Starting from here, p.9
Starting from Here, page 9
But Eve was like that—always helping out old ladies and “friends” she disliked. Like when she answered the phone with her voice two octaves higher than normal, then chirped on to someone who just moments before she’d called a “flaming idiot.” Which was puzzling. René could only assume that Eve liked and trusted all the people she said she didn’t. But maybe she didn’t like or trust any of the people she pretended to—Pete’s grandma being one of them.
* * *
—
They finally pulled up to the Babbitts’, where, René noted with relief, Pete didn’t try to kiss her. He just stopped the car, pressed his full hand hard into her crotch, and said, “There ya go, babe.”
Candy Striper? Sweet Stuff? Babe? Maybe he couldn’t remember her name.
She got out and took her suitcase from the backseat.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said through the rolled-down window of the passenger door, now firmly closed between them.
Pete extended his open hand—the same hand that had just been up between her legs.
After a momentary confusion, René said, “Oh, I almost forgot.” And she reached into her jeans pocket and handed him the ten-dollar bill Eve had given her for gas.
Pete snatched it away, winked at her through the open window, then tore off, honking, leaving her standing on the broken sidewalk with her suitcase, her legs trembling beneath her—from what, she couldn’t really say, because nothing had really happened, she told herself. Nothing serious. She was all in one piece, after all. She was in Denver. Delivered. As promised.
She just needed to shake it off. She needed to enter this new place clear-eyed and ready, not quivering, not falling apart—which, it seemed, was imminent, tears of anger, confusion, helplessness now way too close to the surface.
She turned to haul her suitcase up the crumbling cement steps to the Babbitts’ decrepit little yellow house in the middle of the block of old, similar-looking houses, feeling that she’d somehow stumbled through an unseen doorway and wound up on the wrong side of her own life.
And suddenly, as if to confirm the notion, the scarecrow mom came dancing frantically out onto the front porch, sing-hollering, “Helloooo theeeeeerre. We’ve been waaaaaiting for youuuuu,” her spooky daughter standing quietly behind her in the doorway like a spirit, shivering and mute, seeming to brim over with eerie, unexplainable anticipation.
31
The bedroom across the hall from the scarecrow mom and her dying father was filled all night with the old man’s coughing, spitting, yelling, and bell ringing, followed by scurrying footsteps. Often in the mornings René could see that not only had Mrs. Babbitt not slept, but that she’d been crying. Her eyes were swollen and red beneath her big glasses, and her singsong voice was no disguise.
René wasn’t sleeping, either. With all the noise from the old man’s room—along with the mewing of cats and the whistling of birds—she was up, tossing and turning under the filthy bedcovers, causing the canopy above her to send down dust motes like late winter snowflakes. She watched as they swirled in the strip of light shining in from the alleyway, then covered her face and tried not to breathe.
* * *
—
At Dicker’s studio, Mrs. Babbitt was in class every night, just like Dicker had promised, sweating through her headscarf, working her exhausted body into a lather. And there were other adults in class, too—grown men who looked like they might have stepped in right off the street but who could keep up in general, even if their feet tended to flop at the ends of their legs like canoes in a storm. Mostly there was a lot of stumbling and hopping about, but Dicker didn’t seem to mind. He wore his three-piece suit and shiny loafers instead of tights and ballet slippers, and presided over the class like a monarch, preening and distracted.
He’d demonstrate combinations with exaggerated aplomb, as if he were onstage, then walk the length of the studio, checking his reflection in the mirror—smoothing his hair, straightening his vest, brandishing his shiny walking stick. Sometimes he’d stop during a barre exercise to adjust one of the grown-ups’ ports de bras, or interrupt a center-floor combination to tease one of the older guys about a botched combination or a turned-in supporting leg and splayed hip, taking the time to demonstrate just how silly the guy had looked, making everyone laugh.
At least René was relieved to find that, even after all her summer indulgences, she was skinny compared to the other girls at Dicker’s studio—though that didn’t seem to matter here. There was a girl whose over-ample backside made her look like she was wearing jodhpurs, and another who ballooned out around the middle—extra flesh like an overflow of molten candle wax spilling over the waistband of her tights—and no one looked twice, much less made a comment.
But, for reasons she couldn’t discern—admiration of her clean lines? anger about Eve’s asking for a discount?—Dicker kept his distance, scanning her silently, his head tipped so far back he had to look down his nose.
So it was confusing. Like everything else in Denver, ballet was different—less exacting and ambitious, more laid-back and egalitarian. There was no struggle for rank, since no one seemed to have a position in mind. There was an older girl, Marcie, who worked at a real estate office downtown and was obviously Dicker’s favorite. She’d already tried her luck in New York and—“after too many girls and too few chances,” as Mrs. Babbitt told it—had simply come back and decided to stay.
And one night, after Dicker had spent an entire class praising some new guy René had never seen in class before—a guy who pirouetted on flat feet and did grand jetés across the floor like he was kicking one football after another—René realized that there was going to be nothing for her in Denver. And she began to wonder what she was doing here.
Especially since she couldn’t imagine how she was going to make her way from here to where she was actually trying to go, which—though, of course, was to be a professional, a principal, a star—was still hazy, like a distant castle on a clouded hilltop, including every equivalent to a moat and a bolted gate and a hidden key. If she was ever going to dance in New York City—like Carly, Didi, Terri, and those other Phoenix girls were bound to do—she was now going to have to get there by slogging through this Denver backwater.
* * *
—
“Anyone can go to New York,” Eve said impatiently over the phone one evening, interrupting René’s latest rant about Dicker—his cavalier attitude, his shoddy, untrained students, his continuous silence. “A lot can happen between now and then, you know. First you have to finish high school. That’s the main thing. And Denver’s as good a place as any for that. You’ll just have to try your best, René.” Eve was scolding. “It’s too late to go back to Phoenix now, anyway. I can’t imagine Mr. B’s had any better luck finding you a place—”
René cringed at the thought of Mr. B—at how kind and encouraging he’d always been, at how he’d pleaded with her to come back, warned her to listen.
And as Eve harangued on, René felt all her high hopes deserting her, as if every door she’d fought so hard to open were locking shut. With nothing in Denver to reach for, nothing to rise to, and Mr. B now out of the picture, all her chips were on Dicker. If Dicker wasn’t going to help her, there wasn’t going to be anybody else. It was Dicker or nobody.
“Looks like it’s going to be whatever you decide to make it,” Eve was saying, transitioning to one of her pep talks. “Just work hard. Do your best. You know how to do that. Then you can do whatever you want. Trust me.”
But trusting Eve was beside the point. Eve didn’t know. And like she’d just said—it was René’s problem now.
She’d have to do her best—whatever that might mean at this second-rate dance studio where she’d landed by a collision of lack: lack of a place to stay, lack of courage, lack of information, lack of funds, lack of faith in Mr. B. Because no matter how she’d ended up here or why she had to stay—in this place where it felt like her dreams were suddenly dangling headlong over a precipice—it was clear there’d be no going back.
She was here. And there was a long way to go.
32
After Mother Mary Ignatius in Phoenix, the dryly named Denver Catholic High was more like a public school back home—groups gathering and dispersing in the hallways, cheerleaders hosting bake sales, jocks roughing one another up against lockers, couples holding hands, leaning in, whispering in corners.
At least René didn’t have to wear a uniform or spend her lunchtime watching those Mother Mary Ignatius girls running in circles around the courtyard, lifting each other’s skirts. And compared to the workload in Phoenix, her studies at Denver Catholic were simple—no more homework, no more essay questions, no more harsh injunctions or raised eyebrows. Here again were the familiar mimeographed worksheets, the tests where you could choose (a), (b), (c), or (d) all of the above, and be done with it. Even the graduation requirements were minimal. If she planned it right, she could condense two years into one and get out.
She took Speech and stood swaying in front of her classmates, relating facts about Mother Teresa she’d lifted from a single page of the encyclopedia. She took Family Planning with Mr. Davis, where they colored in worksheets on the reproductive parts of flowers. The class was all girls, and when they got to the part about “saving themselves” for marriage, Mr. Davis took a poll.
“Just wait,” he said when almost everyone in class raised a hand to confirm their abstinence. “You’re gonna change your minds.”
“I’d change my mind for you, Jim!” one of the girls tipping her desk to recline against the back wall called out, making the others giggle.
Mr. Davis was young and built, solid and broad with dusty-brown hair and a chiseled jaw, obviously an athlete. He was easygoing and friendly. All the girls liked him.
Then one day her English teacher, Janet Zee—who’d told the class to call her Janet, “just Janet”—called René up to her desk to ask why she hadn’t been doing the reading. Shocked that her neglect of In Cold Blood was apparent, René ended up telling Janet about being away from home, about living with a family she didn’t know, about dancing, about trying not to eat, and about her brother, Leon, who’d already been in jail twice for DUIs, how things at home always seemed unfair to him.
“It’s too scary,” she told her. “It’s too real.”
“It is real. That’s what makes it so sad,” Janet sighed.
So Janet understood, even sympathized. And after that, René started lingering at Janet’s desk each day as the rest of the class cleared out.
* * *
—
Janet was short, with stark blond hair that feathered around her face in pretty layers, and matronly, even though she was young. She had a warm gaze that landed on you and stayed there. Whatever you might say to her, she’d give you a wry smile and roll her eyes—like you were funny, but also like she’d heard it all before.
Janet was separated and had a little daughter she was struggling to raise. She was lonely and wanted to be married again—not to her husband, who wouldn’t even give her a divorce. She just wanted to find someone who wasn’t a “complete asshole,” she told René.
René also heard from Janet that some of the other kids in class had their own problems—like never having any lunch money, or spending too much time getting high in the parking lot instead of going to class. Because Janet got to know her students. She felt responsible for them, followed their lives and did what she could to help.
So when René finally worked up the nerve to ask Janet about Dan—the cowboy guy with the dark curly hair and big, toothy smile, who sat in the back row, and who’d recently been catching her eye as they passed in the hallways, grinning at her like he was hiding a game for them to play—she learned that he wasn’t just another ranch kid but a real rodeo guy, a bronc rider.
“He’s won bunches of prizes. So many,” Janet said, widening her eyes to show that the list of medals and ribbons he likely had was way too long to catalog. “Trophies, cash purses, you name it.”
Dan wore a cowboy hat and tight jeans with a shiny rodeo buckle to school, ducking his head to say hello and strutting the halls in his cowboy boots like he was leading a victory parade. Just looking at him made René feel like somewhere inside her a light had blinked on.
* * *
—
Janet didn’t believe in tests, so she graded on discussion. And René soon found that, though Dan kept the kids around him in stitches, he didn’t do much of the reading. Mainly he was an artist, he piped up to say one day as the class was going over A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He liked to draw horses in pencil, “sometimes charcoal,” he said. He hadn’t said anything for a while, so he was trying to get a word in, clearly taking his cue from the title.
“I don’t think he’s read a single book all year,” Janet lamented after class. “But he’s a good kid. He’s got his own thing going on.”
René agreed. She was like that, too. She had her own thing going on.
“Plus he’s so damn cute,” Janet added, shimmying her shoulders and tossing her feathery blond hair, smiling. “What’re ya gonna do?”
And later that afternoon, as they passed in the hall, René swung around to look back at Dan—struck by his long sturdy frame, by how easily he might be leaning up close to her at her locker as she soaked in his deep, rich ranch smell—and found that he’d turned, too, and was blushing and thumbing his hat the way cowboys did in the movies when they caught sight of a girl they liked in a saloon.
After that, she was watching for Dan everywhere.
33
Days and weeks went by with nothing much happening at Dicker’s. There was class every night but Dicker didn’t have anything to say—only that René should lower her shoulders or pull in her thumbs.
Though she was still trying not to eat, she found herself careening back and forth between starvation and gluttony. Mainly, she’d have dry salad and a hard-boiled egg in the school cafeteria. But when there was cornbread floating in maple syrup, she convinced herself it was time for a treat, and when it was taco day, she figured there wasn’t much difference between an egg and a spoonful of hamburger, and she went ahead.
“All shapes and sizes of people love to dance, you know,” Mrs. Babbitt said one day, setting out a plate of Hydrox cookies. “No one should feel like they have to fit into someone else’s mold.” She did a wobbly tour de basque, catching herself on the kitchen counter, and tilted her head, causing her glasses to slip.
“Sure,” René said, thinking, Sure, if you want to dance around the kitchen, or barefoot in the grass at a park somewhere. But classical ballet? In New York City?
No matter what kind of world Mrs. Babbitt might dream of or wish for, it didn’t work that way.
Kat suggested René try sticking a finger down her throat and throwing up. “You could eat whatever you wanted,” she chirped, shrugging.
So the next night, after Mrs. Babbitt had stopped for burritos on their way home from ballet, René dug in, loading up on sour cream and salsa. And later, she bent over the toilet, crammed a finger down her throat, and made all the right noises. But no luck.
Then Mrs. Babbitt said she should try eating before ballet class. “Not that you need to, but you’d burn up all those calories. Presto!” She snapped her fingers above her head like a flamenco dancer as Kat nodded behind her.
But with nothing to win or lose in Denver—with no more calorie notebooks to keep, no more logging her weight each night—René found that Mrs. Babbitt had a point. There was no real need to restrain her appetite or deny her desires. She didn’t have to be that same girl she’d been in Phoenix. She could be different. Here, in Denver, she could be herself. And if only she could get back to the happier, sweeter, more carefree parts of herself—the real parts, she thought—then maybe Dan would like her.
Because what she could see most clearly—from the kids holding hands at school, from the silent, despairing aloneness of Mrs. Babbitt, which she attempted to cover with wan smiles and awkward melodies, from Janet’s open sadness—was how comforting it would be to simply belong to someone.
She could remember Eve and Mrs. G chuckling uneasily about boys, about how they always ended up ruining a girl’s life: “If it wasn’t for Doug showing up in the middle of my dance career and getting me pregnant,” Mrs. G would start, grinning and shaking her head.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Eve would say, tsking. “I know that story—just all too well.”
“You’d never do anything as stupid as all that, would you?” Mrs. G would say, putting her hand on René’s head.
“No,” René would answer proudly each time, as Eve snorted and rolled her eyes and Mrs. G laughed along.
How old had she been back then? Nine? Maybe ten?
Still, it didn’t have to be like that. She could be Dan’s girl. Why not? It wasn’t too much to ask, was it? To have that simple piece of a normal life?
34
Each morning she bundled up, got on the number 23 bus, took a transfer, then got off at Saint Joseph Hospital, where she waited, craning her neck, crumpling the transfer in her pocket until the number 20 finally showed up to take her to school. It was cold—the skies gray and heavy with clouds, the air biting, thick with the promise of snow. And as she watched for the number 20, her breath crystallizing in front of her, René would find herself gazing down the road, mesmerized by the gleaming windows of Saint Joseph, thinking how lucky all those people were in their warm hospital beds, sleeping until noon, pushing a button to sit up or lie down, nurses bringing whatever they wanted—warm blankets, cups of fruit cocktail.
