SHADOW WALTZ
She lives alone in an older place, down the street on a very large lot, a Mediterranean style house with beautiful hardwood floors, always polished, polished like her slick persona, worn and shiny. Beneath her pride, the slick, shiny floors, run thousands of tiny caverns, left by the nagging creatures that eat away beneath her. When the house is quiet, she can hear them, she can feel their teeth chewing away the supports. They aren’t really termites, you know. Beneath the scarves, behind the make-up, they eat away, fat and happy at her expense.
Alongside her house flows a creek, clear and pure, overgrown and hard to find beneath the trees, bushes and grasses but you can hear the sound. She longs for its sound, but fears that more of the creatures await in the green growth that lines the creek on each side. She looks vaguely like an older version of a long forgotten Hollywood actress, Susan Hayward. No longer glamorous, she layers pancake make-up over the tension and wrinkles. Thick red lipstick shines on her pursed lips. During the day, when she goes out, she bundles up tightly, wearing multiple sweaters and jackets, even on warm days. Fists clenched beneath her chin, she pulls a chiffon scarf taut around her pale face. Elbows pressed against her bosom, she hurries where ever she goes, talking only briefly on her errands, then returning home.
In the evening, dressed only in a thin silk robe and sweeping through her rooms, all painted a warm, light adobe yellow, she swirls around. On this night, a gentle summer wind blows through the patio doors and, as she swirls and gestures, frees her from bondage. In such reverie, she gloats, dreaming of romantic victory over sweet and broken hearted young men, and plays records from another era, hoping the rhythms and melodies will hide her awareness of the dark and empty rooms that surround her.
The tie of her robe comes loose and she dances carefree, her hands clutching the doorknobs of an obliging partner hinged to the wall. She arches back and shakes her tresses, letting her dyed auburn hair flow with the dance and in the wind, making moves once reserved for the ballroom floor. The door’s old and the hinges make noise so she doesn’t want to swing too wildly. In their soft creaking she thinks she can hear the crying of broken hearts she captured long ago. The sounds intermingle until she cannot tell one from the other, a perfect harmony.
The true sound of the creaking hinges sounds more like a banshee’s wail and the cheap speaker makes the violins sound like tortured cats but does it matter? Perhaps not. Perhaps she only wishes there were broken hearts and broken strings. No. She knows for sure of hearts she broke. The weakening floorboards creak. She smiles in recollection of the sounds of the last man she captured on the borderline of her charm and irrationality. Satisfaction in her victory and misery in her loneliness.
A pirouette, a bow, a dancer smitten with a snicker. The wailing of the hinges sings pain through the halls, pain that brings the joy of real feeling and she relishes the pain she wants to escape from, the only real feeling she’s ever known, though she no longer recalls the source of the pain.
Each night she re-enacts the waltz, swinging the door just the right way to match the pitch of the cries that echo distantly through her and through her house. She swoops through her entrance, spreading her billowing shadow across the barren, polished and rotting floors. Along the edges of her mask of joy, the smugness and conceit dissolves into a fear that always lingers there. She can’t stand the sound and can’t stop the dance, swinging on the door, laughing at the painful nose of rusted metal, dreading the inevitable chorus. The joy and terror mix together as a sweet venom cocktail and she would flee if she could let go of the handle. She wants to flee, flee the maddening torture of the voices of the doors and the scratching and chewing beneath the floors.
But, she feigns joy, remembering and wanting to recall too many sorrowful nights.
Outside, beyond the door, there is hardly any sound, only the gentle rippling of the creek.