Dance of the Happy Shades

Joe.”
    “Eat your supper,” Mary said, bending over me. I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her. “Look at her,” she said. “Her eyes dropping out of her head, all she’s been and seen. Was he feeding the whisky to her too?”
    “Not a drop,” said my father, and looked steadily down the table at me. Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after—like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.

THANKS FOR THE RIDE
    My cousin George and I were sitting in a restaurant called Pop’s Cafe, in a little town close to the Lake. It was getting dark in there, and they had not turned the lights on, but you could still read the signs plastered against the mirror between the fly-speckled and slightly yellowed cutouts of strawberry sundaes and tomato sandwiches.
    “Don’t ask for information,” George read. “If we knew anything we wouldn’t be here” and “If you’ve got nothing to do, you picked a hell of a good place to do it in.” George always read everything out loud—posters, billboards, Burma-Shave signs, “Mission Creek. Population 1700. Gateway to the Bruce. We love our children.”
    I was wondering whose sense of humour provided us with the signs. I thought it would be the man behind the cash register. Pop? Chewing on a match, looking out at the street, not watching for anything except for somebody to trip over a crack in the sidewalk or have a blowout or make a fool of himself in some way that Pop, rooted behind the cash register, huge and cynical and incurious, was never likely to do. Maybe not even that; maybe just by walking up and down, driving up and down, going places, the rest of the world proved its absurdity. You see that judgment on the faces of people looking out of windows, sitting on front steps in some little towns; so deeply,deeply uncaring they are, as if they had sources of disillusionment which they would keep, with some satisfaction, in the dark.
    There was only the one waitress, a pudgy girl who leaned over the counter and scraped at the polish on her fingernails. When she had flaked most of the polish off her thumbnail she put the thumb against her teeth and rubbed the nail back and forth absorbedly. We asked her what her name was and she didn’t answer. Two or three minutes later the thumb came out of her mouth and she said, inspecting it: “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
    “All right,” George said. “Okay if I call you Mickey?”
    “I don’t care.”
    “Because you remind me of Mickey Rooney,” George said. “Hey, where’s everybody go in this town? Where’s everybody go?” Mickey had turned her back and begun to drain out the coffee. It looked as if she didn’t mean to talk any more, so George got a little jumpy, as he did when he was threatened with having to be quiet or be by himself. “Hey, aren’t there any girls in this town?” he said almost plaintively. “Aren’t there any girls or dances or anything? We’re strangers in town,” he said. “Don’t you want to help us out?”
    “Dance hall down on the beach closed up Labour Day,” Mickey said coldly.
    “There any other dance halls?”
    “There’s a dance tonight out at Wilson’s
school
,” Mickey said.
    “That old-time? No, no, I don’t go for that old-time.
All-a-man left
and that, used to have that down in the basement of the church. Yeah,
ever’body swing
—I don’t go for that. Inna basement of the
church,
” George said, obscurely angered. “You don’t remember that,” he said to me. “Too young.”
    I was just out of high-school at this time, and George had been working for three years in the Men’s Shoes in a downtown department store, so there was that difference. But we hadnever bothered with each other back in the city. We were together now because we had met unexpectedly in a strange place and because I had a little money, while George was broke. Also I had my father’s car, and George was in one of his periods between cars, which made him always a little touchy and dissatisfied. But he would have to rearrange these facts a bit, they made him uneasy. I could feel him manufacturing a sufficiency of good feeling, old-pal feeling,