“We’re pretty bad,” I say.
Fifi calls the bachata count—“Five-six-seven-eight”—and we begin.
Despite the music, we make our usual mistakes. The Into the Armpit Twirl?. The Toe Destroyer?.
By the third and fourth times, we make fewer mistakes.
The fifth time, we get all the footwork right.
The sixth time too.
In the middle of our seventh time, Fifi turns off the music.
“Finally, you have steps down,” she says. “Now real work can begin!”
I don’t know what she means by “real work,” but I’m sure I don’t like it.
She walks over to the closet and pulls out a boom box. Why do we need a portable stereo when we have a perfectly functional built-in sound system? you might ask. I might ask it too.
“Evie,” she says when she’s done checking the boom box for batteries. “What are most important elements of ballroom?”
Despite my trepidation over what’s happening with the boom box, I answer right away. “Footwork, musicality, artistry.”
“Yes, but forgot two.” She turns to X. “You want to guess?”
“Gotta have some bravery,” he says.
“Yes, good,” she says. “You must be bold. You must have showmanship.” She rummages through the closet again and picks out a handful of CDs. “Last element is chemistry, but is for another time. Today we work on showmanship.”
She heads for the door. “Come, come,” she yells over her shoulder.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Come. I drive you to Santa Monica. You two are going to dance for your supper.”
* * *
——
I spend the entire car ride trying to talk her out of it, but she will not be deterred. From his spot in the backseat, X is unhelpful with his silence.
I catch his eye in the rearview mirror. “Help me out,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I say yes to everything, remember?”
I twist in my seat so I can face him. “You know, I thought about what you said yesterday, about living every day like it was your last.”
He leans forward, interested. “Yeah?”
“I decided that it doesn’t really work. If people lived like that, they would indulge all their worst impulses. They’d blow off their obligations, say and do inappropriate and immoral things, eat the wrong foods. It’d be a disaster.”
He throws back his head and laughs. The sound fills up the car. “Wow, that was a dissertation. But why do you assume people would do the wrong things with their last day? Maybe they’d eat all their vegetables. Maybe they’d tell the people they love how much they love them.”
I think I used to have as much faith in people as he does. I face forward. “No, they wouldn’t,” I say.
“All I’m saying is it could be nice to dance by the beach in front of a bunch of strangers.”
“Nice or no, you’re doing it,” Fifi says.
Fifi parks and unearths supplies from her trunk: tip jar, boom box and CDs. Then we’re on our way.
The Santa Monica promenade is basically an outdoor mall with a closed-to-traffic, paved-brick road running through it. In the spring and summer it’s packed with tourists watching street performers. There are B-boy dancers, the School of Rock kids, singer/songwriter types. My absolute favorite, though, is Grumpy Clown. He looks like a desaturated version of an actual clown. If he’s not stalking the length of the promenade smoking a cigarette and glowering at small children, he’s sitting on one of the benches constructing the balloon animals you see in your nightmares. Seriously, they’re terrifying.
Fifi chooses a spot right next to one of the dinosaur hedge-sculptures that dot the promenade.
She puts down the tip jar and seeds it with twenty dollars from her purse. “People are more likely to like you if they think other people like you,” she says to my questioning look.
X puts the boom box down next to our tip jar and Fifi loads a CD.
“Fifi—” I begin, trying to give my objections one last chance to make an impression on her.
But she’s not having it. “To dance on a floor with eleven other couples, you must be fearless. You must hold judges’ attention over other dancers. You must make other couples invisible.”
“Fifi, man, you make it sound like we’re going to war,” X says.
“It is war,” she says. “And right now you are not good weapon.” She claps her hands together. “Into position.”