Rules for 50/50 Chances (32 page)

For a minute I can't even remember what I'm looking for, but then I spot it there, just one line among many.
Grierson Scholarship Award: Full tuition, room and board. All expenses covered.

And that's it. No cheering, no fireworks shooting out of the computer, just a tiny little line, “all expenses covered.” I'm one of the chosen few. I can go for free. To San Francisco. To dance, to start the rest of my life—and my career—as a ballet dancer. If I want to.

I waste most of the afternoon in Harvard Square, looking at flimsy sundresses I have no interest in buying. Then I walk up Mass Ave. to the bookstore in Porter, where I slump down in the back corner of the nonfiction section and skim a book about psychopathy for an hour. At least Mom's not charming on the outside and a narcissistic, pathological liar and potential serial killer on the inside. Being in the bookstore reminds me of my first “date” with Caleb, when we met here on the pretense of coffee and ended up getting ice cream instead. It feels like years of my life have passed in the interim.

Caleb and Lena both wanted to go out and celebrate, but I feel strangely deflated. Maybe I've just been thinking about this moment so much, for so long, that now that it's here, it doesn't seem real. I've been imagining this exact opportunity since I first fell in love with the BPC. Here I am, a decade later, with a chance into the company. I should be doing
tour jet
é
s
down the street. Instead I walk all the way home from Porter, imagining myself in San Francisco, with my days full of ballet. I think of being in the studio for even more hours than I'm used to now, for the next however many years. I think of being surrounded by bunheads all the time, like the girls at the audition.

I push the front door open with some effort—it's warping as the weather has warmed up—and survey the sounds in the house to figure out where everyone is.

“I'm home,” I call upstairs.

“Kitchen!” Dad says. He's sitting at the table, working. He glances up from his laptop as I put my bags down on the radiator, but he doesn't say anything. It's been tense like this ever since our dinner conversation about Mom. I haven't brought it up again and neither has Dad, but it's lingered in the house.

I sit across from him, not saying anything. Finally, he looks up again. “What's up?” he asks.

“I got in,” I say.

“UVPA? The scholarship?” I nod. “All right!” he says, pumping a fist in the air. “That's my girl! Yeah, baby!”

“Dad, Dad. Dad! Stop.”

His brow furrows, like a dark cloud has blown in, out of nowhere, over his face. “What? I thought this would be the happiest moment of your life to date. This is what you've always wanted.”

The man sitting across from me is a person who, I suddenly understand, would do anything to give me the tiniest glimpse of a decent future. My situation is in no way his fault—the bad genes aren't even on his side of the family—but that doesn't matter. He'd do anything to erase the uncertainty.

I get up from my seat and give him a hug. When I pull away, he's got tears in his eyes, of course. “What's that for?” he asks.

I shrug. “I'm sorry for being a jerk the other night about Mom. Also, you're a pretty good dad.”

“Pretty good? That's the best you can do, you little ingrate?”

“Quite good. Significantly above average.”

“I'll take it,” he says, closing his laptop. “So what's up?”

I look over at the refrigerator door, where there are pictures of me in full dance regalia from various performances over the years and a yellowing
Cambridge Chronicle
article from sixth grade, when I won a big statewide ballet competition. The most recent addition to the collection is a program from this spring's showcase. Looking at the ever-rotating items on the fridge used to give me this feeling of crazy awesomeness. I know that sounds super egocentric, but somehow remembering all my best dance moments made me irrationally happy. Now, they might as well be pictures of someone else.

Going to UVPA means living and breathing ballet for the next four years, and if I'm successful there, which I think I could be, and if I'm lucky—which who knows—then for however many years after that.

I feel Dad's eyes on me, waiting for a sign of what's going through my head. “Remember how Mom used to tell me to flip a coin when I couldn't make a decision, to check my gut reaction?”

Dad nods. She said it so many times to me over the years, it's hard to imagine he'd forget.

“So I sort of feel like, the coin flip came up the way I thought I wanted it to. But my gut doesn't feel right.”

“All right,” Dad says. “So what do you think that means?”

I take a breath. “I didn't feel like I belonged there. Maybe I just don't belong in the ballet world anymore. I love ballet, but it's not how I want to spend what could be the last healthy fifteen years of my life.”

Dad cringes when I say “the last healthy fifteen years of my life,” but he doesn't contradict me. He just waits, maybe to see if I'm finished or if I might still change my mind again. Finally, he says, “Okay. What about next year, then?”

I take a deep breath. “Cunningham. That's my choice. I can dance there—and try something other than ballet. That's what I want.”

The skin around Dad's eyes crinkles a little bit. He looks almost proud. “You can try all kinds of things other than ballet there. Modern, jazz. You could choreograph. Hell, you could try biology.”

“Dad.”
I cut him off, rolling my eyes. “So how do I tell Mom?”

“You just tell her,” he says.

“But I know she always wanted me to be … you know. A successful dancer.”

“Did you not just get into one of the premier ballet programs in the country? You are a successful dancer, Ro. She wouldn't want you to go there for her. Please. You know she'd kick your butt if she thought that's what you were doing.”

“I strongly suspect Mom has lost the ability to kick my butt, Dad. If she ever had it.”

“I wouldn't be so sure,” he says. “I bet she could still muster a decent right hook, given the right motivation. For you, I think she could.”

 

 

Mom is lying on the bed with a mask over her eyes, but she pushes it up when I knock on her open door and come into the room. The mask rests awkwardly on her forehead, sending her hair in ten directions. I sit next to her and slip it off her head, smoothing her hair down.

“W-w-what's up?” she says, smiling at me.

“I have news,” I say. “About next year.”

“Ok-k-k-kay.” She waits for me to say more, but I can't tell if she really understands what I'm referring to, or if she even remembers about UVPA in the first place.

“So, you remember how I auditioned for the scholarship at UVPA? In San Francisco?”

“Of c-c-c-course I remember that. I'm not d-d-d-dumb, you know.” But from the way her eyes flicker when she says it, I think she's faking it.

“I got in.”

Mom's face lights up. “I kn-n-n-new you would. See, I t-t-told you s-s-so. D-d-didn't I?”

I don't remember her telling me so anytime recently, but maybe she's right in the global sense. All my life, in one way or another, she told me so.

“Yeah. You did. But Mom—the thing is…” I trail off, afraid to see her obvious pleasure turn to disappointment.

“W-w-what's the th-th-thing?”

“I don't want to go.”

She struggles to prop herself up on one arm, so she can get a good look at me. The left side of her face twitches as she stares me down, just like she used to when I was little and she wanted to know if I was telling the truth. “Are you still worried that my plane is going to crash?” she'd ask before leaving for a business trip, and then she'd give me that deep stare-down until I'd admit that yes, I was still worried about her plane going down in a field. Then she'd take me straight to Internet and show me all the statistics on how many planes fly safely every year, to calm my fears.

She's still trying to be that mother now, even as her body is betraying her.

“You d-d-don't want t-t-to?”

I shake my head. “No. I want to go to Cunningham. Remember, where we saw that dance show last year?”

She closes her eyes, maybe trying to bring back the memory.

“Are you s-s-sure? That's w-w-what you r-r-really want?”

“Yes. Really.” Saying it again, to Mom, makes me feel even more certain. That I won't have a six-hour flight—or a two-day train ride—between us is a bonus.

“Ok-k-kay, then. Did your f-f-father order d-d-d-dinner?”

 

 

On Saturday, Dad makes me invite Lena and Caleb over for what he calls a “celebratory dinner for talented people.” I humor him. In exchange, he actually grills, like he used to all the time.

“I'd like to raise a glass to all of you completely amazing youths. Here's to big things!” He raises his pint glass with one hand and reaches over to squeeze Mom's shoulder with the other, as he blinks back predictably sentimental tears.

“Here, here!” Gram adds, hoisting her beer. Gram rarely drinks alcohol, but tonight she said it was an occasion worthy of a “fine ale.”

“So you're making a shift toward vegetarianism, I see,” Lena says, surveying the spread of chicken, steak tips and sausages.

“You only live once, Lena,” Dad says. “Might as well enjoy your meals.”

I wonder if Dad's new gospel of living in the moment has anything to do with Mom's decision to reserve herself a place in a care home, and the newfound glimpse it offers into the life she's headed for—sitting in a wheelchair in a room that smells like urine faintly disguised by disinfectant, smearing soft food across her face, playing “games” with aides in pink smocks and other people in varying, withering states of incapacity. (Or at least that's how I'm imagining it. Dr. Howard says it's not really like that.)

“YOLO, Dave,” Lena says, clinking her iced tea against his Guinness.

“What what, Lena?”

“Never mind, Dave.” Under the table, where our knees brush up against each other, Caleb squeezes my leg.

When Lena leaves, Caleb and I manage to extricate ourselves from the rest of my family and slip upstairs. I close the door behind us, shove him back on the bed, and straddle his lap, pulling my shirt over my head at the same time. He looks pleasantly surprised, but also a little concerned, glancing toward the door.

“Whatever,” I say, kissing his neck. “We'll just be quiet.” I open my laptop and turn up the volume on iTunes. If they hear anything, they'll hear Adele, and maybe they'll wonder, but I don't even care. He runs his hands down my torso to my waist and kisses me back.

 

 

Afterward, we lie on my bed, on top of the covers, not doing or saying much of anything. I lean against his chest, and every now and then he twists a strand of my hair around a finger.

“I'm doing the right thing, right?” I say after a few minutes. “About school?”

“You know what I think.”

“You think I should do what I want.”

He nods.

“But that's just you being a good human being. I want to know what you really think.”

Caleb sighs. “That
is
what I really think. I can't tell you what to do. Do I know what I would do in the same situation? Yes. But that's me.”

“You would take the scholarship and go to UVPA.”

“Hell yeah, I would go. I can't imagine just giving up on the thing you love.”

I lean against his chest and press myself up so I can see his face. “I'm not giving it up, though. I'm choosing something else. And I can still dance at Cunningham.”

He nods, thinking. “I know. That's what you're telling yourself. Are you sure you're not just scared?”

“Why would I be scared?”

“I mean, you've been waffling about this from the beginning, from before you even auditioned. Don't you think that's about something else?”

“No. I think I'm making a
choice
, which you've been pushing me to do for months, and now you just don't understand that choice so you're being weird.”

“You
asked
for my opinion. I'm just giving it to you. Ballet is your life. You have a chance to do it at the best place in the country, for free. So no, I don't get not going. I didn't get a scholarship to RISD and I'm going anyway, because it's the right thing for me.”

“And because you can,” I remind him. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I shouldn't have said them. But he can't possibly think our situations are the same: his parents can afford to send him wherever he wants. His eyes harden and he pulls away from me, ever so slightly but I notice it anyway.

“Yeah. Because I can. Do you want me to apologize for that, Rose?”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Because, you know, you've been asking me for a lot of apologies lately. Apologies for not having my family's illness, apologies for not having to worry about money, apologies for having what you seem to think is an easy, uncomplicated life.”

I sit up on my knees, alarmed by how quickly this conversation has taken a turn. “Hey, I never said that.”

I know Caleb worries about his family, that their illness weighs on him. I've never doubted that, but now it's creeping into my head that maybe I haven't said that out loud to him very often. Or ever, really.

“Come on. You've been competitive about whose life is harder right from the beginning. Let me ask you this. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘twice as good'?” He folds his arms across his bare chest. “Have your parents ever had that talk with you? You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?”