by Beth Kephart
Then I was falling too, falling and falling from Nick territory, falling down through the branches. I remember my mother saying, “Oh, my God. Oh. Help us. Oh, Rosie. Honey. I’m so sorry.” I remember the whack of the ground, which might as well have been stone. I remember my mother scooping me up in her arms and the drive to the hospital in the back of Mrs. Robertson’s old-lady car, my head safe in my mother’s sundress lap, my arm swelling up into a sausage, the pain like the pain of a heart attack, I suppose, but down around the fingers. I was in and out of sleep in a clean vinyl room, and then I woke up for good from the anesthesia, and I was puking out my guts. I’d smashed my wrist in three separate places. I had scratches that made scars I still have. I was wrapped up in a cast by some doctor I don’t remember from my fingertips up to my shoulder, and that cast, from the very first, was steamy hot.
In the weeks afterward Leisha visited me at home, drawing her name in bright purples and pinks on my cast, telling me secrets, as she worked, about the people where she lived, who were getting richer by the second and buying multiples of fancy cars. Rocco came with a bag of crushed peppermint patties to perform his best stand-up routines—new material, he told me, though some of it wasn’t very good at all and some of it was old. For my troubles Mrs. Robertson knitted me a new pair of socks to match, she said, my cast, and for being his one and only granddaughter, my granddad came every morning around nine o’clock to show me whatever he had found on the walk between our houses: A stone. A feather. A four-leaf clover. A paperback novel that someone had dropped. A folded-up five-dollar bill. “Life is full of surprises,” he’d say, holding my hand, but not saying much more, lining up his finds across my sill and leaving within an hour or so.
And then there was Nick, who designed me a plane that he launched from my very own bedroom window. Who told me the names of the birds he was seeing. Who found, he said at the end of one day, his owl. Who sat so close, I swear I could have kissed him. Almost kissed him. Dreamed I did.
But it’s my mom I remember best in the weeks after the fall, my mom, who was always there, nearby and close, softly humming some song. We weren’t alone, neither one of us back then, because taking care really is the cure. Taking care and staying close, which somehow my mom had lately forgotten or lately forgotten to believe.
TWENTY
THINK OF MUSIC, Max was saying a few nights later, as a garment or a shell, as a kind of shelter. Think of choreography as story.
It was our tenth lesson together, and he was working me hard, because that was the only way, he’d said, that I’d have a speck of a single chance to bring the dance to Granddad. He’d told me stories of his black cat, Fosse, stories of his competitions, stories about other dancers who’d come and gone, brilliant or moody or dangerous, all of them leaving a trail. Now Max’s eyes were on something I couldn’t see, his ears tuned to music I couldn’t hear. He was still testing my limits. I was dancing in his shadow, dancing beside him, rising and falling and holding and turning and keeping the frame and respecting the sensor and carrying myself like a queen—trying to. “Shift your weight,” Max said. “On one,” he said. “Arms up, up, up, and down.”
I was falling out of balance. I was falling in with him. There was nothing I could do but to take it slow and listen.
“No, Rosie, look at your hands,” he said. “And look at where your left arm is, and pay attention to the count. Again, Rosie. That’s the only way. You have to do it again.”
I tried. Max started laughing, shaking his head. “The waltz is glides and turns,” he said. “The waltz is confidence.”
“I can’t,” I said, smiling so that he wouldn’t know I was desperate, so that he wouldn’t start doubting me even though I had begun to doubt myself. We’d danced together two hours every day since the first lesson. The dance he’d crafted was nothing but simple fundamentals. It would last only a minute. Any doofus should have been able to dance it well, but I was getting nervous.
“It’s your deadline,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But still.”
“Listen,” he said, “it isn’t hard. It’s a lift; it’s turns; it’s shifting weight; it’s a twinkle and a breakaway and a right-hand wrap and a spin.”
“Tomorrow night,” I said, “I’ll be better. I promise. Tonight I’m…off, I guess.” Max’s next lesson was already there, doing mambo hips in front of the reflective glass. She was tiny, dressed in purple. Her name was Julia.
“Confidence, Rosie,” Max said. He covered his heart with his hand. Blew me a kiss, which is just a dancer’s kiss and doesn’t mean a thing.
“Same time tomorrow,” I told him, leaving the floor.
“Rosie at six,” he said. “I remember.”
“I’m getting nervous,” I said, “about the show.”
“Don’t. Just let it happen.”
In the lobby, where I went to change my shoes, I sat for a long time, perfectly still, trying to shed my dizziness. Behind the front desk Marissa sat working the books, her skin cool and dry despite the fact that her partner, William, had been in. He came down from New York two mornings a week. Took the train, walked up the stairs—and they took over. On the mornings Marissa and William danced, there was nobody else on the floor. Then he’d leave, and she’d become her regular self, or as regular as Marissa got, which was not very regular at all.
“I think I’m a bit of a disaster,” I said, for we had gotten to know each other a little by then.
“It just takes time,” she said, not looking up. She was the sort of woman, I was thinking, you could never miss in a crowd of thousands. She was the sort who left an impression. Everything that Marissa wore was fitted. The skin under her makeup glowed. But her beauty was also in the way that she sat and the way that she stood: still and straight but unpredictable too. You had to watch her to understand. You had to watch her move. That day she was wearing low-rise white jeans and a pale pink scoop-necked top. She had glued a single rhinestone near the corner of one eye.
“I’m almost out of time,” I said.
She closed her book. She put her pencil down. She looked at me as if for the very first time. The hair around my face was flat and damp. My dress was ordinary. I’d danced the life out of my mother’s shoes, and I felt the opposite of girlie. Marissa knew about my plan to throw a party for my grandfather. She knew, all of the House knew by now, the hope I was hanging on to, the goal I was fighting toward.
“You have time enough,” she said. “What you need is the right equipment.”
“Equipment?”
“Shoes,” she said. “Size seven?” She pushed herself out of her chair and disappeared to a back room. I sat on the couch in my bare feet, too surprised to move. A few minutes later she was back, a drawstring bag dangling from one hand. She came and sat beside me. “I’m a seven too,” she said, “which is how I remembered.” She loosened the neck on the pouch and slipped one hand inside. “I wore them only once, at a Rising Star competition,” she said, revealing a bright red satin shoe. “Let’s see if they fit you.” They were the prettiest shoes I had ever seen.
Leaning down toward my feet, Marissa slipped the first shoe on, then tightened the buckle. She handed the other one to me, and I slipped it on myself. “Stand up,” she said, and I did. “These are your new dance shoes,” she said. “You start to practice in them now, and by the time of your party you will feel like you are dancing in bare feet. But leave them with me in between the dancing. These shoes have very special soles. They’d be ruined by the streets.”
She was upright now, her back perfectly straight, her eyelashes casting feathery shadows on her cheeks. The phone started to ring, and she shrugged and did not get it. “They’ll call back if it’s important,” she said. She sat there beside me. Her thoughts seemed far away.
“How did you learn beauty?” I finally asked, which sounded so stupid the second I said it, but there the question was. She did not turn. She did not laugh. I reached down to unbuckle the red satin.
> “You know,” she said at last, “I was ten. I’d been dancing since I was six years old. In Moscow. In Warsaw. In Düsseldorf. My father drove a truck. I was my mother’s only daughter. Dancing was my family’s hope for me. I lived and traveled with my coach and my partner, who was ten, like me. I was sponsored by my country. I was too far away, most of those years, for my mother to come and see.”
I pictured gray skies and bright costumes. Big ballrooms and skinny kids. I pictured Marissa with another color hair, pale brown perhaps, like her eyebrows.
“Between the dancing at the competitions I was alone,” she continued. “I was going in and out of dressing rooms, watching the women at their mirrors, watching their faces change with color, trying to understand how they could turn themselves into any mood they wanted. Some of the dancers let me sit beside them. They let me play with their buckets of paint. I made experiments. I learned.”
“And your mother never came?” I asked.
“Once,” she said. “My last competition before I came here to the States.”
“And what did she say when she saw you dance?”
“She said, ‘Marissa, you’re a dancer.’” Marissa’s eyes were wet, her eyelashes heavy. She turned and took a long look at me. “Mothers are proud people, Rosie. And beauty begins with color.”
“These are beautiful shoes,” I said.
“You are your own kind of beauty.”
TWENTY-ONE
“TELL ME,” I said to Granddad the next day, “about the places you always wished you’d been.”
“The places?”
I was sorting the books now, into Toss, D.L., and In Trust, and also a fourth pile, Library. There were stacks about my feet, and I’d asked Granddad for a basic strategy, but he’d said that if I started, I would know just what to do. “Books can get brittle” is all he’d said, and I took that to mean the old encyclopedias, published in 1962, since there had to have been new facts since then, even new ways of deciding what facts mean. “We’re pulping the old encyclopedias,” I’d said to Granddad, and he’d smiled, which was his new approach to laughing. I’d gotten myself a system for the novels, too: In Trust the ones that looked mashed with reading, Library for those that looked too clean to have ever been of interest, and D.L. for books I might have wanted myself, though I was having the worst time deciding.
But then I got fixed on the travel books, all the fairy-tale trivia of the 1960s, the prices of places that might not exist anymore. The stuff was ancient and out-of-date, but it was scruffy, too, with handling. Dots on maps circled with green pen. Writing in the margins in blue ink. Pages accordioned in.
So I said, “Tell me about the places,” because Teresa was in the kitchen pulping apples into sauce and Riot was snoring softly in her basket, and because this part of my Granddad’s past was, like so much else, a mystery. I took the travel books to him and puzzled them out on the bare parts of his bed: Montreal next to Venice, below Barcelona, across from New York, one step down from Verona, sliding to Paris, finally Seville. Country by country, cracks up their spines.
“They still teach geography in school?” Granddad asked when he saw what I’d done. One by one, slowly, he reshuffled the books, restoring, as he said, the world’s quite fragile order.
“So they’re important?” I asked. “In Trustable?”
“They were Aideen’s,” he answered. “They were how she got around in her own imagination.”
“The books took her places?”
“The books were how she traveled.”
I looked at him funny. “Just by reading?” I said, when what I meant was “Just like you?”
“And by looking at the photos, too. The maps. And by telling me about it later, when I got home from work.” He said all that; then he was quiet. I could hear Teresa metal-smushing red deliciouses in the kitchen, striking the cold, hard-sounding bowl with her tool. I could hear the water running. “Money was tight,” Granddad said. “Plus I was cautious.”
“So her telling you was like her being there?” I was just trying to understand.
“The closest she could come. The closest I allowed. Oh, Rosie,” he said, “what regrets.” He stopped talking, and I tried to picture my grandmother in that room at night, moonlight coming in, maybe music riding a tune beneath her words, and the words smoking up like places you could touch and smell and make memories from, because the words were all she had. Both of them would have been younger than my mother is now. The house would have been younger too. The streets outside. All of it younger, and they just dreaming, my grandmother mostly just dreaming, going from nowhere to somewhere in her own mind, because money was tight and Granddad was cautious. And because she died, now Granddad had regrets.
“I’ve never been anywhere but here,” I said.
“Every day’s for living in. That’s my new say-so.” He asked for the eyeglasses he kept on the sill, and after I helped him pinch them to his nose, I wedged in beside him on his bed behind those bars. Slowly he turned the pages of the book titled Seville, running the tip of a blister-colored finger over photos of cathedrals, shops, pig thighs hanging from restaurant hooks like caveman clubs, white horses in dark streets, red flowers bursting out of the tops of roofs, big nests in chimneys, and bulls. Some of the photos had gone blurry with time, and some pages had torn a bit, and one page was missing, hidden somewhere, maybe, inside another book.
He traded Seville for Barcelona, showed me buildings that looked as if they had been built with drips of sand, streets you could play pinball in, a wide and very blue sea. He said, “I’m trusting that you’ve heard of Picasso? They teach him still, in your fancy school?” And when I nodded and he was done with Barcelona, he decided on Verona and started down its streets, sat his blister finger on the steps of its amphitheater, tripped it past the ghost of Romeo, until Verona was enough for one day. He slipped the glasses from his nose. I placed them back on the sill, helped him with his pillow, scooted the books off the bed as he straightened his legs. He closed his eyes, but not before I said that his eyes were the color of the Barcelona sea.
“The mistake I made,” he said, “was thinking there’d be time for places later. I was wrong about that. I was a nest-egg man, feeding the bank what money I made, leaving Aideen to her dreams. Dreaming Aideen’s dreams for her later, but by then it was too late.”
“She had you,” I said. “And Mom. And music. Even if she didn’t have places.” He had started sinking deeper into his pillow, and the sun through the window had pressed a square of white light to his face that made that part of him so see-through that I could see past his skin to the skinny red rivers that rode up and down his nose.
“Your mother’s mad at me,” he said. “I wish she weren’t.” The words came out in ghost whispers.
“Mom can be funky.”
“I tried to tell her, after your father left, about time and what it does, about living and how you have to, but she kept hearing different. She thought that I was criticizing. She thought I could not understand.”
“Granddad,” I said, leaning in so close, because that’s how hard it was becoming to hear him, “you’re tired. You should sleep.”
“Plenty of time for sleeping,” he said. “Plenty of time for that.” But his fingers around my fingers were finally breaking their grip.
“Wishing you sweet dreams,” I told him, and kissed his forehead, and turned and gave Riot a you-behave look. I sat where I was with him for a very long time. Only after the sun had taken its mark from his face did I slip from the bed and drag the travel books over to the pile of In Trusts.
“He’s sleeping,” I told Teresa, rounding the corner.
“You’re a good granddaughter,” she said.
“I have an appointment,” I told her.
“I know.”
“But I’ll be back.”
“You always are,” she said, with her swervy Spanish lilt. “He trusts you, Rosie. Loves you.”
I stared at the floor. I couldn’t look
up.
Outside Granddad’s house time was fast-forwarding. There were birds that weren’t crows on the railroad lines, a skate-boarder on the sidewalk, three cyclists on the street going side by side, making a backup in the right car lane. The closer I got to Pastrami’s and Whiz Bang and Bloomer’s, the more people there were in the way, the more moms with strollers and kids, the more window-shoppers and businesspeople in the bright sunlight, going fast, the better I could smell the cinnamon bread at Sweet Loaves, plumping the air with so much sugar that the air was a sugar high. I stopped for the doggerel at Harvey’s Once Read, the scribble of blue ink on the already sun-faded page:
I rose today to pure gray skies
But then the weather changed
And on the clouds that drifted by
Were birds and colors strange.
I looked past the doggerel through the smudged glass door, and there was Harvey, behind his register, sitting on his stool. He had pushed his glasses up on his forehead and was holding a book very close up to his eyes. The hair that he still had on either side of his head was all gray fuzz grown patchy. There were a couple of regulars at the Best in Store table, where Harvey always put his finds. I poked my head through the door and the chime rang. I waited for Harvey to glance up and see me.
“Nice doggerel,” I said.
He did a half bow on his stool.
“It’s your best one yet,” I said. “I like the ‘colors strange.’”
He smiled, and then I got on with my day. Someone had just pushed open the House of Dance windows. I looked up and caught a glimpse of Max and Annette, thought I saw Marissa. People were pushing in both directions. I walked on until I reached the awning that said Bloomer’s. This was a place I’d only ever gone with Dad. It was dark, as it always was inside, except for way back on the other side of the store, where a bright light shone over a counter and workspace and the proprietor known as Annie Pearl. She was mostly gray with some blond still in her hair. She was wide and wore a gaping apron.