by Aine Greaney
In her bedroom mirror, she watches herself pack the last of her things into the suitcase. The downstairs band has just started up its second set. She can hear the bar voices, the twangy sound of an electric guitar, the lead singer’s voice through her bedroom floor.
Her cell phone bleeps from her nightstand. Who? She leans across the bed to read her text message. It’s Viktor, her downstairs neighbor from the Academy apartments. He’s returned to Coventry-by-the-Sea early for the fall semester. Managed to finagle another six months of the freebie pad. So it’s gonna be the same for her. Six months gratis. Would his little Ellenita be heading back soon? Either way, give him a call.
She checks the bedside clock’s digital numbers. 10:30. So just 5:30 over there. She sits on her hotel bed and dials Viktor’s land line from the wall phone above her headboard. She listens to it ring, brr-brr-brr in his living room across the Atlantic—just the other side of the clapboard wall from her own living room. In fact, if she were there now, sitting in one of her armchairs, she would hear his phone ringing through the wall. She always does.
She inserts herself back there: among her armchairs, bookshelves, her framed posters of Paris and Québec. But she keeps slipping out of her own picture. After her summer in Ireland, after a year of widowhood, there is too much of her now, too much to fit back into its old narrow slot.
Viktor’s machine clicks on. “Hola. This is Viktor Ortiz. I’m not here right now, but please leave . . .”
She prepares to leave a funny, breezy message. But at the sound of that voice, that life, she feels something hard and sour catching in her throat, the weight of knowing, learning. “Hey Viktor. It’s me, Ellenita. I’m ah . . . well, I’m still in Ireland. Flying back tomorrow. I’m at a hotel. So if you get in later, I’d love a chat. I’ll give you the number . . .” She recites the number from the hotel phone.
Then she slides off the edge of the bed onto the carpet, sits there with her knees to her chin. She watches Gowna’s silent main street, the night rain in a halo around the streetlights.
An hour ago, she stood out there in the rain hugging the Fitzgeralds and Father Bradley good-bye. “Maybe we’ll come over skiing,” Tom said. “Next winter. We’ll definitely give you a shout.”
“Look after yourself,” Ruth said, gripping Ellen by the forearms. “And don’t be a stranger. For God’s sake, send us an e-mail and tell us how you’re getting on.”
“I’ll be in touch, Ellen,” Father Bradley said. “The minute I hear anything about Jo’s sister. Good or bad.” He had a wistful look.
Then she stood there waving as Tom Fitzgerald’s Volvo drove out the hotel gateway and turned up the Main Street toward the priest’s house. The Fitzgeralds were giving him a ride home.
Downstairs now, the band’s singer finishes up his song. “Thanks,” he says. “Thanks very much folks for dancing. We’ll take another break and then see ye back for the last set of the night.”
A car passes underneath her window, the wipers thwacking, the street-lights glistening on the rooftop. “Hello!” It’s a man’s voice. Ellen scoots on her bottom closer to the window to peer down. The man is standing directly underneath, just outside the bar door and shouting into his cell phone. “No. No, I’m down here at Flanagan’s. Yeah. No. Sure, chance it. They’re serving another while anyways. Oh, now, you know how Gerry is.”
She looks behind her at the wall phone above the bed, the cord dangling down the wallpapered wall. Call back, Viktor. She longs to hear a voice, any voice that will take away this loneliness.
43
THE TUBE FROM HEATHROW AIRPORT speeds into the sunlight, past the upstairs windows and the red-brick gables of south London houses. Ellen checks her cell phone again. No missed calls. Damn.
From her train seat, Ellen eyes the other Friday afternoon passengers—business commuters with their briefcases and newspapers; a flight attendant in a navy blue uniform and a black wheelie suitcase. Further down the train sits a large, loud family—mother, father, kids, and grandparents—all wearing white cotton sun hats. From her seat, Ellen can smell their suntan oil.
The woman’s voice announces the next station: “Hounslow Central.”
This evening, Saturday, Ellen will take the train back to Heathrow to fly British Airways back to Boston’s Logan.
The train is slowing again. The flight attendant steps off, and Ellen watches her crossing the station platform. The vacationing family has turned noisier, the three children fidgety and petulant while the young mother promises that they’ll all soon be home soon, all back home and their holiday over.
On the telephone this morning, Miss Daniela Jarkowski said that the dance studio would be easy to find. “Get off at—you’re taking the tube, yes?—well, get off at Camden Town or Chalk Farm. Walk from there. You have the address? From the web site? With the Saturday market crowds, you should begin your journey early.”
At the station, Ellen carries her suitcase amid the Saturday morning rush, that crisscross of voices and the patter of footsteps, the volley of voices in the underground corridors. How can it be just a short flight away? This city and what she’s just left—the quiet, sleepy village of Gowna or the road she just drove to Shannon Airport with its overgrown hedgerows and the stretches of fields and limestone?
Now, standing on the escalator and balancing her suitcase as she scans the framed posters for movies, summer festivals, theater productions, Ellen wonders if this sudden flight change, this extra day and the diversion to London was a stupid idea.
On the telephone from Flanagan’s hotel, she told Miss Jarkowski that she and her husband were moving to north London, where Ellen’s husband has a fictitious contract job with a multinational. So their fifteen-year-old daughter needed a dance studio. Could they come and check it out?
The sun is suddenly bright on the London sidewalk. The street smells of coffee. Techno-music blasts from a store. At another store, a man is unlocking, rattling up a security shutter.
More techno. Then reggae.
A flashing neon signs offers Tattoos and Body Piercing.
A woman is stacking leather boots on a set of street-side wooden shelves: “Doc Martens. Best Price,” says the cardboard sign.
Ellen would need a week to take it all in—the voices and movement and crisscross of languages. At another market stall, a man stands on a step stool to hang a line of black T-shirts along a railing. He winks at her as she walks past. “Some nice shirts here, darling; cheapie, cheapie.”
She turns into the side street, to another line of just-opening stalls and food vendors setting up their pans and woks and crepe makers. The smell makes her hungry, reminds her that she hasn’t eaten breakfast. There’s a blast of Elvis singing, “Love me tender.” Another security shutter rattles open.
The stairway of the Red Dragon Chinese restaurant smells of frying grease and duck sauce. At the top of the stairs, taped to the white stucco wall, is a homemade, computer-printed sign with an arrow pointing toward the front of the building: “Jarkowski Dance Studio. Day & Hourly Studio Rentals.”
Ellen opens the studio door to thumping music and a huge painted room with red-painted walls and three rows of girls who are dancing in front of a large, room-length mirror. Between the grimy front windows, under a white floodlight, music blasts from a laptop set up on a narrow, high table, the two speakers on the floor: Love me, love me / Say that you love me. “Arc! Arc! Hip!” A woman’s voice above the music. “Right! Left! Triangle! Mira. Excuse me, Mira! Mira! You’re turning your whole body, sweetheart. Just that shoulder, then slo-ooowly lifting your chin. Good!”
Ellen studies the teacher, who is standing in the opposite corner, left of the laptop setup. She’s a wiry little woman in a white, oversized T-shirt and black leggings. Daniela Jarkowski is older and smaller than her phone voice.
At last, Miss Jarkowski sees Ellen standing there inside the door. Unsmiling, the dance teacher holds up both hands. Ten. Ten more minutes until the girls’ break. She nods Ellen to a plastic chair s
et against the side wall.
“Okay, now hop step. Hop. Step. Beautiful. Now get ready for the next . . .”
Cat Cawley is the girl in the middle row. There she is: the center row, second from the end. She has a goth-black fringe pinned back off her face, the rest of her hair in a wispy little ponytail. Her skin is ghostly white against her black shorts and knee socks, a black strappy top. Oh, yes. That’s Fintan’s daughter.
The music revs up. “Kiss me, kiss me.”
The young girls dance in a distracted, fidgety way, watching each other’s reflection in the mirror, whispering over their shoulders. A few girls are downright clumsy and out of sync with the music. But Catherine Cawley’s eyes are shut, her face serene. Her whole body is graceful, in perfect rhythm. She’s by far the best dancer here.
“Now, girls, get ready for the turn. Turn!” The girls all turn in almost unison, facing the door and Ellen’s plastic chair. They dance to the right, arms high, together, the thump-thump-thump of stockinged feet on the polished-wood floor.
Fintan’s daughter is right there, less than ten feet away. She keeps her eyes closed as she dances.
“You have five, six, seven, eight. Throw! Throw! Jump!” calls Miss Jarkowski.
Then, in unison with the other girls, Cat Cawley turns toward their teacher behind the laptop.
In her tiny office, Daniela Jarkowski lights a cigarette. Across the desk from the dance teacher is an old wooden chair with a half-used packet of printer paper, but she doesn’t invite Ellen to remove it, to take a seat.
“So your daughter, what kind of dance is she doing now?”
“Tap,” Ellen lies across the small metal desk.
“She’s good, yeah?” The tone is skeptical.
“Okay,” Ellen says. “Not as good as she could be. She needs practice.”
Miss Jarkowski exhales smoke through her nose. “Ach, they all need practice. You see those girls out there? Each one, they arrive on Saturday. ‘Oh, Miss J, I’ve had to go here, pop over there. Time for everything but I haven’t had time to practice.’”
“What . . . what about that tall girl? The girl with the black hair? She seems good.”
Miss Jarkowski frowns across the desk at Ellen.
“The tall girl in the second row. The jet-black hair.”
“Ah, yes. Catherine. Best student I have. Very, very good. But the poor kid, you know. She misses too many classes. And now she travels from some bloody place, from out in the home counties or . . .” Miss Jarkowski twirls her cigarette hand. “And the mother sends my money late. Always late. Once, she telephones me, this mother, stupid woman, and she says that Catherine’s not coming. No more dance. She says—”
“—But she is here. She’s trying.”
Something in Ellen’s voice stops the dance teacher in her rant. She levels a quizzical gaze on Ellen. “You know this kid, this Catherine?”
“No. But you can’t help noticing her, how talented she is.”
Miss Jarkowski gives a theatrical shrug. “Usually they pay. Must pay. But a kid like that . . .” She gives Ellen a twisted smile. “Hey, maybe one day, she’s gonna make me famous, right? Make me famous and I can sleep late on Saturday mornings and not take two tubes to come and teach these girls with no talent.” The teacher gives a high, forced laugh—“Oh, except your kid. Hah! Your American daughter, I’m sure, is very good. Very good. Now, when are you and your family moving to London?”
“Next month.”
Another cigarette puff, then Miss Jarkowski glances at her watch. She pushes a sheet of printed paper across the desk. “So your daughter can read this. On your airplane tonight when you fly back to America. If she wants Saturday mornings, contemporary dance, maybe we can find a place, hah? Maybe something? Maybe it becomes sixteen girls? Why not?”
Crossing back across the mirrored studio, Ellen weaves among the clusters of dancers, the girls, standing there in their little cliques of three and four girls.
No Cat. She’s noplace to be seen.
On the landing, Cat Cawley doesn’t turn to the sound of Ellen closing the studio door behind her. Cat is standing alone, eating a candy bar and watching the street from the front landing window.
Ellen creaks along the landing toward the stairs. She starts down, then stops on the third step. “Hey. You were great in there. Really great.”
Cat turns. There’s a tiny chocolate stain on her upper lip. They face each other through the white stair rails. Cat flashes a small, shy smile. “Oh, d’you actually think so?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Oh, thanks.”
Through the studio door the music starts again. “I like the way you move!” Then Miss Jarkowski’s voice: “Okay, change lines this time. New girls, change to the front. Same formation as last time.”
Ellen says, “Your break’s up. Maybe you’d better get back in there.”
Cat gives a little hand flap, the teenage approximation of a wave. “Yeah. ’Bye.”
44
December 2002
ELLEN SLIDES two crisp dollar bills under the park ranger’s Plexiglas window. He passes her a tiny green ticket and points her toward the open parking spots along the fence. She rolls up the car window and bumps across the packed-mud parking lot, past the wooden sign with the white lettering: “Welcome to the Santa Madera National Forest. No firearms, fireworks, alcohol. Leash law. Please lock your vehicle.”
On this Saturday afternoon, the lot is already half-full. It’s shady and cooler up here in the park. Under the piñon trees and along the low fences, the parking lot and trailhead are rimmed with watery, glittery snow.
Ellen’s red Nissan with its Massachusetts license plate is the only non–New Mexico car.
She grabs her fanny pack and sweatshirt from the passenger seat, then reaches into the back for her water bottle. In all the guidebooks, they warn newcomers and tourists about elevation headaches.
Now Ellen starts up the first part of the trail or arroyo.
On Saturdays, she teaches two morning classes at the Santa Madera Community College. Otherwise, she would have made it out here for her Saturday hike much earlier, when the sun was still high in the blue New Mexico sky, and when there was time to climb to the top of the park and back down again before the park rangers come looking for her.
Today, if she walks fast, she’ll make it to the first lookout halfway up the mountain.
Sometimes on her Saturday hike, Ellen conjures the town park in Coventry-by-the-Sea, its white bandstand and its statue memorial to Nathaniel Lunt, died 1872, a British-born town father, shipbuilder and antislavery advocate in his new country of America. She pictures his statue amid the clipped lawns and well-tended begonia beds.
A town park. Just like this. Except that New England park is already fading in her mind.
Yesterday, Ellen woke to a snow-covered skylight above her bed. She rolled back the covers and thumped across to her second-floor window to see the year’s first snowfall. Outside, under a blue December sky, the snow had blanketed the apartment buildings and the benches in the courtyard.
Noel the cat flopped down from the end of the bed and crossed to the window, too. He set his front paws on the windowsill. Together, they stared at that blinding blue against white. She scratched behind his ears and he purred—this New Mexico cat named for an Irish priest.
In her e-mails to Ireland and Gowna, Ellen has told Father Noel Bradley about his American namesake. But she hasn’t told him that, the second she saw this kitten at the animal shelter northwest of town, its sleek black fur reminded her of Father Noel’s bicycling shorts.
Now she pulls to the side of the trail to let an approaching woman and her black Labrador pass. The dog strains at its leash, forcing the woman in her swishy Gortex coat to hurry down the slope.
“Hi there!” the woman calls.
“Hi,” Ellen answers, inwardly smiling at the red ear muffs and winter jacket. Three months living out here and she’s still amused at these people all muffl
ed up for Arctic weather, when this, she’s been told, is about as cold as it gets out here, in this spot just east of the Rio Grande, in the lower peaks of the Santa Maderas.
She pictures those twenty-below-zero days in Patterson Falls, New Hampshire, when she and Louise waddled down their street to school in snowsuits and boots. Here in the New Mexico forest, she can hear them now—all the kids from all the houses along River Road, Patterson. For months at a time. Swish, swish, swish.
Her sweatshirt is too hot and heavy draped around her shoulders. She unknots it, ties it around her waist. Then she takes a long drink from her water bottle and steps around a hole in the steep path. Up here, not yet quarter-way up the trail, there’s more snow under the undergrowth.
The Santa Madera Community College sits just off Highway 85, heading south out of town. The college is all spaceship white except for its rows of dark-tinted windows to block the perpetual sun.
Last September, Ellen Boisvert arrived there in her interview suit and stockings on a 105-degree day. Amid their interview questions about pedagogical approaches and cross-curricular integrations, the interview panel members couldn’t keep a tone of incredulity from their voices. Why would a preppy-school girl from New England want a job teaching teenagers from the county’s surrounding towns and Indian reservations?
At the interview, they boasted about the college’s well-published study on first-generation college students—Latina and native kids who betray their own family by signing up for college classes.
When they called her with a job offer, Ellen gave a two-week notice at Coventry Academy. In one long weekend, she packed up her belongings and drove, pioneer style, across the country. When she woke in highway motels with rattling air conditioners, she still started awake with that sense of duty, as if Jo Dowd were waiting for her breakfast and medications in a downstairs sickroom.
Her students at the community college can only be assigned papers or assignments that can be completed during class time or study-support labs. At home, her students have neither space nor time to write short comprehension paragraphs, nor to practice the reading and writing exercises from their GED prep classes on Saturday mornings.