Brando sat next to me, but we had been distant during the party. His eyes had been on me, though, and his hand on a glass of amber whiskey at all times. Maggie Beautiful and Aberto sat across from us, Livio and Santina next to them.
For the first time that night, I smiled, seeing them together. After dinner we were going to pass around pictures from our vacations, relive our experiences, and recount our favorite memories of the summer. The happy couple had their little packet of pictures next to them. Brando had his, the ones Violet had taken of me. It didn’t seem like he was going to share those.
The night wore on and on, and before I could get up and excuse myself, Maggie Beautiful leaned forward and whispered, “We have something to tell you both.”
Brando set down his glass, the look in his eyes suspicious.
“We are—” She took a lung full of air and blew it out. She had been drinking sherry.
Aberto put his hand over hers. His round spectacles glistened, reflecting the small waves of flames around the terrace. “We are getting married,” Aberto finished for her. “We would like your blessing.”
“When?” I almost breathed out. It was a shock. Apparently to Brando too—his eyes were glued to his mother, and he hadn’t blinked once.
“This weekend. Here. Well, at Li Galli. Pnina and Everett offered. There’s a small chapel there, facing the sea. We don’t want a fuss. Just the people Berto and me love the most.”
“That’s!” I lifted up, opening my arms to them. “Wonderful! I am so happy for you both,” I whispered when they both embraced me at once.
“Maggie Beautiful,” Brando called. I turned to look at him. “We need to talk. Alone.”
Aberto cleared his throat. He and Brando stared at each other over the many candles wavering along the table. “I know she still loves your father. I am old enough to know and accept that the heart has an amazing capacity for love. He has his place. I have mine.”
Brando nodded, accepting the man’s words as truth, but still he motioned for Maggie Beautiful to follow him. “Scarlett,” he said, doing the same to me, tucking the packet of pictures in his back pocket.
I looked at Aberto and then back at him. “You go ahead,” I said. “You should talk to Maggie Beautiful alone.”
He didn’t like being dismissed, but I was well past caring. I turned back to Aberto and started discussing the details of the wedding. I could feel the heat from Brando’s eyes boring into the back of my head, but there was enough of a breeze in the air to fan it.
Once Brando left the terrace to find a more private spot with Maggie Beautiful, and Aberto began to discuss Livio and Santina’s honeymoon with them—pictures were starting to be passed around—I slipped from my place and back to our room.
Lanterns tall enough to reach the hip flared with light, flickering with the smooth gusts of wind that felt like warm silk against my skin. It carried the scents of the ocean, brine and fresh, and the ones from shore, lemon and mint, and some of the heavier perfumes from the party.
The fabric of my dress, soft gauze, fluttered against me, caressing and freeing. I leaned against the cement balcony, gazing toward Li Galli, thinking of my dream of Maja. I was surprised to find my eyes filled with warm tears, blurring the world around me. Not at her absence, so much, but at the fondness of the memory. The value of the times I had spent with her felt priceless since memories were all that existed.
What had come to me in dreams continued in remembrance. I could clearly see the dance studio, Maja and her partner in it, moving in time to the music, their movements so synchronized and perfect that one seemed incomplete without the other. Both of them were gone, to dance along golden streets, and there I was, Maja’s “protégé,” still able to move when they couldn’t.
Sweeping all of my emotions into the machine of my heart, using it as fuel to get started, I closed my eyes, absorbing the music and releasing the heaviness of self at the same time.
A current song played. I could match it to a classical performance. It started off slow enough. So did I. The air seemed to accompany me, my partner, and as I moved, the soft flow of the gown moved like fluttering wings.
The warmth of the day had been preserved in the stone of the villa. It rose up beneath my feet, like sand from the shore. I remembered the steps she took, move for move, time for time.
5…6…7…8…
I leapt in the air, coming down without so much as a sound, recalling the words from her mouth, the same ones from the dream, where she felt even closer to me than she had when she was living.
Well done, vnukinja!
It was rare that she praised me. Her methods of teaching were not easy, nor were her lessons, and she was harder on me than most. She took no pity just because we shared blood. I would bleed into my ballet shoes, pink satin stained with crimson, blisters leaking and burning, and she would nod and say,tomorrow we work harder.
I did.
You will know the price of love, she would occasionally say.Love is never easy. The blood, sweat, and tears we lose in honor of our passion make us appreciate it more. The vines that produce the sweetest grapes suffer in the ground to make the finest wines. You will suffer for your art, for love. In the end…it will be worth it.
Charlotte would fall and cry. I would stick my chin up and do, do, do, no matter how tired or hurt. Maja’s hawkish eyes would move with us, a nod here and there, and then…AGAIN, I SAY!
I would do it again, and again, and again. I refused to cry, to even acknowledge the pain. I felt the want in my soul, the desire in my heart, and my blood recognized what she had called our magic. Therefore, my bones stood aside, allowing me to float, to become as thin as the air that seemed strong enough to move me because I was so light.
Grace incarnate, that is what you are,vnukinja. But tomorrow, you will be even more than you are today, as lissome as a rose petal in the wind—but we use the wind to our advantage. A ballerina is a magician of the arts. We defy what the eye sees, what the mind knows is there but cannot prove.
