Love Edy (18 page)

“
I’m not Rebecca,”
she said.
“Nor
your father, where you can tuck into corners and dip into shadows
unseen.”
She tilted Edy’s chin upward, forcing their eyes to
meet. She had Hassan’s same gold flecked green eyes. Hassan, minus
the warmth in that instance.
“There is no hiding your heart from
me. I know you love him. But your feelings don’t matter. Accept
that he’ll never be yours.”

She dropped Edy’s face and sat back, as if
expecting the tears to come, as if expecting an encore performance
from the nine-year-old who needed comfort.

Edy’s eyes stayed dry and her mouth kept
closed. She didn’t have Hassan’s heart steady as a promise, but
sometimes, sometimes she sensed it, sometimes she felt it. But God,
anytime that thought seeped into her mind she couldn’t help but
question it. Could it even be true? Or was it blatant hope soaring
out on the wings of trouble? Hell, his mother thought so.

But so what if she did? And what if Hassan
did feel something for her? What then?

“
You are young still,”
Rani said
“Feelings are fluid. What appears certain will succumb to the
passing of time. Do you understand, my love?”

Except this—them—Hassan and Edy—had never
felt lax, fluid, changeable. The earliest bastions of happiness
placed them side by side, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder,
growing through the years together. Her mantel and his overflowed
with pictures of the two in diapers, in need of front teeth, in
dozens of countries, and as time passed, with them curling one
toward the other.

She could think about that, of course. That
and the endless nights he spent in her bed, plus the hugs, and
forehead kisses. She could tell herself they meant something,
possibly everything. But she knew better than to put her heart
through a gamble with the deck stacked against her.

“
Edith, we must all do what is best for
the family. As you grow up, you will discover that sacrifices for
the people you love are common, even desirable.”

Whatever.

Her stomach cramped again. With the relief
of a hot towel on her mind, she got up, gave Rani the obligatory
kiss on her cheek to let her know there were no hard feelings
between them, and headed straight for the bathroom.

She collided with Ronnie Bean in the
hall.

He was fully dressed. Hand on the doorknob
across from Rani’s room, Bean froze, white stick of a lollipop
jutting from the corner of his mouth.

Edy folded her arms. Caught.

“Better me than your aunts,” she said.

Bean exhaled. “What’ll it cost?”

Edy smirked. “I want to go with you.
Wherever it is that you dance.”

“Be serious. I—”

Kala coughed in the next room.

“Agree or I scream.”

“Dang it, Edy. You’re so lame. I don’t want
to bring you with me.”

“That’s funny,” Edy said. “’Cause I don’t
remember giving you a choice.”

Edy didn’t expect her opportunity to come so
fast. But that next Monday night, Bean cracked open her bedroom
door.

“We leave in an hour.”

He gave no word on whether she needed money
or how to dress. So, Edy rose, pulled on blue jeans and a Harvard
tee, grabbed a ten-dollar bill, and stood in the hall until Ronnie
Bean met her.

“Obvious much?”

He flipped off the hall light, grabbed her
by the wrist, and pulled her, yanked her to the front door. They
were out so fast. Together, they rushed away.

Bean slipped the doorman a five, and they
headed for the subway at Eighty-First Street. B toward Brighton
Beach, a transfer at West Fourth, then the F toward Stillwell. It
wasn’t till Bean asked her if she was keeping a log that Edy
realized she’d been studying the time.

“I’ve never been out so late,” she
admitted.

“You asked to come. No regrets now,” Bean
said. He scowled at her Harvard tee and turned away, annoyance
jerking his features.

At East Broadway, they exited and walked two
blocks on before they joined a queue of jean-clad teens on a
trash-strewn sidewalk.

They entered Epic, a suffocating, peeling
black box of a nightclub. The sort that prided itself on violated
fire codes and poor ventilation, Edy presumed. Packed body to body
with sweat-covered adolescents, Epic itself pulsed and strobed to
the beat. People didn’t dance so much as sway, in limbo.

“Give it a minute,” Bean said, “and you’ll
see what you’ve been missing.”

Wild bass pumped, then froze. A single note
pierced the air, then another. The crowd shrieked their approval. A
vamped and lusty voice of first one woman, then another, echoed and
overlapped.

It happened fast.

A black guy, short and compact, popped onto
the floor like a jack out the box. He cavorted to the center, feet
gliding, torso snapping, head swiveling in a jerking burst of art.
Edy tossed Bean a look of disbelief. Was this what he meant by
dancing?

When Edy was ten, her mother caught her
watching
Krush Groove
and banished her from the room,
promising her that disjointed jerking would lead to a thrice-broken
neck. But this boy looked fine. Better than fine, in fact, and Edy
pulled Bean in for a closer squint.

“
Explain it to me,”
she said,
drinking in every flicker of motion, every flinch of muscle, making
parallels to classical form when she could.
“Tell me what he’s
doing.
Tell me why he’s doing it.”

“Old school purists call it b-boying,” Bean
said, ignoring her Punjabi for English. “But you probably know it
as breakdancing.”

She’d seen breakdancing before, and never
had it seemed so curiously frantic, so inexplicably enormous. Never
had it volleyed such a crash of emotions, forcing her inward
instead of out. What a contrary shock of beautiful ugliness buried
beneath the tender parts. Classical dance breathed technique and
execution, but this . . .this wanted identity.

She stepped closer, drawn like a child
uncertain she’d be permitted to play.

The pit’s new b-boy surveyed his crowd with
a face-wide smirk, tilted his hat, and mocked the music’s snare
with a flurry of amped up steps, ultra heavy on the bravado. Cheap
strobe lights from a corner illuminated the sharpest of features: a
witch-like nose that hooked at the tip and barely there lips that
disappeared as the lights sought out a contender. B-boy taunted
them for a competitor, beckoning with fingers and booing.

Bean slipped from Edy’s grasp and leapt in,
spat back the boy’s moves triple fast and in reverse, and bowed for
the pleasure of his company.

Edy glanced at her shoulder to double check
if Bean still stood there.

He didn’t.

Bitter, frantic jerks, ensued—first Bean,
then the other guy—isolated pops and snaps, followed by disturbing,
joint flexing contortions of the body. Edy pushed closer for an
examination of their technique, until an Asian chick shoved her
back rough and laughed at her Harvard shirt. Slides, glides, mocks
of gravity pursued—Edy knew these tricks and yet didn’t know them
at all, she’d done them and yet never had. It was foreign,
familiar.

This
was
ballet, she told herself.
But how could it be? No training commenced here. Flourishing and
controlled, balanced and bursting, fluid and fire. Ballet, as
polluted by life.
This was freedom, dance without
dictation. While she loved the sculpted beauty and control of
classical ballet—this—
this
was life as life came: sudden, rearranged, burned
down, and hurled back up.

Life on her terms, whole, bold and
unapologetic.

She wanted that.

“
Teach me,”
Edy said the moment Bean
returned.

He snorted and looked past her to the
dancers.

She stepped in front of him, nose to nose,
close enough to kiss.

“
I need this, Bean. Please. Teach
me.”

He looked at her as if trying to determine
what she was and when she’d become it.

“First, speak English,” Bean said. “We’re
not back with the villagers. Second, and more importantly,
b-boying, krump dancing, it’s about anger, frustration, rage—raging
back
. It can’t get you into Harvard. It can’t get you into
City Ballet. It won’t get you the family’s approval.”

They turned back to the pit. This time, a
pair of stick figure blondes in baggy jeans and oversized tops
whipped and cavorted, both spastic and graceful at once.

“I don’t care about their approval,” Edy
said. “I want to do something for me.”

Bean looked at her as if she were the new
toy everyone had been raging about.

“Well, well,” he said. “You just got
interesting.”

“Bean—”

He slipped into the crowd before she could
say more. Halfway to somewhere, Bean stopped by a rakish blond guy
with a neck half as long as his arm. A conversation ensued, maybe
even an argument, before the two melted into darkness together.

Three renditions of an 80s hip hop remix
later, and Edy’s bladder pressed to her belt. She could stay rooted
no longer. Maneuvering through stacks of sweaty teens, she kept her
gaze trained for a glimpse of Bean as she made her way to the back.
Edy found the bathroom near a cushioned bench no one dared use. A
turn of the knob and a fruitless shove later had her noticing the
out-of-order sign on the girl’s bathroom door. Great. Not only
couldn’t she find Ronnie Bean, but even if she did and they left
that moment, she’d pee her pants long before home.

After a surreptitious glance around, she
jammed a shoulder in the men’s bathroom door. It swung open, and
the pungent musk of urine waved hello. The imminent threat of
wetting her pants pushed her forward, but her gag reflex revolted
nonetheless. Sideways, Edy sidled, heart thumping, as she
suppressed an irrational fear of her high school principal
snatching her from the stall with her pants down.

Edy grabbed a toilet toward the back, where
she could wait and listen should someone join her. Quickly, she
snatched down her jeans and hovered over. Never had she been one to
sit on a public toilet; she certainly wouldn’t start in a
pee-stained nightclub.

In the stall across from her, someone
exhaled. A groan followed, then a squeak of rubber on linoleum. It
wouldn’t have been so bad had she not been in a men’s restroom.
Maybe her heart wouldn’t have tried to leave her body in a pitch of
fright. Whatever the reason, Edy cut short her peeing, wiped,
flushed and yanked her pants up. She wanted out of there. She
wanted away from whatever was making that
sound.

Another groan.

Edy burst out of her stall and hurried to
wash her hands. A slip in a puddle of liquid brought her down hard,
chin to floor in a head-jarring slam. A burst of pain swallowed
Edy’s head, ricocheting in blind, unforgiving waves. The stench of
urine filled her nose as Edy’s vision became one white blur. She
rolled onto her back with a whimper as the stall next to hers
opened.

Two bodies stepped out.

“Edy. Can I not take you anywhere?” Ronnie
Bean asked, sounding resigned.

“She looks hurt,” the second boy said. “What
do you want me to do?”

Bean sighed. “Help me get her off the floor.
I have no idea how to explain this.”

~~~

“So, obviously now you know,” Ronnie Bean
said as they emerged from the subway station. On the horizon, the
first rays of sunlight peeked out through early morning haze.

Bean shot Edy a look of loathing just as the
last of the roast beef from Nick’s All Night Deli slid from her
cheek and hit the sidewalk. Whatever. It had warmed too much to be
useful anyway.

Edy had already made up her mind that Bean’s
business was Bean’s business and no one would get it out of her.
Still, they’d been friends once. Good friends. And she had a
question.

“Your father—”

But she got no further, remembering what
Hassan’s mother once said:

“Homosexuality is rampant in the western
world. It’s so because western cultures are so experimental, so
unorthodox—so rewarding of individuality for individuality’s sake.
Homosexuality is a road to recognition, nothing more; a quest to
seek attention.”

Her views hadn’t surprised Edy. When they
tucked away, just the two of them, Rani pressed on with passion
about the plight of women in India, spousal abuse, the dowry
system, and female infanticide. She detached from it all though, as
if her parents hadn’t given Ali’s family a dowry, as if her worth
as a daughter and a potential had never been the subject of
scrutiny. Rani Pradhan hauled double duty as a covert detractor and
open advocate of the old ways. Long story truncated, Bean had no
allies.

“I’m not ashamed of what I am,” he said.
“They don’t have to accept me. It’s just that I—”

“Need a place to live,” Edy supplied.

“And food to eat,” Bean said.

The plight of every kid everywhere. Not
prepared enough to be independent, yet needing it so
desperately.

Rani didn’t take Edy’s face so well. While
Kala sat stoic and stirring her tea, Bean did all the talking,
telling a tale that looped endlessly and proved no respecter of
common sense. Edy, he said, had taken to training on the stairs. Up
and down she ran until she grew so fatigued she tumbled face first.
Bean, who happened to be checking for mail in the middle of the
night—no, he wasn’t expecting any—found her, in the stairwell.

To Bean’s credit, no onslaught of logic
could wither his story. Rani pointed out that she’d seen them both
go to bed, that it was absurd for someone not expecting anything to
rise in the middle of the night and check the mail, and that Edy
had no need for stairwell aerobics when she got plenty of exercise
everyday at ballet. Still, Bean remained rooted. Edy, never adept
at lying, did her part by keeping up groans of pain to elicit
sympathy and a softening of their culpability.