Rose Sees Red (11 page)

“Okay, what’s the plan?” Caleb asked, rubbing his hands together with glee.

“The plan is to do everything,” I told him.

“We should definitely go to our house,” Caitlin said.

Caleb nodded. “Yeah, if only because taking the Staten Island Ferry is one of the best ways to see New York City.”

“Yeah! Come to Staten Island with us!” Callisto chimed in. “Spend the night at our house. Our parents are out of town.”

“Spend the night?” Yrena asked.

“Yeah, sleep over,” Caitlin said.

“Sleep over,” Yrena said dreamily. Callisto was nodding her head up and down: Yes. Yes. Yes. “Then we can go to the march tomorrow?”

“Can I come, too?” Maurice asked. “No one is at my house, and if I go back home now, I might oversleep.”

“Sure,” Callisto said before he was even finished.

“So where should we start?” Caleb asked.

“What about starting there?!” Maurice was pointing at a hot-dog cart, and we all agreed that Yrena needed to try one of everything. Hot dog. Pretzel. Warm chestnuts.

We were walking and Yrena was making faces as she tasted the different street foods. We stepped past Columbus Circle.

“Where are we going?” Caitlin asked.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” I asked.

“Practice,” Callisto said.

“Ha, ha,” Caitlin said.

“Let’s go by it and then head over to Fifth Avenue and look at the windows,” I said.

It was too bad that it wasn’t Christmastime. The window displays were something that I loved as a kid and I would have liked to share them with Yrena. But I was certain that the October window displays would be just as interesting to her.

“You girls are a lot different from what I thought you were like at school,” Maurice said.

I almost told him that I was probably
exactly
the way that he thought I was at school. Right now this was me being different. I was not myself right now. And I was enjoying it.

“Why do you always kind of hang back in class, Rose? You’re not that bad a dancer.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said. I knew where I stood in class. I didn’t want it pointed out to me.

“It’s not like you couldn’t be better—it’s just, you always come late. You’re not warmed-up properly. You concentrate so
hard that you don’t feel it in your body. I can see that in class. So you just sort of do the minimum. That gets you by, but I think you could probably stand out in a better way.”

“But not great,” I said. “I could never be great. Like you. Or Yrena. Why bother trying if I’m not going to ever be great?”

“Not everyone is going to be great,” Maurice said. “And besides, none of us know what we are yet and that doesn’t mean you can’t be better than you are now by trying. I saw you up there with me and Yrena. You got it then.”

I was feeling exposed and vulnerable. I didn’t want to cry in front of Maurice on the first day of our maybe-friendship just because he was right that I didn’t try hard enough in dance class.

So I did something I never did.

I let it
slide.

Caleb fell into pace with me but we didn’t say anything.

I almost thought we were breathing in and out at the same time. I wanted to ask him if he felt as I did, that something had happened to all of us on that stage, because there was an electricity between us. Like we were a unit. Like there was a thread between us.

“Wait,” Yrena said from up ahead. “What is this?” Then she stopped so short that Caleb and I nearly knocked into her.

Yrena was at a dead stop in front of an elaborate-looking doorway.

“Look, Russian bears!” she said.

The Russian Tea Room.

“Oh, I’ve heard of this place,” Caitlin said.

“This is a fancy place. Really fancy,” Callisto added.

“That’s right!” Yrena said. “I have been telling you, Russia is fancy.”

“But this is expensive fancy,” Caitlin said.

“Besides, it’s closed,” Caleb said. “It’s after one
A
.
M
.”

Yrena stepped up to the glass doors and peered inside. Then she began to knock.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Someone is in there,” she said. “I can see a light and people moving around.”

She knocked on the window a bit harder. Then she pulled her hair out of her ponytail and let it fall softly around her shoulders.

An older blond woman opened the door, and she and Yrena began to speak in Russian. The woman looked us all over and then opened the door up a bit farther and let us in.

When we walked in, Yrena seemed lighter on her feet.

“You all have shown me New York City,” she said. “I want to show you a little bit of Russia!”

Even though the place was clearly closed, there were still people sitting at tables. It was the post-theater crowd. Not the audience, but the
performers.

“Isn’t that Betty Buckley and the cast of Cats?” Maurice whispered.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Look, that’s Athol Fugard,” Caleb said. “God. I loved
Master Harold and the Boys.
”

It was hard not to stare at them or at the decor. It was a restaurant that looked stuck in time—it was 1982, and yet in here it felt like it was the 1930s. Everyone’s eyes were as big as saucers as they took in all the gold and brocade.

“This place is crazy,” Callisto said.

“It smells all kinds of good in here,” Maurice said.

“Whatever it is they have cooking, it has to be delicious,” Caitlin said.

Maurice pointed at a picture of Nureyev in tights, doing an arabesque, his face serious and magnificent, his extension exquisite. Nureyev was looking right out of the frame, right at us from there on the wall, welcoming us.

Yrena was speaking to the blond woman again, and now instead of looking surly, the woman was laughing.

“What’d she say?” Caitlin asked.

“She says that she will take care of us.”

The hostess signaled one of the waiters and spoke in Russian to him. The waiter nodded and smiled and brought us to a nice cozy booth in the back. He pulled the table out to let us all in and then slid the table back. We were completely hemmed in—no chance to dine and ditch from here. I sank deep into the lush seat.

It felt good to sit down. My muscles were tired. I knew tiredness and soreness from dancing, but this was different
somehow. It felt like world-weariness. Or weight-of-the-world-on-my-shoulders-ness. I closed my eyes for just a second. I was just resting.

“You okay?” Caleb asked. Somehow he’d managed to get next to me again.

“Tired,” I said. “Worried.”

The waiter brought us ice water for the table, but no menus. Yrena hadn’t been lying when she’d said that they’d take care of us. When the waiter came back, it was with an ornate silver pot of coffee, which he poured into china cups for each of us. It was the most delicious coffee I’d ever tasted.

“Are you really quitting?” I asked.

“Yes,” Yrena said. “I will go home tomorrow and while I am facing my punishment, I will take the chance to tell them how I really feel.”

“How do you feel when you dance?” Maurice asked.

“As though I am a puppet,” Yrena said. “Or a show dog.”

“Sometimes I feel as though my body isn’t my own,” Maurice said. “But I never feel like a puppet.”

“I feel as though each muscle, each point that I hit, is like some complicated math problem that my body has to solve,” I said. “I love that. When I solve it, it’s as though the universe sings.”

“On the days where I let myself, yes,” Yrena said. “I have felt like that. I will miss those moments. But not the rest of it.”

“That’s how I feel about music,” Caleb said. “That’s why I went into the drama department.”

“When I dance, I feel as though my heart is bigger than my body,” I said. “And that I am giving it back to everyone who is alive.”

“You should dance like that in class,” Maurice said. “Why don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I freeze up. I get scared.”

“I saw you tonight,” Caleb said. “I don’t know that much about dance, but I know that you don’t have anything to be scared of.”

The waiter came back and put down a bunch of plates and some bowls of ice with tiny bowls of stuff inside of them—egg whites, egg yellows, onions.

“Ew. What is it?” Callisto asked.

“Russian delicacies!” Yrena proclaimed. “Caviar. Blintzes. So delicious.”

“Caviar—fish eggs,” Caleb said. “Yum.”

But I could tell that he meant
Yuck.

“You’ve never had caviar before, Caleb!” Caitlin said.

“Sure I have. Well, not this kind, but the orange kind.”

“Mmm. It’s good,” Callisto said.

“Salty,” Maurice said.

“Fish eggs,” Caitlin said.

“Delicious,” I said.

Caleb tried some with a pinched nose, but then he went back for more.

“There is a part of me that wants to stay here in this big city,” Yrena said as we all dug in and stuffed our faces. “Is it
bad for me to say that there is a part of me that does not want to go home?”

“Do you want to defect?” Caleb whispered.

Yrena shook her head. “No. But I also want to know this place. I want to know you. I want to be able to be myself.”

“I don’t know how a person does that,” I said.

“Now, knowing you, there is a part of me that sees a different path. A different way that I could be if I were American.” Yrena sighed and lifted the coffee cup to her mouth.

“Maybe things will change one day?” I said.

She shook her head.

But, I realized, that was what I wanted.

Change.

The waiter cleared our plates and dropped something on the table.

My heart sank because I thought it was a bill. But then I noticed that it was a piece of paper.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The price for the meal,” Yrena said. “I am going to visit and bring news to his grandmother in Moscow. That’s her address.”

She slipped the piece of paper into her shoe.

“For safekeeping,” she said.

After window-shopping on Fifth Avenue, running on the steps at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, looking at Rockefeller Center, and jetting over to Times Square, we hopped on the train and got ourselves to the Whitehall Street/South Ferry station to catch the Staten Island Ferry.

I felt giddy. We all did.

We had to move to make the ferry. We didn’t want to wait for the next one. We ran. All of us. Running and leaping. Leaping and running. We laughed as we jumped onto the deck just as the man was about to put the chain up.

It was after two
A
.
M
. and New York City was moving away from us at a slow pace. The city shone. It glowed. It winked at us. We were standing at the back of the Staten Island Ferry so we could best see everything.

We didn’t have to say anything to each other, and I liked that.

“It’s cold,” I said. “It’ll be winter soon.”

“You do not know what winter is,” Yrena said. “Your winters here are not cold.”

“They feel cold to me,” I said.

She was the only one of us who didn’t look like she could use an extra sweater.

Maurice and Callisto left together to get us all some hot chocolate from the concession stand.

Yrena, Caitlin, Caleb, and I stood side by side at the railing and stared at the city as it drifted away from us.

“I bet you don’t have cities like this in the Soviet Union,” Caleb said to Yrena.

“There are cities in Russia that are prettier than New York,” Yrena replied.

Caleb shook his head. “That can’t be true.”

“It is,” Yrena said matter-of-factly.

“No way!” Caleb said. “I mean, look at that!”

Caleb began to point out everything there was to see on the boat ride. He indicated what was obvious to anyone with half a brain, that New York City was, in fact, the best city in the world. He made motioning movements to lower Manhattan. Governor’s Island. The Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island.

“It is very beautiful, but it is not for me,” Yrena said. Still, I noticed that her eyes followed Caleb’s every swoosh. Her face took in every new view.

“Let me ask you something,” Caleb said. “Do you think your country is better than ours?”

“It is,” Yrena said.

“How can you say that your way is better when you can’t even leave the Bronx without sneaking out of it?” Caleb said. “I can do anything I want. I can go anywhere I want. I can say anything I want.”

“Your department stores. Your supermarkets and delis. Your blue jeans,” Yrena was mumbling to me.

“Yrena, you’re wearing blue jeans!” I pointed out.

“Here is how we are different. Russians
feel
things. Russians feel the weight of history. Americans are all surface and plastic,” Yrena said.

“I feel things,” I said.

“Me, too,” Caitlin said.

“Not like we do,” Yrena said.

“You can’t see into my heart,” Caleb said.

Caleb was looking at me with an intensity that made me buzz. He was wired up, and that thing I felt growing between us just kept buzzing louder. I wanted to take his hand. I wanted to just take it and hold it and tell him that I loved the way he argued.

Instead, I looked away from him. I looked over at New Jersey while they continued to bicker. There were ships tugging along, too, container ships, moving toward the docks.

Maurice and Callisto rejoined us and distributed the hot chocolate. Maurice was being all upbeat and I noticed that he was also standing really close to Callisto. They were laughing and poking each other and it was obvious that somewhere
between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Staten Island Ferry they had become a couple. They were so into their little world of getting to know each other that they were oblivious to the extra chill in the air from the silence that has settled onto me, Caitlin, Caleb, and Yrena.

“Oh, look at that,” Maurice said, pointing out the Statue of Liberty.

Lady Liberty was a beautiful old thing. She stood there, metal torch all lit up and raised high, all green and lovely.

“Yrena,” I said. “We can at least agree that that is just beautiful!”

“‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’” Caleb quoted.

There was something about the way that he closed his eyes as he said it. The way that his hand moved a bit in a wave, as though the words were a kind of music that he was singing. Caleb knew how to say something and make it seem majestic.

“‘The wretched refuse’?” Yrena said. “Isn’t ‘refuse’ garbage?”

“You are crazy!” Caleb said.

“That you take in the garbage from the world?” Yrena said, laughing.

“That’s not what they mean, Yrena. Not
actual
garbage,” I said.

“Yeah, what she said. Not
actual
garbage, Yrena. It’s not like that,” Caleb said. “It means that we are a refuge for all those who are oppressed. Like, we’re good. We’re a
haven.
”

Yrena turned her head toward him and I saw her face soften from the hard lines that had been there since the conversation started.

“What do they call it? The American Dream? It seems as though America is the dream because America is dreaming. Not awake,” Yrena said. “That is what my parents say.”

“Wait. Maybe Yrena is right. Maybe we
are
the garbage collectors of the world,” Caitlin said.

“You mean, maybe we are the wretched refuse?” Callisto asked.

“Well, you know what they say,” Caleb said. “Beautiful gardens grow out of crap.”

“And one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure,” I said.

I thought about America and garbage. I stared out at the black inkiness of the Hudson River. My treasure. My garbage.

Why do we have to belong to any country at all? I wanted to stay on the ferry, floating on the water, neither here nor there. I didn’t want to be part of the politics. I just wanted to be friends with whomever I wanted to be friends with. And everyone I wanted to be friends with was right here on the boat.