Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (17 page)

“CINDY NEEDS TO SHUT
her mouth,” Mommy said.

It was a constant refrain. Mommy said that Cindy was still talking to reporters and making her out to be a bad, negligent mother.

“We’ve got to make sure we get our side of the story out there,” she said. At times she seemed obsessed in her furor.

One day she told me that she had gotten a call from the producers of
Leeza,
a talk show anchored by onetime entertainment reporter Leeza Gibbons. They wanted Mommy to come on to talk about her initial arrangement with Cindy, how it had deteriorated and led to my eventual disappearance. Mommy agreed, despite my fervent protests.

It turned out that Cindy would also be there, though not in the same room as Mommy, to make sure both got to air her version of events.

I was terrified. It would be the first time I was in the same space as Cindy since those days in court a few months before. I didn’t want to relive that experience. It had been so traumatic, and I was just starting to recover. I just wanted to be in the studio, dancing.

I told Mommy I wouldn’t do the show. But she reassured me that I wouldn’t have to sit on the stage: I could just sit in the audience, and maybe Leeza would walk over and ask me a couple of questions. My brothers and sisters would also be there for support.

I will never forget the day of the taping. Mommy said that she would come by the school to pick me up. So after my last class, I went outside and waited, expecting her to pull up in her cream-colored Honda Civic.

To my horror, a black limousine rumbled down the street, then stopped in front of me. The driver opened the door, and inside I saw Doug, Erica, Chris, Lindsey, and, of course, Mommy. It was exactly the kind of showy display that I hated. I didn’t want attention unless I was
pirouetting
on a stage, and now, here in front of working-class San Pedro High, was a stretch limousine.

Everyone—my classmates, even some of the teachers—was now gawking at me, wondering what was happening, where I was going.

I hurried into the car, wishing that it was a shell into which I could burrow and hide. Crying, I began to yell at Mommy.

“A limo? How could you pick me up from school in a limo when you know this is already too much for me?”

The car was silent except for my sobbing.

It all only got worse from there. I sat in the audience, next to Erica, while Mommy took a seat on the stage. Cindy was there, too, but in a back room, visible only on a monitor as a producer interviewed her separately.

Though Mommy had warned me, I was startled when Leeza Gibbons suddenly turned her attention to me, asking a couple of questions. I managed to mutter yes and no before I broke down crying.

That’s when Erica, always protective and maternal, stood up and took the microphone.

“You tried to destroy our family,” Erica yelled at the monitor showing Cindy’s face. “You exploited a little girl, and now you want to act like you’re an angel and we’re the bad guys. We’ll never forgive you for what you tried to do.”

It had to have been the longest hour of my life. The limousine later dropped us off at home. And the next day I went to school, trying to keep the spark of anguish that had been reignited from bursting into a full flame.

As I walked down the hallway, several of my classmates approached me. “We saw you on TV,” they told me. “Our teacher turned on the show so the class could watch.”

I was mortified—I felt naked, exposed. I no longer had
Cindy’s home, the San Pedro studio, or school. Nowhere was sacred. But I had no choice but to keep going.

SLOWLY, THE DAYS RESUMED
a regular flow instead of their former slow, creeping quality. A few months after I moved back home, Mommy got a new sales job and was able to get a comfortable two-bedroom apartment on a quiet street in San Pedro. That was the first time that I felt we’d ever had a home that was truly our mother’s, not available to us based on the whims of some man.

Knowing that, I think we all felt a peace we had never before known. Lindsey and I shared a bedroom, and for the first time in years I could walk to school.

Dance was still the center of my life, but I attended classes only in the afternoons now that I was no longer being homeschooled. Still, I felt the rigor of the instruction and the prowess of some of my fellow students made up for the shorter period of time I was spending in the studio. One of Mommy’s gifts to me was a life-size cardboard cutout of Mariah Carey. I pinned it to my wall, right next to a poster of Paloma Herrera.

I began to appreciate Mommy again, how she had made sure to find a new dance home for me with Liz Cantine’s help. How she had been able to get back on her feet—buying a car, getting her own apartment. She was finally taking care of our family. I just wondered why it hadn’t happened sooner.

There was a photograph on the living room mantel of Gloria Allred holding my hand up in triumph outside the court
building in Torrance. By then, the tug of war raged mostly in the recesses of my mind.

And I now had a little perspective, allowing me to unspool the reel of the previous three years.

When Mommy and my brothers and sisters said I had been brainwashed by Cindy and Patrick, I ignored them, or fought them fiercely. Now I was no longer so sure.

I came to believe that while Cindy and Patrick had meant no harm, I
had
been brainwashed, if only a little bit. I grew to believe that I deserved more and that Mommy was not willing or able to provide it. But just maybe, I’d been wrong.

It was a revelation. One day, near the end of that transitional year in my life, I sat down beside Mommy on the couch in our living room. I thanked her for fighting for me, for never giving up on me or on herself. And I apologized for what she must have gone through.

Now that I’m grown, my perspective has changed yet again, to one that is more balanced and completely my own. What I know for sure is that Mommy loved me fiercely, and that the Bradleys had loved me, too. That I wouldn’t be where I am without their dedication, their willingness to sacrifice and take me into their family. Without them, I would not have learned to voice my opinion, to feel confident that I had opinions worth listening to. All that, and more, the Bradleys gave to me.

LESS THAN A YEAR
after the battle over my emancipation, I would go away to New York for the first time, to participate
in ABT’s summer intensive program. Jessica would go with me, just as we’d planned the previous year at San Francisco Ballet.

I’d auditioned for the program a few months before. The drill for all the summer intensives’ admissions was basically the same. Budding ballerinas would look in the back of
Dance Magazine
to find the schedule of observation classes being held at studios across the country by each major ballet company. The classes were the way potential students auditioned for the companies’ summer instruction.

The tryouts usually took place over the course of a single month. Each school required its own particular uniform—
black leotard, pink tights, no distracting colors!
You’d show up at your allotted time, pay a small fee, and be given a big number to wear over your chest. Then you and fifty or sixty other dancers would go through the moves of a typical ballet class, at the barre, in the center, while a school representative stood to the side or behind a table, watching closely.

I was invited to audition for ABT’s summer intensive by Rebecca Wright, who was the program’s then director. She’d also been one of the judges when I’d won the Spotlight Awards more than a year before. Liz and Dick Cantine took me to the studio, paid the required fee, then waited in the hallway outside with the parents of all the other dancers.

A couple of weeks later I received a letter in the mail telling me that I had been accepted on full scholarship. In June, I headed to New York.

Chapter 7

THE FIRST TIME ANYONE
from American Ballet Theatre had seen me, I was fifteen years old and was competing in the L.A. Spotlight Awards.

From the time I sat in front of the television at the Bradleys, transfixed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gelsey Kirkland, and the other stars of ABT, I had dreamed that I would one day be a part of that company. I had to walk where Paloma Herrera walked, dance where Paloma Herrera danced.

ABT had been one of the five companies that offered me a scholarship to attend its summer intensive program. But New York had felt too far away at age fifteen, so I headed up the California coast instead. Now, a year later, I was ready to take the Big Apple by storm.

A friend of Mommy’s met me at LaGuardia Airport, and we took a cab to where I’d be living, a convent on West Fourteenth Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village, with the Carmelite Sisters Teresas of San Joseph.

Some people may have found it stifling, strange, to be a teenager living in a nunnery, the Mariah Carey poster I’d brought with me taking its place on my wall among the rosaries.

But I found it comforting. The structure and order of the nuns’ world put me at peace.

The theatrics that had brought such a turbulent end to my San Francisco summer were long over. I felt I could walk anonymously through the canyons of Manhattan, preparing for my next adventure.

The primary dramas in my life now were the ones that I wanted—fitting in with the occasional ballet diva, winning the approval of the ballet mistress, hoisting myself to the next rung on the ladder that would hopefully lead me to a permanent spot within my dream company, ABT.

But one day, I was walking down the street, earbuds in my ears, bopping to a long-forgotten beat, when I caught a man looking at me strangely.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you that little girl everyone was fighting over in California?”

New York was a new start for me. No one knew me, I was at ABT, and I could finally start the life I dreamed of. But hearing this man’s words made me feel otherwise.

OUTSIDE THE CONVENT’S DOORS
was New York City, with its dirty streets and omnipresent cacophony that sounded like an orchestra endlessly tuning its instruments. It crackled with the aggressive energy of people rushing everywhere and nowhere, and the humid air reeked of garbage, urine, and meat
frying on food carts. It was my first time visiting a city this big. I had never experienced anything like it.

But behind the convent’s pink walls, the nuns were kindly and motherly. They spoke no English, only Spanish, and most of the time I had no idea what they were saying. Each small room had an intercom, and every morning at seven a.m. it would buzz to wake us from our dreams.

BZZZ.

“El desayuno esta listo,”
a Sister would call. “Breakfast is ready.”

We hated that early-morning salute. We wanted to sleep longer. But we loved the breakfasts and dinners that the Sisters prepared for us girls every day.

The dorm, with two narrow beds to a room, didn’t just house dancers studying with ABT. There were students from other summer intensives as well. At first I bunked with Margeaux, a girl whom I danced with at the Lauridsen Centre back home. She was attending the Joffrey Ballet’s summer program. But halfway through, I began to share a room with my good friend Kaylen, also from my school in California and dancing with the Joffrey that summer.