My Father, Dancing: Stories by Bliss Broyard by Bliss Broyard. Knopf: 224 pages. $22.00.
Though some might be seduced by the neat orderliness in the cliché that you have to learn the box step before you can fox trot, Bliss Broyard would probably not agree--instead she would hold that dances of life and love are best learned by listening to the call of the music and answering it. In other words, the dance is the destination. . There is no safe way to begin; there is no formula—only improvisation.
In the title story, a daughter must improvise—emotionally—as she waits for her father to die. Alone with him in his hospital room, Kate remembers how her father once told her that wanted to be the first man to break her heart, “because then he could ensure that at least it would be done gently.” But no such feat can be accomplished—in the dance of life, pain is a partner to the joy of experience. As Kate remembers dancing with her father, and begins to dance in the hospital room (“I lingered and loafed in the hollows between the beats”), she begins to reconnect with her father. Though dance is what she and her father had in common, dance, in this story, also becomes a metaphor for joining life, in all its pain, for riding the tides of emotions, experimenting with body and voice and being.
Most of Broyard’s stories are about the complex relationships between fathers and daughters. In “Mr. Sweetly Indecent,” a daughter discovers her father’s affair just as she is struggling with rejection from a man she has had a one night stand with. In this story of betrayal and love, the daughter tries to reconcile the father she knew as a child with the father she knows as an adult.
In “The Trouble with Mr. Leopold,” an adolescent daughter, Celia, and her intimidatingly intellectual writer father stake their territory. He writes her English paper for her and receives a C-plus from her teacher, Mr. Leopold. This diminishment of her pompous father gives Celia secret joy, but angers her father, provoking him to demand the firing of Mr. Leopold. Perversely, Celia must go to bat for this odd, pretentious teacher whom she has previously made fun of (and who makes a practice of meeting alone with each of his female students in order to give them advice on their appearance). Celia’s rise from awkwardness to assertiveness is thrilling: “He was still standing in the doorway, holding the knob with one hand, the other arm raised along the door frame. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. As I looked up at him, I thought of how he reminded me of me, standing in his doorway, hoping for his approval.”
Stories that ring the truest are the most complex ones—especially in fiction about women’s lives. It’s disappointingly common to read about hard questions easily answered with a wedding, or perfumey parent-child reunions. Broyard provides no easy answers, no guarantees of perfect love—Broyard has something better in store for readers: the intricate, open-ended dance in which every step is brand new and which all at once captures complexity, ambivalence, pain, incredible beauty, power, and love.
Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.