"The Flamenco Academy" (24 page)

Pausing only to change shoes, I rushed out
of class without waiting for Didi. Flamenco was my one bright and
shining thing and Didi was snatching it away from me. The ducks
quacked, demanding a handout as I stormed past the pond. I didn’t
pause at the Robert O. Anderson School of Management where my Intro
to Financial Accounting class would start in five minutes.

Metronome? I was the Metronome and Didi was
the Tempest?! Screw it. Screw her. She can keep her own fricking
books. La Tempesta!

With no idea exactly where I was headed, my
feet carried me across campus until I was staring down Lomas to the
West Mesa, where the distant black cones of extinct volcanoes
spiked the horizon. Didi’s hangout. To the east were the Sandia
Mountains. I headed toward them down Lomas Boulevard. The street
was on fire. Pyracantha bushes flamed with orange berries, tall
shafts of pampas grass were plumes of smoke in the diamond-sharp
sunlight, chamisa blossoms blazed a molten yellow. I was back in
the quiet neighborhood Tomás had taken me to before I realized that
my destination was the jewel of a park hidden away like a harem
beauty behind thick walls. I rushed down the street and found the
narrow, unmarked path that snaked between two nondescript houses.
Not until I was again within the park’s secret expanse could I take
a full breath.

The cottonwood with the giant’s swing
hanging from it anchored the park. As if it were an object of
veneration I could not approach, I skirted around the place where
Tomás had held me and found a spot at the park’s edge. I sat on
grass green and velvety from sprinklers as I recalled every detail
of that night with Tomás. I stroked the grass as I remembered his
hands on me, holding me as we swung up to the stars. The grass
caressed me in return. It was soft, full, and green, unlike any
other in the high desert city. It was fairy-tale grass.

I forgot Didi as I realized what should have
been obvious to me from the beginning: I had walked into a fairy
tale. Doña Carlota’s story of Gypsies living in a world where the
earth burned and everyone had names like Piglet and Monkey and
Looks at the Sky, where a thousand years of a people’s history were
hidden in songs and dances, that story was a fairy tale. It was
Tomás’s fairy tale. It would have to become mine.

I had been sleeping and in this secret park
Tomás awakened me with a kiss. I wondered where he was, what he was
looking at at this very moment. I imagined him looking at me. I
imagined myself dancing for him, passionate and devastating in my
long, black skirt, dancing better than anyone had ever danced.
Dancing so well that I won him.

I had to win him.

Though I had been the one sleeping, Tomás
was the beauty of our fairy tale and the hero always won the
beauty.

I would have to be the hero.

Every fairy tale had a trial where the hero
had to prove himself. My trial was flamenco. That was the field
upon which I would have to prove myself. Somewhere in Doña’s story,
somewhere in the very history of flamenco itself, were the clues
that would tell me how to succeed, how to make my story twine
around Tomás’s so tightly that they would become one.

The sky behind the West Mesa, behind the
volcanoes, turned into a dome of stained glass, violet, rose, and
green, shifting to cobalt blue streaked with rose above the Sandia
Mountains to the east. The air grew chilly, and damp seeped up from
the ground beneath me. The colors left the sky as it darkened to
navy blue.

Stars appeared in the night sky. I found the
North Star that Daddy had shown me so that I would always be able
to find my way home. I started to make a wish on it, but Daddy was
gone and would be gone forever. All my other wishes clumped up in
my chest with a weight that pushed the air from my lungs. The only
name I could give to all I yearned for was Tomás.

“Rae! Rae-rae, are you here?”

Didi was at the entrance to the park. Even
more than I didn’t want her in my flamenco class, I didn’t want her
in my, in
our
, secret park.

“Rae! Rae?”

She couldn’t see me. The second time she
called my name, her voice broke and she sounded lost and scared. In
the next second, she got mad at herself and, thinking no one was in
the park or not caring if anyone was, she cursed herself,
muttering, “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Shit.”

She was leaving when I called out from the
darkness, “Didi. I’m over here.”

“You bitch,” she said, dropping onto the
grass beside me. Her nose was running and I think I saw tears on
her face, but she scrubbed them off, bending her head into the
shoulder of her jean jacket before I could see for sure.

“I looked everywhere. Frontier. The duck
pond. Puppy Taco. I even went to your old house and looked in the
backyard. Couple of lesbians are living there now with a pack of
rescue greyhounds. What would your mom think about that? It took me
forfuckingever to remember about this park. Mystery Man’s secret
park that you wouldn’t tell me about? Of course, this is where
you’d be.” Without stopping for a breath she asked, “Why did you
run off?”

Tone, there it was again. As I’ve said, Didi
and I could have done away with words altogether and just
communicated everything we needed to tell each other, everything
important, in the infinite vocabulary of tones and inflections we’d
taught each other. We both heard in her question the admission that
Didi knew exactly why I’d run off.

It was superfluous, but I said it anyway.
“You’re an asshole.”

“Okay, I admit it. I’m an asshole. The big
pink bird, that’s your thing. I’ve horned in too much on it. I’ll
drop out.” She tilted her head to look at me, but I kept staring
straight ahead. At the far end of the park, the sprinklers came on,
sending silver arcs of water over the velvety grass. In the silence
that fell between us, she counted.

“Seventeen clicks,” Didi said.

“What?”

“It takes seventeen clicks for the sprinkler
to make one arc. Smells like the very end of summer, doesn’t it?
The grass when the water hits it?” She sucked in a deep inhalation.
“It smells like watermelon.”

I breathed in. The grass did smell like
watermelon. We listened to the clicks, smelled the watermelon
smell, and watched moonlight gleam on the rain of silver drops.

“Wow, reminds me of Lorca. Have you been
reading your Lorca? Doña Carlota is right. He is totally amazing.
He has one, ‘Ditty of First Desire.’ Queer title. Probably a bad
translation. But tell me this isn’t killer. ‘In the green morning /
I wanted to be a heart. / A heart.’ ” Didi clapped the rhythm for a
bulerías
and repeated the words in time. “Then it goes on
with how in the ripe evening he wanted to be a nightingale. A
nightingale. The end will annihilate you. He tells his soul to turn
orange-colored. To turn the color of love. Just that, just getting
turned on to Lorca is totally transforming my work already.”

I knew what Didi was doing. She was showing
me why I should tell her it was okay for her to stay in the class.
She was working me, but I could hear in her voice that she was also
telling the truth.

I didn’t say anything and she went on, her
words tumbling out in a rush. “But the best, the absolute best, the
most amazing thing you will ever read in your whole, entire life is
his essay on
duende
.”

“Do what?”

“
Duende
. Oh, Rae, this is the
essential thing we have to understand. This is where real art,
where anything good or true comes from. It’s like inspiration or
possession. But more. I can’t even explain. It’s the real deal. He
said it bums the blood like powdered glass and rejects all the
sweet geometry. ‘Sweet geometry.’ Do you not love that? So Lorca
wrote that
duende
rejects all the sweet geometry we
understand and it shatters styles. Isn’t that amazing? It’s not
about perfection. True inspiration can be ugly and messy and
radically imperfect? Sort of like us, huh?”

“Sort of like you,” I corrected her. I was
the geometry person being rejected.

She fell silent and we studied the houses
that ringed the park. Light glowed in the windows and scenes of
family life played out in each one. In one a father entered holding
a white paper bag of takeout. A child of around eight, maybe a boy
with long hair, maybe a sturdy little girl, reached out to grab the
food away. The father pivoted from the child’s grasp and the child
ran around to grab from the other side. The father feinted again,
then spun back, scooped the child into his arms, and swung her
around. She was a girl.

I glanced over at Didi. The same hunger I
felt was on her face.

“Fuck it,” she said, dismissing the sadness
with anger. “Fuck all this shit.” She turned to me. “Rae, you are
the one essential person in my life. I have to have you in my life.
Nonnegotiable. If you want me out of flamenco, I’m out. No
questions asked.”

I didn’t say anything because I no longer
knew what to say. No longer knew what I really wanted.

“Rae, it’s like I said, we want completely
different things out of flamenco. You want love and I want to rule
the world.”

She was right. She wanted fame and I wanted
Tomás. We could dance next to each other for the rest of our lives
and our paths would never cross. I knew Didi like no one else in
the world knew her. I knew what she had lost, I knew where all the
holes in her heart were and just how big they were. I knew she
cursed when she wanted to cry and railroaded through life the way
she did because she was afraid if she took things any slower she’d
fall off the tracks entirely. I knew all that, but I still couldn’t
share flamenco with her.

Didi jumped up, held her hands out to me,
and dragged me to my feet. There was plenty of room on the giant’s
swing for both of us. I felt her hip pressed against mine work as
she stretched her legs out then back, pumping the swing higher.
Once we took off, she yelled, “Hang on!” and we both had to throw
an arm around the other’s waist to keep from falling off. As we
gained altitude, she sang Doña Carlota’s song:

In my life I have known

The sorrows of this world

Others often have a look

But not the knowing

“How do you sing like that?” I yelled as the
wind whipped away the words sung in flamenco’s ululating style.

“
Melisma
!” she yelled back. “I had to
learn it for my bat mitzvah. Lots of warbly notes on one syllable.
It’s all a version of that urban yodeling thing Whitney Houston and
them do. I’ll teach you that if you’ll teach me that compass
shit.”

I didn’t answer and the swing went up, then
fell back down three times. Finally, I said, “Screw it. Yeah. Okay.
What’s the point in resisting. You’re the biggest brat in the
world. You always get what you want.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” She
used her standard line, then, grinning, put on a big push, hauling
back on the rope she held in her right hand, forcing me to hang on
for dear life to the rope in my left hand and to her waist with my
right. When we were high enough that we suddenly seemed much closer
to the stars than to the houses far below, houses where fathers
brought home take-out treats and swung their daughters into the
air, Didi screamed, “Fuck them! Fuck them all! Who needs normal
life when you can fly above it! Fuck consensus reality! Right,
Rae?”

She didn’t want an answer and I didn’t give
one. Instead, we soared together into the night sky and, just as
they had with Tomás, the higher we climbed, the faster we fell and
the more the stars blurred into a silver smear.

Every time I set foot in Doña Carlota’s
studio, it was as if Tomás were waiting there for me. I bathed and
perfumed as if I were meeting a lover. Every second of class, I
felt his eyes on me. I believed that Doña Carlota was Tomás’s envoy
to me, sent to teach me about the art, the culture, the blood that
had formed him. Every stamp of my foot nailed him to me. Every
twine of my wrist wound him closer to me. She had been sent to tell
me his story, to give me the information I needed to salve all the
complications in his life. Once I learned enough, I knew I could
make every equation in his life balance. I could do what no one
else could for him and he would need me and love me. Didi would
occasionally point out how long it had been since that night. I
couldn’t explain to her that it seemed I saw him or he saw me every
day in class, that we were together, that everything I did was
bringing us closer. It didn’t make sense then. It wouldn’t make
sense later. It is impossible to explain obsession, to explain the
irrational rationally.

The weeks passed and flamenco was hammered
into me until my knees ached, my spine throbbed constantly, and my
wrists felt as if they would twist off my arms. Pillows of blisters
formed along the outside of my big toe, across the back of my heel,
and on the balls of both feet. The nail of the right big toe turned
black because I pounded on it the hardest. But every one of my toes
felt as if they’d been run over. The muscles of my calves and
thighs burned as they grew harder with each class, with each of the
endless hours outside of class that I practiced.

Still, no more of her, of his, story was
forthcoming. Doña Carlota had warned us,
You will only hear more
of the story when you have earned it.
As the weeks passed
without a single word from her that was not instruction, I began to
fear that she would never consider us worthy to hear another word
of the fairy tale that was hers and Tomás’s life. Instead, she
spent every second of every class hammering flamenco’s diabolical
rhythms into us, making our heels and toes into percussion
instruments, our hands and arms into cobras curling out of a snake
charmer’s basket, and our hips into an ocean of waves that never
stopped rolling.