Free Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner Page A

dance. He watches a pair of girls go by, dancing with one another for lack of male partners. Does one of them look at him with an interest not quite covered by her gum-chewing indifference? He wishes he had a white coat that fitted him. The one he has to wear has sleeves six inches too long, so that he has to turn back the cuffs, and the shoulders are broad enough for someone twice his size.
    The members of the band on their platform all wear ice-cream pants and blue jackets and straw skimmers. They are playing “Ain’t We Got Fun,” and the people at the tables begin to join in, singing and clapping like people at a picnic.
    There’s nothing surer,
    The rich get rich and the poor get poorer (laid off, children),
    In the meantime
    In between times
    Ain’t we got fun.
    Near Bruce a boy and girl are doing the Charleston. He is a slicker in a four-button pinch-waisted suit with bell-bottomed pants. The girl’s red dress is so short that he can see her stockings rolled below the knee. Her mouth is red and laughing, her shingled head is like a boy’s. Her feet move in swift twisting motions, following the twistings of her partner’s bell bottoms. They hang on to each other’s arms and put their noses together, watching their feet and laughing.
    Bruce can do the Charleston. A high school acquaintance whose mother is a dance instructor taught him one afternoon at Warm Springs. But he is not sure he would do it here. Whole dance halls have been shaken down when a lot of people start doing it. It works like an earthquake. It gets everything going toa rhythm, and pretty soon the hall vibrates apart. He watches these two, and is both envious and contemptuous of the bell bottoms and the sideburns, and thinks with disapproval that the girl shouldn’t show her knees in public this way, and wonders what it would be like to put his arm around her red silk waist, and with his face only inches from her laughing face, Charleston her around the floor.
    He moves to ease the swelling in his pants. What’s the lightest thing in the world, Mr. Gallagher? Your pud, Mr. Sheen, it rises with thought. All by himself, he snickers.
    Then he spots a family—father, mother, somewhat fat daughter—leaving a table. With one hand in his pocket, hiding his condition behind the cart, he starts toward them. Ed Mueller, the manager, is watching him, he sees, and he hurries, wanting to impress. Almost at once he feels it is safe to take his hand out of his pocket and be businesslike with both hands on the cart handle. In his mind, as he starts stacking the dishes, is a tableau in which Mueller, at payoff time, publicly praises him.
Watch this Mason kid. He may be little but by God he’s on the job. He could teach all of you something.
    His glance brushes the glance of the fattish girl. She turns away so indifferently that he knows she is only lighting a Murad. Back of that nonchalance there is a gleam of curiosity, interest, invitation.
    In the grease on one of the plates he finds a nickel embedded, and hastily digs it out and darts after the departing family. “Mister? Sir? You left this.”
    Young Lincoln, he waits for their praise. He hopes Mueller is still watching. But the man toward whom he holds the nickel does not accept it. His face is full of heavy astonishment. The fat girl is staring, the mother smooths her dress over her high corseted rump. Slowly comprehension dawns. Bruce’s face grows slowly hot. “Oh,” he says vaguely, and turns away, too confused for thanks or anything else. Three tables away, Ed Mueller, who
has
been watching, is breaking up in laughter.
    Sullenly Bruce finishes loading the cart and starts off toward the kitchen around the dark edge of the dance floor. He has an impulse to throw the nickel as far as he can throw it out into the water, but instead he wipes it off on a napkin and pushes itdown into his watch pocket, where his ten-dollar paycheck from the news company where he works during the week is folded