Note from the Editor:

Welcome back, Cairn! We’re celebrating the kick off of the semester by sharing a story—a story that won the Dr. Jean Minto Fellowship Writing Award for Creative Non-fiction last semester!

Before we present this poignant true story, let us present its author: Abigail Wagher.

What first inspired you to write this story?

We did a writing exercise in Creative Non-fiction where we picked an object and jotted down anything we could possibly associate with it in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way. I chose the classroom speaker, started with talking about morning announcements in elementary school, and ended with talking about my mom’s music blasting through the house. This, combined with the “Suffering and Solace” [writing] prompt, inspired me to explore my mom’s life story a little.

What were some of the joys you experienced when writing?

It was really exciting to write in a genre I hadn’t before. I loved being able to write about real life creatively—the content is true, like the content of a

research or any academic paper, but being able to use imagery and artistic language that doesn’t always get used in other papers was so fun. I also loved feeling like I got to know and understand my mom a little better through writing this.

What were some of the challenges you faced?

I’d never really written non-fiction before this piece, so I just really had no idea what I was doing. I struggled with structuring the story and with making sure I represented characters and events as truthfully as possible. The honesty and vulnerability that non-fiction begs is both wonderfully freeing and terrifying.

And now, without further ado…

“Ever-Moving Feet” by Abigail Wagher

In Levittown, Pennsylvania, on Frosty Hollow Road, in a lone, red brick building sits Kenneth E. Fox, D.O’s Family Practice. I’ve driven past it countless times growing up, always on the way to see my grandparents, and every time, Mom tells me the same thing.

In Levittown, Pennsylvania, on a sectioned-off piece of land next to Durham Road, in the cluster of red brick buildings dubbed the Foxwood Manor Apartments, lives a small girl named Jen. Thick, clear glasses take up half of her face, a cloud of blonde covering the rest. In 1980, she attends her first wedding.

At the reception, the wild terrain of unknown dance floor stretches before her. Jen spends much time alone. Her parents work all they can. Her sister has yet to be born. She plays with her neighborhood friends often, but when she doesn’t, she settles down in the tiny living room with mac-and-cheese and hotdogs and watches VCR recordings of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. She memorizes the routines without meaning to, but she doesn’t dance with the ballerinas, at least, not out loud. At the reception, though, the fake hardwood slats look like a stage, and she knows she could be them, those ballerinas, just once if never again. The expanse of the dance floor and thunder of music and voices cannot deter her. Jen dances out loud, and she feels safe, like belonging.

Even at five years old, she knows money is tight. That Mom and Dad fight more than not, and that neither really have time for her, but the women on television with their movements delicate as fluttering snowflakes and feet carrying them as ships to land play on a loop in her head. Beautiful. Sure. On a rare night of family dinner, Jen spills out, “CanIpleasetakedancelessons?” She expects her mom’s hand hard against her face any second. For speaking out of turn, for asking. Instead, she’s met with silence. No answer, but no repercussions, either, and that weekend, she’s the speechless one when her mom drives her to the store to buy her a pair of pointe shoes, the cheapest ones there. The next week, Jen enters her first lesson at Knecht Dance Academy.

Dance teaches her how little in the world is easy. She cannot remember first position from third. She swears all her toes break when she tries to stand like the Sugar Plum Fairies, and though Jen knows nothing of anatomy, she’s sure the muscle behind her knee is not supposed to feel like that. Once she has the basics down, though, hope grows that she might take a few steps forward.

She dances to “The Blue Danube Waltz,” and her performance prompts her teacher to ask for help in choreographing a number from Little Shop of Horrors. She choreographs with her new friends she’s made, ones who aren’t always getting into trouble like the ones in her apartment complex. She memorizes routines with her mind and her heart. She excels.

She goes to the studio in between school and making meals for her sister. Sometimes, her sister has to come with her, which is just as well, so that they both escape their mom’s screams and blows. Jen often bikes herself there to avoid asking for rides, and though it’s miles away, the ride is always worth the solace of the studio lights and barres against mirrors and the clack of wooden toes against wooden floors. The studio feels like home.

She grows older. She gets her first job at fourteen. It’s under the table, and her creepy boss pays her far more attention than she’d like, but since she’s old enough to carry her own weight, she needs the money to pay for her lessons. Other dance styles call to her—jazz, hip-hop, contemporary—but those lessons cost more, and she needs to put away as much money as possible for every future need. At sixteen, she starts work at Woolworth’s, where customers stalk her and she has to dress up as a strawberry to advertise strawberry season. She goes through several boyfriends, each ending in a different kind of hurt, and she’s just about given up on men entirely (she doesn’t have time for it, anyway) when she meets a knight in shining armor at Woolworth’s. He goes to her dance recitals and he doesn’t do drugs, qualities that her neighborhood friends lack.

Home never gets better. Mom never gets better. But she isn’t always around home or mom anymore, only spending time there when she needs to raise her sister, and she has a decent boyfriend, and she starts thinking about college. She researches colleges that offer dance majors. She could become a choreographer on Broadway, or dance with the Rockettes. Those colleges, though, have tuitions higher than all the money she’s ever earned combined, and she should stay close to home, for her sister, for the family.

            She will grow up. She will marry Knight from Woolworth’s and quickly find he carries bottles instead of swords and that declarations of love really sound like doors slamming at midnight. She will watch as faces from childhood show on the news as Jane Does in alleys and think about all the times her dance lessons kept her away from the needles in her neighborhood. She will be a nurse, full-time, on her feet all day, ever-moving, too sore to move with any grace when she gets home. She will have two daughters that tease her incessantly about how she dances at red lights and in stores, and even when there’s no music to carry her.

            But she does not tell me any of this whenever we drive past Kenneth E. Fox, D.O’s Family Practice. She simply says, “There’s my old dance studio.”

Last summer, my grandmom came across several boxes overflowing with old pictures and insisted my mom, my sister and I all sort through them over lunch. I sifted through dozens of nameless fourth-cousins and estranged great-uncles before my thumbs caught on the edges of a familiar face. A young girl stands, frozen in time, in pointe shoes and a white tutu, blue and red ribbons decorating her arms and a flower crown tying her perm out of her densely bespectacled face, background blurry but her smile evident, and I thought to myself, She looks like my sister. The year 1988 marked the back in faint, stamped numbers.

All the notes I’d learned about my mom over the course of my life came together into one song. I’d heard her mention section-eight housing, joke about how crazy her mom was, tease that my aunt was like another daughter. I knew she liked to dance. I grew up on her getting words wrong to every song but always dancing on beat, on her inexplicable playlist of Latino club music, 80s pop, 90s R&B, and Keith and Kristyn Getty. For my whole life, my mom has been two separate people in my head: the girl and the mom. This photo I found, though, bridges the gap, makes the two women into a whole person: the one who, right after her husband left her for the first time, turned music to low-volume on her speaker and carried on her household tasks in gentle, quiet, sure footing; who, when I catch her doing her Zumba routines in the kitchen and roll my eyes fondly at her, laughs at herself and says, “There’s dancing in the Bible;” who, I have started to realize, is entirely correct, and more than anyone I know understands that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. She dances within the mourning, calling her ever-moving feet a blessing that draws light into her deepest valleys time and time again.