Rules for 50/50 Chances

by Kate McGovern

“You do have steady hands,” I offer.

  “Chuckle, chuckle,” he says, wryly. “But you know what I mean, right? I have to paint. There’s nothing else. You get that.”

  “Yeah.” I used to. I’m not so sure anymore. But I keep that thought to myself, because I know Caleb doesn’t want to hear it, and let the silence hang between us for a minute. “All right,” I say finally. “I should go. I didn’t get any homework done this afternoon.”

  I hang up and look back at my missed-call log. There it is, staring me in the face, just like it has been all afternoon. Unknown. I click on the voice mail and bring the phone to my ear.

  “Hi Rose, this is Roxanna. Give me a call when you get a chance and we can set up a time to have coffee.” Then she repeats her number, twice.

  At first, I struggle to wrap my head around why Roxanna would think I would want to have coffee with her—isn’t that a violation of some professional code of conduct? But then I remember that she warned me that she’d leave an “ambiguous” message if she reached my voice mail. It’s protocol, apparently, not to identify the genetic counseling clinic in a voice mail so that the patients’ privacy is protected. I told her it was my cell number, that no one would listen to it but me, but she said it was protocol. I can tell Roxanna is the kind of person who takes protocols very seriously. Maybe that’s a prerequisite for her job.

  I start to hit Roxanna’s number to call her back, but then I stop myself. I’ll do it later.

  * * *

  There’s a soft knock on my door maybe an hour later, when I’ve finally forced myself to turn my attention to the introduction for my English paper. As usual, Dad pokes his head in without waiting for a response. He doesn’t ever seem to worry that I might be buck naked, or making out with my boyfriend, or doing any number of other things he definitely doesn’t want to see his daughter doing.

  “Dinner’s ready, Ro,” he says. He seems a little off—worried, or tired or something. Like he has been a lot lately, I guess. Only more so.

  “I’ll be right down. Everything okay?”

  “Fine, fine. Just come on down.” He disappears and pulls the door shut behind him. I save my English essay and close my laptop, shooting a quick IM to Lena first: “Dinner. Dad’s acting weird.”

  “Weird like Chico Lederkranz?” she replies, referring to a card she gave me years ago for my birthday with a ridiculous poem about some weird guy named Chico Lederkranz. It had a cartoon picture of a skinny old man making a stupid face, and it became one of those jokes between us—“you’re weird like Chico Lederkranz”—mostly because it meant nothing at all. No one else thinks it’s funny, but it cracks us up every time.

  Downstairs, my parents and Gram are already sitting around the table, passing slices of pizza around. As usual, “dinner’s ready” really means “dinner has been removed from its takeout vessels.”

  I slip into my seat and Dad passes me a slice of mushroom and peppers without asking or even making eye contact. He looks watery, like he’s been teary-eyed recently, and I glance from him to Mom to Gram to see if I can gauge what’s actually going on here. Everybody just looks strange. Uncomfortable or something. Worried.

  I take two bites of pizza, chew, swallow, drink some water, and look around again. No one says anything.

  “Okay. What’s up? Why are you being weird?” Chico Lederkranz flashes through my mind again, but now I know whatever this is, it isn’t going to be funny.

  Dad looks hard at Mom, who is shakily sipping water through a straw. “El, I think you should tell her.”

  “Tell me what?” My heart’s pounding now, making that kind of fuzzy white noise in my ears. “What is going on?”

  “Sssweetheart. I’ve made a decision. I’m going to make arrangements. For long-term care.”

  My mind goes blank for a split second, like a TV at the moment the picture disappears. I’ve been turned off.

  “Wait—what does that even mean?” I look from her to Dad. Mom gestures awkwardly at him, telling him to explain further in words that form more easily than hers do.

  “It just means she’s chosen a facility that she likes. And we’re going to make the arrangements. Now. No one’s moving anywhere just yet,” Dad says. “Just yet,” he says—but what I hear is that Dad’s promise to keep Mom at home, the one we’ve both now made to her, was a lie.

  “Okay, but when? When will you move?”

  “We’ll just wait and see how things progress—” Dad says, but Mom cuts him off.

  “When I sssay so.”

  I stare at her. She’s coherent. She doesn’t need a feeding tube. She doesn’t need round-the-clock care. Sure, she’s been getting worse—she needs her wheelchair now more often than not, she can’t bathe herself safely, and the chorea is more pronounced than it was a year ago. And yeah, I suppose those outbursts, the moments when she loses control, lashes out at one of us, are more frequent than they used to be. But she’s not a danger to herself. She’s not a danger to us. It made me angry when the woman on the Downeaster spouted that bullshit. It makes me furious that my own parents are now, apparently, doing the same thing.

  “It’s absurd,” I say. “You can’t. You’re not dying.”

  “Rose, this is your mom’s decision,” Dad says. He hasn’t touched his pizza. I can see the cheese congealing on his plate, getting that cold, dull look.

  “No it isn’t. This is a family! That’s a family decision. She doesn’t just get to decide to leave us!”

  Gram reaches across the table to touch my arm, but I pull away. “She’s not leaving us, Ro. Even when she does move, you’ll still see her whenever you want.”

  “That’s BS, Gram, and you know it.”

  Mom raises one arm awkwardly in the air and slams her hand down on the table, shutting us all up. My glass rattles.

  “Hey!” Mom says. “Hey.”

  I meet her eyes with mine and force myself to hold them there.

  “I want to do this, fffor you. I want you to go to college and not worry about me.”

  Mom tugs her napkin from her shirt collar, where it’s tucked like a bib on a two-year-old, and turns her wheelchair away from the table. In the threshold between the dining room and the living room, she turns her chair back around to face us again.

  “I’m ssstill your mother. I get to decide what’s best fffor you, one last time.” Then she buzzes out of the dining room. I hear her shift herself into the stair lift. Gram, Dad, and I sit in silence until we hear the bedroom door click quietly closed upstairs.

  “Don’t be selfish about this, Rose. She really does think this is the best thing for you,” Dad says after a moment.

  “I’m being selfish? You’re the one who just let her spring this on me.”

  “Babe, this is for the future. She’s not going anywhere yet. It could be months, hell, it could be years before she actually makes the move.”

  “That’s not what it sounds like to me. It sounds like she’s decided on a place, and that’s it. How am I supposed to react to this?”

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘I love you and support whatever decision you make for how you wish to live the remainder of your life.’ She wants to be in control of this. You and I might not understand that or like it but we have to respect it.”

  Like Mom, I push my chair back from the table and leave them sitting there. Maybe I am being selfish, if that’s what you call this, this not wanting my mother to give up on her life before it’s really over—this. If that’s selfish, then I guess I am.

  Twenty-eight

  Petrilli gives us a unit test on the Wednesday morning that I’m supposed to hear back from PCCA. Coupled with Mom’s announcement, this is a less than ideal combination of events in terms of my ability to focus on calculus (or anything, really). As we wait for our classmates to get settled, Lena glances at my knee, which is bouncing rather conspicuously up and down under my desk.

  “What is your problem, dude?”

  “It’s the thirtieth, dude.”


  Lena looks at me, clueless. She got her acceptance to NYU last week, like I knew she would. Caleb got into RISD. And I got into Cunningham, with a nice financial aid package, too, which felt like more of a relief than I expected it to. Still, PCCA is PCCA. It’s everything I should want.

  “PCCA decisions are out today,” I whisper loudly.

  “Oh shit!” Lena practically yells.

  Petrilli looks up. “Come on, Lena. Seriously?” That’s the kind of teacher Mr. P. is. No detention for swearing, not even a “that kind of language isn’t tolerated in my classroom”—just a deadpanned “Seriously?” That’s why we love the guy.

  “Sorry, Mr. P.” She turns back to me, whispering again. “Shit, I forgot. You’re so getting in.”

  “Ah–right,” Petrilli says, clearing his throat. “Got a quiz today, no open book, no open notes.” He passes a stack of scribbled papers—Petrilli always handwrites his tests—to the kid in the front row with unfortunate white-boy dreadlocks whose name I always forget. “Good luck and thanks for playin’.”

  * * *

  Finally, after slogging through Petrilli’s test and the rest of the day, the blaring fire alarm masquerading as our bell system announces that it’s two thirty. My stomach rolls over itself a few times as I make my way to the public library. It’s a slightly more anonymous locale than the computer lab or the school library, better for checking the admissions decision, no matter what the outcome is. Earlier I was feeling grateful that Lena had volleyball practice and couldn’t come with me—I have a direct order to send her a text message once I find out the verdict—but now I sort of wish she were here. Or Caleb, obviously.

  I check my phone. Caleb sent me a text about thirty minutes ago: “Fingers crossed. Let me know ASAP.”

  The thing is, I don’t know what my own fingers are crossed for. I’ve thought this thing through and through, and I still don’t know what I want the decision to be. I guess I’ll just be relieved to know one way or the other.

  I sign up quickly for an Internet station and log in. My fingers are barely functioning properly as I open my e-mail. Sure enough, there’s a message there saying that the decisions are now available online, with a link to my personal outcomes page.

  What if they mess up the links and you get a URL to someone else’s decision? Like that woman whose book got nominated for some huge prize and then they realized, oops, we confused your book with some other/better book with a similar title. Too bad for you.

  I click the link. The library computer is a little slow, and it takes about five seconds longer than I think I can stand to open the page.

  “Rose Alexander Levenson,” it reads at the top—good, they haven’t mixed me up with someone else, I guess—“Congratulations! You have been admitted to The Pacific Coast College of the Arts Dual BFA/Ballet of the Pacific Coast Apprenticeship Program!”

  Admitted. In. I’m in. I feel a kind of numbness all through my extremities. A split second of joy and relief washes over me and then passes, replaced with a fresh wave of nerves: what about the money? The scholarship information isn’t there on the same page, but scanning the letter I find another link down at the bottom: For more information about your scholarship and financial aid decisions, please click here.

  My phone vibrates loudly against the wooden desk. Caleb. “Don’t leave a sickle cell hanging.” I click the link to the scholarship page and find what looks like a generic financial aid profile with all the possible funding sources listed, alongside the amounts I’ve been offered—most of which are zero, because they’re scholarships I didn’t qualify for, like one for minority students from California and several other in-state-only things. I see that I haven’t been offered any need-based aid, which hardly seems fair, considering that Mom can’t work and her medical expenses are pretty ridiculous.

  For a minute I can’t even remember what I’m looking for, but then I spot it there, just one line among many. Grierson Scholarship Award: Full tuition, room and board. All expenses covered.

  And that’s it. No cheering, no fireworks shooting out of the computer, just a tiny little line, “all expenses covered.” I’m one of the chosen few. I can go for free. To San Francisco. To dance, to start the rest of my life—and my career—as a ballet dancer. If I want to.

  I waste most of the afternoon in Harvard Square, looking at flimsy sundresses I have no interest in buying. Then I walk up Mass. Ave. to the bookstore in Porter Square, where I slump down in the back corner of the nonfiction section and skim a book about psychopathy for an hour. At least Mom’s not charming on the outside and a narcissistic, pathological liar and potential serial killer on the inside. Being in the bookstore reminds me of my first “date” with Caleb, when we met here on the pretense of coffee and ended up getting ice cream instead. It feels like years of my life have passed in the interim.

  Caleb and Lena both wanted to go out and celebrate, but I feel strangely deflated. Maybe I’ve just been thinking about this moment so much, for so long, that now that it’s here, it doesn’t seem real. I’ve been imagining this exact opportunity since I first fell in love with the BPC. Here I am, a decade later, with a chance into the company. I should be doing tour jetés down the street. Instead I walk all the way home from Porter Square, imagining myself in San Francisco, with my days full of ballet. I think of being in the studio for even more hours than I’m used to now, for the next however many years. I think of being surrounded by bunheads all the time, like the girls at the audition.

  I push the front door open with some effort—it’s warping as the weather has warmed up—and survey the sounds in the house to figure out where everyone is.

  “I’m home,” I call upstairs.

  “Kitchen!” Dad says. He’s sitting at the island, working. He glances up from his laptop as I put my bags down on the radiator, but he doesn’t say anything. It’s been tense like this ever since our dinner conversation about Mom. I haven’t brought it up again and neither has Dad, but it’s lingered in the house.

  I sit across from him, not saying anything. Finally, he looks up again. “What’s up?” he asks.

  “I got in,” I say.

  “PCCA? The scholarship?” I nod. “All right!” he says, pumping a fist in the air. “That’s my girl! Yeah, baby!”

  “Dad, Dad. Dad! Stop.”

  His brow furrows, like a dark cloud has blown in, out of nowhere, over his face. “What? I thought this would be the happiest moment of your life to date. This is what you’ve always wanted.”

  The man sitting across from me is a person who, I suddenly understand, would do anything to give me the tiniest glimpse of a decent future. My situation is in no way his fault—the bad genes aren’t even on his side of the family—but that doesn’t matter. He’d do anything to erase the uncertainty.

  I get up from my seat and give him a hug. When I pull away, he’s got tears in his eyes, of course. “What’s that for?” he asks.

  I shrug. “I’m sorry for being a jerk the other night about Mom. Also, you’re a pretty good dad.”

  “Pretty good? That’s the best you can do, you little ingrate?”

  “Quite good. Significantly above average.”

  “I’ll take it,” he says, closing his laptop. “So what’s up?”

  I look over at the refrigerator door, where there are pictures of me in full dance regalia from various performances over the years and a yellowing Cambridge Chronicle article from sixth grade, when I won a big statewide ballet competition. The most recent addition to the collection is a program from this spring’s showcase. Looking at the ever-rotating items on the fridge used to give me this feeling of crazy awesomeness. I know that sounds super egocentric, but somehow remembering all my best dance moments made me irrationally happy. Now, they might as well be pictures of someone else.

  Going to PCCA means living and breathing ballet for the next four years, and if I’m successful there, which I think I could be, and if I’m lucky—which who knows—then for however many years a
fter that.

  I feel Dad’s eyes on me, waiting for a sign of what’s going through my head. “Remember how Mom used to tell me to flip a coin when I couldn’t make a decision, to check my gut reaction?”

  Dad nods. She said it so many times to me over the years, it’s hard to imagine he’d forget.

  “So I sort of feel like, the coin flip came up the way I thought I wanted it to. But my gut doesn’t feel right.”

  “All right,” Dad says. “So what do you think that means?”

  I take a breath. “I didn’t feel like I belonged there. Maybe I just don’t belong in the ballet world anymore. I love ballet, but it’s not how I want to spend what could be the last healthy fifteen years of my life.”

  Dad cringes when I say “the last healthy fifteen years of my life,” but he doesn’t contradict me. He just waits, maybe to see if I’m finished or if I might still change my mind again. Finally, he says, “Okay. What about next year, then?”

  I take a deep breath. “Cunningham. That’s my choice. I can dance there—and try something other than ballet. That’s what I want.”

  The skin around Dad’s eyes crinkles a little bit. He looks almost proud. “You can try all kinds of things other than ballet there. Modern, jazz. You could choreograph. Hell, you could try biology.”

  “Dad.” I cut him off, rolling my eyes. “So how do I tell Mom?”

  “You just tell her,” he says.

  “But I know she always wanted me to be … you know. A successful dancer.”

  “Did you not just get into one of the premier ballet programs in the country? You are a successful dancer, Ro. She wouldn’t want you to go there for her. Please. You know she’d kick your butt if she thought that’s what you were doing.”

  “I strongly suspect Mom has lost the ability to kick my butt, Dad. If she ever had it.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he says. “I bet she could still muster a decent right hook, given the right motivation. For you, I think she could.”

  * * *

  Mom is lying on the bed with a mask over her eyes, but she pushes it up when I knock on her open door and come into the room. The mask rests awkwardly on her forehead, sending her hair in ten directions. I sit next to her and slip it off her head, smoothing her hair down.