"The Flamenco Academy" (3 page)

A triangle. The staple of opera, melodrama,
romance novels, of flamenco. Odd how knowing something is a cliché
actually makes it slightly more painful rather than less.

When I was a girl with hair turned white
blond in the Texas sun, I used to squat beside tiny funnels of dust
created by ant lions. I would carefully feed captured ants into the
funnels. The ants would scrabble frantically, trying to escape, but
all their clawing accomplished was to create microscopic avalanches
that swept them inexorably down toward the predator that waited,
hidden beneath the dry dirt.

A hot wind blew through the truck. The smoke
drifting down from the north seemed to have sealed the day’s heat
in. Still my fingers on the steering wheel were stiff and I
trembled with cold.

She was coming back. Which meant that he was
coming back as well. I had to be ready. Before I ever faced Didi
again, long before I ever faced Tomás, I had to decode the secret
I’d been given, the long history that explained so much.

I started the truck, drove to Central
Avenue, and turned right, heading east. I could have turned left
and gone west, but the future lay that way. East to West. Old to
new. That was the direction Americans took to move away from the
past. I needed to move toward the past that night. My answers were
back there, back in my history with Didi. With Tomás. Back before
any of us, any of our parents, were even born.

I passed the old Lobo Theater. It had been
converted into a Christian meeting place. I kept driving. Past Nob
Hill Shopping Center. Past the Aztec Motel. I drove Route 66 back
to where it all started. Back almost a decade to when I was still
Cyndi Rae Hrncir from Houdek, Texas. Back to when all flamenco was
to me was a big pink bird and the most exciting person ever to step
into my life was Didi Steinberg.

Naturally, Didi Steinberg had no idea on
earth who I was that day she sat with her parents in the reception
area at the oncologist’s where I was waiting by myself while my
parents consulted with the doctor. Even though Didi and I had
several classes together, she was unaware of my existence. I was
suffering through my senior year at Pueblo Heights High School in
total anonymity. I had made one friend, Nita Carabajal. Nita had
been assigned to be my physics lab partner. All we had in common
was that neither one of us had any other friends. Everyone knew who
Didi Steinberg was. She occupied a space that was a unique blend of
legend and outcast.

Didi was the coolest person I could imagine
because one look at her told you that she didn’t give a shit about
much of anything. Stories of her general wild-ass behavior had even
reached me way out in my social Siberia. I’d heard about how she
was sent to the principal for wearing a top that officially met
dress code regulations because it wasn’t spaghetti straps, but was
so short the bottom half of her tits showed. I heard how she’d put
on a tuxedo and taken herself to the prom the year before, then
danced all night with the busboys. I’d heard that she called her
car the Skankmobile and got stoned in it every day before school.
That her father was a disc jockey and she’d had her own show on his
station for a while. Mostly, though, I’d heard that Didi Steinberg
was the Groupie Queen of Albuquerque.

That day, however, slumped in a chair next
to her father, she looked like any teen trying to become invisible
when she’s with her parents. Mr. Steinberg reminded me of Daddy.
His clothes, his skin, his eyes, they all looked borrowed from a
bigger person, the person he’d been before he’d gotten sick. Even
in the best of health, though, Mr. Steinberg would have been old
enough to be Didi’s grandfather.

A nurse in lilac scrubs with a bright
aquarium print opened the door to the reception area and called
out, “Mort Steinberg.” Mr. Steinberg breathed heavily as Didi and
her mother helped him up. He had a goatee, thick, gray muttonchops,
with only a few strands of hair on top. A black turtleneck and a
silver ankh around his neck completed the ancient hipster look.

I was surprised that Didi’s mom stayed in
the waiting room and let her husband go back alone with the nurse.
My mother had not left my father’s side in the past four months,
ever since he’d developed the cough that wouldn’t go away. Mrs.
Steinberg was the most exotic woman I had ever seen. I couldn’t
decide if she was Mexican or Asian. She looked like an animé
Natalie Wood with big eyes and a broad, doll-baby face. She
gibbered away to Didi in rapid-fire Spanish.

Didi ignored her mother, pretending to be
interested in an article in
Golf Digest
. This gave me a
chance to study Didi Steinberg. She made me think of one of those
celebrities who swear in
People
magazine that they were
dorky and unpopular as teenagers and you don’t believe them until
you see the old yearbook photo and understand how out of place they
would have been in a normal life. Didi was like that, bigger than
life, at least normal life. The hard planes of her face, the harsh
flare of her nostrils, her high, slanted cheeks and wide, ravenous
mouth were too masculine for a girl, too unsettling. Not pretty,
not ugly, something more compelling than either of those
classifications. The word that popped into my mind was
arresting
because of the way she put your attention behind
bars. Didi Steinberg was made to be looked at and not just because
she wore more liner than a mime around her paisley-shaped eyes, and
she had three diamond studs glittering in her right nostril, and
she’d dyed her hair black then done the tips the color of a lime
popsicle. You would have stared at Didi Steinberg even if she’d
been wearing Chap Stick and jeans from Wal-Mart like me. Even back
then, Didi always seemed like there should be a bank of footlights
between her and the rest of the world.

If you’d taken a picture of Didi Steinberg
and looked at the negative, what you would have seen would have
been me, her exact opposite. My family had moved to Albuquerque
from Houdek, Texas, at the start of my junior year. My mom had
taken one look at the brilliant swoops of gang graffiti and metal
detectors at Pueblo Heights High School and announced that no child
of hers would ever set foot in such a place. She homeschooled me
until Daddy got sick, so when I entered Pueblo Heights at the start
of my senior year, I didn’t know a single person. In addition to
not having one friend, I had two names, Cyndi Rae, and a Texas
accent.

The first thing I had learned when we moved
to Albuquerque was that pretty much everyone in New Mexico hates
Texans. On top of that, I had a gruesome collection of consonants
for a last name, Hrncir, so every time a teacher called on me, I
had to conduct a little seminar in Czech pronunciation, HERN-SHUR.
The best any of my teachers were ever able to do was make a sound
like they had a chip stuck in the back of their throats, Hrr-KURR!
Few teachers called on me more than once. I had more than the usual
teen quota of reasons to do what came most naturally to me, which
was keep my mouth shut and try never to be noticed.

Didi suddenly looked up from
Golf
Digest
and caught me staring at her. She shot me a look that my
mother would have said “coulda killed Aunt Katie.” My mother had
lots of country sayings that no one else understood. Except my
father. Probably because they’d grown up on farms next to each
other in Houdek, a little town north of San Antonio populated
mostly by members of their two Czech families. Everyone back home
had thought my father was a giant rebel when he took a job with
Circuit City and drove forty miles into San Antonio every day and a
complete extraterrestrial when he got a big promotion and moved us
to Albuquerque.

It was a hard move for my mother. She’d
never lived more than two miles from her parents her whole life and
even after she was married always ate either breakfast or lunch
with them every day of the week and dinner every Sunday. In Houdek
everyone knew that my mom, Jerri, was high-strung. That was how
she’d been her whole life. It was the reason she’d never finished
high school in spite of having straight As and being a math genius.
She couldn’t sit still for an entire class. Sitting still made her
so nervous, she took to plucking out, first, a big patch of hair
above her right ear, then all her eyebrows. When she started in on
her eyelashes, everyone agreed that Jerri would be better off at
home.

In Houdek my mother’s high-strung
peculiarities were “just Jerri’s way.” No one ever asked my
mother’s parents if they’d thought about Ritalin or seeing a
psychologist. People in Houdek tended more to say oddball behavior
was just someone’s “way” and let it go. Still, everyone agreed that
it was a blessing when my mother married my father, easygoing Emil
Hrncir. Daddy, all reddish blond hair and freckled from the sun,
was the opposite of high-strung. Quite content to spend his days
rumbling around on the back of a tractor and his weekends hunting
dove or deer or whatever was in season, Daddy was so low-strung, in
fact, that he verged sometimes on being unstrung. I always wondered
what had brought two such different people together. Maybe Daddy
thought my mother’s relentless buzz of energy would rub off and
energize him, that they’d balance each other out. Or maybe it was
just because my mother was pretty, really, really pretty, with
wavy, strawberry blond hair, delicate features, and skin like a
baby’s. Everyone said I favored her but had Daddy’s height, though
I never saw the resemblance.

I never questioned the world I was born
into. That, in our house, the radio and television always had to be
kept at a whisper-soft volume. That all dishes had to be removed
from the table immediately upon finishing a meal. That friends were
never allowed to visit. That when my mother’s migraines struck, I
would stay home from school to bring cups of flat 7Up to her. I
never questioned it and never took it too seriously because Daddy
didn’t. Whenever Mom would tell me to stop turning the pages of my
magazine so loud, or insist that she couldn’t stand to even look at
any food that wasn’t white, or when she’d get so wound up, her
hands balled into tight fists that oscillated beside her head,
Daddy would always catch my eye and wink. Then we’d lay low
together. I’d take my magazine and sit up in the cab of the tractor
with him and we’d pretend to plow until we saw the light in my
mom’s bedroom go out. Or we’d take off early in the morning and
leave a note saying we’d gone to fish or hunt snipes, then we’d sit
all day in the Dairy Queen in Helotes and drink coffee and Cokes.
We had great times together. His favorite thing was teasing me by
asking how “Sometimes Y” was. Sometimes Y was his name for the
pretend boyfriend he claimed I had. It came out of his joke that I
would fall in love with the first boy with a lot of vowels in his
name. “A, E, I, 0, U, and Sometimes Y, right?” he’d say. I told him
to stop it. I was too shy to even talk to a boy, much less ever
have a boyfriend.

We were all right in Houdek where everyone
accepted that Jerri Hrncir was a little too tightly wound and that
Emil Hrncir was the best thing that could have ever happened to
her. We were a small-town family, designed to do what generations
of Hrncirs before us had done: farm, raise soybeans, sorghum, a
little cotton. After Granddad’s stroke, Daddy took over and might
have made it if the price of diesel along with everything else
hadn’t kept rising. After Mom’s nerves got too bad for her to
handle the bookkeeping, I was the one who itemized all the
expenditures. Like my mother, I was good with numbers. It was never
anything I worked at, just something I was born with. It was my
“way.”

When I told Daddy the bad news the numbers
had for us, he got a job with Circuit City. At first it was just to
tide us over. But the numbers told another story: he’d never go
back to farming. The transfer to Albuquerque was a shock to Jerri
that she never recovered from. We left Houdek right after the last
day of my sophomore year, when the creeks were still running and
the fields were still green and succulent. We drove a U-Haul truck
loaded with our stuff to Albuquerque and parked it in front of a
house Daddy had flown out earlier to rent for us. It was flat on
top and squared off as a shoe box with red lava rocks where a lawn
should have been and one spindly desert willow out front that
didn’t cast enough shade to cool off an ant. Mom took one look at
the shoe-box house and burst into tears. She folded her arms across
her chest and locked Albuquerque out as much as she possibly could.
Everything about the city frightened her, annoyed her, or dried her
skin out.

Daddy got a giant-screen TV as a return from
Circuit City and Mom kept it turned on night and day. Every time
there was anything on the news about someone being taken to the
West Mesa and raped or a drive-by shooting in the south valley, Mom
stepped up our home security system. She had bars put on all the
windows, triple dead bolts on the doors, and an alarm system wired
to a special private security service. I think she’d decided to
homeschool me before she even saw Pueblo Heights, but the armed cop
at the entrance and the sight of more brown than white faces sealed
the deal for her.

The one good thing for me about
homeschooling was that I discovered an incredible online math
program that let me go as far and as fast as I wanted in calculus,
trig, some statistics. The only people I met my junior year were
other homesehoolers and the geeks I competed against in Math
Olympiad. It was through the homeschooler group that Mom connected
with HeartLand, the weirdo church she ended up joining. The major
emphasis of HeartLand seemed to be to remind women that they were
“subject” to their husbands and to try to return to what they
imagined was a simpler time. None of the women from Mom’s new
church cut their hair and they all wore clothes that they thought
small-town people wore. But no one I ever knew back in Houdek would
have been caught dead in a long denim skirt and high-buttoned
blouse like a five-year-old would wear to a piano recital.