It was harder than it looked, and I was nervous.
"One-two-three, one-two-three, rock step." "This is how you shag," he said, shuffling his feet from side to side.
He was still big on doing the right thing then. I was afraid my love for him and my need for him to say yes would be written on my face like a poem.Ĭonrad sighed. "Connie, dance with Belly," Susannah urged, her face flushed as Jeremiah twirled her again. I was lying down on the floor, on my stomach, looking up at them. "Stevie, dance with me," I demanded, poking him with my big toe. I did dance ballet and modern, after all. I watched them, Susannah throwing her head back and laughing, and Jeremiah twirling her around, and I wanted to dance too.
It was called the shag, and it was a 1960s kind of beach dance. He'd been playing poker with Steven and Conrad and my mother, who was very, very good at poker.Īt first Jeremiah protested, but then he was dancing too. That night I put the Boogie Beach Shag CD on the big stereo in the living room, and Susannah grabbed Jeremiah and started to dance. I would listen to it on Susannah's old Walkman when I tanned. My favorite music was the Motown and the beach music. And then my mother might put on her Aretha Franklin CD, and Jeremiah would sing all the words, because we all knew them by that time, we'd heard it so much. Jeremiah would put on his Chronic CD, and my mother would be doing laundry, humming along. There was the Police, which Susannah put on in the morning there was Bob Dylan, which she put on in the afternoon and there was Billie Holiday, which she put on at dinner. We spent the whole summer listening to the same CDs. The summer house had a stack of CDs that we listened to, and that was pretty much it. When he was sweet like this, I remembered why I did. Good night, Bells." Bells, my nickname from a thousand years ago. Conrad had a way of looking at me, at you, at anybody, that made everything unravel and want to fall at his feet.
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