The guests at my brother Sean’s wedding have formed a huge circle on the dance floor, ready to watch Uncle Johnny and Aunt Peggy do their Peabody. They’ll have the floor to themselves. It’s a tradition in Mama’s family, a kind of initiation performed for each of the many cousins at their receptions. My aunt and uncle stand very straight and still, their bodies several inches apart, his arm around her waist, her hand on his shoulder, elbow sharply high. The hands they reach out with to complete the pose aren’t clasped but placed gently one above the other. They stand motionless for a few beats, and we hold our breath, waiting. Once they move, the steps are very fast, circling and circling—tracing the periphery of the ring of onlookers. We’re captivated. Even the kids younger than me pay attention.
My uncle wears a dark suit that Mama says he bought in 1950, ten years ago, but it still fits him. He’s no Fred Astaire but he’s lean and agile for a man his age. Aunt Peggy is in light green chiffon, and the layers lift and swirl as she turns. Her hair is white and teased into a bouffant, so different from the way she usually wears it, when she’s taking care of her kids and her chores. Even when she’s busy, she’s kind to me—finds me an extra candy or a bow for my hair. She still treats me like a kid, like she’s forgotten I’m eleven already, but I love seeing her dancing this way and getting so much attention.
That’s the part she likes the least about the dance, everyone looking at her. She prefers Uncle Johnny to dance with his sister, my mother. They performed together for years—on stage at every parish show in Brooklyn they could find. But this is my brother Sean’s wedding, and we can’t break tradition.
When their Peabody ends, the Knights of Columbus reception hall erupts with applause and the dance floor crowds with couples who can’t sit still. My sisters and brothers can rarely stay at their tables long enough to finish the meal. All seven of us will be up dancing, even if we don’t have a partner. We don’t need one. We connect through the music, mimicking steps, signaling with a smile or an arm in the air what comes next. It’s a tribal thing. Here, where movement rules, where no words or reasons are needed, we’re free.
Sit us together at a dinner table or in a quiet living room and conversation will be thin, propped up by verbal hijinks from the four oldest of the seven, the ones who’ve always seemed so grown up to me. When we’re not moving to a shared rhythm, unruly feelings have more room to surface, chilling memories, the kind no one wants to share. So, we joke. We tease, sometimes too sharply. We make light of anything that hurts.
Aunt Peggy doesn’t do that. When the reception is almost over, before the band has offered the last dance, before my brother and his new wife can say goodnight, she takes my hand and moves me away from the circle of men trying to get my dad under control. She tells me my mother is all right, though I can see her near the bandstand, her mouth smeared with blood.
Uncle Johnny is not dancing anymore. No one is. I can’t see him in the circle of men, but I can hear his shiny shoes scraping the floor as he struggles with the others to keep Daddy from hitting anyone else. Daddy’s brothers, all broad-shouldered, much taller than the others in the ring of men, back Uncle Johnny up in this, but they’re rougher about it, less hesitant to use the force needed. Yet Daddy manages to push them away. Arms flailing, he stumbles and slides, but his force makes him hard to hold on to. He wears the expression of a man who will not surrender, someone entitled to his rage. His bow tie is undone, his shirt opened from collar to mid-chest, the sleeve torn at the shoulder, his tuxedo jacket gone.
Only this morning his face had no anger. Clean-shaven and shining, it made me wonder if that’s how he might have looked sometimes as a boy, like someone ready for something good to happen, some change overdue. “So how do I look?” he said. I almost said handsome, because I love how he looks when he’s sober, when he sips his morning coffee in the kitchen and tells stories you know can’t be true. But Mama spoke before I could. “Like a choir boy,” she told him, so maybe she saw it too, the boyish joy. I wondered if he was happy for Sean, his oldest son, so responsible and honest. I’ve never seen them hug or even touch each other on purpose, but I think Daddy loves him. I’ve heard it in the way he talks to him about baseball, like Sean is a worthy apprentice, deserving of his candor, capable of understanding when a slider is the wrong choice. He doesn’t talk to me that way.
The madness on the dance floor isn’t all that different from the chaos Daddy creates at the end of almost every gathering, large or small, but Aunt Peggy turns to me and my sister Irene, puts her hands on Irene’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she says as she leads us outside to Uncle Johnny’s car. “There’ll be no more of this. You’re coming home with me. All of you.” She means my mom and her three youngest. That’s us—Irene and me and my little brother, Kevin. We reach the car, but she doesn’t have the key. I lean against the Chevy’s fender as we wait for Uncle Johnny.
Aunt Peggy puts her arms around Irene and Kevin, but I stay where I am, expecting as always that there’s no need for grownups to comfort me, that I can hide how scary this is. That’s when my aunt motions for me to come to her, pulls me close. I feel myself surrender to the soft weight of her arm, to the steadiness of her voice, telling us we’ll be all right, letting me be little again, and the knot in my chest comes undone. I rest my wet cheek against the chiffon, afraid to spoil it but unable to pull away.
Mary Ann McGuigan’s work appears in Brevity, The Citron Review, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Her collection Pieces includes Pushcart Prize-nominated stories. That Very Place, her second collection, reaches bookstores in 2025. Mary Ann’s novels have been named best books for teens, Where You Belong was a finalist for the National Book Award.
She loves visitors: www.maryannmcguigan.com.