Points to me.
The secretary writes something down.
An hour later, Mom, Dad, and I sit
Before a scholarship offer:
A year of study at the Jersey Ballet.
And though the July Fourth fireworks
Are still a sunset away,
My heart explodes.
In the morning, I unpin the numbers
From my leotard.
The safety pins have left little holes
In the black nylon.
I smooth the paper rectangles,
Fold them once.
I know that other girls
Were offered places at ballet schools
In better cities:
Boston, Miami, New York.
But though I did not admit this to Ms. Alice
Or Mom
Or even Dad,
I was uncertain
Number 78
Would be good enough
For any place beyond Darby Station.
Ms. Alice signed me up
For this audition,
Said I was ready.
Dad glowed with silent pride.
Mom preened, prompted, pressing
For details on what time to arrive,
Best place to park.
I nodded
As if I had dreamed of this day
Before it was suggested to me—
As if I had imagined
Dancing up Ms. Alice’s basement stairs
Into some sort of real world.
Before yesterday, prima
Of small-town Vermont
Was all that I imagined.
Now
My head reels.
My dream shifts,
Expands.
Big news is
Hard to share
In a small town.
Kari, Tina, and I sit on tinny bleachers
Behind the high school,
Watch Billy Allegra drive his dad’s tractor,
Plowing down waist-high weeds
From the county fairground fields
Beyond the fence.
“I’m leaving,” I say, not too loud.
Watch Billy, tanned and shirtless,
Turn the tractor.
“I got a dance scholarship.”
First they squeal,
Pat my back.
Then
Tina rolls her eyes.
“Least you’re getting out of here.”
“That’s so cool,” Kari says.
But her shoulder is just a little bit turned away.
My best friend, Bess, is at music camp.
I text,
“Got a scholarship
Jersey Ballet.”
She texts back,
“Cool.”
Then,
“When?”
Then,
“Will you be gone
Before the fair?”
For the last six summers
Tina, Kari, Bess, and I
Lolled on fence posts,
Gorged on cotton candy,
Watched older girls flirt and line dance.
Promised each other that, soon, we’d be the ones
Prancing in short-short denim,
T-shirts knotted above our waists.
Promised that, when we were sixteen, we’d dare
Sneak into the tattoo artist’s trailer
To mark our friendship
In ink.
I see the penciled star
On a top September square
Of Mom’s calendar by the woodstove;
Three weeks before the weekend of the fair.
Type, “Yeah. I’ll be gone.”
It’s longer before Bess’s next reply.
“2 bad.”
Then a line
About a drummer,
Stephen,
She let get to second base.
When you flirt with the mirror
You never pose
In baby first position.
Nor in second,
Though they teach that next.
Feet turned out but apart
Makes for an ungainly grand plié,
A few ugly jumps.
“I am going to study
At the Jersey Ballet,”
I whisper to my reflection
In the antique looking-glass
Mom hung over my bedroom dresser.
Bat my eyes
At some invisible boy.
Imagine second base
Nothing
Like second position.
When you flirt with the mirror
You pose in fifth, arms high.
Better still, arabesque.
Best of all, not posing
But spinning in a perfect pirouette.
After the fireworks,
Summer stretches its long limbs,
An unending series of parallel days.
Mom leaves for the air-conditioned bank.
Dad races to the orchard, where the peaches
Are rosy and enticing
For a tiny window of time
Before they drop from their boughs,
Helpless fodder for deer and mice,
Splendor forgotten.
I spend long hours in my room,
Reread favorite books,
Reorganize the things I will take to Jersey,
Scribble dreams into my black-and-white notebook,
Imagine the future until I am completely terrified
Or ridiculously excited
Or weary from the humid heat.
Up the road
Mrs. Allegra can always use some help
With the newest baby
In her giant, Catholic house
Where children tumble out of crevices
Like that woman in the shoe.
I can swim in their pond
Whenever I take a handful of her school-age ones along,
Lead the girls in made-up steps
Of a water ballet and
Keep the boys from swimming out too far.
In July, Ms. Alice and her husband
Visit their grown son and grandchildren in Maine.
So I plié, relevé, stretch
Alone
In the soft sand.
Try to hold on to whatever it was
Yevgeny saw in Boston.
“Hey, Sara.” Billy, the oldest,
Tosses a pinecone over my head.
We used to build sand castles on this spot
But it hasn’t been the same since that night
Just after school let out
When the moon stretched Billy’s shadow
Across the narrow beach.
I darted beneath a tree branch.
He met me around the scrub hedge,
My skin blushing in darkness,
His breath hotter than summer air.
He cocked his head, leaned in, but
He had grown taller,
Smelled like Dad’s aftershave.
Done with sophomore year of high school,
My head level with his shoulder,
The next step should have been natural
As sun ripening fruit, but,
My mind awhirl, I felt myself pull back—
Take too many steps in the wrong direction.
He straightened up, walked away
Before the glow could fade from my cheeks.
Now I watch him from the safety of fairground fence posts.
I think of Bess and the boy, Stephen.
Wonder how she let him slide his hands
Beneath her shirt.
Pick up a pinecone
But don’t throw it.
July dribbles into August
Like wet sand onto play castles,
With books and dreams of Billy Allegra
Where I am as brave
As when I wear pointe shoes.
In the evenings, Dad and I watch Mom
Make all my arrangements.
>
Efficient banker-mode never releases
Her hunched shoulders.
She fills out permission forms,
Piles new school supplies,
Weeds unmatched socks from my dresser drawer.
I know the suitcases I bring to Jersey
Will be packed with clothes she has chosen,
Arranged in outfits she will try to get me to wear
Even from hundreds of miles away.
One last sleepover at Bess’s house,
Lying on blankets
In her basement bedroom.
Listening to her little sisters
Giggling in the hallway,
Listening to her parents
Begging them to settle down.
Listening to Bess’s iPod:
Jazz
Show tunes
Big bands swinging
Songs I never hear
At the ballet studio.
Bess the trumpet player,
Room painted dare-you bright blue,
Silver-striped curtains,
Giant posters of Miles Davis, Arturo Sandoval,
Taped onto the far wall.
While I,
With my pointe shoes,
Long, straight locks,
Ballet scholarship,
Feel false,
Wishing my bedroom walls shouted in sapphire,
Wishing I liked jazz
Or Frank Sinatra,
That my sound track didn’t feel
Jumbled, discordant,
Blaring from speakers outside
My heart
Or sometimes, so close
To silence.
My eyes open before Bess’s
To the sound of her mom’s voice
Calling down the stairs.
“Pancakes, girls?”
Pancakes at Bess’s house
Are studded with blackberries,
Shreds of lemon peel,
Drowning in maple syrup
Boiled down behind their barn.
I watch Bess,
Who sleeps longer,
Doesn’t crave
Her mother’s creations,
Just wonders
If she wants to call Stephen
Or if she didn’t like kissing him
All that much.
“Wanna go down?”
I whisper.
“Remember?” Bess says
As she opens her eyes, kicks herself free
Of the black-and-white quilt.
“We were gonna get tattoos
This fall at the fair.
A ballet slipper for you.”
“A music note for you.”
“Right here.” Bess giggles,
Touches a spot on her breast.
“You wouldn’t!”
“Where else?” She sits up.
“Where would you put that ballet slipper?”
Dad’s horn outside the window
Saves me from having to pretend I know
Where I’d let the bearded guy
At the fairground tattoo parlor
Drive his pen.
“Sara! Your dad’s waiting,”
Bess’s mom calls.
Bess helps me roll my sleeping bag,
Collect my brush, book, mascara.
“Good-bye!
Good luck!
Have fun!”
Takes my departure for the city
As a matter of course—
Something right as a harmonic chord—
What people like us do.
Though, all the time we traded dance and music magazines,
Talked of rehearsals, recitals,
I’d secretly thought
Bess would be the one to follow a melody
Far away from Darby Station.
On the way
My heart beats faster
Every mile we drive.
Syncopated beats pound between
Excitement and
Yearning
To paste the falling brown leaves
Back on the trees,
Turn the burgeoning fall
Back to summer,
When I could loft my nose into the sun-drenched air,
Announce
My scholarship to the Jersey Ballet
Four states south
Of my country home
Without actually
Having
Togo.
Turning off the exit,
Dad’s fingers drum the steering wheel
Like they always do
When he doesn’t have a cigarette in hand.
His car stinks of stale smoke
Despite constant attempts to quit.
Still, I can’t stand
To open the windows,
The pressure in my ears, the mess of my hair,
The scary sense that something from these city streets
Will fly through the window
And hurt me.
He turns onto a wide avenue.
“Red light,” I yelp.
“Shit!” Dad slams the brake.
Right hand slices across my gut.
Seat belt tightens against my neck.
His eyes telegraph a thousand apologies,
Ever afraid to mar what he sees
As flawless.
As if I could stop the forward momentum,
The ball of my foot presses
Against the car mat.
Half in the intersection,
The light still red,
I scan left and right,
Terrified an inattentive driver
Will fail to swerve around us.
At last,
Green.
Forward into the safely moving lane.
“You really want this, right?”
Dad’s voice is soft as country soil.
I am not like the seasons, the seeds he knows
How to grow.
“Want what?” I taunt,
Like I would never taunt a boy my age.
A silence longer than a metronome beat.
Another.
A third.
I remember signing my name on the paper in Boston,
Mom’s frantic packing.
Dad’s systematic mapping of the route to Jersey
Has become my inevitable course,
So what difference would it make for me to say
That it is complicated?
That I am both excited
And afraid.
“Because you can come home anytime.
We can turn around
Right now.”
Now I bleat,
“I want this.”
I feel queasy
Though Dad’s sudden stop
Is long past.
While my fears and wishes
Frantically duel,
Tugging my stomach and my heart
In a thousand directions,
The car drives
Straight
Toward my destination.
Señor Medrano waves
From his cement stoop.
The celebrated Chilean ballet master
Has agreed to house me for the year,
But I had not imagined
His dark, oiled hair, firm waist,
Wild eyes
Living in this bland, middle-class lane.
The split-level house, pinkish-beige,
Sits between a dozen like-painted, split-level houses.
Every fifth sidewalk square
Sports a tired-looking birch tree straggling upward
From a hole in its center.
Dad takes my big suitcase and small duffel.
I grab my ballet bag and follow him
Up the chipped stairs, through the front hall.
“So, Sah-ra.”
Señor’s accent makes my name all sighs.
“Here you are, sí?”
He leads us upstairs to my new room
With red shag carpet
, smelling faintly of mildew,
A closet with sliding doors,
Twin bed with a shiny, synthetic spread
Splattered with bright poppies.
“My wife”—the teacher struggles
To find English words—
“Think you might like de flowers on de bed.
She be back next week.
When de dancing tour finish in
Vah-len-ciah.” (Like Sah-ra,
All sighs.)
I am glad Señora Medrano,
The famous flamenco dancer,
Isn’t here to meet me today,
Because I don’t like the quilt.
But I tweak my lips up into a smile.
Audition Page 2
