The “everyone” part is apparently literal because the bar is packed with people of all ages - teenagers awkwardly shuffling around next to their grandparents, couples holding hands, groups of friends laughing at their own mistakes. The band is a three-piece outfit playing country songs I do not recognize, but everyone here seems to know by heart.
I am the epitome of “fish out of water”.
I’m perched on my usual stool at the end of the bar, nursing a glass of boxed Chardonnay I have reluctantly come to accept as my signature drink, while watching the chaos happen on the dance floor. I’ve officially turned into Norm from that old TV show, “Cheers.” I have my own stool, and I fully expect people to start yelling “Eleanor!” when I walk into the bar the next time.
“You should try it.”
I turn to see Presley beside me, her auburn hair loose tonight instead of in its usual braid.
“Try what?”
“Line dancing. It’s fun!”
“Oh, I don’t know the steps.”
“Nobody knows the steps at first. That’s the whole point. You learn as you go.”
“My feet hurt.”
“You liar!” She grabs my hand and tugs me off the stool.“Come on. I’ll teach you.”
“Presley, I really do not think?—”
“Listen, you’ve been sitting on that stool for two weeks watching everybody else have fun. I can literally see the imprint of your butt cheeks on the fake leather. Mavis would be horrified.” She is still pulling me toward the dance floor.“Besides, you’re supposed to be learning to be a real person, right? Real people dance badly and then laugh about it.”
I want to protest that I can dance. I took ballroom dance lessons for years. I can waltz and foxtrot with the best of them. Maybe even salsa if my life depended on it and there was enough good wine involved. But something tells me that particular skill set won’t help me here.
Before I can formulate a proper objection, I am standing at the edge of the dance floor, surrounded by people in cowboy boots and jeans, feeling spectacularly out of place in my slacks and silk blouse.
“Okay,” Presley says, standing beside me. “This one is easy. It is called the electric slide. Surely you’ve heard of it and danced this at weddings. If not, just follow along.”
I want to tell her that people in my neck of the woods don’t do the electric slide at weddings. My mother would’ve had a heart attack and died right in front of me just to avoid something like that.
The music shifts to something with a driving beat, and suddenly everybody around me is moving in unison, stepping to the right, stepping to the left, forward, backward, in a pattern that looks simple but is absolutely not simple when you are trying to do it for the first time.
I step where I am not supposed to step. I go left when I should go right. I turn the wrong direction and almost collide with a woman who is at least seventy and executing all these moves with the precision of a drill sergeant. I lose the rhythm entirely and stand frozen while everybody grapevines right on past me.
“You know, you’re thinking too hard,” Presley calls over the music. “Stop counting and just feel it.”
I try to feel it. I fail to feel it. All I feel is out of place.
I step on someone’s foot, a man who laughs good-naturedly, and then consider fleeing back to my stool and planting my butt cheeks right into their allotted slots.
But then something strange happens.
The woman I nearly collided with, that seventy-year-old drill sergeant, takes my hand and physically guides me through the next sequence.
“Step, step, step, turn,” she says, her voice cutting through the music. “There you go! Now again.”
I do it again and again. And somewhere around the fourth repetition, it finally clicks.
I am not good. I would not even say I am competent. But I am moving, and my feet are in a pattern that is starting to feel almost natural, while my body is responding to the music in a way that has nothing to do with the careful, controlled movements of ballroom dancing.
And I’m laughing.
I do not even know when it started. Somewhere between the third wrong turn and the fifth stepped-on foot. But I’m laughing, like really laughing, the kind that comes from somewhere deep in your chest and doesn’t care who is watching.
When the song ends, I’m breathless. My hair is coming loose, and my silk blouse is probably ruined by sweat, but I feel amazing.
