Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  “Forgive and forget.”

  “There isn’t even much to forgive. He was always clear about who he was. I was in denial.”

  Campbell tsks. “He didn’t love you, darling. What could be more necessary to forgive?”

  III

  APRIL 1986—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  SOME DAYS WHILE JOAN TEACHES, HARRY GOES TO HIS FRIEND Dale’s house after school, and other days he comes to the studio and does his homework behind the reception desk or on the lobby floor by the big window into the studio. Joan has asked him if he wouldn’t like to try dancing, but he politely declined, just as he turned down soccer, baseball, tennis, and karate. At a loss, she and Dale’s mother signed them both up for swim team. Harry goes and swims with little complaint, but he is fundamentally an indoor child, dreamy and thoughtful and given to abrupt, consuming interests (astronauts, trains, submarines) that require semiweekly trips to the library for books he races through, shoveling information into himself like coal into a furnace.

  The little girls in Joan’s classes wear black leotards and pink tights and have their hair done up in buns decorated with bright scrunchies or little pink crocheted cozies. Their limbs are too thin or too plump; their bodies are incapable of grace but full of will and infantile pomposity. “Stand like a turkey,” she tells them, gesturing to her own lifted chest, the way her weight is slightly forward. “Be over the balls of your feet, but not too far.” With the addition of a gauzy black skirt, she wears what they do.

  She likes to teach the girls who are just starting to go en pointe. As a warning, she shows them her own feet, pointing out the knobby protrusions, the toenail that has simply given up and stopped growing, the thick yellow calluses. “Still want to do it?” she asks them. They do. She tells them how she went through a pair of shoes every day when she was performing with the company. All the dancers got custom-made shoes. Hers came from London. Once she went to the factory and met the man who made them, and he had asked to see her feet because he wanted to find out if they were as he imagined. Joan shows the girls how to sew on the satin ribbons and rough up the pointe. She demonstrates how to tape their toes and pad them with lamb’s wool. She leads them over to the rosin box, and one by one they step experimentally into the sticky dust. One day, she tells them, each of you will have your own method for getting your shoes just right. Then she leads them to the barre, and up they all go like seven baby giraffes: spindly, ankles trembling. First position, face the barre, plié, here we go, ladies, and relevé, and roll through your foot, whole foot, all the way up. Back down, and cambré back. Remember to push down to go up, and pull up to go down. Now again in second position. Only a few minutes for the first time, but they almost look like dancers.

  Chloe Wheelock is taking a beginning jazz class. Joan hadn’t recognized her when she first caught sight of her through the big window, only noticed her pleasing lines and proportions. But then Chloe did an airy leap across the diagonal and came running toward the window, not seeing Joan but looking past her, her face foxy and triangular like her father’s but without the smugness, her eyes hard with focus. Chloe paused, breathing hard, and saw Joan. She waved.

  “I hope you aren’t offended she’s not taking ballet,” Sandy says when Joan runs into her at pickup time a week or two later. “We decided jazz would be better.”

  “That’s fine,” Joan says. Chloe has been watching her classes, sitting very straight in a folding chair out with the mothers behind the big window, her knees together and small, pointed chin held high, her posture meant to tell anyone who might wonder that, yes, she is a dancer. Now Joan spots her in the jazz studio, sashaying in a circle with the other girls while Whitney Houston blasts through the stereo. She is mildly ridiculous looking in her shiny red unitard and cropped T-shirt. Her ponytail is decorated with curly ribbons. The song ends as the girls crowd together in the center of the floor and drop to their knees, raising their arms over their heads and wiggling their fingers. Their teacher applauds and the girls disperse, chugging from water bottles and draping towels over their shoulders with affected nonchalance, mimicking the high school girls. To Sandy, Joan adds, “But you shouldn’t wait too long if she wants to do ballet. The Russians start them at four.”

  “This isn’t Russia. She wants to do jazz. She’s having fun. She’s only seven, anyway.”

  “Jazz is fine, but I’d hate for her to waste her talent.”

  “So now she’s talented.”

  “You never asked me if I thought she was talented,” Joan says.

  “Well, she wants to do jazz.”

  “That’s good, then. She should do what she wants.”

  Sandy falls silent. Joan wonders why she doesn’t just leave, then follows her gaze. In the studio, a girl is letting Chloe try on her pointe shoes. Though the ribbons are tied clumsily and the satin foot is loose around her small heel, she gets up easily, looking around from her new height. She experiments with her arms, takes a few tentative steps.

  “Look,” says Sandy, “she can do it.”

  “She shouldn’t. Her bones are too soft. She’s not strong enough.”

  “She’s just playing.”

  “No,” says Joan. “She isn’t.”

  Harry is watching, too, from his seat on the lobby carpet. He still says Chloe is his best friend even though they have been seeing less and less of each other. Joan gathers that Chloe ignores Harry at recess, but, on afternoons when he doesn’t have swimming and she doesn’t have dance or gymnastics, she still appears on their doorstep or calls him on the phone to come over and keep her company or act out roles in her games.

  Harry stands up and taps on the glass to get the girls’ attention. Chloe drops off pointe and glances at the other girl, the shoes’ owner. Sticking out his butt and going up on his tiptoes, Harry turns in a circle with his arms in a hoop over his head and then does a silly, wobbly arabesque followed by some sideways leaps, mimicking Chloe’s timidity, her pride in the shoes. Usually he is so shy and serious.

  As he has become his own person, Joan has stopped, for the most part, wondering if he will dance. Sometimes in idle moments, watching him running and jumping in the backyard with Chloe or standing straight and small on a diving block and then snapping out to pierce the pool like a javelin, she still dwells on the possibility, but mostly she has accepted that he will do other things, be something else. She is glad he was not a girl. Through the window, Chloe’s friend waves to Harry to come in, and soon the shoes are on his feet. He teeters but stays up, sticking out his tongue and undulating his arms like wings. Sometimes late at night Joan watches a tape of Swan Lake, and sometimes Harry gets out of bed and watches with her until he falls asleep on the couch.

  “Oh, look,” says Sandy. “He’s a ballerina.”

  Joan wants to say that they are just playing, but she doesn’t.

  DECEMBER 1987—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  DROSSELMEYER MAKES THE CHRISTMAS TREE GROW UNTIL ITS STAR vanishes up into the light grid, and then the Nutcracker turns from a doll to a human, and the other toys come alive, and the rats creep out into the dark house to do battle with the tin soldiers, and Chloe is the smallest rat. It is Christmas Eve, the last performance. For three weeks, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, twice on Saturdays, and on Sunday afternoons she has waited in the wings until the last big rat slinks onstage, rubbing his paws together under his chin, and then she goes scurrying out after him, lifting her knees high to show she is nervous. When the rats leap menacingly at the soldiers, raking the air with their claws, she covers her eyes with her tail, and the audience always laughs.

  She has grey tights and grey slippers and a leotard of hot, itchy grey fake fur and a heavy rat’s head she can barely see out of. The rats, some men but mostly women who do modern dance and wouldn’t have made good snowflakes, wear grey unitards with funny ovals of fur that cover their chests and stomachs like long bibs. The soldiers rush forward, swords above their heads. Their jumps are low, and their footwork is sloppy. Now is Chloe’s big
moment, her answering attack, running out from behind the other rats into a heroic grand jeté all alone at center stage, throwing her head back like she will when she is a famous ballerina and in a good company, one where the dancers don’t also teach school or work in stores. She lands and does a few nimble pas de chats, first toward the soldiers, then toward the rats, then back again, her feet landing exactly where she wants them to, and she does chaînés turns closer and closer to the soldiers, driving them back until she stops and shakes her fist at them.

  To her left is the darkness that contains her mom and dad and her maternal grandparents and her uncle Rodney and aunt Sarah. Joan is out there, too, as she is most nights, and tonight Jacob is with her, come to see Harry, who is dancing Fritz, Clara’s bratty little brother. The high school girl who dances Clara is skinny and pimply and always smoking outside while wearing her taffeta party dress or white nightgown. Fritz breaks the Nutcracker when it’s still a doll, just to be mean. If the whole auditorium were empty except for Joan, Chloe would still dance her hardest, but when Joan isn’t there, the whole performance seems almost pointless. Joan had been the one to suggest she join in with a ballet class after jazz, beckoning when she hesitated in the door, telling her to find a bit of empty barre or to stand in the back when they did center work and try her best. Chloe had disliked the sight of herself in the mirror. At first her reflection shamed her for not knowing the ballet words or what to do with her arms. Her jazz clothes, silly and garish next to all those neat black leotards, marked her as an impostor.

  Joan lets her come over to her house whenever she wants and applauds the dances she and Harry make up in the backyard. Joan slices vegetables for a snack and puts on ballet movies for them after they get tired and tells them stories about when she was a professional. Joan found hand-me-down leotards and tights when Chloe’s mom complained about the money wasted on jazz outfits, and Joan took her to a store and bought her a pair of slippers and told her to tell her mom they’d been a free sample. But somehow, eventually, Chloe’s mom had decided ballet was a good thing, and now she cares too much and breathes down Chloe’s neck, watching all her classes and giving loud opinions about the other girls in the car on the way home, criticizing their technique and bodies.

  The tin soldiers cower; Chloe turns to the rats, arms lifted in triumph. Applause, and then a soldier stomps once, hard, on her tail.

  The director has told her to pretend to be very angry when her tail gets stepped on, but she does not need to pretend. The indignity of her ruined moment is a fresh pain every night. She leaps in the air, whirls around and rushes at the soldiers, full of fury, but they are not afraid of her small claws, and they catch her and spin her down their battle line, grabbing and turning her, one to the next to the next. When they finally let go, she falls to the stage in a tantrum of humiliation, beating her fists and feet against the cool, smooth surface until a big rat picks her up and carries her into the wings, still kicking and thrashing. “Take it easy, Chloe,” he whispers, and she lets up and dangles limply from his arms.

  They are to wait in the wings until the Rat King enters from the other side, wearing his crown, brandishing his scimitar, and because they need to enter as soon as he does, the rat holds her while they wait. She has complained to Joan that he holds her forever, but Joan timed it and amazed her with the news that they are offstage for only twenty seconds. The rat, a man named Brett who works in a lamp store, smells like BO and cologne. His rat head, which never really dries out, smells like mildew, and his breathing is loud inside it. The head reminds her of the animals at Disneyland, how they hugged her, and also of the man on the Matterhorn. The memory can’t be trusted. It is too vague, too blurred by motion and sound—the descent of the toboggan, the rattle of the tracks, the roar of the snow monster—but at its center is the alien, disturbing image of her mother being embraced by a strange man, leaning back against him with her eyes closed, her mouth dropping open. Who is that man? He has no face, not really, but he kisses her mother’s neck. The memory can’t be trusted, but it lingers and rubs like a bit of grit between Chloe and her mother, taking on layers of nacre, growing larger but turning more opaque.

  Brett groans and shifts his weight, trying to support her with his hip, but then he gives up and leans back so she is draped down the front of his body. The fur on the back of her leotard mingles with the fur on his chest, and she can feel the hot dampness of his unitard through her tights. She can even feel his heart beating. During rehearsals, she liked him. He was nice and asked her about school and showed her a special way to jump after her tail got stepped on so the audience would know how much it hurt. He wore cut-off red sweatpants over his tights and a bandanna over his curly blond hair, which she liked, but he also wore tank tops, which she didn’t like because of the dingy clumps of hair in his armpits. When she informed him she was afraid of being touched by his armpit hair, he laughed and wore T-shirts instead.

  But Brett’s nice face and curly hair is hidden under that big, whiskery rat head with two shiny white teeth and protruding black eyes. There is also the problem of the amorphous bumps in the front of his tights, where her bottom is resting. She likes the embroidered vests and velvet jackets and shirts with long, blousy sleeves that male dancers wear, but their lower bodies, exposed and monochromatic in tights, all muscles and butt cheeks and those troubling bumps, disconcert her. She knows what boys have, has seen illustrations in books and has made Harry show her his, but those purple and pink drawings and Harry’s embarrassed snail-without-a-shell seem to have little to do with the contours of Brett’s tights.

  Once when an Arslan Rusakov special was on TV, her father had come in with a plastic cup full of red wine, stood and watched for a minute, then said, “So much brouhaha about one fruity little grape smuggler.”

  “What’s a grape smuggler?”

  “A guy in tights,” he said, picking up the remote and changing the channel.

  So now she can’t see grapes without thinking of men stuffing them down their tights, and when she finds grapes in her lunch, warm from sitting in her backpack all morning, the sides of the baggie misted with condensation, she throws them away. She asked Joan if she could be a famous ballerina without doing all the pas de deux stuff, and Joan said no but also that she didn’t have to worry about partnering for a few more years. The Sugar Plum Fairy’s variation is just the kind of thing Chloe wants to do—light and dainty and self-sufficient—but when the Fairy’s cavalier is around he is always holding her hand and touching her waist while she turns and lifting her by her thighs.

  Her mother has come to every performance, but this is the only night her father would agree to come. At home, the stack of presents is small and wrapped in paper left over from last year. Chloe’s class had done a wrapping paper sale, and while most kids’ parents bought at least a few rolls, Chloe had to peddle her paper swatches door-to-door in the neighborhood because her mother wouldn’t buy any, not even the silver paper dotted with tiny penguins, which was the best. At the school Christmas fair, Chloe picked out a small framed photograph of a racing cyclist for her father with an inspirational saying about perseverance printed underneath. He lost his job at the mall and is having trouble finding another one. She is under strict orders not to tell anyone even though everyone already seems to know. At night, after she goes to bed, her parents either watch TV or fight. Sometimes they fight about her.

  “You were so obsessed with her being gifted—she is gifted. This is what she’s good at.”

  “I was obsessed? You’re the obsessed one. You care about this ballet stuff more than she does.”

  “I care about her having opportunities. You were always talking about her having every opportunity. You said it a million times. Like really you were so oppressed growing up. Like really it was so tragic being from Grand Rapids and having a dentist for a father. Bull shit.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s bullshit. This ballet crap is bullshit. It’s a fantasy for little girls. Little girls and you
and Joan Bintz and her faggoty kid. The best thing I can say about it is that at least girls who do it don’t get fat. Do you ever stop to think about how much it costs?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Why don’t we just give the whole house to the Bintzes, would you be happy then?”

  A silence, and then her mother’s voice, calm like a teacher’s: “Do you want me to find her a different studio? It’ll mean a longer drive, which means more gas money, more of my time.”

  “Because you’re so busy.”

  “I could get a job. It would be so much better if we just had a little money coming in. I could bartend again.”

  “I’m not going to be supported by my wife. I’m not going to have a wife who’s a bartender.”

  “Great. Let’s wait for the repo man to come. Let’s move in with my parents. No, let’s starve to death.”

  Chloe’s father, quietly: “Shut up. You’re being stupid. Just shut up.”

  She thinks her father is right not to want to be supported by her mother. She imagines their doing a pas de deux, her mother lifting and spinning her father, and it is all wrong. She cries when they fight and worries they will make her stop dancing, but she is impatient with them, too. Her dancing is none of their business. She has begun to divide the world into dancers and nondancers, and her parents are nondancers. What they think is not important. Harry doesn’t even seem to know how lucky he is to live with Joan. At school, a nondance place, Harry is in the class for smart kids, but on the playground he embarrasses Chloe with his overtures of friendship and gestures of familiarity, and she wishes he would just leave her alone there so she wouldn’t have to hurt his feelings. He is a part of a better world, the hard one, the one you have to work to get inside.

  The Rat King makes his entrance, and Chloe locks into an arabesque, raising her fist over her head as Brett swings her sideways, lifts her high, and rushes onstage.