While writing this book, the obvious question that struck me was—Whatever happened to Frau Troffea? I could find no mention of her fate in any article, despite nearly every single one identifying her as the first dancer. A few details also differed from my memory of the story. Like for instance, there’s not a single mention of her husband and children bringing her food or cleaning up her shit as she danced. I suppose that was my own hopeful invention. I did, however, find an image of an engraving by Hendrik Hondius from 1624 called Dancing Mania on a Pilgrimage to the Church at Sint-Jans-Molenbeek. Hondius based his engraving on a drawing made nearly eighty years earlier by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who had been a witness to the events.

In the foreground of the engraving are six figures. Two middle-aged women are held by men on either side. The men have their arms hooked through the women’s arms, and grip the women’s hands, but it isn’t initially clear if the men are dancing with the women, or restraining them. In the distance, two men appear to be carrying a woman away over a low bridge, while nearby, another woman sits in a stupor by a creek. The more I looked at this image, the more I realized that the women were the only ones being portrayed as wild. Raving crones to be wrestled by their concerned menfolk. The women are not rendered sympathetically; they’re homely and heftier than the men who attempt to subdue them. In other words, they’re comic subjects, meant to be mocked and scorned. It feels like a knowing elbow nudge, from Bruegel to Hondius, one man to another, about the inherent and eternal madness of women. Madness as our nature. We only need the slightest provocation to break free from our homes, from our domesticity, and flee into the wilds, for our menfolk to come chasing after us, and carry us back to civilization, back to our senses.

When I found this image, my eyes lingered over the figure of the woman on the left-hand side of the group. Her gaze is angled towards the sky, and her brow is furrowed with intensity, as if trying to challenge God. She is gazing beyond the moment, beyond herself, and the strictures of her body, and the social order that attempts to restrain her. She is gazing upward to the heavens, to the birds that circle above, to a divine mystery that she alone seems attendant to in that chaotic moment. In her look I do not see madness.

I see resolve.

11

KYLE WAS NOT INVITED TO THE PARTY. ASHLEY AND I HAD been extremely clear about this fact. So it was with considerable surprise that I pulled into the driveway the next morning to find Kyle walking out the front door. And not only was he walking out the front door, but he was accompanied by Paul. And not only was he accompanied by Paul, but he was helping carry one of Paul’s cardboard boxes down the front walk and load it into the trunk of Paul’s car.