I remembered, too, the nunnish handmade tango shoes that I’d procured in haste at the Flabella factory on Suipacha in the city center the next day, desperate to take home an artifact of tango. Black leather, with a closed toe box coming to a military point, they were the only pair available in size 43. I thought that when I looked at them, I’d conjure back that old wood-paneled room made beautiful by live musicians and by all those men and women gelled and coifed and dressed in black. I thought the shoes might make me elegant like them, their eyes closed and contemplating, with some unnamed pleasure, something very sad.
Then again, I was sixteen. What something very sad was there for me to contemplate with so much untrammeled life ahead? I stuffed the shoes into my suitcase, said goodbye to Buenos Aires and to Argentina, and flew the fourteen hours back to ordinary adolescence. Tango was soon abandoned with the box of souvenirs beneath my bed: ticket stubs and candy wrappers, the unassembled scrapbook of my months abroad. A time capsule of myself at age sixteen. Now here I was again in Argentina, with a suitcase full of woodsmoke, aching for the wonder I had lost.
Back in New York, the idea haunted me. I still had the dusty dance shoes—unworn and wrapped in tissue paper. What better way to cure my spinning wheels, I thought, than to dig them out and learn the dance of endless loops? I wanted what I’d seen onstage—a woman and a man who wore each other out like nemeses—and the dance I’d seen old couples do in basement clubs, with wrinkled foreheads pressed together, their eyelids lowering to sad, sad strains of bandoneón. I wanted to close my eyes and trust.
Tango was to be my trapdoor into transformation. Instead, I found my first class awkward and unbeautiful, the way I’d always seen myself. Instead of mettle, it required only minor calisthenics. And while it held enormous promise, I had not envisioned spending the entire fifty minutes standing like a lame flamingo in a pond.
My doubts reverberated. This tango was stern and cold. Anticlimactic. Nothing about that harshly lit lesson felt like flying in the dark—more like a rehabilitative gym class. I wasn’t standing around in fishnet stockings hoping to be ravaged, but I was waiting for some kind of benediction.
By the time I stepped into that January night and met Peter for dinner, I had resolved to swallow my deflated feelings and concentrate instead on acing Basic Section A in hopes of one day making it to Basic Section B. My schoolgirl egotism demanded I not fail, again, at this. I would not put the shoes back in their box. There was something necessary buried in that tangled footwork—swirling in that dark—and it was buried still. Terrible and beautiful as a brushfire burning miles upwind. I couldn’t see it yet, but it was there. Where had she gone, that girl who braved two city buses and a train to take a tango lesson in another tongue halfway around the world? I wanted to be her again.
I wanted other things I didn’t know enough to name.
I played up the glamour of my first grown-up tango class to Peter, my first grown-up boyfriend, though I knew the truth of both was more banal. I wanted him to see me differently. I wanted him to be a little jealous, a little threatened by my newfound poise. I sipped wine with affected mystery. I thought tango had the power to make him fall in love with me in earnest, so I babbled away about the music and the melancholy and the foot muscles required. Though every detail seemed to bore him, I pontificated on. I wanted to see me differently as well.
When you say “thank you” to an Argentine, he sometimes says “please” back. Gracias. Por favor. Partings are marked with suerte, luck. And when you aren’t sure of something, he will say por las dudas, for the doubts. Here’s another dish of butter for your bread. One last splash of wine. You know, por las dudas—just in case. I started dancing tango for the doubts.
Chapter Two
then again, the truth is much more complicated than a boom box and a box of shoes. The folded memory of Argentina in a winter coat ten years forgotten is a pretty thought, perhaps the best one. But tango was more to me, even then, than artifact or curio. And I knew more of sadness than I knew how to admit.
I sometimes say I started dancing tango because I had forgotten what it felt like to be touched. That’s true, except, if I am honest, I had never really let myself be touched, not in that unguarded, pleasure-seeking way. I also say I started taking tango class in spite of all the overt sensuality, and consciously, that’s also true. But somewhere in me, even then, some small voice must have fought through all the cotton wool and known enough to ask for what it whispered in the dark.
There is another story, one I almost never tell. A story I carried with me into tango, and carry with me still. It is the story of a very little girl, hiding from her male relations in a life already half-forgotten. That little girl was me and, for the longest time, a ghost I spoke of only in third person. I’d wait, sometimes for years, until I was sure enough of someone, then I’d share the scant details: how I lived mostly with my birth mother until I was six years old. How she wasn’t stable, wasn’t well. How she’d forget to pick me up from school. How she would leave me in her dark apartment, vanishing for hours or days; and when she was there, she was never present—just a lolling silent thing in rumpled sheets, with naked breasts and legs under a nightshirt, barely moving from her bed.
I never felt it was her fault. She herself had been abused—by threat of vengeful God, by cruel mother, forceful father, and by her brothers’ grown-up lusts. I would explain about their sad eyes and leather belts, about their calloused fingers and their nails black with grime. How they would stare at her, at us. I would explain about the cocaine and her deep dissociation. Half the time, you see, she could not know that I was there to be forgotten.
I tell myself she hid beneath the decades, under mounds of substances and men and money. She chose oblivion. I picture whole pieces of her going blank and disappearing, until there was not much woman left, certainly not enough to call a mother. Just a collage of empty, censored places held by skin, amnesia, cigarettes.
This woman, tied to me by accident of birth—she did the best she could. She was smart and worked in sales, for a while at least, and must have managed to pay bills. She sent me early to a private kindergarten. The same school where, in my red tartan pinafore that reeked of menthol lites, I was sometimes abandoned overnight, left to the kindness of the staff. She made enough to pay for cocaine, smokes, and diesel for her rust-colored sedan. She made enough to buy me Barbie dolls, then left me playing with them in her empty shag apartment while she went on a two-day bender. There was usually a small amount of food among the bottles of champagne in the fridge; I learned to work the electric range before I was tall enough to see the top of it. I learned to curl up in my closet with a Teddy Ruxpin and a book whenever she brought people home and end tables were littered with white talc and butts. I learned to hold my tongue while driving through the wide flat frozen nothing of Nevada to her parents’ trailer, for the holidays, avoiding the chicken coop one bearded uncle had made his home. Most weekends and for two weeks every summer, she did the humane thing and passed me to my dad, who wanted custody but wanted confrontation less. He drove three hours each way up the California coast, and carried me with him through his world of contractors and daiquiris and backyard barbecues and paperbacks. To him, my weekdays were a bad dream he did not wish to see, but soothed.
His best efforts could not protect me from the edges of the darkness she had weathered. That darkness had disgusted him during the two years they were married: the old man’s meanness, his perverted rage, his great displays of piety—as his children, brother and sister, disappeared together behind locked bedroom doors. Dad caught them at it, maybe more than once. That’s when he finally left. Too noble-hearted to imagine such things would affect a little girl.
Her darkness became my darkness, shading over innocence by innocence. Her cruel mother was my cruel grandmother, and her father’s hand, on occasion, forced its gnarled way upon me too. Her brothers looked at me with that same stare, and I felt enough of their sour breath to fear them more t
han any other thing. I remember grizzled hair and greasy cuffs and, over all their clothes, the grit of ash. I hid behind the cityscapes of green glass bottles cluttering the coffee table, but was never small enough to disappear.
I was six years old, nearly seven, when my dad remarried. A recent heart attack had scared him sober. No more daiquiris. No more pretending I was safe. His new wife could not bear children, but she could help him save and raise the daughter he already had. They fought for custody and won. I never saw my birth mother again. Months later, when summoned for questioning, she didn’t show. We left the state. At seven, I went into therapy two afternoons a week until I turned thirteen and shut the door on my past.
It could have been much worse. I was rescued young and plastic; and of all the horrors perpetrated upon children, I was spared the most severe. A state exam confirmed this. They’d been careful; there was no lasting harm. The telling was almost worse than what had happened. Telling brought with it too much fuss, too many concerned adult faces and unfastened secrets. All that shame loosed in the air and caught and kept in documents and folders. I was certain they would come for me because I’d told—the birth mother, the prurient old man, the uncles; they’d told me that they would. They’d told me they would know. Therapy helped, but it was years before I sat in public places without fear.
When it came time for the official case against my birth mother, part of me wanted to lie. To say to the policemen that my therapist, or I, had made the whole thing up. Then I would never have to say out loud what Dad and I could not discuss: That she had let them hurt me. That I had been tampered with. That he had left me there each week. To this day, as if in mutual embarrassment, we rarely speak of it.
His new wife was the one to soothe my horror dreams and tell me I had courage. To steer me through a youth spent mostly in the backseat of a minivan as the three of us boomeranged from state to state, chasing my father’s job. She taught me valor, honesty, and how to pack a suitcase. Soon she was my mother, in both act and name. I called her what she called her mother: Mum. The word felt awkward in my mouth at first, then absolutely true. I was hers. We were a family. In exchange, I was as crowd-pleasing a kid as I could muster: good grades, good behavior, handiness in the kitchen. I had their love but I wanted their pride.
Children are resilient. Still, the darkness left a stain, a shame I have no memory of not feeling. I was afraid of men. At first it was their pleated pant legs, heavy tread, their voices thick with threat. Then their attention. I was afraid of kindness, which I knew could curdle overnight.
The only man I did not fear was my father. I remember doubting only once or twice, and feeling all the more ashamed for it. But he was mine to trust, my dad. I hugged him, face against his cotton pullover, swooning in his scent of shaving gel. He’d hoist me up onto his shoulders, hold my ankles to his chest. We kissed goodbye as innocently as other parents and their children kiss: a quick peck on the lips. We had this unspoken pact: You never blame me for getting you into this, and I’ll be an honorable dad.
Sometimes, when I was very young, I cringed to hear him out of bed at night. The sheet rustling, the toilet flush. A floorboard shifting underfoot. I had no need to fear. His steps were heavy, but they never found their way into my room with any bad intentions. He wasn’t like those other men, the grandfather and uncles. He would not do those things. He didn’t drink beer out of cans, and leave his cigarette stubs floating in the lukewarm dregs. He didn’t hit or yell. He read to me. When I called his desk phone in his temporary cubicle, he answered, almost every time. He loved me almost as much as I loved him, which was worshipful, immense. I loved him perfectly.
Soon the contrast between my new life and the old was so intense, the old one started to feel false. We moved from coast to coast, and up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I felt safer in each new place, within the sanctuary of the three of us. My family. It didn’t matter where we were. With each routine supper served on plastic mats, with each day running errands, reading, swimming alongside them; with every good report card, every fistful of tinsel on a Christmas pine, and every passing uneventful year, the darkness was diluted. Books were my refuge. I read story after story, willing myself into the lives of others. I learned what words could do—obscuring some truths, laying others bare. I read widely, darkly—perhaps beyond my age. I peered into the worst recesses of the world and came out wheezing with relief. I had parents, and both assured me I was special, bright, and safe. I’d been given all of the advantages, and every gift. I had all the luck and love I needed to overcome, to render those early years insignificant. They didn’t have to be my story anymore. Outgrowing them, I thought, as one did school clothes, was the only way to show my gratitude.
By the time I started high school, I was ready. We’d moved fourteen hundred miles away from where I’d started, and not one soul knew me there. I no longer needed to explain why I did therapy instead of sports. I lost my baby fat and built a better version of myself—a girl who studied hard and sang in chamber choirs with her eyes shut because the music was too beautiful, who tried to talk and flirt like people did in the old black-and-whites. A girl who could win mid-sized roles in school plays, and try on other dresses, other aspirations, and come to love the stage paint and the lights. My past no longer felt like mine. I was just another teenage girl; I didn’t need a handicap for what I had survived. I’d done the work and wanted to be judged on different metrics than that tired story of a wounded child. When I did let on, and tell a trusted friend or two about my past, I reveled in their shock. But you’re so well adjusted! they would say, and I would smile. I was.
But shame, the residue of what came before, is what persists. Mum saw this coming. When I placed out of mandatory therapy, and moved to reinvent myself, she tugged me by the ponytail to hold me back. No matter how well I deflected, or how hot my face would flush, she kept me tethered to those roots. She knew better than to allow me to forget, no matter how seductive the forgetting. She’d seen the statistics, and was worried I might fall victim to the adult traps of early tampering: promiscuity, low self-esteem, seeking an abusive partner, or—worse—becoming one. She wanted to be sure the cycle, from adult to child, ended with me.
There were a lot of ways in which I hid: isolation, burrowing into family, eating myself to chubby sexlessness, a bowl cut and a beefy-T. Mum took one look at me and knew that it was up to her to teach me sex was not something to fear. She made an early choice, to overshare. To show little-girl me a frank and healthy view of human sexuality. To teach me about pleasure. She knew that I did not like looking backwards, so she kept the focus on herself: she kept it effervescent. She started small—as I was small—describing my parts and womb as a kind of pink, inviting beau parlour, and spiraled through the years into treatises on penis sizes relative to nationality (French: passable; Middle Eastern: grand; and German: might as well not bother). She made jokes of all the things I found most terrifying, until those things were harmless, comical appendages, subject to gleeful ridicule.
She made it sound so wondrous: two people who loved and found each other so delicious that they simply had to shuck their clothes spontaneously and groan. I had been so full of hope that, at first blush, I’d join her priestess temple, that it would make me feel honored, make my body feel good. That didn’t happen. First blush was brief and painful, with an undeserving boy who vanished afterward and broke my adolescent heart. I didn’t feel that he had robbed me, but I felt then, more than ever, that I must have been repulsive to him somehow, because I wasn’t pure.
My next attempt was with a nice boy I deflowered, clumsily. He didn’t vanish; he stared straight into my eyes and tried to love me, but the smell of us together like that made me ill. I never told a soul about my nausea. I left him for college, embarrassed and ashamed. And after four years sequestered in the bosom of a same-sex education, where I fell so hard and fast in love with a woman that I thought the male subject moot, the project fell apart.
Meanwhile, I lo
st myself onstage. After one college production, I declared my very unwise major. I could have aimed at anything I wanted—scholar, lawyer, engineer—but I picked theatre. Like an addict, a maenad tripping after Dionysos, I found myself insatiable, subsumed. Mum wasn’t thrilled. I think, she said on more than one occasion, that you are hiding. She was right. She thought I should own my fractured life, and “share my story,” not keep on pretending that it wasn’t mine. I was never certain why. She also thought that I should study something practical. I much preferred to hide. I slunk into the brick, windowless theatre, where, term after term, role after role, I could be anyone. I wore prostheses, swimsuits, hoopskirts, a papier-mâché wig. I was a psychiatrist, a drunk, a mother, a nurse, a Scottish schoolgirl, Susan B. Anthony’s muse. When I wasn’t asleep or studying, I was there in the dark, watching beaches, stables, platforms built around me. I stepped into other memories. I spoke other people’s words. Performing was a strange and self-obliterative rush. I hid in full view, beneath the blinding lights that I’d helped hang. Invisible while everybody watched. Dizzyingly present, somewhere else. And burning purely at the center of me, which was no one. There was a roar of sound, a heavy curtain, silhouettes of friends and strangers filling empty seats. Then it was over. I smeared another face from mine and left the ghost light burning on another empty stage.
Just before my senior year, my father left my mother. In the aftermath of my redemption, their greatest shared wish come mostly true, they’d fallen out of love. As though they’d sucked the ugly out of all my wounds and it had poisoned them. Each of us—our little unit—came apart. There was a blast of acrimony, a short and vicious war. Dad shoved the contents of his closet into a plastic garbage bag, clicked closed the sliding-glass back door, and walked away. Mum crumpled in a heap of swallowed sobs, with blood rage in her eyeballs. The dog whined at the door. All three of them were lost to me that day, and I to them. I spent the last weeks of my summer watching Mum implode, pleading with her to believe he would come back, standing helpless in their bedroom doorframe as she keened, replenishing the water glass beside her bed. And when September came, I turned my back and drove to school. I took on another role, and dug down into it, until I couldn’t hear her pain.
Tango Lessons Page 2
