From her mother, she inherited the smooth lines of her oval face and her strong jaw. A sharp face ironically filled with the submissive qualities of a frightened rabbit. She had pale green eyes that were deep set in her pretty face, eyes that no one else in the family had. Those eyes held a far off look at all times, like a child engrossed in the world of make-believe.
She did make an attractive sight as she stood in the wings of the stage waiting her cue in her peasant girl costume of dark blue. Her crimson hair was pulled back in a mass of curls at the nape of her neck. Her appearance was an asset, the child-like look, the seeming total ignorance of the world and its cruelties, but it was her talent that won her the lead in Giselle.
Standing apart from the other dancers, Sarah seemed poised and in control of the world around her. What a deception! If only they could have seen the longing in her eyes, the desperate need for approval, they would have seen how terrified she was.
Like most shy adolescents, people often mistook her withdrawn silence as her being arrogant or too proud. Perhaps they even believed that she thought herself too good for the likes of normal people, but Sarah looked up to others. It was true that she came from a wealthy family, but she was far from thinking that she was above it all.
Her mother gave her love and encouragement, but it was her father that was responsible for Sarah’s withdrawn personality. He was an abusive man, often drunk, but Sarah feared no one would believe her tales of horror when he seemed such an upstanding citizen to the rest of the New York society. Her only escape from his mental and physical cruelty was the ballet; there she could fall into a world where all her dreams could come true by the final act.
In the wings it was easy to believe that dreams could come true. Everywhere there were beautiful people in beautiful costumes. Only she and a choice few from the dance studio were selected to dance with the New York City Ballet, and then to be given the opportunity to dance the lead role, it seemed like a dream come true. It all seemed so unreal, so much better than the reality that she didn’t really belong in.
Despite her wealthy background, Sarah had few friends and knew little of the sort of social life that her peers enjoyed. She lived in the pages of her romance novels and the staged embraces of the ballet, for it was the only sort of romance that she had known in her young life. It was perhaps that last reason that made her love dancing so much, for it was the one thing in the world that Sarah felt passionate about and only when on stage could she experience the romance that she had only read about.
Sarah stole a glance at the other dancers, she was envious of them all standing together and chatting in whispers. Most of all she wondered what it would be like to be Jaclyn Wright, the pretty ballerina that all the male dancers gathered around. She smiled and tossed her bonnet covered head as Sarah looked on, wishing that she had such power over men.
Jaclyn hated Sarah. She too had been up for the lead role. Miss Lucy considered Sarah a better choice, a decision that shocked Sarah as much as it insulted Jaclyn.
Across the room her eyes met with Sarah’s, they were deep dark eyes that were full of hate. Jaclyn turned to her admirers, “The little princess looks awful nervous. I think she’s realized that she’s bitten off more than her rich mouth can chew.”
Dropping her gaze, Sarah tried to hide the tears that were building up, would no one ever approve of her? The worst part was that Jaclyn was probably right. She was in over her head and everyone knew it.
The orchestra began to tune their instruments, Sarah felt as if it was her nerves that they kept plucking over and over. Miss Lucy with her snowy hair and small powerful body was beside her. She smiled at Sarah with eyes no bigger than those of a mouse.
Sarah loved Miss Lucy dearly, for only she could see past the shy girl and see the person deep within. She reached up and put a thin arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “Don’t listen to them. You will dance beautifully.”
“Thank you.” Sarah said softly, but the compliment did little to ease her doubts. She twisted and wrung her hands, “I don’t think I can do this. I’m too afraid, let Jaclyn go out there in my place.”
Miss Lucy placed her rough hands on Sarah’s thin shoulders and spun her around. She had surprising strength for a woman standing only five feet tall. “Listen to me Sarah, you’re not backing down. This is an incredible opportunity and you will not throw it away. We’ve both worked too hard for this. This isn’t just about you; my name is on the line too.”
Not used to such force, Sarah began to cry. People of power always reminded her of her father, and she was terrified of her father. “Please, I can’t. I’ll freeze up. I know I will.”
Once again Miss Lucy grasped Sarah’s shoulders and spun her around. She held her there when she would have run away. Sarah was facing the darkened stage.
“This is who you are,” Miss Lucy explained. “This is your life and you can’t run away from it. You will never forgive yourself if you don’t dance tonight. You would be nothing without this and you know it.”
“I’m just not ready. Maybe next time, but not tonight.”
“There is no next time.”
Sarah nodded and pushed her tears away. Miss Lucy went to see about the other dancers while Sarah peaked out the side of the heavy velvet curtain. She scanned the faces of the audience and then she felt her heart leap. There he was!
Vincent Allen sat in the second row, right beside Sarah’s mother. He was the son of her father’s business partner and ever since Sarah could remember she had been in love with him. She thought he was just humoring her when he accepted the ticket she offered, but here he was!
He looked very comfortable sitting with her family. He and Charles were speaking softly while Eric fidgeted beside them and Beth looked like she wished she was somewhere else. Somehow it all looked perfect, like that’s how they were all supposed to be. Sarah took it as a sign that she and Vincent were meant to be together. Why else would it seem so right to see him sitting with her family?
There wasn’t any more time to think, for the opening music was playing. The other dancers took their places on stage and upon cue Sarah danced out as the naïve village girl, everything in her own life was forgotten.
At that moment, she was Giselle and she was in love. It was easy for her to slip into this. The character was just as innocent in the ways of the world as she; if this character could triumph then perhaps Sarah could too. At that moment she forgot the tragic ending and only recalled the hope and love that Giselle felt.
The hot stage lights felt like a lovers caress. Sarah leaped high into the air with her partner. She was overjoyed by life and its opportunities; she could envision an escape from her father and the restricting walls of the Deardon house. Even as her on stage lover betrayed her for another woman, Sarah danced about believing in the promise of the future.
Sarah was full of life and herself as she danced the final part of act one. She was moving with a wild passion that made her muscles tremble with exhaustion. She wouldn’t give in to it. If she did, none of her dreams would ever come true.
I will dance so amazing tonight that Vince will fall in love with me…He will at last see me…I won’t be some little kid…He will see me as a woman….
Even when the pain shot into her right knee, Sarah ignored it. She just had to last through the performance, but when Giselle discovered that her lover was to marry another, the tears were real.
She kept dancing, as graceful as she could, showing Giselle’s rapid descent into madness. She pretended to struggle with the heavy sword, only to have it taken away. She mocked the worried onlookers, just as Giselle was denying her lover’s betrayal; Sarah was denying her own physical pain.
Sarah leaped into the air, pretending to throw herself on her lover’s sword and then falling back limp in her mother’s arms. The dancers closest to her were surprised by the extent of her performance; they noticed that when she slid from the other dancer’s arms, she didn’t flinch when she hit the hard floor.
>
Backstage Miss Lucy watched in horror as did Sarah’s mother from the audience. When the curtain came down, Sarah was carried off the stage. She had fainted from the pain and her knee was swelling to huge proportions.
Miss Lucy rushed to Sarah’s still body. She gazed down into the pale face with its brows cutting a harsh line over her closed eyes. Sarah’s face was hard and stone-like from the pain.
“Call the hospital.” Miss Lucy commanded. “There is little that we can do here. I’ll go get her mother.”
Miss Lucy avoided Beth Deardon as much as possible. There was something off about that woman and she felt it the minute she was near her, like being near a ticking bomb that never exploded, but just ticked on and on. She hated it, but now there was no way not to deal with her. She must be worried sick, knowing that fall was not part of the show.
It was easy enough to find Sarah’s mother. She was pacing the area outside the stage door with apprehension written all over her beautiful face. Miss Lucy almost ran into her. Both women locked eyes and even though Miss Lucy tried to hide it, they both knew it was over.
“No need to explain.” Beth said with a deep breath and erased the emotions from her face. “I’ll go to the hospital with her and call you as soon as I know something.”
As Miss Lucy watched Beth walk through the door to take her place beside her daughter, she wondered if Sarah was blessed or cursed to have a mother that could distance herself from her emotions so easily. Still there was a strength and nobility in her squared shoulders as she walked away. So much like Sarah, even if she didn’t know it….yet.
An excerpt of
Ghost Country
A compelling literary novel from author Dana Michelle Burnett
The Ghost Country
(Rose—2010)
My aunts have asked me to accompany them to my grandmother’s house. They want my help to sort through her things now that she has gone on to Tsusgina’i, the ghost country. It is the final duty of a daughter and I was to represent my mother, who was too busy with her artsy friends to deal with the obligation.
My mother commonly had this reaction to death. If we were in nearby Corydon, she would cross the street rather than walk past the front of the funeral parlor. I didn’t pretend to understand this, since it was my aunt Autumn that lost a husband, but then again, my mother had mourned a dead rock star for most of her life. Needless to say, she had some strange ideas about death.
When my Aunt Ama called with the news of my grandmother’s death, my mother came down with a full schedule and volunteered me to act in her place. When Ama told me, I wasn’t surprised by my mother’s reaction, but I was shocked that my grandmother died. I always thought that the devil himself would have to hit my grandmother over the head himself to get her in the ground.
“How did she die?” I asked.
“What do you mean ‘how did she die’?” Aunt Ama barked. “She was seventy-six years old. She just woke up dead, that’s all.”
I did not ask how a person could wake up if she was dead. I understood what she meant, that my grandmother was old, had lived her life, and now she was dead. It was as simple as that, but in our family, it was never that simple.
My grandmother started and honored the traditions in our family. Some of these were handed down from her Cherokee parents, others I was pretty sure she made up as she went along. For example: The name thing, what was that about? All of the names in our family were special, be it the seasons in which we were born (my mother and her sisters claimed that right), the Cherokee name for the month that we were born in such as my cousin Anayilisv, something in nature such as I, or to honor the dead as in my cousin Joe’s case.
My grandmother told us the story of her own name Selu, which meant corn in the Cherokee language. It was something about a woman that could make corn come out of her body and her sons that buried her body wrong when she died; I never really paid close enough attention because I could not ever get the facts straight.
“Let that be a lesson to you,” she would say to my cousins and me. “Always listen to your mothers.”
I do not know about my cousins, but I never took that lesson from her story. What I remembered was the corn coming from the woman’s body, but even that trivial fact somehow got mixed up in my six-year-old mind. I would go into her kitchen in the early summer and see fresh cornhusks in the garbage can. My imagination took flight and I would be pulling at my mother’s hand and announcing that my grandmother had pooped in the garbage can again.
Everyone would laugh when I said this, thinking it was my childish attempt at a joke. I never could understand why they were laughing, no one bothered to explain. It seemed that I never understood anything, that even now I was still seeing the world through the eyes of a six-year-old child. Now, after learning of my grandmother’s death, I was trying to remember the story about the corn woman and just what it was that the sons did wrong when they buried her so that we would not make the same mistake.
* * *
My grandmother’s house was just outside of Lanesville, Indiana. It was a small white bungalow surrounded by three acres that had not been tended in more than thirty years and kept the house lost in a sea of green grass. When I arrived, the first person that I saw was my Aunt Ama. “I was starting to think that you had forgotten us.” She complained. “What took you so long?”
Aunt Autumn stood up, I had not seen her sitting on the porch swing, and nodded as she shook her finger at me. “We were starting to worry.”
I did not say anything. What could I say? Do I tell them the truth? Do I tell them that I sat in my apartment and tried to think of a plausible excuse not to come? My mother would have told them just that, but I was not my mother.
Aunt Ama unlocked the door and motioned us inside, waving her hand as if trying to fan the outside air into the old house. Once inside, I understood. The house held the scent of the food cooked over the years such as greasy venison and sweet grape dumplings, of Christmases long gone when the rooms were decorated with pine boughs and sweet pears, talc from my grandmother’s twice-daily showers, and of ammonia where she mopped the kitchen floor twice each and every day. A lifetime of scents trapped in rooms too small to hold them.
I looked around the living room, expecting things to be different, but nothing changed from my last visit. Along the walls was the same old furniture, nubby and black, looking just as ragged as it must have been long ago when my grandfather brought it home from a yard sale. My mother used to shake her head at this every time that we entered the house and would declare loudly: “Your grandmother never owned anything new in her life until my father left, don’t let that happen to you.”
Being only a child, I dared to ask her once what was so wrong with that furniture. She snorted, “Every time I sit down, I think of some stranger farting on that same cushion.”
That thought stuck with me over the years. Each time that we visited my grandmother, I would look at that couch and picture an overweight man in his boxer shorts passing gas while drinking a beer. It got to where I could almost smell it.
Back when she first corrupted me with this idea, we lived with my grandmother, later we visited her every Sunday. The aunts would be there with my cousins and we would all have lunch together as a family.
My mother and her sisters would stay in the kitchen with my grandmother. My cousins and I would pretend to go off and play, but then we would sneak back to listen at the door. We heard stories of things that took place before we were born, people we never met, and things never meant for our ears. I think we all learned about sex by listening to our mothers’ giggling conversations through that kitchen door.
“Your mom is so cool,” my cousin Ana whispered after overhearing my mother talk about her escapades at a place called Woodstock. “I wish my mom was more like her.”
Ana’s mother was my Aunt Ama and I used to think that Ama was the most beautiful, even more so than my own mother was, because Aunt Ama kept her black hair in two lon
g braids and always dressed in rich shades of turquoise. She was by far the most Cherokee of all of us and proud of it even though my mother often teased her and called her Pocahontas behind her back.
“Your aunt wouldn’t know a good time if it hit her in the ass with a tomahawk,” my mother would whisper, often loud enough for Ama to hear. “What Pocahontas needs is a big chief in her teepee.”
If Ama was the most beautiful, Aunt Autumn was the most tragic. No matter what she wore, she gave everyone the impression that she was in a perpetual state of mourning. Her life was like the script to an old movie, something sad and in black and white. She married her childhood sweetheart and when he died in Vietnam, she never got over it. She had to raise my cousin Joe all alone. It was the saddest thing that had ever happened in our family.
“She’s going to die of a broken heart,” my grandmother used to say about Aunt Autumn. “And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Then there was my mother. She was not the most beautiful, in her face were too sharply blended the angular traits of her Cherokee mother and the fluid features of her German American father. She was full of contradictions, my mother was, and seemed to change her convictions as often as she changed her clothes. She could be the most annoying person in the world, preaching about animal cruelty, but when you asked her about her new leather purse she would smile and say that it was from the Big Mac that she ate for lunch. She took up all of the space in a room with the enormity of her personality; you couldn’t be near her without feeling pushed out of the way.
I followed my aunts to the back of the house and into the kitchen. I was stunned to see them opening cabinets and taking down cans of soup and boxes of crackers. “What are you doing?”
“First we will have lunch,” Aunt Ama explained. “Then we will take care of things.”
Now the idea of cooking and eating in a dead woman’s kitchen did not appeal to me at all, regardless of the fact that the dead woman was my grandmother that I had seen almost every day of my life. “Why don’t we just go out to eat then?”
Spiritus, a Paranormal Romance (Spiritus Series, Book #1) Page 20