Dancing with Girls

When I was twelve years old my mother got it into her head that I needed to know how to dance, and, over my vehement protests, insisted that I join a square-dancing club, as well as take private ballroom dancing lessons from the daughter of one of her friends, a girl a head taller and a year older than myself. Both endeavours were horrific, soul-searing disasters, ending in mutual outbursts of exasperation between me and my partners. Wisely, my mother abandoned the project of heterosexualizing me at that point, and didn't foolishly resume it until I was fifteen, when my total lack of interest in girls began to worry her, and she nagged me into going on the first, last, and only date-with-a-girl that ever I went on--another scarifying experience, but of no relevance to this story, except that it did include a little post-football game sock-hopping, from which I emerged virtually sick with tension and disgust. Heaven spared me then for many years from the horrors and terrors of ballroom dancing, until I was in my early thirties, and was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner and party afterward with a family of hospitable and genteel negros. Nicely, the daughter of the house grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the center of the livingroom where several other couples were apparently enjoying themselves doing what seemed to be fairly free-form ballroom dancing. Gamely, I allowed myself to be dragged into the loose embrace of what might have been a two-step, and tried to divine my partner's intentions and imitate them. Which resulted in a tangled train-wreck. Laughing, the young black woman held me at arm's length and said, "Don't you know how to lead?" In an instant, forgetting how determined I was to take part in things and be Good Company, I responded indignantly, "'Lead'? What do you mean 'lead'? Aren't we equals?"