"The Flamenco Academy" (8 page)

I didn’t ask her permission to ride over
with Didi to the HeartLand Compound, where she’d arranged for the
funeral to be held. I just left. Nothing on earth could have gotten
me to cram into the HeartLand van. Didi parked in the huge lot
surrounding the complex of buildings—church, school, fellowship
hall, crafts store—that was HeartLand’s Albuquerque center. Neither
one of us left the ’Stang, we just watched the SUVs and vans drive
up and women in lace bonnets and men in suspenders pile out and
parade into the church, the men leading, the women and children
following behind, as if there were dangers ahead that the head of
the house would have to deal with. Indians, crack dealers, who
knew? I felt as if I were watching a movie that had nothing to do
with any life I could have ever imagined living.

“Jesus, why don’t they all just get buggies
and be done with it?” Didi asked. “Bunch of Amish wannabes.” Didi
had dressed as conservatively as she could out of respect for
Daddy. But even her most sedate skirt was still a foot above her
knees and her hair was currently bleached white with pink
stripes.

“Come on,” Didi said, opening her door.
“This will be a freak show and a half.”

The church looked like a giant wooden barn
with lots of big oak beams and wooden pegs holding everything
together instead of nails. Inside, all the men and boys were
sitting on one side and all the women and girls were on the
other.

An usher with an Abraham Lincoln beard led
us to the front row and seated us next to my mother. My right side
prickled where it almost touched her. I leaned away from her and
into Didi. The service was worse than I imagined it would be. Of
course, it had all been arranged without anyone consulting me.
Hearing strangers talk about Daddy was awful. My mother hadn’t even
asked if I wanted to speak. The brethren and what Didi called the
sistern stood up and recounted stories that were supposed to
illustrate what a good Christian Daddy was. I wanted to scream that
none of them had the tiniest idea about who my father was. Daddy
was
a good Christian but not in the way they were talking
about.

Their pastor, a tall man with broad
shoulders whom the sistern all had crushes on, took the pulpit and
made a big show of placing his Bible on the lectern and opening it
reverently. He made a bigger show of starting to read, then looking
up to show that he knew the passage by heart. “Let not your heart
be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s
house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where
I am, there ye may be also.”

My mother was sniffling beside me, dabbing
at her eyes and nose with a balled-up Kleenex. The pastor looked
straight at her and asked, “Sister, why do you weep? This should be
a day of rejoicing, for your husband has gone before you to prepare
a place just as Jesus did. If you truly believe, there should be a
smile on your face.”

The prickling on my side turned to waves of
revulsion when Mom obeyed, stretching her mouth into a big puppet
smile that made all the sisters beam at her.

Didi popped her eyes at me to show how
strange she thought it was to be told you’re not supposed to be sad
at a funeral.

After the service, there was a reception in
the fellowship hall next door. The HeartLanders walked into the
afternoon sunshine with shoulders thrown back and satisfied looks
on their faces as if they’d just cleared some pioneer land or
churned a batch of butter. Some of them seemed kind and acted like
they wanted to come over and say something to me. But I had shut
down behind a wall of sullen hostility and glared warnings at them
to keep their distance. They were happy to oblige since I was
clinging to Didi, and she represented everything in the modern
world they had arranged their lives around rejecting. For my
mother, basking in the consolation and condolences and blessings
that were being rained on her, the funeral was like a debutante
ball, like her coming-out as a true HeartLand sister. I wanted her
to be my mother so badly that I momentarily considered breaking
into the group clustered around her, but that would have been
pointless. My mother was enjoying being mothered herself too
much.

Didi drifted away and I followed her toward
the big showpiece of the Compound, the HeartLand Crafts Center. A
large display window was piled with quilts, baskets, decoupage,
pottery, beeswax candles, handmade brooms, and all manner of jams,
jellies, and pickled things. In another window were manly items
like handmade furniture and wrought-iron grilles. In the girl
window, I recognized a quilt top I had worked on. A really
intricate Double Wedding Ring pattern all in gorgeous,
supersaturated shades of periwinkle and lavender, violet and marine
blue, it had a $1,200 price tag on it.

“Wow,” Didi, who was also perusing some of
the price tags, said, “the brethren and sistern aren’t shy about
asking for the big bucks. What kind of a cut does your mom
get?”

“None that I know of. It’s all supposed to
go to support ‘The’ Work and ‘The’ HomeTown.” I made quote marks in
the air so Didi would know that they always capitalized the
words.

“What is ‘The’ HomeTown?”

“It’s their headquarters or something,
somewhere down in Georgia or Mississippi. One of the hookworm
states.”

Didi shook her head. “Wow, and they think
I’m weird. At least I’m not making a whole life out of pretending
I’m living in another century. What a bunch of freaks.”

“Nutcases,” I added, feeling a guilty
thrill.

“Lunatics.”

“Psychos.”

“Amish wannabe foot-sniffers.”

I started laughing. Not good laughing
either. Scary, gasping, hiccuping laughter that I couldn’t
stop.

Didi watched me for a few seconds, then put
her arm over my shoulder and gently led me to the ’Stang. I fell
into it, never more grateful for its refuge. I calmed down the
instant the door closed.

“This reception? It’s not going to work, is
it?”

I shook my head no.

A few of the sisters still outside the
fellowship hall stared as we pulled away.

We drove in silence over to Central, taking
the street past Old Town, then up Nine Mile Hill toward the West
Mesa. I watched the city shrink in the mirror on the visor until it
was little more than a short streak of green winding through the
high desert, the thinnest thread of life fed by the slender silver
artery of the Rio Grande. On either side of the fragile city,
desiccated plains waited to suck the life out of it. The Sandias
loomed above, ready to crush whatever might survive. I flipped the
visor back up.

We parked and hiked up toward the
petroglyphs. Didi led me to a sheltered spot. “This is my compound,
my church. This is where I came every day. After.”

After her father died.

We squatted on the ancient volcanic rocks
that marked the escarpment. Blue tail lizards skittered away
through the snakeweed with their sulphur-yellow flowers. A desert
millipede traced waves in the sand as it undulated past my feet.
The black basaltic rocks, shadowed even in the bright sunlight,
felt forlorn. Everywhere I looked petroglyphs thousands of years
old had been scraped into the dark lava to reveal the lighter, tan
rock beneath like chalk drawings on a blackboard. On the rocks just
beneath us was a drawing of many tiny hands raised to the sky that
made me think of HeartLanders when they were “receiving the
Spirit.” Farther on was a petroglyph that depicted strange,
extraterrestrial lines resembling those at Nazca. Another featured
a bloom of happy, square faces like Teletubbies. Contemporary
graffiti on a nearby rock had the Teletubbie heads committing
pornographic acts. On the path around the rocks the powdery dirt
was imprinted with treads from hundreds of pairs of running shoes,
the squiggles, waffles, and starbursts as mysterious as any of the
petroglyph designs.

The sun edged low enough to shine golden
through the papery seed heads of the chamisa. A breeze scented with
sage and moist from the first exhalation of a cool evening wafted
by. In the distance, pylons marched across the open rangeland, a
line of silver kachinas that went on until they were out of
sight.

Didi stared off and seemed to be talking to
the pylons more than to me, as if she were continuing a
conversation she’d been having with them that I’d interrupted.
“What I really loved about my father was that he liked me. He
didn’t just love me, he really liked me. He got my jokes and I got
his. Maybe I would have loved music without him, but he made sure
that I loved it for the right reasons. That I knew it was a gift
from the people who made it. I loved it that he never, ever said
one negative thing about my mother even though she didn’t like him.
I loved it that I could talk to him about anything.” She looked at
me, the sunlight cutting into her eyes, glittering on the gold
flecks there. “What about you? What did you love about your
father?”

For one second, I didn’t want to say
anything. Not out loud. But the words flowed forth on their own. “I
loved how, in his heart, I was still a little girl. How he thought
my favorite food was corn dogs because I liked them when I was
five. I loved how he sang along with the radio, even though he had
a horrible voice, just because it made him happy. I loved how he
treated waitresses like queens and always gave bums money and
called them sir and wished them luck. I loved how much joy he could
get out of a corny joke. He could barely get to the punch line, he
was always cracking up so much. The jokes were never any good, but
it was funnier than anything to hear him try to tell one.”

The more I talked, the more important it
became that I make one other person really understand who Daddy
was. “We had this sort of like code phrase that we always used.
‘Now what was that about?’ He would whisper it to me or I would
whisper it to him whenever something weird happened. It was the
punch line to this really corny joke he told me when I was
eight.”

“Tell me.”

“Now, it’s really stupid.”

“It was your father’s joke,” Didi said. She
meant, it didn’t matter if it was a good joke or a bad joke, it was
my father’s joke.

“Yeah, okay. So, the doorbell rings and a
guy answers his front door and finds a snail on the porch. He picks
up the snail and tosses it out into the yard.”

“And?”

“And two years later, the doorbell rings and
the man answers the door and there is the same snail. And the snail
says”—Didi helped me say the punch line—“ ‘Now, what was that
about?’ ”

Halfway through the last line that Daddy had
said to me or I had said to him so many times—when my mom was
melting down, when I came home in a grumpy mood, when he started
cursing and yelling at the TV set because the Cowboys had made a
“bonehead” play, but mostly because my mom was melting down—I
stopped dead. It was as if I’d awakened in the middle of a dream
and discovered I was standing on the edge of a cliff that dropped
off into infinity. That I was leaning out over the edge and could
not step backward. That I was going to fall and never stop
falling.

“He’s gone.”

Didi let me cry until a spot of powdery dirt
between my knees had turned to mud, then she said, “Repeat this
after me. ‘As long as I keep my father in my heart, he is with me.’
”

I raised my head. My face was glazed with
tears and snot.

“Say it,” Didi ordered. “Say, ‘As long as I
keep my father in my heart, he is with me.’ ”

I bent my neck into my shoulder like a bird
and scrubbed my face against my blouse until it was streaked with
black from mascara. “As long as I keep my father in my heart, he is
with me.”

“ ‘He will always be with me.’ ”

“He will always be with me.”

“ ‘No one can ever take him away.’ ”

“No one can ever take him away.”

“Okay, good,” she concluded, relieved. “Keep
saying that because it’s true.”

She was right. Daddy was with me and he
always would be. I nodded and my stomach, which had traded places
with my heart when I peered over the edge of the cliff, settled
back enough that I could breathe. Not a full breath but enough to
keep living. The shadows grew longer and deeper. I was hugging my
knees and shivering before I realized the sun was down, it had
gotten dark, and I was cold.

“I’ve got your back. You know that, don’t
you?” When I didn’t say anything, Didi put her hand on my shoulder
and asked, “You do know that, right?”

I nodded. Didi Steinberg had my back.

At Didi’s house, Mrs. Steinberg quickly
burned through the small savings Mr. Steinberg had left, then
turned to eBay. She was using it to sell off all of Mr. Steinberg’s
jazz albums and memorabilia.

Didi had taken to calling her mother
Catwoman since Mrs. Steinberg now barely spoke, slept most of the
day, worked on her eBay sales during the night, lapped all her
nutrition out of a bowl, and never showed any outward signs of
affection toward human beings. Catwoman had turned the living room
into eBay Central with two computers going all the time, tracking
the progress of whatever auctions she had under way. She had
economy rolls of clear tape on big gun-type dispensers and stacks
of sturdy boxes scrounged from the liquor store for shipping out
items that had been sold. Teetering piles of old albums,
autographed publicity stills, yellowed copies of
DownBeat
magazine, and odd things like cuff links and bar napkins, all
carefully labeled and stuck in ziplock bags sat around waiting to
be sold or shipped.

We were looking through Mr. Steinberg’s
stuff one day a month after Daddy’s funeral when a loud chiming
came from one of the computers.