Dancing Lessons Read Online Free

doorway of my room, looking down the hallway to where his was, wondering what to do, when from his room came the most marvellous sounds. I knew it was from the gramophone he had brought from his latest time away. I hadn’t heard him play anything on it, though he must have done so when I was at school, for at the dinner table Miss Celia called what he played the devil’s work and asked why he couldn’t have brought home some hymns. But now the minute her back was turned this noise started up and what he was playing certainly sounded like the devil. It was the strangest cacophonous music I had ever heard, though I had never heard anything more than hymns and school songs. It was raucous and loud, with a driving rhythm like horses galloping overlaid by discordant gawps and boops and bleeps. It shocked me so much, I felt tilted into another world. Without thinking I walked down the hallway to his room and peeped in.
    He was standing by the window overlooking the veranda, facing into the room where the windup gramophone stood, conducting this music with one hand and moving his head and shoulders to the beat, with a smile on his face that I had never seen before. It was some time before he noticed me, and I had time to study him and to wonder anew at what a handsome man my father was. He was tall and well built, his limbs gangly and loose, with the triangular face and straight nose of his mother, for her parents had come over from England, Miss Celia was always proudly saying. Which is probably why she hated me. My mother’s family had come from out of the canefields, I once heard her say. But where her husband came from, I don’t know. All I ever saw of him was a picture in a large oval frame of a fierce-looking man with bushy hair and a moustache and skin that was very much darker than the young Miss Celia, who sat primly in a wicker-work chair with her legs crossed at the ankles while he stood behind her beside a small wicker table with a vase of artificial-looking flowers.
    But while Miss Celia and Aunt Zena’s skin was white and mottled with freckles, my father’s was logwood honey. And while their hair was brown and dead straight, both the same, his was rich dark brown with lots of kinky waves and red highlights. He wore it longish, swept back from his broad forehead. The more I looked and admired, the more conscious I became that I was nothing at all like him, except for the long legs. This day he was wearing what I thought of as his uniform when he was at home, his cream linen pants with cuffs, his red suspenders, and a pale blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows that brought out the blue in his hazel eyes and reminded me that mine were dirty brown.
    When he saw me, he didn’t look surprised, he smiled but didn’t stop moving to the music. A curl of his hair that had been plastered down with pomade came loose and flopped about in time to his movements. I couldn’t believe anyone who looked so young and carefree could be my dad.
    â€œHey, Girl,” he said when the record stopped. “Know what music this is?”
    â€œNo, sir.” I shook my head, suddenly feeling my body shrink with shyness.
    â€œWell, this is the greatest music in the world. Jazz. American music. This is ragtime. The devil ripping it up.” And he threw back his head and laughed, showing his beautiful teeth. He picked up the record sleeve and started to read from it, “Harry James and His Orchestra ‘One O’Clock Jump’ composed by Count Basie; Louis Jordan ‘Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’…”
    After that, it was talk, talk, so much talk in a non-stop stream. He’d put on a new record and smile and move his body until the record stopped and then he’d start talking again, getting almost as fast and frenzied as the music, his eyes bright, his face and body mobile, the lock of hair dancing to its own syncopation. At first I was simply entranced,