SmokeLong Quarterly

I never wrote the eulogy. Not a real one anyway, just something to satisfy the obits and the work friends (always the work friends) who kept calling the house phone with condolences. I’d taken too long to find the right questions. And even though my aunt had promised to proof it herself before she died, Debbie had never been a patient woman.

Instead, three days after Debbie’s death, I posted a video from the late eighties of Debbie teaching Mom how to dance. I must have already been born because my step-father took the video—I’d found it on an old VHS tape, spliced between clips of birds landing on telephone wires and slow pans of the dirt road leading to the house—but I wasn’t in this one. It doesn’t matter though. The way they are laughing in the kitchen, faces shining over a colander, it’s impossible not to feel like you’re right there with them laughing too.

Every year, three days after the anniversary of her death, the video pops up as a “memory” on Facebook, and Debbie is resurrected: boogieing in a crop top and purple basketball shorts, her bare stomach tan and toned. A childlike version of Mom is resurrected too, a few years younger than Debbie, wearing an oversized T and a look of innocence I don’t recognize. Every time I see the video, I wonder if I’ve ever really seen my mother before. When I think of her now, I only see a sad old woman with knees like cantaloupes, her green eyes gone gelatinous behind horn-rimmed readers. Every year the “memory” pops up for her too, and I get a screenshot of them at the colander, followed by a gif of a raccoon doing the disco finger. What is it like, I wonder, to watch yourself feeling something you’ll never feel again?

In the video, Soul II Soul drops the bass while Debbie pumps her chest like a piston. Mom tries to keep up but can’t isolate like Debbie and the move ends up traveling through her whole body like a pinball, but she is so earnest it breaks my heart a little. Now they are doing the pony, a jazzercise type move with lots of bouncing on the half-beat. Debbie is nailing it, riding that pony like she could do it forever, off into the sunset, tally-ho. Mom follows along in her awkward way, then surprises me by keeping up, and for a delirious moment they are both bouncing together in time, Debbie hollering over the speaker “That’s it! That’s it!!” while Mom throws back her head in a howl, and they are just girls, girls having fun, girls left to themselves before men, before children, before guilt and shame and loss—watch any girl long enough and won’t she start to dance?—and I feel the giddyup in my bones itching to break free, to ask the right question after all this time, which turns out not to be a question at all but the solar plexus HYAH! of a rider digging her spurs into a pale horse that must go faster, must keep up with the sun so that it never really sets, chasing it if only for the thrill of wind, for joy, for joy, for every woman on the planet exploding with laughter that is also wailing as the girl who was Debbie says “You’ve got it!” and the girl who was my mother asks with her whole, perfect body: “Like this? Like this? Like this?”