WHEN LOLA SHOWED ME extra attention, the other girls in the program didn’t seem to mind. I was such a beginner, and most were so far ahead of me in knowledge and practice, that I don’t think they saw me as competition.
There were roughly two hundred students in the summer program, including perhaps eighty boys. Many of us hung out with one another, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, and occasionally forming a rowdy caravan that wended through the streets of San Francisco, reveling in our temporary freedom from home and ballet.
But there were a few girls who clung to one another and kept their distance. They weren’t mean, just in a world unto themselves. Back in San Pedro, I had never been one of the popular, cool kids, and those girls existed even in ballet, all cliquish, glossy, and gossipy.
They seemed more mature than me and my friends, talking about boys and all the summer intensives they’d been to, conversations I had nothing to contribute to. And they would party on the weekends, staying up all night, drinking beer and wine coolers they got some older boys to buy. Meanwhile, my friends and I would order pizza, tell silly jokes, and be in bed by eleven.
For all of us, though, Alanis Morisette’s album Jagged Little Pill was the sound track of the summer.
And isn’t it ironic
Don’t you think ?
I spoke to Mommy and Cindy several times a week, telling them about the friends I’d made, the new things I was learning. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Mommy came to visit and brought all my brothers and sisters.
For some reason, though they had long been separated and continued to have a tense relationship, Robert came, too. Looking back, I assume it was because Cameron was going on a road trip and Robert wanted to be there to look after him. Besides, Robert and I had always gotten along, at least better than he had with my siblings. They drove up on a Friday, and we spent the weekend visiting Fisherman’s Wharf and Haight-Ashbury. Cameron, who was only about eight years old, stopped at one point to play chess with an older gentleman downtown. He was pensive and brilliant.
On Sunday, before they made the six-hour drive back to San Pedro, we stopped at an International House of Pancakes for breakfast.
“You know,” Mommy said, irritation clouding her voice, “the school’s director was surprised that I was in your life. They thought Cindy was your sole guardian.”
I nodded, focusing on my scrambled eggs.
She continued. “I saw Jackie and her mother the other day.” Jackie, my best friend from middle school, and I hadn’t seen each other very much after I began to be homeschooled and became consumed with my dance classes. “They were so excited about your getting accepted into the program up here. They said they wanted to hear all about it when you got back.”
She took a sip of her orange juice. “You know, Misty, we all miss you,” she continued. “I think when this summer is over, we need to start thinking about you coming back home to live with me.”
I nodded. Not because I agreed, but because I didn’t want to talk about it. I was desperate to end the conversation before it got started. I took a bite of my toast, though it was dry and tasteless in my mouth.
The next three weeks flew by, and sooner than I wanted it to be, the program was over. On the last day, I was summoned to a meeting in Lola’s office.
She was there, perched in front of her wooden shelves lined with books and photographs. Sitting beside her was Helgi Tómasson, San Francisco Ballet’s artistic director.
Lola spoke first.
“You know how impressed we are with you, Misty,” she said softly. “We think you have the potential to be a great dancer, but you need consistent training to refine your technique. We would like you to come to our school and study with us for the full year.”
Helgi sat silently beside her. I’d seen him only a few times, when he would enter the studio and watch the students dance. He never stayed more than a few minutes, and I’d never heard his voice. Until now. “If you keep working hard,” he said, “I can see you one day being a part of our company.”
The invitation wasn’t unexpected, but still I was overwhelmed and flattered. I managed to eke out a thank-you and told them I would talk about it with my mother and teacher back home.
I floated out of the office, buoyed by their belief in me. Back in the studio, I began stretching before class, as usual. That’s when I noticed the whispered chatter.
All the girls knew that I had been summoned to Lola’s office—and what that meant. Only two other girls and a couple boys in the entire program had received similar invitations.
One girl, speaking in a voice loud enough to carry, decided to express what so many of the others had been murmuring.
“Why’d they ask her to stay?” she asked. “She doesn’t have enough training. Anyone could see that.”
I continued stretching but could feel heat rising in my cheeks. I was embarrassed, and the self-doubt that plagued me in so many areas of my life—but so rarely when it came to dance—crept back into my mind.
Do I really deserve this? I asked myself. So many of these other girls are so much more experienced, so much stronger. Why me?
I wanted to run away, to retreat to my dorm room, lock the door, and privately dance my sadness away, just the way I did when I was younger, back home. But the day was only beginning. I still had to get through my ballet classes, dancing beside those same girls who had been jealously grumbling behind my back. I couldn’t flee. I had to block out the criticism, the pain, and stand my ground.
At the end of the day, we took a class picture. I felt uncomfortable, but I found my place, in the center of it all, and smiled bravely.
WHAT MADE ME FEEL even worse is that I knew that some of those girls who’d expected to be asked to stay had set their sights on one day dancing professionally with San Francisco Ballet Company. And I knew even before it was officially offered that I wouldn’t be accepting a full-year scholarship from the school. I didn’t even plan on returning to San Francisco Ballet’s intensive program the following summer.
It really hadn’t been up to me. Mommy had told me several times that she couldn’t wait for me to be back in Southern California, and while Cindy had expected me to get an invitation from the San Francisco Ballet School, she had told me in many of our phone conversations that I needed more training back home with her. She didn’t believe that I would get the same attention in a big ballet school and that my technique would suffer if I didn’t have time to clean up and hone all the little details of my dancing.
Though I knew San Francisco Ballet Company was one of the best in the country, if not the world, and I loved the care and warmth Lola and the many teachers had shown me, I was okay with the decision Cindy and my mother had made. The ultimate prize for me had always been ABT.
At the very start of the summer program in San Francisco, Jessica and I had decided we were both going to be in ABT’s summer intensive the following year. “See you there,” we both wrote in our farewell notes, scribbled in each other’s photo albums.
ABT had been my goal since I first saw its dancers on the TV in Cindy and Patrick’s home, since I’d seen Paloma Herrera dance the role of Kitri in Don Quixote at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. And being in ABT’s summer intensive was a stepping-stone to one day being a part of that professional company.
The last night of our summer in San Francisco, all the girls gathered in a common room reserved just for us. We had pizza and listened to Alanis Morissette together one final time. We stayed up all night, and Jessica handed me a note saying that whenever she saw cotton candy or took a bite out of a piece of rock candy, she would think of me.
I was sad to leave. My first taste of independence had been sweet. I’d forged connections with a lot of the girls, made many new friends. And I’d grown so much as a dancer, with my training far surpassing what I’d received in San Pedro.
I also knew there were issues starting to break out back home between Mommy and Cindy. Mommy’s entre
aties for me to come home to her had become more urgent each passing week. Cindy also was becoming more insistent, telling me how much I needed her guidance and care to help prepare me for the career looming before me.
That was the tension I was returning to.
When my plane landed at Los Angeles International Airport the next afternoon, Cindy was there, waiting.
I hopped into her car and made her play my Alanis Morisette CD all the way home.
Chapter 6
ON THE WEEKENDS, WHEN I’d return home to the Sunset Inn and Mommy from Cindy’s, I began to hear a word mentioned again and again.
Brainwashed.
“Come on, Misty!” Doug and Chris would yell in unison. “The popcorn’s ready and the game’s on.”
My brothers knew I’d never particularly liked sports. “No thanks,” I’d say, clutching a copy of Pointe magazine. “I’m going to go into Mommy’s room and read.”
“Ummm,” Doug would say, smirking and giving Chris a knowing glance, “you can’t take a break from ballet for a minute? That woman’s got you brainwashed.”
Or there was the time Chris had made a pot of spaghetti with meat sauce. He’d used ground beef. I preferred turkey.
Erica looked at me and frowned. “You didn’t complain about ground beef before,” she said, clearly irritated. “Would you prefer caviar? Cindy’s got you living in a dream world.
“But I guess you should be able to eat what you want at her house,” Erica added, sharpening the blade for the final dig. “After all, with all that publicity you bring her dinky school, you’re probably paying for it.”
I’d mostly ignore my family’s snarky comments. Ribbing and teasing had always been a big part of our family chatter. But it was becoming clear that there was a lot of talk about me behind my back that was happening during the week, while I stayed at Cindy’s.
I knew Mommy felt that I was starting to put on airs when I came home, not wanting the food that she bought, turning up my nose at the crowded motel room where we lived. I think she was telling my brothers and sisters that Cindy was trying to make me feel that I was better than them.
My brothers and sisters and I were still extremely close and fiercely protective of one another. They would boast to their friends about the scholarships I’d been offered, the places where I’d been performing. They came to every show that they could, and no one, except maybe Mommy, ever cheered louder.
But their resentment of Cindy was building. I don’t think they were jealous of my new life. I think that they were worried that I might be being used or exploited, and they were concerned what my living apart from them—with a woman they felt didn’t respect our mother or them—was doing to our family.
Of course I disagreed. I knew what the term brainwashed meant, and my life with Cindy and Patrick had been the furthest thing from it. Still, it was true that I brought a whirlwind of publicity to Cindy’s studio and school, with all the accolades I received and the news coverage about me.
Cindy readily acknowledged that I was her star. She would sometimes sell as many as two thousand tickets to one of her school’s performances, the audience packed with balletomanes and the curious, all of whom had come to see the ballet prodigy who’d been discovered at the Boys and Girls Club and bloomed in a working-class corner of San Pedro.
But I still think all that was a happy, unintentional outcome, not the goal. The Bradleys had helped unearth and hone my gift. Instead of treating me like a student or project, they embraced me as a daughter. I was still shy, but thanks to their nurturing, I now knew that my voice was worth hearing.
And as much as I loved my family, I hadn’t missed the chaos or the day-to-day uncertainty that we’d lived with. I liked having my own room, even one that I shared with a little boy. I loved coming home to the smells of the peach cobbler and lemon pie that Patrick had baked. I cherished not having to worry about whether I would eat or where I would sleep. I appreciated that the only thing I had to do was be a girl who loved to dance.
But my brothers and sisters didn’t understand. They were all on Mommy’s side.
I RETURNED FROM SAN FRANCISCO a different ballerina from when I left, much more educated and refined.
One of the many new steps I’d learned over the summer was a temps de cuisse, something I had never heard of, let alone attempted, before.
During one of my first classes back at the San Pedro Dance Center, I did the step literally without missing a beat. Cindy was in awe. She called Patrick, then asked me to do it over and over and over again, displaying what I had learned.
When I glided across the floor, my glissades were smoother. When I did a grand jeté, I leaped higher, extended farther. When I performed an entrechat, jumping in the air, crisscrossing my feet the way a bird flaps its wings, I felt like a fairy suspended in the sky. Cindy was elated.
I was, too. But I also began to feel a bit as if I’d outgrown Cindy, her studio, and her teaching—if not her devotion.
Meanwhile, my conversations with Mommy were growing more and more fraught.
“What they’re doing isn’t right,” she’d yell when she called me on the phone during the week. “They’re trying to take you away from me. I’m your mother! You have a family! You don’t need them.”
“They’re not trying to take me away!” I’d yell back. “They’ve done nothing but help me!”
It seemed every time we spoke those first couple of weeks after I returned from San Francisco, Mommy and I were performing a variation of our own tortured ballet. Mommy would yell that the Bradleys were up to no good and turning me against her; I would scream in their defense and then, feeling torn and exasperated, I’d hang up the phone and run to my room, in tears.
Finally, one weekend when I was at the motel with Mommy, the moment I’d been dreading arrived.
“You’re moving back home,” she said with finality.
It made sense, she explained. The fact that San Francisco Ballet had offered me a full scholarship for the summer, and then the chance to be a year-round student, showed that I didn’t need Cindy anymore: I was good enough, and had learned enough, to get major opportunities on my own. Besides, Mommy added, I had probably learned more during those six weeks in San Francisco than Cindy could ever teach me.
I would also be going back to San Pedro High School. Mommy had already called the Board of Education to make sure the school knew that I would be re-enrolling.
Mommy had thought of everything. She’d even made plans for me to continue dancing. Elizabeth Cantine, the drill-team instructor who had first encouraged me to take Cindy’s ballet class and then paid for my leotards and pointe shoes when I went to Cindy’s studio, had become as much a part of my mother’s life as mine. As the relationship between Mommy and Cindy deteriorated, Mommy starting calling on Liz, who became a go-between for the two, expressing each one’s feelings and concerns to the other, trying to calm the building storm.
When Mommy had made up her mind that I would return home, she enlisted Liz to help find a new ballet school that I could attend in the afternoons or on weekends. I would begin training at the Lauridsen Ballet Centre, a small dance school in Torrance, immediately.
Mommy had it all figured out, but I wouldn’t hear any of it. Not that she’d taken the time to find me another school so that I wouldn’t have to give up dance. Not the truth that Cindy had, indeed, probably taught me all that she could. Not the fact that my closeness with Cindy was conjuring Mommy’s deepest fear, that she was losing her children the way she had lost so many of the people she loved before.
All I knew was that I didn’t want to leave Cindy. To me, Cindy and dance were inextricably linked. And in my mind, without her, my career would be over.
MOMMY CALLED CINDY THAT Sunday night to let her know of her decision. I could go to my dance classes at the studio the next day, but then she expected Cindy to drop me off back home. If that was a problem, Mommy, who now had a car, would come and get me herself.
That wa
s it. Good-bye.
That night my head throbbed and spun. Lying on the couch, I thought of the room I shared with Wolfie. On the wall hung one of those caricature sketches that street artists draw, where you pose, they scribble, and then they hand you a portrait that usually looks nothing like you. Cindy had had such a drawing done of Wolfie and me.
I wonder if Cindy will let me take it, I thought, tears filling my eyes.
I didn’t bother to put on my pajamas. I lay where I was and fell asleep, knowing that I’d never again return to the room where I’d been lulled to sleep by Wolfie’s soft, steady breath.
The next morning, Cindy drove to the motel to pick me up.
In the car, she looked somber. I suddenly felt scared.
“Misty, have you ever heard of emancipation?” Cindy asked.
I knew that the word literally meant freedom. But what was she getting at?
“A lot of child performers become emancipated,” she explained. “It’s something they seek to have independence from their parents, when they feel they can make better decisions than them about their careers and their lives.”
My heart began to pound. A light was dawning, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what it illuminated.
“You’re not going to class,” she said gently. “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
We drove to a coffee shop near the dance studio. Sitting at a table, drinking a glass of water, was a man dressed casually in a polo shirt and jeans. He had a stack of papers in front of him. He smiled as we sat down.
His name was Steven Bartell, and Cindy explained that he was an attorney. Steven patiently began to explain to me exactly how emancipation worked.
Because I was under eighteen and we lived in California, I would have to petition the court to be declared an emancipated minor. A judge could grant it immediately, or the petition might require a hearing. If my request was ultimately approved, I would then be able to make decisions about my dance career, about where I lived—about nearly everything, really. It wouldn’t be up to Mommy. It wouldn’t be up to Cindy. It would all be up to me.
Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Page 10