Читать книгу Brother and the Dancer - Keenan Norris - Страница 10

Ballet slippers might as well be glass slippers; matter-fact, might’s well be glass ceilings, Erycha thought. The ballet slippers she could buy, but it was all the expenses that purchasing the slippers entailed that became the problem. The slippers were an investment, followed by one expense after the next, so much money down the rabbit hole that her dancing life had become. There was no way to justify spending all that money, but once those slippers were on her feet again Erycha knew how hard it would be not to take the next step. Her whole body went tense at the thought of those slippers, like a noose drawn tight. The boy sitting next to her in the bleachers must have felt it, too, because he flinched a little and gave her a quick, concerned glance.

Erycha looked back at him. Couldn’t take her eyes off him now. She hadn’t had but two hours of sleep and figured the Kool-Aid red veins around her pupils probably made her look crazy. She noticed how the boy was leaning away from her and into his mother as he frowned back in her direction. He even lowered his gaze. But she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

Erycha didn’t know what college would be like. Already she was having trouble concentrating on what the student speaker wearing a gray U.S. Army T-shirt was preaching from his pulpit of a podium at the basketball gym’s center court. Her attention had run off and hid and no matter what the man said, he couldn’t call it back.

Sitting next to her but leaning away and into his mom, Touissant Robert Freeman wasn’t interested in ethnic diversity or a more perfect university culture or anything else that the student speaker had to say. The speaker was from the military, which meant that he probably knew a lot about the mercenaries and losers that populated college campuses. A speech along those lines, or to do with the coked-up Christian college kid who earlier that year went wilding like an act of God and burned down the neighborhood Buddhist temple, now that would make for an interesting speech. Touissant thought about the brand new mega church, its cement foundation snuffing out smoldering embers. The best stories never got told, or people long after the fact and far from the source mixed things up and got it all wrong.

He listened to the speaker firing off automatic rounds of platitudes, but his attention drifted to the girl sitting next to him: just a second prior she’d leaned into him out of carelessness or suggestion and he’d noticed the momentary friction of her skin on his. She was the color of chocolate and wood, her body small and light so that it only slightly moved him when she leaned in. Her eyes were fierce, charged with an intensity not of her environment. He didn’t try to meet her gaze.

The second phase of orientation involved ushering the parents away with suggestions of fine dining in city restaurants and the refettering of the students based on their intended majors. Touissant kept his eye on the girl from the bleachers as she made her way out of the gym. He decided he would major in whatever she had decided to do with her life.

He followed the girl underneath a placard reading Dance. She had a long striding walk, elegant for such a short and shapely girl. And she moved slow too, slow enough that he walked up too close behind her and ticked her foot, which caused her to lose her footing and tremble in her heels.

“Hey there, what’s your name?” he asked opportunistically. He came shoulder-to-shoulder with her.

She cut her eyes his way. “Erycha Evans.”

Erycha gave him her hand.

He was already looking at her, appraising her. She judged him and his appraising eyes right back, a full-on stare. Like so many boys, he had eyelashes that she would kill for; even once-a-week trips to Miss Simms’s beauty parlor couldn’t lengthen her lashes that long. Ironic, she thought, how pretty a boy could be. She thought about the beauty parlor back home, the sweet smells, the sour talk, the divas coming and going and prettying her up. She didn’t have money enough to go there and get fine right now. She knew she was half as pretty as she could be, wondered why he was even interested.

“Where you from?” she asked.

He blinked at her like the question was unusual somehow even though it was the first question everyone asked where she was from. “Highland,” he said after a second.

“You are?”

He nodded.

“Me too,” she stuttered, “I’m from there, too.”

She had never seen him before. He had never seen her.

“You are?”

“Yeah.”

“Highland isn’t big enough to hide people.” He laughed. “I live over by where the Buddhist temple used to be.”

She laughed. “I’m a lot closer to Central City Mission than that Buddhism place.”

The mystery was solved. “Oh,” they said in unison.

“You’re from the Westside.” He laughed.

“You from East Highland.” She smiled, letting her teeth show this time. “But it’s all good: we still from the same city.”

“The same suburb.” He corrected her.

“Nah, where I’m at, it’s city.”

Like the city that had birthed and nurtured it, the university was vast but uncrowded and serene, a hot and windless plain of scattered trees and infrequent buildings and wandering students who came and went in ones and twos. The campus’s long deserted pathways seemed to reach out into the sky or over the edge of the world they ran so long and so deserted. The pathways ran into and out of the school and because of the lack of trees and buildings the new students had a view onto the city that would soon be their home, a nondescript industrial sprawl of shopping centers and apartment houses and motels and tire and brake shops and supermercados. This wasn’t San Diego or San Francisco, Santa Cruz or Santa Barbara; there was nothing picturesque or even vivid in these polluted skies. “When the smog recedes in the evening, we have the loveliest sunsets,” their tour guide told them.

“On your left,” he continued, “is the Science Library: it’s newly renovated with beautiful new carpeting, couches for study groups and individual desks for individual students. We’ve installed a temperature control panel. And to your right, you’ll notice two towering smokestacks in the sky. Those constitute the mathematics hall . . .

“Now here’s our English Library. Constructed in 1964, it is the oldest building on the campus, and what it lacks technologically it makes up for in charm and dignity. Though the air conditioning is only a feature of the first and third floors, the second and fourth floors have been equipped with large electric fans . . . ”

The tour lived and died like this, a long string of introductions to various inanimate objects.

The sun shone overhead, a cruel brilliance of heat and light.

“We the only two,” Erycha said, peering up at him to catch his expression. She still didn’t know his name. “Did you notice that, we the only two?”

“The only two from Highland?”

“Yeah. And the only two black people from there or from anywhere else. At least we the only two with this major that I’m seein. You seen somethin different? Nahright. You see what I see. What you think about that?”

“I think it’s not true.” He pointed at one black boy here, one mixed girl there. “There’s, like, several.”

But in fact the black boy and mixed girl weren’t even freshmen. The boy, Erycha remembered from the student speaker’s opening address, was an editor for the school newspaper. And the girl was the chief coordinator for the ASU, Asian Student Union, and MSU, Minority Student Union (the BSU having been dissolved into this more embracing exclusivity).

Erycha explained these facts and watched him think it over for a second before nodding, conceding. “A’ight, now you know to trust me.” She smiled. “So, what you think about that?”

“About us being the only two?” Touissant weighed his options, his fabrications: he didn’t want to tell her that his choice of major was passing, false and solely contingent on her presence, but on the other hand telling the truth would require less thought. “I think you make up for the scarceness,” he finally said.

Erycha narrowed her eyes into slits and shook her head: “You still gotta mack, huh?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Well I’m just askin. Seriously.”

The newspaper editor visited them where they sat on the stone bench along the spacious walkway beneath the sunlight and heat. He informed them that it was 2001 the Year of the Lord and yet in the state of California, at one of its premiere universities, he was still the only field Negro on the staff of the college’s supposedly representative newspaper. His voice echoed down the empty walkway like down a funnel. And as he preached on, his red, black and green beads clinked like dice against his neck.

Touissant listened and thought what it would be like to write for or edit the school newspaper. His goals hovered vaguely round the possibilities of writing books, speeches, closing arguments. Writing for the paper would be a great way to find his literary voice. But for now he was a dance major. He shook his head, no.

The editor looked to Erycha, his beads rattling like a gambler’s last chance. “What’s your black gift, sister?”

“Ballet.”

The mixed girl had hazel eyes and mocha-colored skin. Erycha looked at her and saw the earth rotating, fucking and birthing. The girl smiled and waved and approached. She was wearing a clingy, tie-dyed dress that sort of lilted right over her breasts in the attractive way that only a garment made with individual care could. Intricate lace-stitching, clearly hand-done, ran along its sides, fringing each moment of her form.

Erycha could tell that the girl wasn’t going to leave her alone until she said whatever it was she had to say.

“Heyyy,” Erycha drawled, not sure what to make of the girl but figuring it was probably best to speak first.

“Hi! Hi there!” The girl’s voice was a chime struck by a champagne glass. Defiant of the slow summer day, she broke quickly into an introduction. “My name’s Kai Jefferson. I coordinate the MSU, Minority Student Union. The Union motto, Teach, Educate, Organiiiize.” Her voice broke over the word. “Just so exciiited, sorry. It’s my personal slogan, too: Teach, Educate, Organize. You probably already know that this is a majority-minority school and a majority-minority state, California, so we are an important institution on campus and in our many diverse communities. Although the minority population is increasing, our population as African-Americans on campus is shrinking. Dropout rates for African-American students are increasing, 35% now. GPAs and other academic indicators are trending distressingly. I’m one-eighth, Granddaddy is St. Lucian, or whatever you call it, so I know the intimidation, the real isolation of the black experience at the university. But that’s where MSU comes in and saves academic lives.”

“Coo’,” Erycha said, cutting Kai off.

“Ballet?” Touissant asked.

“Yeaaah,” Erycha sighed, “Yeaaah. What about you?”

“You’re a ballerina,” he said, evading the question. “Tell me more.”

She didn’t seem to notice his dodge. “Ballet,” she began, then paused self-consciously, as if choosing her words more carefully than she knew she should. “I’m tryin. Tryina get on pointe, so it’s all about the shoes right, the ballet shoes. Cain’t be on pointe without ’em. But they cost.”

“But you need them, so you’ll get them.”

“Hopefully you’ll be correct. But they cost.” She looked away at the sun or something. “And somebody went an’ stole my old pair so it’s not like I can just be payin for the same thing twice, na’mean?” Her fierce eyes came back to him. “What about your struggles, though, that’s what I wanna hear about.”

Right then, a white kid who Touissant recognized from the guided tour appeared in their view. His shadow fell across the stone bench and rippled along the heat waves above the concrete like risen black water. “What’s up, you guys.” He smiled.

“Hey.”

“Heyyy.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting something.”

“Nah.” Erycha shook her head. She tucked her arms in against herself and smiled up at him: “What’s up?”

“Yeah. Um, I think they’re about to get into the next thing, whatever it’s gonna be. Anyway, you guys were way over here, and I didn’t think you’d hear so . . . ”

“Thanks.” Touissant nodded. He tapped Erycha’s knee and stood.

She stood slowly, unfurling herself in elegant little sections. She moves with real grace, he thought, like every dancer I know.

They started back toward the center of campus. The white kid was talking, making background vocals to Touissant’s thoughts. The white kid said that he had noticed how the MSU girl and the guy with the red, black and green beads had both so rudely interrupted Touissant and Erycha’s conversation and how people could really get on your nerves when they did shit like that. Terrible, truly. Especially agenda people, people with gender and racial agendas. As far as the white kid was concerned, there should be no unions or alliances or fraternities or sororities or group identities whatsoever. He was an individual, he said, and individuals didn’t conform. All organizations and groups were formed by conformist minds, he told them, especially the organizations and groups founded on college campuses.

These were the kinds of things a white kid would say, Touissant thought. The kind of things whiteboys had been telling him for years. Probably why he had never had a white male friend. His mind wandered to the late lunch he was supposed to have with his parents and with his sisters, who attended USC and were in town only briefly. There was no getting around the commitment. He would either need to take his chances on running into Erycha later, or interrupt the whiteboy and invite her to lunch right then.

Erycha’s hands opened and closed upon an imaginary razorblade. Her weapon was back at home, where she left it whenever she went to colleges and other safe places. Now she wished she hadn’t taken Touissant’s invitation. His family’s refined voices scared her more than any thug: listening to his mother and father and twin sisters speak with all the smooth and intellectual grace of the world, she knew that she wasn’t close to ready for college. It was too much of a leap, too much of a change. Her body didn’t bend quite right when she danced, her words didn’t sound sophisticated when she spoke.

“Do you like the campus?” the first sister asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you consider any private universities?” the second sister wanted to know.

Erycha noted the USC sweatshirts that both twins sported. Their enviable chests made each letter stand out as if embossed upon the fabric. They had both highlighted their hair Trojan red, which more than hinted at their preference in the private vs. public question. She had seen both these girls before, locally, though she couldn’t fix a time and place to the twins. She figured they were dancers like herself, probably better dancers than herself. Maybe she had seen them dance, maybe wished she could hold a position the way they held themselves and wished she could move as they moved.

“I was always wantin to be here,” she answered, neglecting to mention that Riverside was the only university that pledged to pay her way for four full years. “Ever since I was lil,” she added. “Little.”

“Where are you from?” The mother asked, light and sharp at the same time.

Erycha answered that she was from Highland and thought she noticed the woman’s expression brighten a little.

“We live over by the new church. Where’s your parents’ house?” the lady asked.

“Round there,” Erycha lied. “We live nearby,” she said more properly. “East Highland’s so small, right?”

The lady laughed and nodded.

Erycha stole a quick glance at Touissant. He looked stunned, or hurt, as if it mattered that she had lied to his momma. She knew that lying went contrary to every book of rules from the Bible to the Student Catalog handed out during orientation and was obviously wrong before God, but doubted that it mattered before Mrs. Freeman. Better to just tell the lady what she wanted to hear. That she had two caring parents, that her life was good and getting better.

She kept on lying to Mrs. Freeman and her husband all lunch long: yes, she’d always loved all forms of dance, especially ballet. She had never lost faith in her talent, had always been supported by her folks, had always made a way out of no-way, like black folk know how to do, she quipped. She played her black card in just the way she knew boojie black people like their black cards to be played, displaying it in order to describe her pride, determination and success, but never her poverty, anger or loneliness in a world full of black folk who never gave a damn about her unless she was braiding their hair or spreading her legs. She even loved writing about dance, she told the Freemans. She was so committed to it, she might get a PhD in the field one day.

Mr. and Mrs. Freeman seemed to like all this. The twin sisters smiled at Erycha with twin precious approving gazes. Touissant just seemed bewildered by everything he was hearing; his fork stayed in his mouth the whole meal.

Erycha started to realize just how good a liar she could be. So good she didn’t have to think about the lies before she said them. All she had to do, in fact, was say anything that she wasn’t actually thinking. Her true thoughts were a little too strange for public disclosure. All lunch long, she stayed thinking about Josephine Baker. Queen Josephine, the baddest lil black girl dead or alive. What would Josephine do if she were ever tricked into lunch with a bunch of boojie black folk? Would she figure a way to gloriously devastate the ceremony and expose the class struggle beneath the bed of lies being told? Would she manipulate the young man who was trying so hard for her? Or would she be the nice girl, smile, do right, say right, and save the real talk for another time? Josephine might do just about anything. After all, Erycha had read where the woman once walked her cheetah along the Champs-Elysées. A black girl controlling a big dangerous cat. Everybody staring her way. Erycha knew that it would take some doing before she could bend nature and folks to her will like that.

She kept on with the pretty lies about a different world.

When lunch was done, the twins went one way and the parents and Touissant another.

Erycha followed after the parents and Touissant, so as not to end up at an expensive private school. She got in the backseat next to Touissant. As the engine revved, she felt him lean into her the way she had leaned into him at orientation. “Were you lying to me or to them?” He whispered very quietly, almost too faint to hear.

Erycha was surprised by the question but took it in her stride. She was still impressed by just how easy it was to lie. She dug in her purse, found a pen and a large business card for a hair salon. The card had nothing written on the back.

to them

She handed over the card and looked at him, straight at his dishonest eyes.

He took the pen along with the card. Why?

they wanted the lie you wanted the lie

He looked into the blood spider explosions that were her eyes. That makes no sense.

yes it does

How?

you wouldnt understand.

Is your name even Erica?

erycha evans are you really a dancer?

Touissant knew she already knew the answer to that question. If she hadn’t figured him out at orientation, she surely had at lunch, when his parents went on and on about his goals in the fields of political science and later law school and local and state government. None of what he had going for him had anything to do with dance. And he had planned to tell her the truth anyway, sometime before the dancing started. Really, Touissant just didn’t understand why his not being a dancer would make her want to retaliate in kind. He had lied, but for a good cause. He was just trying to get closer to her.

No.

Erycha kept thinking about Josephine and her cat and that incredible walk she took. She imagined herself in that beautiful body. She was walking down that Paris street buck naked, the cheetah by her side. She had no leash for it, just her will. She was Josephine and Touissant and every other fronting, foolish brother she had ever known was the cheetah. She stopped and knelt and said something in French that made the cat stop, and she placed a diamond collar round its neck. All around her female-acting Frenchmen and their jealous wives watched her. She could hear each and every murmur. The Champs-Elysées was her campus and the people watching were an audience before which to perform. Everything in Erycha’s dream was the opposite of the real world, where she sat in a far corner of the banquet hall next to a boy who had straight-up lied to her about himself and to whom she had been lying ever since just for the hell of it. Nobody was watching them. Nobody knew they were at the campus. Their only connection was the false one that they had created in their conversations that day. In the fantasy, she strolled slow and naked down the street, her walk a dance, her nakedness a basic beautiful truth. In the fantasy, she didn’t have to worry about lies or class segregation or whether her grammar was completely proper. She spoke exquisite French in her dream.

The difference between dreams and lies dwindled as the night wore on. Touissant determined to go through the motions with the girl even though he knew she was doing the same thing, writing notes back and forth, talking to him when she had to, dancing with him when she got tired of sitting in her chair too long. But she was living in her thoughts, living in a silent conversation with her own desires, just as he was. He was even more centered on himself than she was. He was only thinking about himself now and about what would come next for him: in less than a week, he would be in New Orleans, at yet another college orientation. This one would be at Xavier University. He had family all over the South but mostly in New Orleans. He had ancestors buried there who had lived and died well before Emancipation. But he had yet to visit the town. He thought about the campus and all the black people that would be there. He thought about the cedar-skinned Creole girls and wondered if it would be easier or harder to talk to bayou sisters with heavy accents and different slang than with this person from his own hometown. He imagined that he would catch on to the New Orleans chat instantly, that some deep hidden part of him, combined of his Southern heritage and whatever else was working inside his soul, would vibe with the ways of the people down there. They would be familiar to him in a way that he wouldn’t be able to understand or explain. He would just know them. That simple. It would be home out there, he thought, a return to an old home.

He wrote her one more note.

What if God told me to lie to you? What if He wanted me to meet you?

He didn’t know where that line came from, if he had heard it somewhere before, in a church, on television, or the radio, or from the mouth of some kid trying to talk one of his sisters into a date. He didn’t even know if Erycha went to church or even believed in God. He knew he didn’t. But he passed her the note anyway.

you dont talk to god

Dance, Erycha had learned somewhere, was a story. That was why, though she had trouble admitting it aloud, she now intended to dance as little as possible and to think and to write about dance until she had filled volumes with a philosophy linking movement to culture and solitude. There were reasons for this decision that in sum was a story all by itself. It was a story she was living, though, and couldn’t even talk about, let alone put down on paper. If it was a conversation, it would be one that nobody she was likely to spend time with could follow. If it was a movement, it would be something post-modern, probably some sort of desperate painful lunging on her back on the floor. She didn’t see that going over well at the banquet. Instead, she tried something subtle.

She waited until the DJ exhausted a few dance and trance and hip-hop tracks. She thought how half the time the girls doing modern dance looked like old folks trying to do the gator on their backs. She thought about clubs in Los Angeles she had only heard tale of where the dancers could leave people motionless and in awe, their ideas on a dance floor were so good. When the first staccato beats of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” began and Prince began to speak and then sing, she got up from her chair and looked at Touissant. He stared back at her unmoved but interested enough not to take his eyes from her. It wasn’t long before a slim girl in jeans and heels began dancing in her space. The girl danced close and wanted Erycha to come even closer. But Erycha was a solo act, despite the presence of a partner who flowed and shook and melted into her every time Prince came out of his pleading falsetto and dropped his voice into normal register.

Erycha was used to men dancing close and the girl was really no different. She was a shadow of movement, a likeness and a following all at once. She was willing to bend not only to the beat but to her partner, whereas Erycha, who led, told a story unshaped by the song and independent of her partner. Her body described the knife resting with its blade up right where she’d left it on the table in her small apartment. Her movement was not flow, but a strolling aggression that bent the girl in the jeans and heels this way then that and anticipated Prince’s vocal changes so that she was ahead of time. She vogued her way into Prince’s highest registers and sauntered her way out on the downbeat. She cut one dancer so quick and cold he didn’t even know he’d been upstaged, his lame Chicago-step parodied and discarded, his partner distracted by a deep laceration that he had neither felt nor seen. Then the boy’s partner stopped dancing with him and simply watched Erycha.

Erycha kept on dancing, first with the girl who had approached her, later with the girl who had left her partner. Erycha glanced at Touissant now and again. He was watching her.

In fact, he was captured by her glances. Her looks, even when they were brief, were demanding and fierce, but incredibly sad, too, like nothing he had seen before. In the parking lot after the proceedings had come to their close, she looked at him with eyes that said she wished not to be lied to, but knew that even her dreams were lies, that everything she had ever wanted was one way or another unreal. They both said goodbye and then she turned and walked away, strolling through the poorly lit lot. And he couldn’t stop staring after her.