The Chicken Dance Read online

  So after Happy Days was over, I got up from my seat, threw away my aluminum platter, folded up my tray, and excused myself to my room.

  But before I got to my room, I heard my mother shout, “I hate it here!”

  “Quiet,” my father said. “He’ll hear you.”

  Then my mother screamed louder, “I don’t care if he does hear me! To think I gave up that dancing job in Las Vegas to marry you and end up on a chicken farm. I used to be Janice Remington, Dancer. I traded that in for Janice Schmidt, Chicken Farmer. I’d be famous right now if it weren’t for you.”

  My father must not have liked that because then he yelled, “You weren’t a dancer! You were a waitress at a drive-in where the manager let you dance for people’s birthdays. I’m the one who was in college and had to drop out and do the honorable thing and marry you!”

  I heard something that sounded like someone was getting slapped, and right after, a dog food commercial and then the theme song to Laverne and Shirley.

  I never understood what my father meant by “do the honorable thing and marry you.” I knew what honorable was. It’s like if someone drops their wallet and you find it. So I figured that my father had dropped his wallet and my mother found it and returned it to him and so since she had done the honorable thing, he did an honorable thing back and married her.

  Anyway, right after the theme song to Laverne and Shirley, I heard my father say, “I’m sorry I yelled. But you know we can’t go back to Shreveport.”

  “Why not?” my mother asked real loud. “Why can’t you beg for your old job back?”

  “Well,” my father said, “for one, businesses don’t usually hire back people they fire; for two, we’re just starting to get out of debt and can’t afford a move; and three, I couldn’t stand to face any of our friends because I’m embarrassed about everything that happened.”

  “You know it’s your fault!” my mother shouted back. “If you had taken family dance classes with us, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Come on, Janice!” my father screamed. “It’s my fault because I didn’t run around in polka-dotted leotards and high heels, clopping like some wounded satyr?”

  “A wounded satyr?” my mother yelled.

  And my father shouted back, “I call them like I see them!”

  Then I heard another slap and footsteps that sounded like they were going toward the kitchen. So I opened my door, stepped out into the hall, and tiptoed into the living room. I could hear pots hitting the floor and plates crashing into the sink. This happened in most of the fights even though we ate out of the TV trays and never used the pots or dishes.

  After a few minutes, the pot and plate sounds stopped. That’s when I walked out of the living room and into the foyer. I knelt behind a bookcase and right when I did, I heard my father say, “Listen, I’m sorry, Janice, but don’t blame me for what happened. That’s cruel, and I’m just as upset as you.”

  Then it sounded like a hundred forks and spoons fell on the floor and my mother let out this really loud scream. It kind of scared me and I wondered if I should run back to my room and lock the door.

  But I didn’t because then my father said, “I promise that next year when the house becomes ours, we’ll sell it and move to another city. Until then, it’s all we’ve got. We spent all of our savings on Mr. Munson. So if you’ll be a little patient, this will pay off. And I can buy you that convertible you always wanted.”

  My mother started crying and my father said, “Everything is going to work out, Janice. I promise.”

  Nobody talked for a few minutes and then my father asked, “Would you like to go to New Orleans this weekend and get your hair done at one of those fancy salons?”

  “Can we go to a dance club?” my mother asked.

  “Yes,” he told her. “We can go to a dance club.”

  “Oh, thank you, Dick,” my mother said. “That would take off some of the pressures I have.”

  The arguments happened I guess every month from as far back as I can remember. The one on my eleventh birthday started because my mother had to feed the chickens, but sometimes they were because the weather was too hot or the townspeople were too stupid or because the hair salon didn’t have banana-pineapple–scented shampoo. But during all of them, my mother always screamed, “I hate it here!”

  When the arguments first started happening, I would sit in my room and listen to them like their voices were coming from the radio. When I first started learning to write, I copied some of the arguments in a notebook. I was about six and since I couldn’t write out the whole argument, I’d write the words I knew like the, hair, dance, job. The words I didn’t know the meaning or spelling of, I’d sound out and then look up in the dictionary. I found the words leotard and honorable easily. I could never find the word satyr in the dictionary, though, because when I’d sound it out, I imagined it to be spelled sat tire, or satire, but never satyr. I found out at school one day that a satyr is a thing that is half man and half goat. We also found out that a centaur is a thing that is half man and half horse. I think that would have been a better word for my father to call my mother, because a horse clops more than a goat.

  Anyway, after each argument, I’d look at my notes from the one before and compare them with the new one. I couldn’t always hear what my parents were saying. Some months I’d hear, “It’s my fault because I didn’t run around.” Then other times I’d hear, “didn’t run around in polka-dotted leotards and high heels, clopping like some wounded satyr?” After a while I could write the whole sentence out and then the whole argument and that’s when I started to realize that maybe my parents were hiding something from me.

  After I was sure that the argument on my eleventh birthday was over, I walked real fast to my room. I hadn’t had a chance to ask my parents my question and they still hadn’t given me a cake or birthday presents or a Chinese clown. I thought that at any moment they would call me to go and meet them in the kitchen where they would be waiting to wish me happy birthday. I didn’t want to look like I was waiting for them so I changed into my pajamas and lay in my bed awake. After a few minutes I heard a knock at my door.

  This is it, I thought. They were going to call me into the kitchen and give me a T-shirt that said, “Kiss Me! I’m 11!”

  The door opened and my mother stepped into my room and I looked at her and smiled. She didn’t smile back or say, “Come to the kitchen” or, “Happy birthday.”

  Instead she said, “Don! I’m turning off your light. It’s past your bedtime.”

  I lay awake for the next hour thinking that she was trying to fool me. She’d never surprised me before on my birthday, but I was sure that this was the year it was going to happen because the picture of Dawn made me think that eleventh birthdays were a really big deal.

  An hour after my mother turned off my lights, I fell asleep and dreamed about a Chinese clown. It didn’t look that different from a regular clown.

  But anyway, when I walked into the kitchen the next morning, my parents were sitting at the table. My father stared straight ahead while he ate a banana and my mother bounced around in her chair while she ate a donut.

  When my mother finished eating, she said, “Don, your father and I have an announcement to make. Don’t we, Dick?”

  My father nodded and scratched the bald spot on his head and then my mother said, “We’re going to New Orleans this weekend, so you’ll be staying with the babysitter.”

  My mother stood up and walked over to the radio and said, “I’m so excited. I need to practice dancing for New Orleans.”

  She turned on the radio and the song “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain and Tenille was playing.

  I closed my eyes and tapped my fork against the table and moved from side to side with the music until my mother said, “Don! Stop tapping that fork. You’re messing up my rhythm.”

  I opened my eyes and saw my mother spinning around. She looked like she was in a good mood so I decided I would ask her the q
uestion I’d wanted to ask the night before. I took a deep breath and was about to ask if I could start taking care of the chickens. But something else fell out of my mouth and I said, “Yesterday was my birthday.”

  My father turned and looked at me. My mother, who was kicking her leg in the air, froze for a few seconds. Then it was like she melted, and she dropped her leg down and said, “Oh. Happy birthday. You know, I’m sorry, we forgot. I don’t always have time to remember these things. I mean, I cook and clean all day, every day. You mustn’t try to make me feel bad about this. Dick, tell him not to make me feel bad about this.”

  My father looked at me for a couple of seconds and then at my mother. He did something funny with his eyes that made him look like he was thinking. Then my mother crossed her arms in front of her and looked at him. My father closed his eyes and then said, “Don, don’t make your mother feel bad about this.”

  Three

  My mother called the chickens “The Feathered Curse.” The reason she didn’t just call them “The Curse” was because she used that name to talk about her menstrual cycle. I overheard her tell my father several times that the chickens caused just as much pain and suffering as her menstrual cycle, but couldn’t be controlled with sanitary napkins and pain relievers. I didn’t know what my mother meant the first time I heard her use the words menstrual cycle. All I knew was that it was bad and that you probably couldn’t ride it like a motorcycle.

  Both curses put my mother in a bad mood. On days when she would wake up with puffy eyes and complained more than usual, I’d check the front foyer of our house to see if my father had packed a suitcase and was heading out of town. If there wasn’t a suitcase, I knew my mother was acting the way she was because of “The Curse” and that I should stay in my room and away from her. If there was a suitcase, I knew it was “The Feathered Curse” and I’d get happy because I knew I’d get to watch her feed the chickens.

  Even though feeding the chickens was like a menstrual cycle to my mother, I liked watching them being fed because they always seemed so excited. They each had their own way of getting over to the grain. Some of them would spin around in circles, roll around in the dirt, fly a few feet, and then flap their wings the rest of the way. Sometimes a group of them would line up like they were playing that game Red Rover, and then they’d run over together to the grain. Some of the smaller, lighter ones could fly the few feet over to where the grain had landed, but the heavier, older ones couldn’t, so they danced over.

  Sometimes my mother didn’t feed the chickens because she decided it was too much of a bother for her. There were a few times when some of them died and lay in the middle of the pen until my father came back from his business trip and got rid of them. The next day, the dead chickens would be replaced with others, so we always had twenty-five of them, because of the will.

  My mother eventually figured out that it was better to feed the chickens than to let them die and stink up the yard. But even though she stopped starving the chickens, the yard still stank because of the eggs.

  You see, since my mother was so scared of the chickens, she never collected their eggs, but instead left them in the nest until my father got back from his business trips. After a while they started to rot and smell up the yard. My mother decided one day to replace the hens with roosters so they wouldn’t lay any more eggs.

  I watched the roosters for a few hours the first day they showed up and one of them did this little dance where he ran sideways and then opened his wings and turned around in circles. The hens got around him like they were praying to him and the rooster jumped on one of the hens and did some stuff. At first I thought that maybe he was hurting her, but then the other hens lined up and the other rooster did a similar dance and also had a line forming for him.

  When my mother added the roosters to our flock, two things happened that she didn’t expect. One was that they usually crowed in the mornings. I loved the sound of the roosters waking me up and I’d watch them from my window while they stood on the top of a rock or bucket that made them higher than the other chickens.

  My mother hated the crowing and usually threw a shoe or bucket at them. It never came close to the roosters, but the curse words she shouted usually made them run or stop crowing. After a few weeks, my mother traded the roosters in for some hens. It wasn’t soon enough, though, to stop something else from happening.

  You see, since she didn’t collect the eggs, the chickens began sitting on them and they began to hatch. To me, it was amazing the first time I saw a hen walk out with five little chicks following her. I watched the mother hen and her chicks from my window. She walked with her chest stuck out and she clucked at the other chickens when they’d look at her new kids. I sat there for a few minutes staring at them until I heard my mother scream, “Oh my god! What is going on?”

  I ran out to the backyard and stood next to my mother. She pointed at the chicks and asked, “How could this have happened? How could they have started reproducing?”

  When my father came back from trips, he collected all the eggs that were in the nests and since it takes around twenty-one days for an egg to hatch, this stopped the chicks from being born. I figured out later, though, that one of the hens was laying her eggs behind a bush in the chicken yard.

  The morning we found the chicks, my father had already left for work, but when he got home, before he even stepped out of the car, my mother was standing over him shouting. My father grinned a little while she shouted and flapped her arms around. He explained to her what roosters did and she told him, “But we got rid of the roosters a few weeks ago.”

  My father shrugged and said, “I guess they did their deed before they left.”

  My mother put her hands on her hips and said, “That’s just like a man,” and then she went into the house and slammed the door.

  Neither my father nor my mother understood the chickens as well as I did. They didn’t realize that the rooster was admired for its courage and its morning crow, and because the hen laid eggs, she was a sign of fertility. I looked that word up and it means that she can have a lot of kids. I thought the courage and fertility thing was kind of cool, but the reason I liked the chickens so much was because they made me laugh and listened to me. This was why I wanted to start taking care of them. And I finally asked if I could, two days after my eleventh birthday.

  My father had left on a business trip the day before so my mother had to feed the chickens. I went with her because she was scared the chickens would attack her and she needed me to call the police and an ambulance if they did. I didn’t mind because I liked watching them get fed and I think watching them was a better present than a Chinese clown or a T-shirt that said, “Kiss Me! I’m 11.”

  So that afternoon, I stood next to my mother behind our house and looked at the chickens behind the fence that separated them from our yard. My mother was wearing a red bow in her hair, a white pantsuit, and high heel shoes. It was the end of April and it was starting to get hot and so my mother had a bunch of sweat dripping down her face.

  “I hate your father,” she said, and then she took a deep breath and walked toward the fence separating our backyard from the chicken yard. She threw a fistful of grain over the fence, and one of her red press-on nails flew through the air with the feed. When the chickens started dancing toward her to eat the feed, my mother screamed, “Go away, you nasty rodents!”

  Then she dropped the pail, threw her hands up in the air, screamed some more, and ran from them until the heel of her shoe got stuck in some mud. She bent over and started breathing hard and bobbing her head up and down each time she took a breath. The red bow in her hair was flopping back and forth like a chicken’s comb. She did this for only a couple of seconds and then stood up and looked at her hand and said, “Oh my god. I lost another nail!”

  Then she made a fist and shouted, “I hate you, chickens! You are a feathered curse!”

  I laughed because my mother looked like a chicken herself because of the red bow a
nd white suit, so it was kind of like she said she hated herself. My mother scrunched up her face, looked at me, and said, “I can’t believe you! I could have been killed and you’re laughing!”

  I stopped laughing and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, sorry isn’t good enough,” she said. “You’re punished, young man, so tonight after dinner, I want you to go straight to your room and think about how hateful you are.”

  That night, right after I ate the boysenberry tart in my Mountains of Meatloaf TV dinner, my mother sent me to my bedroom. My room had a single bed, a desk left over from Uncle Sam, and a wooden toy box I’d won in kindergarten for guessing how many jelly beans were in a jar. The edge of my bed was right by a window, and from it I could see the chicken yard. I sat on my bed and looked at the chickens and laughed again when I thought about how my mother looked like a chicken when she was screaming. That’s when I realized that maybe it would be a good time to ask to start taking care of the chickens.

  You see, I knew that my mother hated feeding the chickens and that my father wasn’t coming back for a few days and so she would probably be happy that I asked to start taking care of them. So I walked over to my door and listened to the television until a commercial came on. This was the best time to ask, I figured, so I opened my door and walked out into the living room. My mother was sitting in her chair watching TV.

  “What are you doing out of your room?” she asked. “You’re punished.”

  I looked down at the ground and said, “I,” but before I could say anything else, my mother said, “What? You’re what? You’re sorry for laughing at me?”

  I looked up at her, pushed my glasses up on my nose, closed my eyes, and asked, “Can I start feeding the chickens?”

  “What?” she asked.

  I opened my eyes and asked, “Can I start taking care of the chickens?”

  “You want to start taking care of the chickens?” she asked.

  I looked up at her and said, “Yes, ma’am.”