“I want chorus.” My voice came in a decibel stronger. Clear enough so that there was no confusion. “I just want chorus; that’s all I can handle, Birdie.”
Birdie must have made a joke or something. As I turned away, the camera sneaked in to capture my uncertain eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, half to the camera, half to myself. “I’m done.”
And then the screen cut to black.
I glanced at Birdie, who had obviously looked at this video clip many times.
“So, yeah. That’s that.” Her voice was kind. She wasn’t harboring anything. No hard feelings. Not then, not now, not ever. She’d always been such an excellent role model, and my exit from dance never would have diminished that.
“Lissa said I bombed it.”
Birdie shrugged. “Yeah, it was funny, that’s what you told everyone. Maybe it was easier for you. You never attempted to reschedule the audition. I put you in chorus, and you were fine with it. You were worried about your parents, and their disappointment. But you knew what was best for you. You said you’d rather razzle-dazzle with a perfect four-cheese lasagna.” She smiled. “And then you actually brought in a lasagna, and of course none of the dancers would touch it. Maybe that was your point. Anyway, I had a big wedge of it.” She winked. “And it was delicious.”
Just sitting here with Birdie, talking with her again, was an old familiar ease. “I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you,” I said. “But I didn’t want to deal with the fact that being part of this world isn’t a choice anymore. Maybe I walked away from dance once, but I could never reclaim it now, even if I wanted to.” I rolled up my sleeve, exposing the scar. “My body just can’t do what it used to. And I don’t have that extra determination that would push me past my obstacles, to try and become what I’d been.”
“You have to let your training serve you better than that. It was the one thing I gave you that might have qualified as advice. I told you not to let the fact that you weren’t studying dance mean that you had to put away your passion for it.”
I thought of Areacode, my nights out with Lissa. “I think I took your advice.”
“I’m glad. You were wonderful to watch. But it’s not what the audience sees that counts. It’s what the performer feels.”
Once upon a time, all I’d wanted to do was perform. Once my life—just like Lissa’s and Hannah’s and Birdie’s—had been cleanly divided into timetables of dance schedules and rehearsals and steps to memorize, all for a chance on stage. I’d breathed daily inside that choreography. I’d followed the rules, made mistakes, and tried harder next time. I’d put my hours in, and then at some point center stage had not been what I’d wanted after all. Whereas in a kitchen, backstage was also the spotlight. Still, I was relieved to know that I’d made the right choice before the choice had been made for me.
“Thanks for this, Birdie,” I said as I stood to go. “It means a lot to me that you showed me that clip. It was kind of painful, but also a relief to see it.”
Birdie’s gray-blue eyes met mine in empathy. “Thought that might be the case,” she said. “And you’d better not be a stranger around here, okay? And maybe next time you come bearing gifts? I can’t stop thinking about lasagna.”
“You got it.”
And we let our smiles hold the promise, before I reached for the door and she turned back to her computer screen so that I could steal away in peace.
27
Chop Chop Chop
Carroll Gardens was a considerable distance. I ran it. I wanted to see it again. I cut around back; the symbol was far away, that dry splash on the bottom of the wall. The silvery, fallen-down A—the same one I’d jotted on my hand, on the Halloween scrap paper, those first early days back from Addington, and the same one that was at the Lincoln Center subway stop.
Quick as an infielder, I shifted direction to sprint toward it.
A tag, Hannah had said. A way to show you’d been here. A territorial mark.
Obviously, I’d grown up seeing all kinds of tags, all over the city. I’d just never really paid attention to them. Not till now.
Why did I keep finding these tags? They haunted me, but how could Anthony continue to shadow new places I went to, when he was no longer here and couldn’t possibly have known about the direction of my life now?
I stared at the mural, willing answers. Defiant but good-humored, the tag also seemed smart-ass—with a dash of lighthearted. I touched the grimy drywall and traced the symbol. The pad of my finger came away blackened. There were no more answers here.
I turned and left the park.
El Cielo had just opened, but it was too early for customers. Some 1950s rockabilly music—my dad’s favorite, Chuck Berry? Yep, I was pretty sure—was blaring tinny from the speakers. At a corner table, the busboy was rolling silverware into individually bundled settings. He looked up and tipped his head toward the back kitchen.
Deeper in, I caught sight of Isabella, as if she’d never left. She and the prep cook guys were busy with kitchen work. The blond waitress was making pots of regular and decaf coffee for the busing stands. Kai was nowhere in sight. His shifts were erratic and depended on his classes. I hadn’t seen him since Coney Island, but I knew if I came back here, it would only be a matter of time before we would intersect.
But even Kai didn’t matter right now. Right now, I just needed it back. The secrets of this kitchen were mine if I was willing to work for them. I had to be part of the kitchen theater. To feel the heavy handle of the knife, to bisect onions into tom-tom drums, to decrown parsnips and send potatoes and shallots off to their translucent sizzle.
When Isabella murmured something to one of the cooks, he immediately stopped what he was doing and unhooked an apron from a peg near the stovetop, balled it tight, and lobbed it high through the air to me. I caught it and shook it out, slid it on, and secured it by its long ties.
They would allow me to be here, and being here was all I needed.
Isabella, kneading dough for tortillas, waved her flour-dusted fingers at the heavy bouquets of carrots and the bin of red, orange, and yellow bell peppers up from cold storage. I nodded, reached for the cutting board, and attacked a Spanish onion; good-bye top, good-bye base. Right from the first moments, I began to tear up.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I muttered to nobody in particular, wiping my watering nose on my sleeve. Stinging in my eyes and bluesy electric guitar in my ears. This music was even older than my parents’ era, but at least it did me the favor of conjuring up no memory, nothing at all except the cheerful, jangly background noise to a much-needed blast of right now.