Page 106 of Playworld

“Did you have a lot of friends? Like Cliffnotes and Tanner?”

“No, my best friends were my mom and your aunt Maine.”

The waitress passed by and Mom ordered another sake.

“It’s hard to have best friends when your father’s in the military. Everything’s transient except your family. Do you know what ‘transient’ means?” When I shook my head she said, “Impermanent. Something that only lasts briefly.”

It occurred to me that Mom still did not have any good friends, none that I could name. No one she went out with regularly. No one but Dad.

“What about when you were dancing?”

“Then I moved around a lot too. At least when I was dancing full-time.”

“When was that?”

“The winter of 1960 through the spring of ’61. With the American Festival Ballet. I was studying at Ballet Russe again, and then a woman I trained with asked if I was willing to travel, and when I said yes, she gave my photograph and résumé to Renzo Raiss, who was the head of the company. And he gave me the job. We went all over. Uruguay. Buenos Aires. Argentina.”

“Was it fun?”

“It was not fun at all,” Mom said. “The dancers were all very cliquish. And the schedule was brutal. Do a matinee and then an evening performance, get on a bus and then drive all night, wake up, eat, rehearse, eat, and do it all again. It was sort of an endurance test. And it was lonely.”

Was Mom lonely now? I had thought about this several nights ago. She’d emerged from her bath in her robe. She appeared in my room and asked me to help her. Her hips were terribly tight, she explained. When I said yes, she sat with her back against my bunk bed’s post, the soles of her feet pressed together and legs butterflied, and asked me to push down on her knees until her thighs touched the parquet. Her skin was still hot from the tub, and I felt no discomfort at this, being, I believed, an athlete too, glad for the contact, because she was so rarely physical with us, and I wondered if she ever asked Dad to do such things, because I couldn’t imagine it.

“Why didn’t you quit?”

“Because I’d made a commitment,” Mom said. “Because I’d done all of that training since I was a girl and was living the life, really, for the first time ever. And I needed to see it through. You find something very hard and warm inside of you when you do difficult things. That no one cantake away. Like a sauna stone. But it’s more precious and magic, really. And it’s always there when you need it. At least, that’s how I’ve come to think about it. During a difficult class, for instance. Or sometimes when your father’s away.”

I couldn’t help it. The story Dad had told me about Millie occasionally gusted through my mind. “Did you have a boyfriend before Dad?”

“You are full of questions today,” Mom said. “Yes, I had several before your dad. Why do you ask?”

I glanced over her shoulder at the sushi bar. The chef was stacking sushi on a wooden ship. On the other side of the curtains, I could hear a group of men toasting someone in Japanese. Why was I asking? Was it because I had always suspected that Mom and Dad loved each other differently? Because there was in Mom a loyalty that seemed unreciprocated? Because I needed to know if she’d married the great love of her life?

“Any you liked as much as him?”

Mom smiled reassuringly and shook her head. “Your dad always has been and always will be my favorite.”

I smiled. “Because he’s a fox,” I said.

Mom snorted, a little embarrassed. She took a bite of her yellowtail and I ate the whole piece of pigeon-colored mackerel, and, after a few seconds, we both began waving our hands before our mouths and tearing up.

“Wow,” Mom said. “That was a big hit of wasabi.”

She explained what it was. We ate some ginger and drank some ice water and blew air from our puckered mouths like the goldfish in the tank near the door. And when the heat subsided, I asked, “What was your favorite thing you and Dad ever did together? Was it your honeymoon with Anthony Quinn?”

“Oh, most certainly not,” Mom said. “That was lonelier than South America.”

Mom poured herself the last of the sake and smoothed out the napkin on her lap, thinking. “It was when we drove across the country together. In October of ’63. After we’d returned from Europe. We flew over the pole—Paris to Los Angeles. We stayed with Morris and Mignon.”

“Who?”

“Your father’s parents. Zada and Babu.”

When I looked at her questioningly, Mom said, “It’s Yiddish. For ‘Grandpa’ and ‘Grandma.’ ” She let my ignorance slide. “We stayed in San Bernardino with them for a few weeks. They gave us their Cutlass to make the drive back to New York and told us to sell it when we got there and send them the money. The drive took seven days. We’d bought Minou—do you remember our cat?”

“Barely.” Which wasn’t exactly true. I sometimes recalled her sadly meowing her name during the fire.

“We bought her from a Frenchwoman selling kittens on the street in Barstow, just before we picked up I-40. The car’s air-conditioning didn’t work, and even with the windows down it got so hot going through the desert that by late morning Minou would get overheated. She’d pant in her cage and it was so pathetic. We’d have to stop at a hotel and cool her down.”