Dancing in the Light by Shirley Maclaine Page A

and her scene partner. Did she tell you about the scene partner she had during the love scenes who stuck his tongue in her mouth?”
    Both my properly raised mother and my liberally raised Sachi had an uncanny gift for stating the blunt truth without censorship.
    “Oh, yes,” said Mother, “the boy wouldn’t leave her alone. He followed her everywhere and tried to make dates with her, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. She’s such a darling.”
    I laughed, wondering if not having anything to do with such a demonstrative boy was what made her darling.
    As she talked, Mother seemed unaware of her fragile bones, her dry mouth, her shattered shoulder, the monitor on her heart. She was aware only of what she was talking about. I admired her focus, her concentration, her obliviousness to pain.
    “Shirl?” she asked, changing the subject in that free-associative way that old people have of doing. “Do you really believe that we have all lived before?”
    “Yes, Mother. I do. That’s what I’ve been writing about.”
    “I know,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure you really thought it.”
    “Well, I do. I thought about it and questioned it and read everything I could get my hands on about it and, yes, I have come to the conclusion that it must be true.”
    “So you think we have known each other before?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “So, if I knew you before, then I would have known Sachi before too?”
    “I think so, yes. But I can’t say about anyone else. I can only speak for what I believe about me.”
    “Well,” she went on, “I feel very close to Sachi.Very familiar. I don’t know what other mothers feel about their grandchildren. I’ve never discussed it with them. But I feel I have known Sachi for eons. Especially when she touches my hand. I don’t know what it’s all about. It’s beyond me. And at a certain point, I just give up thinking about it. But I know that whenever she touches my hand, it reminds me.”
    I gazed at the faraway look in her eyes. She wanted to say more.
    “I think,” she went on, “that Warren had something like that with my mother. I remember he used to get all dressed up to come to the dinner table because he knew Mother would be dressed. She never came to the table without having dressed, with a new hairstyle and perfume. And she wouldn’t use a paper napkin. She insisted on a real linen napkin. Anyway, as soon as Warren and Mother sat down, Warren would snuggle up to her and say, ‘Oh, Grandmother, you smell so good.’ He never left her side. There was something very profound between the two of them.”
    I listened, remembering the trips we had taken to Canada to see her mother. The wind-blown clam hunts along the Nova Scotia shore were my favorite times. We dug the clams and steamed them over tin pots in the cool evening sand and told stories as we dipped them in dripping hot butter and slurped happily into the night.
    “You, on the other hand,” Mother went on, “you would come rushing in from dancing somewhere, all tumbled and disheveled. You’d eat partly standing up as though you couldn’t stop moving. Then you’d look over at Mother and say, ‘Hello, Grandmother. You’re looking beautiful.’ And Mother would say, ‘She’s such a little lady.’ ”
    I thought of Grandmother MacLean’s powder-white hair, like strands of fine ivory-colored silk. She had the bearing of a dean of women (which is what she was at Acadia University, in Wolfille, Nova Scotia)and she seemed aware of every move she made and the effect it would create. She flowed when she walked, as though she had an invisible pot on her head.
    “Well, what did we talk about at dinner when we were little?” I asked Mother.
    “Oh, dinnertime was the time for discourse,” she answered. “It was when your father flourished. You know how he loves to talk. He’d pick out a subject and then draw you and Warren out. Sometimes it went on for hours. Your father had plenty of time for it,