Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (2 page)

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, my mother’s second baby girl, and her fourth child. Two husbands later, our number would swell to six. When my mom squeezed our lives onto a bus headed west, our family began a pattern that would define my siblings’ and my childhood: packing, scrambling, leaving—often barely surviving.

I don’t remember the ride, but it took two days. Our final stop was the city of Bellflower, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles. We started anew there, and for a time that would turn out to be too brief, we had a home full of comfort and warmth, along with a new father.

His name was Harold. A childhood friend of my mother’s, he met us at the bus station, and a little over a year later, he became her third husband. Harold was a sales executive for the Santa Fe Railroad, but his personality didn’t match the stiffness of his title. He looked like the baseball player Darryl Strawberry in his home run–hitting prime—tall, muscular, and chestnut brown. Until my sister Lindsey was born three years later, I was the family’s baby and tiny for my age. Harold would scoop me up in his strong arms and tickle me until I dissolved into tears of laughter.

Most of my earliest memories aren’t of my mother, but of him. We kids were practically spilling out the front door and windows of our small apartment, but if our home sometimes resembled a three-ring circus, Harold was more the ringmaster than a parental figure committed to reining us in. He was a prankster with an infectious laugh. When my mother wanted him to discipline us kids, he would turn even that into a game.

“I’m not really going to spank you, but holler like I am,” he’d whisper as he corralled us in the bedroom and shut the door. Then he’d take his broad palm and loudly slap the bed.

“No, Daddy, no,” we’d scream, choking down giggles as we put on a performance we thought worthy of an Oscar. Mommy, satisfied and sitting in the living room, was none the wiser.

Despite there being so many of us, Harold would carve out
moments that made each of us feel like his only child. I remember loving sunflower seeds so much that my sisters and brothers took to calling me Bird. I trace my obsession to the times I would sit with Harold on the couch, the two of us alone together, popping seeds in our mouths and cracking the salty shells. Mommy hated it because the shells would fall between the cushions, making a mess. But memories of those afternoons remain precious to me.

That was the side of Harold we kids saw: cheerful, comforting, kind. But behind that facade of laughter and fun, my mother saw something entirely different. Harold was an alcoholic. We caught only glimpses of it, out the corners of our eyes, like the ever-present beer can on my parents’ nightstand. But I later found out that what was mostly invisible to us was in Mommy’s plain sight.

When I was eight or nine and we had a new home and a new daddy, Mommy would tell us stories of Harold not being in his right mind because of liquor, and how it sometimes frightened her.

When I was in middle school, Lindsey, his biological daughter, would often stay with him, and I would join them a few nights a week. By then, I had a best friend, Jackie Phillips. We were inseparable. I thought she was beautiful—lean with dark brown skin, she towered over me. We had most of our school activities in common.

Jackie lived right around the corner from our middle school, so Mommy didn’t mind me staying there a couple of nights a week before Harold would come back to pick me up.

One night, Jackie and I were cracking up, blasting TLC’s
CrazySexyCool
while we did our homework. The phone rang.
Jackie’s mom yelled that it was for me. Lindsey was on the line, crying.

“Daddy’s drunk,” she said through her tears. “I told him that he shouldn’t drive. Can you find another way home?”

I hung up the phone feeling sick to my stomach, not sure whether to tell Jackie’s mother what was going on or to call Mommy.

I went back into Jackie’s room. Time ticked by as I tried to figure out what to do. Too much time, as it turned out. The doorbell rang. It was Lindsey. Harold was waiting in the car.

I guess he knew better than to come to the door in his condition in front of Mrs. Phillips. When I got to the car, it reeked of cigarette smoke and beer. Harold put the key in the ignition and his foot on the gas, and we sped off over the Long Beach Bridge. My heart was pounding as the streetlights streaked by.

Lindsey and I sat in the backseat holding each other’s hands tightly. This was truly the first time we understood the condition Mommy spoke of so often. We wove in and out of the lanes on the bridge that night at high speed, so close to the side rails hundreds of feet above the ocean. We feared for our lives. Yet there was something inside me and Lindsey that had such a strong image of Harold’s warmth and gentleness that we did our best to never show him that we knew he was drunk or that it changed our perception of him.

The next time Lindsey called to tell me Harold was drunk, I asked to speak to him and told him that I would just spend the night at Jackie’s, that he didn’t have to pick me up.

I never loved Harold any less. To me, he remains one of the best parts of my childhood, the daddy who’d cook Lindsey and me waffles and serve them to us on plastic trays while we
watched cartoons in our pajamas on Saturday mornings. I remember him sitting in the bathroom with me when I was four, holding my hand while I cried, straining from a stomachache. Memories of Harold are never cloudy, only clear and bright. And he’s now been in recovery for fifteen years.

But five years after we’d arrived at Harold’s apartment, Mommy decided that, once again, it was time to pick up and go.

Mommy strapped Lindsey into her car seat in the blue Mercedes station wagon while the rest of us squeezed in around her, finding space wherever we could. As we drove to God knew where, there was no tussling, no yelling. We were too confused to laugh, too scared to play around.

Our leaving was always like that—dramatic, hurried, and ragged.

Slender, not quite five feet six, until Mommy reached middle age she looked more like somebody’s cool and sultry big sister than a mother of six. Mommy retired her Kansas City Chiefs pom-poms after only one season, but she carried a cheerleader’s exuberance throughout her life, rooting for her children and always smiling, despite too many marriages gone wrong and, at times, bill collectors on our trail.

To this day, I’m still trying to understand Mommy, all that shaped her and, most of all, the choices she made. She didn’t talk much about her childhood, but from what I could glean, it was filled with pain. She was born to an Italian mother and an African American father, parents whom she would never know. They put her up for adoption, and while they didn’t leave an explanation saying why they didn’t keep her, I’m sure that, at a time when blacks and whites could go to jail for being married in many states, they peered into the
future and figured that raising a biracial child was more than they could handle.

Mommy was given a home by an older African American couple, a social worker and her husband, but they died while she was still very young. From there she began to shuttle between the homes of various relatives and ended up mostly raising herself.

Leaving Harold was the beginning of a time when I could measure my days through my mother’s boyfriends, her dependence on an ever-changing string of men. But all that clarity came later, when I was much older. On the night we left Harold, I was only seven, and the movements of my life weren’t yet up to me. Our family was headed to San Pedro, a portside community nestled next to Los Angeles Harbor, and it would be the place to which we would always return, the place that, in between the picking up and leaving, my siblings and I would forever think of as home.

I DON’T KNOW IF
Harold knew that his wife and children were leaving him. But the man who eventually became our new stepfather knew that we were on our way. Robert, my mother’s soon-to-be fourth husband, was the polar opposite of the man who had been her third. A successful radiologist, Robert was a little chubby, and, like my half-Italian, half-black mother, of mixed race, with bloodlines that were Hawaiian, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, and Japanese.

A century earlier, fishermen from Japan, as well as from Croatia, Greece, and Italy, had plied San Pedro’s waters for
sardines and albacore, making Los Angeles Harbor the biggest fishing port in the country by the 1920s. Fishing was a hard trade. Growing up, I heard of longshoremen who were killed on the docks. But it was also a good living, and many of the local men—my schoolmates’ fathers, brothers, and uncles—chose to answer the sea’s call.

Life in San Pedro was etched by the sea, so much so that I don’t ever recall learning to swim, only that from the beginning of my time there I was able to glide through the water effortlessly. When I hit my teens, my clothes would carry the scent of burned wood from bonfires on the beach. And there was many a school field trip to the Angel’s Gate Lighthouse, a structure built in 1913 that still serves as the port’s sentry. When a ship needs guidance, the foghorn pierces the quiet with two blasts every thirty seconds. As a child, the sound must have interrupted our games of jump rope, our lessons, our prayers. But it blared so often that the longer we lived there, the less we noticed it, and it faded into the background, like a heartbeat.

We were a part of Los Angeles but about as far from Hollywood, the city’s flashy, mythical core, as you could get. Except for the palm trees, San Pedro was a lot like Mayberry, the fictitious country town that existed only on black-and-white TVs. Generations lived and died there, unwilling to pull up the roots that their grandparents had buried deep in the sandy soil.

There were no skyscrapers. Instead, downtown was like a daguerreotype come to life, with gaslights and Victorian shops. In San Pedro, it was the simple and familiar that mattered. Most of my old neighbors have no recollection of the time I won a life-changing award dancing the role of Kitri in
Don Quixote
at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, even though
my picture was splashed on the front of the
Daily Breeze.
But everyone still talks about the talent show at Point Fermin Elementary when I wore a white wedding dress and little, skinny Aaron, my classmate, serenaded me from down on his knees. That’s the kind of thing that they remember in San Pedro: Aaron, my frilly costume, and a heartfelt but painfully off-key love song.

There were so many hills and curves on the way to Robert’s home that it looked as if we would drive right into the Pacific Ocean before the car suddenly, mercifully, swerved and hugged the next bend. The house was a single story built in the Mediterranean style, with a huge front yard.

It was a perfect house on a perfect block—and what seemed like the portal to a perfect life. You could even see Catalina Island from the front porch, gleaming like a mirage in the morning fog. But what looks perfect is often just an illusion, like the dancer with a strained hamstring who wears a smile instead of a grimace when she lands as delicately as a butterfly despite her pain.

We kids didn’t pay much attention to the beauty around us. We were too busy trying to figure out why we were here, what had gone wrong, and, most of all, when we would see Harold again. But this was home now, and soon we fell into the rhythms of our new life.

We had chores for the first time: taking out the garbage, washing the dishes, sweeping the breakfast crumbs off the floor. And there was no more grabbing a plate and eating on the couch. We sat down at the dining room table for our meals—morning, noon, and night.

That was okay. We Copelands were like a nomadic tribe:
hardy, fiercely protective of our band, and adaptable. We clung tightly to one another. And there were so many of us, we made our own party, our own fun, wherever we ended up and whatever the rules or circumstances.

My oldest sister, Erica, was twelve when we moved in with Robert. She was the most like our mother, vivacious and outspoken. She led our brood on the daily walks to school and tended to my bushel of hair, pulling it back into tight ponytails or blow-drying it straight after my bath.

Doug Jr., our oldest brother, was eleven, the namesake and, we would one day learn, the spitting image of our father. He was fiercely intelligent and so intent on gathering knowledge that he would curl up in the chair and read the dictionary the way other boys burrowed into comic books.

Like so many African Americans, our family was of mixed ancestry. We had an Italian grandmother on our mother’s side, and our father was the son of a German woman and an African American man. But Doug Jr. stood firm in his blackness.

One day, when I was in third grade, I came home and found Doug Jr. sitting on the porch. His brow was furrowed as he fiddled with something small and white that he held in his hands.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I’m reading about our history—about slavery—and I wanted to know what it felt like for our ancestors,” he said. “So I’m picking cotton.”

Unlike sand or seashells, raw cotton wasn’t easy to find in San Pedro. But somehow he’d gotten ahold of some and was spending time picking the seeds out of a white wisp. That was quintessentially Doug: intense, conscious, and culturally curious.