I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [18]
I reentered the time warp and watched myself walk out the door. On the Stage of Death, under the glare of a “follow spot,” I tried to walk a straight line down the street, step by step, attempting to look preoccupied, counting. One, two, three, four … eighteen, nineteen, twenty …
“Hey, you!” a voice shouted. A big black guy walked over, followed by several of his cronies. I froze, legs twitching, going nowhere. “Yeah, what?” my dry throat croaked. He’s wearing white Keds, blue jeans, and a white polo shirt. For some reason, to my terrified eyes, black muscles seemed bigger than white ones. He looked like a truck!
“That old lady you with—she your mother, grandmother?” I stared at this black shadow with white eyeballs. His big white teeth had a space in the middle. “No! No! She’s just a neighbor, a friend, I just walked her over.” My excuses squeaked out plaintively. “She had to go to the hospital. It was an emergency. I’m going back to my block now.”
His gang clustered around me, hemming me in. “She got those awful-looking legs. Man, people go there, they don’t come out. The hospital’s a place to go to die.”
Then a girl’s voice pops out of the bunch. “Shut your mouth, Joe. That ain’t no way to talk—you’re scaring him. It ain’t that bad.” A fat girl with a shiny face steps in front of Joe and blares at him. “Back off! I’m talking to him now!” She was right in Joe’s face, and she knew how to give orders. She’d be great in the military. Then she turns and beams at me. “I got a grandma like that, but she dead now. We’re sure sorry about that little old lady friend of yours. Maybe she’ll come out alive, and if you ain’t around here to take her home, we’ll see she gets back all right.” I nod repeatedly as I back through the group and try to keep my quivering under control, but near Amsterdam Avenue I run like a crazed cheetah. I never knew what happened to the milk. A week or so later Mrs. Sullivan showed up around the block.
MADAME SEDA
Within a year of our move from Staten Island, the Boss found a ballet school on 181st Street. She came to get me. It was Saturday, and I was seven, ferociously playing stoop ball with my gang. “Jacques, I am taking your sister to her ballet class. You are to come with me.” Madeleine was clutching her ballet bag, smirking.
“Ah, Boss, do I have to go?”
“Of course, and you will love it.” Determined, she grabbed my hand and, clutching Madeleine, led us to Madame Seda’s Dance Academy. It was close to a half-hour walk.
I protested, “Boss, I want to play with the fellas. I don’t want to sit around watching her stupid ballet class.”
“Oh, Jacques, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Ballet is wonderful. It’s magical and very hard to do. Great men in ballet can jump way up high in the air.”
“How high?”
Her finger stabbed at a nearby fire escape twelve feet over our heads. “Oh, they can jump so high, they could reach that.” In her mind, a dancer leaped in the air and finger-touched the bottom of the fire escape. I looked up, effortlessly leaped the twelve feet, and landed on top of the fire escape!
“And when they jump, they seem to float, and when they land on the ground again, there’s no noise.”
Five ragamuffin boys—predators—close in on the last holdout, arms waving like antennae, feet drumming, an orchestra of ants converging on their victim. Squeals and pants, raucous orders: “You get him on this side! I’ll get him from over here.” In a second, he’d be pinned to the curb. Suddenly, he leaps, floating in slow motion over their upraised heads. He looks down, waves to them, and lands lightly on the other side of the street. Mouths drop open in amazement.
“Safe!” he yelps with a triumphant laugh.
Daydreaming