Rose Sees Red (5 page)

It was dark outside, so I didn’t notice them until we got to the crosswalk on Mosholu Avenue. They walked under the streetlamp. Two men. They both had suits on. One was in front, the other trailing behind, both of them following us, but not together.

“KGB or CIA?” I said automatically to Yrena, like I always did to Todd.

She looked over her shoulder at them.

“You can tell by their shoes,” she said.

I looked at the men’s shoes.

“The black ones, KGB. The sneakers, CIA,” I said.

“Yes, I think so, too,” she said. “They are not interested in you. It’s normal for them to follow us. It is not a big deal.”

“Is that why you climbed through my window? To evade them?”

“I thought perhaps we had escaped them by going through the window,” she said. “It’s fun to try to escape them.”

“Will we get in trouble?” I asked. I wasn’t too worried. More curious than anything else.

“Only if we share state secrets,” she said.

“Well, it’s best to take the price tag off the bottom of a toe shoe,” I said. “Otherwise, when you perform, it’s distracting.”

“That’s it,” Yrena said, throwing her arms up in the air. “We’re certainly on a watch list now.”

“What a drag,” I said.

Then we laughed. Because at the time it was funny. I mean, what would two girls like us ever be on a watch list for? Exchanging microfilm in our sugar cones?

When we got to Zips, I ordered a mint chocolate chip ice cream sundae and Yrena ordered a strawberry one.

“What is your high school like?” Yrena asked. “Do you have a boyfriend? Is there a football team? Do your parents let you wear makeup?”

“I go to a special school,” I said. “A school for performing arts.”

“For dance?” Yrena asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “So it’s not like a regular American high school. We don’t have gym class.”

“No cheerleaders?” Yrena seemed saddened by this.

“No,” I said. “Dance class, academics, and the occasional hot lunch.”

“I was hoping you could tell me about cheerleaders. And football.”

“I don’t know anything about that. We don’t have anything like they do in a normal high school. I mean, I guess maybe I’m missing out on a regular high school experience.”

“Will you feel strange later on in life?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I’m kind of glad. Besides, isn’t every school a bit different?”

Yrena shrugged.

“Well. At least we have a senior prom.”

“That’s a dance,” Yrena said.

“Yes.”

“We have dances. Although they try to keep it the same, my school here in America is different than back home.”

“So I guess every school is different and the same.”

“Yes,” she said.

I thought about that for a minute. It was comforting to know that you could always find something in common with someone else.

“How long have you been dancing?” I asked.

“I took ballet class because all little girls take ballet,” Yrena said flatly.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.

“I do not have a boyfriend.” Yrena sighed. “My father says I am too young to go on dates.” She took a spoonful of her ice cream and sucked on the spoon thoughtfully. “I will tell you a secret. I am hoping that because my breasts have grown so much—they are really quite big—that they will not take me back at the ballet school.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“You have some of the best schools in the world.”

“How long have
you
been dancing?” she asked.

“Since I was four.”

“Me, since I was three. But I do not want to dance. I want to quit.”

“I thought for you Russians, dancing was in your DNA.”

“I thought for you Americans, every girl was a cheerleader in love with a football player.”

Sometimes it takes someone saying something stupid to make you realize that what you said was stupid.

“I quit dancing once,” I said. “But it didn’t stick.”

“You are lucky,” Yrena said. “My ballet master says that if you want to know if you are really a dancer, you should try quitting. If you can’t, then you are a dancer.”

“I didn’t want to quit because I hated dancing. I quit because I just wanted to fit in more than I wanted to dance.”

Yrena reached across the table, took my hand in hers, and squeezed it, as though she wanted me to know how much she understood what I was saying. It felt good to be so completely understood, so completely trusted.

“I want to be a normal girl,” she said. “Do normal things. Not be special. Just a normal Russian teenager.”

It was true—Yrena didn’t seem typical. She was living in America, climbing into people’s windows, wanting to go to
Todd’s D&D party. I wondered what a normal Russian teenager looked like, because it didn’t seem like one was sitting in front of me, any more than a typical American girl was sitting in front of her.

I went back to the question:
Aren’t we all different and the same?

“I told myself that I was over ballet,” I said. “Not serious about it anymore. Tired of the endless repetition.”

“Tired of the discipline,” Yrena said.

“Tired of the aching muscles.”

“Of the broken toes. The swollen feet.”

We both said it. And in a way, despite our being from different places, Yrena kind of got it.

But I couldn’t tell how Yrena felt about dancing. She seemed to love dancing as much as I did. But she seemed to hate it more than I did, too.

It was funny how two such different things could be true at the same time. I was tired of those things.

“I told myself all that and it made it easier to quit, and when I did, I had friends,” I said.

“I don’t have many friends since we moved to America,” Yrena said.

She said it kind of matter-of-factly. And I thought about it, and how it must be hard for her, only having the other Soviets that were here in New York to socialize with. Just enough to fill an apartment building. I could barely find
anyone to fit in with at school, and that was a building full of kids.

I brought the subject back to dance.

“I don’t think I’m very good. There is always someone better than me in dance class,” I said.

“There is always someone better,” Yrena said. “Anywhere.”

I wondered if I was better than anyone in class. From the way Ms. Zina barked at me, it didn’t seem possible.

“I am always so relieved when I meet someone who is more talented than I am,” Yrena went on. “I am like, ‘Go! Win the competition, I will gladly come in second place!’ Sometimes, I do come in second place, and my parents and teachers are disappointed. But secretly I am so happy. Unless I get competitive and I push myself harder. Then I get angry at myself for trying and succeeding.”

“I’d give anything to go to one of those schools in Russia,” I said. “Maybe it would give me an edge.”

“You would do well there. They like passion. I can tell that you dance with passion.”

“How do you know?”

“From your shoes,” she said. “And I can see it in your walk. In the way that you are sitting.”

The little bell over the door rang, and when I looked up, I noticed that those same two men had come inside. First one. Then the other. They were probably bored standing outside waiting for us to finish up. They ordered ice cream. They didn’t sit with each other. Each sat at his own table, equally
looking at each other, eyeballing us, and licking their cones. The KGB guy looked at Yrena and jutted his chin out at her as if to say
I’m watching you.

“Creepy,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “They will make sure that I go home soon.”

“Are you afraid?” I asked.

“Not today.”

I could see myself inviting her over to my house to hang out for the rest of the night. Or another night. We could order our own pizza. We could talk more.

“Well, maybe we should go home,” I said.

I was a little bit wigged out by the suits because they were watching us and it was kind of intense. It made me aware of my every action. It felt weird putting the spoon in my mouth, so I finally just pushed my plate away from me.

Yrena, though, liked to take her time. It was a few more minutes until she’d finished hers and we went outside.

“I never believed that those guys hanging around our street were really KGB or CIA,” I confessed. “Todd, my brother, always says that our neighborhood is so safe because of that.”

“It is true,” Yrena said. “That is why I’ve never had a real American night out. Not that I even want one. They are always watching us—where we go, who we talk to. My parents more so than me.”

The two suits watched us through the glass window and
we watched them back as they got up from their respective tables. They were now hanging back a little. They sort of looked sorry about the fact that they were tailing us.

“Well, I will walk back to the house. Have fun at your party,” Yrena said. “I’ll wait with you for the bus.”

She walked me to the bus stop, and as we were standing there, I tried to figure out a way to tell her that I wasn’t going to go to the party. I was going to step back into the shadows.

“You are exactly as nice as I thought you would be,” she said.

“Maybe we could hang out again sometime,” I said.

Yrena got a weird look on her face that I didn’t understand. She was struggling with something.

“That would be very nice if it could happen,” she said.

“Sure it can,” I said. “We can make it happen.”

The bus pulled up right there in front of us. And as the doors opened, I turned around to tell her that I wasn’t going to the party and that she should just come over to my house right then so we could watch some TV together or something.

But instead, something else happened. Yrena pushed me onto the bus with her and reached over me to put in some bus fare as the bus pulled away.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

I was totally flummoxed.

“Carpe diem?” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“Your party, is it far downtown?”

“Miss,” the bus driver said to me, “you have to put your fare in.”

“I’ve never been downtown without my parents,” Yrena said. “Only once, on a school field trip to the United Nations.”

“Miss, you’ll have to get off at the next stop if you don’t pay your fare,” the bus driver said.

The light had changed and the bus was pulling away and we were going. There was no getting off now until the next stop.

“You could take me to the party,” Yrena said. “That way I can see one for myself.”

Once there is a crack in you, it’s so easy for just a little bit of light to seep in. That’s how I felt, as though little bits of light were brightening up the dark corners inside. Once light gets in, things start to grow. Feelings ripen—a tingling in my chest, a flush of excitement, a bubbling up of
happiness.

I dug into my pocket and put the seventy-five cents into the fare box.

I was on a bus going to a party that I hadn’t planned on going to with a girl I didn’t really know, and I was glad.

Yrena grabbed me and we laughed and shouted and ran to the back of the bus and plopped down on the back bench seat like friends. Like
best
friends.

It was while I was laughing that I noticed through the back window that the suits, who had been lazily leaning against the wall of Zips ice cream store, were now running behind the bus, waving at it, trying to tell it to stop.

The two men became tiny as we moved away from them. I poked Yrena, but she just kept looking at me. She didn’t even look back. Maybe it should have struck me right then to be worried. To maybe wonder if they had radios to contact other agents. But that didn’t even cross my mind. Yrena seemed calm as anything.

“I’ve only gotten to live in Riverdale,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s not the real city.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “You have to see New York City. It’s the best city in the world.”

“
One
of the best,” Yrena said, teasing me.

I was about to say something like
Maybe we shouldn’t go to that party.
Yrena got this look on her face. A look that said
Don’t.

“Who will be at the party?”

“People from school,” I said. “Callisto and Caitlin.”

“Is Callisto a boy?”

“No. She’s a girl.”

“But there will be boys?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

We got off at 231st Street and climbed the stairs for the subway downtown.

We were really doing this.

The train arrived in the station and the doors slid open.

I looked over my shoulder, but there were no suits following us.

From that moment on, there was no turning back.

Yrena was tracing the graffiti tags on the subway walls, her fingers making intricate loops as they followed the marks. The farther we pulled away from the Bronx, the more I think we both relaxed.

“Those are called
tags,
” I said.

“Why don’t they do pictures like they do on the outside of the train?” Yrena asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think tags are just people marking their territory. Like a cat.”

“This looks ugly,” she said. “But on the outside, it is very exciting.”

I had to agree with her. The graffiti on the outside of the trains was thrilling. People, like the mayor and my parents, called it
vandalism,
but I thought it was
art
.

Even though their calligraphy was sometimes graceful, tags seemed dirty and uninspired. I liked them better when they were used as signatures on the outside of the subways for
the massive pictures, or where the letters covered the whole outside of the car, boasting. The words were written with aerosol cans so that they looked like pure, colorful art, the kind you could believe would be in a museum. You couldn’t read it until you stepped back and saw the word. I could be sitting in a car with the six-foot word
BURN,
or
STAR,
or
CRASH,
with the occasional image thrown in, like a Smurf or superhero or a hot girl or Puerto Rican flag woven in with the words. Those were pieces I could get behind because they turned the monotone of the subway into something magical. I was glad that someone cared enough to go into tunnels and car yards and make something routine anything but. My first week of school I saw a car with my name on it—
ROSE
it said, with bright red flowers climbing all over the word. I took it as a sign that no matter how hard high school was, I was doing the right thing getting on that train to head downtown.

Yrena and I talked for a bit about that. She said that in Russia, the trains were clean and that they were blue. We agreed that here everything was so dirty. She said that in Moscow there was even a station that had a chandelier in it. Imagine that. I could never picture a chandelier in a New York City subway station. Most of the stations I’d been to were downright dirty and had no frills at all. Platforms with brown peed-on cement, rats you could see running around on the tracks, strange smells, and lightbulbs that flickered. There
was nothing romantic about a subway station as far as I could tell. They were just in-between places, meant to be left as quickly as possible.

The wheels screeched and there was that rumble as the car shook.

“Listen,” Yrena said. “It sounds like applause.”

She was right. If you used your imagination, the sound of the subway moving through the tunnel sounded a little bit like an audience bursting out with joy at the end of a masterful performance.

Brava! Brava! Brava!

“Is this Manhattan?” she asked as the train came out of a tunnel and moved along a track outside for a bit.

“Yes.”

“I have left the Bronx!” Yrena said.

I put my hand into the air to give her a high five. She looked at me blankly and left me hanging, so I changed my hand into a thumbs-up. She understood that and gave me a thumbs-up back.

“Here’s something you would like,” I said. “Near here is the Cloisters. It’s a medieval castle. They brought it brick by brick from Europe. It’s part of the museum where the party is, only they keep it uptown. There are unicorn tapestries and everything.”

“We have a lot of medieval things in Russia,” Yrena said.

“I’ve seen the pictures,” I said, but I actually couldn’t really recall any specific pictures that I’d seen of Russia. I knew that
there was a place called Red Square. But I wasn’t sure if it was square or red.

“I wish we could see the castle,” Yrena said. “Everything outside the window is not so nice-looking.”

“That’s because everything is new,” I said. “We are a new country. We just had our bicentennial. Maybe all of this will be beautiful in one hundred years.”

“I do not think those buildings will ever be beautiful,” Yrena said.

She was looking at the apartment buildings all squashed up against one another. It was dark outside and not all the streetlamps worked. You could see the light spilling out from people’s windows, dotting the buildings like constellations. Sometimes, with the close buildings, you could even catch a glimpse into those strangers’ lives. A living room here. A kitchen there. We watched people moving along privately in their homes as we sped by them.

“Some people say new is better,” I said as we descended into the tunnels again.

“New is not better,” Yrena said.

“I didn’t say that
all
new was better. I never said I didn’t like
old.
Besides, how does anyone know what is going to be beautiful in a thousand years?”

“No one will know,” Yrena agreed.

“Exactly, and isn’t Communism new? Democracy is way older than Communism, and many people on the planet think democracy is more beautiful than Communism.”

Yrena turned her head away from me and looked back out the window where the view had turned to nothing.

Where was this red, white, and blue patriotism coming from? Did being with a Russian somehow make my American feelings kick in? Why had I brought up politics? Was that inevitable when two people from different places and different points of view got together? Did we have to point out all that was different about us in order to define who we were? It was very strange. I was hoping to have fun, and instead I felt defensive and irritable. I couldn’t exactly form an opinion because I realized that I didn’t really have one. Everything was a vague feeling I had in my head. Nebulous thoughts about bigger issues. Vagueness doesn’t really help in a friendship. But now what we’d said was just out there sitting between us. I felt like if I didn’t know exactly what it was that I wanted to say, maybe I should be quiet until I did know.

People came on and off the car, and while Yrena brooded, I did what I did best: people watching. Some were dressed up to go out, some were coming home from work, some were just starting work. There were old people and young people and children. There was every kind of person on an NYC subway: the woman coming home from work in her business suit but wearing comfy sneakers. The two little girls with big brown eyes in very fancy, lacy dresses with their large, round mom. The night watchman with his metal lunch box. The scary-looking guy with wet-looking hair and his
agitated girlfriend. The effeminate, delicate Indian man reading Proust.

“It is very equal on the subway,” Yrena said, breaking the silence. “Every kind of person.”

“Yeah,” I said. “A big melting pot.”

“
That
is beautiful,” Yrena said. “I have not seen much of very different kinds of people in my life.”

We hopped off the subway at 86th Street and took the crosstown bus. Any weirdness that had cropped up for a minute between us was forgotten. Yrena liked the look of Central Park and so did I. I realized that while I’d been to Central Park plenty of times (mostly with my parents), I didn’t really
know
it. I didn’t really know much about downtown at all.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was grand and gorgeous, timeless and fierce. Even Yrena stopped talking when we approached it. I could tell that she was impressed.

“It looks like your White House,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Where the president lives.”

“I know what the White House is. But I don’t see it.” Maybe she meant the Capitol building.

“Look again,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. “If you squint.”

“Squint?”

I squinted my eyes for her so she could tell what I meant. She got it and squinted back at me.

“Interesting. If you squint, you can make something look like something else,” she said.

“This place is filled with treasures,” I said, feeling I was responsible for being some kind of tour guide. “Art treasures.”

It was funny how you could suddenly have complete ownership over something. Here I was bragging about the museum, even though I hadn’t actually been to the museum in a million years, and maybe only a few times at that. I realized I was starting to compile a list in my head of things to do in NYC.

Explore Central Park.

Visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I had the New York pride spring in my step.

“They have some Degas dancers in there,” I said. “You would like that.”

There was a room with a bunch of Degas’s paintings of ballet dancers. There were also statues and a lot of them were little sculptures of dancers in the various positions. I had forgotten about them until just that moment. When I was little, my mom had taken me to see them, and for a couple of years afterward I’d loved to visit them and say hello. I could remember talking to them like friends. I had names and stories about them—what their careers were like, who was in the corps de ballet, who was the prima ballerina, who died of consumption, and who had suffered from a bad love affair. The stories were only for me—I never shared them with
Daisy—and the dramatic ones were based loosely on ballets and operas I’d seen or heard of.

It was amazing what I could remember about myself when I retraced my own steps. When I thought about it, those dancers were what I thought ballet was like more than any of the pink tulle that Daisy used to try to push on me.

I told Yrena this.

“Lovely,” she said.

“Yeah.”

We stood and looked at the building for a minute more, and then a gaggle of kids our age started running by us toward the steps. We followed.

It may have been a world-renowned art museum during the day, but on Friday nights the steps of the Met doubled as a high school rendezvous point for hanging out and drinking. All kids were welcome. Here, private school and public school lives met on even ground.

Kids were mingling on the steps in little groups. Some sat on the edge of the fountain at the bottom of the steps. Some were gathered up on the ledge near the doors. It was a lot of standing around, like a happening waiting to happen.

“I thought it was a party,” Yrena said, looking around.

“It
is
a party,” I told her. I liked that it was not a regular party with a makeout corner, a bowl of chips, and music I didn’t know playing on the record player.

“But this is not what I imagined.”

Yrena was definitely disappointed. If she was looking for the football players and the cheerleaders, this was definitely not the right place. I couldn’t even find it for her if I wanted to.

“Well, a party is a party, right?” I said.

“There is no music,” she said. “No rock and roll.”

“It’s better to have a unique experience.”

She looked at me and pouted.

I just smiled back. A smile is sometimes all it takes to be lifted. To feel brave.

“Come on,” I said with a confidence that I hadn’t felt in over a year. “This is where it’s
at.
”

I actually didn’t know if this was where it was at or if it was going to be awful. But I knew I
wanted
it to be fun. And if you wanted something to be fun, there was a better chance that it actually would be.

“Do you see your friends?” Yrena asked.

I scanned the crowd. I was counting on Callisto and Caitlin showing up like they said they would.

“No,” I said. “I don’t see anyone yet. But it’s still early.”

I was more trying to convince myself than her.

“Perhaps we should introduce ourselves and meet people,” Yrena said.

“Wait,” I told her. I didn’t know why I said wait except that I suddenly froze up. I didn’t know how to just go up and talk to people. It was the difference between being on the dance floor, where you were given all the choreography, and
being
the choreographer, where you made it all up yourself. Anything could happen.

Yrena smiled at me. “If you squint, they will look just like your friends,” she said.

I squinted.

I squinted so that people looked
nicer.

“Okay,” I said. “But maybe we should start by finding someone who can get us drinks?”

Yrena nodded.

I felt better with a plan. I felt more confident about asking people for something, like a drink, than just going up to strangers and inserting myself into their conversations. I had about as much experience as Yrena did at coming out to a party, but with the two of us in it together, it was a lot easier to fake.

I was just starting to feel good about the whole night, and how it might actually go okay, when I saw Daisy coming up the stairs.

Daisy.

I felt that old rush of bad heat come over me.

Of all the people that I thought might be here, Daisy wasn’t one of them. Then again, this was exactly where she would be. She probably partied all the time.

I tried to duck behind Yrena and get her to walk all the way over to the other side of the steps, but Daisy caught sight of me before we could slip away. I watched in horror as she gestured to the girls she was with. They all looked in my
direction and then looked away and laughed. My heart was beating fast. I wanted to run away. I think normally I would have, but I didn’t want to give myself away as a weakling in front of Yrena.

I had to remind myself that Yrena didn’t know me. So she didn’t care about what had happened between me and Daisy.

Yrena was what I’d thought high school would be for me: a clean slate.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Daisy’s friends had formed a little V behind her, like she was the lead bird in a flock of geese going south for the winter.

I stayed put and tried to size up who would be the best person to approach for booze.

“Are those your friends coming toward us?” Yrena asked. She’d noticed Daisy’s crowd looking at us.

“I wouldn’t call them friends,” I said.

“But you know them?”

“I used to go to school with them.” That sounded like a nice balance between a lie and the truth. “They go to Science.”

She didn’t know what that meant. So I explained.