“It’s going to be terrible.”
“I know. I’m so sorry, Dad.”
“I know you are. We all make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes, you know this.”
A hot wind blew a cloud of dried apple blossoms past the porch. Bees buzzed in the lavender buds.
“Face him, Dézi. He may not forgive you. He may not speak to you. But he should know and see your regret.”
Her throat scorching and aching, Daisy nodded against her knees.
“You’re a sapper’s daughter,” Joe said. “We put together what’s broken. We blaze a road, find a way. We snuff the fuses and dismantle the bombs.”
Marching orders in fist, she got up and smoothed her skirt over her knees. Joe caught her hand as she passed and held it to his cheek. “And we come back from war changed, Dézi.”
She nodded through the tears puddling her eyes, damming her lips against the next flood of weeping. She let her fingers nestle against Joe’s goatee, let his love soothe her a moment. Then she went inside to call Erik.
Again.
“I can’t force him,” Christine said. Her voice was soft but chilly. She knew. Her allegiance was plain. She stood at the door of her son’s grief and didn’t forbid Daisy to pass, but she didn’t step aside, either.
“I’m sorry,” Daisy said. “I know this is awkward, I don’t mean to put you in the middle. I just need to talk to him.”
“I know. But I can’t force him to come to the phone. Anyway he’s sleeping now. I’ll tell him you called.”
She hung up.
You’re excused.
OVER AND OVER SHE REPLAYED the day and imagined walking out of David’s apartment at the critical moment. That’s all it would have taken. Get high, walk out. Just walk out, walk away and none of this would have happened.
You stupid, stupid bitch.
It’s all yours. Deal with it. You made this bed. Lie down and deal. Own it. You did this. You only have yourself to blame. Stop crying and own it. It’s yours.
“I wish you’d been more trouble as a child,” Francine said into the tangle of Daisy’s hair. “You were always so good. I feared when you fell it would be such a long fall.”
“I’m sorry,” Daisy said, muffled with weeping. “I ruined everything.”
“It’s fixable,” Francine said. “Everything can be fixed. You just have to find the right glue. Now, look at me. Stop crying. Separate the emotion and tell me what’s true.”
Daisy dragged hands over her wet, swollen face. “I love him.”
“And he loves you. He will always love you. You’re a young couple but your love isn’t childish.”
“This was my fault.”
“You made a choice, yes. A poor one. But we all make mistakes, sweetheart.”
“I want to die.”
“No, darling. That’s emotion, not fact. Anyone can lay there and die after they fall down. You’re a dancer. You get up, figure out what you did wrong and try again. You keep going. It’s everything you’ve trained for. And you go fight for your love because if I know Erique at all, I know he needs to see how much you’re willing to do.”
Daisy called again.
And again.
She couldn’t get through to him.
“Then go to class,” Francine said. One of life’s great answers to tough questions. Daisy put her pointe shoes on and went. She and Will were both in the summer intensive program at the Pennsylvania Ballet. The recital in August would be attended by scouts from ballet companies all over the country. This was the doorway to opportunity. She could not fuck this up.
She became a ruthless perfectionist in class, permitting herself no mistakes. It kept her grounded: the world was in shambles but first position was always first position. Her technique was envied by all, but no amount of praise or attention could get her to smile. She knew the soul had gone out of her dancing, but she could not allow emotion into what had become her sanctuary. It had to stay separated from the factual steps.
AWKWARD EXCHANGES WITH CHRISTINE ENDED when Erik got his own phone line. He almost never picked up. Daisy left countless messages on his machine which were never returned. Once or twice, she caught him live and he refused to speak to her. No amount of apology, encouragement, coaxing or goading could get him to break his silence. She couldn’t recognize him, couldn’t grasp how he was so ruthlessly and completely disconnecting.
How can he? she thought. Isn’t it killing him? Doesn’t he miss me?
Doesn’t he need to know where I am?
“He does,” Will said. “He can’t breathe without you. But you have to give him time.”
Will was her motivation and her rock. Will was affectionate physical contact and constant reassurance that all would work itself out. He, too, was calling Erik night and day and getting the same unrelenting void. Daisy didn’t understand. Will did nothing wrong. How could Erik be distancing the one person who could comfort him?
Days piled up on days. Every morning a mountain she had to drag her bones over.
Lucky was job hunting in physical therapy. Offers were dry in Philadelphia and she began to look further afield in New Jersey and New York, moving away from Will. Their relationship grew strained. Everything around Daisy was stretched tight and thin, trembling under the pressure. One pizzicato pluck too many and something was going to snap. Crack back through the air and tear it open.
Daisy drove her body harder on less and less food and more and more cigarettes. She walked through a cloud of ash. Even her skin was grey and sick. Her eyes went flat blue. Her hands and her heart shook. At night, she burned with fever as she reached hands into the darkness to a body that wasn’t there.
She’d been sleeping next to him since she was on the cusp of eighteen. Three years with practically no break from Erik’s body next to hers in the night. His back pressed to her front, her hand over his heart. The smell of his skin and his hair. The length of his legs, the planes of his shoulder blades. The clink the charms made on his necklace when he rolled or shifted. The sounds he made at peace and the noises he made when he was worked up. Now Daisy threw herself from one side of the mattress to the other, a vast desert with only one body occupying her bed. She rolled and wept, gripped in a physical desire she felt would tear her in two.
Never again. He’ll never touch me again. He’ll never speak to me again.
He doesn’t care where I am anymore.
You ruined it. You did this.
You stupid bitch.
She woke to haul herself over another mountain, somehow got up and went back to class. To the thump of the rehearsal piano and the whisper of seventy-five slippered feet against the floor, she did tendu after perfect tendu to the cadence in her head.
I’m sorry (you’re so stupid). I’m sorry (you’re so stupid). Sorry (stupid)…
“We’re done,” Will said one morning before class. His eyes were red-rimmed and circled with sleeplessness. Angry misery etched every line of his body.
“Who?” Daisy said. “What’s done?”
“Me and Fish. I had it out with him on the phone last night and it’s done. Forget about him, Dais. He’s gone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s not coming back. For any of us. I’m not calling him anymore and I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
“Will…” She tried to touch him and he shied away, his jaw clenched. “He can’t—”
“He can. I’m not going into details, but the shit he said last night… It’s not just you, Dais. He’s throwing it all overboard. We’re dead to him. He’s gone. His heart’s a fucking stone now and you’ll never chisel your way back in. Spare yourself the conversation I had to go through and move on.”
“Will,” she said, the loss of a great friendship fitting around her shoulders like a yoke. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, so am I,” he said. He walked away and for the first time, didn’t do barrework next to her.
The rest of the summer blurred into a water
color wash of confusion. Will apologized for being harsh, but remained distant and reticent. He and Lucky fought constantly and Daisy stood in the middle, barely knowing what was going on. The only way to survive was to shut down and dance.
The recital came and went and the Pennsylvania Ballet offered Daisy a corps contract. Will got an offer from the National Ballet of Canada and accepted. He was going home. Lucky took a job offer in the Bronx and she was staying.
“I think we’re through,” Lucky said. “And I swear, Dais, I’m numb. I can’t deal with him. He’s become so toxic. He’s like a ball of barbed wire, angry and miserable, I don’t even recognize him anymore.”
“I really fucked it all up,” Daisy said.
“Not everything is about you,” Lucky said. After a moment her face softened and she reached a hand to pat Daisy. “But I can see how you’d feel you put it all into motion.”
“Didn’t I, though?”
“I think it was only a matter of time,” Lucky said. “If not what you did, it would’ve been something or someone else.”
Holding hands, they rested their heads together and went still and silent, two lost little girls staring at the rubble and ruin of their youthful dreams.
DAISY GOT A LITTLE APARTMENT in Philly and went to work. She fell into a mindless rhythm of company class, rehearsal, performance. Company class, rehearsal, performance. She honed her already impeccable technique into something preternatural. Digging deep into her imagination, she created an alternate universe where everything was fine and Erik still loved her. He was simply away right now and she had to be brave about it. This vague explanation crafted enough plausible illusion for her to find both her smile and her stage presence.
She elaborated the daydream, placing Erik in a faraway war, fighting for them and unable to communicate for fear of capture. It shored up the façade and gave her strength. A bit of hopeful optimism infused itself into her dancing, and she began to get short, flattering mentions in reviews. Praise for her breathtaking footwork, her effortless turns and sparkling presence. Word on the street was she was going to be PB’s next big star.
But the accolades were bits of rhinestone pasted on a shell of loathing. Nobody knew the effort it took for Daisy to show up. No one could see the guilt and chagrin coating her like an invisible film. The daily pain that was an axe blade to her heart, a noose around her neck, slivers under her fingernails.
Get up. You’ve got to get up…
The pretense got harder and harder to maintain as the shame ate her insides like cancer. She tried to starve it out, to equate the pain with the sharp pangs in her stomach. She tried to smoke it out, to char and burn it away, layer tobacco and tar on top of it to tamp it down forever. She starved and smoked. She destroyed her own health trying to keep the façade intact. With no sustenance, it slowly began to disintegrate. She showed up, but the sparkle faded. The effort showed and she wasn’t distinguishable anymore. She was merely filler. And when the company didn’t renew her contract after a year, she didn’t have the strength to cry about it. She cleaned out her locker and her dressing table and left.
She didn’t tell her parents. She stayed in Philadelphia, going to dance classes with the last of her money and trying to make a plan.
What will I do?
This is killing me.
Isn’t it killing him?
Through the past year, she had continued to call Erik, following him from Rochester to a new number in Geneseo, where, she guessed, he was attending the state university and finishing his degree. She could only guess because all her calls continued to be met with stony silence.
“Erik, please, I’m so sorry, please talk to me,” she said. Baring her heart into the void, showing him her throat, wishing he would take a bite already.
Not a word. Not even, “Don’t call me. Fuck you. Go to hell. I never want to see you again.”
She didn’t give up. His stubbornness only fueled her own determination. She wouldn’t quit until he said something.
“I can’t believe you’re giving up,” she said one night, primed with a couple glasses of wine and frustrated enough to switch tactics. Maybe she’d been going about this the wrong way.
Maybe he wanted a fight.
“I fucked up but I’m here trying to make it right,” she said, pacing and drinking. “You won’t even… Jesus, Erik, one stupid mistake and you’re just walking away without a word. Like it never happened. Like we never happened.”
He was silent but she thought she could hear a choppiness in his breathing. It was a reaction and she pounced on it.
“Say something,” she cried. “Yell at me. Curse at me. Say you hate me. Jesus Christ, you’re like your fucking brother going electively mute. He’s deaf, you don’t have that excuse. Now say something.”
“There’s nothing to say,” he said.
As her mind fumbled to grasp the sound of his voice, the line went dead in her hand. With a cry of rage she fired the wine glass the length of the tiny galley kitchen. A shattering explosion, a sprawl of dark red across the far wall and she was on her knees. Doubled over, her hands threaded through her hair, pulling hard. Teeth clenched against the screaming in her throat. The brittle pain of Erik’s words in her ears. She was free-falling in a nearly psychedelic terror, as if she had inadvertently yanked out some crucial circuit in her brain.
It took a long time for her to come down.
She stopped calling and began to write him instead. The letters weren’t returned, so she continued to pen them. Breathing herself onto the paper at first, then bleeding onto it with apology and entreaty. Soaking the paper with her sorrow until it became embarrassing, even to herself. She got a leash on her emotions, made them heel and behave. She began to talk gently to him about everyday things. Like a visitor would speak to a vegetative patient, filling the silence with this and that. Because he still needed to know where she was.
Didn’t he?
And then the pain jumped the leash and went running off into the night, leaving her empty-handed. After three years of living a conjoined life, he was lost to her.
“I promised you,” she cried, to the walls, to the pillows, to her hands. “I promised you I wouldn’t disappear. We promised. Each would always know where the other was…”
She never dreamed he was capable of such finality.
“Such unforgiveness,” Francine said, sighing over the phone. “I don’t understand. Who has he become?”
A sweet boy with a bitter palate, Daisy thought.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Joe said. “I gave him a medal and I meant it. I will carry what he did that day in my heart forever. But to be so ruthless and stubborn over a foolish mistake? To make such a stone of his own heart and not even give you a chance to explain yourself? I don’t know, Dézi. Maybe at the end of the day…he’s not the boy for you.”
No, Daisy thought, eyes wide with denial. No, he’s the one for me. I was born for him. He was born for me. He’s mine.
This is my fault.
She didn’t know where he was.
And he didn’t care where she was.
WITHIN A MONTH OF LOSING HER JOB she weighed eighty-nine pounds. She was a starved, smoked out hull of a boat. But somewhere in the hold, down in the ballast, was a last ounce of sensibility. A single nut left in the storage room that once stockpiled all her pragmatism. She took it carefully between her palms.
What will you do?
Waiting for the water to warm up in the shower she stared at her naked body in the mirror on the back of the door. Shadowed eyes and hollowed cheeks. Bones and sinewy muscle showed under dry skin. Yellow fingertips and scarred legs.
I was beautiful once.
She stretched a leg out in tendu, her foot arching like a crescent moon. The faintest stirring of pleasure made the corners of her mouth flick. She still had her feet.
Her fingertips moved down the concave curve of her abdomen, trailed over her hip bone. The little red fish lettered there.
/> I have my feet. And I have my fish. He lives here. He lives on my body.
And he needs me to stay alive.
She got in the shower, repeating the words to a drumbeat cadence. He lives on my body. He needs me to stay alive.
Her chest began to loosen. She inhaled carefully. A bit of light began to move through her head.
What are the facts? Separate the emotion and tell me what’s true.
She loved him.
If you love him then you must live.
He was inked into her skin.
And he will stay there forever. No one can take it away. Unless you die.
She wasn’t the girl he loved anymore.
Then get her back. Get up. Put your pointe shoes on and live. He fell in love with a dancer. Go back and dance. Be who you were. Stay alive for him.
The hands washing her hair grew brisk and efficient. She imagined Lucky breezing around on the other side of the curtain, making decisions. Soaping up a sponge, she washed herself roughly then became more gentle. She looked at her body—the only thing she had left.
This was yours before you met him. It’s still yours. And it’s all you have. Dancing relies on your body. You’ve got to get it back. Without it, you’re nothing. Take care of yourself. You have to be here when he comes back.
She squinted through the steam, daring anything to retort with “if he comes back.”
“When,” she said, her voice echoing off the tiles. “When he comes back. I will be here.”
SHE WENT NORTH with the last of her money. She slept on the couch in Lucky’s Fort Lee apartment and went every day to Manhattan, taking class and auditioning for any company that was hiring. Not many were.
The Metropolitan Opera Ballet certainly wasn’t the crowning achievement of her dreams. The resident corps de ballet suffered a perpetual identity crisis, never sure if they were pretty filler for the grand operas or artists in their own right. But it was a guaranteed season with health insurance—she’d be a fool not to take it and use it as a foothold for the next thing. She signed a contract, and was humbly grateful when her father offered to co-sign the lease on the one-bedroom apartment on West 86th Street.
Don’t you fucking fuck this up.
Give Me Your Answer True Page 21
