It was called the Sunset Inn, two stories of stucco just off a busy highway. We were now in Gardena, a town right next to San Pedro. We were closer to our old neighborhood, but this place, this part of town, didn’t feel like home.
Our room was toward the back of the top story. We children slept on the couch and the floor in the large front room, but I would often disappear into Mommy’s bedroom after school, trying to drift away in a dream or a dance. Our front porch looking out over the Pacific was long gone, replaced by an outdoor hallway that we and the other motel tenants shared.
I tried to make the best of it. I would pretend the hallway was a veranda and I’d sit there, soaking up the sun. And I turned the rail into my very own barre, which I would grab hold of to balance as I stretched toward the sky. Or I would place Cameron’s tiny hands on the cool metal and shift him into various ballet positions, the way Cindy had first done with me.
Cameron was in and out of our lives at that point. His father, Robert, didn’t want him living in a motel, so he took Mommy to court and was given primary custody. Cameron would be with us only on weekends. It devastated me. Cameron’s absence in my life opened a wound in my heart. Now I didn’t hold back the emotions that hurt me. The tears that poured out of all of us when we had to say good-bye are still fresh in my gut and memory to this day. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced—I wasn’t ever this expressive of my pain when we left Doug Senior or Harold or Robert, but Cameron was my baby. I think all of us kids felt we had contributed to raising him. I continued to see Cameron at Robert’s home if he wasn’t at the motel on weekends, but it simply wasn’t the same, especially when my other siblings’ presence in my life was likewise beginning to fracture. Lindsey had always spent weeks at a time with Harold, her father. And Erica, who had started staying with friends as much as she could back when we lived with Robert, now hardly ever slept at home. Our family, fraying even at the best of times, was now unraveling.
Often we had no money at all. We would run our hands around the couch cushions and through the carpet to find change. Then we’d go to the corner store to see if we could afford something to eat. Eventually, Mommy applied for food stamps.
I still tried to appear perfect at school, arriving long before the first bell, carrying out my duties as hall monitor and as leader of the drill team. I withdrew even more inside myself as I tried to keep it all a secret, not telling my friends that we’d moved again, that I didn’t have my own room . . . let alone a bed. I’d always spent more time at my friends’ homes than they’d spent at mine, so it wasn’t that hard to pretend my life was as it should be.
It was harder to make myself forget. I was grateful to hide from the chaos for a little while at the dance studio, inside ballet, where there were rules and life was dignified. Beautiful. I had continued to go to the studio every day despite the turmoil at home, taking the half hour drive with Cindy from school, and then riding an hour on the bus to get home to the motel.
The weeks rushed by. My mastery of ballet deepened, and soon I had my first show. It was at the Palos Verdes Art Center and billed as an “afternoon of art, music, and cultural enrichment,” performed for a mostly elderly and white audience of about two hundred.
On the program was an older teenage girl who sang some forgettable pop standard, a group of high schoolers who performed a modern-dance routine, and me, the only ballerina in the bunch. Cindy had created a simple routine that blended the positions, spins, and leaps that I had managed to learn up to that point. I wore my black leotard with a pink chiffon skirt, with a blush-colored rose tucked in my hair.
Mommy wasn’t there. Neither were my brothers or sisters. Only Cindy.
But I had performed ballet solo in front of a crowd for the first time, and by then I was in love. It was fun, exciting—and each day I couldn’t wait for the bell to ring after sixth period so I could rush out the door, jump into Cindy’s car, and head to the studio.
Mommy, however, was starting to change her mind about my ballet dreams.
When Jeff couldn’t give her a lift, Erica would catch the bus, riding an hour each way to pick me up from class so I wouldn’t have to take public transportation by myself. The two of us would get home after dark, often exhausted.
One night after Erica and I returned home from our long trek from the studio, Mommy sat down beside me. She said ballet class, so far away, wasn’t working out.
“It’s too much,” she said, shaking her head, sadness faintly clouding her eyes. “You need to be able to get home earlier to spend time with your brothers and sisters. And both you and Erica are missing out on time with your friends. I know you’re liking this class, but you’ll only be a kid once.”
I knew that Mommy meant well, that she was speaking from a place of concern, but I don’t think she really understood that for me, ballet had become more than a hobby—it was what helped me stand alone, even shine bright. I desperately needed it.
The day after Mommy told me I would have to quit ballet, Cindy was waiting for me in front of the school, rifling through her organizer, looking up from time to time to see if I’d appeared.
I opened the car door and got in beside her.
“I’m going to have to stop dancing,” I blurted out before breaking down in tears. “My mother says that the studio’s too far. That it’s too much, that I’m missing out on time with my friends and family.”
Perhaps she would have been better able to understand if, like many concerned parents of ballerinas, my mother had been worried about my struggling schoolwork or fatigue. But this excuse seemed flimsy, even to me.
Cindy looked as though she’d forgotten how to breathe. Her eyes were wide and glistening. We sat there for a few minutes, silent.
“Well then,” she finally said, “at least I can drive you home.”
I was too tired to protest, too grief-stricken to guard my secret. I gave her my address.
We were quiet in the car. I tried to imagine what would fill the space that ballet had occupied, and I kept coming up empty. Finally, Cindy pulled to a stop. Staring at the run-down motel where my family was living, she looked as stunned as she had when I told her that I couldn’t dance with her anymore.
“Thanks for the ride,” I whispered as I hurried out of the car. Upstairs, I fumbled for the room key and entered the living room, blankets rolled up near the spots where they would later be unfurled as makeshift beds.
I’m sure Mommy didn’t believe she was being neglectful. After all, we hadn’t always lived that way, with pallets on the floor. We hadn’t always called a motel—with a lobby window to slide our rent check through—home. We didn’t always sleep around the corner from a highway lined with liquor stores and sketchy taco joints.
But that’s how we lived now. That’s what Cindy saw.
There was a knock on the door. Mommy, who’d been in the bedroom with Alex, came out and opened it.
Cindy stood there tentatively. I could feel the tension building in the small space, a nearly tangible thing. I just wanted to disappear. She met my eyes where I sat withdrawn on the floor. I believe that she knew this was it: she either brought me with her that night and into the world she believed I was born to be a part of, or I would never dance again.
The two women huddled a while, talking softly, crying, too. Mommy made it very clear that she had five other children. I was not, nor could I be, the center of her universe. I knew that—but I needed to be that to someone. “I can’t leave her,” Cindy said, tears steaming down her face. “I want Misty to come live with me.” Then Mommy sighed and looked around the crowded motel room.
And she let me go.
Chapter 4
IT WAS LATE WHEN we pulled up to Cindy’s house.
When Mommy said I could leave, I was in a daze but managed somehow to stuff my world into a backpack. Blue jeans, pajamas, a few tops. By then I didn’t have very much. Then she hugged me tight, and I walked slowly out of one kind of life and into another.
Cindy
lived across town near the Angel’s Gate Lighthouse in a condominium perched on a hill. Her husband, Patrick, was a full-time art teacher. But in his spare time, he loved to surf. When he wasn’t catching waves or teaching dance at the San Pedro Dance Studio, he was baking desserts. Their front door was barely two blocks from Cabrillo Beach, and the condo smelled like cinnamon and the sea. It was filled with paintings, sculptures, and other tiny beautiful things. I remember thinking that nothing so fragile could ever have survived in my home.
As we walked through the door, Cindy said, “Misty is here with me. She’s going to be living with us. Can you set a third place setting at the table?”
“Sure thing,” Patrick said, not even missing a beat.
I know now that Cindy never asked him for permission or even let him know I was coming. They welcomed me with the most generous and open arms. We ate Chinese food that night at the dinner table, like I had always been there.
After dinner, Cindy led me to the large bedroom that I would share with her three-year-old son Wolf, whom I’d often seen at the studio, taking tap dance. He was asleep in the bottom bunk. I changed my clothes, climbed into the top bed, and she came to tuck me in.
“Good night, honey,” she whispered as she kissed me on the cheek. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
As sudden as it all was—Mommy’s consent, my moving out of the motel room we’d shared—I knew that my going to live with my dance instructor was not an unusual arrangement. Talented young dancers and athletes often leave home to live with their coaches and teachers so they can concentrate on training. Even Cindy had moved out of her childhood home as a teenager to pursue a dance career.
Still, I lay in the dark, terrified. Now I would have to try to fit in not only at school but also in this new home. It was yet another test to pass, another social maze to figure my way through.
But I also knew how devastated I’d been when I’d found out I wasn’t going to be able to do ballet anymore, how the hurt had stung my soul.
“So I guess this is it,” I told myself. “This is how I’m going to be able to continue to dance.” I had to accept it. Finally, I fell asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, Wolfie was peering over the edge of my bed as he stood on his, gazing at me wide-eyed. He would often look at me that way in the two years that I lived in his room. He seemed ever in awe of this older brown girl who had suddenly appeared in his life. I remember waking up sometimes and finding him softly touching my face in the middle of the night. Wolfie just adored me—and I adored him. He was my new baby brother.
That’s how natural it all was. Transitions in my life had always been traumatic. Leaving Harold to move in with Robert, fleeing Robert for Ray, ending up in a motel with my family and Alex. But not this time, not this move. Cindy and Patrick were so welcoming, so warm, and having Wolfie there reminded me of my younger siblings Cameron and Lindsey, whom I loved so much. I didn’t have to struggle to fit in after all. The Bradleys embraced me just as I was.
I NO LONGER RODE a public bus to get to Dana Middle School or to get home in the evenings. Cindy would drop me at school in the morning and then pick me up after the last bell rang so that I could head to her studio. I was still captain of the drill team, and I headed to practice every afternoon during my sixth-period PE class, but my interest had waned. The routines now seemed uninspired and simplistic, nothing like ballet, where the movements rippled like water, where a spin that blended strength and grace could transform a dull room into a music box, and the dancer became the beautiful miniature turning round and round inside.
Elizabeth Cantine understood. She was the drill team’s coach, but she had seen that I had the lines and fluidity to be a ballerina from the first days of practice. She was the one who’d encouraged me to take Cindy’s class at the Boys and Girls Club, and for years to come she would play a vital role in both my budding career and in my life more generally.
I didn’t know it at first, but when Cindy offered me the scholarship to attend her school, she had already had a discussion with her friend Elizabeth, and Elizabeth and her husband, Richard, had agreed to help pay for my supplies. That was no small undertaking. Pointe shoes cost eighty dollars a pair, and I ran through them the way a basketball player exhausts his sneakers. I was also still growing, so there was the constant need for new tights and leotards. Elizabeth and Richard would help me financially for many more years. That’s how much they believed in and cared for me.
Elizabeth became one of my many mentors, and by the time I was in high school, she and her husband had declared themselves my honorary godparents. She observed my classes at Cindy’s school and never missed any of my performances. I would often spend the night at her home, and she remained in my life long after Cindy and I were forced to part. To this day, I still see Elizabeth and Richard, my godparents, often.
I ALWAYS SAY THERE are no shortcuts in ballet, no way to skip steps. That was certainly my truth. You had to know how to do a plié—bending your knees over your toes gracefully—and a passé—passing your foot above and behind your knee, then back again—before you could whip your leg around in a fouetté.
So I started from the bottom at the San Pedro Dance Center, with the babies (as I dubbed the youngest students), though I was so small that most onlookers wouldn’t have been able to tell that I was nearly fourteen and years older than my classmates.
In that most basic of classes, we would hold on to the barre with both hands as we practiced pliés and went over the most elemental ballet positions. First, second, third, fourth, fifth.
Then it was on to pointe class, where we’d do the same steps we’d practiced at the barre, but elevated to the tips of our toes. I was taking three classes a day, each more advanced than the one before. There were maybe twenty students in each group—most of them girls, most of them white. The classes moved so quickly that half the time I didn’t know what the steps with their complex French names and odd spellings were called.
But Cindy threw me into those more advanced classes from the start because she believed I could immediately pick up what was going on around me. I just needed to watch the ballet instructor, or the videos he or she would play, or the other students.
I remember when I began learning how to do those fouetté turns. I was always so eager for that class, so excited to try that complicated move again and again, figuring out how to make it better, how to make it work. Cindy taught me how to do it by holding on to the barre, breaking it down into little steps.
“Now you plié,” she’d explain. “Now swing your leg to the side. Then bring it into passé.”
I’d repeat those steps every day for an hour, holding on to the barre until I was finally able to let go and make those turns in the center of the room. The day that I was finally able to do it—plié! relevé! passé!—was exhilarating.
Then, the next day, it was back to basics, where I would polish what I had learned in the more advanced classes, making sure that every step, every port de bras was as pristine as it could be. Learning to dance with a partner, a pas de deux, was a class unto itself.
Sometimes Patrick taught the class, but my usual instructor, and my first partner, was Charles Maple. He had been a soloist with ABT.
I was so small and fearless that I became the student he would dance with to teach all the others.
“Hold your body and don’t move,” he’d say, as he lifted me over his head with one arm. I could be as still as a statue or as flexible as a rag doll—whatever he needed me to be—as he tossed, lifted, and twirled me around. I would end the class giddy and out of breath.
I wasn’t really aware of how quickly I was learning. But I began to hear a word over and over again—from Cindy, from Charles, from Elizabeth—that would follow me, define me.
Prodigy.
Initially, I didn’t understand that word’s magnitude, how it meant that the instinctive space from which I started would be the standard many expected me to maintain. All I knew then, at the b
eginning, was that dancing was fun, natural. And my constant quest to please pushed me to keep getting better.
All these years later, my technique is very secure, clean, and strong. Yet I still go to ballet classes daily. Dancers understand. It’s because, while we know we’ll never achieve perfection, we have to keep trying. Dancers have to keep studying, practicing, and striving until the day they retire.
It’s what makes ballet so beautiful, that razor’s edge of timing and technique that is the difference between leaping and landing perfectly, or collapsing to the floor.
Human frailty prevents perfection. Your body is forever giving in to fatigue or injury. Something is always a little off. And as your body ages, as the sprains and stresses of life become indelible pieces of your being, your dance technique must change as well. As Misty the woman has grown, so has Misty the ballerina, adjusting to new realities and sudden limitations.
But if you’ve never walked in a pair of pointe shoes, it’s hard to understand.
“You’re still taking ballet class?” a childhood friend once asked me incredulously.
The question used to make me weary. But no more.
“Yes,” I answered. “I’ll be taking ballet classes forever.”
BALLET SUFFUSED MY NEW home life as well. I discovered American Ballet Theatre as I was sitting in front of the television in Cindy and Patrick’s family room.
Other than music videos, I had never seen professional dancing of any kind—let alone ballet. But at Cindy’s it was pretty much all we watched. Gone were the Sunday afternoon football games that had dominated my family life. At the Bradleys, I would sit in front of the TV for hours watching videotaped performances by ABT. I was mesmerized, the same way I had been when I discovered gymnastics. Only it wasn’t Nadia Comaneci on the screen. It was Gelsey Kirkland, Natalia Makarova, Rudolf Nureyev, and Paloma Herrera.
ABT was founded in 1940. Based in New York, it quickly became known as one of the finest classical ballet companies in the world. Cindy and Patrick knew that. And they saw it as my destiny.
Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Page 6
