Up to This Pointe

by Jennifer Longo

  “I have, so much, and I—”

  “For me,” Simone says.

  Ugh, cripes. She pulls that one out only when she’s truly desperate. Which is nearly never. I sigh.

  “Okay.”

  “You understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “Think. Hard,” Simone says.

  “Yes.”

  Kate pokes her rumpled head in. “Hey! You were supposed to wake me up! Time for class!” she grumbles, and stomps off to the studio.

  Thank God.

  Simone folds her hands.

  “What’s your father putting in the scones this week?”

  “Um. Pear?”

  “In a scone?”

  “It’s wintry.”

  She shakes her head. “Americans.”

  Dad brings her a baker’s dozen of whatever she likes every Saturday on his way home, I think out of gratitude for letting me teach for tuition.

  She rolls her eyes. “All right,” she says. “Half dozen, a few plain croissant.”

  “Got it.”

  I turn back to the dressing room, and she calls, “Harper.”

  “Yep?”

  “It is a rare opportunity.”

  “I know.” I duck out to the dressing room to set Willa up with coloring books and her blanket, then back to the barre beside Kate.

  “She still at it?” Kate whispers.

  “Still at what?” Lindsay, two years younger, our Nutcracker for three years running because she’s so tall and we currently have no boys in the entire school, whispers—loud.

  “Lindsay, God!” Kate hisses. “You don’t have to shout!”

  Lindsay’s eyes widen.

  “Nothing,” I tell her. “It’s nothing.”

  “Simone’s on her to go to England,” Kate blabs. “She wants Harp to do the teacher training this summer.”

  “Royal Academy?”

  I nod.

  “Wow!”

  “No, not wow. It’s completely insulting.”

  “How is it insulting?”

  “Because it is! She’s essentially saying, ‘Hey, give up the one chance you have to audition for companies to be a dancer, ever, and spend a year in London learning how to teach other people to dance instead.’ I’m a dancer. I’m not a teacher.”

  “Okay,” Lindsay says. “But are you also a lover, not a fighter?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Why is it one or the other? You do teach—”

  “Babies! For tuition!”

  “They worship you! You don’t like it?”

  “Yes, I do. I love them, but that’s not—”

  “How much would it cost?”

  “Nothing,” Kate says, her spine curved over her legs, forehead touching her knees. “Simone’s sending her. A year in London, full-time training to be a Royal Academy teacher. For free.”

  “Harp.” Lindsay frowns. “Really?”

  I nod.

  Her mouth is agape. “Why not?”

  “I think she may even get a stipend, right?” Kate says. “Didn’t Simone say living expenses?”

  I take my leg off the barre. “What are you doing?”

  “What?”

  “What’s with pushing the Simone agenda?”

  “I’m not!”

  “Kate.”

  She looks down. Reties her shoes.

  “Kate.”

  “What?”

  “I would never do that. You know I would never ditch you….Come on! The Plan! I could give a crap about London; we are dancing for San Francisco in January. Got it?”

  “It’s just…I mean, an entire career, all that training, England—for free?”

  “Kate. I’m with you. I’m not leaving you. January third. You and me. Right?”

  She nods.

  “I wish Simone wanted me to teach,” Lindsay sighs.

  Simone sweeps into the room. “Left hands on the barre, port de bras!”

  “I’ve already said it to her a hundred times,” I whisper to Kate. “I’m a dancer. No thanks.”

  Kate smiles.

  Sort of.

  - - -

  When class ends, I pull Kate back. “Once?”

  “Yeah.”

  I run to the crowded dressing room for my iPod and Willa, so she can watch. Lindsay sits on the floor and lets Willa lounge in her lap. I start the music.

  Our San Francisco audition solo pieces are brief, only two minutes to prove to the director and choreographers why they need us in the company. I choreographed Kate’s; she did mine. We dance them both consecutively, together, fourteen years condensed into this perfect one hundred twenty seconds.

  Lindsay and Willa applaud wildly. We give exaggerated reverence, wave to our fans.

  “I wish Simone would let you go to the Grand Prix,” Lindsay says. “They’ve moved it to November, last Saturday….”

  “Contests are stupid.” Kate sighs, sliding to the floor for a last long stretch.

  “You know you’d go if she let you.”

  Simone’s studio is a ballet studio. Hard-core Royal Academy of Dance ballet syllabus, not tap, not jazz, not hip-hop, no cheerleader-esque competitions. There are no tacky plastic trophies lining the walls.

  YAGP is the Youth America Grand Prix. And Lindsay is sort of right; all of Simone’s students—maybe even secretly Kate and I—would die to go. But students must be sponsored by and represent their school, their instructor—and Simone refuses. She balks at any competition. Ballet is perfection of an art. It is not a competition.

  The YAGP prizes, though, are not only medals and trophies. Directors from companies all over the world judge a ton of age groups for scholarships to schools and for apprentice spots, even company positions. For some people, it is the only chance they’ll have to be seen. The auditions happen in cities all over the world; the finals for the scholarships and jobs are held in New York. Every year, girls beg Simone to take them, and the answer they get is her yearly lecture about love and truth and scaring the crap out of us.

  “A true dancer auditions for the company they most love, the company they will make better and be made better by. This is not a football draft; this is dance, and you had better love who you are dancing for, because you’ll give your entire youth and a good portion of your life and health for a very few short years of this love. It had better mean something.”

  Kate and I were ten the first time we heard this speech and had reveled in the feeling that we’d had it right all along. We’d always known this truth; Simone’s confirmation only intensified our devotion to The Plan. To the San Francisco Ballet. And to her.

  “We know what we’re doing,” I say. “Right, Kate?” Her forehead is resting on her knees. “Kate.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, what?”

  “Nothing.” I smile. “Get your stuff,” I tell Willa, “and we’ll hit the road.”

  Lindsay and Willa hobble to the dressing room together, Saturday sore. It’s like Simone’s out to get the weekend for being frivolous, so she puts us through more than just our paces. I love it.

  Kate stands. “Slumber party tonight?”

  “Soon as Hannah gets back. I’ll be home by, like, five?”

  “Perfect. I can sneak in a nap.” We gather our junk from the dressing room, say goodbye to Simone and Lindsay, and zip our hoodies for the misty walk home.

  I try not to be jealous of Kate’s nap schedule, do my best to convince myself that an afternoon of making crafts with Willa from empty toilet paper rolls and pipe cleaners and white glue mixed with glitter will be just as restful as sleeping.

  I am a terrible liar. Especially to myself.

  - - -

  “Honey, I’m home!” Kate calls from the kitchen door.

  “Bedroom!” I yell back, home from babysitting and just out of a wash-the-day-off-me shower.

  I hear Kate take the stairs two at a time.

  “What is up, Mary Poppins?” She flops on the bed beside me. “No one home?”

  “Mom and Dad
are at dinner with some biology department people. Luke’s spending the night at a friend’s.”

  “Ohhhh, an Owen friend?”

  “Hey. Addendum thirteen.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  I pull on sweats, and Kate pulls the pins from her class bun and unwinds the hairnet, releasing a shining cascade of swinging auburn waves, silky and thick, perfect hair for ballet. Or shampoo commercials. She grabs a brush from my nightstand and works it through the waves, off her flawless, porcelain face.

  “Your mom out tonight?” I ask.

  “In,” Kate sighs. “With a dude.”

  “Sorry.”

  She shrugs. “Eh.”

  Kate’s parents divorced forever ago. It’s hard to remember, even for Kate, because her dad was never home even when he and her mom were married. He’s an international airline pilot with no imagination who decided to have affairs with flight attendants, which Kate says her mom sort of knew but pretended not to. And she was never home much herself; she’s a corporate attorney in an office in Twin Peaks. But when it turned out that Kate’s dad had an entire other family in Seattle (“He couldn’t keep it on another continent?” Kate sometimes complains. “How about ‘Don’t shit where you eat’?”), her mom couldn’t pretend anymore, so she divorced him and got a huge child support settlement, which pays for private school and ballet lessons. As many as Kate wants. So something good came of it.

  “Who is it tonight?” I ask carefully.

  She shrugs. “New one, never met him. But check this out: my dad wants to come to The Nutcracker.”

  “No way.”

  “With his wife. And the boys.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I know! Like any of them gives a crap about seeing a ballet. Or seeing me. Or seeing me in a ballet.”

  “How old are they now?”

  “I don’t even know—ten? Twelve? And super eager to come sit through two hours of dancing, I’m sure. It’s been at least five years since he’s even called, and if I have to read one more Christmas letter about ‘The Boys’…‘The Boys are on the soccer team.’ ‘The Boys entered their goats in the 4-H fair.’ ‘The Boys are the greatest alternative to a daughter I ever could have asked for!’ Kill me now.”

  “Oh, Kitty-Kat,” I sigh, and lie beside her on my bed. “He’s a douche canoe. What does your mom say?”

  “That she’s not going to any performance he comes to, so I’d better let her know which show she needs to avoid because she’s got a lot of potential plans lined up for that weekend, including a Napa winery women’s retreat her hot-yoga teacher is leading, which I think is a thing where they ride in a van and drink a lot and shop at the outlet stores, and that if she misses it just because Satan and his spawn insist on showing up, she’s going to be devastated.”

  The fog is suddenly golden, and my room is hazily aglow.

  “We’re almost there,” I say. “We’re so close. January and we’ll be San Francisco Ballet company members, rehearsing for a living. We’ll be apartment hunting!”

  She nods. Turns her face away.

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.”

  “I blame my dad. He’s got everyone all weepy! Cripes! Do you need a tissue?”

  “No.”

  I hand her the box from my bedside table, and she takes it. Sits up.

  “You are the best friend anyone could ever have,” she says. “Ever. You know that, right?”

  “Well, obviously.”

  “No, Harp, seriously. You are the very best friend I could have ever hoped for.”

  “You are! Come on, what’s the matter?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not. But you know I love you, don’t you? You’re my sister.”

  “You’re mine, too, sister from another mister…just like your brothers from their Seattle mother.”

  “Gross, don’t even talk about them!”

  “It’s not their fault, poor little suckers.”

  “Harp, I’d be so screwed without you.”

  She looks so tired—not just our usual exhausted-but-happy. Lately she looks completely wrung out.

  “Did you get a nap?”

  “I wish. I can’t sleep anymore. At all. But I know what would help,” she says hopefully.

  “Brownies coming up! You have to help me shave the chocolate.”

  “See, this is why no one else should ever bother baking. Shaved chocolate…will you eat one?”

  Her poor eyes have such deep shadows beneath them.

  “Sure,” I say. “One.”

  “Good enough.”

  We also make popcorn, and we watch The Turning Point for the millionth time and laugh and laugh. Because how the hell, with eight hours of training and classes and then three more hours spent performing on any given day, do filmmakers think a professional ballerina would have time for the sexual hijinks and tumultuous interpersonal relationships and tantrums these women spend all their time indulging in? The real story (constant rehearsal, bleeding feet) would be excruciatingly dull, I guess.

  Exhibit A: Kate and I are in bed, asleep, by nine.

  A week in Antarctica and I’ve figured out that shaving my legs in the sink beforehand gives me more of the allotted five minutes of shower time to just stand and let the hot water wash over me, warming me up for the day. Charlotte says five minutes is luxurious; in the summer, when there are twelve hundred people at McMurdo, you get three minutes if you’re lucky, and there are long lines for food.

  My body has acclimated to the cold a little more since our day at the rookery and Shackleton’s Hut. The heat in this main building is great; in fact, when I mess with the thermostat in my room, it’s sometimes too hot. Like almost every one of the other two hundred people here, I’m walking around in jeans and T-shirts. It’s getting way too cold and dark to go outside. The sun will set in a couple of weeks and not rise until August. Charlotte says I should get outside while I can; she says the sky is more beautiful each day as winter nears, but the freezing head pain the air gives me is not so beautiful. Also, we’ve got plenty of work to do in the lab, and the mysterious Vivian is still out sick.

  The lab is small, all tables and file cabinets and microscopes and beakers and mini fridges for samples and a desktop computer nearly buried beneath a pile of paper and folders and Post-it notes. So far Charlotte does a lot of sighing and microscope-looking and note-taking and math analysis, and my job is to organize all this information she’s culling. I transcribe notes and organize boxes of files and input statistics and run computer-calculated algorithms that mean nothing to me, but a ton to Charlotte. And to the Adélies. So I am meticulous. Most of what I do goes into these super-involved grants Charlotte writes to keep the research going when she’s gone after the winter.

  “It’s taking years of research to prove to the NSF that the shit we’re dumping in the ice isn’t good for the ice, or the animals. So I’m here on a grant, contributing to the problem to show them that the problem exists.”

  Global warming has caused open water where there used to be ice, so the Adélies are having to walk hundreds of miles farther to follow the sun. Also waste and pollutants from McMurdo seem to be partly to blame for some jacked stuff called HBCD in the wastewater treatment, flame-retardant chemicals found in the tissues of birds and fish, and Charlotte’s especially worried about the Adélies because it screws with their thyroid function, which messes with their metabolism and brain development. It’s preserved by the cold and stored in their fat, she says. It is all completely foreign to me. And oddly totally enthralling. And heartbreaking.

  She gives me tasks, explains them once, and we work without talking, solely dedicated to getting at least McMurdo’s part in this mess fixed. She’s smart and enthusiastic, and, while we’re working at least, my mind is spared from wandering to home. To ballet or to Simone, to Kate…Just numbers and data and her nice, floaty work music, which is yoga-studio-massage-sounding stuff with whale calls mixed in. Late in the day, it makes me sleepy. I�
�ve taken to drinking caffeinated tea. Lots of it.

  This Friday morning I trek to the dining hall at seven, where, every day since the morning he plied me with cinnamon rolls, Irish/Scottish Aiden comes out from the kitchen to wipe his hands on his apron and offer me some extra thing to eat, some treat he’s made or found frozen in the giant McMurdo walk-in shed.

  “Harper Scott!” he says with a smile, like every day. “Want to take a walk this afternoon?”

  “Sorry,” I say for the hundredth time. “Working.”

  “You’ve got to get out. It’s gorgeous! Maybe tomorrow?”

  I nod.

  “Look what I’ve found behind a side of beef!” He’s made a bowl of orange Jell-O with canned pineapple slices suspended in it. Winter food, with no planes to bring in fresh vegetables or fruits, is starting to reveal its essential kitchen sink–ness.

  “Thank you,” I say, maneuvering wheat toast, three paper cups of hot tea (one for Charlotte, two for me), and a banana. That dark hair falling all in his face…I’d think the kitchen would make him wear a net or something. “I’m vegetarian,” I say, “so Jell-O’s kind of not my thing…but thank you.”

  He frowns into the bowl. “Jell-O’s got meat in it?”

  “It is meat—gelatin is connective tissue. Mostly from pigs.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Huh. You coming for lunch? You and Charlotte?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right, then.” He smiles. “Good—we’ll make a plan to go out walking soon, yes? We’ve got to stick together!”

  “Against what?”

  “The grown-ups!” he whispers, and falls dramatically back through the doors to the kitchen. I hear his voice as I walk to the lab, “Did you know Jell-O is meat? Is that true?”

  In the lab, a girl in jeans and a huge wool sweater sits on a lab table stool, earbuds in, huddled over a cluster of Bunsen burners, cleaning them with Q-tips.

  “Harper, look—Vivian’s alive!” Charlotte cheers from behind a fort of boxes, settled down in a heap of files in the overstuffed armchair she keeps beside the only window—not very lab-like, and also how does furniture like that get to Antarctica? “At last, now you two can be my research wonder twins. Harper, Vivian, she’s an immensely smart biology student, and, Viv, this is Harper. She’s going to save us from ourselves. Those burners are looking amazing, by the way.”