Astonish Me (18 page)

“Too late.”

Campbell stands and offers her a hand. She takes it and he pulls her up so forcefully that she stumbles against his chest. “Sorry,” he says, stepping back. “You’re so light.” He smiles, warm again but sad
around the edges, knowing their moment has passed. “Nothing a cheeseburger won’t fix.”

“Campbell, I haven’t eaten a cheeseburger since I was a little kid.”

He holds out his hand for the scrapbook. “Give me that rotten thing.”

Joan presses it against her chest. “No. I have other plans for it.”

“Such as?”

“I’m going to put it in Ludmilla’s dance bag.”

“Ah. Then, bonne chance.”

In the doorway, she pauses, taps her fingers on the jamb, turns back. “I know I should be over it. I want to acknowledge that I know that.”

“Forgive and forget.”

“There isn’t even much to forgive. He was always clear about who he was. I was in denial.”

Campbell tsks. “He didn’t love you, darling. What could be more necessary to forgive?”

III
 

APRIL 1986—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

S
OME DAYS WHILE JOAN TEACHES
,
HARRY GOES TO HIS FRIEND
Dale’s house after school, and other days he comes to the studio and does his homework behind the reception desk or on the lobby floor by the big window into the studio. Joan has asked him if he wouldn’t like to try dancing, but he politely declined, just as he turned down soccer, baseball, tennis, and karate. At a loss, she and Dale’s mother signed them both up for swim team. Harry goes and swims with little complaint, but he is fundamentally an indoor child, dreamy and thoughtful and given to abrupt, consuming interests (astronauts, trains, submarines) that require semiweekly trips to the library for books he races through, shoveling information into himself like coal into a furnace.

The little girls in Joan’s classes wear black leotards and pink tights and have their hair done up in buns decorated with bright scrunchies or little pink crocheted cozies. Their limbs are too thin or too plump; their bodies are incapable of grace but full of will and infantile pomposity. “Stand like a turkey,” she tells them, gesturing to her own lifted chest, the way her weight is slightly forward. “Be over the balls of your feet, but not too far.” With the addition of a gauzy black skirt, she wears what they do.

She likes to teach the girls who are just starting to go en pointe.
As a warning, she shows them her own feet, pointing out the knobby protrusions, the toenail that has simply given up and stopped growing, the thick yellow calluses. “Still want to do it?” she asks them. They do. She tells them how she went through a pair of shoes every day when she was performing with the company. All the dancers got custom-made shoes. Hers came from London. Once she went to the factory and met the man who made them, and he had asked to see her feet because he wanted to find out if they were as he imagined. Joan shows the girls how to sew on the satin ribbons and rough up the pointe. She demonstrates how to tape their toes and pad them with lamb’s wool. She leads them over to the rosin box, and one by one they step experimentally into the sticky dust. One day, she tells them, each of you will have your own method for getting your shoes just right. Then she leads them to the barre, and up they all go like seven baby giraffes: spindly, ankles trembling. First position, face the barre, plié, here we go, ladies, and relevé, and roll through your foot, whole foot, all the way up. Back down, and cambré back. Remember to push down to go up, and pull up to go down. Now again in second position. Only a few minutes for the first time, but they almost look like dancers.

Chloe Wheelock is taking a beginning jazz class. Joan hadn’t recognized her when she first caught sight of her through the big window, only noticed her pleasing lines and proportions. But then Chloe did an airy leap across the diagonal and came running toward the window, not seeing Joan but looking past her, her face foxy and triangular like her father’s but without the smugness, her eyes hard with focus. Chloe paused, breathing hard, and saw Joan. She waved.

“I hope you aren’t offended she’s not taking ballet,” Sandy says when Joan runs into her at pickup time a week or two later. “We decided jazz would be better.”

“That’s fine,” Joan says. Chloe has been watching her classes, sitting very straight in a folding chair out with the mothers behind the big window, her knees together and small, pointed chin held high,
her posture meant to tell anyone who might wonder that, yes, she is a dancer. Now Joan spots her in the jazz studio, sashaying in a circle with the other girls while Whitney Houston blasts through the stereo. She is mildly ridiculous looking in her shiny red unitard and cropped T-shirt. Her ponytail is decorated with curly ribbons. The song ends as the girls crowd together in the center of the floor and drop to their knees, raising their arms over their heads and wiggling their fingers. Their teacher applauds and the girls disperse, chugging from water bottles and draping towels over their shoulders with affected nonchalance, mimicking the high school girls. To Sandy, Joan adds, “But you shouldn’t wait too long if she wants to do ballet. The Russians start them at four.”

“This isn’t Russia. She wants to do jazz. She’s having fun. She’s only seven, anyway.”

“Jazz is fine, but I’d hate for her to waste her talent.”

“So now she’s talented.”

“You never asked me if I thought she was talented,” Joan says.

“Well, she wants to do jazz.”

“That’s good, then. She should do what she wants.”

Sandy falls silent. Joan wonders why she doesn’t just leave, then follows her gaze. In the studio, a girl is letting Chloe try on her pointe shoes. Though the ribbons are tied clumsily and the satin foot is loose around her small heel, she gets up easily, looking around from her new height. She experiments with her arms, takes a few tentative steps.

“Look,” says Sandy, “she can do it.”

“She shouldn’t. Her bones are too soft. She’s not strong enough.”

“She’s just playing.”

“No,” says Joan. “She isn’t.”

Harry is watching, too, from his seat on the lobby carpet. He still says Chloe is his best friend even though they have been seeing less and less of each other. Joan gathers that Chloe ignores Harry at recess, but, on afternoons when he doesn’t have swimming and she
doesn’t have dance or gymnastics, she still appears on their doorstep or calls him on the phone to come over and keep her company or act out roles in her games.

Harry stands up and taps on the glass to get the girls’ attention. Chloe drops off pointe and glances at the other girl, the shoes’ owner. Sticking out his butt and going up on his tiptoes, Harry turns in a circle with his arms in a hoop over his head and then does a silly, wobbly arabesque followed by some sideways leaps, mimicking Chloe’s timidity, her pride in the shoes. Usually he is so shy and serious.

As he has become his own person, Joan has stopped, for the most part, wondering if he will dance. Sometimes in idle moments, watching him running and jumping in the backyard with Chloe or standing straight and small on a diving block and then snapping out to pierce the pool like a javelin, she still dwells on the possibility, but mostly she has accepted that he will do other things, be something else. She is glad he was not a girl. Through the window, Chloe’s friend waves to Harry to come in, and soon the shoes are on his feet. He teeters but stays up, sticking out his tongue and undulating his arms like wings. Sometimes late at night Joan watches a tape of
Swan Lake
, and sometimes Harry gets out of bed and watches with her until he falls asleep on the couch.

“Oh, look,” says Sandy. “He’s a ballerina.”

Joan wants to say that they are just playing, but she doesn’t.

DECEMBER 1987—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

D
ROSSELMEYER MAKES THE CHRISTMAS TREE GROW UNTIL ITS STAR
vanishes up into the light grid, and then the Nutcracker turns from a doll to a human, and the other toys come alive, and the rats creep out into the dark house to do battle with the tin soldiers, and Chloe is the smallest rat. It is Christmas Eve, the last performance. For three weeks, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, twice on Saturdays, and on Sunday afternoons she has waited in the wings until the last big rat slinks onstage, rubbing his paws together under his chin, and then she goes scurrying out after him, lifting her knees high to show she is nervous. When the rats leap menacingly at the soldiers, raking the air with their claws, she covers her eyes with her tail, and the audience always laughs.

She has grey tights and grey slippers and a leotard of hot, itchy grey fake fur and a heavy rat’s head she can barely see out of. The rats, some men but mostly women who do modern dance and wouldn’t have made good snowflakes, wear grey unitards with funny ovals of fur that cover their chests and stomachs like long bibs. The soldiers rush forward, swords above their heads. Their jumps are low, and their footwork is sloppy. Now is Chloe’s big moment, her answering attack, running out from behind the other rats into a heroic grand
jeté all alone at center stage, throwing her head back like she will when she is a famous ballerina and in a
good
company, one where the dancers don’t also teach school or work in stores. She lands and does a few nimble pas de chats, first toward the soldiers, then toward the rats, then back again, her feet landing exactly where she wants them to, and she does chaînés turns closer and closer to the soldiers, driving them back until she stops and shakes her fist at them.

To her left is the darkness that contains her mom and dad and her maternal grandparents and her uncle Rodney and aunt Sarah. Joan is out there, too, as she is most nights, and tonight Jacob is with her, come to see Harry, who is dancing Fritz, Clara’s bratty little brother. The high school girl who dances Clara is skinny and pimply and always smoking outside while wearing her taffeta party dress or white nightgown. Fritz breaks the Nutcracker when it’s still a doll, just to be mean. If the whole auditorium were empty except for Joan, Chloe would still dance her hardest, but when Joan isn’t there, the whole performance seems almost pointless. Joan had been the one to suggest she join in with a ballet class after jazz, beckoning when she hesitated in the door, telling her to find a bit of empty barre or to stand in the back when they did center work and try her best. Chloe had disliked the sight of herself in the mirror. At first her reflection shamed her for not knowing the ballet words or what to do with her arms. Her jazz clothes, silly and garish next to all those neat black leotards, marked her as an impostor.

Joan lets her come over to her house whenever she wants and applauds the dances she and Harry make up in the backyard. Joan slices vegetables for a snack and puts on ballet movies for them after they get tired and tells them stories about when she was a professional. Joan found hand-me-down leotards and tights when Chloe’s mom complained about the money wasted on jazz outfits, and Joan took her to a store and bought her a pair of slippers and told her to tell her mom they’d been a free sample. But somehow, eventually, Chloe’s mom had decided ballet was a good thing, and now she cares too much and breathes down Chloe’s neck, watching all her classes
and giving loud opinions about the other girls in the car on the way home, criticizing their technique and bodies.

The tin soldiers cower; Chloe turns to the rats, arms lifted in triumph. Applause, and then a soldier stomps once, hard, on her tail.

The director has told her to pretend to be
very angry
when her tail gets stepped on, but she does not need to pretend. The indignity of her ruined moment is a fresh pain every night. She leaps in the air, whirls around and rushes at the soldiers, full of fury, but they are not afraid of her small claws, and they catch her and spin her down their battle line, grabbing and turning her, one to the next to the next. When they finally let go, she falls to the stage in a tantrum of humiliation, beating her fists and feet against the cool, smooth surface until a big rat picks her up and carries her into the wings, still kicking and thrashing. “Take it easy, Chloe,” he whispers, and she lets up and dangles limply from his arms.

They are to wait in the wings until the Rat King enters from the other side, wearing his crown, brandishing his scimitar, and because they need to enter as soon as he does, the rat holds her while they wait. She has complained to Joan that he holds her
forever
, but Joan timed it and amazed her with the news that they are offstage for only twenty seconds. The rat, a man named Brett who works in a lamp store, smells like BO and cologne. His rat head, which never really dries out, smells like mildew, and his breathing is loud inside it. The head reminds her of the animals at Disneyland, how they hugged her, and also of the man on the Matterhorn. The memory can’t be trusted. It is too vague, too blurred by motion and sound—the descent of the toboggan, the rattle of the tracks, the roar of the snow monster—but at its center is the alien, disturbing image of her mother being embraced by a strange man, leaning back against him with her eyes closed, her mouth dropping open. Who is that man? He has no face, not really, but he kisses her mother’s neck. The memory can’t be trusted, but it lingers and rubs like a bit of grit between Chloe and her mother, taking on layers of nacre, growing larger but turning more opaque.