Audition (7 page)

To Señor Medrano’s house.
But he sends Julio outside anyway
To rake their sorry scrap of front lawn
With only the pale illumination of the corner streetlight
To guide him.

 

 

I watch from the front stoop.
Wait for him to start a conversation.
I cannot tell whether he is angry at Señor’s assignment,
Or at me for my coldness at the studio tonight,
But he does not try to joke or tease.

 

 

Blowing wind scatters his pile.

 

 

In Vermont, Dad rakes the leaves from the yard
Over the stone fence into the woods behind.
Here a black plastic sack waits for Julio.
I push off the chilly concrete step,
Grab at the flying leaves.
Shove dusty fistfuls into the yard bag.

 

 

Julio chuckles,
“You kind of suck at this.”
“You’re not so great yourself,
Mr. Classical Guitar.”

 

 

He shakes the rake
Over my head.
Red and gold and brown fall flotsam
Wafts onto my oversprayed hair.

 

 

When Señora Medrano returns home
From her most recent trip
The next evening,
The yard is tidy,
The living room cleared of sheet music (courtesy of Julio),
The house vacuumed (courtesy of Señor Medrano) and
Dusted (courtesy of me).
We smile conspiratorially
Behind her scrutiny.

“Like Sara.
Follow Sara.”

 

 

My ears blink.
I almost stop
Turning
Piqués
Like I have never turned before.

 

 

After weeks of exasperation
Something
Has connected
Between my foot
And my brain.

 

 

Each time I push off from my left leg
Onto my right toe
The box of my pointe shoe
Centers exactly.
My body lifts over it,
So secure,
So solid,
I could stand there forever.
But instead I turn

Easily,
Generously.

 

 

And again.

 

 

And again.

 

 

I reach the corner barely breathing.

 

 

Feel the eyes
Following me.

 

 

But mostly hear the magic echo
Of Yevgeny’s
Hard,
Russian-accented
Shout.

 

 

“Like Sara.”

Apprentices and advanced students wait
For their partnering class,
Next in this space.

 

 

Today, I make my way past
Their superior clusters
With my head up

 

 

To where Señor Medrano stands,
Talking with Fernando and Remington.
I wait my turn to ask
When he’ll be ready to drive me home.

 

 

“Will there be time to work on my dance?” Remington asks
Señor.
His long eyelashes beat black against his pale skin.

 

 

Señor nods.
“Remind me last half hour of class.”

 

 

“Sara, you did well today,”
Yevgeny comments, passing.

Señor and the others turn their heads
As if I had just appeared
From thin air
Into an empty space.

 

 

“What time will you be finished tonight, Señor?”
I ask.

 

 

As the teacher looks at his watch,
Remington gives me a slow, curious grin.

Is a melting step.
The knees of the standing leg and the working leg
Bend together, straighten together,
Until the working leg is extended in arabesque.

 

 

Feels like it should be easy.
My extension is long,
My arabesque high.

 

 

But fondu is not in the final pose,
Rather in the process,
The getting there,
With everything working together:

 

 

Learning ballet steps, trigonometry,
How to add money onto your transit card,
How to wrap a hairnet around your bun to keep it neat,
Reading so many pages of literature and history every week,
Straightening it all into some kind of manageable whole.

 

 

Fondu is not even a little bit
Simple.

Our English class
(Taught by Mr. Green,
Also the JV girls field hockey
And boys varsity baseball coach)
Read one single book:

 

 

Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations
.

 

 

Sitting at the desks around me,
It seemed like hardly anyone besides me and Bess
Dreamed,
Even expected
Much of anything.

 

 

Later,
After I finished the story
(Our class, in fact, never reached the end),
I saw the true irony,
Tragedy.
Felt Mr. Green was being cruel.

 

 

As if he had chosen the novel himself,
Not had it handed down to him
From the weary department head

After a quarter hour’s rifling through the tattered book
stock
To see if there was a classroom set of anything
In the closet beside the library.

 

 

Mr. Green kept asking us
About the images of cobwebs
That cluttered old Miss Havisham’s world
Like the distraction of green turf fields
That filled his own.

 

 

To me the cobwebs
Were less important
Than the lost love,
Lost hope,
Lost dreams
That led the spinster to
Her dusty rooms, empty, absent life,
Turning those around her cruel
By making them expect, want, too much—
The wrong things.

 

 

At my aristocratic new school,
Upton Academy,

Where no expense is spared on copies
Of anything,
A book like that
Fills barely ten days, then on to another,
Another, and
Another with
Expectations
For all.

But my body is covered now
With hunter green,
The more forgiving leotard color
Of the next-up level
At the dance school.
And I am so delighted
That I smile at everyone.

 

 

Even the boys.

 

 

Even Remington.

 

 

He is beautiful
Tall
Strong.

 

 

The throb of my heart
Is ridiculous.
I am just sixteen and he is,
God, maybe twenty-two.
Also, he has a girlfriend,
Jane,
The company physical therapist.

I watch him from the corner of my eye
But stay near giggling Simone,
Who talks about studio gossip
And flirts with younger boys.
I would be so safe if he put his long arms around me.
His hands are so wide.

 

 

“Rem,” his friends call him
(And, of course,
Jane).
“Hey, Rem!” they greet him.
Teachers and choreographers say,
“Rem, pas de chat to the left.”
“Rem, partner Bonnie over there.”

 

 

He is an excellent dancer
But he wants to be a teacher
And choreographer.

 

 

Can I seem old enough to like him?
The teachers say I am doing well
And allow me into some of the advanced lessons.
Still, I am officially only in D class
With mostly younger girls.
So, I try to let everyone assume I am twelve
Instead of a backwards ballerina of sixteen.

 

 

I wish I could concentrate on dancing
Instead of spending so much time pretending
I am still in junior high.
But with Rem, I want to be sixteen
Or, like Alice in Wonderland,
Sometimes smaller,
Sometimes bigger still.