Singing with her feet
My girlfriend is the funniest person sometimes.
Now she’s singing “If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss, that’s where it is.”
But she sings it with this blind enthusiasm that is both endearing and incredible. I’m not even looking at her, but I know she’s sitting on her knees in front of the TV, rocking from side to side, tilting her head and waving her hands.
Later, in her room, she’s lying in the dark and I’m saying goodnight. Or trying to. It’s hard because she’s bumping her feet against the wall and jiggling her body.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Singing with my feet,” she says.
Uh huh. And I’m listening with my hands.
Sounds like a weird metaphor from a new-agey self-help intimacy book. But it’s not.
It’s my girlfriend, tapping out “Two short-necked buzzards” against the wall, in the darkness of her bedroom. At 10:30 p.m.
I look at her. Her eyes are closed. She’s completely serious when she’s being funny, that’s what’s so funny. She doesn’t laugh at her own jokes.
Now, during this singing/tapping thing, which I assume she must be doing to get a laugh out of me, she looks totally serene. She’s good at looking like she really is singing with her feet, and she would be singing with her feet even if I wasn’t there to watch her.
Although, actually, I’m not sure she wouldn’t be. She is a crazy person sometimes.
Finally she stops jiggling and humming and tapping and shaking. Her face is turned toward the windows; it’s banded in the blue light that seeps through the blinds.
“She’s sleepy,” I think. “Time to go home.”
So I lean over and whisper in her ear a line from another song she was performing earlier in the evening:
“Take good care of yourself / You belong to me.” (Listen)
And then I go home.
Or, I would have gone home, if she hadn’t almost immediately burst out singing the rest of the song, “Button up your overcoat.”
She’s back in her weird trance, and she won’t stop singing.
I don’t think she can hear what I’m saying to her, but I try anyway.
“Goodnight,” I say. “Stop singing. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I give her a kiss and I leave.
She’s still singing when I get to the door, and though it’s probably just a coincidence, the last lines I hear are these:
“Take good care of yourself / You belong to me.”
I hope she’ll sleep, eventually. But I don’t mind if she sings those last lines a few more times, even if I’m not there to hear them.
I’ll be listening with my hands.