“Was?”
“He died a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. We weren’t close as adults. I mean, I loved him. He loved me. I was sad when he died. But—and I’m aware this sounds bad—in some ways, his death was a relief, because then I only had to worry about my mom. Between my sister and me, we were able to get her into a little condo.” I paused. “Is your mom alive?” He had talked about her, but only in the past tense.
“As far as I know.”
I waited for more, but he didn’t say anything. So we weren’t going there. Fair enough. “I could see my dad bristling against ‘the Man.’ Like, he didn’t want to have to wake up early to be at work by a specific time. He didn’t want to work to enrich others—some of his jobs were really physical, hard on his body. I get it. I think I even got it at the time, at least to some degree, but I didn’t have a lot of patience for it. This is the way of the world, I used to think. If you wanted to opt out of capitalism, you shouldn’t have had kids who needed things like food and clothes, or hell, maybe even a musical instrument or the occasional vacation, you know?”
He snorted. “Oh, I know. Believe me, I know.”
More solidarity with Teddy Knight. Which was still weird, but maybe a little less so. “But I think in some elemental way, my dad and I were alike. He was creative. He just never had the opportunity to nurture it. He hadn’t grown up with money, or access to higher education, so he never had a shot at a white-collar job, which, while it might have been soul destroying, would at least have been more lucrative.”
“So you took your dad—your parents—as a cautionary tale.”
“Exactly. I got to the end of high school, and I thought, ‘I want to do something where I’m my own boss.’”
“That was some serious foresight.”
“And/or naivete.” Maybe it had been both. I did look back on my teenage self with empathy, and with gratitude. In some ways, it was for her that I was embarking on my man cleanse. My become-a-crone quest was the completion of a project she’d started so many years ago. She had always looked to the future with clear eyes and a sense of what was important to her, and I owed it to her to keep doing that.
I returned to my story. “I did a two-year community college degree and learned basic accounting and marketing. I started thinking about what I wanted to do specifically. I narrowed it down to the two things I loved the most: dance and cats.”
He barked a laugh. “Cats!”
“Yeah, I’m a cat lady.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“I just realized that I know you, but I don’t reallyknowyou. Camp feels like a pause in the normal space-time continuum.”
“I know what you mean. It’s that camp friends thing Marion was talking about. Like, in the normal world I would never be lost in the woods with Teddy Knight. I’d be lost in the woods with a nonfamous person.”
“Ha. No. It’s more that people have contexts, you know? Or at least some people do.”
“You don’t have a context?”
“Well, I did.”
I didn’t know if he was talking about the band or the ex. Probably both.
“Anyway,” he said, “go on. Cats versus dance?”
“Yeah, I narrowed it down to opening a dance studio or a pet grooming place. But I’m not really a dog person, so I went with dance.” I paused. “It sounds so cold and calculating whenI say it like that. I love dance. I love it inherently, but I also love it because it has allowed me the life I have. I work hard, but I’m the boss.”
“Sounds ideal.”
“I guess.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’ again.”
“I myself managed to avoid most of the toxic dance culture garbage, probably because as a kid I only had lessons on and off, as we had money or didn’t. So it wasn’t until high school, when I was on the dance team, that I had any consistent instruction. I saw a lot of girls on my team damage themselves with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, all that junk.”
“Can I just say again that you seem to have been remarkably self-aware from a young age?”
