Wednesday
In the Jukebox Light
Curtis SmithAt first we envied Tom and Betty's dancing. Friday nights at The Big Club, Saturdays at Mickey's and none of us can remember a time we saw them in the arms of another partner. Crowded around the bar, we caught our breath and ordered the drafts that never quite quenched our thirsts, but Tom and Betty kept dancing jitterbugs and twists, the new steps they whipped upon the the spot that were as sharp as any on Bandstand. We dabbed our sweating brows with cocktails napkins and grinned discretely at the picture they made. Betty had left for college a pigeon-toed girl, and when she returned four years later, she brought home a teaching degree and an adult beauty that made us uncomfortable for not knowing the old her. The elementary school in town hired her, and at recess, the other men teacher, Principal Stevens included, fumbled and fawned for her attention, but Betty always opted to join her children, and her lanky frame ensured she was the first pick in the boys' basketball games, the one the other children ran to when a kindergartner needed rescuing from atop the jungle gym. A good six inches shorter, Tom had been the second-string center for our high school football team, our heavyweights wrestler's battered practice partner, and in the ensuing years, Tom filled out even more, growing to resemble the square butcher's block he worked over in McKalb's grocery. No one knew the particulars of their first date, but we were always happy to bump into them on the street because the sight of their intertwined hand--his thick nails tinted pink from years of butcher's blood, her fingers as slender as daffodil stalks--made us momentarily forget ourselves and believe, if only for a heartbeat, that perhaps anything was possible. On the dance floor, Betty 's flat soles whispered and clicked, the hems of her sewing machine dresses ruffling, while Tom, moving with an odd lumbering grace that surprised us all, answered with his asthmatics, wheeze and the pocket jangle of the loose change he never go around to spending on beer. At their wedding, we rushed forward to take snapshots of their first dance, and in our returned photos, they float like blissful astronaut lovers in a sky of flashbulb stars. That whole next year they glowed the way just-marrieds do, the absent brushing of a misplaced curl, the distracted glances when the other took too long at the bathroom. When Betty's stomach grew and her thin ankles swelled, she and Tom abandoned their fast dances for slow tunes where they held each other with an intentness and devotion that blinded them to our inebriated ruckus, the crash of mugs dropped from clumsy fingers, the last-call fistfights that had the rest of us clambering onto our seat for a better view. Oblivious, their forms lit by the jukebox's blue-green glow, they circled each other in endless, delicate orbits.
Their boy lived for a month, and Tom and Betty haven't been to Mickey's since. Now we watch them the way any small town watches its sad stories, with concern and curiosity, politely distant as we sift for the telling details, but none of us has noticed more fat on Tom's T-bone cuts and Betty still teaches long division the way she did before. On our way home from the bar we've been known to park outside their house. We kill our engines and listen for the music from their windows. On tiptoes, we sneak across their lawn and tuck ourselves in month the bushes, and when the wind blows the curtains, we peek inside. They dance the way they once did in the jukebox light, slow and close, their new carpet worn in the tiny plot beneath their feet, the front of their clothes rubbed threadbare. Understanding sorrow, they have become the rest of us. Or not. Either way, we can stop looking.
"In the Jukebox Light" originally appeared in Dead Mule Review and the anthology Along the Lake; it appears here courtesy of the author.
Don't trust the narrator, in Curtis Smith's "In the Jukebox Light." He knows by the end of the piece that tragic things happen to even the most perfect couple, like Tom and Betty, who danced their hearts away in the 50's and 60's at The Big Club or Mickey's as the town looked on in wonder. "We envied Tom and Betty's dancing," he says. And here in small town America, the small towns that some of us might remember, Tom and Betty were the heroes, the narrator claims, for the sight of Tom and Betty together " momentarily made us forget ourselves and believe, if only for a heartbeat, that perhaps anything was possible." For him, they're perfection; she is an "adult beauty," and together, the "blissful astronaut lovers in a sky of flashbulb stars" in wedding photos. So, when their baby dies, at just one month old, the divine couple, known for their "jitterbugs and twists" that made onlookers "sweat their brows with cocktail napkins," the narrator comes to terms with one of life's truths--we are all flawed and no one escapes suffering. For the narrator, the couple is heroic in an era when perhaps it was easier to find heroes. Helpful in the community, committed to each other, beautiful and mysterious, the town's people, characteristically, need to have more, seize every detail and chance to see the dancing couple, even after their public life disappears.
Rich compressed details from the Bandstand era, (I sort of remember), the singular image of the mysterious couple adrift on the dance floor, illuminated by the jukebox light brings us back to a time that we tend to remember with sentimental longing-my favorite line, "Oblivious, their forms lit by the jukebox's blue-green glow, they circled each other in endless, delicate orbits." Smith's skillful use of references to the high school football team, the local grocer, the neon jukebox remind us not only of a time when our landscape was absent strip malls and corporate markets, but a time when people, small minded or not, really did care about community. Against this background, dance is what holds the couple and the community together.
I kept coming back to the controlling images in the piece days after I read it-the perfect looking couple swinging across the dance floor; like the narrator, we can't really know too much, only what Smith gives us. Sometimes we can't trust our vision, but we don't want it shattered either. Whichever we look at it, in the end, we are left to know, like the narrator, that no life is spared heartbreak, and maybe a good polka or waltz across the kitchen floor can help patch up a wound and make life worth living. Dick Clark would have been happy to have this couple, no doubt.
About the Author
Susan Buchler has been an English faculty member at Montgomery County Community College for many years. She is currently an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) candidate at Rosemont College. She lives in Harleysville, Pa, with her husband and two children. 
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