Mambo in Chinatown

by Jean Kwok

  One day, while I was practicing by myself, Dominic approached me. “You’re getting better. Much better. You should think about competing.”

  “Professionally?” I gulped.

  “Why not? You are starting to look like a professional. Nothing will improve your dancing more than doing a competition. Not that you’ll win, not yet, but the training will sharpen your skills like nothing else. I know a few professional men you could try out.”

  I thought about Lisa and Pa, and the costs of doing a major competition. There would be dresses and new shoes and coachings. I was still wearing my one pair of Latin sandals, which had sprouted holes just like Katerina’s. “I appreciate it. But I don’t think I’m ready yet. I’ll just concentrate on my students for a while.”

  —

  I woke to find Lisa sucking her thumb in the night. Despite all of my hopes, she had started getting worse again. I told myself it was because we didn’t know the results of the test yet but I knew it was a lie. I was so disappointed. The nightmares and bedwetting had started again and she also complained of dizziness and headaches. What if something really was wrong with Lisa? As I gained mastery over my body, Lisa lost control over hers. I realized that it was exactly as the Vision had said. What one sister lost, the other would gain.

  I couldn’t sleep any longer and slipped out of the apartment into the deserted streets. In the moonlit sky, the clouds rolled thick and close to the ground. The sky was tight with withheld rain. I stood at the foot of the bridge in Gossip Park, which arched over a large artificial pond. I didn’t know what was happening to Lisa. My entire life had changed in the past months. I felt like a blind person heading into my future. I was so afraid for her and myself.

  I climbed up the broad steps onto the bridge. Pausing, I leaned out over the water and then straightened. I closed my eyes. Slowly, I began to walk, holding on to the stone railing. Keeping my eyes closed, I paused to listen to the wind swirl through the branches of the trees directly over my head. I stepped forward and my fingers trailed over small freezing indentations in the rock.

  My feet seemed to drop themselves into the darkness before me. I wanted to make it all the way across the bridge with my eyes closed but the wind across the water was loud and, suddenly, at the halfway point, the bridge seemed to slant more sharply than I’d remembered. Going down, it seemed that any moment, I would fall off the end of the bridge, off the steps, into the unknown.

  I opened my eyes. I shook myself and went back to our apartment.

  Fourteen

  Now that Ryan was officially in private lessons with me, I had to teach him how to dance for real. I’d already shown him all of the different dances and it was time for him to start learning how to lead. We’d managed to wrestle our way through until now, but it was hard to move together with him. Even so, I found myself looking forward to his lessons. Since Ryan worked for an urban landscaping company, the winter was a quieter time for him and he often came in the late afternoons.

  “Mmmm hmmm,” said Irene as the elevator doors opened and he strode out. We both watched him from the mirror in the reception area. His winter work jacket made him look even broader as he pushed through the first set of double doors, and I noticed the snowflakes on his hair and shoulders. He spotted me, then shook his head in my direction like a dog.

  “Hey!” I jumped off of the couch and out of his way.

  “Whoops,” he said.

  “You can shake anything you like my way, honey.” Irene gave him a broad wink with her thickly mascaraed lashes, then took his jacket from him to hang it up in the closet. He was dressed casually as usual, in jeans and a dark gray long-sleeved cotton shirt.

  His smile lit up his entire face. “Good afternoon, ma’am. May I say that you are looking lovely today.”

  He never said anything like that to me. “Are you done flirting with the studio owner’s mother now?”

  Irene came out of the closet, pulled down her bifocals and pretended to look severe. “Widowed mother. And just because you don’t know how to have any fun, don’t begrudge the rest of us.”

  “I’d be afraid to have as much fun as you,” I muttered as I walked toward the ballroom doors Ryan was holding open for me. I turned to him. “How’s your girlfriend doing, by the way?”

  “Fiona’s just fine. Really busy.”

  “Must be hard being long distance.”

  “Yeah, it is. And she’s the type of person who’s always on the go, so it’s not like she’s that good with e-mail or on the phone. But we catch up when we see each other again.”

  I bet they did. I had no right to be jealous, just because she had a feminine name like Fiona and was probably brilliant and beautiful too. And had Ryan for a boyfriend. “Well, today, I’m going to make sure you’re a fit partner for her.”

  I turned Ryan around, put him in the lady’s place and then took up dance position with me leading. “Okay, I want you to feel what it’s like to dance with you. Don’t worry about which leg you’re on, just start moving backward when I go.” I went forward the way he always did, taking huge strides and only lightly holding him with my hands. He took one step back, and another, then looked over his shoulder.

  I said, “You’re not allowed to do that.”

  “But I can’t see where I’m heading. I’m not sure where you want me to go.”

  “Welcome to my world.” I kept moving forward, even though he was so heavy to lead; it felt like I was trying to move an elephant. Once in a while, I stopped without warning only to have his momentum jerk us both forward. This was pretty different from the time I’d danced with Julian. I wasn’t tall enough to have a clear view over his shoulder so I had to peer around his side to see where we were going. He stopped turning around, although I could tell it took a real effort of will. A few times we almost crashed into each other when he didn’t know if he was supposed to walk or not. He sensed it when we were getting close to the wall and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing himself. I stopped him a few inches away from it.

  “I don’t often have this feeling, but just now I feared for my life,” he said.

  “That’s how it feels for the woman when she is dancing with you. So many men dance as if they were playing a video game. It’s like they think that the closer they can get to the wall without crashing, the more points they’ll win.”

  He winced. “Did I do that to you?”

  “You hold me too loosely when you’re going forward. I have no idea what you want.”

  “But I’m trying to be gentle. I don’t want to hurt you by accident.”

  “And speaking of being gentle, how does it feel when I turn you like this?” I lifted my arm and stood on tiptoe, then pushed him underneath it with all of my strength. I whipped him around a few more times for good measure. To my surprise, he did the spins flawlessly, even though there must have been three of them.

  “I was definitely being manhandled there.” He was grinning, as if he’d enjoyed it.

  “You use so much force when you turn me. I am not a side of beef. I am a woman. All you need to do is to give me the impetus and I can take it from there.” I did the underarm turn again, only giving him a brief push this time. He spun a double, ducking his head to fit underneath my arm.

  “That felt great. I could get used to being a lady.”

  I considered him. “Those were really good spins. You kept your entire body stable. How did you do that?” I’d never seen a new male student be able to whip them off like that. I loved to turn but needed to practice hard just to be able to complete a double without falling over.

  “Like I said, years of boxing and yoga.”

  “It must have been hard for you to give it up.”

  His face turned serious. “Every change has a hello and a good-bye in it, you know? You always have to leave in order to go on to something new.”

  I thought of what Godmoth
er always said. “You must empty the cup before it can be filled again.”

  His smile was slow and warm as he met my eyes. “Exactly.”

  I liked this guy a bit too much. I remembered Estella and the dance student who had gotten her fired. The way I felt around him was starting to scare me, so it seemed like a good time to change the subject. “Are there any dances that you particularly like so far?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever works for Evelyn would be fine, I guess.”

  “I didn’t mean for the wedding but for you, personally. Is there anything you’ve maybe wanted to learn?” When he didn’t react, I kept talking. “It’s just that I had this student last week who’s a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I asked him how he got into paintings. He said he never really cared about art, but as a kid, he liked to whittle. So he used to go to the museum because they have these intricate wooden frames and he enjoyed getting ideas for his whittling. After a number of years, he began to notice that the frames were holding something interesting too.”

  Now his gaze was steady. “And your point is?”

  “I’m just trying to say that sometimes, if you start with one small thing you like, a whole new world can open up for you.”

  “Well, someone may once have told me that white guys were too wimpy to do Latin.”

  “So we’d have to prove them wrong, wouldn’t we?”

  —

  I was glad to have the apartment to myself that Saturday afternoon so I could go over some of the new steps I was learning. I couldn’t do them full out, but at least I could repeat them in my head and mark them on the floor. I was so busy that the time flew by. Suddenly, I realized it was late. I looked at my watch and panicked. I’d completely missed Godmother’s tai chi class.

  I flew downstairs, not bothering to wait for our creaky elevator, and ran over to Godmother Yuan’s apartment. I pounded on the door. She opened it immediately, as if she’d been waiting for me.

  “I’m so sorry, I forgot.” I was still gasping for breath from my hard dash.

  She regarded me. “‘No flower can bloom red for a hundred days,’ Charlie.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It means that I can’t expect a flower to stay beautiful forever. It means you are changing. I can see it.” She looked me up and down. “I don’t know what’s going on but I miss the innocent and lovely girl you were.”

  “I’m really sorry, Godmother, but you can teach the class without me with no problem. You do all of your other classes alone.”

  “Maybe the class would be fine without you, but I was not. I missed you and I needed you, Charlie.” Then she shut the door again.

  I felt terrible and just stood there for a moment, then I knocked on the door again. She didn’t answer. I took a deep breath and turned the knob. I called through the crack, “You’re right. I am not the same anymore, but didn’t you say, ‘The sea accepts a hundred streams and rivers’?” I was reminding her of a saying she was fond of, meaning that a good person was flexible and accepting of things great and small. “I’m twenty-two years old, Godmother Yuan. I need to change and become the person I was meant to be. I made a mistake today but please, can’t you accept that?”

  Godmother sighed, then opened the door wider. “You are right, Charlie. I too am sorry. We did not speak of it but I saw you were becoming different. Growing up. And I guess I was scared of losing you. That you’d become like my own grandchildren, who don’t even come to visit me.”

  I’d never heard Godmother Yuan admit that about her grandchildren before. “They love you. They’re just busy.”

  “Too busy for their own grandmother.” She sniffed. “It’s more than that. When their parents force them to visit me, I do not even recognize them. They are not the sweet children I knew.”

  I said carefully, “I heard about Grace.”

  She stiffened, then to my surprise, began to smile. “I have an idea. You will come to dim sum with our family. In a few weeks.”

  I’d never been asked to join the Yuans before. “Why?”

  “You need a reason for an invitation?”

  “Godmother. I know you better than this.”

  She huffed. “Oh all right. We are having some difficulty convincing Grace to attend. It will help if she has a friend or two there.”

  “Grace and I aren’t friends anymore. We haven’t been for many years.”

  “Of course you are. And you are such a nice unmarried girl too.”

  My lips parted. “It’s a matchmaking session. No way.”

  Godmother Yuan furrowed her brow. She didn’t bother with the Buddhist sayings now. “You owe me.”

  —

  Ryan, a natural athlete, improved faster than any other beginner I’d seen. When I commented on how quickly he could learn the steps, he said, “It’s actually not that different from boxing. It’s all patterns of movement. I always had to memorize combinations too.” His problem tended to be that he focused on the result rather than the process, so if he knew we needed to end up in the opposite corner, all of his energy was directed toward getting us there instead of how we proceeded. Whenever I saw Evelyn, she beamed at me. Once she blew me a kiss from across the ballroom.

  After a few weeks, I asked him, “So do you have a favorite dance now?”

  “Maybe the rumba. Or merengue.” We were doing the Cuban promenade in rumba. We’d separated and I was swinging in a slow circle around him with a Latin walk, involving much swaying of the hips. At the right moment, he tugged on my hand and I whirled to face him, then went into his arms, back into dance position. “But I don’t look quite right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He stopped dancing. “All that stuff.” He waved his hands, gesturing at my hips. “I mean, I don’t expect to look like you, but when I see myself in the mirror, I seem kind of stiff.”

  “Umm, that’s because your hips don’t sway. At all.”

  “So I’m still dancing like a white guy?”

  “You know a lot of steps.” I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d always been honest with Ryan. “You’re here to learn how to be a social dancer. That means how to partner someone at a party or wedding and have a good time, and you can keep your hips frozen solid if you like. If you really want to learn to move, that’s a whole other world.”

  “That guy doesn’t dance like a corpse.” He gestured toward Keith, who was doing a routine with Simone. Keith was all long lines and grace on the floor, and he looked wonderful with Simone, who swirled around him with her left leg outstretched in an extended spiral. She wrapped it around his hips, then he turned them both around so they were facing the same way. She unwrapped from him with a swish and they moved toward the mirror in parallel like two great cats. I’d noticed they were doing more set choreography recently, probably preparing for another competition.

  “He wins everything. Everyone loves dancing with him.”

  Ryan studied him, carefully not looking at me. “You too?”

  “What?” Then I understood. “Keith’s a great, considerate partner. Yes, I enjoy dancing with him at the parties.”

  He flexed his shoulders. “I could take him in a fight.”

  I laughed. “You’re probably right, but in a dance studio, that’s not relevant.”

  “Yeah. So teach me to dance better than him.”

  “That’s not easy. You’ve been dancing for a couple of weeks. He’s been here for years.”

  “You don’t know how determined I can be once I get my mind set on something.”

  I saw that he was serious now. “Ryan, the level of technique you’re talking about is beyond the number of lessons you were planning on taking. You’re enrolled in a program which will be done in a few weeks.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll extend.”

  —

  Later, in the teachers’ roo
m, Nina said, “I was standing right behind you guys, not that you noticed me. Maybe you should try to make a competition student out of Ryan.”

  “I know him. He’s shy about his dancing. He wouldn’t want to do it.”

  “It sounded like he did.”

  “He wanted to prove some manly thing about how he’s better than Keith. That doesn’t mean he wants to dance in front of people. He can’t even move his hips.”

  “Give the man a break. He has to be taught. But the thing is, if you can get him into competition, he might blow everyone else away. Some students have had ballroom lessons somewhere else and we need to completely rebuild them. It’s better to get someone fresh, like your guy. He’s new, he’s cute and he’s talented. He can go far.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking: how could I ever afford it? I was giving so much of my salary each week to Pa toward Lisa’s treatment and our other bills. “I don’t think I can get him to do it, and I don’t even have a competition dress.”

  “So what? Buy one.” Nina went over to the clothing rack, which was always filled with formal wear and ballroom dresses, and pulled out one of Simone’s Latin costumes. It was two brief pieces, covered in bright gold sequins. “This would look fabulous on you. Try it on.”

  “No way. That’s not a dress, that’s a bikini with fringe.”

  She shrugged and hung it back. “Your choice, your life. But you know what you should do? Ask him to go for that scholarship with you.”

  I tried not to look as shocked as I felt. “The one for fifteen grand? Aren’t you and Simone doing it?”

  “Simone is. She’s already working on something with Keith. But I don’t have anyone who’s willing to dance with me, I’ve tried. So the studio only has one couple in that competition right now and the truth is, none of my students would have a snowball’s chance in hell against Keith anyway.”

  “Come on, if your students are outclassed, what kind of odds would Ryan and I have?”