dancer, zero
by S. Michael Choi
Copyright 2012, S. Michael Choi.
The moral right of the author, S. Michael Choi, to be identified as creator of this work is asserted.
Cover photograph, creative commons licensed. Ian J. Parkes photography, Stoke-on-Trent, England. https://www.ianjparkes.co.uk/
Thank you to Ian. J. Parkes.
This use of the public domain photo does not constitute an endorsement by Ian J. Parkes or any affiliate of this work or any of the views expressed in this work.
Tatiana, the new girl, arrived in English IIIA amidst a murmur of expectation. We had already heard a beautiful Russian "princess" was coming to our own boring little neck of New Jersey, and her first impression on us was no disappointment. I think a gasp went around the classroom: she was slender, well-proportioned (her head a trifle overlarge). Her face was very beautiful. Princess indeed. But even then, at our first meeting, I noted the slight shadow under her eyes, suggesting an interior darkness. Her slenderness, fey, yet also verged on anorexia. I knew there was trouble lurking under the placid surface, but this was only encouragement for me. What do you want from truly perfected goddesses?
After class we surrounded her to make our acquaintance. She was friendly, open to sharing the pictures of her hometown near Irkutsk in Siberia. The townscapes looked grim and desolate, and her family a bit shabby. "Why did you come to America?" Her father had found a job as a computer engineer here, he was very lucky. "How do you speak English so well?" She had loved it since elementary school and gone to good schools. "What do you think of us Americans?" Very friendly and kind. "Do you have a boyfriend back home?" No. But she wasn't looking for one. She wanted to study hard and get a scholarship for college.
To nobody's surprise a fair rivalry developed initially for her affections. To quite a few people's surprise, I ended up the winner. Not unbelievably surprised: I was intelligent, very popular with the girls, and friendly. But a girl who looked like this was supposed to end up with a football, soccer, or baseball jock, right? Wrong. Academics came absolutely first in her universe, and we took a lot of the same advanced classes. Physics IAP, the special Honors Biology seminars, Pre-Calc AP, etc. We shared notes, studied together, and passed on tips about the day's tests in the hallways between classes. For one half of the year we sat at the same table and talked about The Brother Karamazov and The Cherry Orchard. She could surely have become more social had she desired, but she found me and a few other almost random individuals all she needed for daily conversation.
Tatiana's story was this: she loved dance. She had natural grace, identified at a very early age and shuttled into one of the special Soviet ballet feeder schools for the Moscow programs. Leaving Russia, she had to give up this dream, but she couldn't lie, it wasn't going to happen for her anyway: a thousand girls dream, but there's just one spot. Her dance instructor was an alcoholic. He had touched her sometimes. She loved him, once. That was all gone and past. Now, she was an American. She liked ice cream and was amazed at our shopping malls and supermarkets. She wanted to study computers or medicine. She had health problems, but she still danced ballet at least twice a week.
There in the shadow of New York in the particular disaffection only possible in north New Jersey we became close friends. We spent hours on rough endoplastic reticulum and cell membrane receptors after she earned a slot on the Biology Team: hour after hour after school in the late afternoon sunlit cafeteria reviewing our college level textbooks. SATs, college visits, a school play (she, a non-Jew, won the part of Anne Frank, and then, how offensive, turned it down), a cadet ball and Junior prom--those days were full. With the coming of senior year, we got cars to race and college applications to fill out. Tachi turned down two passes of mine without malice, and once, when drunk, she let me kiss her and stroke her while she was clothed. Yet even as she maintained a certain aloofness, I think people began to pick up on that darkness I had detected in our first encounter. In the first few months, as I wrote, she was possibly about to hang out with the athletes and cheerleaders, and then after that, the natural crowd for her was the smart set (at our high-level school, to be sure, the separation wasn't perfect). Yet between inexplicable crying episodes, (no explanations even to me) something that happened in photography, (I got only contradictory stories) and the way she could just ignore a greeting made directly to her face, her popularity went only down. "I am so alone in the world," mocked Tyrell, seeing her in the school courtyard sitting by herself.
When asked, now, "does Tatiana have some sort of problem?" I replied, invariably, "No." I said honestly, "I think that's just the way she is" and pointed out that she got good grades. Nobody could figure it out. Even for me, who talked with her for hours as we listened to Cat Stevens in her dimly lit attic room, I did get the sense that she was holding something back. Very intensely, I also remember her standing at the overlook at an apartment complex on the East River in New York City, the sea wind ruffling her hair and gulls crying, and her claiming that she was just a thought, and even that might disappear. She recoiled from me, then, and her eyes were fearful. (I was acutely and uncomfortably aware of a bystander staring at us.) Another time she asked me if I had ever felt déjà vu and how it felt, and was unsatisfied with any of my answers.
In October of my senior year, my father, a major in the Army Reserves, was activated and deployed to Germany for the NATO Kosovo operation. Over winter break, the family went to go visit him, and seeing as it was my senior year and the applications were in, we were able to get special permission for me to remain there for an additional month with school assignments faxed to me. When I returned home, my friends all teased me for having disappeared abroad. "Thought you were dead," they said. Tachi, who I had called from payphones three times using
the last of my pocket money, gave me one of her rare smiles, and we hugged in the hallway.
For those of us who had put in the long slog through the hardest classes, suffered through derivatives and integrals, memorized the lists of Linnean families and differences between alkyls and alcohols, this period can only be described as beginning with a collective sigh of relief. "Senioritis" they called it: the condition that resulted in a student with a former perfect record of attendance missing seventeen days of school in his final five months. In April we'd have another period of nervousness as the letters were mailed out, but until then, it was studying purely for fun. In Miss Petiteporte's English class we put on Waiting for Godot, purely for class entertainment, and then, because Petiteporte was on one of her artistic kicks, she subverted her filed lesson plans by making the ostensible warm-up poetry workshops the real heart of the class. Tachi and I were assigned together by chance in our group of six. Can you blame me if I looked forward to peering through this window of chance into her thoughts? She was brilliant in her criticism, giving depth to our amateur work by seeing an unintended allusion to Russian literature here, a reference to Pound there. Her own work was entirely opaque. Even poor poetry could be intense and revealing, with what was attempted to be hidden most prominent of all. Tachi's
works were like a blank slate: a pomegranate bleeding purple over her hands as she cut it in the kitchen sink, an automobile's dying headlight like an "orange moon," bells toppling into snow.
With the increased freedom of becoming legally adults, most of us could generally now spend the day unaccounted for, so long as we were home for dinner. Perhaps to a greater degree than our parents realized, many of us took advantage of this freedom to fit in little trips to the city: we'd spend an hour getting there and an hour back just to spend two or three hours walking around St. Mark's place or Herald Square. There is of course little or nothing to do in the middle of the day,
but we felt sophisticated to be in the city without parents around. Tachi and I loved Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and even took the occasional trip to ethnic enclaves in the outer boroughs. She avoided Russians, though we ate at Brighton Beach twice, and I even went alone myself for borscht and hard bread.
In April the letters arrived, and it was with a curiously dead feeling that I learned I was accepted to Princeton. My parents were filled with pride, but I scribbled over my letter of acceptance correcting the grammar of that strangely error-filled document. Tachi had her dream come true: MIT gave her the nod, and a full merit scholarship. Among our classmates there were surprises of course. Jaya, always part of the smart-set, was rejected by every Ivy League school, even Penn. Marco with his 1600 SAT score and near straight-A's was also inexplicably shut-out. Samantha, who many, though never I, considered a ditz, got Brown PLME, which included pre-acceptance to med school. Leticia got Harvard. (It was whispered that her state congress