The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders

  Then one day, warming up for a full rehearsal, she suddenly found it—that elusive, wondrous place Mrs. Gilbert was always talking about, where the fixed outline of the body met the ever-longed-for freedom from confinement, where she was unbound, unfettered, where she could throw off the shackles of gravity and flesh and really dance. She dove in headfirst, as if flying from a high cliff, through an expanse of open air, straight down into the glistening embrace of deep water.

  Mrs. G took one look at her and stopped the class. She came over, stood splay-legged, leaning forward on her stick, and put her face right up to René’s, her eyes bulging.

  “And just what in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” she said quietly, not shouting, but with a deep rumble, a bowels-of-the-earth kind of trembling in her voice.

  René had been demonstrating for Mrs. G’s Saturday classes for almost a year. Once in a while, after they’d finished teaching, Mrs. G would take her out to Dairy Queen for something to eat. René would always order the same thing: a fish sandwich and a lime slush.

  What did she think she was doing? Was this Mrs. G’s way of congratulating her? After all, she was only manifesting the most magnificent form a human body could display—loose and open, free and all-encompassing. Hadn’t she seen it? Was she kidding? René could feel the heat of Mrs. G’s breath on her cheek, and she could sense her own face going white, her blood running cold as creek water.

  After staring at her deeply, searching René for the place in herself where she was hiding, Mrs. G said—her voice still shaking, but now rising in a tremendous, uncontrolled crescendo—“Never in my life have I ever seen anything so sloppy, undisciplined, lazy, junky, trashy, lousy, and, besides that, completely crappy! Never!”

  The whole studio turned to look, including all of the kids René helped teach.

  “Now get it together!” Mrs. G screamed at her. “Pull up, place your hips. You know better! I don’t want to see garbage like that from you ever again! Not ever! Do you understand me?” René nodded repeatedly as Mrs. G walked away mumbling, “What in the hell? What kind of idiotic—?” She struck her stick against the floor. “Again!” she cried.

  She restarted the music, and René uncoiled the knots of panic in her joints and slowly, carefully went back to the steps as she’d always done them—guarded, controlled, managed, contained. And as she concentrated to hold all the pieces of herself in check, to not let a millimeter of movement creep in where it didn’t belong, one thing became clear: this was not going to be about freedom. It wasn’t going to be about letting loose, letting go, or getting what she wanted. It was going to be similar, but reversed. She was going to have to rewind, forget her yearnings; she was going to have to use her judgment and clarity, her supervision and control to create an outcome; she was going to have to build a direction by wrestling and conquering, by attending to the most minute detail, by controlling her body and mind beyond the realm of the ordinary. Extraordinary control. No surprises. If she was going to be transported by anything, she was going to have to transport herself—through discipline and technique. She was going to have to know the rules, perfect them, make them unquestionable, become them, so that she stood above reproach, above even the thought of being unworthy or at fault. Once she’d done that, it would be her arena, no one else’s. So whatever happened from here on was going to be because of René. Whatever she did belonged to her, no one else. And her time would come. But for now, finding her place, making her way, was most certainly not going to be about freedom.

  * * *

  —

  All through the second dress rehearsal, which was going much worse than the first, Mrs. G was yelling and stamping her feet.

  “You know what they say,” she told Eve when it was finally over. “Bad dress rehearsal, good performance.” She let out a “Ha!” that was definitely not a laugh. She was beside herself. The first performance was scheduled for that evening, and there’d be four performances to get through before it was done.

  “That was a bad one,” Eve conceded.

  Eve almost never said things like that to Mrs. G.

  “What was so bad about it?” René asked when Mrs. G took off at a run after someone backstage.

  “Good God, I think she’s going to have a heart attack,” Eve said. She started gathering her things. “Oh, the lights were all haywire, the Snow Queen was completely in the dark, and half the soldiers were on the wrong side. And the mice still can’t see where they’re going. They were all over the place,” she said to Rene. They were collecting their coats from where they’d left them in the orchestra. “I almost went offstage without Jayne getting back under my skirt. Did you see?” She laughed. “Well, there’s not much to do about it now,” she said. “We’re all doing the best we can.”

  There were just three hours before they had to be back at the auditorium. Mrs. G had told everyone to keep going over their steps again and again, and to return at five-thirty sharp because the curtain was going up at seven, ready or not.

  * * *

  —

  Everyone was back on time, and the Friday night performance was a great success. Tutus sparkled, lights hit their marks, dancers executed steps in sync, mice miraculously found their way through the battle scene, and Mother Ginger got all her little ones under her skirt and off the stage in one piece. Everyone was thrilled.

  “No celebrating yet,” Mrs. G warned. “We’ve got three more performances, don’t forget. No room to jinx ourselves.” But she was shaking hands, carrying around bouquets, accepting congratulations like everybody else. Mostly she seemed pleased and relieved that the problems of the dress rehearsals had disappeared.

  And the next two performances went just as well.

  “One more time,” Mrs. G said, coming down under the stage to the dressing room after the finale on Saturday night. There’d be a matinee on Sunday afternoon; then it would all be over. “Go home. Get a good rest. Tomorrow, eleven o’clock sharp.”

  Eve hung up her hoop skirt. René put her shoes under her chair and her headpieces on the counter. She placed her silver crown for the snow scene in the box with the others, as usual. Then they all bundled up against the cold and headed out, happy.

  When they got home, Al was there, sitting at the kitchen table.

  “Well,” he said as they came trooping through the door at ten-thirty, “how was the performance?”

  “Great!” René said.

  Al laughed. “Well, my.”

  Leon took off for his room.

  “Great job, Leon,” Eve called up the stairs. “Oh, it was good,” she said to Al, exhausted and invigorated at the same time. “I think it’s all been pretty good, which is a shock.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Al said, standing up to give her a kiss.

  “I still have a little makeup.”

  “You’ve been working so hard, Eve,” he continued. “I’m not surprised. Not one bit.”

  “When did you get in?” she said.

  “Just drove up. Just this minute. From over east. Highmore.”

  “Run to bed,” she told Jayne and René. “Another big day tomorrow.” She turned to Al. “You coming?”

  “You’re coming?” René said, grabbing his arm.

  “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “I couldn’t miss it. Not after the way everybody around here’s been working so hard—every day, day and night,” he said, singsong. He laughed.

  René gave him a hug. He was her dad—the one who’d danced her around on his cowboy boots, the one who’d helped her plant a peach pit in their garden in Philip and, after she’d watered and tended and watched it for weeks without so much as the tip of a shoot poking up through the dead dirt, had secretly gone inside, brought out an enormous cantaloupe, buried it, and told her to run get her trowel. He’d matched his astonishment with her own as she’d dug into the newly tamped earth. It ha
d been confusing and led to endless discussions of the properties of seeds and their bewildering capacity to create an entirely different kind of fruit, but still. This was her dad. And now, he was being her dad to everyone.

  “Whoa—!” he said, lifting her and Jayne off the floor as they swung from his arms. “Off to bed, like your mom said. See you in the morning.”

  They kissed him good night and skipped up the stairs for bed and sleep. Al was coming to The Nutcracker. He was going to see everything Eve and Jayne and Leon and René had been working on for so long.

  In the morning, Eve gave Al his ticket and told him not to be late.

  “René and Leon are both in the first scene, so you won’t want to miss it,” she said as they hustled to the car.

  Al was sitting at the kitchen table, still in his pajamas. He looked at the ticket and nodded. “And after,” he said, “I’m taking you all out to Daisy Dell for dinner.”

  “Right!” René hollered from the back door.

  “We won’t be dressed—” Eve started.

  “You don’t have to be dressed up,” Al said. “It’s just us.”

  “Well, all right,” she said, grabbing her coat. “Let’s go,” she called to the kids. “Come on. The weather’s really lousy. Let’s hope people show up.”

  And they were out in the car in a freezing rain, skidding their way down, one more time, to the auditorium.

  * * *

  —

  Eve sent Leon to peek out from the wings and make sure Al was in his seat before the curtain went up.

  “He’s here,” Leon reported.

  “Good,” Eve said. “I know he’ll be so proud of you. Just do what you always do, honey,” she told him as he walked away. “Break a leg.”

  And the music started, and the curtain went up.

  Everything went along without a hitch through the first scene. Then Clara went to caress her Nutcracker, and René dashed down to the dressing room, as usual, to get the doll makeup off her face and make a quick change into her Snowflake costume. She had to get back up into the wings and in line with the others before the music for Scene Two started and the snow began to fall. The box of silver pipe-cleaner crowns would be backstage, as always, so she’d just pin one into her hair before taking her place; then she’d enter stage right, at the front of the line of dancing Snowflakes, with light-as-air bourrées and floating ports de bras.

  She changed into her white tutu, ran to get up into the wings, stopped at the crown box, and to her amazement, to her total stupefaction, it was empty. The other Snowflakes were all in line, each with a dazzling silver crown pinned in place. The crowns were to be put back in the same box after every performance so that everyone would have one. What had happened? Where was hers? She stopped everyone she could get her hands on.

  “Where’s my crown? It’s supposed to be in here!”

  No one knew anything. Eve and Mrs. G were nowhere in sight.

  “There might be one on the other side,” one of the drama club girls finally said.

  “What?” But there was no time to argue. Eve’s costume room was on the far side of the stage. Maybe there was an extra.

  “You could go check,” the girl said. “If you run through the hallway, you could go quick.”

  She couldn’t go on without her crown; Mrs. G would have her hide. But, more than that, she couldn’t miss her cue.

  “Mrs. G is going to kill me,” René said as she took off running in her Snowflake costume, out a side door, slipping on her toe shoes through the polished school hallways. She tore past the ticket booth and concession stand the drama kids had set up, and hightailed it to the other end of the stage, where Eve was sitting in the costume room. “My crown!” she yelled.

  Eve jumped up and they dug around backstage until they found an errant silver crown lying on the floor, next to the box of long ribbons the girls used for the Candy Cane number.

  “Some idiot must have dropped it back here last night,” Eve said.

  “Hurry, hurry,” René pleaded, desperate.

  So Eve was standing behind René in the wings on the wrong side of the stage, pinning the crown in place just as quickly as she could, as René missed her cue. The line of Snowflakes came out from the other side—without her.

  René watched from across the stage in horror. And suddenly, there on the far side of that vast plain, on the other end of all those dazzling lights, past the long line of dancers who kept glancing across at her like, What’s going on?, was the white-domed head of Mrs. Gilbert. She was clearly livid, motioning frantically to René from the other side of the stage.

  Eve finally nudged her. “I think you’d better get out there,” she said.

  But René was wide-eyed, mute, stock-still.

  “I think you’re just going to have to run across,” Eve said.

  Mrs. G was signaling wildly: Get over here. You get over here right now!

  So René took off, bourréeing as quickly as she could through the falling confetti-snow, from the wrong side of the stage to the very front of the line of Snowflakes, who were completing their series of turns. She got to her place and stepped into the dance. She only had to not let her eyes wander to the wings, stage right, where Mrs. G was leaning, crumpled against a post, her hands raised, hanging on to the hair on either side of her head as if it were the only thing keeping her from falling over.

  * * *

  —

  Between the first and second acts, René got an earful. Mrs. G was trying not to yell, but luckily they were in the basement and the audience was presumably in the hallway René had just careened through, at the refreshment stand.

  “Check, double-check, check, double-check!” Mrs. G kept saying. “Your job. Your responsibility. Your head. Your dance. No one else! You dancing out there.” It went on and on. And the one thing René never said was It wasn’t my fault.

  But Mrs. G seemed to understand that, because she finally tilted her head and just grabbed René and gave her a hug. René was buried for a moment in Mrs. G’s enormous, pillowy bosoms, and after that, it was all back to normal.

  “That’s crappy,” Catherine said when Mrs. G left.

  “It’s okay,” René said, because it was, because Mrs. G had been right. If René wanted this, if she wanted to do this, it was all on her, nobody else, no matter what. There was no room for uncertainty—no wondering or confusion or discussion about who deserved what or who’d caused what to happen. So she didn’t mind. Really, it was one of the things she loved most about it.

  René and Catherine got into their Chinese costumes, and when the music for Act Two started, they made their way upstairs. They stood in the wings and watched as Leon danced his Russian number, sailing across the stage in his leaps, executing his Around the World at full tilt, then dazzling the audience with his multiple tours and perfect, flashy Cossack Hops.

  * * *

  —

  “What a show,” Al said when they met him in the lobby. He’d had to wait as they all got changed and packed up their things. Everything had to come home.

  “We’ll have to make another trip tomorrow,” Eve said. “To get the last of it.”

  “Very nice,” Al said, patting René on the back. “Good job,” he said, meaning all of them.

  And Leon turned his head away and smiled.

  They went to the Daisy Dell, which was a kind of fancy restaurant, with baby blue leatherette banquettes, hanging globe lights, and big menus.

  René had deep-fried shrimp, iceberg lettuce with chunky blue-cheese dressing, and French fries. Eve and Al and Leon all had French dip, and Jayne had a cheeseburger. Then Eve got the mile-high lemon meringue pie, while the kids got hot fudge sundaes.

  “To a job well done,” Al said, raising his cup as they all started on dessert. They clinked their water glasses to his coffee mug.

 
; “Thanks, Al,” Eve said. “Thank you for coming.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it,” he said, stealing a forkful of her lemon meringue. “Not for the world. You all did such a good job.”

  “Did you see me come in from the wrong side?” René said.

  “Nope,” he said, and everybody laughed.

  “I have a feeling you haven’t heard the end of that,” Eve said. “But thank God it was the last performance. Maybe she’ll just forget about it. I know she’s relieved it’s over.”

  “You better hope she forgets,” Leon said.

  But René was eating her way through homemade whipped cream with chopped nuts.

  “She just might,” Eve said, “considering what happened to the Snow Queen.”

  “I did see that one,” Al said, laughing, his mouth full of pie.

  After René’s screwup in the beginning of the Snow Scene, the Snow Queen had made her big entrance—an enormous grand jeté to piqué arabesque, just like Mrs. G had promised—slipped on the confetti-covered stage, and landed flat on her butt.

  “Poor thing,” Eve said. “You have to give her credit. She just got up and kept going. Turns out she twisted her ankle. Helen thought maybe she’d broke it, but it seemed fine. She got through the whole second act.”

  “So maybe Mrs. G will forget about your big mistake,” Leon teased.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” René said. “Plus, she already yelled at me.”

  “My, oh my,” Al said, shaking his head.

  “All’s well that ends well,” Eve said.

  René had to agree. Even if she had got in trouble for something that was totally not her fault, with Eve and Al and Leon and Jayne all happy and laughing together, it seemed like everything had turned out just right.