Sweetheart

An imagining from last night.

In an alternate universe, in Queens, NY, there was a Father-Daughter Dance. Let's say, February of 1978. Valentine's Day week, festooned with red and pink paper silhouettes of cupids, hearts, and arrows. A crowded gym, a deejay playing shiny records he stored upright in milk crates. A veritable swirl of girls' skirts and heeled feet...every color imaginable, all heights, toddler to preteen. Dads in suits, some of which looked like office clothing repurposed for the event...others who were stiff in more fancywear than their blue-collar jobs would ever merit. And then the fathers, boisterous, in brightly floral polyester shirts, chains glinting inside the wide collars, and flare-leg slacks with platform shoes: the dads who "got" disco.

Not my date. My father wore a simple suit, almost '60s throwback. He didn't draw attention to himself, but he looked right for the occasion--even though I knew his tie was too narrow and his collars too subtle. My dress came from Lerner's, a clothing mecca right up the street from my house. I wandered Lerner's for hours to find it, circling through and around the spinning silver racks, a dizzying obstacle course of preteen fashion. Touching every single fabric as I passed them, musing, mulling. I decided on this one because of its pink and beige color combination--soft and different. I liked it on my Irish-pale skin. Long sleeves, because it was winter, but they were puffy floral cotton with elastic at the cuffs. The bodice was shirred and puckered all over, with a rectangular lacy neckline, and the skirt was full. No ruffle at the bottom: felt like a ladies' dress. Mom finally let me wear the wedge-heeled sandals from her closet that I always tried on, because now they fit me for real. With nylons, sheer ones. I had to wear snow boots over to the gym, though; they joined a marching battalion of fur-cuffed footwear near the doorway. My stockinged feet were still icy from the trudge over.

Dad and I were not the types of people to fully buy into the concept of a Father-Daughter Dance. A little too ironically distant, we, and both of us burned by our mutual, unpopular reality: we were eggheads. Never quite in the mainstream. Always suspecting mockery from gaggles of our peers. But we agreed to do this because some of my friends from class got their dads to go--and, as submerged as I kept it, I really did want to feel popular, somehow.

Dad was a jazz drummer, but surprisingly able to dance nonetheless. This was another trait we shared. Early on in the evening, the deejay picked up on the overwhelming craze for all things Bee Gees, and spun "Night Fever". The room, predictably, erupted. Dad never indicated any particular affection for this music as it thumped from my homework-strewn bedroom, but he definitely allowed himself to dance to it, and I found myself grinning--which I did not expect, not at all. In fact, the gym was pervaded by a temporary dismantling of preteen embarrassment about our parents and their uncoolness. I stole glances around as Dad and I, yeah, boogied, and everyone else seemed equally unaware that if the overhead lights were on, we'd be fleeing from this dance floor faster than you could say "get down tonight".

After "Night Fever," the deejay pulled out "Love Is (Thicker Than Water)," which kind of called for a closer dancing posture (and had an uncertain beat, besides). I asked Dad if he wanted punch, and he nodded, so we made for the paper-covered table, loaded up on red sugar fluid and pink cookies, and found steely folding chairs to sit in. The gym was so cavernous that we could converse and hear each other, just.

"I can't believe I'll be graduating in this room, like, 5 months from now."

"I can't believe it either, sweetheart," Dad said. He sipped the punch and grimaced, making a sound something like "grack". "Even in my boozing days I wouldn't have choked back something like this," he said wryly, setting the cup far away.

I was always relieved when he made a comment that placed alcohol in his rear-view mirror, so I smiled happily, even though I agreed the punch was putrid.

"So is this," he paused, "disco the kind of music they'll be playing all night?"

"I don't know," I replied, honestly. "I hope they play a little rock, at least."

He nodded assent and bit a heart-cookie. I looked over as the song ended and the deejay flipped on the next turntable. "Native New Yorker". Shook my head at Dad. Although I did love this song, I just didn't want to dance to it. He didn't seem interested either.

"Do you feel ready for your high-school entrance exams?" he asked. Just the thought of them made my stomach cramp.

"Sure," I lied, hoping my lack of words might kill the topic.

"How many do you have to take, again?" (No such luck.)

"Four," I squeaked. "The overall exam, and then three schools have their own."

"I know you'll do fine," he said with a hand-squeeze. I gulped, cookie crumbs chafing my throat. Then I smiled again to cover it.

People had been making requests; I could see shadowy goings-on at the deejay table. The next song kicked on and I was initially stunned--Led Zeppelin...?

"'Misty Mountain Hop'!" Dad crowed. "Let's go!"

We were still holding hands, so we made our way in tandem into the dance throng. Dad's enthusiasm over Led Zeppelin had me astonished (and he knew the name of the song! I never did, with Zeppelin), but here we were, rocking out, almost choosing the same moves. Robert Plant's vocals pealed and shrieked over the crowd, and the deejay must have had a subwoofer, because the drums and bass were shaking the floor. Dad did not shout "woooooo!" the way some of the wilder fathers were doing, nor did I jump up and down as some of the frilly girls were doing, but we were into it nonetheless.

And then there was a slow song, throwing the mood sideways. Bee Gees again (was that a sigh I heard around the gym?) "How Deep is Your Love". Which I swooned over nightly--not thinking about my father, of course, but wishing for a boyfriend like some of my classmates had. Still, Dad went into his 1950s arms-bent, dancing-with-a-lady posture, and that was fine. Before we started moving, he leaned over and whispered in my ear: "John Bonham on the drums, that last song. Killer." I had to laugh a little, because he was such a music nerd. (And he was right about Bonham, but I didn't grasp that fully until later.) We let the Bee Gees' harmonized warbles wash around us and we swayed with it, twinkling lights along the walls seeming to flow with the melody.

It seems so trivial in the writing: this alternate universe, this father-daughter spot carved into a cold February night, this gym that would revert to a sweaty game space with Sunday sunlight, all guided by the music that mattered to me (and ever evokes my eighth-grade year). Whereas, in the universe I actually lived in, I honestly did not know that I yearned for such moments--because I wouldn't have known to imagine them. I never, ever saw my father, until I was an adult myself.

Now, every year, as a mom and wife, and even moreso as a deejay, I experience a local Father-Daughter Dance and I see in countless other couples what could have been; what was right to expect; what pure happiness and fun looks like; what touches the heart and bonds the daughter to the daddy, and vice versa. Placing 1978 Nessa and Dad in that scenario...absent the many, many reasons that I did not know him at that time in my life, stripping away what was negative, while keeping our essences...this is a healing, rightful vision.

Because, I can attest, it is painfully possible to miss what you never had.

Nessa's List of Arcane, Obsolete Job Skills

This morning I was pondering the many ways I've made a living over the years, and I realized that I have acquired a bizarre collection of skills, not one of which is practicable or useful in this post-post-modern world. Because many of you reading this were but oocytes when my work life began, I thought I would share the list with you (kinda like, "Gee, Grandma, what DID you do before TV was invented?!" Please note that, in fact, television was invented and adapted into a large, viewable screen size before I was born. However, I did live through the Wizard of Ozian transition from black-and-white to color...and dang it, I still like black-and-white.)

Herewith, the list:

1982: Laundress. Yes, laundress. Every Saturday morning, I was paid $25 for five hours' toil in the basement of a Manhattan restaurant. I washed and dried four loads of tablecloths, napkins, and (no shit) the owner's shirts in silvery industrial machines...and after they were all dry, I had to iron each and every one of them by hand. Which is why, decades later, the palms of my hands are pretty insensate to heat. And why I can still iron a man's shirt like a pro. There's a job skill for the ol' resume.

1982: Supermarket cashier. Polyester three-quarter-sleeved jacket with store logo, a foot pedal to move the groceries forward on the black belt, and here's the real dilly: no scanners. I had to ring up every single itemon a keypad. Throughout that summer, I would wake up in the middle of the night to find my right hand ringing up independent of my conscious mind: 1.99 Grocery, 5.50 HBA, 9.98 Meat, 4.99 Txbl Item....

1983: Operations Assistant. I spent a summer working with my older brother and a hilarious crew of co-workers in a Wall Street computer room. We were responsible for data processing financial transactions for numerous high-end firms (geez, now that I think about it, that's scary). The room was a byzantine array of whirring, humming IBM hulks, exactly like this:


It was windowless and glaringly lit, and every day we went through the same exact paces, as dictated by the mainframe's programming. My mind was constantly racing from the monotony...but luckily my co-workers were inventive (they used to make a baseball bat out of rolled-up greenbar paper, and a ball out of a wad of tape, and voila--instant diversion!)

This job taught me how to operate a punch card reader, a 1960s contraption that endured for a surprisingly long time as a data storage and retrieval method:


I was also the tape librarian, collecting plastic, circular "scratch tapes" from big tape drives and refiling them in numerical order on massive storage racks:


The awesome thing about this job--besides the spontaneous baseball games--was getting paid more than I'd ever made in my life. I bought scads of records at Tower on 4th Street that summer, plus my brother and I had a crowd of friends who worked downtown, so Friday nights were a guaranteed blowout at the Raccoon Lodge and other Tribeca haunts.

1984: Database developer. Another obsolete computer system--the DEC-10--and another repetitive, summer-long task: catalog every single photo in Bowdoin College's Office of Public Information. I actually had a blast doing this; among the hundreds of photos were 19th century glass negatives, pics of every faculty member as a novice, and relics from the protest-laden 1960s. I still use the archivist skills...only, not on a computer with a tiny black screen and glowing, dot-matrixy orange letters.

1985: Film projectionist. Yup, I was the shadowy figure in the flickering little window-box, high above the theater seats, loading huge film reels onto creaky equipment and hoping my manual transitions from one reel to the next would be seamless. I also ran filmstrips--BOOP!--in classrooms. Doing this job made me feel invisible.

1985: Disc jockey. Two turntables, a microphone, and moi, broadcasting jazz over the airwaves. Bowdoin College had a massive vinyl LP collection, and I never tired of fingering the spines in the shelves and finding new/old music to play. Three years later, the station went digital, and hundreds of LPs were ignominiously disposed of, upended into trashcans. Oh! my heart! I salvaged some, but the station managers chucked them faster than I could rescue them. Heathens.

1985: Telephone operator. Ever see those Movietone films of ladies with a clunky headset, seated at a big console full of plugs and holes? That was me, every weekday lunch hour, when I would cover for the college operator. I developed an operator patois: "MmmmmBowdoinnnnCollege," I would say as I picked up the incoming calls. They'd ask for an extension; I would pull up a thick plug, find the corresponding hole with the extension number, and ram the plug home to connect the callers to their party. And even better--once I plugged in, I had to manually ring the extension with a toggle switch. Once the call ended, the line would emit this irritating errrrrnnnnn noise to remind me to pull out the plug. If I fell behind, the console became a befuddling, crisscrossed maze of flexible wires. It was all very I Love Lucy. 

1985-86: Secretary. Smith-Corona typewriters, keys jumpy with electrified juice. Liquid paper and Correctype--lots of it. Index cards. And phones with flashing hold buttons shaped perfectly square.

1986-94: Editorial Assistant. Yet another useless computer skill: laying out a tabloid-size newsletter on a minature Macintosh screen. You learn how to scroll, squint, and cross your fingers when you hit "print".


This job also trained me in manual layout of newspaper advertisements, which required use of a waxer: a handheld metal roller with an electric plug. Inside the roller is a block of wax that's heated to sticky goo (which means it's hot as a mofo. See above for iron-acquired hand insensitivity). To do newspaper layouts, you'd scissor little paper images into the desired shape, run the roller over the back of the paper-bit, then press it into place on the master page. 

I am a master of lost arts, of machinery that clunks and whirs, plastics that are hard and inflexible, metals that gleam with the patina of use and the sheen of oil. My fingers have been smudged with typewriter ribbon, reddened by unsafe levels of heat, and numbed with keypad entry. My first dalliance with minimum wage saw me getting $3.25 an hour.

The world turns.

The dance

A moment in my day froze today, while I lived it. Paused and assembled into a memory that would last, with all the sensory elements recollected.

 

Peter and I d.j.'d a wedding reception tonight. This was the latest in a series of stressful events in our lives, and getting ready this afternoon, I cracked. (PMS, you are no friend of mine, and my family wishes you would get lost also.) I snapped twice at Pete because he just wasn't doing things at the frenzied robotic pace I was maintaining. Why isn't he dressed? Why aren't the speakers in the van yet?? my mind was ranting. I prefaced one of my outbursts with "I'm realLY PANICKING HERE!" which came out escalating, just like that. Maybe this sounds minor or stupid, but I just don't get mad very often. And never like that at Pete. Even worse, it wasn't really him I was mad at—it was my stress, my nerves, and my eternal penchant for taking on too many things that have honking deadlines and tons of associated details.

 

That wasn't the moment I had in mind, anyway. It's just a mortifying preface moment to the actual one. I never had time to apologize to Pete, that's how busy we were...and my resultant internal discord seemed so at odds with the wedded bliss we were soundtracking in the reception hall. Finally, six hours into the job, the last song slid into the CD deck: "You're Still the One" by Shania Twain. The bride and groom collapsed into the familiar fit-together of a slow-dance, as they'd done about a dozen times already. I stood up to stretch...and when I opened my eyes, in front of me was Peter's extended hand.
 

In the semi-darkness of the d.j.'s corner, we slow-danced. And here's the moment: my face pushed up against his chest. The tweedy jacket texture, that man-scent. And the flood of connection, forgiveness, and gratitude I felt in his arms. We fit together too, his tall-guy chin resting on my head, his hand caressing my neck, mine on his back, low. That moment: our married experiences, compressed into one dance. 

 

They said, "I bet they'll never make it..."
But just look at us holding on,
We're still together, still going strong.
You're still the one I run to,
The one that I belong to,
You're still the one I want for life.
You're still the one that I love,
The only one I dream of,
You're still the one I kiss good night.

 

Writing this, I'm crying for joy, not the first time today. I'm used to crying for others' joy—it's a by-product of providing first-dance music for people whose love shines all around them. Now it's mine, ours, his.

 

Enough writing. He's waiting for me.