"The Flamenco Academy"

Ditty of First Desire

In the green morning

I wanted to be a heart.

A heart.

And in the ripe evening

I wanted to be a nightingale.

A nightingale.

(Soul,

turn orange-colored.

Soul,

turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning

I wanted to be myself.

A heart.

And at evening’s end

I wanted to be my voice.

A nightingale.

Soul,

turn orange-colored!

Soul,

turn the color of love!

—Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)

Chapter One

Flamenco has Ten Commandments. The first one is: Dame la verdad, Give me the truth. The second is: Do it en compás, in time. The third one is: Don’t tell outsiders the rest of the commandments. I come here, to the edge of the continent, to honor the first commandment, to give myself the truth.

Waves, sparkling with phosphorescence in the darkness, crash on the shore just beyond my safe square of blanket. I cup my chilly hands around a mug of tea that smells of oranges and clove and search for that first streak of salmon to crack the far horizon. There might be one or two early risers, insomniacs, troubled sleepers, who will see the light of a new day before me. But not many. I am alone with my tea and my thoughts.

The waves roll in all the way from Asia and slam against the shore. Their roar comforts me. It almost drowns out the sound of heels, a dozen, two dozen, pounding on a wooden floor, turning a dance studio into a factory manufacturing rhythm. That is the ocean I hear. It is broadcast by the surge of my own blood, pulsing en compás, in time, to a flamenco beat. My heart beats and its coded rhythms force me to remember.

Once upon a time, I stepped into a story I thought was my own. It was not, though I became a character in it and gave the story all the years it demanded from my life. The story began long before I entered it, long before any of the living and most of the dead entered it.

I start on the night that I saw the greatest flamenco dancer of all time perform. That night I had to decide whose story my life would be about.

Chapter Two

It was early summer in Albuquerque, when the city rests between the sandblasting of spring winds and the bludgeoning of serious summer heat to come. New foliage made a green lace against the sky. The tallest trees were cottonwoods and they spangled tender chartreuse hearts across the clouds. It was the opening evening of the Flamenco Festival Internacional. A documentary about Carmen Amaya, the greatest flamenco dancer ever, dead now for forty years, was to be premiered at Rodey Theater on the University of New Mexico campus.

I dawdled as I crossed the campus. The air smelled like scorched newspaper. The worst forest fires in half a century had been blazing out of control in the northern part of the state. Four firefighters had already been killed and still the fires moved south. That morning, the Archbishop of Santa Fe announced that he would start saying a novena the next morning to lead all the citizens of New Mexico in prayers for the rain needed to save the state, to save our beloved Tierra del Encanto.

I slowed my pace even more. I wanted to reach the theater after the houselights were out so that I could see as much of Carmen Amaya and as little of the community as possible. I dreaded being plunged again into the hothouse world of New Mexico’s flamenco scene. Tomorrow, when I started teaching, I would have no choice. Tonight was optional and only the promise of glimpsing the greatest flamenco dancer ever could have dragged me out.

Although we, all us dancers, had studied every detail of Carmen’s mythic life, although we had pored over still photos and read descriptions of her technique, none of us had ever seen her dance. Film footage of her dancing was so rare and so expensive that we’d had to content ourselves with listening to the legendary recordings she made with Sabicas. We memorized the sublime hammer of her footwork, but hearing was a poor substitute for seeing.

Only the news that the documentary contained footage of Carmen Amaya performing could have gotten me out of my bed and into the shower. The shower had removed the musty odor of rumpled sheets and unwashed hair I’d wrapped myself in for the past several weeks since I’d taken to wearing my own stink as protection, as a way to mark the only territory I had left: myself. I wouldn’t have been able to face the humiliation of seeing the community at all if I hadn’t had my newly acquired secret to lean on.

When I was certain that Rodey Theater would be dark, I slipped in the back and grabbed the first empty seat. Only there, alone and unseen, was it safe to take the secret out and examine it. It strengthened me enough that I corrected my slumped posture. I’d leaned on my new knowledge to get this far; tomorrow, somehow, some way, the secret would guide me to what I needed, what I had to have. Of course, tonight it changed nothing. To everyone in the theater, which was every flamenco dancer, singer, and guitarist in New Mexico, I was still the most pathetic creature imaginable: the third leg of a love triangle.

The credits flickered; then Carmen Amaya’s tough Gypsy face filled the screen, momentarily obliterating all thoughts. It was brutal, devouring, the face of a little bull on a compact body that never grew any larger or curvier than a young boy’s. As taut with muscle as a python’s, that body had made Carmen Amaya the dancer she was. A title beneath her face noted that the year was 1935. She was only twenty-two, but had been dancing for two decades.

She oscillated in luminous whites and inky blacks, gathering herself in a moment of stillness, a jaguar coiling into itself before exploding. A few chords from an unseen guitarist announced an alegrías, Carmen’s famous alegrías. The audience, mostly dancers as avid as I, leaned forward in their seats. Hiding from random gazes, I burrowed more deeply into my chair, considered sneaking out. Even armed with my secret, I wasn’t strong enough yet for this. There would be questions, condolences, sympathy moistened with a toxic soup of schadenfreude. I wasn’t ready to be a cautionary tale, the ultra-pale Anglo girl who’d dared to fly too close to the flamenco sun.

I was pushing out of my seat, about to leave; then Carmen moved.

A clip from one of her early Spanish movies played. The camera crouched low. Her full skirt whirled into roller-coaster arcs that rose and plunged as those bewitched feet hammered more rhythm into the world than any pair of feet before or since. I dropped back into my seat, poleaxed by beauty as Carmen told her people’s hard history in the sinuous twine of her hands, the perfectly calibrated arch of her back, the effortless syncopation of her feet.

I tore my eyes from the screen long enough to pick out the profiles of other dancers, girls I’d studied with for years, women who’d instructed us. They were rapt, mesmerized by the jubilant recognition that Carmen Amaya was as good as her legend. No, better. That not only was she the best back then, but if she were dancing today none of us, forty years after her death, could have touched her. I wished then that I were sitting with those other pilgrims who’d made flamenco’s long journey, who understood as I did just how good Carmen was.

I joined in the muttered benediction of óles, accent as always on the first syllable, that whispered through the theater; then I surrendered and let Carmen Amaya’s heels tap flamenco’s intricate Morse code into my brain. Though I had willed it to never do so again, my heart fell back into flamenco time and beat out the pulses with her. Flamenco flowed through my veins once more. From the first, flamenco had been a drug for me, an escape from who I was, as total as any narcotic, and Carmen Amaya hit that vein immediately, obliterating despair, rage, all emotion other than ecstasy at the perfection of her dancing.

The brief clip ended. We all exhaled the held breath and sagged back into our seats. An old-timer, white shirt buttoned up to the top and hanging loosely about a corded neck, no tie, battered, black suit jacket, appeared onscreen. A subtitle informed us that he had once played guitar in Carmen’s troupe.

Tell us about Carmen’s family, an offscreen interviewer asked.

"Gitana por cuatro costaos, the guitarist answered. Gypsy on four sides." The translation of this, the ultimate flamenco encomium, made my secret come alive and beat within me. Blood, it was all about blood in flamenco.

The withered guitarist went on. Carmen Amaya was Gypsy on all four sides. We used to say that she had the blood of the pharaohs in her veins back in the days when we still believed that we Gypsies came from Egypt. We don’t believe that anymore, but I still say it. Carmen Amaya had the blood of the pharaohs in her veins. That blood gave her her life, but it also killed her.

What do you mean?

Her kidneys. The doctor called it infantile kidneys. They never grew any bigger than a little baby’s. La Capitana only lived as long as she did because she sweated so much when she danced. That was how her body cleansed itself. Otherwise, she would have died when she was a child. Her costumes at the end of a performance? Drenched. You could pour sweat out of her shoes. She had to dance or die.

"Bailar o morir." As the guitar player pronounced the words, his lips stuck on his dentures, tugging them up, holding them rolled under so that he looked like a very sad, very old marionette. Dance or die. Dancing was the only thing that kept her alive.

"Bailar o morir." He was right. I had to start dancing again. The last few weeks had brought me too close to the alternative. For the first time, I was happy I’d agreed to teach. But that was tomorrow. Tonight, it was essential that I be gone before the lights came up. I glanced at the exit and debated whether I should leave.

When I looked back, though, a clip from one of Carmen’s glitzy Hollywood movies was playing. I settled into my seat; I would risk a few more scenes. Carmen was dancing in a nightclub in New York. She wore a short, cabin boy-style jacket and high-waisted white pants that jiggled about her legs as she pounded the wooden floor, creating an entire steel band’s worth of percussion.

Before Carmen Amaya, a narrator intoned, "flamenco dance was a languid, matronly twining of arms, legs rooted to the earth like oaks. Eighty years ago, Amaya’s father, El Chino, put her in pants and Carmen broke the spell that had frozen the lower half of las bailaoras’ bodies for all of flamenco’s history."

The narrator pronounced bailadoras the cool Gypsy way, bailaoras. To show that we were insiders, we did the same, using Gypsy spelling and pronunciation whenever we could. Dancer, bailadora, became bailaora; guitarist, tocador, turned into tocaor; and once we’d gobbled the d in cantador, singer, it emerged as cantaor.

The guitarist returned and stated unequivocally, She never rehearsed. Never, never, never. Nunca, nunca, nunca.

The other dancers in the theater snorted at that statement. We knew how ridiculous it was. It was like boasting about a Chinese child never rehearsing before speaking Chinese. We knew better. We’d read the biographies. Like all good Gypsy mothers, Carmen’s had clapped palmas on her belly while she was pregnant so that her baby would be marinated in flamenco rhythms in utero. Carmen danced before she walked and was performing in cafés in Barcelona by the time she was six years old. As the other dancers leaned their heads together to whisper and laugh, I wished I were sitting with them. We would all share our favorite complaint, the near impossibility of a payo, a non-Gypsy, ever being truly accepted in flamenco. Compared to Carmen Amaya, Gypsy on four sides, even those Latinas who believed they had an inside track were outsiders.

I counted few of the dancers as friends. I knew this world too well. Friend or not, I would be the subject of hot gossip and, since I’d been asked to teach at the festival, envy. There were those who believed that the honor had been bestowed out of pity.

Pity—that was what would be the hardest of all to deal with. No, tomorrow would be soon enough to face them all. At least then, when I was teaching, I would have my flamenco armor on, my favorite long black skirt, my new Menke shoes from Spain with extra claves—tiny silver nails—tapped into the toes.

On the screen, home movie footage from the fifties played. The colors of the old film had faded to sepia tones. A much older Carmen sat on the concrete steps of a porch and held her arms out to a chubby-legged toddler in sandals who staggered toward her. Offscreen, an ancient voice recalled, Carmen couldn’t have any children of her own so she asked us for our son. That image, a little boy, just learning to walk, wobbling toward the most famous flamenco dancer ever, one who had earned her crown with blood, caused the polarity in the room to reverse. The air beside my head trembled as the secret beating in my chest recognized its double on that screen.

Carmen couldn’t have any children of her own so she asked us for our son.

The home movie ended and the speaker, an elderly Gypsy man identified as Carmen’s nephew, appeared. The harsh light glistened off his bald scalp, sweating beneath a few wisps of ash-colored hair.

His wife, portly and silent, nodded. Her husband continued speaking. He was as passionate as if he were pleading his case before a jury, though the incident had occurred half a century ago. Why did she ask that of us? It was like he was hers anyway. We were all one family anyway. Why did she need to adopt him? Simply because she wanted a child who was of our blood?

The old man finished and a rustling swept through the auditorium as heads steepled together and whispers hissed back and forth. A few dancers, those who knew the most, craned their necks searching the auditorium. Doña Carlota was who they really wanted to see, to search her face for a reaction. When the other dancers discovered that she wasn’t in the theater, the glances sought me out. I ducked my head, hiding until the bat-wing skitter of attention had dissipated.

When I looked up again, Carmen Amaya’s funeral procession was winding across the screen. It snaked for miles down through hills thick with rosemary, leading from Carmen’s castle on a bluff above the Costa Brava to her burial plot in the town of Bagur. This home movie footage was old and jerky, but rather than fading out, the colors had intensified into a palette of cobalt blues and deepest emerald greens. The devastated faces of thousands of mourners were masks of grief as profound as if each one had lost a sister, a wife, a mother.

The documentary returned to Carmen in the last year of her life. A clip from a Spanish movie played. She was only fifty, but Carmen’s ferocity had been blunted. The feral lines of her face were swollen with fluid her infantile kidneys could not eliminate. She sat at a rickety wooden table in a dusty neighborhood, a slum, like the one in Barcelona where she’d been born in a shack. She was surrounded by Gypsy children as dirty, ragged, and hungry as she once had been. She began to tap the table. One knock, two. Just enough to announce the palo, the style. Then in flamenco’s code of rhythms, she rapped out a symphony that held the history of her people during their long exile from India. She told all the secrets her tribe kept from outsiders. All the secrets they had translated into rhythms so bewilderingly beautiful that they lured you in like the honeyed drops of nectar hidden in the throat of pitcher plants. You got the nectar, that’s true, but you could never find your way back out again. You never wanted to find your way out again. All you wanted was to burrow even deeper, to break the code, to learn one more secret.

In that moment, watching Carmen, it was still all I wanted. Even after everything that had happened, all I wanted was one more sip of nectar.

"Mi corazón," a singer wailed the start of a verse in the background behind Carmen’s image fading into history, into legend. I knew the letra, had danced to it dozens of times, and my cheeks were wet before the translation appeared in subtitle: My heart has been broken more than the Ten Commandments.

The line sung in flamenco’s unearthly quaver stabbed straight into my chest because I realized then that my own heart was not broken so much as missing entirely and no secret, however carefully interpreted, would ever return it. I was groping in the dark, ready to escape, when the lights unexpectedly came up. I had missed my chance. I was scrubbing tears off my cheek when a hand grazed my shoulder. Thank God it was Blanca, universally recognized as the least bitchy of all the serious dancers. We’d started out together back when Doña Carlota had taught the introductory class.

Rae, how are you doing? Blanca patted my shoulder and stared with the damp sympathy I’d dreaded.

Pretty good. I injected as much pep as I could into my answer, gesturing toward my reddened eyes. Allergies are bothering me. All the smoke from the forest fires. There was no smoke in the air inside the theater.

Blanca nodded. It’s good to see you, Rae. Really good. She put too much emphasis on the last good, speaking to me as if I were a patient who doesn’t know yet that she’s terminal. But Blanca was nice. I’d discovered far too late that I should have put a much higher priority on nice. I should have been friends with someone like Blanca instead of Didi.

Keep in touch, okay? she said. Her solicitous question was drowned out by the thunder of applause that erupted when the incandescent Alma Hernandez-Luna, director of the flamenco program, bounded onstage. "Bienvenido a todos nuestros estudiantes. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the more than two hundred students who are with us this summer from China, Germany, England, Belarus, Tokyo, Canada, and nearly every state in the union. We welcome you all to the country that we will create for the next twelve days. The country of flamenco!"

The applause fell briefly into compás and the audience laughed at us all speaking the same language with our hands.

It is strange to be welcoming you. For the past fifteen years our founder, Doña Carlota, has always opened the festival. She cannot be with us here tonight in body, but her spirit fills this hall! We are all here because of Doña Carlota Anaya. She created the first academic home for flamenco in the New World.

That part was true.

Alma continued, The festival is her baby. That part wasn’t true. Alma means soul, and Hernandez-Luna had been the soul of the program for years. The festival was entirely her baby. Through her connections, she was always able to lure la crema del mundo flamenco to our little sun-blasted campus. Whoever the reigning god or goddess of flamenco was, Alma would hunt them down and bring them to the festival to perform and teach. I was one of only a handful of locals on this year’s faculty. The night should have been a triumph for me. I knew it wasn’t going to be that, but, until the film, I had thought the festival would be an opportunity for me. An opportunity to learn where Tomás was. To start using my secret. The film, the image of the coveted child toddling toward the world’s greatest dancer, had changed all that.

I hope everyone has their tickets for Eva La Yerbabuena’s show—a burst of applause for the acclaimed dancer interrupted Alma—because they’re going fast. I would like to thank our visiting documentarian—the maker of the Carmen film stood to a hearty round of applause—for helping us to kick off this summer’s festival with that astonishing film. Okay, gang, the fun is over.

Laughter erupted.

Tomorrow we get down to work.

The loudest applause yet broke out.

"But before that could you, all you visitors, please, join us in a moment of silent prayer. Pray for rain, okay? Because if we don’t get some rain Dios only knows what’s going to happen to our poor state."

As the theater fell silent, Alma stared at her palm. When the moment of prayer was over, she read the note she’d written there. Oh, big announcement, people. It’s about Farruquito. A chorus of squeals greeted the name of the Elvis of flamenco, a young dancer with the talent and, more important, the right genes, to be crowned the Great Bronze Hope. Like Carmen Amaya, like all the members of the true inner circle, Farruquito was gitano por cuatro costaos.

Alma gestured for the squealing girls to calm down. This is a good news–bad news sort of deal. We’re not going to have time to publicize this, but I think we can probably fill the KiMo Theatre just with word of mouth. We have a last-minute change in the lineup.

For the second time that evening, my skin began to prickle and the air around me seemed to become denser, the molecules slowing down as if the barometric pressure had suddenly dropped the way it does before a storm. Because it was the worst thing I could imagine, I knew before Alma said the words what her announcement would be.

The bad news is that Farruquito has had to cancel.

A wave of groans swept through the crowd at learning that the boy wonder of flamenco and heir apparent to the title of king of old-school flamenco, flamenco puro, was not coming. The deadened thud in my chest accelerated with a rhythm like horse hooves pounding nearer.

But the good news is that our most famous alumna has agreed to fill in.

I prayed, I begged all the flamenco deities to, please, stop what I knew was coming. They ignored me.

So let’s spread the word. Ofelia is coming home!

That name, those syllables, Oh-fay-lee-yuh, filled my head with a rushing like storm water surging down a drain. It blocked out the sound of clapping. I had to leave. Immediately. I staggered to my feet. Heads bobbed in front of me like a collection of people-shaped piñatas, a gauntlet I had to run.

Outside the theater, I tried to inhale, tried to make myself breathe. The scorched air chafed my lungs as I ran across the campus. I was coughing and my eyes were streaming by the time I jumped into my truck, which I’d left in the Frontier Restaurant parking lot. I pounded my hands on the steering wheel to drive that fraud of a name, Ofelia, Oh-fay-lee-yuh, out of my head. One name, that was her entire life’s goal, to be a one-name celebrity. I refused to give her that, to think of her as Ofelia. To me she would always be Didi. Didi Steinberg.

A long time ago she had been my best friend. Not so long ago she stole the only man I will ever love.

Chapter Three

A triangle. The staple of opera, melodrama, romance novels, of flamenco. Odd how knowing something is a cliché actually makes it slightly more painful rather than less.

When I was a girl with hair turned white blond in the Texas sun, I used to squat beside tiny funnels of dust created by ant lions. I would carefully feed captured ants into the funnels. The ants would scrabble frantically, trying to escape, but all their clawing accomplished was to create microscopic avalanches that swept them inexorably down toward the predator that waited, hidden beneath the dry dirt.

A hot wind blew through the truck. The smoke drifting down from the north seemed to have sealed the day’s heat in. Still my fingers on the steering wheel were stiff and I trembled with cold.

She was coming back. Which meant that he was coming back as well. I had to be ready. Before I ever faced Didi again, long before I ever faced Tomás, I had to decode the secret I’d been given, the long history that explained so much.

I started the truck, drove to Central Avenue, and turned right, heading east. I could have turned left and gone west, but the future lay that way. East to West. Old to new. That was the direction Americans took to move away from the past. I needed to move toward the past that night. My answers were back there, back in my history with Didi. With Tomás. Back before any of us, any of our parents, were even born.

I passed the old Lobo Theater. It had been converted into a Christian meeting place. I kept driving. Past Nob Hill Shopping Center. Past the Aztec Motel. I drove Route 66 back to where it all started. Back almost a decade to when I was still Cyndi Rae Hrncir from Houdek, Texas. Back to when all flamenco was to me was a big pink bird and the most exciting person ever to step into my life was Didi Steinberg.

Chapter Four

Naturally, Didi Steinberg had no idea on earth who I was that day she sat with her parents in the reception area at the oncologist’s where I was waiting by myself while my parents consulted with the doctor. Even though Didi and I had several classes together, she was unaware of my existence. I was suffering through my senior year at Pueblo Heights High School in total anonymity. I had made one friend, Nita Carabajal. Nita had been assigned to be my physics lab partner. All we had in common was that neither one of us had any other friends. Everyone knew who Didi Steinberg was. She occupied a space that was a unique blend of legend and outcast.

Didi was the coolest person I could imagine because one look at her told you that she didn’t give a shit about much of anything. Stories of her general wild-ass behavior had even reached me way out in my social Siberia. I’d heard about how she was sent to the principal for wearing a top that officially met dress code regulations because it wasn’t spaghetti straps, but was so short the bottom half of her tits showed. I heard how she’d put on a tuxedo and taken herself to the prom the year before, then danced all night with the busboys. I’d heard that she called her car the Skankmobile and got stoned in it every day before school. That her father was a disc jockey and she’d had her own show on his station for a while. Mostly, though, I’d heard that Didi Steinberg was the Groupie Queen of Albuquerque.

That day, however, slumped in a chair next to her father, she looked like any teen trying to become invisible when she’s with her parents. Mr. Steinberg reminded me of Daddy. His clothes, his skin, his eyes, they all looked borrowed from a bigger person, the person he’d been before he’d gotten sick. Even in the best of health, though, Mr. Steinberg would have been old enough to be Didi’s grandfather.

A nurse in lilac scrubs with a bright aquarium print opened the door to the reception area and called out, Mort Steinberg. Mr. Steinberg breathed heavily as Didi and her mother helped him up. He had a goatee, thick, gray muttonchops, with only a few strands of hair on top. A black turtleneck and a silver ankh around his neck completed the ancient hipster look.

I was surprised that Didi’s mom stayed in the waiting room and let her husband go back alone with the nurse. My mother had not left my father’s side in the past four months, ever since he’d developed the cough that wouldn’t go away. Mrs. Steinberg was the most exotic woman I had ever seen. I couldn’t decide if she was Mexican or Asian. She looked like an animé Natalie Wood with big eyes and a broad, doll-baby face. She gibbered away to Didi in rapid-fire Spanish.

Didi ignored her mother, pretending to be interested in an article in Golf Digest. This gave me a chance to study Didi Steinberg. She made me think of one of those celebrities who swear in People magazine that they were dorky and unpopular as teenagers and you don’t believe them until you see the old yearbook photo and understand how out of place they would have been in a normal life. Didi was like that, bigger than life, at least normal life. The hard planes of her face, the harsh flare of her nostrils, her high, slanted cheeks and wide, ravenous mouth were too masculine for a girl, too unsettling. Not pretty, not ugly, something more compelling than either of those classifications. The word that popped into my mind was arresting because of the way she put your attention behind bars. Didi Steinberg was made to be looked at and not just because she wore more liner than a mime around her paisley-shaped eyes, and she had three diamond studs glittering in her right nostril, and she’d dyed her hair black then done the tips the color of a lime popsicle. You would have stared at Didi Steinberg even if she’d been wearing Chap Stick and jeans from Wal-Mart like me. Even back then, Didi always seemed like there should be a bank of footlights between her and the rest of the world.

If you’d taken a picture of Didi Steinberg and looked at the negative, what you would have seen would have been me, her exact opposite. My family had moved to Albuquerque from Houdek, Texas, at the start of my junior year. My mom had taken one look at the brilliant swoops of gang graffiti and metal detectors at Pueblo Heights High School and announced that no child of hers would ever set foot in such a place. She homeschooled me until Daddy got sick, so when I entered Pueblo Heights at the start of my senior year, I didn’t know a single person. In addition to not having one friend, I had two names, Cyndi Rae, and a Texas accent.

The first thing I had learned when we moved to Albuquerque was that pretty much everyone in New Mexico hates Texans. On top of that, I had a gruesome collection of consonants for a last name, Hrncir, so every time a teacher called on me, I had to conduct a little seminar in Czech pronunciation, HERN-SHUR. The best any of my teachers were ever able to do was make a sound like they had a chip stuck in the back of their throats, Hrr-KURR! Few teachers called on me more than once. I had more than the usual teen quota of reasons to do what came most naturally to me, which was keep my mouth shut and try never to be noticed.

Didi suddenly looked up from Golf Digest and caught me staring at her. She shot me a look that my mother would have said coulda killed Aunt Katie. My mother had lots of country sayings that no one else understood. Except my father. Probably because they’d grown up on farms next to each other in Houdek, a little town north of San Antonio populated mostly by members of their two Czech families. Everyone back home had thought my father was a giant rebel when he took a job with Circuit City and drove forty miles into San Antonio every day and a complete extraterrestrial when he got a big promotion and moved us to Albuquerque.

It was a hard move for my mother. She’d never lived more than two miles from her parents her whole life and even after she was married always ate either breakfast or lunch with them every day of the week and dinner every Sunday. In Houdek everyone knew that my mom, Jerri, was high-strung. That was how she’d been her whole life. It was the reason she’d never finished high school in spite of having straight As and being a math genius. She couldn’t sit still for an entire class. Sitting still made her so nervous, she took to plucking out, first, a big patch of hair above her right ear, then all her eyebrows. When she started in on her eyelashes, everyone agreed that Jerri would be better off at home.

In Houdek my mother’s high-strung peculiarities were just Jerri’s way. No one ever asked my mother’s parents if they’d thought about Ritalin or seeing a psychologist. People in Houdek tended more to say oddball behavior was just someone’s way and let it go. Still, everyone agreed that it was a blessing when my mother married my father, easygoing Emil Hrncir. Daddy, all reddish blond hair and freckled from the sun, was the opposite of high-strung. Quite content to spend his days rumbling around on the back of a tractor and his weekends hunting dove or deer or whatever was in season, Daddy was so low-strung, in fact, that he verged sometimes on being unstrung. I always wondered what had brought two such different people together. Maybe Daddy thought my mother’s relentless buzz of energy would rub off and energize him, that they’d balance each other out. Or maybe it was just because my mother was pretty, really, really pretty, with wavy, strawberry blond hair, delicate features, and skin like a baby’s. Everyone said I favored her but had Daddy’s height, though I never saw the resemblance.

I never questioned the world I was born into. That, in our house, the radio and television always had to be kept at a whisper-soft volume. That all dishes had to be removed from the table immediately upon finishing a meal. That friends were never allowed to visit. That when my mother’s migraines struck, I would stay home from school to bring cups of flat 7Up to her. I never questioned it and never took it too seriously because Daddy didn’t. Whenever Mom would tell me to stop turning the pages of my magazine so loud, or insist that she couldn’t stand to even look at any food that wasn’t white, or when she’d get so wound up, her hands balled into tight fists that oscillated beside her head, Daddy would always catch my eye and wink. Then we’d lay low together. I’d take my magazine and sit up in the cab of the tractor with him and we’d pretend to plow until we saw the light in my mom’s bedroom go out. Or we’d take off early in the morning and leave a note saying we’d gone to fish or hunt snipes, then we’d sit all day in the Dairy Queen in Helotes and drink coffee and Cokes. We had great times together. His favorite thing was teasing me by asking how Sometimes Y was. Sometimes Y was his name for the pretend boyfriend he claimed I had. It came out of his joke that I would fall in love with the first boy with a lot of vowels in his name. A, E, I, 0, U, and Sometimes Y, right? he’d say. I told him to stop it. I was too shy to even talk to a boy, much less ever have a boyfriend.

We were all right in Houdek where everyone accepted that Jerri Hrncir was a little too tightly wound and that Emil Hrncir was the best thing that could have ever happened to her. We were a small-town family, designed to do what generations of Hrncirs before us had done: farm, raise soybeans, sorghum, a little cotton. After Granddad’s stroke, Daddy took over and might have made it if the price of diesel along with everything else hadn’t kept rising. After Mom’s nerves got too bad for her to handle the bookkeeping, I was the one who itemized all the expenditures. Like my mother, I was good with numbers. It was never anything I worked at, just something I was born with. It was my way.

When I told Daddy the bad news the numbers had for us, he got a job with Circuit City. At first it was just to tide us over. But the numbers told another story: he’d never go back to farming. The transfer to Albuquerque was a shock to Jerri that she never recovered from. We left Houdek right after the last day of my sophomore year, when the creeks were still running and the fields were still green and succulent. We drove a U-Haul truck loaded with our stuff to Albuquerque and parked it in front of a house Daddy had flown out earlier to rent for us. It was flat on top and squared off as a shoe box with red lava rocks where a lawn should have been and one spindly desert willow out front that didn’t cast enough shade to cool off an ant. Mom took one look at the shoe-box house and burst into tears. She folded her arms across her chest and locked Albuquerque out as much as she possibly could. Everything about the city frightened her, annoyed her, or dried her skin out.

Daddy got a giant-screen TV as a return from Circuit City and Mom kept it turned on night and day. Every time there was anything on the news about someone being taken to the West Mesa and raped or a drive-by shooting in the south valley, Mom stepped up our home security system. She had bars put on all the windows, triple dead bolts on the doors, and an alarm system wired to a special private security service. I think she’d decided to homeschool me before she even saw Pueblo Heights, but the armed cop at the entrance and the sight of more brown than white faces sealed the deal for her.

The one good thing for me about homeschooling was that I discovered an incredible online math program that let me go as far and as fast as I wanted in calculus, trig, some statistics. The only people I met my junior year were other homesehoolers and the geeks I competed against in Math Olympiad. It was through the homeschooler group that Mom connected with HeartLand, the weirdo church she ended up joining. The major emphasis of HeartLand seemed to be to remind women that they were subject to their husbands and to try to return to what they imagined was a simpler time. None of the women from Mom’s new church cut their hair and they all wore clothes that they thought small-town people wore. But no one I ever knew back in Houdek would have been caught dead in a long denim skirt and high-buttoned blouse like a five-year-old would wear to a piano recital.

All the burglar bars and buttons in the world, though, couldn’t keep out the one thing Mom should have been afraid of. Daddy had the cough for months before he finally went to the doctor. It was cancer. Daddy acted like it was no big deal. Still, it was decided that homeschooling on top of taking care of Daddy was too much for Mom’s weak nerves, and for my senior year I was enrolled at Pueblo Heights.

Daddy joked about the chemo and radiation, said he was doing it just to humor the tumor. Even when he got so weak he had to use a wheelchair, he was still able to convince Mom and me that the thing growing inside of him was merely a passing annoyance. The day I met Didi was the day even Daddy had to stop pretending.

When my parents came back out to the oncologist’s waiting room where I sat watching Didi Steinberg act like she was reading Golf Digest, the expression on my mom’s face scared me. The way the nurse in her tropical fish smock held the door open for her to push the wheelchair through scared me even more. It was too kind, too solicitous. My eyes met my father’s and everything he’d tried to hide from me for the past four months was there. The fear and panic were so big that they made him a little boy who just wanted someone to rescue him. My mom looked at me in the same lost, scared way. But there was nothing I could do for her, for either one of them. When Mom realized that no one would be coming to rescue her, that nothing would change what the doctor had just told her back in his office, her face started squirming around. At first, it didn’t seem she was about to cry, more like she was going to say something but couldn’t remember the words. All I cared about in that moment was that she was going to do something embarrassing in front of Didi Steinberg. Like talk.

She did something worse, though. My mother fainted. One instant she was standing behind the wheelchair, pushing my father toward me, the next she went down so fast I thought she’d stepped into a hole.

Didi, who only truly came to life when the adrenaline was flowing, reacted faster than anyone, even the nurse. She was helping Mom to a chair before I could figure out what had happened. My father tried to hoist himself up to help her, but Didi was already in charge.

Make sure he stays put, she ordered me, pointing to my father as she helped my mother bend forward to put her head between her knees. She looked at the nurse and barked at her, Get us some water. Stat.

Everyone followed her orders. Her calm, authoritative manner combined with using the medical word, stat, made us all believe that, in spite of the lime-popsicle-colored hair, she just might be an intern, a medical student, someone who had answers and could help us. That, I would later learn, was Didi’s greatest gift. When she wanted to, she could read your deepest needs and turn herself into whoever could fill them.

Cyndi. Rae. Honey. My father huffed out one word on each laborious exhalation. Get. The. Keys.

I picked the car keys up from the floor where Mom had dropped them. I’ll. Drive. Home. He held out his palm.

Are you tripping? Didi asked my father, plucking the keys from my hand.

Mom didn’t object. Whatever unimaginable news the doctor had given my parents had stolen the little bit of fight she had left.

You—she pointed to my father—need to get into bed. Stat. You— she pointed to my mother, who was staring at the cup of water the nurse had put into her hand as if she were trying to figure out how to work it—should not be behind the wheel of a car. You—my turn—need to be in the backseat of the car monitoring your father. I—she thumped her chest with an open hand—will drive.

Didi blurted something in Spanish to her mother. She used the word papi a lot so I assumed she was telling her mother to take her father home. All Mrs. Steinberg did was shrug and nod vaguely. Then Didi took the handles of my father’s chair and propelled him forward. I helped my mother get up. Her body was damp and clammy against my own. Didi seemed so crisp and strong marching ahead of us, so dark and well defined. Mom and I with our identical wispy, strawberry blond hair, blue-veined skin, invisible eyelashes and eyebrows, had always run together like two underdone cookies melting into one blob on the baking sheet. I hated the touch of my mother’s doughy body.

Didi drove us home, helped Daddy into bed, then refused Mom’s halfhearted offer of a ride home. Instead, she said she needed the exercise and ran off.

The next morning, without any plan being made, Didi pulled her dad’s Mustang into our carport and honked until Mom gasped, Well, I mean, that is the rudest thing I’ve ever heard. Go make her stop before the neighbors call the police.

I crunched across the rocks that were our front yard, wishing I had a pair of the cool low-rise jeans Mom had forbidden instead of the dorky ones with a waist she insisted on. Didi yelled out her open window, You going to school today? Just like it was optional. Just like I might be considering not going that day.

Uh, yeah, I answered. Give me a second. I rushed into the house, certain that if I gave Didi more than ten seconds to consider what she was doing, she’d be gone. I grabbed my books and the box of animal crackers I took every day to eat on a bench in the patio so I wouldn’t have to sit alone in the cafeteria at lunch. I ran back to the car pretending I didn’t hear Mom yelling that she didn’t approve and that I was to get back into the house this instant.

The Mustang, fingernail-polish red with white leather upholstery,