Dance classes, for Isadora, were not the same as watching ballet in a movie. She hadn’t realized it would hurt. Her teacher was an old Englishwoman named Mrs. Smathers who would rap a wood pointer on insteps that weren’t lifted, on fingers that refused to melt on the music, on bodies wrongly angled. Some days Isadora came home with welts on her arms, red and humiliating. Once Duse called the teacher up, right then and there, while Isadora slumped at the table, but the teacher told Duse curtly that Isadora simply didn’t sweat enough, that she didn’t hurt enough, and until she did, the teacher would continue to thunk down that pointer. “That’s how I teach,” she insisted.
“It’s up to you,” Duse told her. “Quit or keep on.”
“You decide,” said Isadora.
“I will like hell,” said Duse.
Isadora took class for two years, never really getting any better, watching one bruise heal up only to give way to another. On the days when she was most in pain, she sometimes tried to cheat a little, layering three pairs of leg warmers over her ankles so the teacher wouldn’t see her letting them roll in, wearing sweaters with the necklines cut free to hide the way she let her shoulders slump. She winced as soon as Mrs. Smathers came into her line of vision. She whipped around, forgetting form, wanting to just bead up her skin with sweat so she wouldn’t be struck by the pointer.
The funny thing, though, was that she was always daydreaming about dancing, always seeing herself in a film of white as she pranced across some stage. It was easy in a daydream to pirouette, to lift her legs up past her shoulders and to hold them there—unmoving, solid—and do turn and leap after turn. She was always feeling vaguely cheated that dance wasn’t that easy or that liquid in real life. It didn’t seem quite fair that a dream should be better, that she could love a dream, feed it image after image, and yet hate the reality, and try to block it out.
When she burst into frustrated tears in class one day because everyone was doing turns and she couldn’t understand what leg went where, she decided, abruptly, that that was it, she would never come back. When she told her mother, Duse neither praised nor condemned her. She took it as matter of fact, as simple a statement as if Isadora had told her that she had just baked a potato and eaten it. It was Martin who did the comforting. He took her out to the car with him and drove her out to get ice cream, even though he said it was the most punishing thing you could do for your teeth.
“You’re not mad?” she asked.
He looked at her, grinning. “Nondancers can get as fat as tubas,” he told her. “Now I’ll have someone to share a guilty ice cream cone with.” He leaned over and swabbed some fudge off her chin with the edge of his finger.
“I love you,” she said.
“I knew it all the time,” he said.
Isadora knew she didn’t want to dance, but she didn’t know what she did want to do. She tagged Duse, but Duse told her to be patient, that there was no rush. When Isadora seemed the most depressed, Duse would read her palms for her, and if she was disappointed by what she saw, she never let Isadora see it; she made the smile on her face bloom and catch.
Isadora was twelve when her star appeared. It was tiny, so faint she had to squint to see it. “Now we don’t know what exactly that means,” Duse told her. “Just that it means something.” Isadora showed Martin and told him it meant she was special, but Martin just took her palm and closed it up again, wrapping her fingers back down over her palm. He told her that he didn’t need to see any star in her palm to know that, that he had always known her worth.
Isadora never stopped poring over her palm. She traced the lines like a speedway road map, she braced for the turns. But there was never any of Duse’s cement, never any of that certainty stiffening Isadora up. Instead she was gum—she could be pulled into doubt as easily as she took a breath—and she worried. She was always picking at the inside of her hand, disturbing the skin. She inked in her star with a blue fountain pen so it would stand out, but the dampness on her hand made the star blur and the ink rubbed off on her good white blouse. In art class, Isadora painted her palm, outlining her lines in yellow, insisting to the baffled art teacher that she was living art.
She wanted Duse to teach her what she knew; she wanted to be able to do everything her mother could. “But those are my gifts, not yours,” Duse said mildly. “You just hang on. Yours will turn up.”
Isadora was impatient. She saw Duse as having a secret knowledge of things that made her invincible. She never saw Duse flustered about anything. That woman always seemed to know how to deal with people before they even opened their mouths; Duse wouldn’t stumble and stutter in front of a teacher or a stranger the way Isadora did, all the time wondering what they wanted from her. Duse never worried about the outcome of anything, she didn’t sit up half the night worrying herself into tangles over an exam. Duse would just look into her palm and know how she’d do on that test and no one could tell her any different.
But there was something else, too. She saw the open curious way Duse always initially approached a person, she watched how Duse savored every new palm she touched. But Isadora learned to recognize the way Duse changed, the way the quick hard flickers of disappointment would show in Duse’s face, the way she would let the palm drop from her hands. “They’re just ordinary,” Isadora would think, seeing how Duse would dismiss the people whose hands she had so willingly taken.
All those people wanted to meet Isadora, wanted to know her too. “Duse’s girl,” they said, swiveling their faces to her. They all attached the daughter to the mother. Sometimes someone would want her to do a reading and she would cringe, she would shake her head and say she didn’t know how to do that, and it amazed her how she wasn’t believed. Isadora tickled her fingers into her palm; she had a queasy sense of panic, a feeling that if she didn’t get her gift soon, it wouldn’t be long before her mother’s eyes would narrow when they saw her, too.
Isadora was always looking at hands, always trying to see just who had a star now and just who didn’t. She tried to pry open every fist she saw. At first, when she scavenged the hands of people, she tried to explain. She would show off her own subtle crisscrossing but then she saw the eyes rolling, the smirks pull at the corners of their mouths, the disbelief. At last, she just left those kinds of hands alone, she kept her knowledge to herself.
She tried to look at Martin’s hands, but he tugged them out of her fingers. He never seemed to want to have anything to do with that sort of thing. He never wanted to discuss palms or gifts, and when she brought it up, he always deftly changed the subject. She would be talking about lines and he would suddenly ask her if she had brushed her teeth that day, if she had seen a movie that had just opened at the Beekman.
He was different with her than Duse was; he didn’t care whether she had a star or not—in fact, he seemed to prefer that she didn’t. When he saw her poking at her hands, he would take them from her, scowl into them, and then tell her that her hands were too lined for a girl her age, that she should use hand lotion.
It bothered her a little. His palm was so clean that she sometimes wondered if he was embarrassed, if he felt the lack, and she couldn’t imagine Duse marrying a starless man.
“How come you did?” she asked Duse.
“It was my destiny to,” Duse said simply.
It made Isadora crazy, her saying a thing like that. She became indecisive, skittery as a cat. How could you know your destiny, how could you be sure you didn’t miss it, that you weren’t wrong? Isadora became tentative. She would have to steady herself on a curb before she could push her feet off to cross. She always felt paralyzed that her crossing was making her miss something, that it was changing her life in a way it might not have if she had simply stayed perched up on that graveled sidewalk for a moment longer. She began to be overly aware of the time, of having to tell the things inside of her immediately to another person—because if she forgot, if she let hours slide into one another, she might never tell something someone might need to hea
r, and her silence would affect both their fates. She went up to Martin and made sure he knew that Duse considered him her destiny, but the queer kind of half smile on his face bothered her. She told Duse every single incidental thing that happened to her—the way she felt when she woke up with her eyes glued together at the lids, the new shampoo that she liked that lathered up blue and rinsed out green. She couldn’t risk not telling Duse everything, one slanted detail might be crucial. She couldn’t clamp her words back; they sputtered on the heels of one another, and she sensed Duse’s interest evaporating, waning into irritation. “What is it with you?” Duse said.
Isadora pulled back. “Nothing’s with me,” she said, rubbing one finger over her star. “Nothing.”
Something began happening. She began to look at her starred marking as a fissure in her life, not a cement. She might have her star, but as far as she could tell, there was no gift, and as the days blurred into other days, she began to feel like more and more of a sham. She wouldn’t look at calendars, and when the paper came, she practiced reading it without letting her eyes catch on the date. Sometimes she felt her star boring right into her, reminding her, blaming, and she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She would sit up, sweating into her sheets, terrified that her star might disappear in the night, that a smooth, even palm would become her stigma.
She had loved the way it was when the talent was just Duse’s, when it was a thing so hard and strong you could feel it. She hadn’t really questioned anything back then, and when she thought about it, she saw her childhood as a kind of wonderful Oz. She doubted her own self now, and she was wistful around Duse.
Duse was little help. She had no idea what talents her Isadora might be a harbor for, but unlike Isadora, she was firm in her belief that it was just a matter of time before something showed. When Isadora slumped about the house, Duse refused to be sympathetic. About the only thing she would do was to try and guide Isadora into a gift. When Isadora caught cold, Duse told her to cure herself; she said Isadora could hone her will against the germs, that she could win, and it was only when Isadora coughed so hard that she could hardly breathe that Duse was silent.
Isadora, too, tried. She ripped apart a tea bag with the prongs of a fork and dusted the leaves into a cup. After the tea had steeped itself black, she carefully poured off the water and looked down into the dank mess in the cup. She kept her eyes wide, she wouldn’t blink, until her eyes watered, blurring her sight, but still she saw nothing in those leaves, she couldn’t make one thing out, and she ended up dumping the leaves into the white sink, staining the porcelain. She couldn’t tell anything; those leaves hadn’t looked like anything to her but what they were.
She tried other things. She’d walk around the house, letting her fingers trail on the furniture, on the drapes, on Duse’s jacket lying across the chair. She sometimes stood right in Duse’s closet, inhaling the scent of that woman, the way it was woven into the fabric, but she never picked up anything, it was all she could do to just recognize what it was her fingers were settling sightless on. She kept a notebook and wrote out her dreams, waiting to see if they came true, she stared at people and tried to make them do things, to scratch their necks, twist about and see her. Nothing happened, nothing, and she didn’t see how she would live. She was dying, she was smothering with her wanting, with the fierceness of her yearning.
Isadora would probably have never really concentrated on the ways other people lived their lives if it weren’t for Duse. Duse didn’t like the way Isadora was moping and carrying on with this gift business, and she began to think that maybe part of it was her own fault, that maybe she had made it too easy for Isadora, reading her palm, her clothing, doing everything for her so that there was no real need for a gift to surface at all.
Duse called it weaning, but the removal was anything but gentle. She was suddenly too busy to read Isadora’s palm. She told her she would do it on Isadora’s birthday. She wouldn’t try to trance on a ring Isadora had found and she told Isadora simply that it was time for Isadora to find her own answers.
“If I knew how, then I would,” Isadora said. She wanted to talk about her star all the time. It wasn’t enough to just see that marking in her hand, not anymore, not if it didn’t do anything, if it didn’t somehow make her more than what she was. She trailed listlessly after Duse, she asked if there were any way that the star could be a mistake, a fluke. She wanted to know if there was something she was supposed to do to prove herself, if maybe she had to earn that star.
Duse never seemed to hear Isadora anymore. She went on cooking, continued to swab down the countertop, humming under her breath. When Isadora pressed her, all Duse would say was that it was silly to talk about things like that, that the star simply was.
Duse’s seeming detachment stung Isadora. “Fine,” she said. “Who wants to talk to you anyhow?” She made a show of going to her room and slamming the door, but once inside, she rested her cheek along the door, she listened to all the house noises as they filtered in to her. In the middle of dinner that night, she got up and made a quick breathy phone call to a girl in one of her classes. She said she had things to tell her but she couldn’t talk now because her parents were in the room. Isadora glanced over at Duse, but Duse was laughing at something, pointing into the newspaper for Martin to see.
I don’t need you, Isadora thought. She would find other ears. She began studying how other people lived. She watched the clots of girls giggling in the halls, but the whispering, the way their arms were snaking about one another’s waists, made her uneasy. She saw a few students earnestly talking to teachers after class, and Isadora felt more comfortable with that. She did try. She spoke with both her math and her English teacher, and although they seemed receptive, she saw how it was, how as soon as she said anything about destiny or palms, their faces went blank. No one had answers the way Duse had, no one could explain anything to her, and Isadora’s own doubt was compounded by other people’s uncertainties.
She had never planned on going to Confession. She had never really been to church. Martin had never really believed in organized religion; he always said he just preferred to loll his Sundays away in bed with Duse, reading the paper, talking, littering the sheets with breakfast crumbs. That was his form of worship. “The Church of Duse,” he called it.
They had told Isadora about God, they celebrated the important holidays, the ones with gifts or candies, and Isadora picked up bits and pieces from school. She walked past St. Marks every day, she saw people she knew going in and out, she heard how they complained about the priest, saying how he never let them get away with one damn thing, that he could look right inside their heads and pull their sins from them. She saw, too, the old women in their heavy black shoes, in those funny printed kerchiefs they knotted over their hair. One day though, she noticed something different. She was restless, itchy, she couldn’t manage to stay still, and when she walked she jittered. She watched the faces coming out of St. Marks, and every face looked certain to Isadora, and some of them looked relieved. It was that certainty, that relief, that pulled Isadora inside that church, that drew her into one of the pews.
She didn’t know what you were supposed to do, how you were supposed to go about confessing, she wasn’t even sure if someone who wasn’t a member of the church could confess. Isadora noticed an old woman and cleared her throat, and then she very politely asked her what it was that you said in the confessional, she said she hadn’t been in years and she wanted to repent. The woman clucked her tongue at Isadora, she reprimanded her for being a bad Christian, but still she took ten minutes to coach Isadora. She took Isadora over to the confessional herself, touching her arm, prodding her forward, blocking any escape.
The booth reminded Isadora of one of those Woolworth four-for-a-quarter picture places. She wasn’t sure anyone was even on the other side of the dark screen, so she cleared her throat a few times, she scraped it with sound. She liked the darkness, and when she heard the priest, she recited the snatches of l
ines the woman had given her.
It felt funny talking to someone she couldn’t see. She shut her eyes, she tried to force a connection between them, and she almost tried to pretend that it was Duse there and not some priest. She talked about feeling deficient, about wondering if she were being punished because her gift hadn’t surfaced yet. She couldn’t read palms or tea leaves or know things just by stroking her fingers across some object like her mother could.
Isadora suddenly felt the priest’s interest. It was a living thing, it seemed to stalk her, and she pulled away from the screen, she pressed her back against the far wall. He began whispering his questions at her, rephrasing things again and again, as if he had thought she might be lying. When she had finished telling him about Duse, about the things she could do, the things Isadora couldn’t, he was silent. He made that silence a shroud over the two of them, smothering out the air.
“You know, you don’t really need to be your mother,” he told her. He said that while the Church didn’t exactly countenance divination and the trappings associated with it, it didn’t seem to him that Duse was doing anything so terribly harmful.
“What about my star—” said Isadora.
“What about it?” he said. “I have a mole under my left eye that looks like a question mark. Do you think that means that no answer satisfies me? You can fool yourself any way you want.”
“Don’t you think I could have a gift? Don’t you think my mother does? She does do things, you know. She can find things that are lost, she can tell things about a person just by touching their sleeve.”
“I think,” the priest said, “that everyone has a kind of gift, that everyone has something special, something unique about them.”
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