Dance, Gladys, Dance

Cassie Stocks

Description

Winner of the 2013 Leacock Memorial Medal for Canadian Humour Writing!
Long Listed for Canada Reads 2018!
Nominated for the First Book Award at the 2013 Saskatchewan Book Awards!
Twenty-seven-year-old Frieda Zweig is at an impasse. Behind her is a string of failed relationships and half-forgotten ambitions of being a painter; in front of her lies the dreary task of finding a real job and figuring out what “normal” people do with their lives. Then, a classified ad in the local paper introduces Frieda to Gladys, an elderly woman who long ago gave up on her dreams of being a dancer.

The catch? Gladys is a ghost.

In Dance, Gladys, Dance, Cassie Stocks tells the uplifting story of a woman whose uncanny connection with a kindred spirit causes her to see her life in a new way—as anything but ordinary.

Winner of the 2013 Leacock Memorial Medal for Canadian Humour Writing!
Long Listed for Canada Reads 2018!
Nominated for the First Book Award at the 2013 Saskatchewan Book Awards!
Twenty-seven-year-old Frieda Zweig is at an impasse. Behind her is a string of failed relationships and half-forgotten ambitions of being a painter; in front of her lies the dreary task of finding a real job and figuring out what “normal” people do with their lives. Then, a classified ad in the local paper introduces Frieda to Gladys, an elderly woman who long ago gave up on her dreams of being a dancer.

The catch? Gladys is a ghost.

In Dance, Gladys, Dance, Cassie Stocks tells the uplifting story of a woman whose uncanny connection with a kindred spirit causes her to see her life in a new way—as anything but ordinary.

Informations

• Publié par: NeWest Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781927063583
• Langue: English

Extrait

A text above reads, Dance, Gladys Dance is a winner. You don’t want to stop reading, Sharon Butala, author of The Girl in Saskatoon: A mediation on friendship, memory, and Murder. The cover photo shows an illustration of a gramophone with a green blob representing music.
Dance, Gladys, Dance
CASSIE STOCKS
Dance, Gladys, Dance
N E W EST P RESS
COPYRIGHT © Cassie Stocks 2012
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Stocks, Cassie, 1966– Dance, Gladys, dance / Cassie Stocks.
Also issued in electronic format. ISBN 978-1-897126-76-9
I. Title.
PS 8637. T 618 D 35 2012      C 813’.6      C 2011-906882-6
Editor for the Board: Anne Nothof Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design Vintage crocheted doily © Elzbieta Sekowska / Shutterstock.com Author photo: Terry Gasior

NeWest Press acknowledges the financial support of the Alberta Multimedia Development Fund and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We further acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund ( CBF ) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

#201, 8540–109 Street Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1 E 6 780.432.9427 www.newestpress.com
No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 13 12
To all those who came before and all those who will come after.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE She Needs The Room To Bake
CHAPTER TWO A Taciturn Old Dame
CHAPTER THREE Heavy
CHAPTER FOUR The Dominant Oblique Direction
CHAPTER FIVE The Gimlet Portraits
CHAPTER SIX Wherein I Embark On Job Interviews
CHAPTER SEVEN Perfectly Good Except For The Fact They No Longer Work
CHAPTER EIGHT The Sex Store King
CHAPTER NINE W-O-M-B-A-T
CHAPTER TEN He’s A Toad
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Wooden Spoon Woman
CHAPTER TWELVE An Unhealthy And Disgusting Habit
CHAPTER THIRTEEN He Looks Bad
CHAPTER FOURTEEN She Seems A Bit Lost
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Little Cardboard Pets
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Great If You Like That Sort Of Thing
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Like An Angel
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Foggy Mountain Breakdown
CHAPTER NINETEEN A Scared-Ass Rabbit
CHAPTER TWENTY Rear Deltoid Development
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Go Fork Yourself
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO She Twitches Too
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Was it So Wrong?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR A Regular Tornado
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Damsel In Distress
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX What Do You Need A Career For?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN That Fancy Woman
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Something For The Pain
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE It’s My Policy
CHAPTER THIRTY Solidarity. Publicity. Protest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE A Gnarled Root
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO She’s A Good Girl
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Damn Decent
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE, She Needs The Room To Bake
I had no point of navigation but I was hell-bent on finding my way to Ordinary. I didn’t know what I hoped to find on that voyage or, God forbid, at the end of it, but I knew there was nothing but bilge rats and bullshit on the course I’d been following.
I still awoke at night as if in midthought. That copy of Emerson’s Essays . . . did Norman keep it? I’d be compelled to run downstairs to the storage room and root through the boxes I brought back from Kentucky with me. First, though, I had to rouse Ginny to find the key. Ginny tolerated these wakings only twice, and then, griping about delusional roommates, she had a copy of the key made and hung it by the condo’s front door.
It’s a physical deficiency you feel in the middle of the night after a breakup. Oh shit , you lie there thinking. It’s not the books or the brassieres — I’ve left my thighs in his spare closet.
Along with my ex, Norman, and possibly some missing-inaction body parts, I’d abandoned my creative spirit in Kentucky too, left it disintegrating underneath a tree beside the Barren River (symbolically enough), buried alongside the last paintings I swore I would ever do.
Ginny had left the newspaper on the kitchen table folded open to the employment section, alongside a conspicuously placed red pen. I sat down at the table and wriggled in the chair. Ginny’s condo is the Shrine to Design: titanium white walls, ebony floors, leather furniture, and none of the clocks had numbers. I could never tell what time it was, not that I had anything to be late for. The two kitchen chairs were Bertoia Wire Chairs, sans cushions. The wire frame was incredibly uncomfortable and my butt would be dented like a reverse waffle when I stood up. If the other items in the room and I were featured in a certain Sesame Street game, I’d be one of the things that’s not like the others.
I unfolded the paper and turned past the help-wanted ads to the furniture-for-sale column. I’d be getting my own place again, someday. It didn’t cost anything to look and I wanted to feast my eyes on the cost of a nice flat-bottomed kitchen chair. Underneath the AMAZING queen mattress & box, cost over $1100, sell $495, there it was:
BEAUTIFUL old phonograph for sale. 78 record player. Excellent condition. Gladys doesn’t dance anymore. She needs the room to bake. Bring offer. Ph. 254-9885.
Now there was a woman grown earnest about life. It must be a joke. I picked up the portable phone and dialed the number. I didn’t need a phonograph. (Who does, really?) I wanted to see Gladys. I imagined a woman wearing a flowered housedress, her arms covered in flour, polkaing and shaking the floor while cookies turned black in the oven. But now Gladys had abandoned dancing and turned serious about her baking, perhaps trying for a blue ribbon at the neighbourhood fair. I wanted to look at this woman, to see if she looked broken. I wanted to see how she managed to give it up.
“Hello.” An old man’s voice spoke on the other end of the line. Gladys was probably busy baking pies.
“Hi. I was calling about your ad in the paper.”
“You’re an early riser; that’s good. I had people call at noon sounding like they just got out of bed. I didn’t even let them see it. Do you like to read?”
“Uh, yes.” What did that have to do with a record player? Perhaps Gladys had been driven to baking by her insane husband.
“Listen, could I come to see it?”
“Certainly. How about ten o’clock?”
I wrote the address down with the red pen, hung up the phone, and went back to flipping through the newspaper. It had been only two weeks since I returned to Winnipeg and moved in with Ginny, but she made it seem like I’d been lying about for months — decades even. I first met Ginny at the Paraskeva College of Art three years ago. She was excelling in Commercial Art. I was dropping out of Fine Art. I randomly circled help wanted ads and made big noises with the pages. See, Ginny? Flip . I’m trying to restart my life. Flip. Flip . Look at me go.
I’d returned to Manitoba to live as I believed a normal person lived. No more Frieda Zweig the Artist. Abstract depictment in exchange for appropriate deportment. Who was I going to be? I was more inclined towards inertia than upward mobility and didn’t like most people enough to devote my life to helping others less fortunate than myself. I’d work somewhere, I thought, watch TV in the evenings, and become wholly involved in the lives of non-existent people. I’d develop my own life of quiet desperation, as Emerson’s buddy Thoreau suggested the mass of men (and, presumably, women) led.
Ginny walked into the kitchen in her pyjamas. I too wore my PJ s — a black Rolling Stones concert T -shirt and a pair of men’s long-underwear bottoms. Classic sleepwear. Ginny wore a peacock-blue satin slip and matching robe. The other kind of classic sleepwear. Immense yellow Velcro rollers clung to the sides of her head. We looked at each other silently for a moment; neither of us was the dreaded Happy in the Morning species of human. She smelled like cucumber face cream and vanilla fabric softener.
“You should get a haircut today,” she said. “You’re a wreck.”
“Good morning to you too. A wreck, huh? Plane wreck or bus wreck?” I circled another arbitrary ad.
“You know what they say — dress for success.” She poured herself a coffee from the completely intimidating automatic espresso machine, which, thankfully, she pre-programmed to perk at 7:45 each morning, and sat down at the table. “Your appearance indicates the level of work you’re qualified for.”
I eyed her head. “This from a 1950s alien queen? Where are you going to work? The mothership?”
“Volume,” she said. “The rollers lift the hair at the roots and give you volume. You can borrow them if you like.”
“I’m app