Rules for 50/50 Chances (26 page)

“Looking at those views while picking up other people's trash, though.”

Jay holds up his handful of junk. “Some people do seem to have a hard time moving their trash from table to bin. It's a difficult concept, right?”

“Very. It's really too much to expect of the average person.”

Jay chuckles as he crosses the observation car and tosses out the trash. “The mountain views remind me of home, so I'm willing to put up with some mild annoyances.”

“Where's home?” I take it he doesn't mean Chicago.

“Home-home is Shimla. You know it?”

I shake my head.

“It's a city in northern India, up in the mountains.” He points out the window. “These aren't exactly the Himalayas, but they'll suffice.”

“Why'd you move here, then? Not to work for Amtrak, I'm guessing.”

He laughs suddenly, one big, loud boom, and reminds me of Caleb for an instant. “Not exactly, no. I fell for an American girl. Just my luck, right? But what are you going to do.”

“Try to fall in love closer to home?” I suggest, smiling so he'll know I'm kidding.

“You sound like my sister.” Jay shakes his head, bemused, I think. “Yes, that's definitely considered a rule to live by in my family, and it probably would've been easier. But you know what they say about rules,” he says, shrugging. “Anyway, instead I ended up here, riding Amtrak back and forth and seeing my wife every eight days or so, and it's a decent life. I wouldn't call it exactly a
normal
life, maybe normal-ish. But that's not too bad, all things considered.”

“No, I guess that's not too bad.” All things considered. “Do you have kids?”

His eyes shift to the window for a moment, flicking from left to right as they follow the passing scenery. “No kids.” The way he says it, it sounds like a sad secret, an admission, not a choice. “My wife thinks this train-riding lifestyle is not conducive to fatherhood.”

Lots of things aren't perfectly conducive to parenthood, and people do it anyway. But I don't say that.

“Maybe one day,” Jay says, turning briskly back to me. “Well. I'll let you get on with the window-gazing.” He passes back through to the dining car.

Normal-ish. Maybe he's right, and that's the best any of us can hope for.

 

 

An hour or so later, the observation car fills up again as we climb the Sierra Nevadas to Donner Lake. A guide from the California Historical Society hopped on board when we hit Truckee, and he's been giving a spirited history of the American rail ever since. Apparently some of this route is still impassable by car. Donner Lake itself looks like a huge, round oil spill in the middle of heavy woods, so still and shiny you can see the pine trees reflected in its surface. And just beyond that is the stretch known as the Donner Pass, where those people ended up eating each other in the 1840s. I snap a picture on my cell phone and text it to Lena and Caleb as soon as I have a few bars of cell service.

“The Donners were here. Should I be worried that my seatmate looks hungry?”

Lena writes back right away: “Nah. You're too bony to make a good snack.”

A few minutes later, Caleb responds too: “Yes. Watch your back. Meet any more crazies?”

Two days ago that's exactly how I thought of these people. Because who rides a train across the country unless you're a little nuts? Look at Mom and me, after all. “Nuts” barely cracks the surface. But they don't feel that way to me anymore. I can't put my finger on what's changed.

“I actually don't think they're that crazy,” I write back. “They're just people with their own stuff.”

Maybe that's what it is. They just have their own stuff, and it's not any more or less crazy than mine, and we're all doing what we can. Without waiting for a reply, I write to him again. “There's a lot of stuff in the world.”

Caleb doesn't respond for a while. Then finally, my phone buzzes. “So there is, HD. So there is.”

I slouch down and rest my head against the back of the seat. We're winding our way up the mountain through a twisted stretch of track. The Zephyr feels like it could almost careen over the edge. A woman and her young daughter—seven, maybe—slide into the seats next to me and lean toward the window. I haven't seen them on the train before. The woman takes her cell phone out.

“Excuse me, do you mind taking a picture of us?” She smiles at me. “Sorry to interrupt you.”

“Oh, you're not. I mean, I'm just sitting here.” The little girl presses her cheek into her mother's side. I snap a few shots in a row.

“Those are perfect,” the woman says, taking a look. “I appreciate it. Want me to take one of you?”

I hadn't thought to put myself in any of the many pictures I've taken so far, but I guess it would be good to have some evidence that I was actually present on this journey. For posterity.

“Might as well. Thanks.”

She takes my phone and steps back into the aisle so she can get some of the scenery behind me. “Lovely,” she says. “Send that one to your mom. We like to see things like that.”

I wave to the little girl as the two of them head off in the other direction, toward coach. Then I open my photo album and look at the picture. The woman's right, actually. Mom will like this one for her collection. You get a nice glimpse of the observation car itself, and the mountains are in view through the window behind me. And I look different—tired from two nights of train-sleeping, maybe. Or maybe it's that I just feel different, like the Zephyr has changed me.

Twenty-three

The dressing room I've been assigned to at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts is strewn from top to bottom with dance bags, leg warmers, spare shoes, makeup kits, sweatshirts, bobby pins, hairbrushes, and water bottles, not to mention the occasional pack of cigarettes and protein bar (a complete meal for many of these girls, I suspect). The room is packed with dancers, all elbowing for enough room in the mirror to fix their makeup and tuck stray hairs into their buns. They all look familiar: they're ballet dancers. Tall (all taller than I am), thin, flat-chested, and generally pointy, physically and in demeanor. There's not a lot of camaraderie in the dressing room, let's put it that way. I guess it's no surprise—we all know that there are about twenty girls auditioning today for each place in the scholarship program.

We're all dressed identically, which is a tried-and-true trick of the ballet world: individualism, any kind of standing out, isn't exactly prized. Every girl here is wearing a sleeveless black leotard, pale pink tights, and a number pinned to her chest. Our shoes are invariably busted—deliberately so, of course; ballerinas are known for taking brand-new shoes and beating the hell out of them before we even put them on.

Mom taught me how to break mine in when I first went on pointe at twelve. “Give it a few good whacks, Rose,” she'd said. “Go ahead.” The shoes were so perfect, so beautiful in their pink satin—I'd been waiting for them for years. I couldn't imagine deliberately breaking these exquisite, expensive things. But Mom said all dancers do it, and I knew she was right—I'd seen the older girls break theirs in at the studio often enough.

“Go on, whack 'em.”

After I'd hit each shoe several times against a cinder block in the backyard, Mom showed me how to use pliers to remove the little nail in the heel—the tack—so that the board along the sole of the shoe would bend more easily. We trimmed the board itself, too, to fit my foot better. Then there was glue to add to the inside of the toe block, and pink ribbons to be sewn on.

“Dental floss,” Mom said. “It's stronger than thread.”

Now I do it without thinking, with every new pair of pointe shoes. But back then it was like being initiated into a secret world of knowledge.

The girls surrounding me in the dressing room all speak the same language, follow the same rituals, but I feel uneasy around them anyway. This morning, too early to be awake, I did most of my makeup in the shared bathroom of the UVPA dorm where the admissions committee put us up last night, and I'd averted my eyes from several girls who wandered around buck naked, all ribs and collarbones and flat chests. It was almost alarming. I've never thought much about having a “ballet body”—although I guess I have one, minus the height. But these girls looked skinnier than any of my classmates at NEYB, and something about all those bones on display made me queasy.

Now, in the dressing room, I try not to focus on their bodies or their height or anything but my own reflection in the mirror. By some minor miracle, I manage to find myself a corner of the room where I can hole up for a moment and take a few deep breaths while I sew myself into my shoes. I want to be entirely focused on the task ahead of me, but I can't quite clear my head of a jumble of thoughts that are careening around in there. I'm still on the Zephyr in my mind, and I need to get back to reality.

Exhaling deeply, I redirect my focus back to the room. Across the room, I spot a redhead who smiled at me earlier, almost clandestinely, like she knew it wasn't really normal to make friends at these things. Most likely it was because she recognized me as another slight underdog—her red hair, my inadequate height, even those tiny things make us stand out from the crowd, put us at that much of a disadvantage.

An ageless woman with a tight, gray ponytail and plastic glasses pushed up on top of her head swings the door open and announces that it's time for us to head to the studios. Grabbing my water bottle and checking myself one last time in the mirror, I follow the crowd out and down the chilly hallway.

A long table is set up at the front of the room, strewn with papers and discarded numbers and coffee cups. A handful of ballet-ish-looking adults—a few women who have the slightly leathery, sunken-chested look of former dancers, and a short, ponytailed man in jeans too tight for his age are gathered around the table, chatting in low voices and jotting notes in pencil on their clipboards.

The ageless woman directs us to the barres around the room. We start the audition with a standard class, led by one of the former prima ballerina types. Then she demonstrates a quick combination—complex, but not overly long—and splits us into three groups. I'm relieved not to be called in the first one. While the unlucky eight make their way to the center and jostle for the best places, the rest of us shuffle to the sides of the room, grabbing sips of water while we can. It's clear right away who's with it and who isn't: there's the one who trips up the double
pirouette
and curses under her breath, and another who adds an extra flourish at the end, which is met with a disapproving glance from the instructor. There are a handful of girls who stand out. They're Georgias: not a hair out of place from their buns, nothing distracting them, flawless technique.

There's something else about those girls, too, and about a lot of the girls in this room. It's obvious on every inch of their bodies how badly they want this. They breathe ballet. They're built for this world. I miss Lena, all of a sudden.

I mark out the combination with the second group as they go. I think I have it, but there's a section in the middle that's quick and I wish we'd had one more opportunity to practice it with the instructor before being left on our own. My group is called last. I find a spot toward the front, but not right front and center, which is fine by me. The pianist starts in, and I spot my reflection opposite and focus solely on that, trying to ignore the other girls around me and particularly the judges sitting at the table between us and the mirror.

The combination goes relatively smoothly, I think, although I have to think a little harder than I'd like to in the middle section. When we're done, they take a few minutes to chat silently and then call out the numbers of the girls who, as they put it, “have done enough for today.” Done enough to get themselves cut, in other words.

But my number's not among them, and with the group thinned out to about half of our original, we're taught a much longer and more complicated combination, with series of inward and outward
pirouettes
, and a trio of
fouett
é
s
with an
attitude
turn thrown in the middle. Scoping out the room, I notice that the redhead is gone.

The prima ballerina leading the audition gives us a two-minute break before the first group goes, and I take a long swig of water and wipe my forehead with the back of my hand. Our scheduled time slot should be finished in twenty minutes—the next pack of girls, more of us in the same black leotards—are probably already warming up in the hallway. Twenty more minutes and this will be done. At least then I'll know one way or the other if San Francisco is even an option for next year. Once I know my test results, too, I figure the answer to my life will magically dawn on me, like the result of some fancy algorithm of possible outcomes.

I roll my neck around to the front a few times, and then to the back, trying to forcibly push all thoughts out of my head to get through this last twenty minutes and those complicated turns.

There's nowhere to hide, this time: each group is small enough that there is no front or back row. I choose a spot toward the center. I can feel the judges' eyes on me, so I close mine. In the darkness behind my lids, I'm alone in the room, just me and the music and the floor under me. I might as well be in Studio D at home, not dancing for anyone other than myself—not the audience, not the judges, not even Caleb. I count in my head as the music starts, and then I give in to it, and nothing else matters. And then I'm soaring.

 

 

When we finish and I deliver myself back into the real world, I know I've killed it. The judges whisper to each other, glancing from one of us to the next, and jot some notes. I see the prima eyeing me, nodding, but I don't need anyone to tell me that it's gone well. I know it has. This is how I expected my last show at NEYB to feel—like everything I've been working toward for all those years has finally come together. It feels complete.