Nan asks if I want to hang out outside with her while my ma shops, so we sit on a bench and chat. Mostly we talk about school and some stuff she’s been doing, and she asks if she can take my portrait. I tell her sure, I like having my picture taken, especially while I’m in my dream suit.
She takes a couple of frames in front of the newsstand on the corner before my ma comes out and we say good-bye. Part of me wants to go home with Nan. Part of me wants to go home with everyone who seems like they have a nice, warm, safe place. I wonder what her house looks like and if there’s a room there for me. But my place is with my ma, and I know that.
A few weeks later one of Nan’s assistants calls and says the New York Times wants to use the photo she took of me in their magazine and is that okay. Ma says it’ll be good for my career, so of course they can, and do they pay models. No, they don’t, the girl tells us, but she’ll get us some copies for sure.
The next Sunday we stop at the newsstand and pull the magazine out of the paper. Holy shit, there I am on page 51, under a headline that says “Portrait of the American Child, 1995.” Ma starts laughing and says, “Yeah! My bud! And they don’t even know you’re a girl!”
Ma doesn’t think it’s strange that I live as a boy. Boys have all the fun, girls have tons of restraints. She gets it. She thinks it takes balls to go up to the African men in the park and tell them I wanna play soccer with them. She respects that. She says who cares, it’s not about what I am, it’s about the fact that I’ve got moves. She says if the boys don’t even notice anything’s up it just means that I’ve got skills! I love my ma so much in those moments. Then I feel bad for wishing she’d get hit by a bus.
Chapter 21
PCS
Manhattan, February 1996
I FINALLY GOT A ROLE WITH MORE THAN JUST A FEW SCENES after nine thousand auditions. It’s a movie that shoots up in Poughkeepsie for two weeks. Ma says it’s so amazing that I got the role and it’s gonna change everything. Including school. I’m gonna miss too much, so I need to go to a special place for actors.
There’s a private school uptown called Professional Children’s School, where all the kids are performers and they make a special curriculum you can take with you to set so you don’t screw up your progress in class. It’s a crazy expensive place, but they gave me a scholarship, and my grandma Edie is making up the rest.
We were home one night not too long ago, and Ma was really upset. She was yelling into the phone and then at no one, because the house was dark again. The electricity had come back on for a spell, but when we flipped the switch that night nothing happened. Same old story, we couldn’t pay the bill, so no lights.
She started making these loud noises that reminded me of a moaning antelope. I’m not allowed to close my door, but I closed it as much as I could and got under the airplane blankets. I lit a candle and tried to read, but I couldn’t concentrate.
I yelled at her to stop screaming. At first she was stunned that I had raised my voice at her, but after a few seconds she went right back to it. I got up and went into her room and said, “Hey. Ma. Ma! Heyyy!”
It was like I was invisible. Nothing. She didn’t even look at me, she was just standing in the corner holding a tissue, screaming at the Rasta Bitch like she was in the room. When Ma’s real upset like that her voice takes on a different pitch. It’s scary. She looks straight through you, and it doesn’t register that you’re speaking. She can be looking into your eyes and you can be begging her to please stop screaming, but it’s like she can’t see you. She just goes on and on. When she’s in these fits I can usually get away with closing my door, and I do, even though I know she’ll yell at me for it later.
I go back into my room and lay down with my pillow on my head. The tension in the air is making me angry and sad, and the darkness is freaking me out. I’m hungry and tired. I want to sleep, I don’t want to go to school in the morning, I never want to take another dance class, and I want to just disappear to Europe with my dad.
I start to wonder how that could ever happen. Maybe I can just not get on my return flight when I go visit him. Would that be kidnapping? Would she have him arrested? Would we be international fugitives?
She cries out so abruptly and with such force, I worry she skewered her hand on something. I listen in the darkness, but her rant picks up again and I know she was just emoting. I exhale deeply as fear starts to burn through me.
Ma has been getting worse and worse with these fits and we have fewer and fewer sweet moments between us now. She smashes things sometimes, but she never hits me, although the blackness inks over her eyeballs. It used to be only at night, but now I’ve stopped knowing which version of her is gonna pick me up from school.
The army cot claps up around my face when I try to roll over and the wooden bar smacks me in the forehead. The shock of this makes me furious and I jump up and scream, “Fuck!”
My ma yells at me from the other room to not fucking curse who the fuck do I think I am. This makes me feel like my face is on fire and I ball my fists. I have to let the rage out, so I punch the wall. One, strong, flat punch, and the drywall dents a little. I can see it even in the darkness.
The pain of this brings tears. I slide down the wall and sit on the floor in the pitch black, crying, holding my hurt knuckles. The thing is, I can’t call someone and tell them how bad this is, because then I’d be a rat.
Looking over at the candles next to the cot, an escape plan begins to form. Maybe I can show them. What if I burn myself? Maybe then they’ll see it and come to my rescue and I won’t have to say anything and I won’t be a filthy rat.
I scoot across the floor using my not-hurt hand and pick up the matches. I light a shabbat candle and hold it in front of my face. How will I do this? It’s a good idea, right? Should I burn my face? No. Then I can’t do that movie. That would be super bad. Should I burn my hand? No . . . that wouldn’t be bad enough. Maybe I can just burn my hair! Maybe if I burn a bunch of my hair off I can tell somebody that I tried to burn my head off and they’ll think that’s so bad that they’ll say I just can’t possibly live here like this anymore. Yeah!
It takes three seconds, and it smells horrible. A big clump of hair vanishes and the air smells like fireworks. Well, that’s not gonna work, there’s no evidence, I just look like I have a stupid haircut. I grab a napkin and go again, this time being careful to catch the singed black bits that fall from the flames.
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, I sneak to a pay phone and call Edie collect. I tell her I need to speak to her and can I come over.
Between tap and jazz I bolt out to the subway and go up to the Upper East Side, which is super-duper not allowed, but I’m willing to risk it.
Edie’s house is so beautiful and pristine it scares me. I don’t want to mess anything up. She welcomes me with a hug and leads me up the stairs slowly.
She’s not a warm person, but we have a special bond, Edie and I. Everyone is always telling me not to call her Grandma, because it makes her feel old, that I should call her Edie, but I don’t like that. It feels too sterile. I keep calling her Grandma because that’s exactly what she is, my grandma, and I don’t want to give that up. I want her to know what she means to me.
I’m wearing my fingerless gloves when I tell her I have to show her something. I can’t quite bring myself to explain what it is she’s looking at when she unfolds the napkin, but I try to telepathically communicate that it’s the physical manifestation of how I feel on the inside, trapped in this nasty cycle of darkness and dance class. She doesn’t seem to get it.
“It’s my hair, Grandma.”
“It’s your hair? How did your hair get burned and into this napkin, iO?”
The words feel like sharp objects lodged in my throat, but I push them out, at risk of being a dirty rat.
“It got burned on one of the candles in the house. We don’t have any lights right now.”
“Oh dear! Really? Why not?”
“My ma says she can�
�t pay the bill.”
“Ohhh. Oh dear.”
She has me call the dance studio and tell my ma where I am, even though I just want to hide. She feeds me some tuna fish and olives and I fall asleep on her corduroy sofa. She tucks a blanket in around my edges like she always does. The cozy feeling makes me want to cry for longing. It makes my heart hurt for some reason, like it’s too much of a good thing I want so bad.
At one A.M. the doorbell rings long and hard. I wake up startled and afraid. I’m warm and deep asleep and I don’t want my grandma to answer it. The bell goes again, sharp and piercing. A light flicks on in Edie’s bedroom and she comes out in her long white nightgown and slippers, shuffling carefully across the black stone floor. I watch her with dread as she moves toward the stairs.
Ma starts yelling my name in the street. I want to die.
I hear Edie try to speak to her sensibly three flights down, but Ma starts yelling up the stairs for me. The thought of her volume hurting Edie’s ears makes me stand up and gather my things. I hear her on the stairs screaming for me to come on, let’s go, it’s time to go home, adventure runaway bullshit playtime in the castle is over.
I’m angry as I drag myself toward the door. She’s getting louder and louder, so I bark down that I’m coming and to stop fucking yelling.
When I get down there, Edie is standing in the entranceway in some kind of trance. She looks up at me slowly and licks her lips, unsure of what to do, resigned to the fact that the banshee mother will always win. She asks my ma to wait a minute, goes upstairs, comes back and presses twenty dollars into her hand, beseeching her elegantly to take a taxi.
Ma tries to wave off the money, but Edie won’t let her, so we take it, but we still get on the train. Ma is pissed that I took off like that and doesn’t stop ranting at me the whole way downtown.
When we get off at Bleecker Street I walk real slow so she’ll go ahead of me. Trailing behind her up the dark street, glaring at her back with so much hatred, I realize that her shoulders are lopsided and she’s wobbling. This pulls my mind out of the sticky swamp of sleepiness and I observe this new development with sharpened eyes. Sure enough, she’s limping. She’s trying to stand tall and hide it, but there’s no denying it, my Viking warrior priestess mother is hurt.
WHEN I GET BACK from the movie shoot, I start at the new school. It’s a weird place. Macaulay Culkin, the kid from Home Alone, lives next door, in a fancy high-rise with a doorman, with his brother and sister, who both go to the school, plus two other siblings, and their mom.
I imagine their house to be a floor-through place brimming with luxury and all of the toys one could buy oneself if one were a multimillionaire at fifteen.
I try to get close to him at recess. He’s like some kind of glowing magnet. If you get into his orbit, maybe his good luck will encompass you, too, and people will want to be your friend or give you roles. We play basketball together in the gym a lot, but I don’t think he even knows my name. He’s fifteen and I’m ten so I’m just a scrappy runt compared to him.
This school is like the X-Men academy. Everybody has a secret hidden talent that makes them a mutant. We’re not like other kids, we’re the chosen ones, the ones that get up on the stage in front of the masses and entertain them. The one grain of sand separated out from the beach of humanity and put up on a pedestal to be gawked at. Either because we’re so gifted or because we’re so freakish. My gender mystery hardly ripples the pool in this circus.
I feel on edge in this fancy school, a sense that I’m out of place. This is compounded when I see that a girl in my new class, Rachel the figure skater, is driven to school every day in a black car with a gloved chauffeur. There’s the Korean violinist whose entire rich family moved to New York so she could come here and eventually play at Carnegie Hall. These kids are all on fancy meal plans. Their parents pay hundreds of dollars a semester for them to get the nice meals at lunchtime. I eat the orange Creamsicles out of the dessert cooler because that’s what I can afford to buy.
There’s a teacher here, Mr. Ryan, a tall skinny white guy, who’s in charge of the gym at lunchtime. He’s been giving me shit about the fact that I don’t eat normal food. He’s threatened to not let me play basketball if I don’t start eating regularly, but I don’t want to tell him it’s because I can’t afford the food. How would they look at me if they knew that?
It’s fucking cold and disgusting out, and it’s hard as hell to get here. It’s way on the West Side, so I’m late almost every day. They really don’t like that here. It’s different the way they disapprove in this place. They give you that white-people disapproval frown here, which seems to assess your potential in life based on your performance now. They act like you’re showing them your essence, the truth of who you are, based on whether or not you show up late to class.
We have to take three trains to get here and my ma is always late so we’re always late. They think it means I don’t take school seriously, so they start to take me less seriously, and that sucks—to know people are investing less in you, expecting less from you, because of something that’s out of your control.
Lincoln Center is just three blocks away, the place where we’re all supposed to end up if we do our jobs right. American Ballet Theatre is there, that’s where they put on The Nutcracker, Hansel and Gretel, all the ballets and operas and plays that we should be in if we have any talent in us.
The dancer kids stand around outside, loitering with their feet permanently turned out in first position, as if they’re showing off that they’re part of this tribe.
When we go there I stand up straighter; I remember the thread that’s supposed to be pulling my head up from above, straightening out my neck and spine. I turn my legs out so I walk in first position. No slouching. I pretend to be one of the gazelle-ish boys to fit in.
Across the marble courtyard is Juilliard. Hallowed ground. The place where only the most gifted go. The place where I have to end up, to prove that I’m worth anything.
Beyond the American Ballet Theatre and behind the Metropolitan Opera House is the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This is where they keep a record of the fruits of all of the many generations of talented performers’ labors before me. Cassette tapes with recordings of every Broadway show, VHS tapes of all the old movies from silent to Star Wars, sheet music by my beloved Gershwin, recordings of West Side Story. All of these to be studied and emulated. By my ma. By me.
I don’t want to be here right now, but I have to wait for my ma. She’s pulling something for us to practice at home.
It’s dark by the time we’re ready to go. It’s snowing outside and all our layers are damp. It’s cold. I’m tired from school and I want to go home. I want to go to somebody else’s house. A place where it’s warm and there’s food getting cooked. It’s fucking depressing and I don’t want to go to Broadway Dance, but Ma doesn’t negotiate class.
We walk past the Met and their restaurant and I want to eat everything they serve, but I know the best I’ll get is a free couple of slices of bread. I literally cannot even imagine what their foods taste like. Lush and rich soups. Thick cuts of meat. Hearty potatoes.
Fuck this. I don’t want to go to class. I don’t want to be trained. I don’t want to have perfect posture. Yes I do . . . I just want to go home right now. And I want a piece of cake.
IN A FEW MONTHS, Mr. Ryan will forbid me from playing ball until I eat and we will fight about it in the gym. My teacher, Lucy, will tell me that kind of behavior is unacceptable and scold me in front of the whole class. Embarrassed, I’ll stick a hot nail in her weakest spot, telling her maybe her adult braces and hairy legs are why she can’t get a boyfriend, and she’ll start to cry. The class will then treat me like a pariah, further isolating me in this castle of privilege, and I’ll get so sick of the rich kid song-and-dance that I’ll freak out and barricade myself in the classroom with a desk, screaming through the door for Lucy and all the rest of them to fuck off.
Th
e administration will politely ask me not to return.
Chapter 22
Rocky
Midtown, spring 1996
BALLET STUDIOS ARE ALL LINOLEUM AND MIRRORS. A JUMBLE of stale sweat and skewed body image. People are there for two reasons: either it’s their job, or it’s how they want to see themselves—lithe and straight backed, twirling through a world where body mass is veiled by impossible grace. Walk down the hall of any dance school, peek in the window, and you will see the same look of determined ferocity, the glare of willpower stretched to its limits, the bulging eyeballs of bodies protesting hell-bent minds.
Dancers dress like a game of Jenga: tights tugged down to the ankle peeking out of sweatpants pulled up to the knee, waistband rolled down to show off their hip muscles, a leotard over jutting collarbones. Bleeding toes are wrapped in tape and shoved in slipper-shaped boxes. At some point someone invented the jazz sneaker, giving dancers a needed break, but wearing them is for sissies. It’s like showing up to a gala in sweatpants. If you want to ball, you have to be brazen, a cowboy in tights; rugged, roughed up, stripes earned. Ligaments are torn, bones are cracked, shins are for splints, and good knees are a fleeting gift to the young.
My mother has danced in a single pair of ballet slippers for three years. That is akin to having only one sweater for a lifetime. Your singular protection from the elements, the first thing judgmental eyes size up, the measure of how seriously you take yourself. Their canvas was beige once upon a time, but now they are tattered, black and streaked from the floor, the elastic straps hang loose, and a toe peeks out on the left side. It would be cruel to begrudge her this if ballet slippers were expensive, but they aren’t. I know this, and I’m only ten years old. Ballet slippers are cheap, but it has to be important enough to you to go down to Capezio and buy yourself a new pair. My ma doesn’t seem to mind.
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