The Good Life (21 page)

The resentful grumble rose to a din the afternoon Georges posted an audition sign-up sheet for a touring company. The job was chorus line, requiring tap, ballet, and jazz, with a guaranteed run and union benefits. Teachers gave permission for the studios to stay open, and everyone except Sue spent nights practicing past eleven, past midnight, past sense.

The afternoon before the audition, Sue found me in one of the practice rooms, where I'd been hammering at my time step for two hours. “You'll do better if you get some sleep.” She practically had to yell; the room was a storm of tapping, curses, three different boom boxes cuing three different songs. Everybody kept turning up the volume.

“I'll do better if my time step is right,” I said, clacking through it again, missing—I always missed—the tricky kick-turn-jump.

“How well are you going to dance if you've got a bottle of Dexatrim doing time steps in your bloodstream? Get some sleep.”

I kept my eyes on my sweaty reflection. My feet rattled along, kick-turn-jump, kick-turn-jump. “I don't need sleep. I need to be perfect.”

“Put a little pressure on yourself, why don't you?”

“Look—if you want to stay in here, then dance. That's what the rest of us are doing.”

“I'm just saying it pays to stop and take stock every once in a while. Make sure that what you're doing is paying off.”

“And if it isn't?” I tossed off a fast, low triple pirouette, a turn she'd never been able to do.

She shrugged. “Then change what you're doing.”

I stood still then and looked at Sue in the mirror, as she was looking at me. I had four inches on her. I could lift my leg straight from the hip until my toes pointed at the ceiling. “Your talk doesn't change anything,” I said.

“I'm trying to be a friend.”

“No, you're not.” Taking one step back, I whipped out pirouettes until Sue left the studio. Then I went back to the time step, two against three, five against four. By morning I was haggard, caffeine burning like a coal in my stomach, but I had the step.

Sue appeared at the studio fifteen minutes before auditions began. Freshly showered, she looked like a plump doll, her cheeks rosy and her soft forehead untroubled. Her clear eyes scanned her competition. I looked too, seeing what Sue did: the limps and winces, the skull-like faces, the angular, mean want. Watching myself in the mirror, I lifted my arm and lowered it, unable to soften the sharp line. At the end of the day, three girls from our class were hired, two of them girls who had rehearsed beside me all night.

Sue called every week or two from the road, reporting on the amphetamines, the B12 shots and blood transfusions, the sleazeball audience members—and not just men—who lingered after performances. She explained life on the road and told me stories about the headliners. At first she would interrupt her monologue and urge me to talk about myself. But I resented the smallness of grades and end-of-school recitals beside Sue's glamorous, sordid backstages, and I quickly rediverted her to the footlights. Not that she needed much diverting. “Wait until you hear about the director,” she sometimes began.

More and more tightlipped, I listened. A month from graduation, I had no prospects, not even teaching in some suburban studio that specialized in tap for toddlers. During the days I tried to think only of steps, tried not to think, but my steps became distracted and confused. “You lack,” Georges said in front of the whole class, “enough want.”

“I want,” I muttered.

“Not enough.” Then he turned to the next girl in line and did not look at me again.

I blamed Sue. Some small, reasonable, silenced part of me had always known that I wouldn't dance forever, that careers were built on stages in New York, not in barely accredited colleges in Indiana. I had known that my dream of the body would have to stop eventually, but I couldn't shut away the belief that Sue had brought me to unhappiness early.

After graduation I went back home to Hammond and worked as a receptionist at the studio where I had taken classes as a girl, answering phones and keeping track of the cash box. After two years I enrolled in an accounting course at Ivy Tech and there met Dan, who told me he wanted to get out of Indiana and wouldn't mind starting his own school of dance. Sue called from Oklahoma City while we were addressing wedding invitations.

“It must be in the air,” she said. “I can hardly talk over the wedding bells out here.” She was marrying the show's producer, thirty years her senior, already three marriages to the bad.

“This is news,” I said.

“We were friends. Then we got to be friendlier.” I could hear Sue's quick, birdlike smile. “When we get to Chicago, I'm going to be soloist.”

Pure self-respect forced me to congratulate her, but something else, a masochistic curiosity, prompted me to keep asking Sue about her engagement ring, the rave reviews the show had gotten, her day with Twyla Tharp. “Some mornings I wake up and don't even recognize my own life,” Sue said.

“It's yours, all right. I could have picked it out of a lineup.” After we hung up, I insisted on addressing every last one of the invitations, even though it was late and Dan was ready to go to bed.

 

What little was left of our friendship drained away without drama. I continued to hear from Sue at odd intervals as she called to announce her succession of personal victories. The marriage to her producer lasted two years, long enough to give her a season as soloist and a daughter she named Gloria. Shortly after Dan and I moved to L.A. and opened our first studio, she called to let me know she was marrying an engine-parts heir in Indianapolis and planned to open a dancing school of her own. Later I heard about another baby, and later still twins, after Dan and I divorced, childless despite years of hoping.

Once in a while, late at night after a few drinks, I would consider calling Sue to tell her about my steadily lengthening chain of studios—three after Dan left, then four, five, six. I also invested in a little production company to help a friend, a job that let me feel as if I had my own small scrap of power in this city full of powerful people. Some vestigial store of pride always kept me away from the phone. Still, I imagined the conversations so acutely, I might as well have gone ahead and run up the phone bill. With great clarity I saw and resented the state-of-the-art floor her husband's money had allowed her to install, the students she had recruited from New York and eventually sent back there, her children, who were, every one of them, Pavlovas. “You and Dan didn't have any kids, did you?” I could hear her asking.

Maybe twice a year the old fury swept over me, and for days at a time I didn't answer the phone, afraid of what might come out of my mouth. I was emerging from one of these interludes, working at home on billing, when the phone rang. Without thinking I picked up the receiver. As unlikely as it sounds, in the moment of buzzing, long-distance transmission I knew with damp certainty exactly who was waiting for me.

“Hello, Mona!” she sang out, as she had always done.

“Listen,” I said, “I'm sorry, I was on my way out the door.”

“I just want to ask you one thing, a favor actually. I don't think you'll mind.”

“I'm very busy. You know, last month I opened my sixth studio.”

“We're expanding too. Two regional companies want us to provide training to their dancers. I gave an interview about it to
Dance
magazine.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I'm supposed to be in Pasadena in fifteen minutes, and it's a twenty-minute drive.”

“You don't let time get away from you. I was just saying so to Gloria. She's graduated from high school; can you believe it?”

“That's what kids do,” I said, although I was startled. Sue had sent me a picture years ago—a tiny, saucer-eyed child with dark hair caught in fuzzy pigtails.

“She's six feet tall and weighs 119 pounds. She looks like a thermometer and thinks she should be a fashion model. She wants to go to L.A.”

“Sue, I've really got one foot out the door.”

“She's convinced that she'll take the world by storm. She doesn't know a thing about the world, or about storms, either. But her heart is set on this. So I thought of you. You could help her, give her advice. Show her how to make a career with the beautiful people. Don't you have a production company?”

I couldn't keep from snorting. “Who do you think I am, Swifty Lazar? The company makes two commercials a year. Me, I teach seven-year-olds to plié.”

“But you live there. You know people. Anyway, it could be exciting, hearing about the photo shoots and all. I'd trust her with you. You don't have a houseful of other folks needing your attention.” Her voice grew subtly louder, as if she had moved the telephone closer to her mouth. “Of course I'd pay for her rent and meals.”

I was scrubbing at my eyes. “I can afford to feed a 119-pound teenager. But I'm not up to taking in a stranger right now.”

“A friend,” Sue said, and before I could point out the distance we had traveled since friendship, she added, “I know you need to get going. Just think about it, and I'll call again this weekend.”

“Nothing will change.”

“She thinks she's going to set the town on fire. Who knows? Maybe she will, with you there to help her fan the flames.” She chuckled comfortably.

“I was never the one to start fires.” I was practically gargling with outrage but didn't suppose Sue heard that. Her ears never discerned anything so obvious as impatience or irritation. Instead, she listened for desires that pulsed and bloomed only in secret—a long, helpless wish for a child, for instance. A sudden curiosity about someone else's child. Like a quick animal, Sue sensed reflexes and defenses; she smelled alarm. What she almost certainly sniffed now was the scent I couldn't control, the first acrid whiff of capitulation.

 

I happened to be watering the patio plants the afternoon Gloria arrived. Hearing her pull into the driveway, I looked up from glistening begonias to see a girl emerge from a beat-up convertible, her body unfolding like the spindly legs of a compass. I held my face in an expression that I hoped was cordial, then felt it jerk into something less practiced when she bounded up the steps and looped her long arms around me. “Mona! You're here! I'm here! Finally!”

She beamed, a few strands of her springy hair tangling in a low branch of the olive tree. “Indiana to L.A.—some miles! I wasn't sure Kansas was ever going to stop. But I kept reminding myself that you'd be at the end.”

“Like a pot of gold.”

She laughed, and I studied her. What could Sue have told this lanky girl? Her smile shone like a spotlight.

“I've got so much to tell you.” Gloria bounced back to the car and tugged at a colossal suitcase that barely cleared the lip of the trunk.

“Let me help.”

She shook her head. “Mom said if I was old enough to be out on my own, I'm old enough to pull my own weight.” After a final yank the suitcase thudded free. “Anyway, I'm stronger than I look.”

“That's good to know.” She looked strong enough to lift a small cat. Sue hadn't exaggerated about her child's shape; Gloria was a long tube of a girl, with no curves at all. When she bent to hoist her suitcase, her vertebrae made a bony ridge under her T-shirt, and her stretch pants hung from her hips without a bulge or crease. But she didn't have the sleepy, blank air of many ultra-thin girls. She chirped, she hopped, she chattered; the air surrounding her seemed spangled. She raced up the steps to the front door, so clearly delighted to have arrived that a smile pulled at my mouth, and when we went into the kitchen, I gave her knobby shoulder a squeeze.

“I feel like my life is finally starting, right here, right this minute.”

“Whoa, girl. You're bringing a lifetime with you. Don't go denying your wholesome Midwestern girlhood. Around here, it'll make you exotic,” I said. “Would you like some coffee?”

She shook her head at the coffeepot. “I brought celery juice. Want some?” I made a face, and Gloria laughed. “That's what Mom says, too.”

“How is your mother?” I would have liked to hide the cardboard dustiness of my words a little better, but Gloria only grinned.

“How do you think? Twenty different directions, forty different projects. When I was packing to come here, she wandered into my room and told me that she was sending me to you because you're the best help a girl could ask for. I asked her what that meant and she said, ‘Mona's always got the answers.'”

I reached into the refrigerator for milk. This shining girl would want to hear about pranks, escapades, close calls with boys, not a years-long string of phone calls in which Sue detailed her wildly unfair gift for the main chance and the windfall. “Your mother's got me mixed up. She's the one with the answers.”

Gloria sighed and grinned and frowned at me. “You're just as bad as she is. I should have guessed. She's always said you're her best friend.”

“Has she, now?” I said.

She cracked open her can of celery juice. “Are you surprised?”

“It's been a long time, that's all. We haven't actually seen each other since college.”

“Well, she says best friend. She says it all the time.”

 

In the shower or car, safely unobserved, I fretted. Things hadn't been going well for Sue in the friend department if she thought I was her best one. A best friend would have encouraged Gloria to talk about her mother and pointed out Sue's many virtues. A best friend would not slide around the mere mention of Sue's name. A best friend would certainly not spend nights envisioning scenarios—illness, bankruptcy, a long-term imprisonment—that would force Gloria to stay with me for a lifetime. I was ashamed of myself. But the girl whooped from room to room, a boxcar of delight, and she pulled me into delight with her. The house grew rich with the smell of her almond oil. She insisted on baking leaden oat muffins, which she brought to me for breakfast, and her laughter chimed in every corner. Often she returned from her runs clutching little bouquets of geraniums and nasturtiums that she left in the coffeepot. In the bud vase she plunked a stalk of celery.