Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (6 page)

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?”

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.

When Robert was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon for his father to hit him. Robert was thrust into the role of fathering five kids, and I think he was trying to raise the boys the way he’d been brought up. He was hard on my brothers, especially Chris, who was rambunctious and loud.

Once when Chris was boiling the rice for dinner, he burned the grains into a thick crust in the bottom of the pot. Robert literally dragged him back to the kitchen by his ear. “Clean it up!” he screamed, and Chris quickly obeyed. Another time, for an infraction I can no longer remember, Robert hit Chris with a frying pan.

Sometimes Robert encouraged violence rather than inflicting it.

Chris and Doug were arguing with each other one Saturday like they often did, this time about whose football team would have a better season.

“The Forty-Niners!” Chris shouted.

“You must be crazy,” Doug yelled. “Do you know what Randall Cunningham has done for the Eagles this year?”

Suddenly, Robert intervened. “Since you guys can’t agree, you’ll have to fight it out.”

Robert made the boys walk behind him out to the backyard. Then he got some of the rags he used to buff his Jeep from inside the garage. He wrapped my brothers’ fists.

“Now,” Robert screamed. “Fight!”

It was an awful ritual that we’d see again and again, a battle royal that seemed designed to showcase his power over us all. Mommy would stand to the side, watching and crying. But she never stopped it. The fight would usually end when one of my brothers would say he gave up and both were in tears.

We grew to be terrified of Robert. When we heard his Jeep barreling around the corner, rumbling into the long driveway, we’d scramble, picking up toys, straightening up magazines, afraid that if the house wasn’t clean and organized the way Robert liked it, there would be hell to pay. Erica began to spend the night at a friend’s house as often as she could. And Doug and Chris spent a lot of time in their room.

I’d often join my brothers there, crawling into Doug’s top bunk, where we’d listen to tapes of New Edition, or the latest rhymes from MC Hammer and LL Cool J.

“Mr. Telephone Man, there’s something wrong with my line.”
Doug and I would bop our heads to the beat. We felt safe there together, just us and our music.

But we could avoid Robert for only so long, and we didn’t have to do much to make him angry. And though he was tough on the boys for acting out, Lindsey didn’t have to do anything at all to earn his wrath.

Lindsey, our baby sister, was the spitting image of her father, Harold, with skin the color of caramelized butter and
a tight tuft of dark brown curls. She looked more African American than any of our mixed-race clan, and it seemed that whenever there was a glass broken, a toy in the middle of the floor, or too much yelling on a Sunday morning, Lindsey was always,
always
to blame.

Often, when he was angry, he would call Lindsey a nigger.

It stunned me. That was a word I’d heard only in black-and-white documentaries about the bad old South. I knew it was a terrible thing to call my baby sister.

We’d hear that slur and many more often over the next few years. The Arab guy at the store was a “sand nigger.” Robert talked about smelly Indians. He’d use the N word when a black man cut him off on the freeway and talk about spics when he saw Latino teenagers hanging out on the playground.

Things just got worse between Robert and Mommy. She began to confide in us kids, telling us stories about Robert’s family that we really had no business hearing. Like how they didn’t believe our baby brother Cameron was Robert’s child, though by the time Cameron’s newborn smoothness disappeared and his features came into focus, it was clear he was the mirror image of his father.

Looking back, it’s clear that Robert’s family didn’t trust my mother. And as hateful as some of them were, in some ways I don’t blame them. Robert had a comfortable life on his own, and then all of a sudden this woman moved in with her five children. She was older than him, still married to another man, and they lived together a year and a half and had a baby before they finally headed to City Hall and became husband and wife. It was all very shady, and now, with the perspective that comes with distance and time, I can understand why they were wary.

But it was shocking to realize that for certain of them the
main
reason for hating my mother, for not wanting my brothers and sisters even to visit, seemed to be because we were black. It was the first time I’d felt any negativity because of the way my family looked or because of what we were.