Master Class
OCTOBER 4, 1975
That Saturday was to be a day littered with exclamation points and tiny hearts punctuating the ends of sentences in her diary. Luz was so excited, she packed her dance bag as if she’d be spending a week at Miss Rita’s Toes and Taps dance academy instead of a three-hour master class with a guest teacher, Kyryl Kyryl, who, trained at the Bolshoi, had been a principal dancer in ballet companies in Iceland, Belgium, and Finland.
When she came down for breakfast, her mother was in the kitchen, still in her filmy negligee, her hair in rollers.
“Buenos días, baby.” Salvadora put a small bowl on the table. “Two soft-boiled eggs today. Come con calma. Tu as le temps.”
“I’ll need the energy,” Luz said, liberally sprinkling salt, pepper, and paprika on her eggs. “Ce sera un grand jour.”
Luz and her scientist parents, Federico and Salvadora, were quadrilingual in English, Spanish, French, and German. Their conversations en famille were inscrutable to friends and neighbors when they switched from one language to another as if they were all one.
Salvadora buttered a square of toast and cut it into triangles. “¿Estás nerviosa?”
“Un peu. Miss Rita said he’ll challenge us.”
“Personne n’est plus exigeante de toi que toi.”
Luz grinned. “C’est vrai.”
Salvadora peeked into a paper bag. “Te empaqué dos guineos, and a double portion of gorp con extra pepitas.” She folded the top and clipped it with a hairpin from her curlers. “Why do you have to be there so early?”
“Miss Rita wants to make sure no one is late. He’s coming an hour later. Ella nos dio un discurso entero about what we should and should not say or do. Apparently he’ll challenge us.”
“Bist du bereit, mein Lieber?” Federico came down carrying his lab coat on a hanger inside a plastic bag. “Llámame if you need anything. I can stop at the store on the way.”
“Gracias, mon cher,” Salvadora said.
“I’ll be at the lab until it’s time to pick her up.” He kissed his wife’s lips.
“Y yo aquí, pelando plátanos.” She glanced at the ripe plantains. “I’m making three trays of piononos.”
“They always want you to bring them because you make the best, Liebchen,” he said. “Alors, nena. Miss Rita will have an infarto if you’re late.”
Luz threw her dance bag in the back seat and unlocked the driveway gate as Federico backed out to the street. He seemed happiest inside his 1971 Impala, bought from a used-car dealer near the pharmaceutical company where he and Salvadora worked. Luz would have preferred another vehicle as the family car. The four-door Impala was too much like the públicos that were stuffed with sweaty passengers and their bundles. Because it reminded her of a whale, she’d named it La Ballena.
In a week, she’d turn sixteen and could get her learner’s permit and go to driving school. Federico wouldn’t let her drive his car, so Salvadora agreed to let Luz practice on hers. After she had her full license, he’d buy a cacharro she could ding and dent until she had more experience.
“Bist du nervös?” He cranked open his window to the fresh morning and Luz did the same. He tuned the radio to rock and roll, not so loud they couldn’t talk.
“Maybe a little nervous,” she said. “Pero no se lo digas a Mami. She was more upset than I was when Mr. Kyryl canceled before.”
“Je ne lui dirai pas. It was kind of el maestro to change his schedule.”
Kyryl Kyryl had been expected two weeks earlier, but his flight was canceled in advance of Hurricane Eloise. The storm had uprooted trees, caused floods, and eroded the slopes that spilled into the valley from the highlands, where Luz and her parents lived. With so many trees downed, it was now possible to see over the roofs and towers of Ovestran, where Federico, a chemist, and Salvadora, a pharmacologist, headed teams researching, developing, and testing female birth-control drugs.
Federico finessed La Ballena down the narrow road and around the hairpin turns, as Luz gazed over the buildings and parking spaces below.
“The view from up here always reminds me of my father’s stories about what it was like to grow up down there”—Federico pointed to the valley—“in what was left of a famous sugar hacienda. Er sagt es ist deprimierend, es jetzt zu sehen. Nothing left but rusting hulks of machinery among weeds, surrounded by arrabales and collapsing fences.”
“Does it make you as sad as Abuelo?”
“Sometimes, pero el progreso deja consecuencias, aunque it usually leaves traces of what had been there. C’est pour que nous n’oubliions jamais.”
Signs at the entrances of tightly packed housing developments and strip malls recalled the hacienda’s heyday. As Federico took the last curve downhill before the straightaway into Guares, Luz caught a glimpse of the roof of Miss Rita’s Toes and Taps dance academy occupying its own building in Los Gemelos shopping center. By the time they pulled up to the curb, four students were already waiting for Miss Rita to unlock the doors. A poster of Kyryl Kyryl mid-leap hung over vases bursting with flowers and surrounded by welcome messages Miss Rita had insisted the students prepare in advance of his visit.
“This is it,” Luz said.
“Einen Moment, meine Prinzessin.” Luz’s father came around to open the passenger door and helped her out. He grabbed her dance bag from the back seat.
“Mierda.” He embraced her.
“Oui.” She hugged him back and ran inside.
Miss Rita organized the dancers into a circle.
“As with other master classes, your teachers will observe, but Mr. Kyryl is in charge.”
“Did he escape from Russia?” The ballet boys were in thrall of Mikhail Baryshnikov.
“I suppose, but don’t be impertinent. It might be a touchy subject for him.” She adjusted a hairpin on her topknot. “I expect discipline and respect from you. Take his corrections seriously. We should leave him with a positive image of Puerto Rican dancers, able to perform as brilliantly in ballet as in bomba y plena.” The students snickered but Miss Rita was serious. She waited until they realized it. “If Mr. Kyryl is impressed, he might recommend you to a top ballet company school.”
Luz flushed when Miss Rita looked at her. She was the most accomplished dancer in the academy, but she was also the tallest girl and the only Black one. She’d been ridiculed and scorned by students and their parents, who could only envision female ballet dancers as petite, light-skinned, delicate swans, even in racially diverse Puerto Rico.
Although Miss Rita was a dance snob, she believed in Luz. She had encouraged Federico and Salvadora to take her to the ballet in New York. The first trip, when Luz was eleven, had been discouraging. Luz and her parents despaired that there wasn’t a single brown face and body like hers on the stages.
When Salvadora told Miss Rita, she said, “We’ll have to do something about that,” as if she alone could change dance culture.
The next summer, Miss Rita arranged for Luz to study at the Dance Theatre of Harlem School, where she was neither the darkest nor the tallest. Her dorm mate was Tere, another Puerto Rican girl, who lived in Chicago. Like Luz, she was delivered to their dorm by her parents, who exchanged phone numbers with Federico and Salvadora. The girls were expected to have dinner with Tere’s great-aunt in Queens at least once a week and were to call their parents every other day. Even when they found time before or after classes, workshops, and rehearsals, Luz and Tere weren’t rebellious enough to seek adventures. Equally determined to perform on world stages, they protected their future by having less fun than their classmates. When she returned to Toes and Taps, Luz was inspired and encouraged, but soon realized her new confidence was interpreted as arrogance.
“You know your potential.” Miss Rita held Luz’s face in her hands. “Erase the opinions of ignorantes from your mind. Save your emotions for the stage, not for them or for envidiosos.”
Miss Rita meant well, but she couldn’t protect her students when she wasn’t present, and those being bullied, Luz among them, didn’t complain, because snitching made things worse. Instead, Luz kept to herself and pretended not to be bothered by every snicker, comment, racist remark, or disdainful gaze. They pained her, but she swore not to let it get in her way, agreeing with her mother: No one should demand more from her than she demanded from herself.
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