by Vendela Vida
I lock my bike and cross the street and pass into the narrow outdoor passageway that leads to Madame Sonya’s backyard. I’ve never been to the backyard before, but one day after class Madame Sonya took me and Maria Fabiola to her parlor, as she called it. She had seen something in us, she said, something that reminded her of herself. She wanted us to know that if we were ever in trouble (“I won’t ask what kind of trouble, I will never ask”) we were welcome to come stay in the shed in her backyard. “It’s a safe haven,” she said, pointing out the window. “A safe haven?” Maria Fabiola asked. Madame Sonya explained what that meant and told us the combination to the lock that would grant us entry. There wasn’t much drama in our lives, and I tried to imagine a time when we might need such a place. Maria Fabiola was probably thinking the same thing. We both smiled gratefully.
The corridor leading to the backyard has cracked cement, a hose spiraled like a forgotten lasso, and a wooden door with a lock. Madame Sonya told us the code to the door’s padlock is the year of her greatest fame: 1938. She blames the start of World War II for the premature derailment of her career.
The backyard isn’t much of a garden. The large shed takes up most of the small plot of land, and, around it, weeds have grown tall, and in patches, prickly. I step up to the front of the shed. It has a proper door, like to a house. I turn the knob suddenly and push the door open. I want to catch Maria Fabiola by surprise.
She’s not here.
The light is on. As I glance around, I think the room looks very familiar. But where would I have seen it before? And then I remember: on the walls of the ballet studio hang photos of Madame Sonya’s dressing room in Paris. The interior of this shed is a replica. I know the year this unofficial shrine is commemorating—1938.
On every table of the room stand vases of bouquets of dried roses, fraying ivory-colored ribbons still tied around their stems. Pointe shoes hang from hooks in a row, like Christmas stockings. In the center of the room is a plush pink divan draped with a white fur blanket. I run my fingers over it. The tips of the fur are pointed and hard, as though a substance was spilled on it decades before.
On a wall is a large framed poster. The painting shows a raft holding what looks like a dozen shipwrecked passengers, a few of whom are dead. A boy in the right-hand corner of the painting is waving a red flag, signaling for help from a passing boat. Below the painting the poster says:
The Raft of the Medusa
Théodore Géricault
THE LOUVRE MUSEUM
The shed is windowless, which makes the room feel even more like a shrine to the past. Mr. London assigned us Great Expectations last spring and Madame Sonya’s dressing room reminds me of Miss Havisham’s dilapidated mansion that encapsulated the wedding that never happened.
I pick up the shaggy fur blanket that’s draped over the divan. It’s almost bulky enough to hide a body. I pull at it quickly, like a magician. There’s nothing beneath it except for a tattered and dusty pillow. There’s a small bathroom, which means it would be possible to stay here for days without leaving.
I wait across the street from Ballet Russe in the restaurant that sells piroshkis. I ignore the looks of the older Russian women with their bright-red hair. I can tell they don’t like that I eat my piroshki with my hands, as though it’s a burrito. My sister thinks piroshkis smell like dog food. I think they smell like love. They’re warm, the bread is soft, and the meat is a tender surprise. I sit there and wait and watch to see if Maria Fabiola enters or exits the small passageway to the right of the studio.
Eventually the floor-to-ceiling window curtains part and I watch Madame Sonya instruct five-year-olds at the barre. Her pianist accompanies her on the upright. He has white hair and a permanent stoop, as though he’s spent his life hunched over at the piano, one ear horizontal to the keys to make sure the instrument has been properly tuned. Madame Sonya turns to him to signal the start of a new song. It suddenly hits me—the pianist is her boyfriend. Why have I not realized this before? Is it because I haven’t watched them while eating the piroshki that tastes like love? This revelation that they’re a couple provokes a cascade of questions: what else have I not seen? What else could I be missing?
* * *
I BIKE TO THE BEACH. It’s getting dark and the waves are choppy, their crashes a loud staccato. I walk to the promontory to the right and consider timing my sprint around it so I can make it to the next beach without the ocean splashing or swallowing me. But I’m suddenly scared. What if Maria Fabiola really is missing? I decide to climb up and over the bluff instead. I get to the top and as I’m about to descend to Baker Beach, I look down. From this high-up perspective, I see a figure hunched over, making itself into an oval. “Maria Fabiola!” I yell. The waves crash loudly in response.
I scurry down the cliff and to the sand.
The oval shape is not a hunched girl; it’s a rock.
The air is moist, salty. I look down Baker Beach, where a number of bonfires are burning. There’s no pattern to their location, their range of brightness.
A burst of white darts in front of my eyes like a comet. It takes me a minute to realize it’s a drunk girl wearing what looks like a white nightgown, veering between the bonfires. She has a blanket pulled around her shoulders, trailing behind her like the robe of a dethroned queen. She takes a swig from a bottle and then is chased away by the gathered group of friends as though she’s a dog.
The cold breeze hits my face, the damp air rises into my nostrils. The scent of the beach at evening is oddly bosky, like a dense forest.
The girl is now sprinting, trying to get the blanket behind her to rise like a magic carpet. She repeatedly turns her head back toward the blanket, as though to check whether or not it’s gathered momentum and height. Her dream, I imagine, is to get on the carpet and fly above all this.
She’s running in ovals, and then she looks back and falls over herself and to the ground. She rolls on the sand and at first I think she’s laughing but as I get closer to her I hear her wails.
Her hair is spread over her face like seaweed, and one large eye stares up at me. She looks like a dying horse.
“Eulabee,” she says. “You know me,” and she laughs at her own rhyme.
It’s Julia’s half sister, Gentle. “Let me help you up,” I say. “You’re cold. You need to get somewhere warm and sober up.” I picture myself, or someone, walking her in circles as she drinks coffee.
“I’m not wasted,” she says, slurring the word “wasted.”
She stands and runs away, the blanket above her head. She zigzags around the beach like a Chinese dragon.
When I leave the beach I bike to Julia’s house. I need to tell her mom that I saw Gentle at the beach and that she’s drunk.
I ring the doorbell and I see Julia’s head peek out from behind the curtain of a window. I ring the bell again. Julia’s mom, Kate, finally opens the door.
“Eulabee,” Kate says, kindly. “I haven’t seen you for a while.”
I force a smile. Is it possible she really hasn’t heard?
“Yeah,” I say. “I wanted to let you know that I was just down at Baker Beach and I saw Gentle.”
Her face falls. “What?” she says. “That’s not possible. She was home sick from school today. She’s up in her room resting.” Gentle’s room, I know, is in the attic.
“Oh, okay,” I say. “It’s just . . . I’m pretty sure it was her.”
Kate looks at me and I see panic enlarge her eyes. “Wait right here,” she says. Her strong legs sprint up the stairs.
I can see Julia in the kitchen eating ice cream out of a carton.
“Now you see something,” she says. “How convenient for you.”
“I thought your mom would want to know,” I say.
“Clark!” Kate calls out. “Clark! Gentle snuck out. She’s at the goddamned beach.”
“Thanks for ruining my family’s night,” Julia says. “Can you please leave?”
I wait outside the house by
the curb in case Kate and Clark need to ask me anything. The side gate opens and they get into a dark green car parked on the street. Julia’s mom rolls down the window. “You can go home now, Eulabee,” she says impatiently. “Go on home.”
14
When I come through the kitchen door it’s after 7. My father is pacing, my mother is cleaning, and Svea has the sly smile of a sibling who’s confident her sister is going to get in trouble. But my parents are more relieved than angry to see me, and this upsets Svea. While my parents hug me, she races upstairs to her bedroom.
“We were so worried,” my dad says.
I expect my mom to temper this comment, but she doesn’t.
At dinner—iceberg salad and spaghetti—we talk silently about Maria Fabiola, as though Fate is listening. My parents want to protect Svea, whose eyes are wide—I know she’s going to tell her friends about the situation the next day. Her friends have spent the night when Maria Fabiola has spent the night. They know her and now she has disappeared.
The drama extends from the breakfast room table to the study, where, after dinner, my father watches the news. “Greta!” he yells to my mother who’s washing dishes by hand. She washes them with great thoroughness before placing them in the dishwasher. “Greta!” he calls again.
She doesn’t respond but I run to the study. On the news there’s a segment about Maria Fabiola. The camera shows the Spragg campus from an angle I’ve never seen before—“helicopter,” my father explains. Then a close-up of a box of sugar appears on the screen, and for a moment I think it’s a commercial break. But the anchorwoman is back in the frame and she’s talking about how the missing girl is an heir to a famous sugar fortune. Her great-grandfather started the sugar company and there’s speculation that this may be a kidnapping case.
Two questions surge through my mind: A kidnapping? And then: How could I have been her best friend for eight years and not know that her family was part of a famous fortune?
“Did you know that?” I ask my father. “That she was an heiress?”
“Yes,” he says, still staring at the television. “Everyone knows that.” Then he yells for my mother again. “Greta!” he roars. By the time she arrives the segment is over and my father is angry she missed it. “What were you doing in there?” he says.
“Cleaning up after dinner.” Her pink gloves make a schwak! sound as she removes them.
My dad repeats everything the news report said so she hasn’t missed anything. This is a good lesson for my mom, I think. Next time he calls she’ll come running, because he goes over the segment in exasperating detail. He even elaborates on what the anchorwoman was wearing and how her hair was styled. My father never misses an opportunity to admire beauty.
“Did you know Maria Fabiola is an heiress to a fortune?” I ask my mom.
My mom is not easily impressed by appearances or money—in fact, she’s skeptical of money so I think there’s a good chance this news has escaped her. Otherwise why would she have allowed me to be such good friends for so many years with someone apparently so famously wealthy?
“Of course,” she says. “Her mother’s from an old East Coast family.”
“Her mom’s the one with money?” I say in disbelief.
“Yes,” my mom says. “I think her family came over on the Mayflower.”
I picture Maria Fabiola’s mom in her large sunglasses and the Lilly Pulitzer prints she wears when she takes us to her swim club in Marin. She doesn’t dress in what I imagine someone from money would wear. Her jewelry isn’t very noticeable and her purses aren’t even leather. Instead she carries an L.L.Bean canvas tote bag with her everywhere. She bought Maria Fabiola a similar tote for school. After that, we all subscribed to the L.L.Bean catalog.
Usually I say goodnight and go to my room by myself to finish my homework, but tonight my parents follow me upstairs. After I’ve changed into an old and pilling Lanz nightgown, they both tuck me in. This hasn’t happened since I was nine. I can’t remember the last time my dad was in my bedroom—he looks around as though the furniture has moved.
“Can you help me get that sticker off my window?” I ask him. “The one that tells firemen there’s a child in this room.” I point to the window and my dad lifts up the shade. From inside the room you see the oval of the sticker but not the words.
“Sure,” he says. “Tomorrow.”
My mom uses her hand to brush my hair away from my forehead. Despite her devotion to the pink dishwashing gloves, her fingers are still rough. She’s told me that she’s had to add stitches to women’s vaginas in the surgery room—especially women from other countries—because they don’t want their future husbands to know they’re not virgins. These are the same hands that do that, I think. These are vagina-stitching hands.
“How do you feel about going to school tomorrow?” my dad asks. “Do you want to—”
“She’s going to school tomorrow,” my mom interjects before my father can finish his question. I have never missed a day of school at Spragg. This is what happens when you go to a private school and your parents don’t come from money. They have done the calculations of what each day is costing them.
“I feel okay about it,” I say. I don’t admit that it’s kind of exciting with all the television cameras circling campus. I don’t say that even though the cameras aren’t in the classrooms, some of the teachers have started acting more performative, as though they’re being filmed. Especially Mr. London.
“We love you,” my dad says, and my mother nods. My mother shows her love in every way possible but has a hard time saying the word. My dad and I have had many conversations about why this might be; we think it’s because she’s lost so many people she’s said the word “love” to. Half her family is dead.
“I love you both, too,” I say.
When they leave, I stare up at my tilting canopy, contemplating the fact that Maria Fabiola is the heir to a sugar fortune. I picture her kitchen pantry, which we used to raid after school and on sleepovers. The pantry did have sugar, but I don’t remember her parents using it more than anyone else.
When I wake up the next morning my mom’s already left for work. My dad insists on driving my sister to school. He wants to drive me, too, but I remind him my job starts today. A neighbor up the street is out of town and she’s hired me to collect her newspaper each morning so potential burglars don’t realize she’s gone. The timing couldn’t be better. I want to read the news, to know about Maria Fabiola, but we don’t get the newspaper unless the Chronicle (the morning paper) or the Examiner (the afternoon paper) are running a special trial where you get the paper free for six weeks. These sorts of deals are offered all the time. The newspapers or magazine say you can cancel before six weeks, but they count on you not cancelling. My parents never forget to cancel.
“Why isn’t she just putting her paper on hold?” my dad asks. “That way she wouldn’t have to pay for the paper, or for you, while she’s gone.”
“She doesn’t trust the newspaper. She suspects the newspaper tells the burglars who’s going to be out of town.”
“Everyone is entitled to their crazy theories,” my dad says, using a shiny black shoehorn to slip on his shoes. From his reaction I can tell that he probably has some crazy theories, too.
I walk out the front door a few minutes before my father and sister leave through the back door. Our street, El Camino del Mar, seems longer today, and steeper. The neighbor’s home is nondescript. As far as I know, it has housed neither a magician nor a musician. It’s just a regular house in Sea Cliff. The Chronicle is on the brick path to the widow’s front door. A thin pink-red rubber band is stretched across a photo of Maria Fabiola’s face.
I roll the band off and place it around my wrist and open the paper. I know this photo of Maria Fabiola. It was taken of us together at her last birthday party at the roller-skating rink, the one with the multiple posters of Brooke Shields modeling Calvin Kleins. I was standing to the right of Maria Fabiola when the photo
was snapped, but I’ve (obviously) been cut out of the picture. The headline is “Young Heiress Missing.” The story starts with some expected adjectives. Our school is “elite,” our neighborhood is “tony.” But then the word choices become more curious. Maria Fabiola is described as a “star student and devoted ballerina.” I don’t think Maria Fabiola would want to be described as a star student, but she’ll like the devoted ballerina part.
I hear a car horn honk. My first thought before I turn is that it’s the man in the vintage white car. But it’s my dad. He has Svea and her dour friend in the back seat and encourages me to jump in front. I place the newspaper in my backpack and get in.
“I just wanted to offer you chauffeur service today,” my dad says.
When we get to school it seems that everyone’s being driven to school by their parents. Some students are getting driven by their families’ official chauffeurs. Nobody trusts their kids to walk or take the bus today.
At school everyone’s abuzz—no one’s acting normal. Teachers ask if I’m okay and don’t wait to hear the answer. Throughout my classes, I snap the newspaper rubber band against my wrist to remind myself to act sad. The truth is I don’t believe anything bad has happened to Maria Fabiola. This is all a ploy for attention.
During lunch I go to Mr. London’s office. The door is propped open with a large dictionary, but still I knock.
“Come in!” he calls out. He’s sitting at his desk, with what looks like a student essay in his hand.
“Oh,” he says. He looks disappointed that it’s me. Maybe he was expecting a journalist.
“Are you busy grading?” I say.
“No,” he says, placing it down theatrically. “It’s Maria Fabiola’s essay on 1984. I was looking through it to see if I could find any . . . clues.”
Now I really know he was waiting for a journalist. He’s probably been pretending to read her paper for hours, just hoping someone will catch him in the act and deem him wonderful.
