Rules for 50/50 Chances

by Kate McGovern

  “So, how are things with you, HD girl?”

  It gives me a little rush of warmth in my stomach, the way he says it. I never thought I’d enjoy being identified by my family disease.

  “Things are fine. The parents are on my case about college.”

  “I hear you. My parents met at Yale. I’m dressed in bulldog gear in three-quarters of my baby pictures. No pressure.”

  I laugh, picturing Caleb as a baby. “So is that your plan? Yalie-to-be?”

  “Hell no,” he says. “They ruined any chance of that by talking about it so damn much over the years. Anyway, I’m pretty sold on RISD.”

  “RISD?” I repeat it the way he says it—Riz-dee.

  “Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence. It’s the best for painting. I know it’s not the most practical career plan, but you know … life’s short, right?”

  Indeed. And sometimes it starts sucking long before it’s technically over.

  “I totally hear that. I always thought that in my dream world I’d go to a ballet BFA program. There’s one in San Francisco that’s, like, ridiculous. It’s attached to the Ballet of the Pacific Coast, which is one of the top companies, and it’s—” I realize I’m rambling again and cut myself off.

  “It’s what?” The way Caleb asks, it sounds like he really wants to know. The BPC is one of the premier companies in the country, probably in the world. Mom took me to see them when they came to Boston on tour when I was eight. I’d already seen the Boston Ballet, plenty of times, but the BPC was something special, Mom said. She was right, of course. Even at that age, I understood that what I was seeing onstage was extraordinary.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s the best. Most of the other major ballet companies don’t have actual bachelor’s degree programs attached to them—usually it’s one or the other. Dance, or get your college degree. Anyway, that’s what I always imagined I’d do.”

  “Why the past tense?”

  Across the room, on the wall over my desk, there’s a bulletin board covered in pictures, including many of my different ballet performances from over the years. My eyes land on the one of me at three, dressed like a tutu-ed bunny rabbit. Ballet has been the center of my universe since then. It’s hard to imagine living without it.

  “Well, if my parents are paying for college, they sort of get a say in where I go. And my dad thinks I should be studying business or something else practical.”

  “Well,” Caleb says, then stops for a moment. “I think you deserve to do exactly what you want.”

  “I’m sure my dad will appreciate your support for my lousy career choices.”

  “Career-shmareer.” He laughs. “That’s what I say to that! We’ll make our lousy career choices together and prove them all wrong.”

  The word rings in my ear for a moment after he says it. Together.

  “Anyway, HD, I gotta finish some homework.”

  “Okay, Sickle Cell. Me too, actually. So I guess I’ll … talk to you soon?”

  “Obviously.”

  We hang up, and I sit there for a moment, frozen. Obviously.

  Seven

  I’m ten minutes late to dance the next afternoon, which is pretty unheard of and definitely frowned upon. My first class starts at three thirty on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, which gives me just enough time to leave school at two thirty and get to the studio in time to change. Today, though, I slip in at three forty-two. I take my place as inconspicuously as possible at a barre by Eloise, but Miss Julia still shoots me a disapproving look from the front of the room.

  “What’s up with you?” Eloise whispers when we lean over to stretch.

  “Nothing. Subway delay.” It’s a lie. I was sitting in the hallway by my locker, considering my conversation with Caleb last night and debating whether or not I was even going to go to ballet. I hung up the phone with a weird, nagging feeling, like two kids with pretty bad illnesses in their families should be worrying about more important stuff than whether or not we’re going to pursue our “creative passions” after high school. Like we were being petty, or something. Plus, I saw the bill from my studio on Dad’s desk the other night and it reminded me how expensive this passion is. Even when my mom worked, my parents saved wherever they could to pay for my dance training. Now there’s one income in my house and huge medical expenses, which are only going to go up. How much longer can I really justify doing this?

  Eventually, though, I went to class—because no matter what, ballet is still the thing that makes me feel calm when everything else is confusing. Now that I’m here, stretching by Eloise like we’ve been doing three to five times a week since we were three years old, it feels good. Normal, solid, predictable.

  Miss Julia teaches us a new combination. Thursday afternoon classes are usually fun—more of a mix of ballet and jazz, so no pointe shoes today. Eloise and I mark through the combination at the side of the room while half the class runs it first. Georgia, taller and thinner and definitely blonder than any of the rest of us, is at the front, as always. Even on Thursdays, when the rest of us wear our hair in looser ponytails, she wears hers in a tight bun, hair-sprayed within an inch of its life. Never a single strand out of place for Georgia.

  Finishing up the combination, Georgia slips past Eloise and me and takes a swig from her water bottle. She gives us a tight smile.

  “Did you hear?” she asks.

  “Hear what?” Eloise says. I try to avoid giving in to Georgia’s bait, but Eloise can’t help it.

  “BPC master class next week. They’re in town.” Georgia purses her lips. “They might be scouting for the PCCA program for next year.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Eloise asks, not even bothering to try to hide her enthusiasm from Georgia, who shrugs.

  “Just around. Your group is up.” As we rush to the middle of the floor, Eloise turns to me, her face flushed with excitement. So much for giving up dance. That’ll definitely have to wait.

  * * *

  Caleb said we would “obviously” talk soon, but I’m still startled when I see his name on my phone, buzzing away practically the minute I transfer from the subway to the bus, headed home from dance.

  “Obviously, huh?” I answer.

  “What?”

  “You said obviously we’d talk again soon. I just didn’t realize how soon.”

  Caleb laughs, and I picture those shoulders going up and down. “I wanted to talk to you. Should I have waited two-point-five days or something like that?”

  “Why two-point-five?”

  “Isn’t that the requisite number of days a guy is supposed to wait before calling a girl?”

  “I think two-point-five is actually the average number of children in a stereotypical American nuclear family,” I reply.

  “Okay, smart-ass HD. How are you?”

  Somehow, coming from Caleb, that question doesn’t feel like a total throwaway.

  “Since less than twenty-four hours ago? Good. Just got out of dance, and I’m on my way home now.”

  “Little late, isn’t it?”

  I glance at my phone screen, even though I know it’s after eight o’clock.

  “This is pretty normal,” I say. “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are my long days.” I’m used to the schedule: three days a week from three thirty until eight, the other two from four to seven, plus Saturdays from nine to four. Sometimes I forget that normal teenagers have more free time. That might be nice.

  “So, what do you do in these mysterious ballet classes, anyway?”

  “You really want to know? Pretty much beat up our bodies until we’re bleeding, bruised, and busted—”

  “Alliteration, nice work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you guys supercompetitive with each other like in the dance movies?”

  “Big Center Stage fan, huh?” I tease. Of course, it’s secretly one of my favorite movies of all time. That and Dirty Dancing (the original, obviously).

  “Two ten-year
-old sisters, remember. I know dance movies, trust me.”

  “Oh, right,” I say. “Sorry, I forgot you were well-versed in all things little girl.” I hunch down in my seat closer to the window, and cup my hand over my mouth. I hate being that person who talks loud on the bus. Normally I wouldn’t even answer the phone.

  “We’re pretty competitive, I guess,” I tell him. Competitive is one word for it. Cutthroat is another that comes to mind. I think of Georgia’s pursed lips. “Of course, we’re not exactly in the corps at the Boston Ballet, so we’re probably not the cream of the crop anyway.”

  I tell myself that, but the truth is every year a few dancers from our studio join major companies. I’m sure it’s Georgia’s plan, even though she’s keeping her cards close to her chest, and I know Eloise is auditioning for a few. Miss Julia has hinted to me that it could be my plan, too, if I wanted it to be.

  Talking to Caleb feels so normal, so natural, that I almost miss my stop. As I hop off and walk the half block home, he tells me about a kid from Barrow whose mom danced with the Boston Ballet until she was like forty. Turns out she’s pretty famous. It’s no surprise, of course, that Caleb has famous people’s kids in his class, but I’m still impressed. Dance celebrities don’t tend to be a big deal to regular people, but for me they might as well be Angelina Jolie.

  When I walk in the door, I smell pasta—the second largest food group in our house these days, after takeout. Dad’s probably left me some on the stove, still warm. Mom sits at the dining room table, surrounded by about a thousand photographs printed off from the travel Web sites she’s obsessed with. She’s got her big, easy-grip scissors out and she’s making jagged cuts to the photos, letting shreds of paper fall lightly to the floor like broken snowflakes.

  “Hey, Caleb?” I say in a low voice so she won’t hear me. “I just walked in the door and I think I should go see what my mom’s up to…”

  “That’s cool,” he cuts in. He gets it.

  “So how about I call you tomorrow?” But even as I say it—trying to sound all nonchalant, like I call guys all the time—my gut is churning with something between excitement and abject horror.

  “I would very much enjoy that. Later then.”

  I hang up and dump my slew of bags by the foot of the stairs. “Hey, Mom. What’s up?” I sit across from her, careful not to disturb the spread of pictures.

  “Hi, babe. Adding to my collection.”

  By her “collection,” she means her scrapbook of photos from train routes all over the world that she’s never traveled.

  “Uh, yeah—I can see that. What are these?” I ask, picking up one that’s sitting in front of me.

  “These are from the Hiram Bingham Orient Express.”

  “The Orient Express?” Maybe she’s confused. I’m pretty sure she already has the Orient Express in her scrapbook.

  “No. Hiram Bingham Orient Express,” she repeats slowly. “It’s in Peru.”

  “Oh, cool.”

  “It climbs Machu Picchu. You can get altitude sssickness on the train.”

  A train that climbs a mountain does sound pretty cool. “Want me to put these in the book?” I ask her.

  “I can do it, Rose. Don’t treat me like a chhhild,” she says, suddenly harsh. She clutches the papers to her chest in her quivering hands, like she has to protect them from me.

  This is how she is now—warm one minute, cold the next. I look at the pictures scattered across the table, some of which have been cut almost in half because her fine motor control is so weak.

  I take a breath to steady my voice before responding to her. “Okay. I have homework.”

  “Don’t talk down to me! I’m still your mother. Don’t ffforget that.”

  I get up and leave her to it, surrounded by scraps of paper and all those imagined exotic trips she’s never going to take.

  * * *

  Mom got her train obsession from her father, along with the Huntington’s. My grandfather, apparently, was a bit of a rail buff in his early days, before Huntington’s and alcohol took him away. He gave Mom’s brother, Uncle Charlie, a toy train set for Christmas when he was eight or something like that, the kind that speeds around a track in a circle, forward and backward, with a caboose and a coal car and a heavy engine. My mother said it was the only nice thing he ever gave either her or Uncle Charlie, and she coveted it.

  So when I was seven, Dad gave Mom a train set of her own, the gift she’d always wanted. He still sets it up every holiday season, and over the years we’ve added miniature fir trees and snow-covered bridges and a little station with a platform. It’s become a dorky family tradition.

  Mom says trains are romantic. She used to tell me bedtime stories that were all train-themed, stories of little girls named Rose who rode the rails and had adventures involving mysterious strangers and thieves and romances and other plotlines that probably weren’t completely appropriate for a little kid.

  “You never know who’s going to sit next to you on a train,” she told me. “It’s a people’s-eye view of the world. A plane is a bird’s-eye view, but a train gives you something different.” Then she showed me all the classic train movies, unveiling them one at a time over the years of my childhood: Murder on the Orient Express, Strangers on a Train, The Lady Vanishes.

  When I was eight, Mom and I rode the train to New York to see City Ballet, just the two of us. She knew exactly where to sit for the best views—on the left side of the train going down, right side coming back. We bought gummy candy for the ride in South Station—peaches, sour strawberry straws, and twin cherries. And she didn’t let me read my book for the whole trip, even though I was reading Matilda and I was really into it.

  “Just watch, Rose. Trains aren’t about getting from point A to point B. They’re about what’s in between.”

  That person and the person downstairs, snapping at me for nothing, can’t be the same. It defies all sense.

  When she was diagnosed, Mom decided that she needed to take all the greatest train rides in the world while she still could. She bought a big world map and started doing all this research, comparing which routes were supposed to be the most scenic and then marking them out on the map with a red Sharpie: the Rocky Mountaineer in Canada; the Darjeeling Himalayan in India; the Glacier Express through the Swiss Alps. And the Trans-Siberian, which stretches all the way across Russia. The best American routes were on there, too: the Coast Starlight from Los Angeles to Seattle, the Empire Builder, and, of course, the California Zephyr—Chicago to San Francisco, supposedly the most scenic train route in the country.

  She didn’t make the Zephyr or the Trans-Siberian. Actually, she didn’t make any of them. I wanted Mom to go to Russia and see the flat, white expanse of Siberia stretching out into eternity. I wanted to go with her, pack her up and ride all those trains as far as they would take us. But first there was the expense—trains aren’t cheap—and then there was her health. Her symptoms progressed slowly at first, but still too quickly to plan a decade or two of international travel. I guess at some point, she just resigned herself to the fantasy of it.

  Hence the mess of papers currently burying the dining room table. She prints them out and sticks them in these scrapbooks, and keeps telling and retelling the same made-up stories about what all the journeys would be like. Frankly, these days I’m not sure if she’s repeating them on purpose or if it’s the disease playing tricks on her mind. I don’t know what goes on in there.

  As I head to my bedroom, I pass by Mom’s office. I still think of it as her office, anyway, even though she certainly doesn’t do any work anymore. My mother stopped being an architect when she lost the ability to hold a pencil steady. She used to draw the most intricate, precise plans at the slanted desk by the window in this room, and she’d hang her plans on the wall so she could step back and look at them from afar. Now on the wall where those plans used to be, Dad’s taped the huge map that documents all of Mom’s train routes. She’s stuck pictures to the map like a psyc
hopath plotting a murder and then an elaborate escape route. Glancing at the map, I notice that the Hiram Bingham Orient Express isn’t marked out. There aren’t any red lines across South America at all. It must be a new one for her list.

  In my bedroom, I fire up my laptop and quickly Google it. “Hiram Bingham Orient Express” brings up a bunch of hits from rail Web sites and blogs. “This Pullman train follows Peru’s Urubamba River past lush countryside and mist-soaked mountains, winding towards Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca citadel.”

  I print out the route and take it back to Mom’s study. Locating her red Sharpie on the desk, I add the Hiram Bingham to the map.

  Eight

  For the Ballet of the Pacific Coast master class, I show up at the studio wearing the least faded of my black leotards and a new pair of pale pink tights I picked up yesterday, after I realized that all of my hundreds of pink tights had some kind of run or hole in them, or looked otherwise abused. I don’t want the BPC people thinking I don’t take this seriously. When I get into the room, I notice that the rest of the girls look similarly polished for this occasion. Eloise is wearing what looks like almost full show makeup.

  “All right, girls, let’s do this,” says the lead BPC dancer, Felix. “Ready to show us what you’re made of?”

  Felix warms us up with pliés and tendus, but the class quickly accelerates into a mix of exercises that make our regular classes feel like relaxing in front of the television. The BPC is famous not only for their gorgeous productions of the classical ballets, but also for being one of the most demanding companies in the business. Felix’s class is a crazy-rigorous workout, and it’s using muscle groups I didn’t even know I had. Midway through the class, my obliques are pulsating and my quads burn.

  Felix and his partner, a dancer named Nell with long, blond hair twisted high on her head, take us through a couple of combinations. Finally they announce that they’re going to teach us the opening movement to Ampersand, the BPC’s signature original ballet.

  I throw a quick look at Eloise, who grins at me. We watch the BPC perform more or less every year when they come to town. I can practically see the Ampersand choreography in my head, but I’ve never had the chance to dance it. Even though I’m pretty sure I can handle it, I get a swell of nerves in my stomach as Felix starts placing us in a cluster in the center of the room, and gives us our counts for the opening sequence.