“And that means?” Ellie encouraged her.
“I showed up on time for bookings, and I took all the work I could get. I don’t mean to brag, but the result was that I was on the cover of three fashion magazines and was offered a lucrative cosmetics contract at the end of just eight weeks.”
Madison paused to take a bite of her cake. “But when I held the checks I’d received for the work, I thought, I could send two kids to college on this. And that’s what gave me the idea, and you know the rest.”
“No we don’t!!!” the other two said in unison.
Madison looked at them in disbelief that they could have forgotten something so big. “I used the money to start working on getting my degree,” she said.
“Your degree in what?” Ellie asked, her breath held.
Madison narrowed her eyes at her. “You know as well as I do that I’m a doctor.”
“Of medicine?” Leslie asked, her eyes wide.
“Yes. I’m a physiatrist,” Madison said, shaking her head at them. “I’m glad I chose that specialty because I had a wonderful teacher at Columbia, Dr. Dorothy Oliver. It was as though she and I had known each other forever.”
Ellie looked at Leslie; then Leslie looked at Ellie. At first they smiled at each other; then they grinned. Then, in a spontaneous gesture, they began to laugh. Then they threw back their heads and laughed some more. Then they pushed their chairs back and got up and linked arms and began to dance around, laughing happily.
The other patrons looked up, at first frowning, but when they saw the unabashed happiness of the two women, they smiled.
There was music playing i
n the restaurant, something soothing, but Ellie and Leslie seemed to find a beat as they whirled each other about in what looked like fifties swing. “Doctor!” Ellie said. “She’s a doctor.”
“Of medicine,” Leslie answered, laughing, as she twirled about with Ellie.
When it came to dancing, Ellie was outclassed by Leslie, so she stepped back, and in the next second Leslie was on her toes. In a way, it had been about eighteen years since Leslie had danced, but in another way, for the last two weeks, she’d spent two hours a day dancing. Now, she put her hands above her head in a graceful arc and began to twirl her body in a tight little circle; then, still twirling, she made her way between the tables.
The diners knew talent and experience when they saw it. They put down their forks and gave their attention to Leslie, and when Ellie began to clap to the rhythm of the music, so did they. Leslie twirled through the entire restaurant, never losing her balance, or her momentum.
When she returned to their table, she stopped. And when she stopped, the restaurant burst into applause. Smiling, her face red with embarrassment, but pleasure also, Leslie dropped into a deep curtsy, as though she were a ballerina at the end of a bravura performance.
Moments later, they were again seated at the table, both Ellie and Leslie looking at Madison with shining eyes.
“You still have it,” Madison said to Leslie.
“No, not really,” she answered, but this time there was no sound of “failure” in her voice. “The truth was that I never did have it.”
“But I just saw—”
Leslie had to take a deep drink of water. Yesterday she may have been twenty, but today she was forty, and the body she’d just used was not in shape. “I’m a better dancer than the average person, but I’m not as good as the best dancers. And that’s what I always wanted to be: the best.”
“But—” Madison began, but Ellie cut her off.
“So how did you meet Thomas?” Ellie asked.
Looking down at her empty dessert plate, Madison smiled. “Do you two remember that when I met you, I said that I’d been jilted by a boy back home?”
“We remember,” Leslie said quietly. “What happened to him?”
“Don’t tell the punch line before the story, remember?” Madison said, smiling. “The boy who jilted me, Roger, that was his name, wrote me a couple of letters while I was in New York, and it was through him that all the best things in my life have happened.”
Pausing for a moment, Madison waited for Leslie or Ellie to make a reply to this, but both women wore identical expressions: both women had curled upper lips, as though the mention of Roger’s name disgusted them.
“Roger wrote me that the brother of a college friend of his was going to Columbia University. With my background, I didn’t know one college from another, but that school was in New York, so I applied there.”
Looking down at her water glass, she gave a secretive little smile. “At the time, I didn’t know what a prestigious school Columbia was and how difficult it was to get into. But all through high school, I’d done my own schoolwork and Roger’s as well. So, in essence, I’d had two educations. I’d studied English and history, but Roger wanted to impress people, so he’d taken physics and chemistry courses.” Still smiling, she looked up at Leslie and Ellie. “Let’s just say that Roger made straight As in all his courses. So, any test they gave me, I passed with high marks. I was told that I should apply for a scholarship, but I wanted to pay my own way.”