Undercover (14 page)

T
HE PARKING LOT at the Border Road Rink was thick with cars and people, and by the time we finally got there, I was overcome with nerves. Theo coming had been the best thing ever, but it was complicated, too, for suddenly I had so much more to skate for and something new, perhaps, to lose.

“Will you look at this?” Jilly said as we pulled up, in her I’m-impressed voice. And right like that her hand went up, like she was the homecoming queen. It’s belief defying, the quantities of people Jilly knows, the way anywhere you go, it is her party.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I said, and Mom said, “Of course you can.” But she was still somewhat giddy over the early afternoon, and what did she know about ice-skating, really, and what could I tell her just then about the surprise I had planned for us all and how I was suddenly overcome with nerves? I’d been practicing on a pond at night, teaching myself my own tricks. I’d been channeling music the way I hear music, without the benefit—not once—of a critique. Theo had come, and Dad had promised, but isn’t the future always unknown, isn’t it, still, out of reach? Panache, I thought, and I held my head high—across the parking lot, through the door, in through the wintry blast of the Border Road Rink, toward whatever waited.

The little girls were competing first in their sherbet-colored dresses. They were out on the ice with their sweaters on, warming up crossovers and waltz jumps. Muzak floated from the speakers above. The crowd was far from settled. Across the way, right down below the bleachers, a narrow table
had been dressed with a thick white cloth, and behind it were six chairs, each enthroned before the rink. Two of the judges had taken their places and were watching the sherbet girls through spectacles. I scanned the bleachers and the milling crowd.
Elisa,
Dad had written,
I will be there
.
Skate your heart out,
Theo had said. And I’d said,
I will.

“You better hurry up and change,” Jilly said, but there was plenty of time before my age group came on, and I knew from watching my mother for years that you should never let your dress get old. I would reveal it when I revealed myself on the ice at the John Mischa Petkovich First Annual Interpretive Free Skate competition. I would take my chances then.

You had to go through the coffee shop, past the case of history, to get to the ladies’ changing room. I went that way, with all my things—my dress, Jilly’s sweater, my skates, the little competitor’s name badge that had come in the mail after Mom had sent in her registration check. I went that way
with my head held high.
Courage is all, Elisa.

The changing-room door was one of those swing-open doors that led to yet another door, that opened on an angle to the room. There were lockers on either side, and one square window in one corner, letting in milky-colored light. The bathrooms were at a right angle to this room, a couple of stalls behind another swinging door, and a number of the older contestants had already gathered, their dresses hung from a cord that diagonaled across the ceiling and had hung from it, on one end, a pair of drying tights. I hung my dress up with the rest of them and looped the badge around its neck. I tied my skates together and hung them from my shoulder, and went out again, through the two doors, through the coffee shop.

The sherbet girls were getting the judges’ instructions now. They were clustered in one corner, waiting for their music to begin, and Mom and Jilly were already seated somewhere in the stands. I went up the stairs to the balcony to watch. To practice
putting music in my bones. To be alone before my moment. I breathed out and in, long breaths. I telegraphed the calm of the marble girl, tried to conjure Theo laughing on the ice, at night.

Dad, I thought, shouldn’t you be here by now?

But when I scanned the crowd, I couldn’t find him.

I waited a really long time. I waited, pushing all my thoughts around and around in my head. I waited and I hoped, and I waited and I dared. I waited and I watched the others skating. Five sherbet girls had already performed in the free skate. A sunshiny song played on the P.A. system. I’d scanned the crowd again and not found Dad, and that’s when I got hit with the bad feeling. It was like a hand reaching up into my gut and yanking it all around. I stood, because it hurt to sit. I left my chair, walked across the balcony, crept down the narrow stairs. I stepped toward the coffee shop, the skates on my shoulder toeing each other.

It was when I was turning the corner by the coffee shop that I saw them—Lila and her friends. Lila’s hair was tied up in a bun, with the bangs across her face, and she was laughing. You don’t think pretty girls can ever be ugly, but make no mistake: Cruelty is its own brand of hideous. Lila had a secret of her own, and I knew as well as I knew anything that it had taken action against me.

The dressing-room door was swinging shut behind them; they were all four wild with power. It took them a moment before they saw me, and when they did, they all raised their hands and pointed. As if I were an exotic animal found out in the woods. As if I weren’t a girl, too, just like them. They stumbled on their tall high-heeled boots, laughing. They cupped their hands over their high-gloss mouths, snorted through their perky noses.

“Did you think I was kidding, Elisa?” Lila said, coming close, tossing her bangs back with a gloved hand. “Did you think I didn’t mean it when I said you’d asked for trouble?”

“I don’t really think about you, Lila,” I said, “to be honest.” A face-saving lie, best I could do.

“You think about me all the time,” she said, “wishing you had what I have, but you don’t and won’t and never will.”

She wanted to prolong the fight. I didn’t. She wanted some confession. I wouldn’t fall. She wanted me to pledge against any future friendship with Theo. Impossible. I knew another kind of damage had been done, an irreversible something, and I knew that there’d be little time to make it right. I knew before I swung open the one dressing-room door and pulled at the other. I knew before I saw anything at all—before I reached for my dress on the diagonal clothesline, before I looked about that room and saw Jilly’s sweater tossed into one corner, my name badge tossed into another. The cork floor of the dressing room told the truth in haiku—every pearl of my dress, every sequin, fallen like snow, so many bits of spearmint-colored thread like hair after a cutting.

There was no one there—no one and nothing but me and the milky-colored light and the sunshine song I could still partway hear, even though the room was supposed to be soundproof. I took the dress from the line and held it in my hands, touched all the places where the pearls had been, the burst, ruined fabric. There wasn’t a single sequin left.

There were thirty minutes before my warm-up session was set to begin. Thirty minutes. On that bench, in that room with the wrong-colored light, I buried my face in my hands. My mascara was a river, then, black as the deepest sorrow.

Y
OU EVER HAVE IT HAPPEN that a power so infinitely bigger than you becomes you, for just a fraction of a while? You ever dig in past your list of words and live something you will never rightly know the language for? I knew the other girls in my competition class would be showing up soon, and I knew nothing would be gained from any more crying. I had two choices, and those choices were these: Skate in the spandex or hide the ruin of the dress in Jilly’s sweater. I chose to wear the dress, of course. It had been made for me with loving care.

My face was trails of black and transplanted lip
gloss. I scrubbed it clean. Only my hair clips had held, and the smooth, Jilly-quality straightness of my curled hair, which I was extra careful with as I slipped off my turtleneck and stepped into the spearmint dress. I zipped. I heard the sound of someone coming and threw the sweater on, buttoned it up, bottom to top, as quickly as I could. I swept the pearls and sequins from the floor with my hand, retrieved my name badge, put it on. Sat on the bench and laced up my skates. Tested their tightness. Laced meticulously again. It was what my family would have wanted me to do. It was what Theo expected.

All through this the other skaters had come in, unhooking their dresses from the line, zippering themselves into their swatches of pink, their gauze-for-skirts, their yellow-and-black checkerboards, their sparkles. They were girls-who-knew-one-another girls—girls I might have seen around, but none of whom I was friends with—and at the one end of the room, where a skinny mirror was, they gathered, checking their panty lines and rouging
their faces. That they were Border Road Rink members was clear, and that I wasn’t one of them was even clearer, as sometimes their talk would throttle down to a hush and one would look at me, and the others would follow, and then they all would shake their heads and shrug their shoulders. There was a big, old-fashioned clock in the room, and the minutes went by slowly. I sat where I sat until the sherbet girls were done and some official someone in a navy-blue parka swung open the second dressing-room door and said, “Your turn, girls. Time for warm-up.”

I was the last of the competitors through the dressing-room doors, through the old coffee shop, past the case of history. The last to step into the iced rink air, into the noise of all those people on the bleachers who turned the names of the Border Road girls into some kind of pandemonium. I knew Mom and Jilly were there, and Lila somewhere with her crowd, but I didn’t know a thing about Dad. I was the last to take the ice that day, and it was smooth and white as vanilla ice cream.

After warm-up the judges called us over and reviewed the rules. I kept my eyes on the ice, stood outside the members’ circle. When the lead judge pulled our names out of a hat and gave us the skating order, I didn’t complain that I was to go first. When they played the music we were to interpret that night, I let it spigot through my bones.

Then the others left the rink.

Then it was me and everything that I am made of.

Once when I was a younger, I saw Mom and Dad dancing in that place in the house that isn’t a room and isn’t a hallway. It was late at night, and being thirsty, I’d gotten up to fill my cup with water. They never saw me sitting there, on the top of the steps, looking down, while the moon through the windows lit their way. I never told. Dad was making the music up, humming it softly over Mom’s slender shoulder, and Mom was counting slow-slow-quick-quick, slow-slow-quick-quick, quiet as a whisper. She was wearing a nightdress
that looked like a gown, and her hair was loose on her shoulders. Dad was wearing his pajama trousers and a brand-new, crisp T-shirt. They moved like ice was at their feet and music in their bones, and I sat there wishing that I could dance like them, that I would someday hold a moment.

I can’t tell you the name of the music that I skated to that night. I can tell you that it began with four quick strokes across the ice, then a long, deep swoop toward the right, hands touching hands overhead to make an oval, and next a turn. Then I was skating backward, crossover after crossover, readying myself, readying everyone who was watching, for a high-as-the-moon waltz jump. I timed the jump to land on the cusp of a crescendo, and then I held that edge fastidiously. And then the music changed and razzled up its tempo, and I took three quick steps into a split jump, which is, I meant to mention, my brand-new move. Just a scissors split, but it cut the music fine, sent me up above the barrier, then set me down again, because something was happening inside that
song, the violins were lamenting, and it was this lament that carried me down the rink on one long spiral. Despite Lila. Despite the member girls. Despite the pearls that I had swept off the floor. I couldn’t hear anything but the music. I didn’t know if the crowd was with me. All I knew was that I was holding my own kind of moment, that I was making and roaring, and that this was the Cantor legacy. I can’t tell you the name of the music that I skated to that night, but I can say that I was safe inside it, that I was nothing but song until it stopped.

It was only after I was done that I heard my name called out three ways—my mother’s voice, my sister’s voice, my dad’s. Two voices from the bleachers, Dad’s from near the entrance, beyond the ticket booth, where, I know now, he’d been standing all along, keeping his own counsel while I skated, for he had come home. I heard their voices in the clear, bright air, and I heard my name, called over and over, announcing my place in the wild, good family of things.

Every book has a beginning, and
Undercover
began on a rainy day in conversation with the marvelous publisher Laura Geringer. She had been asking questions about the journey that has been my life and the things I’ve loved, and she was listening. Within days the story was writing itself. It had, by Laura, been found.

Along the way, the book benefited enormously from the kindness, steadfastness, and intelligence of Senior Editor Jill Santopolo, and from the care and ingenuity of Assistant Editor Lindsey Alexander. It was given a most glorious cover by Chad W.
Beckerman, who was assisted by Associate Creative Director Martha Rago. Almost every mistake I was inclined to make was eradicated by the fabulously precise copyeditor Renée Cafiero; if mistakes remain, they are mine, for sure. My wonderful film agent, Sean Daily, has read this book with care and made significant contributions to it. My longtime, one-and-only literary agent, Amy Rennert, cheered me through every draft of this, our first novel, with her always-present optimism and smarts. My son, Jeremy, let me read him critical pages so that I could benefit from the wisdom he has always so generously granted. My husband, Bill, gave me room to work and think.

The night I learned that
Undercover
had been bought by HarperCollins, I raced to my parents’ house to tell them the news that a lifetime dream, the publishing of a novel, was about to be realized. My mother sat in her chair at her table, reached for my hand, and said, “Beth, your time has come.” Sadly, my mother did not live to see this book come
fully to life, but where there is goodness on these pages, it is hers.

This is a book of fiction, ultimately. The story was imagined, the characters conjured. Not one member of the Cantor family is to be construed as representative of any member of my own. But I did once, long ago, teach myself Elisa’s basic skating moves on a pond in Boston, and later I wore the very dress I describe here in a skating competition. And once I had an English teacher named Dr. Dewsnap who believed in me, even when my poems didn’t work and my voice faltered in classroom readings.