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6.3
Dancing with Frankenstein
Sheryl St. Germain

It starts as a joke, my husband’s, who says he sometimes feels like Frankenstein’s monster when we practice tango. We’re both learning, and I have to admit that he does sometimes move like he’s put together with parts of dead men that don’t quite fit. Still, he’s of good heart—that is his own, I’m sure of it—so I cling to him as he yaws one way and then another. We are like twin moving Towers of Pisa.

As we dance, it seems he will fall over at any moment to either side, or backwards, or forward, who can tell. His arms are wrapped around me as if I might save him from falling, though I can barely save myself. I close my eyes, the better to feel his movements, and blinded, thrash along with him, slightly off his beat as I’m in dire fear of him stepping on my toes, which are already bruised, the nails black from earlier practices. The instructor tells us it’s almost always the woman’s fault when her toes get stepped on, and I don’t want to be at fault, I never want to be at fault, so my dancing feels mostly like trying to avoid his feet. He lurches forward and I list back, tottering on first one foot, then the other, and somehow we make it to the end of the hall.

He’s trying hard, and so am I, but at this stage there’s so many things to think about—how we hold our torsos, the nature of our embrace, the beat of the music, where to put our feet, where not to put our feet, and how to try to move as one, so it’s not surprising the dance itself seems Frankensteinish, all the right parts there, none of them speaking to each other. And since my one job, so the instructor says, is to follow the leader, in this case my husband, we lurch together as ghouls, for if he is Frankenstein, I am surely his bride.

We are not virtuosos, we are not like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, or Dana Frigoli & Pablo Villarraza who float across the floor, svelte and confident, balanced in their embrace, exuding harmony. Instead, we rock one way, then the next, his foot thumping, mine clumping, the hallway shaking, the fragile parts of us barely holding together for the space of a dance. I close my eyes again, my chest against his chest, and when my heart senses his heart’s beat, I almost don’t mind that I’m dancing with Shelley’s monster, that sentient being whose only wish was to share his life with another like him, a wish that keeps us lurching this way and that til death do us part.


Sheryl St. Germain’s poetry books include Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, The Journals of Scheherazade, and Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems. A memoir Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, was published in 2003, and she co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century. Her most recent book, Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair, was released in September of 2012. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chatham University.