Brewer in Heels

My name is Alex Rosenberg, I'm twenty-four years old, and until a month ago I thought I had a decent sense of rhythm. I was wrong. I found that out in front of about forty people at the Grange hall dance in Brownsville, when I stepped on my own boot laces, then on my date's heels, then on the boot of a man who weighed about twice what I do.

That last part was the bad part.

I am a brewer, not a dancer. I spend my days at the Harvest Moon Ranch microbrewery hauling grain sacks and scrubbing tanks, and my nights usually on the couch with a beer I made myself. The dance thing was supposed to be a fun way to meet people after my girlfriend moved to Portland. We'd been together a year and split up nice and easy when she got the job offer, but a guy can only eat dinner alone so many Fridays before he starts talking to the toaster.

So I paid my ten dollars, walked into the barn hall, and made a fool of myself for two hours. Then I went home and did the stupidest thing a prideful man can do. I decided to fix it.

Kristina Allbright works the cattle side of the ranch and teaches dance at the barn hall on weekends. She's twenty-eight, and she'd watched the whole disaster from the edge of the floor with her arms crossed, and she was one of maybe three people there who didn't laugh. That's why I went to her.

"Okay," I said, standing on the scuffed planks of the practice floor with my hands jammed in my pockets. "I need you to teach me how to move like I actually want to be here."

She looked up from where she was coiling a speaker cable. She had on jeans and a flannel and worn dance boots, and somehow she still moved like a person who lived in her body and I just rented mine.

"You want private lessons," she said. Not a question.

"Yeah. Before the social next month. I can't go through that again."

"Fair enough." She set the cable down and looked me over, and I mean really looked, the way you'd inspect a fence post. She circled me once, slow. "Shoulders up by your ears. Hips locked like a vault door. You walk like you're bracing for a tackle."

"That bad?"

"That's the worst posture I've seen on an able-bodied adult. And I've taught half the football team." She stopped in front of me. "But it's fixable. The problem isn't your feet. It's that your whole body is apologizing for being on a dance floor."

I laughed at that, which surprised me. "Maybe it is."

"We'll fix it. First lesson's free, after that I charge twenty an hour, and no, I don't do discounts for brewery guys. I drink enough of your amber ale as it is."

"Twenty's fine." She was still scanning me, and I got the feeling she was making some kind of decision about me that I hadn't been consulted on. She had that look. Competitive people get it. She'd danced somewhere serious once, she told me, until college ended and she came home to the family ranch, and she had the particular stubbornness of someone who used to be very good at something and misses it.

"Okay, Rosenberg. Show me what you've got."

What I had, as it turned out, was almost nothing.

She put on a two-step from the speaker system and walked me through a basic box step. Slow, quick, quick. I did it exactly the way she said, counted it out loud like a math problem, and she watched me for a full minute with her lips pressed together.

"Stop," she finally said, rubbing her forehead. "Just stop."

"That was the box step."

"That was a man doing arithmetic with his feet. You're thinking too hard. You're in your head trying to be correct, and correct is boring and worse, it looks like dying." She turned the music down. "Dance isn't a checklist. You feel the count. The count lives in your hips and your chest, not your brain. Right now your body is a locked warehouse and you're reading the inventory list through the door."

"That's a lot of metaphors for a Tuesday."

"I'm a ranch hand, I get creative in my free time." She planted herself in front of me. "Again. And this time don't count out loud. Just move."

So I tried again, and it was better, maybe, in the way that a three-legged dog walking is better than a three-legged dog standing still. I was still stiff. I knew I was stiff, I could feel it in my knees, that locked-up feeling of a guy doing a thing he's embarrassed to be doing. Kristina made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl.

"Your weight," she said. "That's your whole problem. You never transfer your weight. You just pick up your foot and put it down in a new place. That's not dancing, that's walking with extra steps. A real step means you give your whole body to it. You fall forward into the step and let the other foot catch you."

"How do I practice falling forward without falling?"

She got a look on her face. Not a mean look. A scheming look, which is worse. She walked off the floor without a word and went through a door at the back of the hall that I'd assumed was a storage closet. I heard her banging around in there for a good two minutes, and I stood on the planks wondering if this was her polite way of ending the lesson.

She came back out holding a pair of shoes.

They were women's dance heels. That was the first thing I noticed, obviously. Worn ones, leather gone soft and dark at the toes, heels maybe two inches, scuffed at the sides from hard use. They looked like they'd been through a hundred competitions and a thousand practices.

"Put those on," she said.

I looked at the shoes. Then at her. "Those are women's shoes."

"They're dance shoes. They're mine, from back when I competed. They're broken in and they've got the right sole." She held them out. "Put them on."

"Kristina, I'm a grown man who brews beer for a living. I'm going to put on heels and fall on my face in front of you."

"Probably," she agreed. "For the first ten minutes. Then something interesting happens. Heels put your weight where it belongs, over the ball of your foot. They force the transfer. You can talk about falling into a step all day and it goes in one ear and out the other. You put on a two-inch heel and your body figures it out in about thirty seconds, because the alternative is your face on this floor."

"And that's not humiliating?"

"It's training. Gymnasts do handstands. Football players do ballet. Put the shoes on, Rosenberg, or go home and keep stepping on strangers."

There was a part of me, the prideful part, the part that had walked out of the Grange hall with my jaw set and my ears burning, that wanted to say no. But there was another part that had watched her cross that floor, and knew she was right about the weight thing, and knew that she'd done this before and knew what she was doing.

I sat down on the bench along the wall and unlaced my boots.

I held the heels up and looked at them closer. They were a women's ten, maybe, narrow, with a strap across the instep and a buckle that had been buckled ten thousand times. My hands were almost shaking, which was stupid. They're shoes.

"Okay, look," I said. "If you ever tell anyone about this, I'll deny it and then I'll water down your amber ale."

"Nobody would believe me anyway," Kristina said. "A brewer in heels. Go on."

I slid one on. The leather was soft and warm from the box, and it cinched around my foot like it already knew the shape. Then the other. The buckles closed with a small click and I sat there for a second on the bench with my feet in somebody else's shoes, feeling like an idiot.

Then I stood up.

The first thing that happened was the floor got closer. The second thing was my whole body made a decision without asking me. My weight rolled forward onto the balls of my feet, my calves tightened, my hips pushed forward, and my spine straightened up like someone