The cafeteria—I shouldn’t call it that. It’s like a restaurant with the best view of the Golden Gate and this huge salad bar and a fajita thing, and everyone says George always comes for burrito Friday. I haven’t seen him yet. But you should come. I can bring guests in for lunch.
Okay. This may be the worst thing or maybe you won’t care, but Kate says she’s written you, and of course we all told her you don’t write us back, either, but did you see her email? You should maybe Google her because I can’t keep the shit straight, like positions and principal and soloist or whatever. But anyway. Are you sure we can’t talk on the phone? Because she’s back. It’s been maybe a month? She said she loved New York, but someone from San Francisco Ballet went to a performance she was in in New York, and I guess they lured her back home with a better contract. Or something. For real, Google her and it’s all this stuff about how she broke her NYC contract to come to the SF Ballet, and how awful and irresponsible she is. Which I think is stupid. But anyway, she’s over at our Presidio place a lot. Which, in case you were wondering, is still also AWESOME. We call it the Cockpit. (Because of some Shakespeare theater, Owen says. Don’t be gross. But yeah, it’s all just dudes, so…pretty hilaire.) But anyway, she and Owen talk all the time and go out to lunch sometimes, so I’m sure he’s getting filled in on the whole sitch.
Anyway, I didn’t know if you knew, and if you did, that’s good because that means you’re reading her letters, and if not, then I’m really sorry. I don’t know what to say except that. Sorry. It’s so messed up. But I know the main reason she said she’s back was to be near you. When you come home. Which I hope you do, soon.
Luke. (I am your brother.)
I am colder than I’ve been since I got here. My hands are ice, my scalp is tingling, my stomach is frozen.
The San Francisco Ballet. Without me. Hanging out at the Star Wars house, Cockpit, whatever. Going out to lunch with Owen? She’s a professional ballerina; is she even allowed to have lunch?
That was their date. The Legion of Honor and pancakes at Park Chow and the beach. But why? He said no to her. He stayed with me all day….
Says the girl about to go on a date herself. With Aiden.
Hanging on the door are two dresses that Charlotte and I scavenged from the costume closet. One is blue satin; the other is sparkly and slinky and strappy, slip-like and practically nonexistent. Like something Kate probably wears on her San Francisco lunch dates. Her museum-and-pancakes dates. With Owen.
I take a shower, a long one. Fifteen minutes, most of which is spent standing, still staring at the drain while water runs into my open mouth. I knock on Charlotte’s door and push it open. It is sleepy warm in there, and dark.
“Sorry!” I whisper. “Got any makeup?”
“Yay, midwinter fanciness!” she cheers hoarsely, directing me to a small bag on her dresser top. “You are going to have fun! Good for you!” She yawns.
My short hair is finally starting to grow in just a little, enough for a barrette to hold on to some swept across my forehead. Back in our room I let Vivian sleep and use some charcoal pencil from Charlotte’s bag to give myself a stage-worthy smoky eye. My lips are glossed, legs shaved; this dress fits perfectly.
I have no shoes for a dress. Rather than bother Charlotte again, I just pull on my snow boots.
Aiden knocks to fetch me, and I open the door to his smiling face and a sweater the color of his eyes, which widen as he takes me in.
“What?”
His green eyes move from the sparkly Kate-and-Owen-date slip dress, to my new body in it, to my feet. “You gonna wear those boots?”
“Yes.”
“You still want to go to the party?”
I laugh. “Yes.”
“Because we could just stay here. In your room.”
“Um, no, you cannot,” Vivian’s sleepy voice comes from her bed.
“Sorry, Viv!” I whisper, grab my key, and follow Aiden out the door.
- - -
Antarctica is a free-for-all. The dining hall is draped with flags of every nation claiming some part of this continent, reminiscent of the photograph in our dining room at home of Scott’s last midwinter dinner, Union Jacks and silk sled flags sewn by the crew’s wives and mothers hanging above the beautifully laid table. The last celebration of their lives. It is all very elegant and formal. Except Charlotte’s carefully taped UNDERAGE ONLY table has been trampled already. I feel like a grown-up because (long story long) not only am I wearing a bra with regularity, I also have now tasted alcohol. Vodka, I think—or whatever is in a cosmo, a drink I have chosen simply because (depending on whom you talk to) it was invented in San Francisco. It is a deceptively delicate shade of translucent pink, but it’s a legit drink that provides legit results, especially in a small person who has never had even a sip before.
Being a ballerina is sort of like being a monk.
I wish I could enjoy this. My first dance, first actual date.
A planet away but foremost in my thoughts, Kate is in San Francisco. Kate is a member of the San Francisco Ballet. Kate is with Owen.
I ask Aiden to bring me another drink. He’s more than happy to.
He maneuvers through the crowd and finds us a place to sit, never taking his hand off the small of my bare back. Were Charlotte in her right mind, not so exhausted and overworked, I’m pretty sure she would not have chosen this dress for me.
Dinner is an amazing, fancy buffet, and I eat some rice and start feeling a little better—at least not as tense and very warm and sort of buzzy—especially when I am three drinks in, and people start leaving in small groups. There is laughter and straight-up shouting, and the formal crowd is half gone.
“What’s this?” I slur, “Where are they going?”
“How’re you doin’ there, teetotaler?” he yells above the Diana Ross album the Midwinter party-planning committee decided to favor us with.
I am very fine so far, and I tell him so and ask again why everyone’s leaving.
“You want to see?” he asks.
We run to get into our parkas. But not before he catches me in the dark doorway of the dorm room, pushes me against the wall, and kisses me. Hard. Which makes me want to ditch the parkas and stay here, but thank God Vivian’s sleeping because I am not in a state to make decisions like this. Drunk and reeling. Kate is home, she’s a company member of the San Francisco Ballet, and she is with Owen. So instead I pull him along to go outside in thirty-degrees-below-zero air down the main road and out just a bit into the vast darkness, until we see floodlights set up on the dark ice around a group of clearly insane people.
They’ve taken a chain saw to a thin patch of ice near a crevasse, exposing a large rectangle of the ice-cold Ross Sea.
People are jumping into it. In their underwear.
There’s some kind of warming pool nearby, and the moment they submerge themselves in the freezing ocean, they practically fly back out and straight into this makeshift black plastic hot pool, where they yowl from the instant temperature change, then lean back and revel in the experience.
“The water’s warm,” Aiden tells me, low beneath the screaming of jumpers. “It’s what, thirty-five below out now? The water’s around one or two degrees. So it’s a huge temperature swing once you’ve disrobed and you’re in and out. Hot tub’s supposed to be nice, though.”
“Uh-huh.”
If I wait one more second, it won’t happen.
My parka is off, boots and sweaters, and finally I hand Aiden the sparkly dress. He accepts it without comment, and I’m running on the ice in a black bra and underwear. Years of existing in various states of undress for quick changes in front of stage crew have rendered me unfazed about being half naked around fully clothed people, but even if I were—fazed—I might not be in this moment.
The soles of my feet are on fire, bare on the ice.
People are cheering for me. A guy hooks a wide belt around my waist, attached to a rope on a pulley. I am the only woman
out here. Probably because the others have the common sense not to be, and they aren’t underage drunk and missing ballet, and Kate joining the San Francisco Ballet without me and having lunch with Owen—seriously, is that a euphemism?
I drop in. The water is a meter deep, I slide beneath the surface—Oh God oh God burning burning burning cold—and I am out and running to the hot tub and in it. Aiden’s still standing on the ice where I left him in the dark, clutching my huge parka and all my clothes.
“Come in!” I shout to him.
He smiles. “Divers only!”
I climb out, accept a towel some nice stranger hands me, and race again across the painful frozen snow to the door of our building, followed closely by Aiden who drops my clothes and wraps my parka around my icy, basically bikini-clad form.
Beard stares. Huh. I had not noticed him when we ran past.
“Let’s get you warmed up, Drunky.” Aiden smiles, then picks me and my clothes up, a fireman rescuing a frozen hammered lady, and carries me up the stairs toward my room.
“Oh, wait, stop, first I have to pee so badly,” I whisper, loud, above the Bee Gees blasting from the party downstairs as we pass the restroom door. He sets me on my feet and wraps the cold towel around me. His hand lingers at my waist, I turn my face to his, and we stand in the hallway, kissing.
“Hey,” he says, and pulls me back to whisper, “want to let Vivian have some time and stay with me tonight? You know, in case you get hypothermia. Or something.”
Kate will be a soloist. She will be Gisele. She will dance with Yuan Yuan Tan.
I can never go home.
“Yes,” I whisper back. “Please.”
I duck in the bathroom, dive into the first stall, and it’s like I’ve never peed in my life; every glass of water and tea I’ve consumed since birth has been waiting for this moment. My head is so floaty. Did I really just tell Aiden I would spend the night with him? What the hell is happening?
The tiled walls echo someone being sick in the stall two over from mine. There’re only a handful of women in this building, I’ve met them all but only in passing, so I’m not sure what to say besides, “Um. Hello? Are you okay?”
More being sick. Booze. Stupid party. So far I feel fine, but what if my body hates vodka and I get sick, too, and have a hangover? I never should have done this—
“Harp?”
I’m out of my stall, standing outside the one Charlotte’s in. “What is it? Do you need the doctor? I thought you weren’t going to the party. Are you drunk? Oooh, what did you wear? I think I got your dress wet….”
“Harper.”
Her voice—the tone—is sobering me up pretty quickly.
“Charlotte. Unlock the door.” But she doesn’t even have to. I push it open with my shoulder.
She’s sitting, exhausted, on the gross tile floor beside the toilet. In her pajamas.
She leans her head against the toilet tank.
“Oh, Char, are you drunk? Don’t get drunk in your room alone! Call me next time because do not tell my parents, but I’m drunk, too!”
“Not drunk,” she says, closing her eyes. “Pregnant.”
I close my eyes against a wave of dizziness, and all I see are the McMurdo condoms. Piles, and baskets, and Halloween-candy-sized bowls of condoms.
“Charlotte,” I say. “That’s not possible.”
She is sick again. I hold her hair back.
“Antarctica,” she pants. “It’s all possible.”
The third Saturday in January, I am up before the sun, eager for my secret day of errands, and early enough to cross paths with Dad and Luke in the kitchen before they’re off to the bakery.
“Baby.” Dad frowns. “What are you doing up?”
I shrug. “Can’t sleep. Thought I might as well get up.”
“You’re coming tomorrow, right?” Luke asks carefully.
“Yes,” I say. “Definitely. What’s tomorrow?”
“Harp!” Luke says.
“Moving day!” Dad says. “You better be kidding.”
I’m not. I have completely forgotten Luke is leaving, which just shows (a) what a horrible sister I can be, and (b) just how down in it I am.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m there. Yes.”
They leave me to wait around until the sun rises, and it’s time to go.
My legs hurt. Not dancing, not stretching for hours each day for the first time in years, is wreaking havoc on my body. Lindsay has reportedly taken over teaching my babies, which is definitely better than Simone unleashing her nuttiness on them. Unless they pick up Lindsay’s barre-clutching habits. Then it’s a wash.
Kate came back from New York with second- and third-place wins for both her solos in the Grand Prix, and went right back to attending class with Simone while she waits for an offer from a company. Which could be any day. When she first came home, I begged Kate to tell me everything—how class was, who was doing what—but then I couldn’t bear to hear any more. Her sleepovers became visits, which became phone calls, which have now been reduced to texts.
My heart aches for her the way my legs do for turns.
I think of Owen in the spaces that ballet and Kate aren’t filling. He is there in the mess of longing, and he calls and texts, and I return them all and we’ve spoken a little, and he is being incredibly respectful in regard to my pleading for being left alone just now.
But I miss him.
Mom and Dad have kept their promise to not chase after Simone for a “talk,” but she tracked them down instead.
“ ‘A hundred messages I have left Harper,’ ” Mom reported Simone said. So they went to the studio, and she explained about my hips. And my feet. My arms and neck, all the reasons why, no matter how much of my life and heart and everything I give to it, it will never change the truth.
“But you love it so much,” Mom says night and day. “You can’t just stop. Please don’t let it go.”
She doesn’t understand. And honestly I don’t, either. I just know going to the studio seems more impossible than not going. So I don’t. And I think about Antarctica instead. Better than dwelling on the eighteen rejection emails I’ve gotten from the video auditions.
At 7:31 a.m., I leave the house, stop by our mailbox, and peer inside. My high school diploma. Perfect. I walk to West Portal Avenue, and in front of the bookshop, Hannah is idling in a car. I climb in and kiss Willa’s sleeping face in the booster seat behind me.
Hannah cranks up the heater.
“I can’t thank you enough,” I tell her.
“Better save the gratitude till we see how the day goes. You never can tell.”
“Got it.”
And we’re off, on a marathon tour of the Bay Area, one government building and doctor’s office at a time.
First up, our family dentist, who, like our doctor, thinks my parents know all about the National Science Foundation forms I’m filling out for them regarding the state of my teeth (X-rays, thorough cleaning) and my general physical well-being (blood work, internal exam).
Wintering Over means living on The Ice for months with no way to leave. No way for anyone to come in. Too cold for planes to land, too stormy. Medical emergencies must be avoided at all costs. Only healthy people are allowed to Winter Over. I’ve been eating. I can fake my way through this. And all those years of fastidious personal hygiene are about to pay off.
While Hannah and Willa wait, I go into a nondescript office park in Oakland to take an hour-long multiple-choice true/false quiz about my mental health, answering a couple hundred questions such as, Yes or No: I hate my mother. And Yes or No: My close friends have often told me I have a drinking problem.
I am increasingly, maybe foolishly hopeful. One of Mom’s past teaching assistants is on The Ice and staying through winter. Hannah says this woman absolutely loves Mom. She may be my way in. I’ll clean the Antarctic toilets—I don’t care—just so I get there.
Hannah’s miserable about keeping secrets from Mom. I’m guilt-ridde
n asking her to—but we’re both still doing it, which is a testament to how worried Hannah is about me. And how worried I am about myself. The intense purposefulness that went into preparing for my life with Kate in the San Francisco Ballet has now found itself poured into getting me on a plane in March to Antarctica. To the frozen dark. To the resting place of explorers, even those I’m not related to by blood, whom I have begun to feel a true kinship with: their years of preparation, laser-beam focus, the all-consuming joy felt in the attempt—and then in a moment, it is gone. Nothing matters. Without ballet, without Kate and our Plan, I am nothing, and when I think about it, I can barely stand up straight. I need the frozen dark in a way I cannot describe but that Hannah seems to understand. And so she is helping me.
At last, we are done. Nothing more to do now but wait for NSF approval, and for some scientist at the bottom of Earth to take pity on me. It is an agonizing wait. An audition for The Ice.
- - -
It is a gorgeous day in the Presidio. Rolling green hills and perfect white stucco officers’ homes, renovated into beautiful single-family and rental houses, rise in the blue winter sky. The house Luke is moving into has peekaboo views of the Golden Gate Bridge from the second story. It takes dividing the rent four ways to make it possible, but anyone could see it is worth it.
I’m scared and impatient to see Owen, hoping he’s not here one minute, praying he is the next. I’ve had to be single-minded of purpose to get this chance for Antarctica figured out, but not one day has gone by I haven’t missed him, haven’t wanted to see him. He texts and leaves messages, and I answer them—but maybe he’s done trying to get me to act like a normal person, with common sense and manners. He doesn’t know about Antarctica. No one does. Just Hannah. Well, and Willa.
My hair is down. I’m in my best jeans, a cute sweater.
I’m terrified.
Dad climbs into the back of the U-Haul pickup he’s rented for this auspicious occasion: Luke’s first foray into independent adulthood. His stuff is covered with a blue tarp—a small pile of recent Craigslist finds. Preassembled, barely used Ikea bed; an estate sale dresser; rugs and lamps from various garage sales. Boxes of game junk are labeled and carefully taped. I put my Antarctica: Terrible Beauty book aside to heft one of the smaller boxes up flagstone steps and through the front door of the house.
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