Free Dancing in the Dark by Joan Barfoot Page A

it, and when I resent something I get mad and then I blow up and get the hell away from whatever it is. See?
    “But if I don’t feel any demands, I can give you everything. I’ll want to give you everything. It’s just a matter of whether I feel forced or not. I have to want to want to.
    “Do you see what I mean at all? I know I’m putting it badly. I didn’t mean to, I had it all worked out how to say it, but I got off the track,” and he gave me that appealing, tippy little smile he had, where one side of his mouth went up and the skin around his eyes wrinkled around them, so that he was kind of peeking, like a little boy.
    Well yes, I could see in a way what he meant, looking at it from his point of view and knowing him as I did.
    Me, I was the opposite. I longed for the obligations and the demands. They would fence my life.
    One would think that would make us fit perfectly together. It did seem to.
    Still, I was a little hurt that he could apparently foresee me so easily as a burden. On the other hand, he was honest at least. “But I love you,” I said, as if that would explain everything.
    “I love you, too,” he said and smiled and leaned forward and kissed my forehead.
    When we made love, I could feel the perfect infinite future of this. It made it a much larger event.
    I never broke the promise. Whatever else, I never broke that promise. It hardly even seemed to matter that I hadmade it. He told me so much: it didn’t seem possible there could be any secrets.
    He broke it. I never did.
    In those days, one pledged to “love, honour, and obey,” although I gather that has now changed and one can promise what one wants. Or not. Sometimes it seems no one promises anything any more.
    But I took the pledge for granted; welcomed it, in fact.
    What about him? Was he frightened, despite our private pact, of love, honour, and obedience? Did he look at me uneasily and wonder what he might be giving up?
    I was uneasy and afraid. I was afraid I might not be good enough, that my alertness might falter for a moment, and like a broken spell, all this would vanish.
    I felt I was being called to perfection (and it was just like that, a vocation, something one is called to—by whom? what?) and I might not measure up. I added more private, silent promises: to be indispensable and absolute.
    Obviously I failed. Obviously there were things missed, the small pin lodged in the carpet. I did not try quite hard enough, although I did try very hard.
    I’m sure I could have been perfect, with more effort. And then Harry might have been perfect too. As it was, there were flaws and shortcomings, and his faults, although more glaring and gashing, were only reflections of my own.
    “Ah, you’re perfect, Edna,” he told me sometimes. But I was not.
    So much hung on that day we were married: all my unhappy, forlorn past and all our brilliant, sturdy future. There would have had to be great fireworks, explosions in the sky, and rumblings and upheavals in the earth, to be the day it meant to me.
    Of course there were not. But I was dazed by expectations. They were: that marrying Harry resolved—everything. I would work hard at it, true, but it was work I could understand and could do and that had a purpose. I was safe, inside two, and questions and fear had no place any more; might even be a kind of wickedness, betrayal. That is what twenty years meant, although at the time I pictured it forever.
    So much fussing, and none to do with the point of all this. Stella pushing and pulling at my hair, my mother tugging at my dress. They worried about the flowers for the church and whether the guests would all be seated properly. They went over the order of people in the receiving line, and were nervous when the photographer was late. But it was all for me, they were on my side: they too wanted this to be perfect.
    I would have liked to stop. To sit alone for a while in my bedroom and let what it meant soak into me, to absorb it until I