The Girls with No Names

by Serena Burdick

  “No, and don’t interrupt,” she snapped, and I huffed and leaned out the window. The buildings shimmered in the heat and the humidity cast a hazy curtain over the river of suits and hats flowing alongside us.

  “Your pirouettes are lovely, you’ll get the timing,” she said. “But your extensions need to be longer. Extend, extend!” She threw one arm forward. “And you must point your toes the instant they leave the floor.”

  I glanced at my sister as she angled away from Mama, staring into traffic. She used to love talking about ballet, going over every detail. Lately, she hardly said a word.

  It was painful watching Mama struggle to be encouraging. She’d start to say something, sigh and give up. We drove in silence for a few minutes before Mama finally got out what she’d been trying to say all along. “Your father and I have decided to send you to Paris in the fall.”

  “What?” Luella’s head turned sharply. “Why?”

  “You’re sixteen. It’s high time you went abroad. You’ve never met my mother, or your uncle Georges, or seen my native homeland.”

  “What about Effie? Why doesn’t she have to go?”

  Have to go? I would have loved to go.

  “You know perfectly well Effie can’t make that trip.”

  Luella crossed her arms. “I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t be ungrateful. It won’t interfere with your dancing. Your show’s in September, so we’ll plan it for October.”

  “What about school?” Luella challenged, even though I knew she didn’t care one whit about school.

  “We’ll call it a holiday. You’ll catch up. Traveling to Europe rivals any textbook.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Don’t be silly. What girl doesn’t want to go to Paris?”

  “I don’t. And I don’t want to dance in Hansel and Gretel either.”

  This silenced Mama. Her gaze shot forward and she clasped her hands as if crushing something. There was an uncomfortable stillness before she said, “You made a commitment. You have no choice.”

  Luella crumbled, her shoulders sinking as she looked pleadingly at Mama. “You heard Mikhail. I’m terrible. He’s going to replace me. Anyway, I’m too heavy. The other ballerinas are like string beans. They’re half the size of me. I don’t know why I was cast in the first place. My feet won’t do anything I want and there are blisters on my toes. I can’t get my fouettés right, and I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  “That’s childish. You have worked too hard to give up now.”

  “You gave up.”

  Mama yanked herself forward, turning to face Luella as she latched a hand on the seat in front of her. “I most certainly did not. A ballerina has a short life. Mine was over.” In a flourish, she tugged off her glove and held her hand in the air, exposing the misshapen scars of her right hand, tender and pink like newborn skin.

  “Do you think anyone wanted to see these arching through the air?” Her voice was pinched and high. “You have had none of my hardships, and I did not raise you to be lazy. Lose some weight. Bind your feet. You will figure it out, but you will not quit.”

  The car lurched and Mama steadied herself against the seat as she yanked her glove back on. From my corner of the car, pressed up against the door, I watched them stare each other down. Luella was almost as tall as Mama, and there was a new maturity in her face that had appeared the moment she turned sixteen. In Mama’s face was a sternness I hadn’t seen in a long time. The tension between them was palpable, a battle of wills. Then my sister did a wicked thing. She lifted her ballet slippers by their pink laces and held them out with a taunting expression, letting them rotate in a slow circle before calmly and deliberately dropping those beautiful shoes out of the car. I had always envied her those slippers. Shocked, I careened my head over the side of the car as they landed on the street and were instantly crushed by the car behind us. There was a slight gasp from Mama, but she didn’t say anything.

  The car slowed to a stop in traffic. I slouched in my seat, just wanting to get home. A boy sped by on a bike. I stole a glance at Mama and Luella sitting shoulder to shoulder. Mama stared straight ahead, her lips a thin line, her hand fixed back into its glove. Luella looked off into the street. I hated how effortlessly she had let go of those shoes, as if tossing away everything Mama had given her was the easiest thing in the world.

  Dinner that night was tense and silent, the air through the open window warm and stagnant and filled with noisy crickets. Daddy was as withdrawn and sullen as the rest of us. I wondered if Mama had told him what happened, or if his own conscience was brewing.

  I nibbled the end of a green bean, glancing at Luella across the table. She hadn’t eaten a thing. Her eyes were downcast, her expression unreadable. What would she do if she didn’t dance anymore? I couldn’t believe she’d thrown away a chance to be on a stage, gliding with all the other angels. Tray had told me the gypsies would head south once it turned cold, so she’d soon lose them too.

  After dinner, Luella went straight to her room without a word to me, or our parents. More and more she slept in her own room. I climbed in bed and tried to write, but I was finding it difficult to think up creative stories. Giving up, I turned the light out and lay picturing my sister’s self-satisfied expression and her shoes being ground to pink dust in the street. At some point I heard the front door open and crept to my window in time to see Daddy getting into a cab. I watched it pull away, a pall of exhaust dissolving under the streetlight behind it. The solid body of my family was being ripped apart, Daddy and Luella the first limbs to go. With a dreadful feeling in my stomach, I crawled back to bed and fell asleep listening for Daddy’s return.

  I woke to Luella shaking my shoulder. “What’s wrong?” I sat up. It was still dark out, but the curtains were pulled back and the moon projected a square of light on the floorboards like a box waiting to spring open.

  “Turn around so I can braid your hair.”

  “What?” Even groggy with sleep this sounded like a ridiculous request.

  “Remember how I used to insist on doing your hair for you, even when you were old enough to do it yourself?” She kneeled on the bed and began brushing my tangles out with her fingers, pulling against my scalp. “You have the most beautiful hair. It’s just like Mama’s, and so much thicker than mine. I always envied you your hair.” She stopped combing and began plaiting. “I envied your blue fits too.”

  “Why would you say that?” The night air was warm and humid and I felt sticky with sweat.

  “Because nothing is expected of you.”

  I found this insulting. “Why did you throw away your slippers?”

  Tiny hairs snagged as Luella threaded the strands together. “It was a test. I wanted to see if Mama would stop the car and make me walk into the street and get them back, crushed and all. Daddy would have.”

  “I don’t see what that would have proved, and you would have hated Daddy for it.”

  “I would have hated her for it, but that’s not the point.”

  Finishing my hair, Luella lay down onto her back and I lay next to her. The braid bunched against my neck. “What is the point?”

  “That she didn’t do it. That she lets all of us push her around.”

  It wasn’t a surprise Mama failed Luella’s test, just a disappointment. “Do you think she’ll tell Daddy and you’ll be punished?” I asked.

  “I’m already being punished. I’m certain it was Daddy’s idea to send me away.”

  “Going to Paris is not exactly punishment.”

  “Don’t you see they have no intention of letting me come home? Daddy wants me gone so I won’t give away his little secret. Why else would they do it now? They’ve never mentioned sending me to Paris before.” She punched her pillow into a mound and sank into it. “They can’t make me go. I won’t.”

  The thing was, they could mak
e her and we both knew it. “If you refuse they’ll send you somewhere worse,” I said, thinking of Daddy’s threat to lock her up. “Especially if you’re not dancing anymore. You have to apologize. You love to dance. It’s your future. What will you do without it?”

  “I don’t know.” She didn’t sound troubled by this uncertainty, but I needed her to care. We’d always conspired about our possible futures. “You, on the other hand—” she smiled, as if remembering her role to play in our conversation “—will go to college and become a great writer, an enviable, independent woman like Inez Milholland.”

  I cringed. “I don’t want to be enviable, or anything like her.”

  “I do. She does exactly what she pleases. Daddy sneaks around with a woman like that and expects us to live by different standards. Who says we have to? You know, the gypsies aren’t really free either.” She propped up on an elbow. “Patience turns sixteen next month and will be forced to marry a boy she despises. She’s been promised to him since she was three years old. Their fathers shook on it and that was that. We’re all trapped.”

  It occurred to me that Luella might be married before long, especially if she wasn’t dancing. She might even find a husband in Paris. Then I’d never see her. “Are you wildly in love with Sydney?”

  “No! I’m wildly in love with their music. When will we ever hear music like that again? If I have to listen to Enrico Caruso belt out one more operatic note on the Victrola, I’ll smash the thing. I keep telling myself there’s only one year of school left, but then what? A failed dance career...a wedding veil and slippers?”

  I used to believe she’d be as famous as the dancer Anna Pavlova, which was foolish. She would not be a ballerina, and I would not go to college. Tracing moon patterns on the ceiling with my eyes, I saw our future plans for what they were: childish stories. We were no longer little girls able to pretend. I lost the ability the moment I saw Daddy kiss that woman. It made what I believed to be true, wrong. Maybe that’s why Luella threw her shoes in the street, because she couldn’t make herself believe her own story anymore either. I glanced at her, lying flat on her back with her hair spread out over her pillow, her wide-open eyes staring at the ceiling. I wondered if she saw the same moon patterns I saw, or if hers made entirely different shapes. I wanted to tell her about my heart stopping, how I’d seen the walls fall away. I wanted to tell her my chest felt tight all the time, and that I was worried I’d lose her to Paris and a husband and a future I’d never have. That I worried we’d already lost our father, and that our mother would be left all alone.

  It was too much to say. I was sleepy, and didn’t know that I’d never get the chance to tell her these things. Closing my eyes, I listened to the shifting of my sister’s wakeful body beside me until I finally drifted off. It was the only time I remember falling asleep before her.

  I woke at nine o’clock the next morning in the exact position I’d fallen asleep. An empty pillow faced me. I sat up, the weight of sleep heavy on me. Luella was gone and a bright day peeked through the curtains. No one ever let me sleep this late and I felt an eerie sense of foreboding as I scurried into my clothes and downstairs, my stomach doing an anxious flip as I saw the empty dining room, all signs of breakfast cleared away.

  “Effie?” I jumped at Mama’s voice. She stood in the doorway, her skin a seamless white from her collar to her forehead. “You’ve slept through breakfast, you naughty girl.” She smiled a bud of color into her cheeks, but there was a false cheeriness to her voice.

  “Why didn’t Neala wake me?”

  “I’ve given her the day off.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s good to indulge your servants once in a while. Let’s go out for lunch?”

  “Just the two of us?” Mama and I rarely did anything alone. “Where’s Luella? Has Daddy left for work already?”

  “Get your hat,” was all she said as she secured hers to her head, a thing so weighted with feathers it looked as if an entire flock had lost their wings for it.

  We stepped out into suffocating heat, slate clouds pressing overhead like the top to a cooking pot ready to boil us alive. If it rained, I imagined the drops would sizzle and evaporate on the steaming bricks.

  Mama and I took the elevated into Manhattan and dined at Café Martin’s, everyone sedated in the warmth, fans and hats waving languidly, red-faced waiters in white jackets suffering behind steaming plates of food. People looked down from their balcony tables as if from the rail of a ship and I thought of the sunken Titanic last spring, and how guilty the onlookers must have felt when they realized that they had waved those passengers off to their deaths.

  I watched Mama consume a single bite of duck, put her fork down and draw a silver cigarette case I’d never seen before from her purse. My mother didn’t smoke. And yet here she was, smoking while I ate, her eyes roaming around the room. My duck was tender and salty, but I hardly had an appetite for it.

  For dessert, she ordered caramel custard for me, and two Brandy Alexanders for herself. Mama never took a drink anywhere except in the parlor room after dinner with Daddy. The alcohol fueled the color in her cheeks and gave her voice an urgent quality. It undid her in the most beautiful way. Her bouffant hairdo cresting like a wave under her hat, her waist cinched into a swan-bill corset, with that name fitting her figure, sleeves billowing, eyes alert. She seemed utterly attractive, and wholly not my mother.

  Under normal circumstances I would have relished an outing alone with Mama. These were not normal circumstances.

  The cigarette case lay on the table and Mama began clicking it open and shut with one hand, her eyes flitting above my head as she said, “Let’s shop for new dresses, shall we?”

  She was too giddy, too bright. Worry curdled in my stomach next to the duck and custard, which I wished I hadn’t eaten. I wanted Luella. I wondered if Mama had forced her to go to rehearsal in spite of the tossed slippers, but I knew better than to ask.

  Instead of heading to Céleste’s, where we usually bought dresses, we walked to 23rd Street. Mama kept a few paces ahead of me, reaching her hand back from time to time to make sure I was still with her, sashaying our way past windows that glinted with shades of violet and amethyst. She took a sudden right through the doors of Stern Brothers department store, and her pace slowed as she lingered at the perfume counter and fingered cloth at the haberdashery.

  After purchasing a pair of white gloves for her and salmon-pink ones for me, we left the store without trying on a single dress, and made our way through Madison Square. No rain came. The clouds broke up and blue swatches of sky appeared with ragged edges like torn fabric. Sweat dampened the underarms of my dress and Mama’s face flushed under her hat. She kept slipping her watch from her purse and checking the time, clasping and unclasping the latch on her mesh bag, as if the clicks propelled her forward.

  I was thankful when we finally crossed Madison Avenue and climbed aboard the train for home. By the time we arrived on Bolton Road, the sky had turned cerulean. Storm clouds rested on the far horizon and the late sun pierced through a crack like a slit eye, rays so defined they looked graspable.

  Mama stopped abruptly when we reached the front door. Daddy stood in the hallway with his jacket unbuttoned, his tie removed. There was a mad look in his eye. Mama stepped up to him, the box of gloves trembling in her hands.

  “Effie, go to your room.” His voice was harsh and the box slipped from Mama’s hands and hit the floor. Neither reached to pick it up.

  I ran up the stairs. Dread washed over me as I flew into Luella’s empty bedroom and saw the sharp corners of her tucked-in bed and her neatly organized vanity. I flung open her wardrobe; all of her clothes still rustled and shifted on their hangers. Rehearsal never went this late. Where was she? She wouldn’t have been sent off to Paris already, and without her clothes. My heart pounded and a ripple of pain eddied out from my lungs into my ribs. I crouched down with m
y forehead in my hands, trying to breathe slowly. When I stood up the blood rushed to my head and the room went black for a split second before everything came back into focus. A skinny, wan girl mocked me in the wardrobe mirror. I banged a fist against the side of my head. She banged hers.

  Trying to calm myself, I went to my room and sat at my desk tracing leaf patterns, focusing on each tiny vein while I listened for the sound of Luella opening the front door and running up the stairs to tell me about her day. It was Daddy who shouted at me from the bottom of the stairs. “Effie, come down into the parlor immediately.”

  The lights had not come on yet, and the early evening cast a bruised hue over the room. My mother sat crumpled on the couch, her shoulders at an odd angle, her dress withered from the heat. My father stood to the side with his arms crossed over his chest. He seemed shrunken, as if recent events had taken height off of him. Then I saw my grandmother sitting in an armchair, her tiny form wrapped in her black dress like a tightly bound package, her face heaped with disapproval. My thoughts raced. What was she doing here? She never left her home on Gramercy Park. The last time she’d come here was when our grandfather died.

  “Where’s Luella?” I cried.

  My parents looked at each other, hesitating long enough for my grandmother to jump in with a crisp, “She’s been sent away to summer camp.”

  Summer camp? I wanted to laugh at them, or scream. How ignorant did they think I was? They knew about the gypsies. “Where is she?” I repeated, choking up. “Has she already been sent off to Paris?”

  “Hardly.” My grandmother pursed her lips and jerked her head to one side.

  “Effie.” Daddy stepped toward me, looking like he used to when he worried I was going to have a fit. Those were the only times he ever looked uncertain of himself. “Your sister’s gone away for a bit, but she’s fine. She’ll be back, and she’s not as far away as Paris so you needn’t worry about that.”