by Sarah Bird
The line sung in flamenco’s unearthly quaver stabbed straight into my chest because I realized then that my own heart was not broken so much as missing entirely and no secret, however carefully interpreted, would ever return it. I was groping in the dark, ready to escape, when the lights unexpectedly came up. I had missed my chance. I was scrubbing tears off my cheek when a hand grazed my shoulder. Thank God it was Blanca, universally recognized as the least bitchy of all the serious dancers. We’d started out together back when Doña Carlota had taught the introductory class.
“Rae, how are you doing?” Blanca patted my shoulder and stared with the damp sympathy I’d dreaded.
“Pretty good.” I injected as much pep as I could into my answer, gesturing toward my reddened eyes. “Allergies are bothering me. All the smoke from the forest fires.” There was no smoke in the air inside the theater.
Blanca nodded. “It’s good to see you, Rae. Really good.” She put too much emphasis on the last good, speaking to me as if I were a patient who doesn’t know yet that she’s terminal. But Blanca was nice. I’d discovered far too late that I should have put a much higher priority on nice. I should have been friends with someone like Blanca instead of Didi.
“Keep in touch, okay?” she said. Her solicitous question was drowned out by the thunder of applause that erupted when the incandescent Alma Hernandez-Luna, director of the flamenco program, bounded onstage. “Bienvenido a todos nuestros estudiantes. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the more than two hundred students who are with us this summer from China, Germany, England, Belarus, Tokyo, Canada, and nearly every state in the union. We welcome you all to the country that we will create for the next twelve days. The country of flamenco!”
The applause fell briefly into compás and the audience laughed at us all speaking the same language with our hands.
“It is strange to be welcoming you. For the past fifteen years our founder, Doña Carlota, has always opened the festival. She cannot be with us here tonight in body, but her spirit fills this hall! We are all here because of Doña Carlota Anaya. She created the first academic home for flamenco in the New World.”
That part was true.
Alma continued, “The festival is her baby.” That part wasn’t true. Alma means soul, and Hernandez-Luna had been the soul of the program for years. The festival was entirely her baby. Through her connections, she was always able to lure la crema del mundo flamenco to our little sun-blasted campus. Whoever the reigning god or goddess of flamenco was, Alma would hunt them down and bring them to the festival to perform and teach. I was one of only a handful of locals on this year’s faculty. The night should have been a triumph for me. I knew it wasn’t going to be that, but, until the film, I had thought the festival would be an opportunity for me. An opportunity to learn where Tomás was. To start using my secret. The film, the image of the coveted child toddling toward the world’s greatest dancer, had changed all that.
“I hope everyone has their tickets for Eva La Yerbabuena’s show”—a burst of applause for the acclaimed dancer interrupted Alma—“because they’re going fast. I would like to thank our visiting documentarian”—the maker of the Carmen film stood to a hearty round of applause—“for helping us to kick off this summer’s festival with that astonishing film. Okay, gang, the fun is over.”
Laughter erupted.
“Tomorrow we get down to work.”
The loudest applause yet broke out.
“But before that could you, all you visitors, please, join us in a moment of silent prayer. Pray for rain, okay? Because if we don’t get some rain Dios only knows what’s going to happen to our poor state.”
As the theater fell silent, Alma stared at her palm. When the moment of prayer was over, she read the note she’d written there. “Oh, big announcement, people. It’s about Farruquito.” A chorus of squeals greeted the name of the Elvis of flamenco, a young dancer with the talent and, more important, the right genes, to be crowned the Great Bronze Hope. Like Carmen Amaya, like all the members of the true inner circle, Farruquito was gitano por cuatro costaos.
Alma gestured for the squealing girls to calm down. “This is a good news–bad news sort of deal. We’re not going to have time to publicize this, but I think we can probably fill the KiMo Theatre just with word of mouth. We have a last-minute change in the lineup.”
For the second time that evening, my skin began to prickle and the air around me seemed to become denser, the molecules slowing down as if the barometric pressure had suddenly dropped the way it does before a storm. Because it was the worst thing I could imagine, I knew before Alma said the words what her announcement would be.
“The bad news is that Farruquito has had to cancel.”
A wave of groans swept through the crowd at learning that the boy wonder of flamenco and heir apparent to the title of king of old-school flamenco, flamenco puro, was not coming. The deadened thud in my chest accelerated with a rhythm like horse hooves pounding nearer.
“But the good news is that our most famous alumna has agreed to fill in.”
I prayed, I begged all the flamenco deities to, please, stop what I knew was coming. They ignored me.
“So let’s spread the word. Ofelia is coming home!”
That name, those syllables, Oh-fay-lee-yuh, filled my head with a rushing like storm water surging down a drain. It blocked out the sound of clapping. I had to leave. Immediately. I staggered to my feet. Heads bobbed in front of me like a collection of people-shaped piñatas, a gauntlet I had to run.
Outside the theater, I tried to inhale, tried to make myself breathe. The scorched air chafed my lungs as I ran across the campus. I was coughing and my eyes were streaming by the time I jumped into my truck, which I’d left in the Frontier Restaurant parking lot. I pounded my hands on the steering wheel to drive that fraud of a name, Ofelia, Oh-fay-lee-yuh, out of my head. One name, that was her entire life’s goal, to be a one-name celebrity. I refused to give her that, to think of her as Ofelia. To me she would always be Didi. Didi Steinberg.
A long time ago she had been my best friend. Not so long ago she stole the only man I will ever love.
Chapter Three
A triangle. The staple of opera, melodrama, romance novels, of flamenco. Odd how knowing something is a cliché actually makes it slightly more painful rather than less.
When I was a girl with hair turned white blond in the Texas sun, I used to squat beside tiny funnels of dust created by ant lions. I would carefully feed captured ants into the funnels. The ants would scrabble frantically, trying to escape, but all their clawing accomplished was to create microscopic avalanches that swept them inexorably down toward the predator that waited, hidden beneath the dry dirt.
A hot wind blew through the truck. The smoke drifting down from the north seemed to have sealed the day’s heat in. Still my fingers on the steering wheel were stiff and I trembled with cold.
She was coming back. Which meant that he was coming back as well. I had to be ready. Before I ever faced Didi again, long before I ever faced Tomás, I had to decode the secret I’d been given, the long history that explained so much.
I started the truck, drove to Central Avenue, and turned right, heading east. I could have turned left and gone west, but the future lay that way. East to West. Old to new. That was the direction Americans took to move away from the past. I needed to move toward the past that night. My answers were back there, back in my history with Didi. With Tomás. Back before any of us, any of our parents, were even born.
I passed the old Lobo Theater. It had been converted into a Christian meeting place. I kept driving. Past Nob Hill Shopping Center. Past the Aztec Motel. I drove Route 66 back to where it all started. Back almost a decade to when I was still Cyndi Rae Hrncir from Houdek, Texas. Back to when all flamenco was to me was a big pink bird and the most exciting person ever to step into my life was Didi Steinberg.
Chapter Four
Naturally, Didi Steinberg had no idea on earth who I was that day she
sat with her parents in the reception area at the oncologist’s where I was waiting by myself while my parents consulted with the doctor. Even though Didi and I had several classes together, she was unaware of my existence. I was suffering through my senior year at Pueblo Heights High School in total anonymity. I had made one friend, Nita Carabajal. Nita had been assigned to be my physics lab partner. All we had in common was that neither one of us had any other friends. Everyone knew who Didi Steinberg was. She occupied a space that was a unique blend of legend and outcast.
Didi was the coolest person I could imagine because one look at her told you that she didn’t give a shit about much of anything. Stories of her general wild-ass behavior had even reached me way out in my social Siberia. I’d heard about how she was sent to the principal for wearing a top that officially met dress code regulations because it wasn’t spaghetti straps, but was so short the bottom half of her tits showed. I heard how she’d put on a tuxedo and taken herself to the prom the year before, then danced all night with the busboys. I’d heard that she called her car the Skankmobile and got stoned in it every day before school. That her father was a disc jockey and she’d had her own show on his station for a while. Mostly, though, I’d heard that Didi Steinberg was the Groupie Queen of Albuquerque.
That day, however, slumped in a chair next to her father, she looked like any teen trying to become invisible when she’s with her parents. Mr. Steinberg reminded me of Daddy. His clothes, his skin, his eyes, they all looked borrowed from a bigger person, the person he’d been before he’d gotten sick. Even in the best of health, though, Mr. Steinberg would have been old enough to be Didi’s grandfather.
A nurse in lilac scrubs with a bright aquarium print opened the door to the reception area and called out, “Mort Steinberg.” Mr. Steinberg breathed heavily as Didi and her mother helped him up. He had a goatee, thick, gray muttonchops, with only a few strands of hair on top. A black turtleneck and a silver ankh around his neck completed the ancient hipster look.
I was surprised that Didi’s mom stayed in the waiting room and let her husband go back alone with the nurse. My mother had not left my father’s side in the past four months, ever since he’d developed the cough that wouldn’t go away. Mrs. Steinberg was the most exotic woman I had ever seen. I couldn’t decide if she was Mexican or Asian. She looked like an animé Natalie Wood with big eyes and a broad, doll-baby face. She gibbered away to Didi in rapid-fire Spanish.
Didi ignored her mother, pretending to be interested in an article in Golf Digest. This gave me a chance to study Didi Steinberg. She made me think of one of those celebrities who swear in People magazine that they were dorky and unpopular as teenagers and you don’t believe them until you see the old yearbook photo and understand how out of place they would have been in a normal life. Didi was like that, bigger than life, at least normal life. The hard planes of her face, the harsh flare of her nostrils, her high, slanted cheeks and wide, ravenous mouth were too masculine for a girl, too unsettling. Not pretty, not ugly, something more compelling than either of those classifications. The word that popped into my mind was arresting because of the way she put your attention behind bars. Didi Steinberg was made to be looked at and not just because she wore more liner than a mime around her paisley-shaped eyes, and she had three diamond studs glittering in her right nostril, and she’d dyed her hair black then done the tips the color of a lime popsicle. You would have stared at Didi Steinberg even if she’d been wearing Chap Stick and jeans from Wal-Mart like me. Even back then, Didi always seemed like there should be a bank of footlights between her and the rest of the world.
If you’d taken a picture of Didi Steinberg and looked at the negative, what you would have seen would have been me, her exact opposite. My family had moved to Albuquerque from Houdek, Texas, at the start of my junior year. My mom had taken one look at the brilliant swoops of gang graffiti and metal detectors at Pueblo Heights High School and announced that no child of hers would ever set foot in such a place. She homeschooled me until Daddy got sick, so when I entered Pueblo Heights at the start of my senior year, I didn’t know a single person. In addition to not having one friend, I had two names, Cyndi Rae, and a Texas accent.
The first thing I had learned when we moved to Albuquerque was that pretty much everyone in New Mexico hates Texans. On top of that, I had a gruesome collection of consonants for a last name, Hrncir, so every time a teacher called on me, I had to conduct a little seminar in Czech pronunciation, HERN-SHUR. The best any of my teachers were ever able to do was make a sound like they had a chip stuck in the back of their throats, Hrr-KURR! Few teachers called on me more than once. I had more than the usual teen quota of reasons to do what came most naturally to me, which was keep my mouth shut and try never to be noticed.
Didi suddenly looked up from Golf Digest and caught me staring at her. She shot me a look that my mother would have said “coulda killed Aunt Katie.” My mother had lots of country sayings that no one else understood. Except my father. Probably because they’d grown up on farms next to each other in Houdek, a little town north of San Antonio populated mostly by members of their two Czech families. Everyone back home had thought my father was a giant rebel when he took a job with Circuit City and drove forty miles into San Antonio every day and a complete extraterrestrial when he got a big promotion and moved us to Albuquerque.
It was a hard move for my mother. She’d never lived more than two miles from her parents her whole life and even after she was married always ate either breakfast or lunch with them every day of the week and dinner every Sunday. In Houdek everyone knew that my mom, Jerri, was high-strung. That was how she’d been her whole life. It was the reason she’d never finished high school in spite of having straight As and being a math genius. She couldn’t sit still for an entire class. Sitting still made her so nervous, she took to plucking out, first, a big patch of hair above her right ear, then all her eyebrows. When she started in on her eyelashes, everyone agreed that Jerri would be better off at home.
In Houdek my mother’s high-strung peculiarities were “just Jerri’s way.” No one ever asked my mother’s parents if they’d thought about Ritalin or seeing a psychologist. People in Houdek tended more to say oddball behavior was just someone’s “way” and let it go. Still, everyone agreed that it was a blessing when my mother married my father, easygoing Emil Hrncir. Daddy, all reddish blond hair and freckled from the sun, was the opposite of high-strung. Quite content to spend his days rumbling around on the back of a tractor and his weekends hunting dove or deer or whatever was in season, Daddy was so low-strung, in fact, that he verged sometimes on being unstrung. I always wondered what had brought two such different people together. Maybe Daddy thought my mother’s relentless buzz of energy would rub off and energize him, that they’d balance each other out. Or maybe it was just because my mother was pretty, really, really pretty, with wavy, strawberry blond hair, delicate features, and skin like a baby’s. Everyone said I favored her but had Daddy’s height, though I never saw the resemblance.
I never questioned the world I was born into. That, in our house, the radio and television always had to be kept at a whisper-soft volume. That all dishes had to be removed from the table immediately upon finishing a meal. That friends were never allowed to visit. That when my mother’s migraines struck, I would stay home from school to bring cups of flat 7Up to her. I never questioned it and never took it too seriously because Daddy didn’t. Whenever Mom would tell me to stop turning the pages of my magazine so loud, or insist that she couldn’t stand to even look at any food that wasn’t white, or when she’d get so wound up, her hands balled into tight fists that oscillated beside her head, Daddy would always catch my eye and wink. Then we’d lay low together. I’d take my magazine and sit up in the cab of the tractor with him and we’d pretend to plow until we saw the light in my mom’s bedroom go out. Or we’d take off early in the morning and leave a note saying we’d gone to fish or hunt snipes, then we’d sit all day in the Dairy Queen
in Helotes and drink coffee and Cokes. We had great times together. His favorite thing was teasing me by asking how “Sometimes Y” was. Sometimes Y was his name for the pretend boyfriend he claimed I had. It came out of his joke that I would fall in love with the first boy with a lot of vowels in his name. “A, E, I, 0, U, and Sometimes Y, right?” he’d say. I told him to stop it. I was too shy to even talk to a boy, much less ever have a boyfriend.
We were all right in Houdek where everyone accepted that Jerri Hrncir was a little too tightly wound and that Emil Hrncir was the best thing that could have ever happened to her. We were a small-town family, designed to do what generations of Hrncirs before us had done: farm, raise soybeans, sorghum, a little cotton. After Granddad’s stroke, Daddy took over and might have made it if the price of diesel along with everything else hadn’t kept rising. After Mom’s nerves got too bad for her to handle the bookkeeping, I was the one who itemized all the expenditures. Like my mother, I was good with numbers. It was never anything I worked at, just something I was born with. It was my “way.”
When I told Daddy the bad news the numbers had for us, he got a job with Circuit City. At first it was just to tide us over. But the numbers told another story: he’d never go back to farming. The transfer to Albuquerque was a shock to Jerri that she never recovered from. We left Houdek right after the last day of my sophomore year, when the creeks were still running and the fields were still green and succulent. We drove a U-Haul truck loaded with our stuff to Albuquerque and parked it in front of a house Daddy had flown out earlier to rent for us. It was flat on top and squared off as a shoe box with red lava rocks where a lawn should have been and one spindly desert willow out front that didn’t cast enough shade to cool off an ant. Mom took one look at the shoe-box house and burst into tears. She folded her arms across her chest and locked Albuquerque out as much as she possibly could. Everything about the city frightened her, annoyed her, or dried her skin out.