“So are you ready to perform?” Clarissa asks me as we warm up for my private lesson. I catch her pointed look in the massive mirror filling one entire wall of the small studio.
I stretch my arms over my head. “Yeah, right. You know I come to the studio to dance, not for the show.”
“It’s not about the show.” She turns on the music and begins the choreography for one of this semester’s dances. I follow her movements. Hip sway, followed by hip slide, then a figure eight. “It’s about the feeling. You know that.”
“I need the mirror in front of me,” I say.
“The mirror’s becoming your crutch,” Clarissa says, her brown eyes watching me. “Belly dance is about trusting your body, Savannah, about trusting you can do it. Come on, you know the routines with your eyes closed. You’re ready to get up on the stage and face an audience.”
“I’m not ready. My costume’s a mess. So is my undulation.”
“Your undulation is fine.” Clarissa fixes me with a stern look. “It’s your courage that’s missing.”
I fidget next to her, wishing I could look away. But the mirror dominates the room. I continue to sway my hips, adding in a rib slide. “I get it. Easier said than done, though.”
“Exactly. So this month,” she says emphatically. “You’ll perform. It’s time, Savannah.”
* * *
As I walk into the house after my dance lesson, Mama and Molly call out hello. I take off my coat in the foyer and hang it up in the same closet I’ve been hanging up my coat my whole life. I grew up in this house and have never lived anywhere else.
I walk through the hallway and into the living room where my mother and older sister are huddled together on our worn but well-loved couch, watching sitcom reruns from the seventies.
Mama and Molly may be years apart in age, but with their matching buns on the top of their heads—Mama’s gray and Molly’s light brown—not to mention their same thick blue sweaters, they could be twins.
When Molly told us all that she was gay, Daddy’s judgment crushed her. He wanted to send her to a therapist to “get fixed” as he so kindly put it.
Molly shut down after that. She works, comes home and cooks, and watches television with Mama. Although Celie’s resolution has prompted Molly to start going out once in a while, so she’s a step ahead of me.
“Hi, you two.” I sit next to Mama and kiss her cheek.
“How was work, honey?” Mama asks me. “And dance?”
“Fine.”
I take a closer look at my mother. She makes a decent living selling homemade aprons and afghans, an at-home business she started after the divorce. It was a divorce she put off for some time, despite my father being long gone. Eventually, he sent her the papers himself, signed and ready for her signature. The house was mainly paid off. She makes enough with the aprons and afghans to live on, and she says she doesn’t want for anything else. But the haunted look in her eyes…that comes from living with a ghost.
“So, you ready for your big trip, Vannah?” Molly asks, leaning past Mama to look at me.
“It’s just a little business trip, Mol. It’s not a honeymoon.”
“Really?” She raises her eyebrows. “I saw that new top lying out on your bed. You buy it for the trip?”
I lean across Mama to flick Molly on the leg. “Quit snooping in my room!”
The front door bangs open, and Celie and her husband, Pru, walk into the living room.
“I heard there’s some good food here tonight.” She throws her arms around Mama and gives her a kiss. “Pru’s starved for good food. Six months of being a wife, and I still can’t cook for crap,” she adds with a laugh. “But I’m working at it.”
Pru, twenty years her senior, smiles at Celie fondly and kisses her head. Molly always jokes privately that Celie dealt with the loss of our father by finding a new one.
Celie turns to me. “How’s Cam the man?” she asks pointedly.
Describing Cam as a man scares me. Boy sounds more manageable. And dating boys isn’t something I got to experience and grow comfortable with. But Cameron Wild is a man without question. A hot, confident, strong man who definitely seems like he would know what he’s doing in the bedroom.
“Cam’s the same as he was the last time you asked,” I snap. “Playing for the Cannons. Off-limits, in other words.”
“Huh.” Celie tilts her head and studies me for a moment, and I shift uncomfortably. “So we need a workaround. That’s doable.”
