Audrey Hepburn's Pearls: Part I

Chapter 97.2: 1995, Georgina

Chapter 97.2: 1995, Georgina

"He would not talk to me about Delilah. I kept asking him, but he kept talking about her students. How she's abandoned them for her own dreams. But who is right? If he got accepted to a ballet company as prestigious- Oh, but there is one girl. Her name is Alessandra, pretty young girl, thirteen. One of Delilah's students. She is in tears because she cannot afford a costume, and she is traveling to Chicago for to try out for a school in a couple of months. So he only wanted to talk to me about can we buy her a costume, her shoes. Those things. It is so important, he says, because what are we working for if not for our students' futures? Why can we not buy these things? And I said to him, he was distracting me, that if we buy these things for her then every student will ask for them. We do not have that kind of money. We are a small network of studios. Look where we practice, even. The rent is not cheap. So he told me, 'we will only buy for them in special circumstances' and I told him that is impossible, because define 'special circumstances'. He didn't have an answer for that. But I know he will ask me again, to buy her these things. Do you know how expensive these things are? And she will just grow out of them! Break the shoes!"

I sipped my tea, staring at Cha Cha who looked like she was in her own world, going on about her dance school. I didn't answer, because she had her own answers. I didn't know much about dance either. Sure, I had danced the box step, danced the waltz when led, a foxtrot. But this was so much more. A world I had no idea about, other than watching ballet on PBS. Still, Cha Cha was getting so passionate that she was breaking her English, surely not unlike the way this Alessandra would break the shoes she was talking about. But how in the world do you break a ballet shoe?

And as reliably as clockwork, as I'd learned by so many days with her in my apartment, she went on.

"Don't get me wrong, I want to support her. Tango is right about how we are working for our students' futures. But I cannot handle every student asking me for this costume and that costume, 'can you pay for me to fly here and there so I can do this', etc and etc. I give so much to our dance school. We buy the powder for the dust boxes, the dust boxes themselves, we scour record shops for the best music, we make our students clean our own studios so that we don't have to pay someone as often. We tell them that is discipline, the love of the art! Sometimes, we take the students to see a performance of what they are learning for motivation and technique. We barely make it. Now if we start to buy their costumes..."

Taking advantage of her pause, I leaned forward a little in my chair, to the middle of the kitchen table to get another shortbread cookie. With every effort, I placed this cookie on her small tea plate.

She looked down at this, and a small flicker of a smile appeared. It made one appear on my face, too. She had to slow down. "Oh, thank you," she sighed, picking it up and beginning to nibble on it. I just nodded, took up one of my own.

But she swallowed fast, and didn't take another bite. It worried me. She needed to eat. If she had been working then dancing until nine o'clock this evening, then when had she eaten? Had she taken the time to eat? She needed to eat.

So I decided to slow the conversation down. Change the track before she could talk about Alessandra again.

"What did you learn tonight, at your dance class?" This was something she'd never spoken about with me, her own dance class. I'd only heard about it from Ruiz. But then my brain went to Ruiz, thinking of her, asleep in her room. She'd gone in there not too long after dinner, after being very quiet since noon. Since she'd seen the inside of that photo album...

But before I had time to dwell, Cha Cha started speaking again, and all of my focus went back to her. Something deep inside was grateful.

"I danced a bolero with my teacher. Warm up, then dance. He was correcting my technique, showing me better ways to transition from this to that. I've danced bolero a thousand times. Tango taught me bolero. But my teacher is a master at Latin dance, Spanish dances. Tango is not. That is why he teaches beginner, and I teach intermediate and advanced. I teach the smallest kids on Saturdays, but I enjoy them so I do it. Tango also teaches beginner ballet, all our beginner ballet classes."