Walking the Tango Labyrinth, Part I: A Lovely Walk with My Dead Friend Barbara

David Hodgson is teaching TangoGnostics. With a name like that, you have to expect a little woo-woo.

In this case, woo-woo walking.

It’s all about the energy, David says. Tapping into the life force, being the conduit. Making that your tango.

He puts on some music. Here are the rules: No stylized steps, no landing on the beat. “Walk naturally,” he urges, “as if you were walking with a friend.”

In four-inch heels.

Glenlivet is hugging the walls, the corners. Even walking naturally, he is making the most of the line of dance. He is behind me, he passes me. We are not walking together, and yet I am attuned to the relation of space between us.

I walk with my eyes downcast. I often walk like this. Does it look shy? It is not. I am shutting out distractions, going inside my head. Daydreaming. Also keeping an eye on the never-dependable earth. Something unusual could happen.

A few minutes ago, the sole of Glenlivet’s shoe found gum on the floor.

Walking naturally, as if with …

… Michigan. We are striding uphill in Charlevoix. It is late summer, early morning. We are going to a café that brags “Hemingway Never Ate Here.” Apparently, he ate everywhere else in town.

Today we are driving to Whitefish Point on Lake Superior, where the Edmund Fitzgerald shipwrecked. Later, we will get lost in the forest, looking for the Two-Heart Campground, which must relate to Hemingway’s story “The Big Two-Hearted River.” We left before sunrise, we won’t be back home until 4 a.m. tomorrow.

Later this morning we will pass a huge wooden sign on a weedy hillside. “Good luck from us!” it proclaims. How cool is that?! The people of Trout Lake, Michigan, love us so much that they pooled their money to wish us good luck! I take this extremely personally. Michigan stops. I scramble up the hillside, pose beside the sign. The photo hangs beside my desk. It heartens me, even when I don’t need heartening.

This afternoon, Michigan will send me away so he can nap on the cold, windy beach. I will hike the waterline to see what’s around the next bend, discover a fat, green worm leaving its trail in the sand.

I sidle up to my friend MKK, who is walking alone. Her husband has a serious cancer. Distracted, she is not interested in this game.

Friends from work? Never will do. Work is a relentless half-sprint, power walking. I come to tango to stop it.

Mary Alice graciously accepts my invitation to stroll. Walking with her is a study in be-here-now. She is nearly sixty, a large, elfin woman with one brand-new hip and a bum one. She walks with a cane, and she graciously accepts all the help she doesn’t need.

In the manner of Jane Austen’s grand dames, we take a few turns around the floor. At this pace, we are not ruled by momentum, we do not take the inevitability of the next step for granted.

Often when people walk, we multitask. We note our surroundings, the people sharing our space, scents, voices, music, traffic. However lightly these things register, however remote on the periphery of our attention, they siphon tiny sips from the attention we direct to our companion.

Mary Alice considers each step; she puts every foot down with care. I sense her consideration, her placement. I do not see the room, I have lost track of Glenlivet. I am not walking-as-walking; I am moving with Mary Alice. I am fully absorbed; my every move mirrors hers.

Mary Alice admires my shoes. So do I. Comme il Faut! We watch them move along, the long legs, the high arch. Drawing on the strand of our shared energy, Mary Alice takes as her own those shoes, those feet, those legs. She is 20 years old again, lithe and graceful as ever. She offers each step as a gift to the cane and the floor. Appropriating my shoes, feet, legs, she is again the girl her daddy called Twinkle Toes. This is what it means to connect.

Mary Alice stops to rest. I walk on alone.

All my life, more than anything else, walking in solitude feeds my soul. The air as it parts is a caress; muscles and tendons cuddle and press as legs swing, weight shifts, joints flex. The subtle contrabody motion--twist of torso as arms swing opposite legs--settles my stomach. The rocking motion, the slow flow of scenery, quiet my thoughts.

Even in four-inch heels.

I am walking as naturally as the shoes will allow. Built to cant the woman’s center of gravity quite forward, they make every step uncertain. They shorten my stride, put my weight too far forward for a natural step. To accommodate the shoe, I go loose in the joints. My legs break free of the habit of walking, swing lazily to land where they will.

With every step, I feel the interior cuddle. My joints go so loose they fall apart. I am tender at the bone.

I’m pretty sure that I look ridiculous, swinging along with the mincing, swaggering saunter of an East Colfax hooker. Suddenly I am aware of Glenlivet again. Yikes!

Later, as we are dancing, I will project a pretty picture, a gift for my partner. For now, I set him firmly aside. I mean to enjoy this moment as an ostrich.

Oblivious to my surroundings, I render myself invisible. There is only me, and for a change I am not in my head, I am buried deep in my body: one heart, dancing.

Now a vision of Barbara rises. It is not real; Barbara never looked back, even when she was alive. Why would she now?

This vision is drawn from a photo. Barbara and I are walking along the Potomac. She is barefoot, carrying her boots. The grass is bright green, the shade deep. We are small in the distance. You can’t see our features or any details. You see only this: two girls absorbed in their own little world, lost to the world at large.

My mother is holding the camera. When she is not annoyed or threatened or worried that we are becoming lesbians, she treasures that Barbara and I have found a home in one another. She snaps this photo with love.

It is a gift my parents have given me, a few hours in DC with Barbara. They picked me up from school in New York, drove down the coast. They have an agenda; they would like to see Gettysburg. I will gladly give them their half-day there. They are giving me a half-day with Barbara.

Our time is up now. I am walking back into real life.

How did that go? David asks. How did it feel?