I try not to regret too much. This has become a sort of cultural imperative, I think – we’re told to have no regrets, that regrets are a waste of time, that they diminish ownership, that they hold us back. I agree with this, for the most part. There are a few instances in my life where I took action or moved in a direction that caused someone else pain: those, I regret.
I danced last weekend. I mean really danced. I mean gave it up – control. I mean breathed through the terror that seizes my limbs when someone takes my waist or my hand. I mean let go.
The morning I left Louisiana I drove from Lafayette to Breaux Bridge, a short but slow drive through the most benign of the Bayou. On a small main street, there is a café that on weekend mornings hosts a Zydeco brunch that walks that fine line between tourist trap and authentic experience. I loved Louisiana. I shouldn’t have. Of everywhere I went on that road trip, it bore perhaps the least resemblance to anything I knew. It was February, 2007, not long after Katrina, and I got lost coming into New Orleans, wound up pulled over on the side of a road near what used to be downtown, next to the burnt-out shell of a Holiday Inn, my car surrounded by gigantic rats. A friend later escorted me through the Ninth Ward, past the signs scrawled on plywood: GO HOME TOURIST, and SEND HELP.
But there was something almost liquidly alive in Louisiana, some sort of tongue heat. I sat in a coffee shop one afternoon in New Orleans and watched this young white teacher, not much older than me, remove a self-described paedophile from the vicinity of his students with a stern, low voice, his hands clenched quietly at his sides. It was sort of breathtaking – all sides of it, the paedophile railing that he just wanted to talk to them, the students coiled and taut at their small tables, the young guy, bleeding New England blue, mustering everything in him to build some sort of invisible force field around these kids.
I’m getting off track. There was a man in a yellow suit with a trumpet. There was a whip-thin kid with a terrible sense of rhythm and a washboard around his neck. I sat at a table with an elderly couple who were driving around the country in their RV. Just like in the movies. They ordered a plate of beignets and shared them with me and I ate those clouds of dough and sugar and basically glued myself to my chair.
The odds of me making it back to Lafayette, Louisiana are kind of hilariously slim. So for the rest of my life I’m going to have to tell the story the way it really was, which is that no less than 8 or 10 men asked me to dance, and I said no to every one of them. I wasn’t a prize or anything – everyone asked everyone to dance. Everyone danced. You go to Zydeco brunch in Lafayette, Louisiana to dance. You dance ineptly with your husband of 40 years, and then you dance with the stranger he hands you off to, and then you dance with the tiny boy with his washboard, and then with a sophomore from University of Texas on his spring break, and then you dance with whomever you get handed to next, until you find your table, hold a beignet in your palm, get sticky with icing sugar, and say yes to the next person who asks. Someone will.
I said no so many times that I couldn’t say yes, even when I started to think I might actually want to. I said no to the man in the yellow suit, no to the tiny washboard kid, to the sophomore from Texas and his cousin and his brother and his brother’s friend, and, worst of all, no to the old man who bought me the beignets, who was genuinely concerned for me, I think, for all my saying no. I said no because I was embarrassed, of course, because I can’t dance. And because obviously all of these people were going to stop what they were doing to judge me all the way back to Vancouver, 3500 miles away.
Of all the insults levelled at me, the one that still hurts the most, as indirect as it was: being written into a play as a girl who doesn’t dance. “She doesn’t even dance,” I think it went, and that somehow encapsulated all that I’ve ever known to be wrong with me, how much life and spirit I lack, the dead space around me I could never quite manage to light up.
It’s all control, of course. When Em and I were in her apartment this weekend, slightly drunk on bad wine, we raved and raged with our whole selves, throwing our bodies around her kitchen, and it was deliriously wonderful. I usually can’t get to that place unless I’m in a dark room and I’ve had two over-full glasses and Kelly Clarkson is blaring and the only person watching is my best friend who has far more ammunition than this on which to judge me, should she feel the need. But I’ve been there a few times before, maybe the time at the wedding when I was berated into submission and then whirled so quickly that I broke the strap of my dress and didn’t even notice. And last weekend, celebrating dear friends - even though we were the only ones - I let this skinny guy throw me around a bit, because he could, because his grip was strong and firm and sure, because it was fun, because I'm striving for bravery beyond my means, because I don't want to carry around the weighty, clumsy-footed self I am too afraid to be.
