Petals on the Wind (Dollanganger 2)

The school Paul sent me to was big and modem with an indoor swimming pool. My schoolmates thought I looked good and talked funny, like a Yankee. They laughed at the way I said "water, father, farther" or any word that had an "a" in it. I didn't like being laughed at. I didn't like being different. I wanted to be like the others, and though I tried I found out I was different. How could it be otherwise? She had made me different. I knew Chris was feeling lonely in his school because he too was an alien in a world that had gone on without us. I was fearful for Carrie in her school, all alone, made different too. Damn Momma for doing so much to set us apart, so we couldn't blend into the crowd and talk as they did and believe as they did. I was an outsider, and in every way they could all my schoolmates made me feel it.

Only one place made me feel I belonged. Straight from my high school classes I'd catch a bus and ride to ballet class, toting my bag with leotards, pointes and a small handbag tucked inside. In the dressing room the girls shared all their secrets. They told ridiculous jokes, sexy stories, some of them even lewd. Sex was in the air, all around us, breathing hotly and demandingly down our necks. Girlishly, foolishly, they discussed whether they should save their bodies for their husbands. Should they pet with clothes on or off--or go "all the way"--and how did they stop a guy after they had "innocently" turned him on?

Because I felt so much wiser than the others I didn't contribute anything. If I dared to speak of my past, of those years when I was living "nowhere" and the love that had sprung up from barren soil, I could imagine how their eyes would pop! I couldn't blame them. No, I didn't blame anyone but the one who'd made it all happen! Momma!

One day I ran home from the bus stop and dashed off a long, venomous letter to my mother--and then I didn't know where to send it. I put it aside until I found out the address in Greenglenna. One thing for sure, I didn't want her to know where we lived. Though she had received the petition, it didn't have Paul's name on it, or our address, only the address of the judge. Sooner or later though, she'd hear from me and be sorry she did.

Each day we began bundled up in heavy, woolen, knitted leg-warmers, and at the bane we exercised until our blood flowed fast and hot and we could discard the woolens as we began to sweat. Our hair, screwed up tight as old ladies' who scrubbed floors, soon became wet too, so we showered two or three times a day-- when we worked out eight or ten hours on Saturdays. The barre was not meant for holding onto tightly, but was meant only for balance, to help us develop control, grace. We did the plies, the tendus, and glisses, the fondus, the ronds de jambe a terre--and none of it was easy. Sometimes the pain of rotating the hips in the turnouts could make me scream. Then came the frappes on three-quarter pointe, the ronds de jambe en Pair, the petite and grande battlements, the developpes and all the warmup exercises to make our muscles long, strong and supple. Then we left the barre and used the center arena to repeat all of that without the aid of the barre.

And that was the easy part--from there on the work became increasingly difficult, demanding technical skills awesomely painful to do.

To hear I was good, even excellent, lifted me sky-high . . . so there had been some benefits gained from dancing in the attic, dancing even when I was dying, so I thought as I plied un, deux, and on and on as Georges pounded on the old upright piano. And then there was Julian.

Something kept drawing him back to Clairmont. I thought his visits were only ego trips so we could sit in a circle on the floor and watch him perform in the center, showing off his superior virtuosity, his spinning turns that were blurrily fast. His incredible, leaping elevations defied gravity, and from these grand fetes he'd land goose-down soft. He cornered me to tell me it was "his" kind of dancing that added so much excitement to the performance.

"Really, Cathy, you haven't seen ballet until you see it done in New York." He yawned as if bored and turned his bold, jet eyes on Norma Belle in her skimpy see-through, white leotards. Quickly I asked why, if New York was the best place to be, he kept coming back to Clairmont so often.

"To visit with my mother and father," he said with a certain indifference. "Madame is my mother, you know."

"Oh, I didn't know that."

"Of course not. I don't like to boast about it." He smiled then, devastatingly wicked. "Are you still a virgin?" I told him it was none of his business and that made him laugh again. "You're too good for this hick place, Cathy. You're different. I can't put my finger on it, but you make the other girls look clumsy, dull. What's your secret?"

"What's yours?"

He grinned and put his hand flat on my breast. "I'm great, that's all. The best there is. Soon all the world will know it." Angry, I slapped his hand away. I stomped down on his foot and backed away. "Stop it!"

Suddenly, as quickly as he'd cornered me, he lost all interest and walked away to leave me staring.

Most days I'd go straight home from class and spend the evening with Paul. He was so much fun to be with when he wasn't tired. He told me about his patients without naming them, and told tales of his childhood, and how he'd always wanted to be a doctor, just like Chris. Soon after dinner he'd have to leave to make his rounds at three local hospitals, including one in Greenglenna. I'd try and help Henny after dinner while I waited for Paul to come back. Sometimes we watched TV, and sometimes he took me to a movie. "Before you came, I never went to movies."

"Never?" I asked.

"Well, almost never," he said. "I did have a few dates before you came, but since you've been here my time just seems to disappear. I don't know what uses it all up."

"Milking to me," I told him, teasing with my finger that I trailed along his closely shaven cheek. "I think I know more about you than I know about anyone else in the world, except Chris and Carrie."

"No," he said in a

tight voice, "I don't tell you everything."

"Why not?"

"You don't need to know all my dark secrets." "I've told you all my dark secrets, and you haven't turned away from me.

"Go to bed, Catherine!"

I jumped up and ran over to him and kissed his cheek, which was very red. Then I dashed for the stairs. When I was at the top, I turned to see him at the newel post, staring upward, as if the sight of my legs under the short, rose, baby-doll nightie fascinated him.

"And don't run around the house in such things!" he called to me. "You should wear a robe."

"Doctor, you brought this outfit to me. I didn't think you'd want me to cover myself. I thought you wanted to see me with it on."

"You think too much."

In the mornings I was up early, before six, so I could eat breakfast with him. He liked me to be there, though he didn't say so. Nevertheless, I could tell. I had him bewitched, charmed. I was learning more and more how to be like Momma.

I think he tried to avoid me, but I didn't let him He was the one to teach me what I needed to know.