First, Finally, and Forever

Tables

She loved to dance on the tables in the bar.

She would swirl across them, a firestorm of female seduction punctuated by the tossing of hair. It wasn’t raunchy, or seedy, at least he never thought so.

Small feet would float lightly across, between beer steins and plates of chicken wings, never once stumbling. He wasn’t sure it was legal to have her stepping on tables in a bar, but no one ever worried if it was the right thing to do. All the girls played along, most enjoyed the attention and the cash they could take home at the end of the night. Business was business after all and he profited as well.

It was a tradition, started by his parents, long before he was the man wiping the counter-top and polishing the myriad of faceted glass on the shelf. He’d never known a time when there wasn’t a young woman working at the bar who would vault up above the drunks and catcallers to the latest rock and roll hit. When he was very young, it had been his mother, when he was a bit older it had been 80’s heavy metal. Now, while he was middle aged and still listening to rock and roll, it was pop anthems that the girls liked best.

She had been with him the longest, and she was the best.

She was the one he stopped to watch even when he had a million drinks to make. His eyes following her smiles, her gestures, her laughs as people would try and dance with her. A laugh and a smile with years of understanding when to shove them back down to earth.

She was the one who made him want for love, ache for something more that the simple open and close loneliness of his world each day.

In his fantasies, she was a gypsy dancer, coins and bells chiming delightfully above the music, scarlet red fabrics, bright embroidered patterns. She would look rich in jewels and silks, her dark hair and bright green eyes a perfect match for the vibrant hues. He could imagine her high cheeks coloured just pink, the flickering light of a campfire playing shadows across her face. Why he thought of caravans and fabrics and magic, he never understood. Perhaps it was more exotic than a simple oak-polished bar in the city. Somewhere caution could be put to rest, and emotion was necessary to live. Where he could be free of the constraints of society and have whatever he wanted. 

Her.

He would sit with her at his mother’s old table, in the back room after close, and they would tally up the receipts each night. She always stayed. She lived closest, she said, and the silent mutual agreement continued from the first day she had offered. He would walk her home in the streetlight shadows, and then turn back to his own home, above the bar. By the time he’d reached the door, the hint of sunrise would catch his eye and the warm glow on the east horizon would remind him of her.

The wrought iron set into the top of the wood table they would sit around each night, gave them ample opportunity to talk, filling the space with stories that would veer and duck back to the curled mysteries held in the decorative swoops and whirls.

Stories about his family, some he knew, others he imagined just to make her stay and listen, giving him her attention.

Once, he had asked his mother why she kept such an old, beat up table, and she had drawn her fingers around the iron with a distant look to her eye. She had stopped, frowned, looked at her son and said, in her thick, almost too foreign accent, “I just did. Is a good table.”

He couldn’t bear to replace it, especially when she would sit with him, run her own fingers around some of the pattern and settle to their work. She’d never danced on this table, she wouldn’t have dared.

He wanted to dance around it with her. He wondered sometimes if he would ever ask her, or live in his fantasy world forever, listening to the far-off jingle of coin and bell wristlets, the swish of fabric as it floated around her legs.

One corner of the iron pattern was slightly lifted, polished from passing shirtsleeves sliding across the surface. The staff would run their hands over the bump, on their way through to the bar from the back cold room. It was simply “Mama’s Table” to most of them. She loved calling it that, a reverence in her voice to the woman she knew when she had first come into the bar looking for work. To him it was simply a link to his past, a time capsule of when his family was different. Bigger. Alive.

Now, it was just him, the bar, and this table.

And her.

She always sat on the side with the bump, and as she did the math on the old spool calculator, she would absently dance her fingers over raised metal with her hand, her brow furrowed in concentration.

He would stop, watch her, pulled in by a simple movement. How could she transfix him with a hand gesture?  He would leap into fantasy again, seeing her curled up somewhere, a book in her hands, rings flashing in the watery sunlight of morning, her long hair lifting in a slight Spring breeze.

It was always the small moments he would capture in his mind, never the full picture of the situation, oddly. Like he was memorizing another life yet to be, so if it happened, he would know what it meant.

Or, maybe, so that one day he could put all the pieces together and make it happen.