Nervous About Your Year Ahead? by Judy Fowler

 

 

 

I was paying rent on a place no one would want to live in an area of the country with long, winding roads.

I’d found low-paid temp work with an entertainment agency.

I was training in a small group when the owner got a phone call.

 “What? She tap-danced over a dog and killed it? Okay, I’ll send somebody else right away.” He hung up the phone and looked at me. “Come over here,” he said.

I walked toward him.

“Do you tap dance?”

I couldn’t remember whether I had put it on my skill list when I applied for work.

He explained that a tap dancer had tripped and killed a small dog, and that he needed to replace the performer.

“I can tap dance, but not exactly like a dancer,” I said. “I practiced in my dorm room. I tapped out the routines to Bonnie Raitt singing ‘I Ain’t Blue.’”

“That’ll do, “the owner said.

 He said the gig had already started. I left, with scant time to digest his driving directions. I was wearing a red jumpsuit from the year I weighed my perfect weight.

He had said the gig was for Wounded Warriors.

In my red Volkswagen bug, I made my way “over hill and dale.” I arrived sweaty and distressingly late.

The venue was a rundown library. “Wounded Warriors” was posted on the door to one room, and I went inside.

One man waited in the room. He was the only person attending. Or who had stayed.  

Someone had written “Tap Dancing for Bulimia” on a blackboard. The tall man sat in his chair, and I began tap dancing. To make more of a performance out of it, I sang letters along to my taps: “B, U, L…”. I sweated, worried that when I got to “A,” I would not know what to do next, since I had no idea why I or anyone would be tap dancing for bulimia.

My audience of one waited for me to connect it all up, so I transitioned from dancing to conversation.   

I assumed he was a wounded warrior seeking information. I did what bad lecturers do: I fished for him to tell me about my subject.

“Are you bulimic?” I asked.

           “No.”

“Do you know what bulimia is?”

“No.”

“Okay, well, it’s throwing up after you eat. To avoid digesting calories.” Beneath the thin red fabric, my underarms were manufacturing a visible stain.

“Oh,” he said.

          Why on earth had this assignment fallen to an entertainment temp agency rather than a mental health professional?

“Obviously, I don’t have bulimia,” I said, and indicated my girth. How insensitive! To him, and to sufferers of bulimia. What did he care about my problems? Several times, I looked past him to the corner of the room where the walls joined as I hunted for a word to connect tap dancing and bulimia, with no luck.

After a minute or two, he left.

Back in my car, I realized the word I wanted was “control.”

“For control,” the man might have pondered. “Ah-ha.”   

And maybe he wouldn’t have left as wounded as when he arrived. He might have looked for a book on the subject before he left the library.

I got back to the agency before it closed. My employer, who was also my landlord, asked how it went. “No more animals were hurt?”

“No. There were no animals. You neglected to tell me why I was tap dancing for bulimia.”

He chomped on a cigar and closed his cash register.

“And for Wounded Warriors, yet,” I prompted.  

But he said nothing.

My jumpsuit was soaked with performance sweat. I sighed. “It would have been good if you had told me what outcome we were going for.”

He was writing in a ledger. Everything was about money for him.

But I was an entertainer. “And just one man in the audience. Maybe if I hadn’t been worried about arriving late—if I hadn’t had to tap dance—I might have thought of a way to link an eating disorder with PTSD,” I said.

 “Only one person?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Awkward.” 

That’s how much he cared. I walked out of his office and returned to the basement apartment with its cracked walls and its peeling paint.

Then I woke up.

It was 4:26 a.m. I’d been dreaming. I was in my townhouse in Virginia Beach, and it was the day of the annual Hampton Roads Writers’ Conference.

I made coffee. By the second cup, I saw how the dream covered every anxiety I had about attending the conference. I’d signed up to pitch a book to a real agent, my first pitch. I’d opened myself up with a contest entry about my Dad’s military service in WWII and its impact on the family. I had given up control of what people knew about my life. Was it too personal?

I felt unprepared. I feared the agent would stare me down during my two-minute pitch and leave before I could provide helpful information about my book. My only attempt at preparation was a diet I’d started after Labor Day. I’d gained fifteen pounds.  

The genius of the dream? It used my worst performance experience as its backdrop. Years ago, I drove a children’s theatre troupe to a school. We got there too late to perform because I’d gotten lost on a winding road in Vermont, in the days before cell phones. My cousin had recommended us to all his friends. 

As I drove to the conference, I recalled Dad telling me years ago to “tap dance”—i.e., make something up —when I didn’t know what to do next. 

The conference turned out better than the dream. “Dad’s” essay won first prize, and I “tap-danced” through the pitch for an agent who asked me to submit some pages.

On the awards video, I definitely looked fat. But happy.