The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders

Mrs. G didn’t allow anyone to watch, but Eve would sometimes peer through a crack in the doorway. And as Helen Gilbert turned her wrath on some kid over a bungled combination or a lazy turnout, Eve would reminisce about being a girl down on the Bad River, about how the one thing she’d wished for most of all was to learn to play the piano. Though she knew it wasn’t something her folks would even consider, not with seven children to raise—her father tending the back roads for the county, her mother wrung out from housework that seemed to come to nothing—still she’d wanted it. She didn’t hold anything against her parents—Lord knows, they’d had it hard enough—but if she had, it would have been that she’d got no lessons of any kind: no piano lessons, no dancing lessons, no language or embroidery or sewing lessons.

  What she had got was a summer job working a farm near Hayes, South Dakota. She’d had to ride her pony, following the railroad tracks morning to night to get there. And though she’d packed herself a lunch, planning to stop for a picnic, the dumb thing had bucked her off twice on the way. She’d had to discipline him each time, then hold tight to the reins so he couldn’t turn his head to bite her when she got back on. And after the second throw, which happened when the train came by, sounding its whistle and scaring her pony so badly that she had to chase him, limping through the open field until he’d settled down enough to let her come near, she couldn’t risk stopping for lunch. She was twelve years old, by herself, and far out in the country. There wasn’t going to be anybody to help her. She bit her lip, doubled the reins around her hands, and gave that pony a stiff boot.

  She got herself all the way to the farmhouse, where the wife was sick, the farmer was in the fields, and the little kids were desperately in need of just about everything. She caught chickens and wrung their necks, bled them out, plucked and fried them for dinner. She killed three rattlesnakes in the barn, chopping off their heads with a garden hoe because the little ones couldn’t play in the yard with a nest of rattlers nearby. She bathed the kids and nursed the wife—made her broths and mashed her food, brought her cool cloths and clean sheets. She stayed out there all summer. She was lucky that when school started, she got to come home and go into the seventh grade. She’d always done well in school, ended up class president, head of journalism club, valedictorian, so it was good of her folks to give her that chance. She hadn’t had to keep on doing farm work. Some of the less fortunate ones had, but then, some hadn’t wanted anything different.

  * * *

  —

  After class, Eve would sit and chat with Mrs. G while the kids got changed into street clothes. Since Leon was the only boy—which meant the girls would have to let him through their dressing room, into the bathroom, to change, and he couldn’t come out again until every girl was dressed and they gave him the signal—it took a while. So Eve and Helen Gilbert got to be friends.

  Helen would tell Eve about her time in vaudeville, her stint with Ballet Russe, how she had friends who were still traveling the world, how if she hadn’t got distracted with getting married and all that nonsense—ha-ha-ha. They both knew that story.

  They’d get to chatting so much that Eve would always be the last one out of the studio. Other moms would poke their heads in to say hello, or just sit in their cars waiting for their kids to come out, but Eve and Mrs. G would go on and on.

  And Mrs. G was thrilled to have Leon. “We need boys,” she’d say. “If we could get more boys like Leon, then we could really do something.”

  Because Helen Gilbert had dreams and, like a shaman or a fairy godmother, she could make things happen. She had the charisma of someone who really knew things: she’d walked the streets of London and Paris and danced at their opera houses; she’d wandered the canals of Copenhagen and Saint Petersburg and performed for their monarchs and statesmen. And she made it clear that, though it rose and shaped itself from the basest limits of our existence—from sweat and bleeding blisters, from the inescapable force of gravity, from the endlessly circumscribed range of the body—ballet was nothing less than the one pure expression of humankind’s ability to transcend, to make this coarse material realm at once central, ethereal, and fully luminous, as if the very word—ballet—meant nothing less than “to ripen, to bring to fruition.”

  Eve would get into such lengthy discussions with Mrs. G that when they were all finally dragging back to the car in the pitch black, she’d have to apologize. “Sorry,” she’d say to the kids. “She gets to talking and I just can’t get away.”

  But they didn’t mind. As Mrs. G went on about how dance surpassed all other art forms, how it lifted one beyond the mundane, they were all ears.

  “It’s not like playing the cello,” Mrs. G would start. “If you want to play the cello, the cello’s right there. You can just sit down and learn to play it, right? But with ballet, you have to build your instrument. You have to build your body. And you have to build it in the right way before you can even begin to learn to use it. If you do it right, it’ll take you places you can’t even dream of. And I don’t mean just different towns and cities—inside places, like that place inside all of us that can fly!” She’d laugh, elated; then her face would darken and contract, and she’d reverse direction without even slowing down. “It takes determination and years of hard work,” she’d say. “It can be the doorway to everything beautiful, sure, but you have to be so dedicated.”

  They listened. And as she spoke, their world expanded and became so brightly lit that their ordinary sky began to crack and chip and fall away like the outgrown shell of a baby bird, and they could see themselves emerging into this new order, this shining promised land on the far other side of anything they’d ever known.

  “If you don’t build your body correctly, you won’t be able to take a single step with grace and purpose. But if you do, by God, you could weigh five hundred pounds and still be a star. Look at me.” She’d stand up from the high stool at her desk and demonstrate a few simple steps—a port de bras or révérence or chassé, pas de bourrée. And she was right: she was glorious.

  “Too bad she can’t take off some of that weight,” Eve would say when they were back in the car. “It must make her terribly uncomfortable.”

  Then late one night, Mrs. G started talking about having a ballet class for the moms, which Eve was all in favor of, saying she’d be the first one to sign up.

  “I can organize it,” Eve said. “Just give me a list of who might be interested and I’ll give them a call.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Not a bit. It’d be fun. It’ll give me something to do while the kids are at school.”

  They both laughed.

  “If you want to,” Helen said.

  “I can’t wait. Really. I’d love to.”

  And just like that, they were partners.

  * * *

  —

  Eve got the adult class going with all the zeal of the converted, and after only a few months, there was a write-up about Helen Gilbert and the Academy of Ballet in the R.C. Gazette, along with a picture of all the moms lined up at the barre in leotards and tights, their hair carefully sprayed into matching high bouffants. And somewhere between the pliés, the port de bras combinations, and the coffee klatches that followed, they started coming up with big ideas.

  Mrs. G wanted her ballet school to put on The Nutcracker. They could do it at the local high school, she said. She was already the choreographer for the school productions, so she could arrange it. Eve could design the costumes and do the parent organizing, and everyone could pitch in with sewing, shoe dyeing, set painting, and carpooling to classes and rehearsals. If they all worked together and the kids worked hard—“If,” Mrs. G repeated firmly—they might just do something that had never been done before.

  “Just imagine. A Snow Queen in a glimmering white tutu sailing through the air in a grand jeté to piqué arabesque,” Mrs. G said—all of which she demonstrated in
grand style with her head and arms—“right here at the Rapid City High School Auditorium. Nobody’ll believe it.” She laughed.

  The choreography was in her head, and she could simplify it, she said, raising her eyebrows and letting her eyes roll. “As needed.”

  They dove in, forming parent committees and typing up phone trees. Helen drew sketches of costumes and handed them off to Eve, who tried to figure out how on earth she was ever going to get them made, especially with this group of women, some of whom had never done anything beyond hemming a pair of pants or sewing on a button. She made one pattern after the next, trying to find something everyone could get right so that she wouldn’t end up having to rip out all the costumes backstage at the last minute and stitch them back together herself. She even came up with an idea for the Mouse King’s headpiece from a craft magazine that appeared in the mail like a missive from heaven: papier-mâché.

  Helen Gilbert was thrilled. “We’re going to knock the socks off this little Podunk town, Eve, ready or not,” she said one night after class. “We’re going to give them something they’ve never even dreamed of.” And after they’d had a long, nervous laugh, she added, growing serious, “Maybe we can have it all set by next year, Eve. Maybe. God willing.”

  It wasn’t going to be easy, and it would take time, but they’d already taken the first steps. They were really going to do it.

  12

  Cheating Gravity

  That fall Eve decided she’d had enough of living in the hills, spending all her money on gas, and they moved down from the mountain and into town, to a two-story house in a real neighborhood, across the street from a wooded field and the wide expanse of the Congregational church parking lot. Asphalt covered the entire hilltop the church had bulldozed, so there was plenty of room for Leon to go-kart, bike-ride, even practice driving a stick shift.

  René would take off across their backyard for school, giving Chuck a pat as he milled in circles around the one big tree, then continue past the detached garage and rusty swing set. If the weather was just right, there’d be a million grasshoppers on the trail leading down to the neighbor’s yard. She’d run screaming as they flew, latching onto her knee-highs or bare legs. But after that, the world would open into a wonderland.

  She’d walk Clark Street until it curved to trace the bottom of the hillside, then scrabble up a steep, crumbling sandstone embankment to keep from going around the long block, cut through backyards to reach the crest of the hill, and follow the lightly worn footpath that ran through the prairie scrub. She carried her books and notebooks, but she never hurried. She’d stop to pick a handful of sage and breathe the deep perfume, just standing, looking out at the sky. And if there was rhubarb growing wild or green peas hanging over someone’s fence, she’d linger, peeling the thin skin off the rhubarb stalk and biting into the tart fruit, or opening the peas at the seam and tipping her head back to pop them into her mouth. She’d take a detour to avoid a barking dog, kicking away any loose stones, feeling her way forward like her ancestors, the pioneers.

  Not all that long ago, her very own great-grandfather had stopped somewhere not so far from here, right in the middle of Indian country, in what was now called Canning, South Dakota. He’d planted ten thousand trees to settle his claim. “We had peach trees and plum trees, apricots, crab apples. Ten thousand,” she could hear Emma gasping. “Just imagine!”

  From there René’s grandma would plunge headlong into how the whole town would gather at their place every Fourth of July for a picnic because of the lovely shade; how the women would wear new summer dresses and bring dishes to pass—including grape and chokecherry pies; how her father’s first wife had died from the hardships but his second wife, René’s great-grandmother, had been as strong and steady as one of the big oaks. She’d been a nurse, and Emma would go on to tell René about the year a deadly pneumonia had come around to Fort Pierre, back when René’s dad was still a small child. Most people had flocked to the hospital, where, in an effort to combat burning fevers, doctors were throwing open windows in the middle of winter—and at the very mention of this, Emma’s brows would fly up in alarm. It was because of René’s great-grandmother, the knowledge and skill she’d passed along, that Emma knew better than to let some doctor set a cold breeze on a soaring temperature. She’d kept her young family at home, sealed up the house against the slightest draft, coated chests and backs with mustard plasters, changed sweated bedsheets, brought hot broths and extra blankets, and prayed for salvation. And while the folks who’d run to the hospital were “dropping like flies,” she’d tell René, every last one in her house had pulled through. “Which is the reason you’re here today and I can get to tell you this,” she’d say, her look of consternation finally giving way to a smile. Then she’d sigh. “So many died that year. No sooner would a person set foot in the hospital than they’d drop dead.” Emma would shake her head, still disgusted, remembering.

  And as René walked along to school, the prairie would seem to teem with those who’d come before, who’d made their way through this endless sea of cactus and yucca, outcroppings and wash-out gullies, just like the great explorers—by being tough and sharp and willing to stand apart. Even all alone in the middle of that wide open emptiness, René would feel she was in the midst of a bustle, the call of the meadowlark just adding to the general hubbub as a single billowy cloud sailed above her, high in the boundless sky, until she arrived at Lincoln Elementary in plenty of time for class.

  * * *

  —

  In the third grade there was a new reading program students could complete at their own pace, with a chart on the wall to record each one’s progress. René loved having her name up there and made sure to keep ahold of her lead. On the playground, she challenged kids to cartwheels and splits, to backbends and tricks on the monkey bars. On the uneven bars, she was the only one who could drop backward or forward and do an uninterrupted series of spins, her long hair flying behind her like a victory banner. And at Four Square, she won so often the other girls started whispering that she was cheating.

  “There’s no way to cheat,” René yelled at the ringleader when the girl finally accused her to her face. “Besides, you don’t have to cheat to win a stupid game like that.”

  “You really think you’re something special, don’t you?” the girl said, which made no sense to René. Of course she thought she was something special. “You’re so conceited,” the girl went on. “That’s what my mom says. She says you think you’re the cat’s pajamas.”

  Her mom? Cat’s pajamas? René went inside to read.

  Later that day, in music class, the teacher put Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre on the school phonograph and told the students to draw whatever came into their minds. So René gave free rein to the whirling visions of dancers Mrs. G was constantly describing in ballet class—images of agility and accomplishment, of dancers executing heartbreaking feats of athleticism and artistry, which had instantly taken hold of René’s imagination. She drew a mummy in high double pas de chat suspended weightless over a gravestone, and another in piqué arabesque, her impossibly long leg extending far above her head, pointing to the moon. She drew ghostly whirling dervishes in a line, en pointe, and vampires flying between mountains in distant grand jetés. And as the teacher held René’s drawing in front of the class to extol its virtues, the same Four Square accuser from the playground smirked and coughed and said something to her nearby companions that made them all laugh behind their hands, which gave René plenty of reason to scowl, fiercely and openly, at the lot of them.

  * * *

  —

  Eve went to the school for parent-teacher conferences and came home looking rattled. She threw her purse onto the kitchen table, then dropped into a chair and rummaged around for a cigarette.

  René had been waiting—fidgeting, arranging herself, trying to remain poised and humble for the inevitable showering of prai
se. But now she felt a wave of something else entirely coming for her.

  “I don’t want you paying one bit of attention to those small-minded dullards,” Eve started. “I’ve known their type all my life!” She lit a cigarette and took a long, deep drag. “You did great,” she said, shaking her head. “Really. Your teacher said all kinds of nice things about you.”

  René hesitated. “Like what?”

  Eve looked at her, seeming to take her measure.

  “Well, the first thing she said was”—Eve effortlessly pitched her voice into a high, mocking register—“ ‘The other girls in class have mentioned, and I’ve noticed myself, that René is very proud of her long hair.’ Can you imagine?” Eve rolled her eyes as she knocked the ash off her cigarette. “I just told her, ‘Yes, I’m sure she is proud of her long hair. It’s very beautiful!’ What a dope! She clammed up after that and went over your schoolwork, which was perfect, excellent. Truly. You’re doing such a good job, honey. Just keep doing what you’re doing. I’m so proud of you.” She stabbed out her cigarette. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Don’t even think about it.” Then she marched up the stairs to change out of her good clothes before starting dinner.

  René was stunned. So it wasn’t just the other girls and their mothers, it was also her teacher. Everyone seemed to be in agreement about their general dislike of her. She was being talked about by the other girls and their mothers, by the other girls and her own teacher. And she started to consider that maybe there was something off about her. She felt she understood it instantly, intuitively, as if she’d known it all along. She was abrasive and arrogant. She was bossy, overbearing, driven. She was everything her own mother had ever accused her of.

  For the next few days, back at school, René was quiet and, for the first time, unsure. But in her chest she could feel something like a caged animal beginning to growl and pace. It got louder and more insistent, roaring through the bars of its cage until she was forced to turn and look at it, to face it and listen to it, and she found that it had something important, something pivotal, to convey to her. And she came to a decision.