—
All through the last, long weeks of the remaining school year, René’s tears flowed without ceasing. She had to get back to ballet. She couldn’t live without dancing. Suddenly everything depended on that one missing piece.
Eve and Mrs. G were on the phone day and night, and soon Mrs. G began to visit every studio within a twenty-mile radius of her new home in Arizona. She found Kelly Boyle and the Phoenix School of Ballet, and sent Eve a newspaper clipping with a black-and-white photo of Kelly and his daughter in rehearsal. She’d marked it up in red pen, with arrows to note different necessary corrections: “She’s got her weight too far back and her foot is overarched,” she’d written, “but they did a fine job.”
The ballet school had just put on a performance of Les Sylphides. Now there’d be an intensive summer workshop. René would enroll. She’d fly down and spend the summer at Mrs. G’s. Then Eve, Al, and Jayne would drive to Arizona at the end of July for a visit and to pick her up.
“You can give it a try,” Al said when Eve went over the plan with him for the tenth time. “But no need going from the frying pan into the fire.”
“Maybe you could even stay down in Phoenix for the school year,” Eve started saying to René. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
And René would stand motionless in front of her.
“But how are you ever going to sleep at night?” Eve would go on, musing, shaking her head as she bent to untangle her latest sewing project. “I simply do not know.”
René didn’t have any answers. She’d be fifteen in a few months, the same age as Leon when he’d first left home. Who knew what would happen from here? All the questions were going to have to wait until after the summer. For now, the only thing that was clear was that René was going to have to take this step; she was going to have to move forward on her own. She was ready. She was going to close her eyes and hold her breath—and go.
33
How Do You Solve
a Problem Like
Kelly Boyle had been a soloist with American Ballet Theatre, then gone out to Hollywood to dance in the movies—Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Daddy Long Legs, Oklahoma! At the Phoenix School of Ballet, he suited up for every class and demonstrated combinations with focus and visible intention. He was elegant and handsome, powerful and sure, and for some reason René would never know, he took her to heart, welcoming her like a long-lost child.
As well as being beautiful, disciplined, and sweet-natured—which is not to say they weren’t cutthroat—his students were thin. And though it was easy to tell that his Advanced class was deeply cemented, firmly enclosed within a sanctuary of uniformity and cliquishness, René could also see a sliver of light coming through a crack in the door, where Mr. Boyle himself was leaning in, forcing the door open for her with his own body weight. There was going to be a place for her. Mr. B was making that clear to everyone.
He included René as an equal in all the corrections, taking the time to show the class he was serious about her. He’d stop the music and stand behind her, using his toe to turn her heel to the front as he lifted her spine and tucked her rib cage, molding her body into a single, long line as the others stood, watching attentively. Or he’d interrupt the center-floor adagio to have René extend her leg. “A little higher,” he’d say, gently lifting and turning her heel while at the same time adjusting her chin with purposeful, light fingers. “Just a tilt,” he’d say. “That’s it. Like that.” And he’d step away.
“Beautiful,” he’d say. “Yes.”
René took classes from morning to night and started eating only protein and fat burners—celery, grapefruit, lettuce leaves—because, although she was thin, she could see that if she wanted to be an equal, if she wanted to be a real contender, she was going to have to be thinner. Dripping sweat during a break, she’d have a bite of tuna in water and a sip from the cooler in the waiting room. Then she’d head back into the studio, not even bothering to think about where she was or how she’d got there. Mostly she had work to do to make up for the year she’d lost and for the years before that when she hadn’t got the training Mr. Boyle’s girls had been getting. Everything needed rebuilding—her technique, her muscle tone, her flexibility and alignment.
So, day after day, she went to class and fought—pushing harder, stretching farther, concentrating with what began to feel like a beam of light at the center of her forehead—knowing that to fail would cost her more than any of Mr. B’s girls could possibly understand, more than she could bear.
* * *
—
Helen Gilbert wasn’t used to having a teenager in her house, upsetting her television schedule, giving her extra cooking and shopping, extra laundry, plus what she liked to call, after her favorite TV game show, the “daily double”: having to change out of her pajamas and slippers for a twice-every-day round-trip to the studio, to drop René off and pick her up. Also, she was gaining weight. The heat didn’t agree with her, and retirement was “for the birds,” she said. She’d gotten so big she’d had to have her bed tilted, higher at the head, so she didn’t suffocate in her sleep, and her legs were constantly swollen, road-mapped with bulging veins. She set the air conditioner to fifty-eight degrees and ate Baskin-Robbins in front of the television. And, since the house was about the temperature of a penguin exhibit, René would open her bedroom window to let in some heat, which was another problem.
The few letters that arrived from home were filled with weather reports: it was a beautiful day, nice enough to hang some bedding on the line; it was raining hard, but the moisture was badly needed, since everything had been so dry; it had been a bright, clear afternoon until hail, the size of softballs, started dropping from the sky, breaking out people’s windshields, but not to worry. They were all okay.
Mostly René would stay in her room, assuaging her growling stomach with carrot and celery sticks, while Mrs. G sat with her little dog in the living room, where she preferred to be alone. Mrs. G’s husband was always on the road, selling hearing aids for Sonotone, and her elderly sister, who was so frail and infirm that Mrs. G had to waddle in to help her to “the lavatory,” was planted in the bedroom across the hall from René. Sometimes at night, René would knock gently on Mrs. G’s sister’s door and venture in to sit on the floor beside her bed, nibbling lettuce leaves and watching whatever was on the television on top of the dresser, telling herself that the poor crippled old lady probably appreciated the company, since she, too, was always all by herself. They wouldn’t talk, but Mrs. G’s sister didn’t seem to mind René being there.
“Try not to get in the way,” Eve told René over the phone. “Remember. Helen isn’t used to having kids around.”
And René had been doing that. But then a boy from home started calling. René had hung out with him just before she’d left town. He was homely, tow-headed and short, and he’d invited her to go along with some of his friends to a baseball game, then to Big Boy’s for hamburgers and milkshakes. Now he was calling Mrs. G’s every day.
“How’d you get this number?” René asked him when Mrs. G first handed her the telephone. But her surprise and anxiety must have sounded like something completely different over the phone line, because from then on, he just kept telling her not to worry, that his family was taking a trip to Arizona, that he’d be there before she knew it. He really wanted to see her again, he said.
René had never laid eyes on his parents, but she knew they lived in one of the broken-down trailers nestled in the gully between the K-Mart loading docks and the railroad yard, so she didn’t think there was any chance they’d actually show up.
The night she opened Mrs. G’s front door to find the boy standing there, ragged and breathless, overcome with the heat, panting like a stray dog, she was as surprised as anyone else. He’d hitchhiked from Rapid City to Phoenix all by himself, he told her. When she asked him where he was planning to stay, he just
said, “I came to see you, silly. Like I said I would.”
So she had no choice. She let him in.
“Can I use your bathroom?” He lifted his pale eyebrows at her, attempting to flirt. “I’m so dirty.”
René got him a towel. And just as he was getting into the shower, Mrs. G happened down the hallway.
“René!” she cried. “Who the hell’s in the shower?”
René couldn’t get everything explained before Mrs. G flew into a spin. And once again—just like when René had accidentally left a bloody stain on Mrs. G’s dupioni silk bedspread—there was a call to Eve.
“Well, you won’t believe what’s happened now!” Mrs. G hollered into the phone.
Then René had to get on the line and swear to Eve that she hadn’t invited him, that she hadn’t known a thing about it.
“He said he was maybe going to stop by with his family. I don’t really even know him,” she whispered, cupping her hand over the receiver.
“Well, Helen is very upset,” Eve said. “Just try to keep her calm, and I’ll see if I can contact his folks. Put Helen back on.”
So René handed the phone back to Mrs. G, who was hovering just next to her.
“I’ll try, Eve,” Mrs. G said, “but I can’t be responsible for some kid who’s run away from home for God knows what reason. That’s too much. It’s too much to ask.”
And as Mrs. G blanched, René turned to find the boy standing in the hallway, naked from the waist up, wrapped only in a towel, his dusty road clothes bundled under his arm, his colorless hair wet and dripping.
“Hey,” he said, smirking at Mrs. G, raising his hand in a peace sign. “You got a washer?”
“Good God, René.” Mrs. G fell onto one of the tall stools at her breakfast counter. “What are we going to do about this?”
And as René felt herself turning to dust, the boy just smiled.
“Hey, lady,” he said. “It’s cool.”
* * *
—
Eve got ahold of the boy’s parents, and though they hadn’t known he was missing, thinking he was staying with a friend, they were relieved and grateful that he’d been recovered. They bought him a bus ticket home. Mrs. G would have to take him to the station early in the morning.
“He’s going to need to spend the night, I’m sorry to say,” Eve told her.
“Good God, Eve. I don’t think I can take it.”
“Don’t worry. Just get an extra blanket and set him up on the couch.”
“I’m not going to get a wink of sleep. I can see that.”
“Probably not. But he’ll be gone in the morning. All done.”
“If you say so.”
After dinner, René and the boy sat together at the edge of Mrs. G’s pool, dangling their legs in the water. Stars came out and the boy leaned into her, placing a hand behind her hips. Then he whispered into her ear, “I brought a condom.”
“What?” She pulled away from him, edging along the poolside.
So he repeated it.
“I’m not doing that.”
“Well, we can if you want,” he said, bending to push his shoulder hard into hers.
“I don’t,” she said, alarmed at this strange, ugly boy who’d traveled so far and was now here, way too close beside her.
“That’s not what you sounded like on the phone,” the boy said.
He was instantly testy, accusatory, even though nothing of the sort had ever once come up in their conversations.
“You don’t think I came all the way down here for nothing, do you?”
And from out of nowhere, all the solitary nights when René had kept him on the phone—talking with him even though she didn’t like him, just to help ease her loneliness—were suddenly right in front of her, demanding their price.
“I’m going inside,” René said, standing, thinking how everything she did made a problem, even just talking to this gruesome boy she hardly knew from a thousand miles away. The boy grabbed her arm as she stood, holding tight around her wrist.
“Let go of me!” she said, her strong legs suddenly braced, ready. And he must have thought better of it, because he let go, and he got up, too.
They went inside and sat at opposite corners of the living room, pretending to watch television as Mrs. G ground her teeth.
“I’m going to bed,” René said after a few minutes. “I have class tomorrow.”
Mrs. G looked at her hysterically, then struggled to her feet.
“You’d better settle in, too, mister,” she said sternly to the boy. “Your bus leaves first thing in the morning. You ready?”
“Sure, I’m ready,” the boy said, narrowing his eyes. He stared pointedly at René. “Let’s stay up a little,” he tried, waggling his eyebrows at her, this time right in front of Mrs. G.
“I can’t,” she said.
“She can’t,” Mrs. G confirmed. “You need anything before I switch the lights out?”
He shook his head at her. He was disappointed with the whole business.
Mrs. G and René walked down the hall, and when they got to René’s room, Mrs. G leaned close.
“Lock it,” she said.
René nodded. She went in and turned the little button on the doorknob.
By the time René got up the next morning, the boy was gone. Mrs. G came back from the bus station just in time to drive her to ballet class, but she was in no mood. She dropped René off at the studio, wrenched her car into reverse, and said she was going home to take a nap.
René danced all day, and that evening she went straight to her bedroom and closed the door. She didn’t have any dinner—not even a hard-boiled egg. She didn’t want any. She wanted to be left alone, she wanted to stay out of the way, and she wanted to go home. Even though everyone but Leon would be arriving in Phoenix in just one more week, she wanted to go home. One more week seemed like an eternity.
* * *
—
The next day there was a package from Jayne—chocolate-chip cookies and a note: “We’ll be there soon! We’re packing everything already.” There was a line of x’s, a line of o’s, and a line of hearts. “But first we have to clean house.” Then a frowny face.
René could imagine they’d all been having a peaceful summer. Eve would have been gardening, Al would have been traveling, then stopping home to rest and read the paper, Jayne would have been playing with her neighbor friends out in the sunshine. No doubt, by the time they arrived, Jayne would be “browner than an Indian,” as Eve said, especially next to René’s ghostly ballet-studio pallor.
Leon had vanished and wasn’t likely to be coming home anytime soon, since Eve had warned him of the outstanding DUIs.
“If you come around, I’m going to have to call the sheriff,” she’d told him. “I won’t have any choice.”
And now, with René gone too, Eve and Al would be getting along. They’d be happy. Jayne was easy-going, content to ride bikes, climb trees, go swimming, so there’d be nothing to fight about. Jayne would be baking cookies, playing hopscotch, setting up lemonade stands with the neighbors. There was no place for René in a pretty picture like that, not without marring it, without changing it from crisp, happy colors to a hazy wash of blacks and grays, not without everything grinding back into the same grim overlays of need and anger, ending in violent rages, quiet grudges, righteous swells of indignation.
“There’s nothing for me here! Nothing. I can’t stand it here anymore!” she could remember screaming at Eve just weeks before, during what Eve had begun to refer to as her “Reign of Tears.”
And she’d got her way.
But given an inch, René “wanted a mile,” as Eve always said. Even now, even so far from home, doing exactly what she’d insisted on, she was overflowing with wanting. Away from home for the summer, with the possibility of
staying away for the entire year looming in front of her, René found that home was taking on the airy, spun-sugar consistency of a fairy tale. She could see it shimmering in the distance, a chimera—like nothing she’d ever known, like nothing on this planet—a far-off place of love and nurturing, of mutual sustenance and caring, a place of refuge where people knew and accepted you, where faithfulness and affection combined to blaze like a beacon.
Leaving home for the summer wasn’t the same as leaving home for good, but somehow, in going away at all, René had wound up on the brink of her own permanent departure, with a great tide swelling behind her. What if it all came together? What if everything worked out so that she could stay in Phoenix for the whole year? What reason could she give for simply turning around and going home? Even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t change course now—not without upending everyone’s expectations, without abandoning everything she’d said she wanted, everything everyone had spent good money on and worked hard for. “Sacrificed for,” she could hear Eve adding.
And after rolling it around endlessly, like spinning rocks in a tumbler, she always ended up in the same place—doubled back on herself, doubting herself—because what was there, after all, for her to go home to? She knew well enough.
The ground was shifting, unsteady. Whichever way she turned, the landscape in every direction turned with her, so that whatever she’d been dreaming of didn’t wind up in front of her. Whatever René was truly yearning for, she couldn’t find it, couldn’t get her hands on it; it wouldn’t hold still. Just as a meteor streaking brilliant green across the blackest prairie night finally touches down to earth, becomes no more than simple, jagged rock, it seemed that the moment René got whatever it was she’d wanted was the moment her heart’s desire metamorphosed from sublime to ordinary, from shining dream to dreary workaday.
There was only one direction. Forward.
She threw herself into training her body, controlling her appetite, silencing her loneliness, and strangling her fear. She tried to remember that she was at the beginning of “a great opportunity,” as Eve had called it. And alone in her room at night, counting the days until Eve and Al and Jayne arrived, she closed up her heart, put it away just like shelving a book, and she tried not to cry.
The Distance Home Page 23