Every Step You Take

by Jock Soto

  Recognizing how much I didn’t know about my parents’ backgrounds and my own early years brought me face-to-face with an even more alarming question: Did I even know my own life, the one I had supposedly lived for the past thirty years here in New York? Luis and I had begun to talk about getting married someday, and maybe even having a family. If I ever had children of my own, would I be able to tell them about this life I had lived, what I had done and what I had learned from it? Or had I danced right over three decades of precious time, pouring everything into the stories I was creating onstage and ignoring the overall arc of how everything, onstage and offstage, fits together? This raised another troubling question, especially for someone facing the challenge of inventing a whole new life: Can you figure out where you are going if you have never paused to consider where you came from or where you have been?

  I had been so determined to channel all my energies forward into a productive future after retiring—yet now I found myself possessed by a curiosity about my past. I kept thinking about the months and months that had piled up into years and years, during which my only focus had been a near maniacal pursuit of the art of dance. Balanchine’s famous quote about ballet came to mind: “The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.” Could I apply his comment on dance to life in general? Could I keep moving through the present and planning for the future, and at the same time be able to rewind the tape and sift through my past, looking for any information and insights that might be embedded in all those days and weeks and months and years during which I had just floated through life—happily adrift in a universe that was all about dancing, dancing, dancing?

  For a long time I wrestled with these questions, wondering if I had the courage and stamina and honesty—not to mention intellectual depth—to actually harvest anything from a more probing look at my life. But on the sad day in March 2008 when my brave mother finally lost her battle with cancer and died, something shifted inside me. I didn’t recognize the change instantly, but over the next few weeks it became obvious that I had been asking myself certain questions for long enough. The time had come to try to find some answers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ______

  The Sleeping Beauty

  Every day the world turns upside down for someone who is sitting on top of it.

  —ELLEN GILCHRIST, IN THE LAND OF DREAMY DREAMS

  I am three years old, and I am dancing with my mother. I am three, and she is immortal—as big and beautiful and bright as the sun in the sky. We are dressed in special dancing clothes that she has made for us. I have little beaded moccasins and a headband of wiry horsehair; my velvet loincloth and matching fringed vest with sparkling sequins are a pretty purple. We are carrying smooth circles that never start and never end, beautiful wooden hoops (mine are small and just my size, and my mother’s are bigger, just right for her) made by my grandfather.

  As we begin to move through our dance steps, holding our hoops, my mother and I become another set of hoops. We roll, separate but connected, inside the heat and the light and inside the irresistible beat of my grandfather’s drum and the sound of his voice as he chants a long, special song. We gather momentum and unity as we move; the surrounding light and colors and all of the familiar smells—horsehair, leather, dust, hot clay—become one with our movement and the drumbeat and my grandfather’s voice. I notice from the corner of my eye that even the sunlight is dancing with us now, its shadow feet rushing to match the movement of every step we take, meeting us toe-to-toe with perfect timing.

  I am dancing with my mother and I am only three, but already I can feel the thrill and the power of surrendering to the sum of our partnership with each other and with everything in this moment in time. I am her son, she is my sun, I am a small moon in her happy orbit. Every time we dance it is like this—we spin ourselves a brand-new universe.

  Whenever I dive into the murk of my childhood years, the earliest artifact I can bring back to the surface is this memory of my mother teaching me the traditional Navajo hoop dance. As memories go, my childhood pas de deux with Mom is always easy to find—in fact, over the years it has revisited me often, bringing with it sensations so vivid and visceral they register more like a current than a recollected experience. On March 28, 2008, as I sit in an uncomfortable wooden pew in a small chapel in Colorado Springs and try to listen to the rent-a-priest who is speaking at my mother’s memorial service, the memory comes to me once more—this time in an act of emotional rescue.

  My beautiful mother—Josephine Towne Soto—has died. But as the gray minutes roll past and the priest at the front of the chapel drones on, my beautiful mother is still dancing with me in a world of bright light and vivid colors. We are moving across the hard-packed earth in front of my grandpa Bud and grandma Rachel’s hogan on the Navajo Reservation in Chinle, Arizona, on a day four decades ago, but we are also dancing through the fluid dimension of time, on a platform that is both of and above the world we usually inhabit. This is what the two of us always have done together; this is what we always will do. My mother was my very first dance partner, and as I close my eyes and ears to the grim little gathering that surrounds me, it is a great relief to know that I will be dancing with her forever.

  Only two weeks have passed since the moment when my brother, Kiko, called me, as I was headed to teach my partnering class at the School of American Ballet in New York, to say I’d better come back to Colorado Springs, where Mom had been admitted to hospice care several weeks earlier. We have been through many tough times since our mother was diagnosed with cancer five years ago—but nothing could have prepared me for these final weeks, when every twenty-four hours seemed to bring brutal new diminishments of her autonomy. For me the visual and emotional horrors of watching my mother suffer a slow and painful death have been compounded by the strange and unpredictable dynamics of our large and unruly family. My mother has always been the powerful and beloved center of that family, both the immediate and the extended branches. Not one of us wanted to let her go. As we all have tried to face the pain of our profound loss, spoken and unspoken feelings have ricocheted like stray bullets among the scattered members of this communication-challenged family. My father has been retreating deeper and deeper into a childlike state of denial that I find frustrating, but even worse are the tensions that have developed between my immediate family members who left the reservation some years ago, and my mother’s traditional Navajo relatives who still live there. The telephone calls between us have grown more and more strained.

  Living in my own world far away in New York City for so many years, I sometimes forget the imposing scale of our “clan.” But whenever I am back home, it hits me—we are a big family. My mother was the second eldest of nine children born to my Navajo grandparents, Rachel Begay Towne and Joseph Towne, and the second of seven daughters—Alice; my mother, Josephine; Buddieta; Rosita; Valerie; Pauline; and Yvonne. Next came the long-awaited boy, Orlando, and finally another girl, Rochelle. Over the years, my mother—always the rebel, always the traveler—established herself as the most colorful and also the most controversial among this brood. For starters, the majority of her siblings have remained on or near the reservation, where they were all born, in keeping with Navajo tradition. But at a young age Mom began to roam to faraway places, and over the years she established a pattern of moving on and off the reservation that upset her more traditional relatives. When she was only eighteen Mom fell in love with my father, a full-blooded Puerto Rican named José Soto, and not much later she made a big break with Navajo tradition by marrying outside the tribe—a huge taboo and another source of ongoing friction with her relatives. Now, to complicate matters, my mother requested that she be cremated and buried on land Luis and I had recently bought in Eagle Nest, New Mexico—thereby resoundingly rejecting the Navajo tradition of burial in which the intact body is returned to its Native soil in a three-day-long, highly ritualized ceremony that involves the entire clan.

  Mom was a bel
oved member of a big clan, but as I look around the little chapel we have chosen for her memorial service I note that the pews are nearly empty. My brother, Kiko, and his wife, Deb, are on one side of me, and my partner, Luis, and my father are on the other. Luis is holding my hand, squeezing it, as I look around at a few friends of Kiko’s and my father’s who dot the pews. Not one of Mom’s siblings has come to this service. Throughout the previous week, as it became clearer and clearer that her death was imminent, I had been calling all of them to tell them that it was time to come see her and say their good-byes. In our phone conversations my Navajo relatives made it clear that all of Mom’s untraditional decisions about her burial were causing considerable upset back on the reservation where her family members and elders had been planning a traditional Navajo burial and ceremony. In the end only three of Mom’s eight siblings—her sisters Rosie, Buddy, and Ali—managed the trip to Colorado Springs to say good-bye to her. When they were in Kiko’s house it had seemed to me that these sisters scuttled about with dark, disapproving looks, and when they visited my mother in her hospice room they stood in a circle and held hands and chanted and prayed. After being there for two days, they took off furtively in the middle of the night, saying only a brief good-bye.

  I had been upset by all of this, and I became even more upset when I heard from family members that the elders on the reservation had started planning a memorial service for Mom before she had even died. I stomped around and cursed my Navajo relatives. You would think a family could pull together in times of such sadness and trauma. All of this was hard enough; did they have to make it harder? Outwardly I criticized my relatives for their selfish behavior, but on some level I was also nervous about the situation. As a resident of New York City for thirty years I have become well versed in metropolitan culture and all the sophistications of modern life. But the power of Navajo beliefs and superstitions and the consequences of going against them have been impressed upon me all my life. For years I have carried a private (and for the most part unacknowledged) guilt at having left the reservation where my clan lived. As I sit at my mother’s memorial service in a chapel that is far away from our clan’s sacred homelands, I have to acknowledge that somewhere deep inside I know that the ancient Navajo laws are nothing to mess with. Thinking about this, I instinctively make the sign of the cross, the way I always used to before stepping onstage.

  Looking around at the empty pews sends a painful reminder of another family situation that contributed to the pressure cooker atmosphere in Kiko’s house during the last two weeks of my mother’s life. Because of recent disagreements between Kiko and his ex-wife, their two sons, Trevor and Bryce (my mother’s only grandchildren), have not been speaking to Kiko—or to any of us. Trevor and Bryce have not come to their grandmother’s funeral. I called earlier in the week and left a voice message at their house, asking if my mother could please see her grandsons before she died. Kiko’s ex-wife left a short and bitter response on Kiko’s voice mail: “Everyone dies.”

  Everyone dies, yes. But not everyone dies with the dignity and courage and grace of my Navajo princess of a mother. Several times in the past few days I have found myself back in the moment when I entered my mother’s room at Pikes Peak Hospice for the last time. The curtains are drawn. The room looks impeccable—cleaner than when I left it to go grab a little lunch a while ago. The oxygen tank that has been her constant companion is no longer there. Mom is lying with her arms crossed underneath her favorite faux-fur blanket, which I bought her one Christmas from Pottery Barn. She looks beautiful, still and peaceful as a Sleeping Beauty. The strained and erratic breathing that I watched for five hours that same morning—counting the seconds between each gasp as I talked to her, touched her cheeks, held her hand—has stopped.

  She looks so lovely and peaceful lying there, that on an impulse I kneel down beside her bed and gently kiss her, allowing myself the wild hope that maybe, just maybe, she will magically awaken and give me her amazing smile. But she does not.

  It is 4:30 on the afternoon of March 25, 2008, and Josephine Towne Soto, my beloved mother, has departed. There is nothing bendable or flexible or fixable about this sad fact. Nothing to do but say good-bye and leave. Looking around the room, I spot my mother’s favorite red bathrobe on a chair. I gather the bathrobe in a tight ball against my chest to take back to New York with me, and then I pick up her laptop computer, which has been waiting like a faithful pet at the foot of her bed. As I cast one last look at my mother’s peaceful silhouette, it occurs to me that my mother has managed her own death with the same aplomb with which she managed everything in our family all my life. I understand that she didn’t want us to have to watch her lose the breath of life and depart. She has chosen to slip away quietly and quickly, while she was alone.

  At the memorial the priest is still talking, and my eyes wander to a poster-size picture of Mom—an enlarged version of a photograph that my father has carried in his wallet for more than two decades—on display in the chapel. In the picture Mom has short hair, much like one of the wigs she wore in the last few years because of chemotherapy. This gets me thinking about Mom’s hair—she had the most beautiful long dark hair, thick and lustrous. I remember how when I was younger she would pile it up into a beehive. A moment later I am a child again, riding in my father’s ’65 convertible Cadillac. In the front seat Mom is snuggling up close to my father as he drives. Kiko and I are in the backseat, eating candy and carefully stashing the wrappers in Mom’s beehive. We giggle. We know she won’t find them until sometime after she gets to work.

  Thinking about how much I used to love to touch my mother’s beautiful hair when I was young, I am suddenly reliving another day, when I am ten and I have asked Mom if she would feather my hair. When she finishes, I am thrilled. I think I look incredible. A male Farrah Fawcett. I put on my roller skates and go outside, feeling like some sort of beauty queen. Me, my feathered hair, my skates. I glide through the streets of our little desert community. Just like a scene from the movie Xanadu. Clearly I am a homosexual already…

  Everyone is standing up. Mom’s service is finally over now, and as we are leaving the funeral facilities I notice a lone figure sitting at the back of a bigger, separate chapel that is near ours. The person looks familiar to me, and a moment later I realize it is Kiko’s older son, Bryce. As soon as he sees that he has been spotted, Bryce takes off in a dead run. A second later Kiko takes off after him, calling his name and begging him to stop, to come back. As I watch them disappear down the road I wonder if everyone’s family is as complicated as mine. Our mother has died. Can’t we all just get along, for her sake?

  My mother and father always shared a chronic restlessness—there were periods of their lives together when they moved to a new place every two or three months—and the day after Mom’s memorial my father demonstrates that he may have lost a wife but he has not lost his urge to ramble. His RV has been parked in Kiko’s driveway during these last weeks while Mom’s been in the hospital, but now he is anxious to take off. He wants to get behind the wheel and hit the road, go somewhere. Luis and I decide to accompany Pop in the motor home on the three-hour trek to go see the house we are building in Eagle Nest, New Mexico. It is the house that I have promised to build for my mother since the age of six. It is the house we were finally building together. Except now it has become the house my mother will never see. It has become the house being built on the ground in which my mother wants her ashes to be buried.

  While Pop is driving, Luis and I take a nice long nap, bouncing around on Mom and Pop’s bed in the back bedroom of the RV. We lie there under the blankets, staring out at the Colorado Mountains, and then at the winding Rio Grande and into the New Mexican landscape beyond. I am lying on my mother’s side of the bed. I bury my head into her pillow to see if I can smell her.

  When we get to Eagle Nest we walk through the house with the builder, Eldon, and discuss everything that has been done and everything that must still be done. We talk toilets, c
ountertops, flooring, doorknobs. It is hard to concentrate, or even to care. At one point as we are standing outside, Eldon looks up and points to a huge herd of elk gathered on the mountainside above us. I wish my mother could be here to see how beautiful they are—so big and strong. As I look at the elk it strikes me that the communal beauty and strength of the herd resemble that of Mom’s big family—our clan. I can see my mother’s face in the faces of her mother and father and in each of her siblings and even in the faces of her siblings’ children—my grandparents and the sprawling army of aunts and uncles and cousins who, in the Navajo culture, are also called my mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. I see my mother’s face in all of these relatives, many of whom I barely know, and I see her face every time I look in a mirror. The strength and rich color of the elk, the way the members of the herd resemble one another and stay together and graze together, remind me of what Mom always said about our family—that we were bound to one another by forces beyond ourselves, and that we would be together always. I am beginning to understand her now, and I believe her. We are many and we are far-flung, but we will always be a family.

  When I leave the house site I head back to my father’s motor home and get ready to do some hard-core cooking in the tiny RV kitchen. This is what I always do when my family and I are together. It is what I always did with my surrogate family members when I was a teenager pursuing a dream in New York. It is what Luis and I do now, when we want to relax together. We cook. As I start to bustle around the little cooking space I remember how much I love cooking in the RV. It feels so contained and no-nonsense, so self-sufficient and cozy. I roll up my sleeves and get to work. I am going to start with some Tequila Courage Margaritas and some Killer Guacamole. And then I am going to make my mom’s famous pork chops smothered in onions and tomatoes with yellow rice and black beans. This is a recipe my father’s mother taught Mom. I know it will make us all feel better. We will still stay here in the RV beside the half-built house for Mama Jo and we will eat together.