Come a Stranger (3 page)

Summers, the church hired Poppa extra to go around to big cities, while the minister from one of the cities came to Crisfield, to rest up. This was the third year of the project. Reverend Jefferson, the minister who had come to Crisfield for the last two summers, had gotten sick, so he was retiring back to Chicago where his people were. He stayed with the Dutleys, whose children were all grown and out of the house. Mr. Jefferson had a room there when he came south to rest up. But the new minister had a wife and three children. The church was renting him a house outside of town, on the edge of the Beerce property. The house was small, but it would make a big change from the city. It had room for the children to run around outside and a little beach just up the way, on a creek. Momma and some of the women got it cleaned up and cleared out of the wildlife that moved in during the years it was empty. They rounded up a refrigerator and some decent mattresses. The new minister had a church in New York, which was the biggest and baddest place to work. So he'd appreciate the peace and tranquility of the country, Momma said.

Poppa said he liked his two-week stint in New York least of
any of the cities he visited. He liked Richmond best, and he didn't mind Birmingham either. He kept wishing, every year, that they'd send him to New Orleans, but Momma said she thought New York might be bad, but New Orleans was Sodom and Gomorrah all rolled up into one, and she'd just as soon he steered clear of that place.

Momma missed Poppa when he was away all summer long. They all did. He called up on Sunday afternoons. He wrote letters and postcards. He even got one or two weekends home, when he was close enough by. But it wasn't the same as having him there. Poppa minded it, but he went on and did it. “It's not forever,” he told them. “It's part of the work. And these men—they've earned a couple of tranquil months. We're all doing the same work, aren't we?”

“Things are different up north,” Momma would back Poppa up. “Things are different down south. You children—you don't know how easy your father makes it for you.”

“I wouldn't mind finding out,” Belle said.

“You will, and soon enough,” Momma answered. “For the time being, I advise you to count your blessings.”

Belle looked around and studied everything she could see. She held up her hand as if to count on her fingers, but said there wasn't one thing she thought of to count.

Momma just laughed.

“I wish
I
was the one going away to camp for the summer,” Belle said.

“So do I, honey.” Momma laughed again. “So do I.”

“That's not funny,” Belle said, her voice going high and offended.

It was too funny, and Mina laughed out loud over it. Catch her being thirteen like that, she thought, as Belle stormed out of the room.

F
rom the first, Mina loved her room at camp, room 226, halfway down the long corridor. It had two beds, two windows, two dressers, two desks, and one closet which she shared with her roommate, Isadora. The beds were covered with brightly striped fabric, and the curtains matched the bedspreads. The windows looked out through the leafy branches of trees to the green quadrangle at the center of the college. Although the room was only on the second floor, there was always a breeze to keep it comfortable, because the college had been built along the ridge of the hills that bordered the broad river.

They stayed on the campus for the whole eight weeks, except for one trip into the city of New Haven, to see a performance of
Swan Lake
at Yale University. Some of the girls, especially the older ones, complained that they felt cooped up, imprisoned, but Mina never did, not for a minute.

There were seventy people living in the dormitory, and all of them were dancers. There were four dance classes, divided by age, with sixteen girls in each class. There were three dance instructors and three assistants who were taking the master classes as well as keeping an eye on the younger students. They all lived together and ate together and worked together. Music and dance, dance and music—that was what they did, all day long. They had a dance class every morning and a music class every afternoon,
taught by a professor from the college. In the evenings, there was almost always something planned, either observing one of the master classes or listening to a concert given in the small college theater or watching a movie of a ballet or symphony. Sunday mornings they went to the nondenominational chapel, whose bells rang out over the quadrangle and dormitories to call people to worship. Mina sat among the dancers in an oak pew and learned a whole new set of hymns from the bound hymnals that were kept in a rack at the back of each pew with the bound prayer books. The sun shone through the stained glass windows, coloring the air with reds and greens and blues. Mina had never known how much she didn't know about dancers and about music; she looked ahead at everything she didn't know, and was glad.

There was always a song rising in her heart, one they sang at the chapel on Sundays, while the collection was being taken. “Praise God,” the song rose up inside her. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” Mina felt like praising God and thanking Him about all day long.

The majority of the girls had studied longer and more seriously than Mina had and knew more. Isadora, her roommate, was sure she was destined to become a famous ballerina. “My mom says she had a feeling, even before I was born. All the time she was pregnant, she went to at least one ballet performance a week and kept music always playing in the apartment. She named me after Isadora Duncan. I've got dance in my blood.”

Mina knew what it felt like to have dance in your blood. “Who's Isadora Duncan?” she asked.

“You don't know?” Isadora looked at her, as if everybody should know, as if Mina came from a different planet.

“Nope, never heard of her. Are you going to tell me?” Mina didn't mind not knowing, she just minded not having her curiosity satisfied.

“Isadora Duncan was a great dancer, probably the greatest modern dancer. She's like Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp . . .” Mina shook her head, she hadn't heard of any of these people. She tucked the names away in her memory, to learn more about them. “Isadora Duncan was the first—she broke away from classical ballet and went back to the ancient Greeks. She wanted dance to be free from rules and things, anything artificial. She thought life shouldn't have so many rules. She danced in draperies, in bare feet, like the Greeks. Her dances were free and strong. She died young, when the scarf she was wearing got caught in the wheel of a car. See, she always wore long, long scarves around her neck.” Isadora mimed wrapping a scarf around her neck, her long arms graceful. Mina could see what Isadora Duncan must have looked like. Mina was sitting on the floor by her bed, watching Isadora. “But her boyfriend had a convertible. The scarf got caught in the tire and—it just snapped her neck,” Isadora concluded. “It was a tragedy. She had lots of men all madly in love with her, all the time.”

“What would your mother have done if you'd been a boy?”

“Name me Isadore. There are male dancers.”

Mina laughed. “I know that.”

Charlie, short for Charlotte, who lived across the hall with Tansy, said that Isadora's mother was typical, a typical stage mother. Charlie often said things like that, in a superior way, as if she knew more. She acted closer to sixteen than eleven, most of the time. “Typical, pushy stage mother.”

“You don't understand,” Isadora said. “I'm going to be a prima ballerina. It's nothing to do with my mother, except she thinks I can, so she helps out. And all.”

“—and I should know,” Charlie continued, not paying any attention. “I've got one too. It's pretty pitiful in a way—it's because she wanted to be a singer. But she got married, instead.
And had kids, instead. And keeps house, instead. And nags, nags us all.”

“Even your father?” Mina wondered.

“Especially Dad. Then she complains because Dad spends so much time out of town on business and nags him more.” Charlie shook her head, pitying the stupidity of her mother. Charlie had no intention of going on with ballet. She wanted to be in the movies. “I'm photogenic, and—there's never the same kind of life in ballet, even if you're a success, not like movies, when you're a movie actress. Ballet teaches you how to move. An actress has to know how to . . . move right.”

Charlie's roommate, Tansy, was a little plain girl, quiet and hard-working. Mina couldn't imagine why the camp had put Tansy and Charlie into the same room. Tansy had even been homesick for the first week, even though she really wanted to come to dance camp.

“How can you be homesick?” Mina had asked, trying to comfort her. “Wouldn't you rather be here?”

Charlie and Isadora had exchanged a look at that. Mina caught it, out of the corner of her eye. It was almost the kind of look kids give one another across the classroom, when they know something the teacher can't begin to understand.

“Well, I would,” Mina said to the two of them. She didn't know what they thought they knew that she didn't. “Even though I miss my family too.”

“Your family's different,” Charlie pointed out.

“I miss my dog.” Tansy snuffled.

Mina chuckled at that, and the chuckle spread out warm into a laugh. The laugh lighted up the whole dormitory room, even the farthest corners of it, and pretty soon everybody joined in, even Tansy, sitting up on the bed and blowing her nose into a tissue. She looked at Mina as if Mina was strange and wonderful.

The four of them were going to work together on the ten-minute performance that every dancer at the camp had to give for the final exercises. Their instructor, Miss Fiona Maddinton, had told them about it on the first day, after they each had an individual conference with her. In the conference, she had told each of the sixteen girls in her class what she had thought when she watched them during the audition or, in Mina's case, when she looked at the tape Miss LaValle had mailed up to New York. Miss LaValle had rented a video camera up in Cambridge and Mina had performed in front of it, the barre exercises and a dance they had worked out to part of the
Nutcracker Suite.
“You have strength,” Miss Maddinton said during her conference with Mina, “and a certain rude grace. Even on that tape your presence made itself felt. A dancer has to have presence. But,” she went on, when Mina opened her mouth to ask what the teacher meant, “you don't have discipline. It's discipline I will teach you. Natalie?” she called, indicating that the talk was over, summoning up the next girl. In the long working days, the hours of practice, Mina was learning what Miss Maddinton meant. Miss Maddinton seemed pleased with her. She was surely pleased with herself: She had never worked so hard and learned so much.

The performance, Miss Maddinton had told them, could be done in groups, or individually, but had to be prepared without any adult help of any kind. Even the instructors were going to take part in the final exercises, performing for ten minutes. A lot of the girls from the class had asked Mina if she wanted to work with them, but Isadora and Charlotte and Tansy had asked her first, and she would have preferred to dance with them anyway. They were going to do an original ballet, based on Narnia. The other three had decided that, because Mina had never heard of Narnia.

“But those books have been on every reading list since I was in
third grade,” Isadora said. “Aren't they even on your summer reading list?”

“I don't have a summer reading list.”

“Then outside reading.” But Mina didn't have that either. “You mean, you don't have to do book reports?”

“We do reports, sometimes, or projects,” Mina said, looking around at the other three. “For science, or social studies.”

“What wouldn't I give not to have to do book reports.” Charlie sighed.

They all three lived in New York City and went to private schools, but different schools. Isadora's rich father sent plenty of money for her and her mother to live on, whether Isadora had a stepfather or not. Tansy's father was a special kind of dentist, called an orthodontist, and Charlie's father worked in advertising. Their mothers didn't have jobs and they had been interested to hear that Mina's mother did. About everything in their lives was different from Mina's, and she loved hearing them talk about their lives.

“I wouldn't mind book reports. I like reading,” Mina said.

Charlie dismissed that. “You just don't know any better.”

“Anyway,” Isadora interrupted, “who has an idea for what we can do?”

Tansy did. Tansy really wanted not to dance, but to choreograph. She had an idea all worked out. “If there are two of the children, a boy and a girl—I could be the boy because I'm so small and all—and Charlie would be the girl—and Isadora would dance Aslan, all in gold, and Mina would be a Tarkaan but she'd turn into Tash, in the middle—”

“How would she do that?” Isadora asked.

“By turning around, or maybe with a mask. I know I can think of a way,” Tansy said.

“Like in
Swan Lake
?”
Mina asked. She had loved that moment
when the magician swept his cape aside to reveal Odile, as if she had appeared by magic.

“Yes, or something like that. It would start out with the children on stage, being—happy or something—and then the Tarkaan would come in . . .” Tansy stood up from the floor of the practice room where they were working out their project and acted out the parts. “He'd try to be nice first and bribe them. Then he'd try to force them—”

“Force them to what?” Mina asked.

“To go with him, to be one of his people,” Isadora explained quickly. Then she said, “I'm sorry, Mina, I didn't mean to snap at you.”

Mina hadn't been offended. She didn't think Isadora had snapped at her. She waited to hear the rest of Tansy's idea.