Come a Stranger

by Cynthia Voigt

  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.

  “Then Aslan comes in and the Tarkaan seems to give up, but he turns into Tash and they fight over the children. Aslan wins and Tash—is defeated.”

  Mina could almost see the dance Tansy was talking about. “That sounds really good,” she said. “Doesn’t it?” she asked the other two.

  “What about me doing the Tarkaan, instead?” Charlie asked. “Miss Maddinton says I’m the most dramatic dancer.”

  Tansy shook her head. “It wouldn’t be as good.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Charlie argued.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Isadora answered. “You’re dramatic but you don’t—Mina has that presence. Miss Maddinton told her that and she’s right.”

  “Only because I’m taller than everybody else,” Mina said, trying to pretend she wasn’t flattered. It wasn’t just being tall, she knew, it was her personality too.

  “But can you be bad?” Tansy asked her. “Really, really bad—Tarkaan is bad, but Tash is—evil.”

  Mina stood up and turned her back to them. She thought: dark, evil, dangerous. She let that run all through her body, until she spun around to face them, tall and stiff; then slowly—to music playing lento in her head—she went through the five positions, feet and hands, thinking all the time of dark and of evil, and how the dark, evil thing would want to spread out and wrap itself around the three girls in the room. When she finished, she smiled at them.

  “Oh, wow,” Isadora said, clapping. “That was neat. See what I mean, Charlie?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” But Charlie didn’t sound convinced.

  Tansy just looked at Mina, as if Mina was perfect. Mina knew she wasn’t perfect, but she felt good. It was discipline that had enabled her to know exactly how to move through the positions, knowing where she wanted every muscle and every part of her body; she was learning discipline. “I think it’ll be fun,” she said.

  “What music will we use?” Charlie asked.

  “Something modern,” Isadora suggested.

  Mina had just begun to learn about music, and she kept her mouth shut. There wasn’t anything she could add to this part of the planning.

  “There’s some Bartok,” Tansy said. “Piano suites, kind of simple but not really.”

  “You’re a walking music library,” Charlie complained.

  “My mom gives me anything I want.”

  They all knew that. They had all admired the stereo that was Tansy’s own to bring to camp with her, and the stack of records. They all listened to Tansy’s records. Mina listened more than anyone else except Tansy, because almost all of them were new to her; as if she had arrived in an unknown country with a wonderful geography, she was always ready to listen and hear something she’d never even heard of before dance camp.

  “Mom says since I’m so mousy and all that, I’d better cultivate my brain—”

  “Why do they all want us to get married?” Charlie cried out. “It’s not as if they were having such a good time.”

  “It’s crazy,” Isadora agreed.

  “My mother’s having a good time,” Tansy said. “I think. She’s always going out to do something interesting, getting dressed up, you know, a show or an exhibit, meeting interesting people, artists and things, having fancy dinners.”

  “Who keeps your house?” Isadora asked.

  “The housekeeper,” Tansy told them.

  That struck them as funny.

  “Mrs. Welker,” Tansy said. “Who keeps yours, Mina? When your mother’s working?”

  “We all do,” Mina said. “You know, we have chores.”

  “Even your father?”

  “Sure.”

  “Boy, if my mother tried to make my father do laundry,” Charlie said, “or vacuum—that would be a fight that would take two weeks to blow over. We’d all starve to death in our rooms before it was safe to come down. But Dad’s in advertising, and there’s a lot of pressure in that. I guess your father doesn’t have that kind of pressure, does he.”

  Mina didn’t know. “We quarrel,” she said. Everybody quarreled, it was human nature, and she hoped Charlie didn’t feel embarrassed because her parents had fights.

  Isadora’s mother had been married and divorced, twice each. “Don’t I know about quarrels,” she said. “I’d rather think about this performance.”

  “I wondered,” Tansy suggested in a particularly quiet voice. Mina sat up to pay close attention. She’d learned that when Tansy used that voice, it was because what she was going to say really mattered to her. Tansy looked at Mina. “If Mozart could work, for Aslan’s music.”

  “Mozart and Bartok together?” Charlie laughed.

  Mina had heard some Mozart. His name often came up in the music class. She wondered if Mozart was the kind of music you could dance to, though. She didn’t say anything and nobody asked her opinion. They talked on about which of Mozart’s pieces they should listen to.


  “I think we ought to at least try. Whatever else, Tansy really does know what she’s talking about when she talks music,” Isadora finally said. “If it works, we’ll be the most original I bet.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Mina lifted her right leg onto the barre, toes pointed, and stretched her arms toward it. Watching herself in the mirror, she bent her neck so that it would follow perfectly the curve her back and arms made. Then she looked back beyond herself in the mirror, seeing the whole class, all performing the same exercise, reflected back and forth in the mirrors that lined the two long walls of the room. “Praise God,” the song sang inside her, over the notes of the piano.

  This was a real dance studio, as different from Miss LaValle’s garage as—she didn’t know anything perfect enough to compare the differences. Even though from the first minute she had stepped into it, she had felt at home, she never lost the feeling of wonder at how right the studio was. It had two narrow walls of tall windows and two long walls of mirrors that went from ceiling to floor. The upright piano filled the room with its waltz tempo for the barre exercises, as Miss Maddinton went up and down the line, correcting. “That’s good, Mina,” she said.

  The floor was polished wood and the air was filled with light. The music went into Mina’s body, and she brought her leg down in time with it, then lifted her left leg. All along the walls, mirrored back and front, fifteen girls did the same. In the mirror, thirty-two arms stretched out. Mina let a smile spread over her face.

  It was coming close to the end of camp, with only a few days left before their performance. They named their dance “Narnia” and they were assigned to this same big studio for their rehearsals because they were a group so they needed more space. These days, the four of them came back every afternoon to rehearse. Mina could see why the instructors were making them work entirely without guidance, and she preferred it that way; but she wished she could hear what Miss Maddinton thought, before the performance. Mina had been careful to listen to what Tansy said when she tried to explain how things should be danced, but she thought Miss Maddinton would have some good advice. It wasn’t that Mina was worried about their dance. She knew it was wonderful. She just thought she wanted it to be absolutely perfect. Miss Maddinton might catch something they’d missed.

  Charlie called Miss Maddinton the “White Witch,” from the Narnia books, but Mina didn’t see why. It wasn’t as if Miss Maddinton wore only white, or had white hair, or anything like that. Her hair was dark, inky black—dyed, Charlie said—and long. She wore grays or silvery blues or silvery pinks, her leotard, tights, and wraparound skirt all the same color. She was a professional dancer who only taught during the summer, only at this camp. Most of the year she was with a ballet company in New York.

  Over the summer, Mina had written to her mother about everybody at camp, and what they were all doing. Miss Maddinton had occupied a lot of letter space, because she was a real dancer, a professional. Miss LaValle, Mina’s teacher at home, had studied dance, but she was only a teacher who gave lessons in her converted garage-studio, with a record player for music. Miss LaValle was built like Miss Maddinton, both of them tall, narrow women with muscular legs, but she was older, and she wore her leotard as if it was a uniform, and it was always a plain black uniform too. Miss LaValle had taught Mina well, Mina could tell that. She liked Miss LaValle and was grateful to her. But Miss Maddinton, Miss Fiona Maddinton—she was a real ballerina. Mina wondered what Miss Maddinton would do for her own ten-minute performance, on the night. Because it got so there wasn’t anything happening to write to her mother about, Mina sometimes just wrote down her guesswork about things like that: what Miss Maddinton would do, or whether Charlie’s father would lose his job because he lost a big account. Her mother wrote back the news from home, that Zandor got a fifty-cent-an-hour raise and had a new girlfriend, that Belle was bored (and boring, Mina’s mother added), messages from Mina’s father and from Louis, and her own opinions about the summer minister’s sermons and his family. It sounded like Mina’s mother liked the minister fine, but wasn’t sure about his wife. “We don’t see much of her,” Momma wrote.

  Mina had started off writing to Kat, just silly things, and Kat had written back, but after a couple of weeks that had tapered off. Kat couldn’t possibly understand how wonderful it was. Mina couldn’t have explained, for instance, how much she liked learning about music, its history, the names of composers, and listening to their different music, the different forms music could be written in. Mr. Tattodine, who liked Mina because she asked so many questions, had white hair that flopped over his forehead, and a way—when the class was listening to a record—of getting entirely engrossed in the music, until his face looked half asleep and his hand would come up to mark the beat, as if he was conducting the piece.

  It was Mr. Tattodine who had given Tansy the idea for where to find the right Mozart music for Aslan. Tansy had been trying movements from symphonies and string quartets, but nothing worked. Nothing made a dance. During the classes on opera, when he was talking about Mozart’s life and the reasons that people thought he was a genius, Mr. Tattodine had mentioned The Magic Flute. “It was considered at the time that he had written a low piece of work, a popular effort, written for money. Well, he did need money, he always needed money. But it is now taken as one of his richest works, musically speaking,” Mr. Tattodine said. Then he smiled at them and said, “I’m sorry, I’m lecturing at you again, I keep forgetting. Let’s have a question. Who can define the differences between opera and ballet. The musical differences, that is, because many operas—like The Magic Flute—do include dance.” Tansy nudged Mina then.

  Mina knew four of the seven differences that were given and realized once again how glad she was to be at camp. Mr. Tattodine said the way she learned she was like a sponge or a vacuum cleaner; “But not in the bad sense,” he said. Mina wasn’t worried about bad or good senses; she knew she could remember almost everything she was told, and she learned that she could hear not only musical phrases and forms, not only harmony and counterpoint, but also the several individual instruments that played together. She loved the whole range of strings, the variety of percussions, the winds and the reeds. Mr. Tattodine had them try playing every instrument, just to get sound out of it. Mina’s favorites were the reeds, because to play them you needed to hold the reed properly in your mouth and blow through it properly, which took discipline; but it was also a matter of your breath going through the wooden tube. The reeds seemed the most complicated and natural.

  The brasses were her next favorite. When she had the French horn in her hands, in class, she got a long clear note out of it, without any trouble, a round winding sound that made you sit up at attention and called out to you. “I’ve just got a lot of hot air,” Mina said laughing and passed the horn to Isadora. “That’s why I’m not having any trouble with it.”

  Once Tansy had listened to The Magic Flute and found passages of music that she wanted in it, passages that would be like counterpoint to Tarkaan’s Bartok, they moved ahead with their dance. It took work, hours of practicing to get the steps right, to get each individual performance right, to get everything put together right so that the dance worked the way Tansy wanted it to. But hours of work were no trouble. Charlie and Isadora complained, sometimes, but Mina never even felt like it.

  “What are you, some goody-goody?” Charlie demanded during their second-to-last rehearsal.

  “It’s because her daddy’s a minister,” Isadora, stretched out on the floor beside Charlie, said. Tansy had been called out to the phone, which was odd because parents usually called during the hour the girls had free before lights out. Mina was trying to get Charlie to go over the part where Tarkaan was trying to win over the human girl. Charlie didn’t see the point of doing it without having Tansy there to watch, because they’d just have to do it all over again for Tansy.

  “I think she’s just stronger than we are,” Charlie said. “You don’t get as tired, Mina; you can’t arg
ue that.”

  Mina didn’t know what it was, except she liked what she was doing so much that she never got tired doing it. She decided to listen to the Bartok again.

  Mr. Tattodine had explained to her the way the rhythm worked and the reasons for the notes being what they were and the different scale Bartok was using. She didn’t really understand, but she could hear the dance in the music now. Mr. Tattodine was an immigrant, from Hungary, which was Bartok’s homeland. He said maybe that was why the music made sense to him. Mina listened to the fragmented chords of the Bartok, standing still but feeling as if her body was moving to the dance.

  Tansy came back through the big door at the end of the room. She looked serious. “Everything okay?” Isadora asked.

  “My grandfather died.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad,” Isadora said.

  “Were you close?” Charlie asked.

  Tansy shook her head. “I’ve barely seen him since he went into the nursing home.”

  “Was he sick?” Mina asked.

  “Maybe we ought to stop the rehearsal,” Charlie suggested.

  “The performance is the day after tomorrow,” Tansy said. “We don’t have enough time as it is. I’m sort of sad, but it’s not as if . . . He wasn’t sick, he just got too old to take care of himself, so he went into a home.”

  Charlie and Isadora started telling stories about old relatives of their parents who had gone into nursing homes, or retired to places where there were a lot of old people gathered together. Mina didn’t say anything, because her one living set of grandparents lived with her mother’s brother in Georgia, and the grandparents who had died when she was still a baby had lived just around the corner. She thought of Miz Hunter, but didn’t mention her either. After a while, Tansy said it was time to get back to work, “If that’s okay?”