Starting from Here

Starting from Here

1

Though Al objected to the idea of his son traipsing around in a tutu, Eve enrolled Leon in a local dancing class, figuring that since Leon was always tripping on the playground and running into things, ending up with stitches, concentrating on where his body was in relation to what was around him would be good for him.

Of course René wanted to do everything her older brother did. But she was too young for school, too young for dance class. So she’d skip and hop, twirling around the living room as Bobby and Sissy polka-ed through the champagne bubbles on The Lawrence Welk Show, Al’s favorite—making Al chuckle and Eve stop whatever she was doing to laugh along.

“Always hogging the spotlight,” Eve would say, shaking her head as Leon let the screen door slam behind him and took off on his bike to meet up with the neighbor kids.

Years later, after Leon and René had been studying together night after night at what may have been the world’s most unlikely ballet school—the only one for more than three hundred miles on the great, unbroken plains of South Dakota—René was in pas de deux class, turning, whirling through multiple pirouettes en pointe under the power of her brother’s hands.

Leon was tall and strong with dark wavy hair and deep brown eyes, and he knew just how to keep her on balance—an unspoken, unerring bond linking their weight and movement, one to the other. And as she spun through rotations she never could have managed on her own, the world was reduced to a single point of light. Everything quiet.

Then glissade and lift, and she was flying. From there, straight into piqué arabesque, then tour jeté, Leon effortlessly setting her up onto his shoulder. And after a mere blink of suspension, she was diving headlong, nose-to-the-ground, Leon catching her at just the right moment, placing her directly onto her pointe for a single beat of sublime, trembling balance.

Was there anything else like it on earth?

There was not.

Leon was teased at school, called “twinkletoes,” “pansy,” and worse—even by teachers—and willfully ignored by Al, whose attention he craved.

Al smoked and paced and worried whenever he was home, off the road for a few days between cattle sales. No one was ever particularly happy to see him. He and Eve fought day and night. Mostly about Leon: Leon’s friends, Leon’s hair, Leon’s dancing. Especially Leon’s dancing.

But when René danced, they’d stop their bickering to cheer her on, whatever was wrong between them left behind for a moment of peace and camaraderie.

So she’d grand jeté and chaine through the house, trying to lighten the mood, while, in the fallout from one of Eve and Al’s regular shouting matches—“You don’t listen, Eve. I’ve told you a thousand times!” and “What do you want from me, Al? You’re never around. I do everything. Everything, for God sakes,” and “Oh yes, everything. Like turning your son into a ballerina. Just where do you imagine we live, Eve? What part of the country?”—Al watched The Carol Burnett Show, smoking cigarettes down to the nub, Eve slammed pots and pans in the kitchen, the youngest, Jayne, played quietly with her Kiddle Kologne dolls, and Leon, who’d given up dancing by the end of junior high, simply disappeared, skipping school to raid the liquor cabinet at one of his new friends’ houses, to kick back with a bottle of whiskey or tequila.

Eve had met Al when she was just fifteen and he was twenty-two, home from air force training. She’d graduated valedictorian of her high school class, but instead of going to business college like she’d planned, like she’d always wanted—to become a personal secretary, a “professional girl”—she’d married Al on her eighteenth birthday. “How stupid was I?” she’d say again and again, charging through the house with a dust rag or the vacuum cleaner, shaking her head. “So stupid. Jesus Christ. A bona fide idiot.”

It was René’s dancing that made Eve proud—that made them both proud. Eve bragged about it to her bridge club, and Al went on about it to the other cattle buyers at the livestock auctions in Philip and Fort Pierre. And René was talented. She knew the thrill of controlling her body, of attending to detail, of marshaling the power to cut through space.

So she’d been sent away to Phoenix. Not because the fights she and Eve were getting into were suddenly turning fierce and incomprehensible—Eve blaming her for how unfair it was that she “got everything” and Leon “got nothing.”

No. She’d been sent away for one reason and one reason alone—to become a dancer, to “make something” of herself, as Eve said it.

And now, in Phoenix—living with an unfamiliar family, in an unfamiliar house, on an unfamiliar road—she was making a new beginning. Like in the fairy tale, she just needed to spin straw into gold.

2

A street ran by the house where she was staying in Phoenix, the house where she lived, the house where Eve and Al were paying “good money” for her to be. She didn’t know what street it was or what part of town it was in or whether it followed a river or led to a highway.

The house was in the country, or nearly in the country. At least, there weren’t any stores or other houses nearby. Not that she could see. It seemed like maybe there was a railroad. At night she imagined a freight train running right across the street, which she knew it didn’t do. But it was definitely in the country because there were lemon trees in the back and grapefruits and limes, plus a stone walkway that led to a little cottage where a grandmother lived, though René had never seen her.

There have to be neighbors somewhere, she thought. Maybe way down the road where the cars disappear?

But she was too young to drive, and the parents at this house never continued down the road in front. They simply turned left out of the driveway, rounded the nearest corner, and went straight ahead onto a street that was empty but for large warehouses set off in dusty fields dotted with sparse bunches of what must have been cactus. And suddenly—instead of far-off jagged mountain peaks like back home—there were low-slung strip malls popping up, multiplying, coming to line both sides of whatever thoroughfare they’d ended up on.

3

All her life she’d been told she was beautiful. In summer the sun streaked her hair with gold and sprinkled her nose with pale freckles, and her mother said she was beautiful and her grandmother said she was beautiful and everyone she met seemed to comment on some aspect of her appearance—her dark blond hair falling down the length of her back or woven into two long braids, her long legs and lean build, her dark brows and long lashes, her blue-gray eyes and Cupid’s bow mouth and sweet smile.

“Well, isn’t she a picture. Isn’t she a beauty! Look out. Hahaha,” people would say, winking at Al or giving Eve a look of warning.

And she was all right. She was good-looking, for sure.

But no matter that everyone seemed to agree that a girl should be at least pretty enough to attract a stranger’s attention, she could see now that, for her, being “pretty” was going to be complicated. Because the dad at this house in Phoenix—who was thin and hairy and supposedly an orthodontist, though he never seemed to go to work—sat every night in his chair pretending to watch television as he snuck sidelong glances at her in her white cotton nightie. Every night, after she’d changed out of her ballet clothes, he trained his eyes on her as if she were the fox and he’d gone a-hunting—scratching his head and thighs with abandon, enormous flakes of dandruff raining onto his bathrobe as he ogled her through thick Coke-bottle glasses, grinning and blushing.

“He’s taking time off,” the mom told her quietly one morning, seeming to be both apologizing and attempting to explain.

Though René hadn’t asked why the dad sat in his chair day and night like that, she’d been wondering.

“He had a heart attack last spring and he’s very weak,” the mom whispered, pouring milk into a serving pitcher.

And strange as he was, René felt sorry for him. Not just because of the heart attack. She could see how his whole life must have been. Lonely. So she figured that, under the circumstances, she shouldn’t mind if he looked at her that way, piercing the thin white of her nightie with his big round eyeballs. But she did mind. It bothered her. She’d only brought the one nightie, since there were other, more important things she’d needed to pack when she left home. And it was white—not sheer but not not sheer, either.

Still, the mom’s explanation clarified one thing, and René began to understand why they’d agreed to let her live with them here—wherever this actually was—in the first place. Despite the blooming succulent garden, the hearty fruit trees, the meandering pink stone walkway, the lush green vines winding up to the awnings, with the orthodontist spending whole days in his leather recliner in front of the television, they likely needed the money Eve and Al were sending.