Awakening to the sun’s weak rays; only just managing to filter through the voile curtain, draped gypsy style, covering the expanse of cheap double glazing – Leah let the music wash over her. ‘Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone…’
Choking back the lump forming in her dry throat, Leah scolded herself; it’s only a song, with words written by someone who didn’t even know her. Didn’t know how longingly, she had, as a young girl, stared through a single pane of glass, as the cycle of the moon, rotated with the passing into womanhood.
Echoing the dulcet tone.. ‘Without a dream in my heart..’ Leah stayed one beat behind, her cognitive skills, a little slower now. Feeling for the volume switch, she allowed the song to rise, to lift her back, to the night she saw him across the dance floor. Gracefully the couples had swept between them and she had longed to join in, to feel the freedom of lifting feet, in pulsating abeyance to the singer, crooning his tune in time with the band ‘you knew just what I was there for…’ Heady from the two glasses of Champagne, she had found herself smiling openly at him, as he returned her gaze, through the moving bodies.
Ill at ease, with the fabric of her frock, not falling below her knees, Leah recalled trying to pull it down against all its stiffened resistance. Just like her mother, the material hadn’t given an inch.
Keeping her wandering mind focused was challenging, but she must get to the end of the song, or else she may have lost him forever.
Leah once more let the only remaining clear memories engulf her frail mind.
‘May I have the pleasure of asking you to dance?’ Nervously, his tremulous voice had caused her to lift her eyes from the fixation of seeing her shapely calves encased only in sheer nylon.
Oh, the temerity of saying yes ‘of course you may’ caused her heart to leap, even now – as the song continued ‘and then there suddenly appeared before me, the only one my arms will ever hold…’
Putting her slim hand into his, she had allowed him to lead her directly under the rotating glitter ball, its twinkling light illuminating dancing patches of fairy dust on the polished floor. Quivering, at first, like two birds in new flight, they had let the music lead them, melting into the 4/4 time of the Foxtrot. Rotating together, two as one combined, eyes locked, her blue moon had turned to gold.
She remembered getting home late, her mother waiting for her, the hand across the face, not even in her grave; which would come soon enough; would she ever forget that – the sheer humiliation, and the hand that had shattered her beautiful evening.
Uselessly, she had pleaded, and locked in her room, the only moonlight, came through the unchanging single pane of glass. Vacant years followed, till her mother breathed her last, releasing her, but it was too late.
‘Without a dream in my heart – without a love of my own…’
“But I had a love once, real love” Leah’s broken voice cried at the radio. “Xavier, I want to dance, are you there?”
Yellow sunlight, a mellow shade of gold fell upon the coverlet, embracing Leah’s cold face. Zephyr wind, warm from the west, carried his answer and putting her wrinkled hand into his, she allowed him to lead her directly under the rotating glitter ball.