The Cobbler's Lesson

The storm hit the law firm around four in the afternoon, right when I was halfway through the conference room carpet with the extractor, and by five the ceiling over the partners' hallway was doing its best impression of a waterfall. I'm Rhonda, I'm forty-four, I clean offices for a living including that one, and I want it said plainly that I did not get paid enough for weather. My boss texted me to say finish what you can and get out safe, which was sweet of him, but the only road out of that building was already running brown and fast, and my little hatchback was parked two blocks away under a tree I didn't trust.

So I did the sensible thing, which in my family has always meant doing the slightly strange thing, and I went up. The building has a flat roof with an old water tank platform on it, a big galvanized tank on legs with a plywood deck around it and a low rail, and there's a covered stairwell up because the lawyers used to smoke up there back before everyone got sensible. The tank room itself, the little shed built around the tank's base, still had a working bulb and a door that mostly shut, and I figured mostly shut was better than the flooding lobby.

I should back up a step and mention that three months ago, after eleven years, Vern told me he needed to find himself, which apparently required a flat in another city and a woman named Deb who does aerial yoga. I'd been doing the dignified silence thing since then, lots of long walks and lots of not crying at work, and maybe that's why, when the storm door banged behind me and I saw there was already a man on my rooftop, I didn't scream the way a person with better nerves might have. I just stood there dripping and stared at him.

He was my neighbor Chester, the cobbler from two doors down from my place, and I recognized him by the way he stands, very straight, like his spine had been ironed. He was forty-seven that year, never married, fixed my good boots once for free and acted like it was no trouble, and I'd always thought of him as the most careful man on the street. What he was doing on the law firm roof in a storm, holding a wooden puppet with one arm, waltzing it around the tank platform in slow, careful circles, I could not have guessed in a hundred years.

He saw me and froze, and the puppet's remaining arm sort of flopped, and his ears went red even in that dim bulb light. "Oh," he said, and set the puppet down behind a coil of rope like that would hide anything. "Rhonda. Hello. I didn't think anyone came up here."

"I clean the building," I said, wringing out my sleeve. "It's leaking everywhere downstairs and I'm not driving in that. What in God's name are you doing?"

He looked at the floor, which was the plywood deck, and then at the puppet, and then he sighed as a man accepting a sentence. "It's a practice dummy. For dancing. My niece is getting married in spring and I'm meant to do a proper waltz at the reception, and I never learned properly, so I've been coming up here when the weather's foul because nobody can see me." He rubbed his thumb along the puppet's little wooden shoulder. "I found it in a skip behind the school. It's missing an arm but it leads well enough."

I'll admit I laughed. Not meanly, or maybe a little meanly, but the sight of the most rigid man on the coast confessing to waltzing a one-armed puppet on a roof during a storm was more than my dignity could hold. He took it well, I'll say that, he just squared his shoulders and waited me out, the way he did at his shop counter when customers came in with some disaster of a shoe and no idea what it would cost.

"Well," I said, when I'd got my breath back. "Show me, then. Show me the waltz."

"Absolutely not," he said, and then, because he was a polite man, "please."

"Chester. I've just spent eleven years with a man who kept everything from me, and I've decided my new policy is that nobody gets to be embarrassed alone on a roof. Show me."

And he did, God help him, he picked the puppet back up and counted under his breath and shuffled through the box step, and it was worse than I'd imagined, stiff knees, stiff elbows, stiff everything, a coat rack that had learned to count to three. I watched two full turns and then I couldn't stand it anymore and I stepped in and took the puppet out of his hands and set it on the tank's ledge, where it slumped against the galvanized steel looking, if anything, relieved.

"You're leading with your shoulders," I told him. "Your mother taught ballroom, I remember, you told me once. How did you end up like a fence post?"

"People watch when they teach you," he said, stiffly. "I don't like being watched. I learned from a book."

"You learned to waltz from a book," I repeated, and he had the grace to look sheepish about it, and something in me, some little warm mean spark that had been banked down since Vern left, stood up and stretched. I'd taught dance in my twenties, before cleaning paid better, two nights a week at a church hall, and my feet still remembered even if the rest of me had gone soft around the middle. "Right," I said. "I can fix this. I can actually fix this, you're not hopeless, you're just rigid, and rigidity is a habit. But I teach a certain way and you won't like it."

"What way is that?" he asked, wary as a cat near a vacuum.

"You do what I say. Every instruction, no questions, no arguing, no adjusting afterward to make it comfortable again. That's how you break a habit like yours, you surrender the decision to someone else and let them move you. I was a teacher, I know what works." I was circling him as I talked, the way my old instructor used to circle us, and I watched him track me with his eyes and then, consciously, stop tracking, which was interesting. "If you hate it, you say so and we stop and I'll just watch you shuffle and we'll never speak of it. But if you want to dance at that wedding like a man and not like a lamppost, you give me the run of you for an hour."

The rain hammered the tank above us and ran off the eaves in ropes, and the little bulb swung in the draft and made his shadow lean and straighten on the plywood. He was quiet a long while, and I could see him weighing it, the embarrassment of obedience against the embarrassment of that wedding, and I knew which one cost him more.

"If I say stop, you stop," he said finally. "That's my condition."

"That's a fair condition and I'll honor it," I said, and I meant it, though I noticed I liked hearing him set a term, liked that he had one in him at all. "Say yes properly, then. Say you'll follow my instructions."

He looked at me, really looked, the first time I'd ever seen him do it without dropping his gaze like a shopkeeper, and he said, "Yes. I'll follow your instructions, Rhonda."

"Good boy," I said, mostly as a joke, and the way his breath caught told me it maybe wasn't entirely one, and I filed that away and stepped close and put my hand on his shoulder blade. "Lesson one," I said, as the storm leaned on the roof above us. "Stand still and let me move you."

He stood still, which for him was clearly an effort, his whole body humming with the need to adjust itself, and I put my other hand on his hip and turned him a quarter turn and stepped back to look at him. "Now hold the