Rose Sees Red (10 page)

I watched her, and what I remember noticing was her hair. When we had left the Bronx earlier that evening, it had been in a high, tight bun. Now her hair was in a high ponytail. Was she coming undone? Was she letting the inner her shine out for one day?

“So, I’ll see you at the march tomorrow?” Free said.

“Yes,” Yrena promised.

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said, imagining what she would face if the suits were really hanging outside of her house when she got home.

“Yes.” Yrena said it to Free, but she was looking at me.

Yrena and Free were hovering around each other. I could tell she liked him. I looked at him and didn’t see anything so special. He was big. He had a beard. His shoulders were very large. He looked like a football player masquerading as a
hippie. He was normal-looking. I didn’t think that anything about Free was hot at all. He was an average American guy.

Oh, right,
I thought.
Average. American. Guy.
Poor Todd. He never really stood a chance with her. He was too eccentric.

Free kind of did the pin on Yrena as she leaned up against the gate that covered the window of the store next door to Night Birds.

I watched as he put his forehead close to Yrena and kind of leaned into her, like he might like Yrena, too. It was sweet. And weird. But I noticed that about Free. He might look like he could be on a football team or date a cheerleader, but he had eyes that cared. I bet that was why he wore the hippie clothes and the beard. He was trying to distance himself from who he thought the world thought he should be.

Were we all like that? Were we all trying to change how we looked on the outside to match how we felt on the inside? Were we all trying to change how people saw us? I knew it annoyed me that Daisy and the Science girls wore leg warmers and headbands when they didn’t even dance. And I wanted so badly for the world to see me as a dancer, as something that was not like my brother in full nerd regalia, something not like my parents in their business power suits. I wanted people to look at our family portrait and see that I did not belong to them. That I was an alien. That I was different.

“So, I’ll see you tomorrow then, Yrena?” Free said Yrena’s name like my brother did, like it was a piece of music. “I’ll be near the big tree on the right side of the Great Lawn.”

“Good-bye,” she said.

“Good-bye,” he echoed, and then, with one last glance back at her, walked away.

Yrena watched him go and looked so sad.

“I should call my brother and let him know we’re on our way,” I said, reaching for the nearest pay phone.

“I can take you guys back uptown,” Maurice said.

“They don’t need a boy to protect them,” Callisto said.

I slid the dime into the slot and dialed.

“I’m not saying they do. And I’m not saying I can protect them. I’m just saying my mom is out of town and I have the time.”

“Where’s your mom?” Callisto asked.

The phone was ringing.

“Rose?” It was Todd. “Did you find her?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank God. There is some weird shit going on next door.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to say—I’m worried they’ve tapped our phones.”

“Don’t be paranoid,” I said.

“The suits were upstairs talking to Mom and Dad. Wait—did you hear that?”

I wanted to say that Todd was acting crazy, but I had heard a click.

I freaked out and hung up the phone. I should have called back, but instead I comforted myself with the thought that at least Todd knew that I had found her. I rejoined the group.

“She’s in Los Angeles, shooting a guest spot on the show
The Nemesis
,” Maurice said.

“Our parents are upstate,” Callisto said.

“I hate being left alone,” Maurice said.

“We can walk you guys to the subway,” Caleb volunteered.

“We’re going there, too. Only in the other direction,” Callisto said.

You would have had to have been in a coma not to see that I was struggling with something. But how could I tell everyone about the click on the phone? It seemed so ridiculous. They didn’t believe me about the KGB.

Maybe I
was
making it all up.

Sometimes, when people can sense that you are upset and not talking, they know that you are really upset, and sometimes what it means is that they’ll start acting nice. Extra nice. Which is how everyone was acting toward me. Even Caleb, the jerk. He was making small talk that I wasn’t really listening to as his steps fell in time with mine.

“…saw Pacino in
American Buffalo
last year…”

“…I have an Atari…”

“…pretty good at
Asteroids…
”

“…I play music, too…”

Yrena stepped in between us, put her arm around my shoulder, and pulled me away from him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said.

“We are friends, right?”

“Yeah.” It was funny to think that by that time, it was true.

“Then I can tell you a secret,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

I figured that she would tell me that she had gone to second base with Free. Or that she had gotten a little tipsy.

“I leave for Moscow next week,” she said. “We are moving back. That is why I do not want to go home. I do not want to let this evening go.”

Once I had a bucket of ice water thrown on me. It made me feel numb and wet and it was as though my skin had been stung with a million tiny needles. That was how I felt when Yrena said that she was moving back to Russia. I wanted to pretend that she hadn’t said it. Like maybe we could just move on to another subject.

“No way—you’re going back to Moscow?” Callisto jumped in, holding her clove cigarette between her thumb and her forefinger and flicking the stub out into the street. “That’s cool.”

“I will never be in New York City again,” Yrena said. “This is my night.”

“Whoa, that sucks,” Caleb said.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked.

“I was afraid,” she said. “Once we got on the bus, I was afraid that if I told you, we would go back. I just wanted to see New York. I’m sorry.”

“So that’s it?” Callisto said.

“It seems weird now that we’ve met you that you’re leaving forever,” Caitlin said.

“We just spent the whole night looking for you,” Callisto added.

“I know, I know,” Yrena said. “I was selfish.”

She put her face in her hands.

“We have to go home,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

But I didn’t want her to leave.

“We could all ride with you guys uptown,” Callisto said. I noticed she was looking at Maurice when she said it.

“No,” Caleb said. “Look, I feel for you. You’re going back to the Soviet Union. But I don’t want to take a train to the Bronx.”

“Caleb, stop being an ass,” Caitlin said.

“I have to get up early to go to the march tomorrow.” Caleb shook his hair out of his eyes. He was scowling again. I could see that he was trying to work something out. “It seems to me like everything that protest is trying to accomplish is happening right here. Right now. This is how world peace starts. We shouldn’t have to separate right now. We should
get closer. They tell us that we couldn’t possibly get along. Well, look at us. We’re getting along just fine, if you ask me.”

He was right to look pissed off. To be brooding over something. To be pointing out the obvious.

“You know,” he said, “I’d go with you if you were taking her sightseeing or something.”

I looked at Caleb. He didn’t seem so jerky anymore. He seemed like someone who understood that this situation really sucked.

“Can we go to the Statue of Liberty?” Yrena asked.

“You can’t go to the Statue of Liberty—the island is closed at night,” Callisto told her.

“But you
could
go on the Staten Island Ferry and kind of see everything,” Caleb said—and he would know, because that was where he and the other Cs lived. “And then we could go home.”

“We have to go home,” I said. “The suits…”

“Yes,” Yrena said. “I know.”

She put her hand on my shoulder to quiet me, as though if I kept saying it out loud, the suits would come running around the corner. But they didn’t know where we were. In a way, we were safe from them as long as we stayed downtown.

We were almost at the subway station. Callisto, Caitlin, and Maurice were insisting on escorting us uptown.

“Come on,” I said to Caleb. “You know you want to be
our bodyguard. Maybe you can disarm muggers with your performance art.”

“Are you saying that at our rehearsal we were that bad?” Caleb said.

“No, I thought it was good.” I grinned. “I just mean that you’d probably have the element of surprise.”

“Right,” he said. “Bamboozle them with absurdist art forms.”

For a split second, his perma-scowl melted away.

“Fine,” he grumbled, going back to his normal, angsty self. “How could anyone resist such a charming compliment?”

Before we went underground, Yrena’s eyes swept one big, long look around the city. She sighed. She touched her heart. She blew kisses to the north, south, east, and west.

I hung back a bit and took a slight pause to try to see the beauty that she always seemed to see. Now, looking back over my shoulder as we descended into the subway, I saw it, too. Oh, the buildings in New York. Oh, the city that never sleeps. Oh, the great wonder of a city that never slept.

New York. So beautiful.

I tried to think about the ways we could sneak back into our houses. Which was funny, because I figured that most people my age tried to figure out ways to sneak
out
of their houses.

The things I was thinking about were crazy.

Like that it was true that we would be in just as much trouble tomorrow as we would be if we went home tonight.

It was weighing heavily on me that Yrena was going back to Moscow next week.

It was just past midnight and the subway car was empty except for some tired man in the corner. He was eyeballing us while he tried to sleep. I was guessing that he just wanted to make sure that we were not the kind of kids who were going to cause any trouble.

Caleb was sitting really close next to me. His leg was pressed up against mine. He didn’t seem to be giving it any thought, though. That was my department, to overthink things.

I kept stealing glances at him. I kept finding things to like in his face. His lips. His cheekbone. His nostril.

While I was sitting with my legs crossed like a lady, Yrena was swinging on the poles in the car.

She lifted her legs in impossible ways.

Yrena was doing a private dance performance, street theater with us as an audience. Maurice shouted out combination moves to Yrena, who incorporated them into her improv. She mixed it up pretty well, too. I noticed that the guy in the corner kept one eye open and was smiling. Yrena noticed, too, because when she was done she did an exaggerated bow. I noticed that the guy had a veteran’s pin on. He was youngish, so it must have been Vietnam. I bet he didn’t know that she was his enemy. He actually clapped as he got off at Times Square.

A bunch of people got on then, too, including some cops. I motioned to Yrena to stop. She plopped down across from me. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were flashing.

Her eyes.

They took everything in. I felt like I always had this measured wariness about me when I was on the subway, this New-York-don’t-mess-with-me look, but Yrena was so fresh-faced and eager. I tried it on. I looked with excited eyes. I
squinted.
Everything went kind of pink. Or yellow-y. It was nice.

“Oh!” Yrena said, tugging at me as the car pulled into the 66th Street station. “Look! Lincoln Center!”

We were just a block away from the epicenter of New York City dance, theater, music, and opera.

“I would have loved to see Makarova dance,” Yrena went on. “I am going to go to the school that trained her when I get back. The Vaganova school.”

“I saw Suzanne Farrell a few weeks ago,” Maurice said.

“Oh! Suzanne Farrell!” Yrena said. “Was she dancing with d’Amboise?”

“Yeah,” Maurice said. “And what about Baryshnikov? Have you seen him?”

“Ach,” she said. “Baryshnikov is not so special.”

And then we all laughed because we all knew she was lying. We knew Baryshnikov was nothing to sneer at. We knew she was making a joke. Or maybe she had to say it. Maybe once you defected, you were proclaimed to be “not so special.”

Just as the bell rang to signal that the doors were about to close, I did something a little crazy. I jumped up and held them until the conductor had to open the doors again.

“Hey, you. Kid,” one of the cops said, starting to come up to me. “Don’t do that.”

But the doors were open now, and Maurice, Caleb, Caitlin, Callisto, and Yrena knew that the plan had changed and that I was now in charge. They followed me and we all went flying out the door together like a flock of birds. The doors closed and there we were on the platform, breathless and flushed. The train was leaving without us.

Then the new me’s resolve, with the new idea, faltered.

“What am I doing?” I groaned.

“You are being the most awesome American hostess to our friend Yrena on her last free night in the U.S. of A.,” Caitlin said, putting her arm around my shoulder and giving me an encouraging lift.

That made me smile, because I liked that she thought I’d done something cool.

“All I know is that a girl like Yrena can’t have lived in New York City for two years and never have seen Lincoln Center,” Maurice said.

“That would be a
crime.
I mean, if the shoe were on the other foot, I would want to go see the Kirov ballet, and I don’t even like ballet,” Callisto said.

“Or the Bolshoi!” Yrena said.

“Or if I couldn’t see them, I would want to at least see the building where they danced,” Caitlin said.

“Come on!” Caleb said. “Enough yapping. More moving along.” He led the way through the turnstile and up the stairs. We emerged on Broadway and it was dark and empty—and yet, as always, there was the bustle of the city. The taxis going here and there. People still walking around. But mostly it was empty. Mostly the city seemed like it was ours.

“It’s always alive, this city,” Yrena said. “That is what makes it beautiful.”

We walked toward the white marble of Lincoln Center. It never ceased to make me excited, seeing those three buildings
and that fountain. I wanted to dance on those stages so badly that I could taste it.

“I am still crushed that I wasn’t accepted into the School of American Ballet,” Maurice said. “I have the wrong body type.”

“Yrena probably would have gotten in. She’s got the perfect Balanchine ballet body,” I said. “Tiny head, short torso, very long, lean legs, and delicate arms.”

We let Yrena run in front of us. She ran up the stairs and did leaps around the fountain.

“Oh, it is beautiful,” she said.

I was one hundred percent awake, because it was actually physically impossible to be exhausted or mad or cranky or frightened or freaked out when there was someone who was so happy in front of me. I just had to go with it.

“All right,” Yrena said. “I have seen it. Thank you. I am ready to go home.”

I could see that she had resigned herself to the fact that after this we were going back to the Bronx and that our American Night Out adventure was over.

But I wanted one more minute. I got that feeling. That feeling of how unfair everything in the world was.

I kicked the side of the fountain.

How dumb was it that Yrena had lived next door to me for two years, and because we were strangers, with governments that were enemies, we had never before taken a chance to say hello? A few hours together and it was obvious what
we had missed out on. Even though we had been taught to fear, there was nothing to be afraid of.

Here we were, just a bunch of kids hanging out in America, getting along perfectly fine with no hint of discontent between us. And if we had been hanging out in front of the Kremlin, we’d have been just as happy and gotten along just as well.

We were warm. I wasn’t going to let the cold win.

“No. Wait. I want to show you something else,” I said.

Museums.

Central Park.

The Twin Towers.

The UN.

Coney Island.

The Statue of Liberty.

Lincoln Center.

Dancing.

I led us back behind the State Theater, over to the Clamshell. Whenever there was an outdoor performance, they would set up folding chairs. But now it was just an empty space with an open stage.

“Look,” I said. “Here’s your chance to perform at Lincoln Center.”

Yrena took a second. Then she carefully took off her sweater, dug into her bag, got something out, and then handed me the bag to hold. She made her way up to the stage. She sat on the stairs and pulled off her shoes and put
on Gelsey Kirkland’s toe shoes—the ones from my room. They were her same size.

It didn’t even bother me that she had stolen something from my room. If I had thought about it, I would have given her a pair as a souvenir.

She was wearing regular clothes, but when she stood center stage and took a position for an adagio, she looked like a swan.

She stood perfectly still. She took it in. And then she was off. She began to dance and twirl and leap and do magic. She twisted and sighed and I noticed that I was feeling a bit jealous—not of her foot technique, since mine was good, too. But her arms. Her arms were near perfect. After each fluid movement, they always fell into perfect place.

Callisto, Caitlin, and Caleb followed her lead. They took their hands and they clapped and slapped the stage, making a rhythm. They began to play in time to her dancing.

I was breathless.

And then she was done.

Why on earth would she want to quit if she could dance like that? I would never understand that. It made me want to dance
more.

Maurice and I began to clap and throw fake flowers. Yrena curtsied deeply and pretended to gather the flowers in her hands, blowing kisses at the invisible-except-for-me-and-Maurice audience.

Then she waved us both over.

Maurice and I went straight to the stage, like we’d been hypnotized by the moment, by Yrena and her beautiful arms. We climbed up to her and she put her imaginary flowers down and she slid her arms around our waists, pulling us into an embrace. And then we peeled away and we all began to dance. Together.

And as we were dancing, Caleb, Caitlin, and Callisto began to use their voices to add to the percussion. It sounded eerie and ghostly and it blended in with the sounds of the city. It made for an arresting and haunting sound track. I was dancing. I was the stars and the moon and the sky. I was air.

I had been bitten by the evening and my heart went straight to my feet. I could feel it. I could feel myself being carried on the waves of music coming from Caitlin, Callisto, and Caleb. I could feel a string pulling me, Yrena, and Maurice together and apart.

My body was a complex equation. X was my soul. Y was Yrena. Sometimes Maurice divided or bisected us. I looped and bent and leapt, and when I came together in sync on a landing with Yrena, something from that point on was different in me. I just moved. I poured myself into the moment. Fluid. Silent. Wordless. And Yrena was always there, receiving and reflecting everything I sent toward her. She matched me and I matched her. There was a selfish beauty to dancing alone, but when you opened up your heart and let it flow out to others, it seemed that for a brief moment you could share a
soul. I did not need to think about where I would go next. Every step, bend, jump, and glide felt perfect.

We, all of us, three dancers, a musician, and an actor, came to a stop at the same moment, ending on the mournful note of Caitlin’s voice.

I had to remind myself that we were going home and that Yrena would be in the Soviet Union in a few days. I was blinking back tears because it was such an unfairly transcendent moment. I didn’t want it to end. I was afraid that I might not ever dance this freely or this well again.

“I am going to quit dancing,” Yrena said. “I don’t need to do it anymore.”

There was something so final in what she said. But there was no remorse. It was Yrena speaking her truth. She had such a gift, but what was the point of the gift if you did not have the passion?

I felt as though I was finally awake as a person. It was like I had just been born.

And I knew what the first step would be.

“Let’s go to that march tomorrow,” I said.

“But we cannot. My parents won’t let me go out once I get home,” Yrena said.

“So then I guess we can’t go back home yet,” I said.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should’ve gotten us home. But I didn’t.

I pointed us toward adventure.