"The Flamenco Academy" (5 page)

She didn’t look like anyone I’d ever known
before. The word whispered out of me before I could worry about how
dorky I would sound. “Beautiful.”

Didi smiled. It was the right answer.

After that first morning, Didi showed up at
my carport every school morning. It was my own personal miracle. At
school, I took over all note-taking in the classes we had together
like world cultures and English, advanced placement classes that
Didi could have aced if she’d wanted to. But she didn’t want to.
Instead, I fed her answers when she got called on and sat next to
her during tests so she could copy off of me. We even developed a
vast language of hand signals for me to use to flash her test
answers. In spite of the fact that she was naturally better in
world cultures and English than I was and it would have taken less
time and work for her to actually study, she insisted on cheating.
After school, we went to her house, where I did her homework in the
classes we didn’t have together, like science and her slow-boat
math.

I loved our division of labor, the fact that
I did all the labor. It helped me and everyone else understand why
Deeds Steinberg would be friends with Cyndi Rae Hrncir. While I
worked, Didi jumped on the Net to research the only subjects she
was truly interested in: bands, astrology, and weirdo diets. She
would always fire up a joint. She said it helped her
concentrate.

A couple of times in those first weeks, Didi
got me to take a few hits. Maybe it kept “consensual reality at
bay” for her, not for me. When I smoked all I thought about was my
dad waiting to get on the lung transplant list. Mom had started
telling me to be thankful that I’d had him for as long as I had and
to stop always thinking of myself. I had my whole life ahead of me
plus I was lucky and had inherited Daddy’s steady nerves. What did
she have, she asked me?

I tried not to make things any harder on her
than they already were. Mostly, I made myself not think about what
was happening to Daddy and that had been impossible the few times
I’d smoked. Then his face would bob up in my mind like a balloon
that I couldn’t press down, swollen from all the steroids he took
to fight off infections.

Numbers, though—numbers took me away. At
night when I lay in bed trying to go to sleep, the only thing that
could block the sound of the ventilator pushing air into my
father’s ruined lungs was numbers. I’d hoard the extra-credit
problems from my AP calculus class to work at night. I’d start
trying to figure out what the area underneath a soccer ball would
be if it followed a path defined by the curve y = 20 sin
x
over 2 yards and a vast calm would flood me.

The one good thing about Daddy getting sick
was that he absorbed all Mom’s attention and she didn’t have any
left over to scrutinize my new friend. If she had, Mom would have
forbidden me from ever seeing Didi again.

Every morning, though, the miracle of Didi
pulling the Skankmobile into our driveway repeated itself and I
would jump in, devouring air, avid for the first real breath I’d
been able to inhale since Didi had dropped me off the night before.
Maybe it was sympathy, my breathing problems. Like when my uncle
Anton gained fifty pounds when Aunt Geneva got pregnant. Because
Daddy’s lungs were getting worse. Pretty soon he had an oxygen line
clamped to his nose all the time and hardly ever got out of
bed.

Didi’s father, on the other hand, still got
around fairly well. He even managed to tape his radio shows from
the studio he’d set up in their garage. Mr. Steinberg always
treated Didi more like a grandchild than a child. Like there was a
real father somewhere doing all the hard stuff like discipline and
all he had to do was the indulgent, grandfather stuff like hand
over the keys to his Mustang and never check what time she came
home at night or whether she’d done her homework or brushed her
teeth. He’d converted their garage into a studio and Didi and I
helped him tape his shows there. He let us pull the old vinyl
records, black and shiny as a cockroach’s back, out of their covers
and cue them up on one of the three turntables he used. I loved the
names of the albums:
I Sing the Body Electric, Bitches Brew,
Pithecanthropus Erectus, Black Pastels, Ezz-thetics, Descent into
the Maelstrom.

Nobody else had ever talked to me the way he
did. “Cue up this side for me, babe. Mingus in Stuttgart.”

“Which cut, Mr. Steinberg?”

“Mr. Steinberg? Who let my father in here? I
told you Mort. Mort!”

“I’m sorry. Mort.”

“Okay, third cut. Now, listen to this. It
will freak your bird.”

All I knew about Mr. Steinberg—Mort—was that
he was the black sheep of a wealthy Jewish family somewhere back in
Chicago and had a small trust fund that allowed him to do what he
wanted: to be a disc jockey at a failing radio station and play the
jazz records he loved so much. I knew that he called Didi babe and
she called him Mort and that he believed and taught Didi to believe
that, against all evidence to the contrary, her shit did not
stink.

There was nothing Didi could do that Mr.
Steinberg wouldn’t find charming and cute and forgivable, from
getting in a fender bender with his beloved ’Stang (“It’s only
money, babe. It can be fixed. Thank God you weren’t hurt.”) to
flunking English (“I met that teacher of yours and she’s a real
chromosome case. Don’t sweat it, babe.”) to getting expelled for
skipping (“You can learn more hanging out at the mall, or wherever
it is you go, than that factory for bureaucrats will ever teach
you. Assholes.”).

When Mr. Steinberg got too weak to tape his
show, Didi knew it was the end. That’s when she got even more
hard-core about “keeping consensual reality at bay.” Her mother
always had lots of pills around the house and Didi started dipping
into them. Percocet, Ativan—she especially liked “the floaty ones!”
She stopped asking me about my father and I stopped asking about
hers. Talk was for things you could change. When all the “sharing”
and “feelings” in the world wouldn’t stop one cough from being
wrenched from one pair of ruined lungs, talk was worthless. Didi
and I knew that. She knew I had her back just like she had mine and
talking about it only made it worse.

Didi’s parents dealt with their fear like
bears, each Steinberg denning up in his or her own pain. Mr. and
Mrs. Steinberg never had much in common to begin with. They just
didn’t fit together. Him: bald, glasses, a vinyl nerd with no
interest in humans unless they had recorded on Blue Note before the
Second World War. Her: twenty, thirty years younger, beautiful as
Natalie Wood, barely speaking English and always vaguely pissed off
in a petulant way that made her look like a Pekinese dog. They,
literally, didn’t even speak the same language. They were an even
less likely couple than my parents. One day, I overheard Didi and
her mom arguing and out of the jumble of furious Spanish, Didi
hissed the phrase “mail-order bride.” I never asked Didi about it
and she never brought it up, but suddenly her parents made a little
more sense.

It was a surprise when Mr. Steinberg died
before Daddy. After the funeral, there was a reception at Didi’s
house. A few neighbors dropped by. Some of the other oncology
patients and the nice nurse who wore the fish smock showed up. None
of Mr. or Mrs. Steinberg’s family came. No friends. There was no
one to wrap their arms around Mrs. Steinberg and make her feel safe
enough to cry. Instead, Mrs. Steinberg opened Mr. Steinberg’s
liquor cabinet, took out a bottle of Chivas, filled a snifter, and
never faced life without a glass in her hand from that moment
forward.

When Mrs. Steinberg finished the Chivas, she
bought a white plastic bucket of margaritas and kept it in the
freezer. She scooped a frozen margarita out for every meal and
several snacks during the day. Overnight, her fragile, doll-like
beauty disappeared and she developed the poochy gut and spindly
legs of the serious boozer.

Didi unhinged a little less dramatically.
For the next few weeks, I walked to Pueblo Heights because I never
knew when, or if, Didi would be going to school. Even though I’d
barely spoken five words to any of my teachers, I went to all of
Didi’s and told them about Mr. Steinberg. I begged them to cut Didi
some slack, to give her special assignments she could do at home.
My workload got pretty intense finishing my work, Didi’s normal
assignments, and all of her special makeup projects. But I was
actually happy to have extra stuff to do since Didi was immersing
herself in two activities: groupieing and getting wasted on the
West Mesa. I don’t know why I had faith that in time she’d come
back. Maybe because I could no longer imagine my life without
her.

I didn’t mind being stuck at my house since
it gave me more of a chance to be with Daddy. That was when I
noticed how my mother’s peculiarities had blossomed. The sicker
Daddy got, the worse her nerves were. The only time she left the
house was to go to her new church. When she wasn’t at HeartLand,
she was on the phone talking to other members whom she called
“sister” and “brother.” She ended all her conversations with them
by saying, “Bless you.” She had taken to telling me things like
“Give Satan an inch and he’ll become your ruler.” And “What you
weave in this world, you wear for eternity.”

She was happy when the Skankmobile stopped
appearing in our driveway every morning. I’d spent my whole life
catering to my mother’s peculiarities. So, when she insisted that I
start wearing one of the long denim skirts with an elastic waist
that all the women at her church wore, I just put it on. Right over
the jeans that I rolled up so they didn’t show. Then, as soon as I
was out of her sight, I’d yank the skirt off and stuff it in my
backpack. When she informed me that Didi was “an agent of Satan,”
all I did was nod. There was no point in arguing. There never had
been.

Seeing me leaving the house in the long
skirt and not riding with Didi made my mother hum with righteous
joy. She relaxed and one night, about a month after Mr. Steinberg’s
funeral, she went out for groceries and left me alone with Daddy to
watch the History Channel. Right in the middle of the Battle of the
Bulge, he huffed out one word, “Stars.” My father loved looking at
the sky. His favorite thing about Albuquerque had been how clear
the sky was, how many more stars he could see here than in
Texas.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” I said. “Mom’ll get
mad.”

Daddy didn’t waste any more of his breath
arguing. Instead, he just raised his hand and pointed his finger
toward the window where a bit of night sky, a few of the stars he
wanted to see, were visible. His skin seemed stained by grape
juice. When I pressed his purplish fingers, a dead white spot
remained for minutes.

I bundled him up in the quilted camouflage
jumpsuit he used to wear when he went hunting back in Texas. He
hadn’t had it on once since we’d left Houdek. I tried not to notice
how the suit drooped on him like a little boy in his father’s
clothes. I disconnected him from the big tank of oxygen that stood
in the corner and hooked him up to the little portable canister he
used on the rare times when he left the bedroom.

“Your chariot, sir,” I said, pushing the
wheelchair up to where he sat on the edge of the bed, breathing
hard from the exertion of getting dressed. He waved the chair away
and tried to stand on his own. When he started wobbling, I angled
the chair under him and he half-fell into it.

When I pushed him outside into the cold
night air, he closed his eyes so that even the lids could drink in
the wild, free feeling. Then he opened them, pointed his finger to
the sky, and, one word at a time, exhaled the names of the stars.
Big. Dipper. Little. Dipper. Ursa. Major. Ursa. Minor. North. Star.
When he finished, he said, “Can. Always. Find. Your. Way.
Home.”

Because there was a little smile on his
face, I laughed as if he’d made a joke and said, “Yeah, Daddy, now
I can always find my way home.” Then, exhausted, he fell asleep and
I pushed him back into the house.

Around that time, my mother officially went
off the rails and plowed headlong into HeartLand. The sisters began
coming to our house, bringing gigantic bags of old clothes that Mom
washed, then cut up into squares of fabric for the church’s
quilting operation. Her hair had grown long and she was wearing it
in a bun that skinned all the hair back off her face, then rested
like a dowager’s hump on her neck. She switched from the long denim
skirt to pioneer dresses. She wore kneesocks to cover the little
bit of calf that showed and bought special shoes that looked like
they’d been cobbled a hundred years ago. Actually, they had just
been manufactured at HomeTown, HeartLand’s headquarters, and cost a
fortune.

The literal cap came when Mom was awarded a
“prayer covering,” a kind of bonnet that all the HeartLand females
wore. There was a special ceremony, a “consecration,” when she was
awarded her “covering.” It usually took place at the church but my
mother got a special dispensation so they could hold it in Daddy’s
room. I watched my father’s face as they placed the white lace hat
on her head. He looked over at me and did what he used to do when
we hid out at the Dairy Queen: he winked. But the sparkle in his
eyes now was from tears. I knew he was thinking about what was
going to happen to me when he was gone, and that, combined with the
fear that Didi might not come back, made me start crying, too. The
sisters hugged me and said not to worry, my mother had told them
that I had chosen to walk God’s path, and, if I stayed on it, I too
might be consecrated in less than a year.

The HeartLanders really started swarming
over us after my mother was consecrated. They promoted her to
making quilt tops. While I waited for Didi to come back, I started
quilting with my mother so I could spend as much time as possible
with Daddy. That’s what I told myself anyway. Actually, it scared
me not only how good I was at quilting but how much pecking out
stitches as small as a sprinkling of salt soothed me. Even the
sisters noticed how fine my handiwork was. When they came over to
pick up the finished work and made a fuss about it, my mother
pouted like a little kid. I didn’t care. I tried to make my
stitches microscopic just to hear someone tell me I was doing a
good job.