Marie Taglioni, the famous Italian ballerina, was so famous that they named stuff after her. In Russia, for example, there were Taglioni caramels and cakes and even hairdos. After her last performance in 1842, someone bought her ballet shoes for 200 rubles, cooked them, and served them with a special sauce. Then her fans ate them! That sounds like something people would do for a saint, doesn’t it?
Marie Taglioni was also very plain-looking. Her teacher in France said, “Will that little hunchback ever learn how to dance?” And then Marie Taglioni became the perfect image of a ballerina. Standing en pointe in her white tutu with her hair parted in the middle and pulled back, wearing a floral wreath. So certainly, I, Madeline Vandermeer, could take it when my gum-chewing second-rate ballet teacher Misty Glenn yelled at me during class: “Madeline, what are you, a chicken? You’re holding your arms like you have chicken wings!” If that wasn’t bad enough, then Misty Glenn said, “Cluck! Cluck!” and a bunch of girls laughed.
Not Demi Demilakis, a girl in my class. She looked at me with pity. She has these really bulgy eyes, like a frog. Like any minute they might pop right out of her head. She’d just moved here from Cleveland, of all places. I asked her once after class if she knew my old friend Rose Malone and those eyes of her went all bulgy and she said, “She was in my grade at Gilmore!” Demi missed Cleveland. Her father used to take her surfing on polluted Lake Erie and she had her birthday party at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now she’s just a new kid, like me.
Still, I didn’t want her pity. When she looked at me that way, I glared at her hard. She shrugged and went back to her lazy arabesques. The girl in front of me was wearing a tie-dyed leotard. Madame would have made her leave class. And the girl in front of her was barefoot. Leave it to my mother to find this place.
“Nice extension!” Misty Glenn said.
It took me a minute to realize she was talking to me. She yelled everything, like a gym teacher.
I knew I had a nice extension. I didn’t need Misty Glenn to tell me that. One thing was certain, I was suffering. Sainthood had to be right around the corner.
The next day at school, Mai Mai Fan almost knocked me down in the hallway. She was carrying her cello case and heading for the front door.
“Sorry, Madeline,” she called over her shoulder. “I can see you are miserable, but I don’t want to miss my bus.”
“What bus?” I asked her. She didn’t stop, of course. Mai Mai never stopped.
I hurried to catch up with her. “What bus?” I said again.
“My bus to Boston. I have my advanced cello lesson there every Monday afternoon. At the Conservatory,” she added. “No one here can teach me anything anymore.”
If some kids said these very words, they would be bragging. But not Mai Mai. Her life was a giant list of accomplishments. That’s really all she had to talk about. She was excellent at everything.
“Do you take that bus alone?” I asked her.
“Of course. I get off at South Station and get on the Red Line,” she said.
She told me every step she took, but I stopped listening. If Mai Mai Fan, age eleven—she had skipped a grade—could take a bus and a subway to Boston and back by herself, then surely so could I.
“Now you look happy,” Mai Mai said. “Good.”
She ran out the door, and disappeared.
“No way,” my mother said. “No way.”
“Mai Mai Fan—” I started, but my mother looked at me all puzzled.
“What?” she said.
“Mai Mai Fan is a who, not a what,” I told her. When your daughter has only a couple of friends, you would think a mother might remember their names.
“The chess champion?” my mother said.
“She is only eleven and she takes the bus by herself every Monday.”
We were on our way home from school. I hadn’t wasted any time. Returning to Madame’s class was too important.
“I am the king of the air,” Cody said from the backseat. He had on a stupid paper crown that all the kindergarten kids had made that day.
“Then you are the king of exactly nothing,” I told him. “Air is nothing.”
My mother had already moved on in topics of conversation. “I have to stop at Whole Foods and see if they carry pomegranate molasses. Jessica says everything is pomegranate this year.”
“If air is nothing, then why do we say good night to it in Goodnight Moon?” Cody said. I could tell he was close to breaking down, and that made me feel slightly better.
With this renewed strength of purpose I said, “Maybe I’ll just go and live with Daddy and go to the American Ballet Theatre school.” For some peculiar reason, when I said this I felt queasy, not elated.
“She wants me to do an entire pomegranate menu,” my mother said with disgust. “As if kids like pomegranates.”
I looked at her. I had just threatened to leave home and all she could talk about were pomegranates?
Cody was starting a full-fledged meltdown. “Are those the little orange things where we have to eat the skin?” he was saying, all panicked.
“No,” I said, my voice as sweet as pomegranate molasses, “they’re the red things where you eat just the seeds.”