House of Dance (7 page)

A
LONG TIME AGO
, when I was eleven, there was a luscious maple rooted deep in my backyard. It was wider than tall, and some of its limbs were loose, but I liked that tree because I had learned from its branches how to save Nick’s lost planes. I could fish the sturdy balsa woods out from a mess of leaves and make Nick smile. I could dig out parts of planes from the maple’s squirrel-nest hollow. Whatever I’d find, I’d run it straight back to Nick’s place, hollering the news:
Smash-faced propeller. Stump of a
wing. Splintered fuselage. Crushed cockpit.

But Nick was even better on that tree than I. He would scuttle out to the maple’s farthest, hardest parts, up toward the sky or out toward the place where the limbs got lacy thin. “Checking out the stratosphere,” he’d say. A word that branded him smart. “Testing. Testing.” Like he was some kind of pilot. He’d shimmy up and the tree would shiver. When he stayed up there too long, I’d go get him some lunch, ziplock bags of bologna rolled up to look like logs, squares of cheese, a tall sleeve of saltines. Then I’d climb into the part of the tree that I’d nicknamed The Nest and wait for Nick to tell me something, and once in a while he would, and once in a while I’d go on about my celebrity father.

Then one warmish afternoon, when I was outside doing nothing and Nick was who knows where, Mrs. Robertson’s cat, Claw, got wild for some bird that had built its nest on a
thin bough of the maple. The big lug had climbed up that tree but couldn’t get himself down; talk about sissy. “A predicament” is what Mrs. Robertson called it when she stomped over across her yard to ours and stood beneath the branches, looking up. By then Claw was mewing up a storm that the whole world could hear, and he would not stop his crying. “Come on, cat,” Mrs. Robertson stood there saying. “Nice boy, kitty, kitty.” But Claw was having none of her. He bared his teeth and stared, as if everyone and everything but him were to be blamed.

“You know, Cloris,” said my mother, who had come outside to see about the commotion, “Claw will come down on his own. Give him time.”

But Mrs. Robertson was fretting, and Claw was stubborn. That cat kept himself stuck, and he was clearly getting hungry, braying instead of mewing now, screaming, you might have said. Mrs. Robertson’s face
was never very pretty. Now it was scribbled every which way with worry.

Finally there was nothing to do and Nick wasn’t home and my mother, trying to fix things, said: “Rosie, I’ve seen you. You’re a mighty fine tree climber. You can scoot on up and shake that branch and make old Claw come tumbling down.” A frame of reference and a strategy that left Mrs. Robertson staggered.

“Your plan is to shake my cat from your tree?” she said, gasping between the words, from shock.

“Do you have a better plan?” my mother asked.

“No, I do not,” Mrs. Robertson said. “But even so.” She looked from the cat to my mother to me and back up the tree.

“I guess that settles it,” my mother said. “I guess I will go get a blanket.” She went off in her sundress and her red flip-flops back into the house. Mrs. Robertson and I stood there,
not talking, just waiting. After a while my mom returned, carrying our worst old plaid rag blanket, all folded up in a square.

“You and I will stand on either side of this,” she said to Mrs. Robertson, snapping the thing out of its creases to its full size. “We’ll catch the poor thing when he falls.”

“Claw is not a circus cat,” Mrs. Robertson said.

“He’s a stuck cat,” my mother replied. “We’ll do what we can.”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Robertson grimly, taking her side of the rag and pacing backward from my mother. “I sure don’t like it.”

“Neither do I,” my mother said, her part of the rag in hand now. “He may be your cat, but this is my tree and also my blanket.”

“Some blanket.”

The maple was mature and secure in the ground. Its branches were messy over the lawn. When I stretched tall, I could grip my
one hand around the lowest branch. When I pulled up, I could reach the next branch after that. That day I kicked off my shoes and took the slightest running start, to make my very best official tree-climbing-with-a-grown-up-audience debut. The branch was smooth and slippery to my touch, but my feet were off the ground.

I climbed. It was a nice-enough day. I got close but not too close to old cantankerous Claw. “Just shake the branch, Rosie,” Mrs. Robertson called up from the ground. “You can do it from where you are.” But as a matter of fact, I couldn’t, because the klutz had got himself perched just out of reach. I had to go forward if I wanted to shake the thing free, but to get closer, I’d be in Nick territory. I let my right hand go, and I stretched, but no, I could not scrabble myself any closer. I tried again, got all trembly inside, hoped that I didn’t show it. I glanced down toward the ground and caught Mrs. Robertson staring
straight at me, her eyes like seeds, hard and tiny. I peeked and saw my mother, her eyes wider than normal, which made them rather basketball sized. The rag of a blanket they held between them was turquoise green and Santa red, little stripes running in all directions. The rag was stained and soggy, but it would have done, if only Claw would have jumped or lunged, if only I could have persuaded him to.

“Come on, kitty,” Mrs. Robertson was saying. “Nothing to be afraid of. Jump.”

“Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” my mother said, and started giggling.

“A nicer blanket would have helped,” Mrs. Robertson said. “What kind of right-thinking cat would want to jump into this?”

“What kind of right-thinking cat—?” my mother started to say, then changed her mind, and I could hear all this, and I remember all this, but I remember thinking too that I wasn’t going to be defeated by a one-eyed,
overweight cat. That I was going to reach that high branch and jiggle the loser free, for all time and for the record. I shifted my position. Changed my hold on things. Strained my way toward Claw’s hideout branch, and finally I could reach it, finally I was there, and I was pumping it, and Claw was seesawing up and down, holding on for his precious portly life until he could hold on no more.

I watched that cat slip and slide like the slow-motion part of a movie, and finally he leaped from his stuck roost. I saw his overcoat of dark fur getting smaller. I saw my mother and my neighbor tighten their grip on the Santa rag. I heard my mother saying, “Special delivery.”

Then I was falling too, falling and falling from Nick territory, falling down through the branches. I remember my mother saying, “Oh, my God. Oh. Help us. Oh, Rosie. Honey. I’m so sorry.” I remember the whack of the ground, which might as well have been
stone. I remember my mother scooping me up in her arms and the drive to the hospital in the back of Mrs. Robertson’s old-lady car, my head safe in my mother’s sundress lap, my arm swelling up into a sausage, the pain like the pain of a heart attack, I suppose, but down around the fingers. I was in and out of sleep in a clean vinyl room, and then I woke up for good from the anesthesia, and I was puking out my guts. I’d smashed my wrist in three separate places. I had scratches that made scars I still have. I was wrapped up in a cast by some doctor I don’t remember from my fingertips up to my shoulder, and that cast, from the very first, was steamy hot.

In the weeks afterward Leisha visited me at home, drawing her name in bright purples and pinks on my cast, telling me secrets, as she worked, about the people where she lived, who were getting richer by the second and buying multiples of fancy cars. Rocco came with a bag of crushed peppermint patties to
perform his best stand-up routines—new material, he told me, though some of it wasn’t very good at all and some of it was old. For my troubles Mrs. Robertson knitted me a new pair of socks to match, she said, my cast, and for being his one and only granddaughter, my granddad came every morning around nine o’clock to show me whatever he had found on the walk between our houses: A stone. A feather. A four-leaf clover. A paperback novel that someone had dropped. A folded-up five-dollar bill. “Life is full of surprises,” he’d say, holding my hand, but not saying much more, lining up his finds across my sill and leaving within an hour or so.

And then there was Nick, who designed me a plane that he launched from my very own bedroom window. Who told me the names of the birds he was seeing. Who found, he said at the end of one day, his owl. Who sat so close, I swear I could have kissed him. Almost kissed him. Dreamed I did.

But it’s my mom I remember best in the weeks after the fall, my mom, who was always there, nearby and close, softly humming some song. We weren’t alone, neither one of us back then, because taking care really is the cure. Taking care and staying close, which somehow my mom had lately forgotten or lately forgotten to believe.

T
HINK OF MUSIC
, Max was saying a few nights later, as a garment or a shell, as a kind of shelter. Think of choreography as story.

It was our tenth lesson together, and he was working me hard, because that was the only way, he’d said, that I’d have a speck of a single chance to bring the dance to Granddad. He’d told me stories of his black cat, Fosse, stories of his competitions, stories about other dancers who’d come and gone, brilliant or moody or dangerous, all of them
leaving a trail. Now Max’s eyes were on something I couldn’t see, his ears tuned to music I couldn’t hear. He was still testing my limits. I was dancing in his shadow, dancing beside him, rising and falling and holding and turning and keeping the frame and respecting the sensor and carrying myself like a queen—trying to. “Shift your weight,” Max said. “On
one
,” he said. “Arms up, up, up, and down.”

I was falling out of balance. I was falling in with him. There was nothing I could do but to take it slow and listen.

“No, Rosie, look at your hands,” he said. “And look at where your left arm is, and pay attention to the count. Again, Rosie. That’s the only way. You have to do it again.”

I tried. Max started laughing, shaking his head. “The waltz is glides and turns,” he said. “The waltz is confidence.”

“I can’t,” I said, smiling so that he wouldn’t know I was desperate, so that he wouldn’t start doubting me even though I had begun to
doubt myself. We’d danced together two hours every day since the first lesson. The dance he’d crafted was nothing but simple fundamentals. It would last only a minute. Any doofus should have been able to dance it well, but I was getting nervous.

“It’s your deadline,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But still.”

“Listen,” he said, “it isn’t hard. It’s a lift; it’s turns; it’s shifting weight; it’s a twinkle and a breakaway and a right-hand wrap and a spin.”

“Tomorrow night,” I said, “I’ll be better. I promise. Tonight I’m…off, I guess.” Max’s next lesson was already there, doing mambo hips in front of the reflective glass. She was tiny, dressed in purple. Her name was Julia.

“Confidence, Rosie,” Max said. He covered his heart with his hand. Blew me a kiss, which is just a dancer’s kiss and doesn’t mean a thing.

“Same time tomorrow,” I told him, leaving the floor.

“Rosie at six,” he said. “I remember.”

“I’m getting nervous,” I said, “about the show.”

“Don’t. Just let it happen.”

In the lobby, where I went to change my shoes, I sat for a long time, perfectly still, trying to shed my dizziness. Behind the front desk Marissa sat working the books, her skin cool and dry despite the fact that her partner, William, had been in. He came down from New York two mornings a week. Took the train, walked up the stairs—and they took over. On the mornings Marissa and William danced, there was nobody else on the floor. Then he’d leave, and she’d become her regular self, or as regular as Marissa got, which was not very regular at all.

“I think I’m a bit of a disaster,” I said, for we had gotten to know each other a little by then.

“It just takes time,” she said, not looking up. She was the sort of woman, I was thinking, you
could never miss in a crowd of thousands. She was the sort who left an impression. Everything that Marissa wore was fitted. The skin under her makeup glowed. But her beauty was also in the way that she sat and the way that she stood: still and straight but unpredictable too. You had to watch her to understand. You had to watch her move. That day she was wearing low-rise white jeans and a pale pink scoop-necked top. She had glued a single rhinestone near the corner of one eye.

“I’m almost out of time,” I said.

She closed her book. She put her pencil down. She looked at me as if for the very first time. The hair around my face was flat and damp. My dress was ordinary. I’d danced the life out of my mother’s shoes, and I felt the opposite of girlie. Marissa knew about my plan to throw a party for my grandfather. She knew, all of the House knew by now, the hope I was hanging on to, the goal I was fighting toward.

“You have time enough,” she said. “What you need is the right equipment.”

“Equipment?”

“Shoes,” she said. “Size seven?” She pushed herself out of her chair and disappeared to a back room. I sat on the couch in my bare feet, too surprised to move. A few minutes later she was back, a drawstring bag dangling from one hand. She came and sat beside me. “I’m a seven too,” she said, “which is how I remembered.” She loosened the neck on the pouch and slipped one hand inside. “I wore them only once, at a Rising Star competition,” she said, revealing a bright red satin shoe. “Let’s see if they fit you.” They were the prettiest shoes I had ever seen.

Leaning down toward my feet, Marissa slipped the first shoe on, then tightened the buckle. She handed the other one to me, and I slipped it on myself. “Stand up,” she said, and I did. “These are your new dance shoes,” she said. “You start to practice in them now,
and by the time of your party you will feel like you are dancing in bare feet. But leave them with me in between the dancing. These shoes have very special soles. They’d be ruined by the streets.”

She was upright now, her back perfectly straight, her eyelashes casting feathery shadows on her cheeks. The phone started to ring, and she shrugged and did not get it. “They’ll call back if it’s important,” she said. She sat there beside me. Her thoughts seemed far away.

“How did you learn beauty?” I finally asked, which sounded so stupid the second I said it, but there the question was. She did not turn. She did not laugh. I reached down to unbuckle the red satin.

“You know,” she said at last, “I was ten. I’d been dancing since I was six years old. In Moscow. In Warsaw. In Düsseldorf. My father drove a truck. I was my mother’s only daughter. Dancing was my family’s hope for me. I
lived and traveled with my coach and my partner, who was ten, like me. I was sponsored by my country. I was too far away, most of those years, for my mother to come and see.”

I pictured gray skies and bright costumes. Big ballrooms and skinny kids. I pictured Marissa with another color hair, pale brown perhaps, like her eyebrows.

“Between the dancing at the competitions I was alone,” she continued. “I was going in and out of dressing rooms, watching the women at their mirrors, watching their faces change with color, trying to understand how they could turn themselves into any mood they wanted. Some of the dancers let me sit beside them. They let me play with their buckets of paint. I made experiments. I learned.”

“And your mother never came?” I asked.

“Once,” she said. “My last competition before I came here to the States.”

“And what did she say when she saw you dance?”

“She said, ‘Marissa, you’re a dancer.’” Marissa’s eyes were wet, her eyelashes heavy. She turned and took a long look at me. “Mothers are proud people, Rosie. And beauty begins with color.”

“These are beautiful shoes,” I said.

“You are your own kind of beauty.”