Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  Joan thinks she should be doing more to draw Elaine out, pry back her layers of careful control, but she doesn’t know how. Her attempts are, for the most part, met with jokes and deflections. “You can freak out, if you want,” she tried once.

  “I don’t,” Elaine said, not quite snapping, but firmly. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to suddenly explode and rend my garments and then be catatonic in your guest room for a week. I’m comfortable this way. There’s always a little motor going somewhere, processing, but it’s private.”

  “Fine,” Joan said. “That’s fine.”

  Sometimes Elaine comes to the studio and sits in a folding chair by the mirror. She watches Joan teach, mans the stereo, drinks from an enormous thermos of black tea. Twice she has taught the advanced class, five girls including Chloe plus Harry. She sounds uncannily like Mr. K as she walks up and down the barre correcting them. The students are dazzled by her and frightened of her demanding brusqueness, the way she might seize an underperforming arm or leg and shake it at its owner as though confronting a dog with a chewed-up shoe.

  Out on the pool deck, Elaine rolls onto her stomach and fiddles with something she pulls from under Harry’s chaise—a small box that must be metal from the way it catches the sunlight. She sticks a joint in her mouth—Joan supposes for one foolish moment that it could be a hand-rolled cigarette—and lights it. Holding it at the end of one outstretched arm, she maneuvers onto her back again, then expels a cloud of smoke. The arm comes down to her mouth in a graceful curve, a swan’s neck bending to feed.

  “Elaine,” Joan calls, going out and crossing the patio to stand over her, “are you smoking marijuana in front of my son?” She should be angry, but Elaine’s brazenness has disarmed her. She’s like a tourist from Balletland who doesn’t know the most basic local customs.

  Elaine looks up at Joan. The sun is a star against the black space of her sunglasses. She cracks her lips and smoke sidles out. “Well, he wouldn’t have noticed except you said so.”

  “I know what pot smells like,” Harry interjects, propped up on his elbows. The position emphasizes how narrow his waist is compared to his shoulders. His shoulders seem to have passed into manhood, while the rest of him is still boyish and gangly. “It’s fine, Mom. Elaine is grieving.”

  Elaine holds the joint up, proffering it to Joan, who shakes her head. She twists onto her side to stub it out in the lid of her little box, which holds a half dozen more skinny paper twists. Carefully, she tucks the remnant in with its brethren, shuts the lid. “Sorry,” she says. “That was presumptuous. But it’s so delicious here in the sun. I couldn’t resist.”

  Suddenly it is deeply annoying to Joan that Elaine has chosen to rest on her life as though it were a lily pad. “Try,” she says. “I know it’s not very bohemian of me, but I don’t actually encourage Harry to do drugs.”

  “I wasn’t encouraging him. I didn’t offer him any. I wouldn’t.”

  “Mom,” Harry says again, soothingly, “it’s fine.”

  “You don’t get to decide,” she tells him.

  Elaine swivels up so she is sitting Indian style. The tendons in her groin stand out like guy wires holding her bikini in place. There is nothing to fold or pooch out on her stomach; the skin stretches taut around the shallow knothole of her belly button. With an air of giving Joan the straight scoop, she says, “Harry will have to make up his own mind, anyway, Joan, since he’s going to be a dancer. You remember how it was. If you’re going to just say no, you’ll have to say it a lot.”

  Harry perks up. “You think I’m going to be a dancer?”

  Elaine aims her sunglasses at him. “Don’t you want to be?”

  “Yeah, obviously. But you think I’ll make it?”

  “You’re special,” Elaine says. “There are no guarantees, but you have the talent. Some people think you just need to work, but they’re wrong. You need talent, too, and the right body, obviously. You’ve got those, so now you have to work harder than everyone else. The second you think you’re good enough, it’s over. Then you’re a complacent sack of shit, and you’re wrong. There’s no such thing as good enough.”

  “Don’t promise things,” Joan says to Elaine. “Especially not while you’re high.” Harry is slipping away from her. She has thought for some time that he is gifted enough to be a professional, even a star, but she has only vaguely considered the intrusive mechanisms that will start to take over. People with more power will move in and shoulder her aside, claiming her son, her student. He is already becoming a commodity. She experiences a tickle of anticipatory jealousy. This is the beginning of people wanting him to dance what they choreograph, wanting him to make money for them, wanting him simply to be present on their stage or at their gala or party. Soon girls and women will want him to bestow attention and love and sex. Even as she wants him to succeed, Joan wants to keep him for herself. She envies the talent that will propel him away from her.

  “I didn’t promise anything,” Elaine says. “Best-case scenario, I promised a lifetime of feeling inadequate.”

  “I don’t think it’s helpful to tell him he’s special. I don’t want him to be disappointed.”

  “Of course he’s going to be disappointed,” Elaine says. “Harry, you’re going to be disappointed sometimes. Is that okay?”

  “Yes!”

  Elaine pats his foot. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ll have to come to New York next summer for the intensive.”

  Harry hesitates. “What about Chloe? Can she come?”

  “She can audition. You’ll have to audition, too. I can’t just ordain that you’re coming. Maybe I could. No, I won’t. Chloe needs to finish growing. I can’t tell what she’ll look like in a few years.”

  “She’s having an awkward time with puberty,” Joan says. “She’s very good. She’ll work it out.”

  “Can you tell what I’ll look like?” Harry asks Elaine.

  “You—yes. Partly because I know your parents and partly because I can just see it. I get more excited about boys in general. There are fewer boys. Harry, you can’t tie your career to any other dancers. You can’t only do what Chloe does.”

  “I know.” He nods gravely but looks unconvinced.

  “You’re bossy for a pothead,” Joan observes.

  “You should hear me without it. I’m Mussolini.”

  Joan goes inside and gets her cigarettes out of their hiding place above the fridge. She returns to the pool, steps out of her sandals, sits down next to Elaine’s towel, and puts her feet in the water. Below, the wheeled cleaner robot glides in long arcs over the curvature of the bottom, vigilantly patrols its tranquil beat, sometimes running so high up the walls that part of it breaks the surface, dipping up into the air like a dolphin’s back. Elaine and Harry are talking to each other, uninterested in her, but they stop when she clicks her lighter, unites the tiny flame with the paper. “I guess we’re all adults now,” she says.

  “I knew you smoked,” Harry says. “I have a nose.”

  “Okay, then. Don’t start, though. You’ll never be able to stop.”

  “I don’t do things just because you do them.”

  The sound of bees comes from the orange tree. A mourning dove sings its four notes. Joan is the architect of this moment, but all along she has been building herself out of it, cheerfully walling off her son’s future. It is too late to undo anything. She has made Harry a dancer and can’t unmake him. She wouldn’t want to, but she is sorry to be left behind again.

  MAY 1993—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  IN THE EARLY MORNINGS, BEFORE HER PARENTS WAKE, CHLOE MAKES herself coffee and does her exercises. She stretches. She lies on her back and spins a bicycle tire around one ankle and then the other. She does handstands and yoga poses in the living room and pull-ups on the spring-loaded bar she ordered from a catalog and wedged in the doorway of the downstairs bathroom. She does these things, but each day she does them more slowly, with fewer repetitions, spending more and more time
lying on her back and contemplating the ceiling, wondering if she should quit ballet.

  Several reasons present themselves for quitting. For starters, dance takes up all her time and makes her tired and is hard and not fun. Second, her mother, who is a fat cow and doesn’t know anything about ballet, is always riding her about staying focused in class. And it doesn’t help that puberty, slow to arrive, finally overtook her like a plague and has spent the past year, her fourteenth, widening her hips, throwing off her center of gravity, robbing her of turnout. No matter how little she eats, the hips will not be fought back—the wideness is in the bone. Her pelvis has spread like a stain, pulling her femurs and knees out of alignment, changing everything forever. The hips are her mother’s fault, genetically speaking, and are resented as such, as though she had conceived Chloe as part of an elaborate plan to cultivate her dancing and then, via anatomical time bomb, sabotage it. Chloe used to be good; ballet used to feel natural, not easy but not like an impossible struggle against her own limbs.

  Harry, too, is undergoing the grand transition they’ve heard so much about in health class, but he seems to be having an unfairly easy time, simply growing taller and stronger. His arms and legs aren’t clumsy saboteurs but have assumed pleasant masculine proportions and continue to cooperate with his wishes. Pure physical luck—along with the political advantage of being Joan’s kid and Elaine Costas’s honorary kid or whatever and the numerical advantage of being one of the relatively few boys who do ballet—is why he got into a better summer intensive than she did (moral outrage: another reason to quit), the one in New York. The worst thing that puberty (such a gross word) has inflicted on him is a change in the way he smells, and she should know because they have been spending more and more time on partnering work and her face is always in his armpit or chest or, if something goes wrong, crotch. He doesn’t smell bad, but sometimes she tells him he does, whispering spitefully as they practice a promenade, him walking a slow circle around her, rotating her on her pointe. Joan says this difficult time will pass, that Chloe will learn how to dance in her new body, but she isn’t giving Chloe any breaks. “Push down with your leg, don’t pull up!” she shouted a few days ago as Harry lifted Chloe. “He can’t support you unless you support yourself. You need to engage.” Harry, trembling, lowered her back to the floor.

  “He needs to get stronger,” Chloe said. “I can feel him shaking.”

  “He does. Harry, you do. But he’s working on it. You have to help. It’s meant to look effortless, not be effortless.”

  For her fifteenth birthday, Harry gave her a book on famous ballerinas, including Emma Livry, who died in 1863 at the age of twenty after her tutu caught fire from a gas lamp onstage at the Paris Opéra, and now Chloe has nightmares about dancing while engulfed in flames. This morning, after plunging into a bottomless orchestra pit, trailing sparks through the blackness as she fell, unable to scream, burning and flailing in silence, waiting to splash into the water Joan said was under the Opéra but never getting that relief, she woke with scratches on her torso and blood under her fingernails, the sheets tangled around her ankles. If she quits, maybe the dreams will stop.

  When her father comes downstairs in his bathrobe, Chloe tells him she was finishing homework and that she has eaten breakfast. There are no dishes in the sink and her clothes are soaked with sweat, but her father pours himself a bowl of Lucky Charms and says nothing. He has stopped going to church. He has been working in a store that sells mailing supplies. He doesn’t care that her mother has started bartending and is gone most nights. As Chloe passes by his chair, he reaches out and grabs her, pulling her into a sideways hug. He so rarely embraces her that her first impulse is to pull away, but he holds fast, his shoulder digging into her ribs. Not knowing what else to do, she pats him on his head and gently pries his arms off her. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s just breakfast,” she says.

  She showers and walks to school. Halfway there, Bryce pulls up next to her in his truck and rolls down the window. “Hey,” he calls.

  “Hey.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Knitting a sweater. What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” His truck crawls along in the bike lane. He says again, “Hey.”

  “Hey what?”

  “Maybe I’ll see you after school.”

  “No. I have dance.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you at lunch.”

  “Maybe.”

  At lunch she goes out to the parking lot, to the far corner where Bryce has parked his truck under a pepper tree. Small green leaves and hard pink peppercorns sprinkle the hood and flatbed. The cab is cool in the shade, and she finds herself almost dozing off even while Bryce kisses her and grasps her wrist to press her hand against the front of his jeans. “You’re so hot,” he whispers. “You’re like crazy hot.” Other students pass by, talking and laughing, but their voices seem as irrelevant as birdcalls and only add to Chloe’s lull.

  When the bell rings, she says, “Is it okay if I stay here and take a nap?”

  “Don’t you have class?”

  She has biology. “Free period.”

  He doesn’t like the idea, but she has let him feel around inside her underwear and knows he will want to keep her happy. She is already folding her sweatshirt into a pillow. “Just don’t get me in trouble,” he says.

  When she wakes sometime later, the parking lot is quiet and Harry is staring at her through the driver’s window.

  “Hey,” she says. “How long have you been standing there, creeper?”

  “They were calling you to come to the office. Mrs. Ferguson asked me to look for you.”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  His face is strange, reluctant. “I don’t think so.”

  “But I ditched.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  “I should probably get used to taking care of myself, since you’ll be so far away this summer. Off with the good dancers.”

  He doesn’t say anything but doesn’t leave, either. She knows he feels bad about the intensive but not bad enough not to go. Taking her time, she sits up and straightens her clothes, pulls down the mirror and checks her makeup, wiping crumbs of mascara from the inside corners of her eyes, licking her index finger and smoothing her eyebrows. It bothers her how he doesn’t tell her to hurry up but just stands there waiting. Only eight boys were at the auditions in L.A. and almost a hundred girls. She had made it through several rounds, and then she had waited, breathless after a combination, the number four pinned to the front of her leotard, while the people from the company conferred. A lady with a bun of white hair said, “Will numbers three, nine, seventy, fifty-two, and twenty-one please stay? The rest of you, thank you very much.”

  True, Chloe had been skipping class in the weeks before audition to hang out with Dylan, who had been more of a real boyfriend than Bryce because he took her to the movies and they had gone all the way, and, true, she had fallen off pointe during an easy set of turns in the audition and been sluggish with her footwork, but the rejection had still come as a shock. Joan knew these people, had told them to look out for her. Maybe if she’d been Joan’s daughter they would have taken her along with Harry. Maybe Elaine didn’t like her and had told them not to take her. The next day she had told Joan the whole thing seemed really unfair, and Joan had been surprisingly bitchy and unsympathetic and said, “You can’t expect to slack off and still be good enough. Ballet isn’t about you. Art isn’t about you, what you want.”

  “I know that!”

  “Maybe I pushed you too hard. Maybe I misunderstood—I thought you were serious.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re not, and if you don’t see that, I don’t know what the point is.”

  “I am,” Chloe had protested, and for a few weeks, she was determined again. She started the morning exercises, trying to get stronger and sleeker, but her commitment is already dwindling.

  “Don’t you have class?” she asks Harry.

 
“Yeah, but, like I said, Mrs. Ferguson asked me to find you.”

  For the first time it occurs to her that something is wrong, and she slides out of Bryce’s truck and walks with Harry across the parking lot. “What’s going on?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  She knows he is lying. When Joan started coaching them in pas de deux, the promenade was the first thing they learned. Chloe stood on one pointe with her other leg back and bent in attitude, and she and Harry grasped hands, their index and middle fingers extended along the inside of each other’s wrists, their arms making an S shape, and he walked in a circle, turning her. The step looks simple but is difficult. She can feel his pulse in his wrist. He becomes a part of her balance; they are one system of weights and counterweights. They might as well be standing on a tightrope together. He’s a glorified butler, her mother likes to say. No, he’s doing a lot, she replies, even though, when they moved on to lifts, Joan had told him not to grab but to support. You’re like a waiter lifting a tray, she said.

  As they come into the principal’s office, two things happen at once: she sees her mother sitting in a chair, and Harry puts one arm around her waist and grasps her under the elbow with the other hand, holding her up.

  CAREFULLY, HARRY CLOSES HIS BEDROOM DOOR AND PADS DOWNSTAIRS. He doesn’t think Chloe is asleep, not really, but he feels he should honor her charade. She is under the covers in his bed, curled on her side, breathing through her mouth, her eyes closed. Outside, the streetlights have come on, but the kid next door is still dribbling a basketball on his driveway. The sound, echoing around the neighborhood, is crisp and sharp. The kid is bad at putting the ball in the basket, but he’s good at dribbling and turning and faking and jumping, graceful and smooth. Harry has watched him before. Sometimes minutes pass without him even taking a shot at the basket while he and the orange ball orbit each other.