Even though my house and my mother and my little brother were the biggest embarrassments in my life, I invited Antoinetta to sleep over on a Saturday night. I had to.
For one thing, my mother didn’t like that I was always at Antoinetta’s house. “Don’t girls take turns hosting each other?” she said, which made her sound like Martha Stewart. For another thing, even though I went to her house every Sunday after church, her father didn’t allow sleepovers there. “Strangers in our house at night make him uncomfortable,” Antoinetta explained, which insulted me. After all, I wasn’t exactly a stranger. When I said that to Antoinetta she got all defensive. “He’s suspicious of things like that,” she said. “That’s all.” So if I was going to get Antoinetta to myself for a whole night it had to be in my awful house with my awful family. That definitely went on my merit list for sainthood.
It took weeks to convince her father that this was a good idea. He asked her questions like: “What will you eat over there?” and “What do these people want from you?” After the asparagus incident I could understand the food question. But I was beginning to think that maybe Antoinetta’s father was paranoid, which meant he believed everybody was after him—that was a bonus vocabulary word and I got it right.
By the time he gave her permission, I was deep into rehearsals for that ballet set to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. This was for Misty Glenn. And I got the lead in “Spring,” even with my so-called chicken arms. It required great concentration and practice. Also, I had just started dancing in toe shoes and my feet killed me. When I took off my toe shoes my big toes were all bloody. I liked to come home and soak my feet. I even let my mother wrap my toes in soft gauze, which made me feel good. She was so gentle and nice when she did it, and all the while I thought of the pain I was enduring and how good that was for my pending sainthood, too.
So even though it was the most inconvenient time in the world for me to have someone sleep over, since that someone was Antoinetta, I got all excited. At rehearsal, the choreographer, a man named Randy, told me I was not concentrating hard enough. I missed my cue twice and I did a sloppy arabesque. My jumps, he said, gave him indigestion. Randy spoke with a mysterious accent, and Demi Demilakis, who got the lead in “Winter,” said that she’d heard he was from Transylvania. This sounded both scary and exciting to me.
Before I could leave, Randy stopped me at the door. “It is Spring,” he said, frowning. “You must think light! Think airy! You must think!”
I stood there, clutching my ballet bag, my toes aching like crazy. I concentrated on my costume, all sparkling green and glittery in its plastic wrap, in my other hand. I wished I could explain everything to him. I wondered where Transylvania was, and decided it must be in Russia. Then I wondered if there were any Russian saints. The only thing I knew about Russia was from seeing half of Doctor Zhivago, which was probably the most boring movie ever made. My mother cried through the whole thing and made terrible soup called borscht for dinner afterward. Borscht is beets, which are the worst vegetables, worse even than cauliflower.
“Madeline?” Randy said. He rapped my head with his knuckles, hard. “What is going on in there?”
I shrugged, thinking that maybe all Russians were saints—all the snow, all those beets. They endured an awful lot. I wondered if I had a crush on Randy, with his sunken eyes and Gumby body and his weird accent.
“Is Transylvania in Russia?” I asked him.
“I have no idea,” he said, clearly disgusted with me.
When my mother and I got home, Antoinetta and her father were already there, an hour early, sitting in their car.
“Is that them?” my mother said, sounding distressed. “Already?”
Limping, I followed her to their car.
“Hello,” she said in her fakest voice. “Would you like to come in?”
“Yes,” Antoinetta said too quickly. “He would.”
I practically groaned out loud. Antoinetta still thought her father and my mother might get together, even after I explained I could never do that to her or her father.
Luckily, he refused to come in. He didn’t like to go into other people’s houses. He actually said that to my mother.
Even with my sore feet and bad rehearsal, having Antoinetta for a whole night made me the happiest I had felt in a long time. My mother was asking us questions about beverages and dinner and renting movies, but we didn’t stop to answer. Instead, I grabbed on to Antoinetta’s arm and pulled her upstairs.
Antoinetta brought her book, The Lives of the Saints, and we took turns reading about different ones and acting out the best parts of their lives: getting our eyes plucked out, burning to death, helping lepers. Being a saint was exhausting.
“You know,” Antoinetta whispered after we got in bed and turned off the lights, “I might become a nun.”
I frowned. “You can’t get married or anything,” I said.