LINE Dancing.

Caterina Vieira was born pigeon-toed. The second daughter, birthed under the sign of the ram, it was inevitable. Her mother, Elvira, used to say that Caterina did everything she could not to be born, but Elvira was born under the ram too, and Portuguese, and so just as stubborn. I was born pigeon-toed too, and I can remember the two of us at birthday parties and holiday gatherings wearing the same shoes--white and round and joined together by a metal brace, one pointing to 10 o'clock, the other to 2 o'clock--and teetering over the dim knowledge that we were different. It's no wonder we never liked to dance.

Our mothers made us, though. St. Anthony's, St. Cecilia's, St. Theresa's, the basements of our aunts' churches, our grandmothers', our cousins'. The city was still alive then, its mills still running, its mayors still sly enough to keep out of jail. This was when people still walked the streets downtown, before the city stopped breathing, before our grandparents finished stitching away their fingerprints in the red-brick mills. Back then, all over the city the Portuguese churches would be strung with lights, festivals for every occasion. And back then, my mother still possessed the power to dress me in polyester and patent-leather shoes and force me into church basements to dance with dark-haired girls.

Caterina wasn't pretty. At 11 years old, she towered over all of us boys and most of our fathers. She was lean and lank, with wiry black hair, and could outwrestle just about anyone with her hairy arms. In sixth grade she'd almost been suspended from school for bloodying a boy's nose. Her sister, Maria, five years older, was all the envy.

Maria's skin stretched smoothly over her body and face and shone like olive oil under hair that was sable and straight as the tail of a mare. Somehow Maria had lost her accent. She had a voice like Natalie Wood's, soft and sweet, with no trace of pidgin. So many boys had taken her to movies that she'd come to seem like a Hollywood actress herself, and old men, huddled around makeshift bars, would often say, "She'll be in the moving pictures."

All the men danced with Maria, even my godfather, Michael, who had married and divorced and was engaged again. Before he moved to California, he'd almost caused a scandal when he gave her a 14-carat gold crucifix for her Confirmation. "Maria will marry well," the old women would whisper over filhos and coffee in Styrofoam cups. "If she's careful." Maria was much older than I was, and so I'd only danced with her in the dark halls of dreams, holding her close, like a secret. I'd only danced with her until the morning light cut in.

"Why don't you ask Caterina to dance?" my mother said to me one summer night at St. Anthony's. Sitting on the metal folding chairs with some other boys I didn't really know, I scowled, like them, at the treachery of my mother and ignored as best I could my patent-leather shoes that slid along the floor without me.

"I don't like to dance slow," I said. Elvira was my grandmother's friend, and so I didn't want to say what I really felt--that Caterina's smile looked like a mangled mess of metal and tiny rubber bands, and that sweat stains had begun to show through her purple satin dress. I could see Caterina across the hall sitting beneath some felt banners: "One Day at a Time," "Think, Live & Let Live." I didn't want to tell my mother that no one ever danced slow with Caterina.

"The poor girl's sitting all alone there. Come on, ask her to dance."

"I have to use the bathroom," I said.

But my mother wouldn't be swayed. "OK, I'll tell her you'll be right over," she said and walked off before I could argue.

In the bathroom I stood on tiptoes and looked in the mirror. I'd started shaving in the hope that hair would begin to grow above my lip, and once, when no one was home, I'd trimmed some hairs from my head and taped them on to see how I'd look as a man. My oldest brother, Antonio, had already started shaving. He no longer came to the dances, and I often wondered what he did with the girls I'd see him with in his friends' cars. Michael, my godfather, didn't wear a moustache, and not because he couldn't. I'd often gazed with wonder at the gold chain creeping through his chest hair like a thin serpent. Even clean-shaven, his face boasted possibility, potential, virility. The face the mirror made for me boasted nothing. It claimed no hint of manhood.

Caterina's hands were sweaty and hot when I took hold, and I resented them, but I respected them. Even with the nails bitten down and the red polish chipping at the edges, they could not belie that they were very old. Those hands had cracked open almonds for centuries. They'd worn wooden handles smooth. They'd never known gloves. Held in mine, her hands were the hands of my grandmother before America's machines took them. My hands felt like they belonged in hers. If only our feet agreed so well.

Caterina's shoes were a size too big. They might have been Maria's or her mother's. Creased just above the toe, they were white and smudged with dirt, and when I looked at them from above and saw how her scarred white stockings had bunched around her ankles, I felt like weeping. Not so much for her, but for the way she must have seen herself in the eyes of boys like me. I don't think any boy had ever asked Caterina to dance. She only ever took to the floor for no-partner line dances like the hully gully, the alley cat, the San Antonio stroll. When the songs began, she'd beam and march proudly out to the floor, her elbows lifting like thin featherless wings.

As we danced, I could see the boys snickering from their folding chairs, the old men tipping cups of homemade wine as if in acknowledgment of some ageless duty with which I'd been charged. They toasted me with consolation. My mother and father danced beside us, cheek to cheek, easy on their feet. "This could be the two of you," said their happy eyes.

Caterina and I said nothing.

Why the Vieiras went back to Portugal no one knew for sure, not even my grandmother, who was godmother to the girls. "Maria must be pregnant," the old men would say, sitting in the barber shops, the coffee shops, the bars. "Maybe it was Michael Machado," I heard them say. "Maybe that's why he went to California." Riding by the Vieira's house, I saw that it stood empty, that it was for sale. "Maybe they found a husband for Caterina," I heard my aunt Bertha say to someone on the phone. "She'd make a good wife for a peasant."

The rumors went on, and then they stopped. I didn't think of the Vieiras for a long time. My feet had straightened and in high school I joined the track team. I thought about joining the Christian Brothers because I loved my teachers, but there were other things to join. I wanted to belong to anything that would reassure me, that would tell me I belonged.

All around I could see the city was dying. The Peerless department store had already closed. I'd heard that Sears would be closing soon, too. People were losing jobs, and there were no new ones for which they might apply. People were dying, too. My cousin Roberto, who had danced on Broadway and was openly gay, was the first person I knew to die of AIDS. First he lost feeling in his left side, then he couldn't swallow, and then he shriveled up and died. My aunt still keeps a photograph of his name on a Broadway marquee.

A year later, his brother Freddy drowned when his fishing boat capsized in the Atlantic. "Ours is not to wonder why," my mother said when I asked why God would do such things. I took this to mean that part of the dream is that it's never really realized. When my grandfather died a few months after that, I didn't wonder why. The night of the wake it snowed, and the Vieiras showed up as though they'd never left.

Portugal had agreed with Caterina. Braces off, her teeth were straight and white. Her hair was straight, and the Azorean sun had lightened it. The angles of her face and shoulders had rounded out, and, even as she stood from kneeling at my grandfather's open coffin, she bore herself with the confidence that she could dance now with any man. The younger men asked who she was. The older men asked if it was really her, and who it was that followed behind her.

If Maria hadn't given birth to a child, she looked as though she had. All the glamour was gone, buried under inches of flesh, so that the style she still tried to project seemed gaudy and implausible. The gold rings looked constricting on her fingers, the black dress overtaxed on her frame. Streaked with gray and styled short, her hair hung behind her head like an oriole's abandoned nest.

The second time I asked Caterina Vieira to dance with me was at the Christmas bazaar two weeks after my grandfather's funeral. Decorated with red and green crepe paper and balloons, St. Anthony's basement was warm and smoky and smelled of linguica and peppers, and as soon as I walked inside I saw Caterina in the corner with her mother selling crocheted doilies and tablecloths. She said no, she didn't care to dance, and her mother grinned a gold tooth in apology.

I brought the two of them coffee and cakes, and Caterina's mother thanked me in Portuguese and then excused herself to speak to someone else.

"It's good to see you again," I said to Caterina. "How was Portugal?"

"Not very exciting, but tolerable," she said. Her lips left a pink kiss on the rim of her cup. "My father's still there, but he might be coming back here by next year."

"What's it been, six years? You left so unexpectedly ..."

"My father was offered a job in the government. It was a `now or never' kind of thing." She crossed her legs under her maroon velvet dress.

"Will you be going back?"

"Someday, but not anytime soon."

I wanted to ask her what had happened to Maria, why her family had never written, but the longer I looked at her and spoke with her, the more I realized that she didn't know the answers to these things anymore than I knew why my cousins had died or why my father never spoke to his only sister or why almost everyone I knew was out of work. "Ours is not to wonder why," my mother always said, but I didn't believe that to be true. Talking to Caterina, I wondered why some girls emerge out of their own vanity grounded in regret, while others, humbled by their flaws, take wing into the uninvited art of themselves. "Do you still hate to dance?" I asked her.

"I never hated to dance," she said with a laugh.

When I received an invitation to Maria's wedding the following fall, I was surprised it wasn't Caterina getting married. It would have explained her disinterest in all the young men, including myself, who'd tried to court her since her return. Perhaps Maria had regained some of her former confidence and had won a man. I didn't recognize the fiance's name, and I later learned he lived in another state.

I'd almost expected it to rain on the day of the wedding, but it was a perfect afternoon in May. At the Mass I picked out Caterina in her blue bridesmaid's dress, and my eyes followed her through all the ceremony and procession until she descended the steps of St. Cecilia's and climbed inside the limousine that would take them to the reception.

I hadn't stepped inside the Portuguese Social Club for nearly a decade, but the place looked exactly as it had when I was a boy and went there at Christmas to get two dollars from a Santa Claus who spoke with an accent and whiskey-scented breath. Same square tables, high-backed chairs, silver-striped wallpaper. After dinner, I walked up to Caterina at the head table, and for the third time in my life I asked her to dance. This time she said yes.

Looking down at our feet, I could see no hint of our pigeon toes, nothing sad about Caterina's egg-blue shoes. Her hands were still her hands. Warm and beautiful and wise. I don't know what I expected from the dance. It was just a dance. Caterina smelled of shampoo and champagne, and in her face I could glean nothing of the way she saw herself now. We joked a little about the Portuguese Social Club and then the song ended.

That night Caterina slow-danced with any man who asked her, and it wasn't until the line dances began and the announcer called for the "Blue Bird" that I understood why. In the center of the hall, the women formed a circle around her, their joined hands raised in arches. When the music started, she danced in and out of the arches until she stopped and tapped another woman and then placed both hands on the woman's shoulders. One by one, the arches collapsed and the train grew, and in the end all of the women were attached and they led Caterina because she had begun the dance, because she had made it possible.

GARY WHITEHEAD is a writer who lives in Warwick, New York.