Free Ballroom: A Novel by Alice Simpson

today. I can take home books. Want me to read to you?”
    “What books did you borrow?” He sat down on the staircase next to her as she showed them to him.
    “I’m going to be a ballerina, so I took five books on ballet.”
    “Then will you come to the Ballroom with me?”
    “Could I?”
    “Sure. You’ll have to learn to dance a mambo, though.” He had just been making foolish conversation, but whenever Maria saw him afterward, she asked.
    “Will you teach me to mambo?”
    He thought about Maria while he worked, hoping she would be in the hallway when he came home.
    One Sunday evening, on his way out to meet one of his dance students at the Ballroom, he found her sitting on the top step, outside the door of his apartment.
    “What are you doing up here?” His stomach tightened like a fist.
    “Listening to your music.”
    “You mustn’t come up here, Maria. You got to stay downstairs.”
    “Why? I like to hear your music, Mr. Korn. I come up here a lot to listen.”
    “Your father wouldn’t like you coming up here.”
    “Why?”
    “He wouldn’t know where you were, and he would worry.”
    “I’d be with you, Mr. Korn.”
    She placed her hand in his as he walked her back down the stairs, terrified the neighbors would see him. If only he could lift her and, with her close to his chest, smell the warm, sweet whisper of her breath.
    Imagining that Maria was outside his door, he began opening it at odd moments to see if she might be there. He played love songs, tangos, and rumbas, hoping they would beckon her.

Chapter 16
Maria
    No gentleman should use his bare hand to press the waist of a lady in the dance. If without gloves, carry a handkerchief in the hand.
                     —Thomas E. Hill, Evils of the Ball , 1883
    M aria has only one memory of her mother. Parts of it are so fuzzy, she isn’t even sure it is real. But the clear portions are so sharp that she could cut around them with scissors and glue them in a scrapbook. Papi said that her mother had died, and that all the photos of her had been lost when she and Papi moved from the Bronx to Twelfth Street.
    She remembers her own small hands gripping a worn brass-buckled leather harness. She has chosen the enormous black stallion, understands that it is a pretender despite its expression of breath and motion. She has looked into its dark, dusty pocket of a mouth, seen that it has no throat. In the hard wooden saddle she sits up very straight, keeping her eyes ahead, so as not to notice how far she is above the floor. The stirrups are adjusted, and she presses down and forward through her black Mary Jane shoes. When the calliope’s steamy music begins, the carousel begins to turn. She feels excited and lost at the same time, unsure whether she is moving or the world beyond the carousel is in a faster-than-usual spin; fearful that she will be torn out of the saddle and sent flying out from under the red roof, over the fence, and into the autumn sky. She must hold on. Sit very still. It is the same joy and fear as when Papi lifts her off the floor and throws her into the air. On the merry-go-round, her only reassurance is the music, its lovely oom-pah syncopation keeping time with the ups and downs of her strong wooden steed.
    Grasping the pole tightly, she watches her mother, who is perched on a pink horse, its neck garlanded by yellow, red, and turquoise painted roses, strung together with pale green leaves. The horse looks over its shoulder at Maria, mouth agape, with large ferocious Chiclet teeth set in a permanent grin. Its nostrils flare beneath bulging eyes in deep carved sockets, and a mane of raucous pink curlicues rises from its neck, like frozen flames. Her mother sits sidesaddle, holding on to the pole with one hand, laughing openmouthed, head thrown back. She turns toward a man in a fringed jacket, who leans against her horse, his arms around her waist. With her other hand she is stroking his hair, while her own blows free,