobody. Then, as the cars dispersed, suddenly there’d be a rumor