Pausing only to change shoes, I rushed out of class without waiting for Didi. Flamenco was my one bright and shining thing and Didi was snatching it away from me. The ducks quacked, demanding a handout as I stormed past the pond. I didn’t pause at the Robert O. Anderson School of Management where my Intro to Financial Accounting class would start in five minutes.
Metronome? I was the Metronome and Didi was the Tempest?! Screw it. Screw her. She can keep her own fricking books. La Tempesta!
With no idea exactly where I was headed, my feet carried me across campus until I was staring down Lomas to the West Mesa, where the distant black cones of extinct volcanoes spiked the horizon. Didi’s hangout. To the east were the Sandia Mountains. I headed toward them down Lomas Boulevard. The street was on fire. Pyracantha bushes flamed with orange berries, tall shafts of pampas grass were plumes of smoke in the diamond-sharp sunlight, chamisa blossoms blazed a molten yellow. I was back in the quiet neighborhood Tomás had taken me to before I realized that my destination was the jewel of a park hidden away like a harem beauty behind thick walls. I rushed down the street and found the narrow, unmarked path that snaked between two nondescript houses. Not until I was again within the park’s secret expanse could I take a full breath.
The cottonwood with the giant’s swing hanging from it anchored the park. As if it were an object of veneration I could not approach, I skirted around the place where Tomás had held me and found a spot at the park’s edge. I sat on grass green and velvety from sprinklers as I recalled every detail of that night with Tomás. I stroked the grass as I remembered his hands on me, holding me as we swung up to the stars. The grass caressed me in return. It was soft, full, and green, unlike any other in the high desert city. It was fairy-tale grass.
I forgot Didi as I realized what should have been obvious to me from the beginning: I had walked into a fairy tale. Doña Carlota’s story of Gypsies living in a world where the earth burned and everyone had names like Piglet and Monkey and Looks at the Sky, where a thousand years of a people’s history were hidden in songs and dances, that story was a fairy tale. It was Tomás’s fairy tale. It would have to become mine.
I had been sleeping and in this secret park Tomás awakened me with a kiss. I wondered where he was, what he was looking at at this very moment. I imagined him looking at me. I imagined myself dancing for him, passionate and devastating in my long, black skirt, dancing better than anyone had ever danced. Dancing so well that I won him.
I had to win him.
Though I had been the one sleeping, Tomás was the beauty of our fairy tale and the hero always won the beauty.
I would have to be the hero.
Every fairy tale had a trial where the hero had to prove himself. My trial was flamenco. That was the field upon which I would have to prove myself. Somewhere in Doña’s story, somewhere in the very history of flamenco itself, were the clues that would tell me how to succeed, how to make my story twine around Tomás’s so tightly that they would become one.
The sky behind the West Mesa, behind the volcanoes, turned into a dome of stained glass, violet, rose, and green, shifting to cobalt blue streaked with rose above the Sandia Mountains to the east. The air grew chilly, and damp seeped up from the ground beneath me. The colors left the sky as it darkened to navy blue.
Stars appeared in the night sky. I found the North Star that Daddy had shown me so that I would always be able to find my way home. I started to make a wish on it, but Daddy was gone and would be gone forever. All my other wishes clumped up in my chest with a weight that pushed the air from my lungs. The only name I could give to all I yearned for was Tomás.
“Rae! Rae-rae, are you here?”
Didi was at the entrance to the park. Even more than I didn’t want her in my flamenco class, I didn’t want her in my, in our, secret park.
“Rae! Rae?”
She couldn’t see me. The second time she called my name, her voice broke and she sounded lost and scared. In the next second, she got mad at herself and, thinking no one was in the park or not caring if anyone was, she cursed herself, muttering, “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Shit.”
She was leaving when I called out from the darkness, “Didi. I’m over here.”
“You bitch,” she said, dropping onto the grass beside me. Her nose was running and I think I saw tears on her face, but she scrubbed them off, bending her head into the shoulder of her jean jacket before I could see for sure.
“I looked everywhere. Frontier. The duck pond. Puppy Taco. I even went to your old house and looked in the backyard. Couple of lesbians are living there now with a pack of rescue greyhounds. What would your mom think about that? It took me forfuckingever to remember about this park. Mystery Man’s secret park that you wouldn’t tell me about? Of course, this is where you’d be.” Without stopping for a breath she asked, “Why did you run off?”
Tone, there it was again. As I’ve said, Didi and I could have done away with words altogether and just communicated everything we needed to tell each other, everything important, in the infinite vocabulary of tones and inflections we’d taught each other. We both heard in her question the admission that Didi knew exactly why I’d run off.
It was superfluous, but I said it anyway. “You’re an asshole.”
“Okay, I admit it. I’m an asshole. The big pink bird, that’s your thing. I’ve horned in too much on it. I’ll drop out.” She tilted her head to look at me, but I kept staring straight ahead. At the far end of the park, the sprinklers came on, sending silver arcs of water over the velvety grass. In the silence that fell between us, she counted.
“Seventeen clicks,” Didi said.
“What?”
“It takes seventeen clicks for the sprinkler to make one arc. Smells like the very end of summer, doesn’t it? The grass when the water hits it?” She sucked in a deep inhalation. “It smells like watermelon.”
I breathed in. The grass did smell like watermelon. We listened to the clicks, smelled the watermelon smell, and watched moonlight gleam on the rain of silver drops.
“Wow, reminds me of Lorca. Have you been reading your Lorca? Doña Carlota is right. He is totally amazing. He has one, ‘Ditty of First Desire.’ Queer title. Probably a bad translation. But tell me this isn’t killer. ‘In the green morning / I wanted to be a heart. / A heart.’ ” Didi clapped the rhythm for a bulerías and repeated the words in time. “Then it goes on with how in the ripe evening he wanted to be a nightingale. A nightingale. The end will annihilate you. He tells his soul to turn orange-colored. To turn the color of love. Just that, just getting turned on to Lorca is totally transforming my work already.”
I knew what Didi was doing. She was showing me why I should tell her it was okay for her to stay in the class. She was working me, but I could hear in her voice that she was also telling the truth.
I didn’t say anything and she went on, her words tumbling out in a rush. “But the best, the absolute best, the most amazing thing you will ever read in your whole, entire life is his essay on duende.”
“Do what?”
“Duende. Oh, Rae, this is the essential thing we have to understand. This is where real art, where anything good or true comes from. It’s like inspiration or possession. But more. I can’t even explain. It’s the real deal. He said it bums the blood like powdered glass and rejects all the sweet geometry. ‘Sweet geometry.’ Do you not love that? So Lorca wrote that duende rejects all the sweet geometry we understand and it shatters styles. Isn’t that amazing? It’s not about perfection. True inspiration can be ugly and messy and radically imperfect? Sort of like us, huh?”
“Sort of like you,” I corrected her. I was the geometry person being rejected.
She fell silent and we studied the houses that ringed the park. Light glowed in the windows and scenes of family life played out in each one. In one a father entered holding a white paper bag of takeout. A child of around eight, maybe a boy with long hair, maybe a sturdy little girl, reached out to grab the food away. The father pivoted from the child’s grasp and the child ran around to grab from the other side. The father feinted again, then spun back, scooped the child into his arms, and swung her around. She was a girl.
I glanced over at Didi. The same hunger I felt was on her face.
“Fuck it,” she said, dismissing the sadness with anger. “Fuck all this shit.” She turned to me. “Rae, you are the one essential person in my life. I have to have you in my life. Nonnegotiable. If you want me out of flamenco, I’m out. No questions asked.”
I didn’t say anything because I no longer knew what to say. No longer knew what I really wanted.
“Rae, it’s like I said, we want completely different things out of flamenco. You want love and I want to rule the world.”
She was right. She wanted fame and I wanted Tomás. We could dance next to each other for the rest of our lives and our paths would never cross. I knew Didi like no one else in the world knew her. I knew what she had lost, I knew where all the holes in her heart were and just how big they were. I knew she cursed when she wanted to cry and railroaded through life the way she did because she was afraid if she took things any slower she’d fall off the tracks entirely. I knew all that, but I still couldn’t share flamenco with her.
Didi jumped up, held her hands out to me, and dragged me to my feet. There was plenty of room on the giant’s swing for both of us. I felt her hip pressed against mine work as she stretched her legs out then back, pumping the swing higher. Once we took off, she yelled, “Hang on!” and we both had to throw an arm around the other’s waist to keep from falling off. As we gained altitude, she sang Doña Carlota’s song:
In my life I have known
The sorrows of this world
Others often have a look
But not the knowing
“How do you sing like that?” I yelled as the wind whipped away the words sung in flamenco’s ululating style.
“Melisma!” she yelled back. “I had to learn it for my bat mitzvah. Lots of warbly notes on one syllable. It’s all a version of that urban yodeling thing Whitney Houston and them do. I’ll teach you that if you’ll teach me that compass shit.”
I didn’t answer and the swing went up, then fell back down three times. Finally, I said, “Screw it. Yeah. Okay. What’s the point in resisting. You’re the biggest brat in the world. You always get what you want.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” She used her standard line, then, grinning, put on a big push, hauling back on the rope she held in her right hand, forcing me to hang on for dear life to the rope in my left hand and to her waist with my right. When we were high enough that we suddenly seemed much closer to the stars than to the houses far below, houses where fathers brought home take-out treats and swung their daughters into the air, Didi screamed, “Fuck them! Fuck them all! Who needs normal life when you can fly above it! Fuck consensus reality! Right, Rae?”
She didn’t want an answer and I didn’t give one. Instead, we soared together into the night sky and, just as they had with Tomás, the higher we climbed, the faster we fell and the more the stars blurred into a silver smear.