Cindy straddled the lines between elegance and eccentricity, self-absorption and altruism. But Cindy would also make me—a girl with knees that curved backward even when I stood straight, my size 7 feet that were still too large for my stick-figure frame—feel like the most beautiful and loved little ballerina in the world. I’d never met anyone like her.
Those first afternoons in her class at the Boys and Girls Club, I would walk from school and take my place among a dozen or so other budding dancers. They stretched and bowed, their brows creased in concentration. But Cindy, staring attentively, seemed to focus solely on me.
The class was very basic. We learned only the most fundamental steps of ballet.
First position: heels together, toes pointed in opposite directions.
Second position: the same, but with space wide enough to slip two feet between your heels.
Third position: the heel of one foot meeting the arch of the other.
Fourth position: one foot turned out in front of the other, with about a foot of space in between.
Fifth position: your feet turned out but crossed in front of each other, parallel like an equal sign.
Ballet teachers usually create combinations, mixing and matching the steps and positions of ballet technique for their students to execute, but Cindy kept it simple.
She would lead, and I tentatively strayed from the barre to follow. I stood on my tiptoes and held out my arms as though I was cradling a giant balloon. My arms were rounded, floating, strong enough not to drop my imaginary sphere but soft enough not to make it pop. Then I spun around, lifting one foot and placing it down into fifth position, again and again until I had made my way halfway across the gym—my first pirouettes.
One afternoon, I lifted my arms above my head and leaped, my right leg stretched straight in front, my left leg extended backward. It was like the splits I would do in the backyard or during drill-team practice, only in the air. My first grand jeté.
I would do many more. And in those moments, when I was soaring, getting stronger, going higher, I felt exhilarated.
Cindy was impressed, whatever I did.
“It’s just amazing that you can already do all these things,” she’d murmur, after I’d done an arabesque or she’d bent me this way and that.
My body yielded to her every suggestion. It was as if I’d been doing ballet all my life, and my limbs instinctively remembered what my conscious mind had somehow forgotten. I didn’t question it, but I didn’t take it for granted, either. Just like with my schoolwork, my drill-team choreography, and anything else I set out to do, my overwhelming need to please—to be perfect—was there in ballet class, too.
So were my insecurities. Despite my prowess, ballet class still felt like being thrown into the deep end of the pool when I’d only just become brave enough to stick my face in the water. Walking into the gym each day, I continued to feel like an outsider. Instead of the leotard and tights that were de rigueur, I was still wearing the baggy clothes I put on for drill-team practice each day. And as I looked at my dance mates, it became clear that, by ballet standards, I was ancient.
Most ballerinas start to dance when they are sipping juice boxes in preschool. I was thirteen years old. Self-doubt taunted me.
“You’re too old. You’re behind. You’ll never catch up.”
But Cindy disagreed. She’d found what she was looking for.
Cindy’s stint at the Boys and Girls Club was always meant to be temporary. Her studio, the San Pedro Dance Center, was in another corner of the community that was far more affluent and much less diverse than mine. But her desire to share the magic and discipline of dance with those who otherwise might not be exposed to it brought her to South Cabrillo Avenue. She and Mike Lansing, the head of our Boys and Girls Club, were friends, and together they had the idea of turning the club into a sort of feeder program, or scouting base. She’d come to teach the basics of ballet to underprivileged children, then pick out those who were the most talented and give them the chance for further study at her school to hone their talents. Cindy chose me, along with a couple of other promising students.
“You need more intense training and the chance to be with strong dancers who can push you,” she told me after I’d spent one forty-five-minute class practicing the same basic positions and pliés. “You’ll get that at my school, and we should start as soon as possible.”
I listened politely, but in my heart I didn’t feel it. Why in the world would I want to trek across town to study ballet? How would I get there?
I knew I had talent and enjoyed dancing, but I still got a thrill from drill team. I was so excited finally to be following in the footsteps of my big sister, Erica, and Mommy’s, too, since she’d once been a Kansas City Chiefs cheerleader. Drill team—that was my dream.
Seeing that she was clearly getting nowhere with me, Cindy tried next to enlist my mother, sending home notes expressing how excited she would be to have me as her student. But she chose the wrong messenger. I’d leave the notes that raved about my talent and potential smushed in the back of my Pee Chee folder, or toss them, grease-stained, into the trash, along with my sandwich wrapper and the other remnants of my lunch.
Of course I didn’t tell Cindy that her notes were barely surviving my trek home. Instead, I made up excuses—that my mother was busy, or still thinking about it, or not really sure. But Cindy kept pressing, promising me a full scholarship that would pay for my training as well as my attire. I’d have that leotard at last, and she’d even give me a ride from school to her studio each afternoon.
Now I knew I had to tell Mommy. It was like getting an offer for a job you didn’t really want but realizing, begrudgingly, that the perks and benefits were probably too good to turn down. I told Cindy that maybe she and my mother should talk and reluctantly gave her our home phone number.
Cindy called that evening. I wasn’t sure what Mommy would say. Maybe the twenty-five-minute drive from school each day would turn her off to the idea, I thought. I hoped. But right away, Mommy said studying with Cindy could be good for me. Mommy didn’t see my nerves or ambivalence, only the opportunity.
“You know, when you were a little girl, you loved ballet,” she told me, smiling after she’d gotten off the phone.
“I did?” I asked incredulously, having no memory of even knowing what ballet was before I started taking classes in the Boys and Girls Club gym.
“Yes,” my mother said. “I bought you a tutu when you were four or five to wear for Halloween. You didn’t want to take it off. You wanted to wear it to school and you’d put it on every afternoon when you got home. You even slept in it. It got so raggedy I finally had to sneak and throw that thing away.”
I still didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Anyway,” Mommy said finally, “Miss Bradley seems to think you’ve got some potential. Let’s give it a try and see how it goes.”
And so it began. Sometimes I would hitch a ride across town with Erica, who was now seventeen, and her boyfriend, Jeff, slipping into the backseat of his 1989 white Suzuki Samurai for the trip to Cindy’s ritzy neighborhood. But most days I would ride with Cindy, who would be waiting in front of the school, watching for my tiny frame and big feet to emerge from the crowd.
If I didn’t yet feel like a ballerina, I now at least looked like one, thanks to the black leotard, pink tights, and pink slippers my scholarship afforded. Five days a week I’d take my place among students who were much more advanced than those I’d danced beside at the Boys and Girls Club—and I’d try my best to keep up.
Unlike the club gym where we danced on wood, Cindy’s studio was the real thing, though, like its founder, it had its quirks.
It was in a shopping center with a glass front that allowed you to gaze right into the small front studio where the youngest students took tap dance. Then there was the back studio, where the ballet company rehearsed. It resembled a box with mirrors—compact and spare. We faced gray walls as we glided across
a sprung floor covered in marley. A few tiny dressing rooms and a bathroom were tucked in the corner. And while most ballet classes have an actual pianist providing the musical background, there was no piano at the San Pedro Dance Center, just a portable sound system and a pile of CDs and tapes.
I would get to know every groove of that space over the next three years, spending nearly every day that I wasn’t performing, or in a program far away, there, in that studio.
My classmates were mostly white, but there were a few other children of color.
Catalina, who to this day remains one of my best friends, was Latina, round, loud, and full of light. She would gild her uniform of black and pink with tiny, bright flowers braided into her hair. I was older, but no one would have guessed that because I was so small, barely topping seventy pounds and standing merely a whisper over four feet. Catalina immediately assumed the role of big sister.
“Do you need any help, little girl?” she asked me during my first week at the school, when I was straightening out my leotard in the dressing room.
“No, I’m fine,” I answered, giving her a side glance. Little girl? “How old are you?” I asked her.
“Ten,” she replied.
“Well,” I said a bit haughtily, “I’m thirteen.” Her almond eyes were disbelieving. But from that day forward, we were rarely ever apart.
Then there was Jason Haley, an African American boy to whom I became very close. Tall, dark, and elegant, Jason was in all my classes at the center and would often be my dance partner. He, too, was a latecomer to ballet, one of Cindy’s scholarship students, and a member of the Boys and Girls Club. We had all that in common and much more.
Ballet was a respite in otherwise turbulent lives for the both of us.
Jason had bounced between homes as a child, with his father gone and his mother grappling with poverty. By the time we met, he was living with an aunt. He was gifted and graceful, but raw. You never knew if he would show up for a performance, and he rarely made it to ballet class on time. Eventually, he would drift away from the studio.
But for a while it was we three brown kids, and our presence reflected Cindy’s character and vision. She was different from most people in the ballet world, who felt Giselle and Odette were best performed by dovelike sprites, lissome and ivory-skinned. Cindy believed that ballet was richer when it embraced diverse shapes and colors. There would be times in my career when I would struggle to remember that, but I would eventually come back to that conviction, that the stage on which I performed was brighter for having me, even if some in the audience or dancing beside me didn’t always agree.
FOR A WHILE, I was just going through the motions. Then it happened.
I don’t recall the precise moment—whether it was during that first week at Cindy’s studio, when I found myself immersed in a new world, or weeks later, when my classes at the dance center became as much a daily ritual as my thumping the alarm clock in the dark before dawn.
Maybe it was all that rigor and routine, my dance mates and I lined up perfectly at the barre, like minarets. Maybe it was peering into the mirrored walls reeking of Windex and realizing that the ballerina staring back was graceful, was good, was me. What I do remember is that the drill team, the stuff of my elementary-school dreams, faded in importance, and ballet was suddenly thrilling. It was all I wanted—needed—to do.
Cindy pushed me from the very start, putting me in an advanced class to see if I could keep up with students who had been training for years. I could, and I did. That was a sign for her to push me even further and faster. Techniques that would normally take a young dancer months, even years, to learn, let alone perfect, I mastered in minutes. Or so Cindy said.
Eight weeks after walking into Cindy’s school, I stood en pointe for the first time.
Going en pointe, wearing reinforced toe shoes that allow a ballerina to dance on the tips of her toes, is a rite of passage for young dancers. I later learned that most budding ballerinas beg their teachers for years even to try pointe shoes on. Once they receive their first pair, they do nothing but simple, repetitive exercises for several more years to adjust to the movements and to make sure their feet are strong enough before they try complex steps: fouettés, pirouettes, renversés. Moving too fast is dangerous. Dancers who are not yet ready can seriously damage their feet and impair their performance and technique for years to come, essentially ending their careers before they start.
But Cindy believed that I had the strength and the skill to stand en pointe just months after I’d taken my first ballet class. She was so confident, in fact, that she had her camera ready and snapped a picture of that most significant milestone. It’s kind of like your mother capturing your baby self at the moment you release her hand and walk for the first time. So many miss it, but not Cindy. I think that from the beginning, in her mind, in her plan, stardom was my destiny, and she was determined to document every turn, step, and breakthrough along the way.
“The perfect ballerina has a small head, sloping shoulders, long legs, big feet, and a narrow rib cage,” Cindy said one afternoon, reading George Balanchine’s description of the ideal dancer.
She looked up and stared at me, adoringly. “That’s you,” she said softly. “You’re perfect.”
I beamed.
“You’re going to dance in front of kings and queens,” she said. “You will have a life most people cannot even imagine.”
I began to believe her.
Chapter 3
BALLET GAVE MY LIFE grace and structure. At the dance center, all the twists and turns were up to me, firmly within my power to master. It was a stark contrast to my life outside, which was spinning out of control.
In the house where we lived with Robert, I shared a beautiful room with Erica and Lindsey; it had a door of stained glass that led to the wide, verdant backyard, where we could dance and play. Life was more rigid than it had been with Harold. There was no laughing with our mouths full, no elbows plopped on the table during dinnertime. We had to be quiet as we ate, though sometimes the struggle to stay silent would make us giggle even more. We’d look at one another, our faces twitching, and finally explode in laughter.
Robert would glare or yell at us to quiet down. He also didn’t tolerate Erica’s aversion to vegetables. Many a night the rest of us had cleared our plates and were midway through The Cosby Show or Roseanne, while Erica was still at the dinner table, made to sit there until she’d forced down every carrot and pea.
Still, in some ways his strict rules were comforting for an anxious child like me. And I later appreciated the order we’d briefly had in our home, in contrast to the instability that would define our lives when we moved away from Robert.
Like our years with Harold, we never wanted for anything. There was plenty of food in the refrigerator, closets bursting with matching outfits, and toys and books all around.
And since Mommy never was much of a cook, Robert was the family chef. He made sure all of us kids felt at home in the kitchen, teaching us how to boil rice from scratch instead of heating the instant stuff that came in a box.
I began to spend more time with him than my brothers and sisters did. Since I was a people pleaser, I’d volunteer to accompany him when he ran errands, picking up tools or wax to buff his beloved Jeep. After a while, Robert would come looking for me.
“Grab your piggy bank and come for a ride,” he’d whisper.
We’d drive to the grocery store, and while he browsed, picking up fruit and cold cuts, I’d spend my dimes and quarters on Snickers bars, cookies, and sunflower seeds.
“Hey, little Hawaiian girl,” he’d sing when he came home from work and saw me playing with my Barbie. Robert also had big dreams for me. He thought I would make a great jockey because I was so tiny.
“We should get you horse-riding lessons,” he told me. “You’re small and don’t weigh a lot, like the best folks out there riding. It’s a very prestigious sport. Have you ever heard of the Kentucky Derby?”
&nb
sp; He often remarked on how much I looked like him and his relatives. It’s true that I probably looked more Polynesian or Asian than my brothers and sisters, with my almond-shaped eyes and long brown hair. I began to realize that my appearance made all the difference in the world to Robert and some others in his family.
It was clear I was Robert’s favorite, and that led to a new riff in the good-natured but relentless teasing that was as much a part of our family sound track as Mariah Carey’s latest hit or the theme to Monday Night Football.
“Stop it,” I’d yell at Doug Jr. when he playfully snatched a book out of my hands.
“What are you going to do?” he’d ask, holding the book behind his back. “Tell Robert?”
“Yes!” I’d yell back.
But I seldom did. I loved my big brother. And Robert had a bad temper.
I WAS CLOSE TO Robert’s mother, Grandma Marie. In the summer, when school was out, Mommy would drop me off at her small stucco home, and I’d help Grandma Marie tend to the smaller children who came to the day-care center she ran in her house. She was the one who taught me how to sew, and I felt like quite the artist, tugging on my shiny needle to create outfits for my dolls.
After a while, I began to notice that while I often went to Robert’s parents’ house, my brothers and sisters were rarely invited. And Robert’s father, Grandpa Martin, was a shadow to us, sullen-faced and holed up in his room on the rare occasions our entire family stopped by. I don’t think he ever spoke to, or even acknowledged, any of us kids.
Back at our house, my being Robert’s favorite didn’t spare me from his discipline. Like my siblings I’d have to go silently stand in the corner if I didn’t make up my bed or if I made too much noise. But we girls didn’t have to go to the corner as often or for as long as Doug and Chris. They’d be made to stare at the crease in the wall for an hour or more, usually while balancing a heavy book on their heads. It was painful for them—and painful for me to watch.
Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Page 4
