Trying to Float

by Nicolaia Rips

  Her face twisted.

  She twirled a plait on a long finger.

  “Tutus and slippers are not part of the dress code. And no pink,” she spat.

  My tutu was tightening.

  “You,” her eyes trained on me, “think that dance is about princesses, fairy godmothers, and hunky men . . .”

  I hadn’t considered that last one but was happy to include it.

  “But for me and others, all of that is passé.”

  Pippi and others? “Passé”? The revolution was afoot and I was wearing the wrong shoes.

  “For us,” Pippi continued, “drunks stumbling around a bar is truer to dance than nutcrackers . . .”

  Better tell my parents they have a future in dance.

  As the weeks passed, Pippi led us through exercises aimed at drawing out our emotions. She would do this by putting on a song and asking us to express our feelings through movement, during which she would call out helpful instructions:

  “Olivia, I really like your use of space; if only Nicolaia could do the same.”

  “Beautiful, Greta, the raw emotion in your spins is breathtaking.”

  “Wow, Uhura, something must have happened to you this weekend, this is powerful.”

  “Nicolaia, can you keep it down?”

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  “I could hear you breathing.”

  “I want to express myself too.”

  “Okay, okay, just do it to the side. And try not to move your legs.”

  “Isn’t that how you dance?”

  “No, you’re moving them excessively. No excessive leg movement. And try not to breathe so loud!”

  I found it all very confusing because while there was “no wrong way to dance,” Pippi assured us, I was never doing it right. If Pippi was correct and dancing was the essence of all of us, what did that mean about me? It took me many years to pinpoint the exact moment when I labeled myself as an outsider, but I think it began here.

  Though Pippi was fond of “we,” she was really only interested in the thin, athletic, and pretty “we,” which excluded me, described by my mother, quite generously, as “solid.”

  It also excluded Doris, a classmate, who was short and mannish.

  When Pippi asked each of us to dance so that she could get an idea of our talents, Doris displayed moves even more grating than mine: jerky thrusts of the arms interrupted periodically by strutting. Doris and I sat together during Pippi’s dance class and came to know each other.

  Doris was quiet (brought to this country from Brazil when she was seven, she was already well trained in the martial arts, the source of her dance moves), but there was a great deal going on inside her head.

  Our conversations involved me making suggestions and her responding with facial expressions.

  “Doris, are you thinking bad thoughts about Pippi?”

  A smile.

  “Does it involve a gun?”

  A shake of the head, no.

  “Rope?”

  Another shake.

  “Fire?”

  A nod yes.

  “You’d like to set Pippi on fire and push her out on stage in front of the parents and principal?”

  A smile from Doris.

  I tried to convince Doris that Pippi wasn’t trying to be mean. Pippi just had a passion for dance and an idea of what it should look like, and she couldn’t bring herself to foul it up with me in my tutu and Doris, the stomping pyromaniac.

  Another thing about Pippi was that she made sure to include her own children in every performance. So the group numbers were filled exclusively with Pippi’s daughter and son (both of whom attended the school), the thin girls in the class, Uhura (my first crush), and a girl named Zalle, who was the only one among us who could actually dance.

  Every day I took my place with the solids, and instead of dancing, we sat as others bounded around us. We were instructed to wave our arms in rhythm above our heads and clap at the end.

  When, after a couple weeks, a parent of one of the solids complained, Pippi announced that the solids and their parents did not have to worry because she was planning a Christmas show which would include all of the kids.

  When the day of the performance arrived, parents gathered in the auditorium. Many, including my own, had never seen their children in a dance recital. The hall was full.

  The time at which the show was to begin came and passed.

  Half an hour late, Pippi appeared on stage. She was dressed in her black leotard, striped stockings, and apron.

  Clearing her throat, she squinted into the crowd.

  “Excuse me,” she began.

  The crowd quieted.

  “Now, I know I invited you here to see the kids in 5C dance, but because we got started late, I’m going to have to cut a couple of the dances. Whoever is left out today will be included in a future dance. Thank you.”

  Pippi attempted a smile and then glided off stage.

  As the lights dimmed, Pippi called out the names of those who would dance. The others would sit on the stage.

  Doris and I took our places on the stage. But instead of sitting quietly, some of the solids, including me, began to cry, which became infectious, and our parents (many of whom were themselves solids) yelled curses at Pippi from the darkened room.

  My mother had brought a couple of her friends from the Chelsea Hotel, and they added their own insults. My father meanwhile was using the chaos as an opportunity to sneak out the door in search of an espresso. “Michael!” my mother screamed as she tried to console some of the sobbing children. During this attack, the chosen kids danced.

  Pippi’s moment as a choreographer of avant-garde elementary school recitals did not last more than a few days. For reasons unknown, Pippi was gone from the school for the next few months. When she finally returned, she leapt from office to office, classroom to classroom, attempting to explain herself. But she stumbled badly on the unhappiness she had sewn, and no one was willing to help her up.

  A modern dance.

  EYES

  MY MOTHER WAS waiting for me when I returned from school. She watched from the doorway as I put my backpack down in the entrance and started to root around the kitchen for a snack.

  “Do you know why Ms. Markowitz called and asked to schedule a meeting at school?”

  Though Ms. Markowitz had said nothing to me, I knew what this was about.

  Following the example of other teachers at the school, Ms. Markowitz was undoubtedly preparing to give out an award to the best student in her class. A lot would go into the decision—­class participation, attendance, tests, and helping those who struggled with their homework.

  I would never have admitted this to anyone, including my parents, but there really wasn’t any question as to who would get the award.

  I imagined that at the meeting with my parents, Ms. Markowitz would explain the importance of the award and go over the speech which I would be expected to deliver to the school when I received the honor.

  The meeting took place a week later. As soon as Ms. Markowitz entered the room, I began to talk.

  “Ms. Markowitz, I’ve already planned my speech and it will make you very proud. Also, I shall have a few comments on how I think the school could be improved.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I shall suggest some additions to the library. Marx Brothers screenplays, for example.”

  “In an elementary school, Ms. Rips?”

  “Why not?! We must raise the bar in public elementary schools, and not allow ourselves to fall behind!” I replied with enthusiasm.

  My dad clapped me on the back.

  “Ms. Rips,” Ms. Markowitz interrupted, “may I remind you that you cannot read.”

  Heavens!

  “Which is why I’ve
asked your parents here today. This school cannot possibly allow you to advance to the next grade unless you can read, and at this point, you are the only one in the class who can’t.”

  Father shifted in his seat. That a school might insist that a student know how to read took him by surprise.

  I must confess, though, to being his accomplice. From the few hours I’d devoted to reading, it became clear to me that it was going to be a tough go, and having inherited Father’s dislike for hard work, I was not inclined to put in the effort. In addition, the books my dad read to me were worlds more interesting than what they were giving me at school (“Pat makes a cake. Pat eats the cake.”). By the time my childhood quirk blossomed into certifiable illiteracy, I also showed a disturbing disdain for what only I considered “too easy.” So there it was: father and daughter, tobogganing off the steep cliff of ignorance.

  My mother, who had indulged my father’s theories of early childhood education, now felt the need to intervene.

  “Be assured, Ms. Markowitz, we shall work with her all summer. Just sign her up for second grade, and if she isn’t able to read by the end of the fall, you can send her back.”

  Ms. Markowitz wouldn’t budge.

  “Unless she is disabled, your daughter is not leaving second grade.”

  The truth is that Ms. Markowitz and I got along, and she always had my best interests at heart. To this day, I am fond of her.

  “Myasthenia gravis!” my father trumpeted.

  Silence.

  “Muscular weakness of the eye,” he translated. “If untreated, there can be damage to the brain, as may be the case here.”

  His family had been in the optical business in Nebraska for many generations, and the Latin names for ocular oddities was the entirety of his inheritance (and mine).

  “Now that you mention it,” Ms. Markowitz remarked, “your daughter does not seem to follow the text of the page as carefully as others, which could . . . just possibly . . . be the result of a weakness in the muscles. I’ve seen it before.”

  My father nodded—the sort of intelligent nodding that accompanied his most idiotic ideas.

  “Yes,” Ms. Markowitz concluded, “a muscular problem. Possibly acute. Maybe even brain damage. She has always been the odd man out, not really good at anything. And her hand-eye coordination always seemed off.”

  With that, I was allowed to pass into second grade.

  —

  Soon after I was diagnosed by Ms. Markowitz, my parents received the news that the school system set certain conditions for my treatment, which, if not met, would cause the handicapped child (me) to repeat the previous grade . . . meaning back to Ms. Markowitz.

  And this is why for an entire year I was forced to spend two hours every day at an experimental eye clinic in midtown Manhattan.

  On the first day, my father and I rode the subway to the clinic. It was on the twentieth floor of a hospital complex. The waiting room was filled with unhappy children and their parents, all of them stewing in the chemical odors from the laboratories next door. Unlike me, though, these kids had scary problems—not pretend ones created by their fathers.

  After an hour, a man in a lab coat opened the door to the waiting room and called my name. I walked slowly toward him.

  I stopped to have a last look at my father as I passed through the door to the laboratories. Given what they were about to do to me, I might never see him again.

  But he was not in his seat. Instead, he had made his way to a shelf against the wall, where he was flipping through a stack of medical magazines. I knew exactly what he was up to: he was expanding his vocabulary of rare eye diseases in anticipation of his next cocktail party.

  The experiments forced upon me that year depended on who did the testing. Each of the doctors had a different theory about how eye problems were cured, and there was competition between them over whose treatment was most effective. I sat in front of screens as different images and words flashed before my eyes. Liquids were sprayed onto my corneas. Every so often the rotating ophthalmologists would get excited and announce a breakthrough. I personally believe that these experiments ruined my eyesight; I started the year with 20/20 vision and came out needing glasses.

  But the eye clinic wasn’t the end of it.

  Once the doctors had assured my school that my nonexistent physical problem had been cured, I still couldn’t read. So from the eye clinic, I was transferred to another program—the GO Project. The GO Project offered free schooling to kids at risk of failing. It was there that I met Nell, a young woman who had been admitted to a graduate program at Harvard and was tutoring until she left for school.

  Hearing that I’d spent a year at an experimental eye clinic caused such a gush of sympathy in Nell that she agreed to spend whatever time was needed to get me to read. Within seven months, I was reading. The first book I ever read on my own was Jerry Seinfeld’s Halloween, and after that there was no turning back.

  My cure did not, however, convince my classmates that I was normal. In addition to thinking I was retarded, they found my false sense of superiority (from my father), the rumor that I was murderous (the pool incident), and my bangs cut at an odd angle (my mother) incredibly distasteful. So there I was: a murderous retard with a bad haircut.

  STORMÉ

  MY STATUS AT school slowly changed from being a kid who was ignored to one who was bullied.

  This was not easy on me, as it was not easy for the others locked in that same cage (the slow, fat, unattractive, and shy), for no matter what you did—how nice you were or how much you pretended that what the other kids said didn’t bother you—you would never be released from their taunting. The sound of it was in your head when you went to sleep and there again in the morning.

  The effects of this must have shown on my face, because one day, returning home from school, I heard a voice call out to me from across the lobby of the hotel.

  “Come over here, baby doll.”

  I knew the voice. Its owner, Stormé, was a regular in the lobby. She was someone my parents liked, but we’d never spoken.

  I had been taught that children should address adults by “Mr.” or “Miss,” and since it was unclear which Stormé was, I had decided it was better to avoid Stormé than insult Stormé. That day, for example, Stormé was dressed in military pants, a work shirt, and an opal-and-turquoise necklace.

  There was the additional puzzle of Stormé’s age. Her face was soft and lineless, but her hair was silver; she had an athletic build, but struggled with the crippled gait of an old person.

  Then there was Stormé’s race. The skin was whiter than any I’d ever seen, and yet Stormé’s hair had the texture of a black person’s.

  I had met others who were hard to identify by age, sex, or race, but never all three at once. Stormé was a mythological creature.

  I crossed the lobby.

  “How you doin’, baby doll?” The voice was gruff.

  As uncomfortable as Stormé made me feel, Stormé struck me as the sort who would be sympathetic to someone who was being bullied.

  “The girls in school are making fun of me.”

  “You tell Stormé why, girlie.”

  “They think I’m a murderous retard.”

  “Do you know what Stormé has down there?”

  Stormé glanced toward the lower half of her body.

  “I’m not sure. I’m still a child.”

  Stormé tugged on the left leg of her pants.

  A pink revolver was strapped to Stormé’s ankle.

  “That, baby doll, is my best friend. And if anyone gives you trouble, you just give Stormé a call, and my friend and I will come down there and take care of it.”

  “Thank you, Stormé, but I’m not sure my elementary school allows guns.”

  “Well then, young lady, Stormé will just shove her boot right up their lit
tle asses.”

  From that day on I went to bed knowing that I had a sexually ambiguous and incredibly violent eighty-year-old woman watching over me. And with that knowledge, who really needs to be afraid of a couple of prepubescent girls?

  BUT NOT THE FISH

  I LIVED WITHIN a twenty-minute walk of my elementary school, but despite my daily vow to arrive at school early, something always went wrong. And that something was usually my father.

  My parents insisted on taking me to school. It was not that they were helicopter parents. They were the opposite. They had nothing else to do. They were like balloons that had escaped a child’s grasp—pointlessly floating.

  “Focus!” I would plead with my mother as she took a twenty-minute detour from making me breakfast. And my father was forever jumping from one obscurity to another. By the time he and I got to know each other, his life had become a diversion from a task long forgotten.

  Each morning began with the intention of getting me to school on time, but my dad would soon get distracted, and the next thing I knew, I was in the middle of the street with him, traffic swerving and honking around us, trying to get a cab to take us the eight blocks between our house and the school. Needless to say, I was never on time.

  One day, before I’d finished breakfast, my father, heading out the door, announced that he was picking something up from his tailor (a short Korean gentleman, whose shop was across the street). He would meet me in the lobby of the hotel.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll have plenty of time to get to school,”

  When Father didn’t show up in the lobby, I walked across to the tailor. Staring in the window, I noticed the tailor and his wife, tucked behind the counter, going about their business, and there, just in front of the counter, was my father, lying on the floor. Next to him, also on the floor, was a woman. Both of them were surrounded by springing fish.

  On the way to school, Father explained what had transpired so that I could better inform my teacher of why I was late:

  For years he had been engaged in a “gentle back and forth” with the tailor (which was curious, since I am pretty sure the tailor spoke no English and my father no Korean) about the photographs on the walls of his shop. The photographs, according to Father, were of the tailor flying through the air, striking much larger men, often simultaneously, with his fists, feet, and head.