ISOLDE AMANTE
Dance
THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS STORY. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR.
This one is even younger than the last. He looks me up and down at the door and asks for Dina, who has been ready for 20 minutes but has chosen to stay upstairs so she can make a slow entrance down the steps, one hand lightly gliding on the banister.

She wears an ankle-length skirt of some shimmery material, gray, and slit to the thigh. Her lashes remind me of spiders. The blouse, an embarrassingly sharp kind of red, rustles as she walks past, like the sound of a secret.

Dorrie looks up from her favorite TV show and favors Dina with her version of a low, two-note whistle. She is rewarded with a look of approval. They are thick as thieves. Later, Dina will tiptoe slowly up the narra stairs, though I’ll probably still be awake, a 24-year-old waiting up for her mother, counting the creaks as she makes her way up to the front door.  She has to open it herself, for an added thrill.

My mother thinks she is in love again.



The barre, I remember it with dread. We lived in a two-story house with a red roof and one entire wall paved with mirrors. I don’t remember her wearing anything but leotards and wrap-around skirts. They were curiosities of sorts where we lived, those mirrors and my mother.

“Bend your knees, Martha,” she intoned. “Bend your knees and keep your chin up.” On one wall hung a picture of me in a gray grass skirt, my arms stretched to one side. Everyone else in the picture held out their arms the other way. I used to think it was my mother’s favorite photograph.

“Why do you always point it out to friends?”  We would often have this conversation while warming up, stretching against the barre, when I never failed to notice how pudgy I looked next to her.

“Because it’s charming!” she would say, still stretched out, taut and indifferent. My mother has a neck made for looking up at bright skies.

She used to tell students that she named me after Martha Graham. I arranged myself carefully for ballet, or for Polynesian. But over the years, the traffic encroached on our old neighborhood and drowned out the music, until my mother had to shut the studio down.

Later—I don’t remember when, exactly—she told everyone she named me after Martha in the New Testament, who prepared meals, beds and just about everything else for the Lord and her brother Lazarus, while her sister Mary sat at His feet and got all the attention.

In the mornings, she refused eggs and toast and settled for a cup of coffee, black. I do not have too many memories of my mother eating.



Dorrie will not sit still. She is forever hopping and skipping; she is enamored with square floor tiles. Yet even at play she watches out for me, careful not to step on the parts that I have just mopped. I wonder how frail I must seem, to have even a three-year-old looking out for me.

She shows off a new movement: hands on hips, she sways, slowly at first then faster and faster. She begins to whirl like a dervish and I get dizzy. In Italy, they used to believe that in order to flush out the poison of certain spiders, all one had to do was to dance to tarantella music, to soggy exhaustion.

“What are you doing?”

“Hootchy-kootchy,” my daughter beams. I’m sure she learned this from her grandmother.

Above Dorrie’s bed hangs a framed print of Mikhail Baryshnikov straddling a chair, his eyes dark. He is playing a young man fascinated with death; Dina bought it years ago. In Hong Kong, I think. “It took so long before I could get away,” she said. I wonder if this is a good picture to decorate a child’s room with.

“Dance, Mommy, dance.” She tugs at my arm. She loves that video of Gene Kelly dancing with a broom.

“No,” I say. “Enough fidgeting.”

She pouts and I am compelled to add: “Go to sleep, Isadora. It’s time for your nap.” Sometimes I wonder what’s left of Vanuatu where, I once read, old men armed with bows and arrows shot every dancer who made a mistake.



I am 16 again and nimble. I climb out of my second-floor window noiseless as a cat. Ballet can be useful. There is a boy waiting for me at a party at the end of the street. It is one of those nights: the neighborhood will not sleep.

Before I leave, a sliver of light under my parents’ door catches my eye. She is probably pretending to sleep, caged in like a heart, and he is reading Bible passages, out loud, about how Moses came down the mountain and wept at the sight of his people gyrating before a golden calf. I feel sorry for my mother, as only restless 16-year-old girls can feel sorry for their mothers.

I land on my feet on the lawn, and run.

Carlos flails his arms in the thick of the crowd. His eyes are closed. Everyone dances alone, yet together. It is strange. We dance like hunters, keeping our eyes peeled for prey. We dance like the hunted, arms up in surrender.

The music stops and a bubbly girl has everyone form pairs for a parlor game. Carlos pulls me into his arms and places a fat tomato between our cheeks.

“Is this like Statue Dance?” I have not learned to like silence.

“Sssshhh,” Carlos says and starts to cha-cha, the silliest dance I know. I end up giggling and we lose, smashed tomato all over our shirts. His is plaid, so the stain doesn’t show.  People say you lose all sense of time when you dance, but that’s not how it is for me. It’s just that sometimes, a dance ends too soon and I am bewildered when everyone else claps or hoots or calls out for more, and all I can do is blink.

In the morning my father whips me with a stingray’s tail. He raises his right arm at a sharp angle, his back straight, like someone who will never learn to dance the tango. 

I have learned not to weep.



In the early evening light, dark circles marked the paramedic’s eyes. All I could think was, How can anyone sleep from six to six and not hear a thing?

“Are these yours?” She held a half-filled bottle of nitroglycerin pills. The ambulance lights turned it the warmest shade of brown I’ve ever seen. It never looked like that on our bedside table, within Carlos’s easy reach. Or mine.

“Are these pills yours?”

How can she be so obtuse?

At the funeral, Dorrie gets annoyed at all these strangers patting her on the head. The house groans full of neighbors willing to help out in the kitchen.

“Mommy,” Dorrie pulls at my skirt. “Music.”  She points to the room where we have kept the piano and the old phonograph since her grandfather left the house. My daughter wants to dance at her father’s funeral, but just how do you tell a child about propriety?

Perhaps sensing my disapproval, she skips over to the room and draws a smile from her grandfather, who is behaving like the guest he is, peering at the photographs on the wall as if he was seeing them for the first time.

Dorrie grabs his hand and swings it, the way she does with neighborhood children who wander in every now and then to play with Dina’s make-up and old clothes.

“Dorrie,” I say, “don’t tug at Lolo like that.”

“It’s okay,” he says.  “We hardly get to see each other.” He gestures to the phonograph.  “Do you mind? It seems too quiet in here.”  Over the crackling of the tired machine, I can barely make out some golden oldie about gossamer wings and other such nonsense. It’s not his sort of music at all.

The room smells of old things and disuse. One wall is paler than the rest, the white shadow of the old mirrors. It is the room we spend the least time in, and I wonder why my father has chosen it. Dorrie wanders out before either of us can think of anything to say.

Next to the old phonograph is a dusty Madonna presiding over a vase of plastic flowers. My father regards it with a pinched brow, opens his mouth briefly, then decides against speaking his mind.

“She did say it was okay to drop by.” He says it the way my father says everything: quickly, as if afraid of overstaying his welcome.

“Of course, Pa. I’m glad you’re here.”

He straightens out a stack of magazines on the coffee table, picks up a few abandoned plastic cups. My father’s hands seem to have shriveled.

“Leave it. I’ll clean up later,” I tell him.

“But the...”

“Leave it.”

He puts the plastic cups down and walks over to the window, and from there he watches while my daughter starts to dance out on the lawn, her arms spread and her face held up to the sun, her eyes closed. Dorrie is spinning again, moving to a music only she seems able to hear. I don’t think she realizes what has happened.

Carlos arrived just a month before his death, stick-thin, his heart having gone crazy on him in a beat he couldn’t quite make out, much less follow. He and Dorrie never had much to say to each other; I think she did not see much use for him as a playmate, as he was mostly bedridden in the time he had left.

“I’ve nowhere else to go, Mar,” he had said on the phone from the middle of nowhere.

“I suppose you could stay with us for a few days,” I said, not knowing what he really needed was a place to die, that this was what had become of me, as far as he was concerned, someone to clean up after him because there was no one else.

“Martha?” My father peers closely at my face. “Is everything all right?”

I want to ask him what went wrong, why he left and yet keeps coming back for these awkward visits, when he and my mother would sit out on the porch talking, sometimes for an hour. I want to ask how one explains death to a child, but all of a sudden I find that I am tired and want nothing more than be able to rest my head on my father’s shoulder.

Outside, Dorrie has stopped dancing and plopped down on the lawn, probably humming to herself again. My father moves back to the forgotten Madonna, takes a starched white handkerchief from his pocket and slowly, like someone with all the time in the world to spare, wipes the image clean.



Last week, another club called. Starlite Magic, one of her favorites, between the Harmonie Pest Control Company and the halfway house of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, women with a mission: We offer counselling, free legal aid and skills training assistance.

“Ma’am, it seems Miss Dina has fallen asleep and we were wondering if you could send someone over to pick her up.”

I sometimes wish they wouldn’t sound so apologetic.

The club’s neon sign is missing a bulb and so it winks, Starlit. At 3 a.m., the dance instructors are filing out in jeans and plain work shirts, you wouldn’t know they are dancers just by looking at them.

The manager has kindly brought my mother to his office and I find her sprawled on the sofa. The yellow light is most unkind: her wrinkles seem buried deep in her cakey face, her eyelids gleam blue and pink.

I pat her cheek. “Ma? Wake up, we’re going home.”

The manager’s office is small and has no mirrors. I check my mother’s bag and find everything in place. He clears his throat.

“Her DI had to rush home, Ma’am. It must have been an emergency. I’m sure he didn’t mean to leave Miss Dina without making arrangements for a cab ride home.”

I look up to thank him, again, for coming to my mother’s aid and spot a framed photograph, about 11 by 17 inches, of a young man bowing in the spotlight.

“Is that you?”

He looks back and smiles. “Yes. We had this dance drama in Saipan about 10 years ago. I played a prince.”

“It must have been exciting.”

“Oh, yes. One time this rich couple invited us to their house, they were having a party for some ambassador or something like that, and it was so beautiful, the fairy lights strung out all over the garden. After the performance, the staff led us out through the kitchen and they were so nice—some of them Pinoy—we went home with bags and bags of fancy finger food.”

He is silent for a while, then straightens the lapels on his sequined tuxedo. “You know, you look just like your mother.”

“Lucky girl!” My mother has awakened without our noticing it. She pulls herself up by holding on to my arm, and slips her feet back into her dancing heels. “Has he been telling you about Saipan? Wonderful, no? And now, look how well he’s done.”

The manager regards my mother with a look of awe.



“Is Mommy mad?” My daughter brings me back; she refers to me in the third person.

“No, baby.” Her hair whispers secrets against my palm. I stroke her head, that is all she needs to sleep.

On nights like this, I imagine my mother out on some dance floor with cheap lights. She says all these silly things in her partner’s ear, or so I think, about full moons and magic stars, depending on which song is playing.

By the time she was eight, she liked to brag, she could stand at full turnout like the best of ballet dancers: legs turned out so far that the heels came together back to back and the feet formed the sort of line that cuts circles in half.

My father met her selling tickets to a charity bingo and lectured her on sin. She thought she no longer had it in her to dance professionally: a bad spine, weak tendons, a lack of bulk in the right muscles. Who can explain it?

I hear her turning the key.

“Ma?” She knows the house well enough to have no need of lights, but still I worry. The stairs are steep.

“What are you doing still up?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

This is our cue for milk and cookies, and I am her daughter again. Dina—Segundina, if you must know—steps down from her heels, and pads around the kitchen in stockinged feet.

She watches me drink, one hand on her hip, and she looks like someone on the verge of hootchy-kootchy. I laugh.
“What’s so funny?” My mother scrunches up her face, half-smiling, half-frowning. “What?”

I laugh so hard I nearly fall off my chair. She steadies me. We often catch ourselves barely in time, always never quite centered, falling and being caught, like the truest dancers.


This story won Second Prize for the Short Story in the 2001 Palanca Awards