The Theremin Show

Sheryl had learned to play the theremin the same year she learned to run a bingo hall, which was to say badly at first and then with a strange, stubborn competence. She was thirty-two now, and the instrument sat on a shelf behind the prize counter like a small wooden altar nobody else in Cinder Creek could pronounce.

She'd bought it at a county fair three years ago. A man in a bolo tie had a booth full of odd instruments, and Sheryl, who had gone to the fair alone because Mack had an auction to run that Saturday, stood at that booth for the better part of an hour. She waved her hand near the antenna and the thing shrieked like a cat in a dryer. She should have walked away. Instead she paid two hundred dollars for it and carried it around the fairgrounds under one arm like a rescued dog.

Mack found out about it that night, when she called him from the parking lot.

"You bought a what?" he said.

"A theremin. It's the one that sounds like a ghost singing."

"Well," he said, and she could hear him grinning, "I guess we know what you'll be doing at a talent show someday."

They'd been dating for exactly one week by then. He'd asked her out at the fair itself, actually, the night before, over a paper boat of fried onions. She had said yes mostly because he talked like an auctioneer even off the clock, a fast rolling patter, and it made her laugh. He was thirty-five, tall, and had the habit of betting her a dollar she couldn't do things. She couldn't two-step. She couldn't eat the fair's three-alarm corn. She could, it turned out, learn the theremin, and he'd never collected on that one because there had never been a bet.

Mack had that quality. He never dared her to do anything he didn't think she already could.

* * *

The Harvest Moon talent show took over the bingo hall every October, which meant the folding tables went against the walls, hay bales appeared at the corners of the stage like obedient livestock, and Derrick, the hall's bingo caller and self-appointed master of ceremonies for one night a year, got to wear his good vest.

Sheryl spent the afternoon of the show stringing lights and testing the microphone, which crackled whenever she said the letter P. Elly showed up at four with a casserole and her own act, which was a yodeling routine that had placed third two years running.

"You're doing it, then," Elly said, setting the casserole on a chair. "The theremin."

"The theremin," Sheryl confirmed. "Forty seconds of it. Maybe fifty if I don't rush the ending."

"Fifty seconds of ghost noises. The crowd will love you."

The crowd, Sheryl thought, would be polite. That was the problem. The crowd was always polite. She had watched eleven talent shows from the folding chairs, and every act got the same warm, mild applause, and then everyone ate pie. She wanted something else this year and couldn't name what.

Mack arrived at six-forty, smelling faintly of the auction barn, and kissed her hello with a hand at the small of her back. He was forty minutes later than promised because a heifer sale had run long, and he told the story of the heifer at length, which was his way of settling in.

"Show starts at seven," Sheryl said. "You're in the third row. Center. I need to see you."

"You always see me," Mack said, pleased.

Derrick tested the microphone behind them, said the letter P four times, and gave up.

It was while they were eating potluck off paper plates, sitting on hay bales because all the chairs had been claimed, that Mack made his usual joke. He did it casually, the way he did everything, spearing a meatball with a plastic fork.

"I'd say you've got something up your sleeve tonight."

Sheryl stopped chewing. "What does that mean, something?"

"Whatever you want it to mean. But you've sat through eleven of these with your hands folded, and tonight you checked the curtain four times."

"Are you daring me?"

"I'm rooting for you," Mack said. "No dollar this time. Not even a joke one."

He did this. He had done it for three years, and she knew the mechanics of it better than anyone: the dare was never a dare, it was a door he held open and then stepped back from. He never pushed. He just made it possible to walk through, and handed her a joke dollar when she did, nothing she ever owed him either way.

"What did you have in mind?" she asked.

"Nothing. I have nothing in mind. I'm eating a meatball."

She looked at him and he looked back, steady and easy, and something turned over in her chest, slow, like an engine catching on the third try.

* * *

The hall filled at seven. Two hundred and change, which for Cinder Creek was a stadium crowd. String lights. Hay bales. Coats passed along the back rows. Derrick opened with a joke about his vest that got exactly the laugh the vest deserved.

Sheryl sat in the wings and did not watch the acts. She watched Mack, third row, center, eating pie he had no business eating before performing any judging duties, and she turned the idea over in her head until it stopped feeling like someone else's idea and started feeling like hers.

The theremin had always been a body instrument. You didn't touch it. You stood in the field of it, and you moved, and the pitch rose and fell with your hands. People didn't know that. People thought it was a box that made spooky noises. If she played it right, if she moved the way the music asked her to move, it was already half a dance. She would only be finishing the sentence.

She found Elly in the wings during the intermission, holding a fresh plate of pie.

"Can I tell you something and you keep a straight face?" Sheryl said.

"I never keep a straight face, but go on."

"I'm going to do the theremin, and I'm going to take some clothes off while I do it."

Elly's eyebrows went up and then, slowly, all the way to her hairline. "How much off?"

"Down to the slip. Maybe. Nothing more. It's not a strip show, it's..." Sheryl waved a hand, hunting for the word. "It's part of the piece. Controlled. Slow. I stay at the theremin the whole time."

"Have you told Mack?"

"He more or less said I wouldn't do anything daring. This is me surprising him."

Elly put down the pie and hugged her, which, casserole-scented and slightly crushing, was Elly's highest form of approval. "Fifty seconds of ghost noises and a slip. Third place, easy."

"First place," Sheryl said, "or nothing."

* * *

Derrick called her name at nine-fifteen. "Folks, give it up for Sheryl Prue, our hostess with the mostest, doing a thing with a machine she swears is music."

There was laughter, warm and mild, the sound she had heard a hundred times. The lights found her. The theremin stood center stage on a folding table, and Mack sat third row, center, with his pie forgotten on his knee.

She leaned into the microphone, crackled through her opening line, and said, "This one's called Ember. It's about taking your time."

Then she started to play.

The first note came out clean, a low hum that she shaped with her right hand, and a few people in the hall stopped talking at once. She let the pitch climb, and her left hand began to move, and with it, unhurried, the rest of her. Her hips found the rhythm of the phrase. She reached back with one hand, without breaking the note, and drew the zipper of her cardigan down its whole slow length.

The hall went quiet in a way it never went quiet, not even for bingo.

Third row, center, Mack sat very still. She held his eyes. He had said she wouldn't, and she was going to make him glad to be wrong.

The cardigan came off one shoulder, then the other, in time with the melody's rise, and she slung it across the hay bale without losing the note, and kept playing.

The blouse was next, and she had planned the blouse the way she planned everything at the hall, which was carefully and with a backup in case the power went out. The buttons were small and there were only five of them, and she had practiced the timing in the kitchen that morning until she could do it in one phrase. Her left hand held the volume steady while her right hand worked the top button between notes, and the hall, two hundred people who had come for pie and yodeling, held its breath in a way that felt alive, not dead.

The second button. The third. The note climbed and her shoulders rolled with it, and Mack sat in the third row, center, with his jaw doing something she had never seen it do, and she had seen him talk a heifer auction past midnight.

He was not eating his pie. That was how she knew it was working.

She took the blouse off the rest of the way in one motion, unhurried anyway because the note carried her, and laid it over the cardigan on the hay bale. Underneath she wore the slip, ivory, and above the neckline of it the lace of her good bra, the one she had bought in the city in the spring and never had occasion for, and the hall got a good long look at both. Somebody in the back said "well" in a voice like a question, and somebody shushed them, and then the whole room was just the theremin, a low and rising sound like the building was dreaming out loud.

Her fingers moved over the antennae without touching them, closer and then away, the pitch bending under her hands. This was the part people never understood, that the theremin was all air and intention, that you played a thing by refusing to touch it. She let her right hand fall slowly toward the pitch antenna and then hover, and the note climbed higher and thinner, and her left hand, low at her side, closed and opened like she was holding something she could not show them.

Derrick, she noticed from the corner of her eye, had stopped walking up the aisle with the trophy. He was standing next to the folding chairs holding it against his chest like a hymnal, watching, uncertain whether this was a performance or an incident he would have to explain to the church committee. That, Sheryl thought, was the finest compliment the hall had ever paid her.

She turned back to Mack.

Third row, center, his hands flat on his knees, his eyes on her and nowhere else, and the intensity of it went through her like the low note went through the floor. Two hundred people were watching her, and every one of them was a warm blur, but Mack was in focus, and being watched by him while two