Last
year I and two of my co-workers, Dee Dee and Kathy, made a momentous decision:
we were going to take ballet lessons. I’d
been learning tap for two years with a very elderly, yet very spry lady who was the oldest ballet teacher in the State and had been honored as such by
several national dance societies. When
she wasn’t teaching ballet, tap, or jazz, she was flying to Florida or Texas
for a convention or to New York City for some other dance-related function. Her husband Lonnie, front office man,
unflagging conversationalist and entertainer of waiting parents and students,
faithfully tagged along behind his energetic wife.
It
all started when Kathy asked me to pick up a brochure on the ballet class. She had learned ballet when she was younger
and had a yen to take it up again.
Because I’d also taken ballet into my teens--pointe shoes and all
that--my interest was piqued. Tap was starting to get a bit boring; it might be fun switching to ballet.
So what if I was over thirty? Kathy
was over forty!
Once
Kathy and I announced our decision, Dee Dee--who was also over forty but had never
taken ballet in her life--decided she would like to give it a try too, especially since she lived just around the corner from the studio. Of course, we all had to be in the same
class, which meant that Dee Dee would need some
quick coaching on basic ballet terms and technique. For starters, and to a passing lawyer’s
surprise, I executed an uncoordinated, very wobbly and stiff plié by Dee Dee's desk.
“Your
knees are actually supposed to point out to the sides,” I explained, though my
knees stubbornly pointed forwards. I’d
never able to do pliés, even when I was a little kid.
“You
mean like this?” Dee Dee stood up and sank into a graceful plié, knees perfectly turned out.
“I
hate you, you wretch!” I exclaimed and threw an eraser at her. An equally-stiff Kathy agreed. Rude comments
began flying from the other secretaries in our unit.
Undaunted,
Kathy attempted a plié of her own. “Ouch!”
she yelled. “I think I just dislocated
something.” She hobbled around seeking sympathy while the rest of us dissolved into giggles.
“There's no way I'm going to be able to stand it,” I gasped. “It's going to be so funny, I know I’m going to laugh all the
time, and the teacher will get cross. We just can't make eye contact, Kathy, otherwise I’ll
start giggling, and I won't be able to stop.
You know what happens when I laugh a lot? I pee my pants. I can see it now: me in my leotard and pink
tights, pee running down my leg.”
Our little secretarial unit was getting into the spirit of the thing now. A discussion began on when we should go
leotard-shopping. “Do
you think they make reinforced leotards to hold middle-aged stomachs in?” Kathy
wondered. The three of us didn’t get much work done for a while.
We kept thinking of funny things to say about geriatric ballerinas and
executing elaborate twirls whenever we had to traverse the office to retrieve a document from the printer. At one point, the rather substantial Kathy daringly attempted a
grand jeté, landing with the force of a dozen elephants. We held onto our desks to keep from being
spilled to the floor as the building shook. One of the senior partners leaped out of his office with a “What was that!”
“Okay,”
I conceded to Frederica, as I turned the car into our driveway, “it didn’t happen quite
that way, but it was a really fun afternoon at the office.”
“And
I thought working in a law office would be stuffy and boring,” Frederica mused,
shaking her head.
*
* * * * * * *
A
day or two later, I called Charmayne.
"I'm sorry," I told her, "but as I already signed the #lease
with Kristina, it seems I'll have to stick to it."
Charmayne was disappointed. "If it doesn't work out for some reason," she said, "let me know, okay?"
"I will," I promised then called
Kristina, who was supposed to be paying me $250.00 in #rent for August.
"Come
to muh #house Friday evening," she told me. "Seven o'clock. I'll have the money for y’all then."
On
Friday at the appointed time, Frederica and I drove to Kristina's #home on
Stanford Street. I could see why she
wanted to move. What a run-down street
it was. All the houses were in various stages of disrepair: paint peeling everywhere, junk piled high on balconies that leaned crookedly toward their neighbors, the odd ramshackle car parked here
and there. A cloud of bluebottles buzzed
angrily over a pool of something on the step leading up to Kristina's
door. I suspected it was urine, since my nostrils were assailed by the strong stench of pee as I gingerly mounted the splintered, sagging steps.
"No
one home," I reported to Frederica a few knocks later.
"Let's
sit and wait a bit," she suggested.
We
sat in the car playing cassette tapes. A young black dude had been
circling around for a while on his bicycle like a shark and now approached our car.
"You
sellin' tapes?" he asked through my open driver’s side window, pointing
at the tape case on Frederica's lap.
"No, just playing music," I told him.
"Oh." He wheeled away in another circle and came
back round again. "What you girls
waitin' for?"
"Kristina
Carter. Do you know her?"
"Nope,"
the dude said. "Thought you was
mebbe sellin' somethin', you know?"
He paused for a second.
"Wanna buy some dope? Got some
good stuff."
"No
thank you!" Frederica exclaimed in a mortified tone of voice. She sounded
very British.
"Okay, okay," the dude said. "Jes
askin'." He retreated to tool
around on his bike some more, keeping a watchful eye on us.
A
moment later, another bike came wheeling up the street. Kristina had arrived.
"Yo,"
she called when she neared my car.
"I bin lookin' for muh brother.
He's supposed to gimme the money, but I dunno . . ."
"Why
don't you take another look around," I suggested. "We can wait another twenty
minutes or so."
"Okay," Kristina agreed and wheeled away, stocky legs pumping,
braids flying out behind her.
Frederica
and I sat playing our tapes and waiting for Kristina to return. The shark still cruised steadily around, but we
steadfastly ignored him. I felt like fish out of water, and I know Frederica felt the same way: two young, naive, ex-convent girls, parked in the middle of a seedy, drug-infested ghetto #neighborhood.
Twenty
minutes passed and Kristina didn't show, so we left. When I called her later she apologized, but
she had found her brother, and he had given her the money.
"Yo
can come git it any time," she said. We arranged to meet at 51 Manson
Street the next day. Kristina's cousin
apparently had a truck that she could use to move into the #apartment that weekend. I met her on Saturday as planned, and we
did a swop: cash for keys.
Wim had an errand in Schemmerhorn on the Sunday and came home to report that Kristina hadn’t yet moved in. Maybe the truck arrangement had fallen through? Kristina didn't have to move out of Stanford Street for another month if she didn't want to. Maybe she'd decided to move into Manson Street gradually.
On
Monday my mom received a frantic phone call from my existing #tenant.
