Just One More Story

Episode 2: Fancy Feet

By Lloyd W. Alexander

Final Version (Revision 1.3)

There is a particular kind of peace that comes from a sheet of fresh ice at noon on a Wednesday.

Ben had never been able to explain it to anyone, mostly because he had never tried.

The rink was cold in the way only rinks are cold, a clean, damp cold that got into the knuckles and stayed there. The Zamboni had just finished its last slow lap, leaving the surface glossy and wet under the lights. Somewhere up in the rafters, a pigeon was considering its options.

Shinny started at twelve. Ten dollars at the door, cash, folded into a coffee can that a man named Walt guarded with the seriousness of a bank teller. No referees. No scoreboard. No checking, no slap shots, and absolutely no fighting, which was the only rule anybody actually enforced.

You showed up, you laced up, and you tossed your stick into the pile at center ice.

Ben liked that part best.

Nobody picked teams. Nobody stood against the boards waiting to be chosen, the way he had in gym class, at least until the other kids figured out he could play. After that, he got picked first, or got stuck doing the picking, which was somehow worse. Here, somebody just knelt, split the sticks into two piles without looking, and that was it. Fate, by way of a stranger’s hands.

Ben’s stick landed in the pile on the left.

Dark jerseys.

He pulled his on over his shoulder pads, found his gloves, and skated to the bench, where he settled onto the far end and waited his turn.

Today was a light crowd. Seven or eight a side. Plenty of room on the bench, which was exactly how Ben liked it. Plenty of room meant nobody had to sit close to anybody.

He watched the first shift go out.

He sat at the end of the bench and enjoyed his peace.

It lasted about four minutes.

* * *

When one of the dark jerseys came off, red-faced and puffing, Ben stepped over the boards and went out.

Two seconds later, someone else hopped over behind him.

Ben didn’t think much of it.

Not then.

The man was hard to miss. Broad through the shoulders, solid through the middle, the kind of build that suggested he had once been a defenseman and had never quite forgiven anyone for retiring him. He had a gray beard, an old helmet with a crack in it held together with black tape, and a pair of skates so worn they looked like they’d been around for generations.

He also skated like nobody Ben had ever seen.

He didn’t so much move across the ice as pour himself over it. Crossovers so smooth they looked lazy. Little half-turns that put him exactly where the puck was about to be. At one point a young guy in a white jersey came at him with real speed, and the big man simply wasn’t there anymore. He’d stepped around him like someone sidestepping a puddle.

Ben stood there for a second, genuinely confused.

“Wheel!” the man barked.

Ben went.

The pass hit his tape perfectly, flat and soft, right where he would have wanted it if anyone had asked him. Ben carried it over the line, saw the man cutting toward the net, and slid it back without thinking.

The man didn’t even look. He just tipped it.

It went in off the post.

On the far side of the ice, somebody in a white jersey tapped his stick on the ice in grudging respect.

“Nice, Fancy Feet!” somebody yelled from the dark bench.

The big man raised one glove like a man accepting an award he felt he probably deserved.

Fancy Feet.

Well.

That made sense, Ben thought.

He skated back toward center, a little surprised. He wasn’t the kind of player who had to be told to wheel. He knew hockey; sports had always been his thing. He was usually a step ahead of the play in his head. But a real connection with another player was rare in shinny.

But that had felt easy.

That had felt like they’d done it before.

* * *

When Ben’s legs started burning, he looked toward the bench, saw a dark jersey waiting, and skated off.

He climbed over the boards and sat down at the far end, where he’d left his water bottle.

Two seconds later, Fancy Feet climbed over the boards and sat down right next to him.

Not near him.

Next to him.

There were six empty feet of bench on either side. The man chose the six inches beside Ben’s left shoulder.

“Nice pass,” Fancy Feet said, breathing hard. “You’re Benny, right?”

Ben opened his mouth.

He had never been Benny. Not once, not to anyone, not even as a child, when people were allowed to get away with things like that. Benny was what you called a goldfish. Benny was a name for a man who sold used cars and winked.

“Ben,” he said.

“Benny,” Fancy Feet agreed, nodding, as though Ben had confirmed it.

Ben looked out at the ice.

All right, then.

He took a drink of water.

“You know what I should be doing right now?” Fancy Feet said.

Ben didn’t and didn’t especially want to.

“Gutters,” Fancy Feet said. “I should be up on a ladder cleaning out my gutters. It’s on the list.”

“The list,” Ben repeated, because something seemed to be expected of him.

“The honey-do list.”

Fancy Feet said it the way other men said the IRS.

“Thirty-five years, my wife’s kept a list on the fridge. Little pad of paper, magnet on the back. Shaped like a lobster. She writes on it; I’m supposed to cross things off. That’s the arrangement.”

He shook his head.

“The thing never gets shorter, Benny. I cross one off, two more show up. I think she’s got a guy. I think somewhere there’s a fella who just comes up with things for me to do and calls them in.”

Ben, despite himself, almost smiled.

He caught it in time.

He did not want to encourage this.

He shifted his weight and slid a few feet down the bench, casually, the way you might move to get a better view of the play.

Fancy Feet slid with him.

Ben stared straight ahead.

“Gutters,” Fancy Feet said again, darkly. “Squeaky step. The step’s been squeaking since the first Bush administration. And the light over the sink, the—”

“Change!” someone yelled from the ice.

Ben was over the boards before the word was finished.

Behind him, he heard a grunt, the scrape of a blade on the bench, and then the unmistakable sound of a large man hopping onto the ice.

* * *

It went like that for a while.

Ben would go out. Fancy Feet would go out.

Ben would come off. Fancy Feet would come off.

Ben would sit down somewhere new. On the far end. In the middle. Once, shamelessly, right beside the door, so there was physically no room on one side of him at all.

Fancy Feet simply sat on the other side.

It wasn’t even that he was rude about it. That was the maddening part. He was perfectly cheerful. He just seemed to assume, the way a dog assumes, that wherever Ben was going was where they were both going.

And in between, on the ice, they kept finding each other.

Ben would look up, and Fancy Feet would already be there, stick on the ice, waiting. Fancy Feet would drift into a corner, and Ben would somehow know to be at the side of the net. It wasn’t anything special. It was shinny. Nobody was keeping score, officially.

But Ben had stopped being surprised by it.

That was its own kind of surprise.

* * *

“Here’s the thing about the list,” Fancy Feet said, settling in beside Ben for the fourth or fifth time. He pulled off one glove with his teeth and wiped his beard. “Half of it isn’t even chores.”

Ben said nothing. He was getting good at saying nothing in this man’s direction. It didn’t seem to slow him down at all.

“Like, she’ll put ‘fix squeaky step,’ fine. That’s a chore. Then right under it, ‘stop leaving socks on the stairs.’ That’s not a chore. That’s a criticism. And right under that…”

He held up a finger.

“‘Tell me I’m pretty more and more and more.’”

He looked at Ben as if Ben might rule on it.

“What am I supposed to do with that? You can’t cross that off. I tell her she’s pretty, does she cross it off? No. She says, ‘That doesn’t count, I had to put it on the list.’”

Ben looked down at his skates.

Something in his chest made a small, unexpected movement, the way it did sometimes when a song came on in a grocery store that he hadn’t heard in years.

“Sounds like she likes the list,” he said, before he could think better of it.

Fancy Feet pointed at him.

“See, that’s what my daughter says. She says, ‘Dad, it’s not a list, it’s how Mom talks to you.’”

He seemed to consider this.

“I told her I already know how her mother talks to me. I’ve been married to her for thirty-five years. She talks to me like I’m a man who doesn’t clean the gutters.”

Ben laughed.

He hadn’t meant to. It came out short and surprised, more of a cough than a laugh, and he covered it by taking a drink of water.

Fancy Feet looked very pleased.

“Change, dark!”

They went.

* * *

On the ice, Ben found himself thinking about a lobster-shaped notepad on a refrigerator he had never seen.

He pictured it covered in thirty-five years of handwriting. Gutters and socks and squeaky steps, and here and there, something that was really a love note in disguise.

He missed a pass.

“Wake up, Benny!” Fancy Feet called cheerfully.

Ben winced.

It wasn’t the missed pass.

* * *

The next time they sat down, it was Fancy Feet who was quiet first.

Ben noticed it the way you notice a refrigerator when it stops humming.

The big man was looking out at the ice, his elbows on his knees, his gloves hanging between them. For a while, he didn’t say anything at all.

Ben realized he was waiting.

That was new.

“There’s one on there,” Fancy Feet said finally, “that’s been on that list for eleven years.”

Ben turned his head.

“Eleven years,” Fancy Feet said. “She never crosses it off. She never adds it again. It just stays. Every list. She rips off the old page when it fills up, and she copies the ones I haven’t done onto the new page, and that one always comes along. Eleven years. Top of the page, every time. Right under the lobster.”

“What is it?” Ben asked.

He heard himself ask it.

He had not intended to ask anything today.

Fancy Feet opened his mouth.

“Change!”

Of course.

Fancy Feet looked at the ice, then at Ben.

Ben had gone first all game. This time, without quite knowing why, he lifted a glove and waved him on.

Fancy Feet heaved himself up with a groan.

“Hold that thought, Benny.”

He went over the boards.

Ben sat there.

He watched a dark jersey coast toward him, red-faced, looking for somewhere to sit.

He’d have liked to stay right where he was. But this one was his shift. That was how it worked. You took your turn, you gave someone else theirs. It was the only real courtesy shinny had, and Ben had always been scrupulous about it.

He went.

But he took a short one.

A very short one.

He touched the puck twice, made one reasonable pass, and was back at the boards almost before his legs had warmed up, at the exact moment he saw Fancy Feet heading for the bench.

He climbed over and sat down.

Fancy Feet sat down next to him.

And this time, Ben didn’t slide anywhere.

He wasn’t entirely sure when that had happened.

* * *

“So,” Ben said.

It was, he reflected later, possibly the first time in his adult life he had restarted a conversation with a stranger on purpose.

Fancy Feet took his helmet off and ran a hand over the gray stubble on his head. Without the helmet, he looked older, and a little less like a defenseman.

“‘Take me dancing,’” he said.

Ben waited.

“That’s it. That’s the one. ‘Take me dancing.’ In her handwriting, eleven years running.”

He put the helmet on his knee and turned it slowly, like a steering wheel.

“Our kids are throwing us a party. Thirty-fifth anniversary. Five weeks from now. They rented the hall at the Legion. Got a DJ. My son-in-law made a slideshow. There’s going to be a cake with our wedding picture on it, which I think is a strange thing to eat, but nobody asked me.”

He stopped turning the helmet.

“And there’s going to be a dance floor.”

“Ah,” Ben said.

“Yeah.”

The puck banged off the glass near them. Neither of them looked.

“I don’t dance, Benny.”

“Okay.”

“No, I mean I don’t dance. I have never danced. At our own wedding, I told her I’d tweaked my knee playing hockey that morning. Limped down the aisle. She was so sweet about it. She danced with her father and her uncles and half the guys from my old team, and I sat at the head table with ice on my knee, drinking a Narragansett and smiling like an idiot.”

He shook his head.

“Thirty-five years. She still thinks I’ve got a bad knee.”

Ben looked at him.

Then he looked at the ice, where ten grown men in mismatched jerseys were gliding and spinning and stepping around one another with something that, if you squinted, looked an awful lot like a dance.

“You,” Ben said slowly, “are the best skater out there.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

Fancy Feet thought about it.

“Out here, I know where my feet are going,” he said. “I’ve known since I was six. I don’t even think about it. But out there, the music starts and everybody’s looking and my feet just…”

He held up one gloved hand and let it drop.

“Quit. Like they’ve never met me.”

Ben was quiet for a moment.

He knew what he should do. He should nod. He should say something sympathetic and small, like “That’s tough,” and wait for the next line change, and go out, and come back, and eventually go home, and that would be the end of it.

Instead, he heard himself say:

“I don’t dance either.”

He said it to the ice.

He said it quietly enough that he could have pretended, later, he hadn’t said it at all.

Fancy Feet turned and looked at him.

“Yeah?”

“I’m…” Ben stopped. There was a word for this, and he didn’t love it. “I’m afraid of it, actually.”

It was a strange thing to hear out loud. It sounded smaller than it felt.

“Weddings,” Ben went on, because now that he had started, it seemed impolite to stop. “I find the cake table. I stand by the cake like I’ve been hired to guard it.”

Fancy Feet stared at him.

Then he laughed. A big, delighted laugh that turned a couple of heads on the white bench just down the ice.

“The cake!” he said. “You guard the cake!”

“Somebody has to,” Ben said.

“That’s worse than the knee, Benny. At least the knee’s got a story.”

“The cake has a story,” Ben said with dignity. “It’s just a boring one.”

Fancy Feet laughed again, wiping his eyes with the back of his glove.

Then he went quiet.

He looked down at the helmet on his knee.

“Afraid,” he said.

He seemed to be trying the word on.

“Huh.”

Ben waited.

“I never said that,” Fancy Feet said. “Thirty-five years. I said bad knee. I said I’m not a dancer. I said, ‘Donna, you know I’ve got two left feet.’ I said everything.” He shook his head slowly. “I never once said I was scared.”

He was quiet a little longer.

“Sounds kind of dumb out loud.”

“It’s not dumb,” Ben said.

It wasn’t advice. It was just true.

Fancy Feet looked at him, then out at the ice again.

“Five weeks,” he said.

Ben said nothing.

“That’s a lot of time, five weeks. You could learn a lot of things in five weeks.”

Ben said nothing.

“You can learn one dance in five weeks,” Fancy Feet said. “Can’t you? One slow one? Just the one?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Ben said honestly.

Fancy Feet barked out another laugh.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t, Cake Guard.”

“Change, dark!”

This time, Fancy Feet didn’t groan when he got up.

He went over the boards like a much younger man.

* * *

The game ended the way shinny games always ended at that rink: somebody looked at the clock on the wall, said, “Next goal wins,” and everybody suddenly cared a great deal.

It took nine minutes.

A kid in a white jersey finally snuck one in off a rebound, and the white bench cheered like they’d won something, and then everyone skated around tapping gloves and saying “good game” to people whose names they didn’t know.

Fancy Feet found Ben near the door.

“Good playing with you, Benny.”

Ben opened his mouth.

This was it. This was his chance. Ben, actually. Just Ben. Not Benny. Nobody calls me Benny.

“You too,” Ben said.

Fancy Feet clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to rattle his shoulder pads, and clomped off toward the locker room on his skate guards, already shouting something at Walt about the coffee can.

Ben realized he had never asked the man his real name.

He had played an hour of hockey with him. He knew about his gutters, his squeaky step, his wife’s handwriting and the lobster on the fridge. He knew about a bad knee that wasn’t, and a dance floor at the Legion five weeks from now.

But he’d only ever know him as Fancy Feet.

Somehow, that seemed about right.

* * *

In the parking lot, Ben sat in his car with the engine running and waited for the heater to catch up.

His legs ached. His hands were cold. His hair was a damp disaster under his hat.

He thought about the bench.

He’d spent the first half hour of the game trying to get away from a man.

He’d spent the second half hour cutting his shifts short to get back to him.

He wasn’t sure what that said about him.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

He put the car in reverse.

Benny, he thought, and winced, and pulled out of the lot.

Afterthoughts

Ben

The radio was playing something old and slow when Ben got home.

He didn’t change the station.

He stood in his kitchen with a cup of coffee going cold on the counter and listened to it for a while.

Then, because nobody was watching, and because the kitchen had the most open floor, he tried it.

Just a step.

He wasn’t entirely sure what the step was supposed to be. Something with a box in it, he thought. Forward, side, back. He had seen it done at weddings, from his post beside the cake.

Forward.

Side.

He caught sight of himself in the dark kitchen window. A man in wool socks, arms held out stiffly in front of him as though he were carrying an invisible tray of drinks, frowning at his own feet.

He stopped.

He stood there for a moment, arms still half raised.

Then he lowered them.

No, he thought. This just isn’t me.

He turned off the radio, picked up his coffee, and drank it cold.

But he left the radio on the same station.

Fancy Feet

The sign on the door said Rhythm & Grace Dance Studio, Tuesday Evenings, Beginners Welcome.

He sat in his truck in front of it for eleven minutes.

He knew it was eleven because he watched the clock on the dashboard the whole time, the way he used to watch the clock in the penalty box.

He had told Donna he had a men’s league game.

It wasn’t the first time he’d lied to her about his feet.

He hoped it would be the last.

Inside, the floor was wood, and the lights were too bright, and there were mirrors on every wall, which nobody had warned him about. There were four other couples and one woman by herself, and an instructor named Gloria who was about seventy years old and looked like she could have taken him in a fight.

“You’re alone?” she asked.

“For now,” he said. “It’s a surprise.”

Gloria seemed to like that.

She put him across from the woman by herself, who was a retired schoolteacher and had a grip like a vise, and she showed them the first step.

Left foot back. Cross over. Shift your weight.

He looked down at his feet.

It was a crossover.

It was a slow crossover, on wood instead of ice, with music instead of a puck. But it was a crossover all the same. He had done it ten thousand times. He had done it with his eyes closed.

He stepped.

He didn’t fall down.

“There you go,” Gloria said. “Don’t look at your feet. Your feet know.”

He thought about the quiet guy on the bench. Benny. The cake guard.

He wondered whether he’d see him next Wednesday.

He thought he might tell him.

When he got home, Donna was asleep. He stood in the dark kitchen in his coat and looked at the list on the fridge.

Take me dancing.

He didn’t cross it off.

Not yet.

Five weeks.

He touched the lobster magnet once, gently, like he was tapping it for luck, and went up to bed.

The step didn’t squeak.

He’d fixed it Monday.

The End