The Bluestone Review 2025

The Bluestone Review

Learning to Dance Larry Ellis

When Wendell Douglas come back from the war he looked to be about a foot taller. He’d volunteered as soon as he was of age and shipped out right before the Allies took the beaches in Normandy. He didn’t see combat, but he sailed on a troop boat to France and worked as a guard in a hospital there for nearly a year. I saw him come home. He stepped out of the bus in uniform and carrying his duffle. It was freezing cold and wind blowing snow everywhere, but he just stepped out onto the sidewalk and walked the two blocks to his house down on Allen Street. I knew things would pick up in the neighborhood after that, and they did. In the year that Wendell was overseas I still walked over to White’s Confectionery every now and then. I’d have a root-beer float and sit there and talk to Mrs. White or her fat daughter, whoever happened to be serving that evening. The juke box was almost never playing and no one was ever on the little rectangle of a dance floor. The Whites made their money on the junior high crowd. The school was only a block away and the kids would flood into there at lunch hour and pack the place and the music would be blaring and kids eating hot dogs and drinking sodas and dancing for all of the forty-five minutes between the two lunch bells. Same thing for the hour after school let out. I hadn’t been a part of that since I had moved up to the high school. Evenings at Whites were nothing like that. Sometimes I was the only customer in the store. Some winter nights they even hurried me out of the place so they could close down early. They’d have the lights off before I got out the door. I’d walk around the neighborhood for a while, even in the cold and snow, just looking at the houses and watching the cars on the streets and up on the state road. On Wednesday evenings they’d be having prayer meeting at the Church of God and I’d walk by the lit-up windows and sometimes hear them singing, Wendell’s mom playing the piano. Down the next block I’d usually see Missy Harless on the corner of Second and Allen Streets. She’d be standing there under the street lamp in her coat and hat, waiting on the bus to take her to the hospital for the evening shift. She always spoke. Always called me by name. By now there were gold stars in the windows of at least one house on every street I walked. I knew some of the boys who had been killed. Didn’t know some of the others

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