Fiction: “Hallways”

Lately Reya’s house always felt too small.

I wanted to reach out and push the walls apart, stretch the bedrooms into ballrooms, bend time and space so we could dance again.

Instead, I shuffled down the narrow hallway and traced my fingers along the popcorn patterns in the wall, adding my own personal dirt to a wall already marred by the grubby hands that had preceded mine.

The bathroom door swung in close to the counter, barely clearing the tarnished bronze handles jutting out from the cabinets.

“I found the scissors on my own,” I announced. “Thanks for nothing.”

Amongst the toothpaste flecks of the mirror’s reflection, my cousin’s pout deepened. She was sitting on the bathroom counter with her feet in the sink, where a gray dust bunny clung, quivering, to her left foot’s pinky toenail. Her fingers worried at a Gatorade-blue, cotton candy-scented glob of gum woven tight into her dark curls.

“Reya, you’re making it worse.” I tried to sound grave, but the thin walls absorbed sound like they did moisture and my voice came out in a snot-soaked whimper. “I told you, we gotta cut it before your mom gets home and freaks out.”

Her fingers faltered. Then they danced in double-time, clawing out pathetic shreds of gum that were promptly embedded under her fingernails or wiped across her fraying jeans.

Reya always moved too fast — a fact I had only once brought to her attention. It was between dance classes, as we sat together in a corner of the classroom and switched from ballet to jazz shoes. Her toe was starting to peek through the tip of her shoe.

“This is getting too expensive,” I knew Auntie Donna would say. “How do you wear through them so fast? Hey, Savannah, chada,” she’d address me, “do you have any old pairs she can borrow for this week?”

Then I would have to give her an old pair, and sometimes I wouldn’t have one and Reya would have to borrow from the studio. Sometimes the other girls would ask me how come Reya never just bought new shoes, and I’d stand there, cheeks burning, and tell them that it didn’t matter if she didn’t have new shoes because she could dance way better than them no matter what she was wearing.

But that day, as I saw that little toe pushing through ruptured pleather, I felt a surge of anger rise within me. Why did she wear through them so fast? Didn’t she know what her mother would say? What the other girls would say?

“It’s ’cause you dance too fast.”

Her eyes snapped up to meet mine. “Huh?”

“You always wear through your shoes ’cause you dance so fast all the time. You’re always a whole count ahead of me.” It didn’t really make sense, but I didn’t care. She always surged forward, in front of me, ahead of me, leaving me trailing behind like the tail to her comet. “You're too rough on your shoes, that’s why you always have to borrow mine.”

A moment passed. My mother’s voice echoed in my mind, reminding me that Auntie Donna had a lot of kids and that I should be nice and share with Reya, and then I felt sick and guilty and almost opened my mouth to say it would be okay if she needed to borrow my shoes again.

Before I could, Reya replied, with the tranquility of absolute conviction, “No, you dance too slow. You’re always following along instead of memorizing for yourself.” She wiggled her foot into her second jazz shoe. “Can I borrow another bobby pin?”

Reya never stopped dancing, no matter the state of her shoes. But as I stood in her tiny bathroom, I wondered what she would do when she outgrew this house.

“Your hair’s gonna grow back,” I informed her. Plus, you have enough to spare, I thought, eyeing her thick locks.

“But I want it long,” she whined, “for hula.”

After all my years of following along, this was somewhere I couldn’t follow her.

I huffed impatiently. “Why’d you even start doing hula? I thought you liked our studio. Now I have to go to dance by myself.”

“All island girls should do hula,” Reya muttered.

“We’re not even Hawaiian!”

“My mom and your mom and Auntie Julia all did it.”

Auntie Donna had shown us old videos of the three of them together, their heels digging into the earth, grass skirts rustling with every step, palms rolling like the waves.

My mom didn’t talk about hula a lot. She told me she liked how ballet made me long and lean, instead of squat and thick-thighed like hula made her.

“My mom said that’s ’cause they were lonely when they moved from Guam.” On mainland American soil, their accents alone had been enough to invite scrutiny. “They wanted to find islander friends.”

Reya stuck to her guns, much like the gum to her hair. “I’d be a fake islander if I didn’t at least try to learn.”

I wondered what that meant for me, but I didn’t ask. “Whatever. So is long hair a hula requirement or something?”

“No, but… all the other girls have it. Plus, they’ve all been doing hula since they were babies, so they’re way better than me. Basically all I have is hair.”

I couldn’t imagine that being the case. Reya was always first to master the combinations in class. She tried for the big-girl parts in our productions and never got them. Instead she was cast as a short-lived Tiger Lily, or the disappearing Cheshire Cat, or, to her supreme despair, a snowflake in The Nutcracker. Her brown shoulders stood out in the sea of white costumes and pale skin, her frizzy curls springing from a painstakingly gelled head, but she played her part with the consistency and grace of a principal dancer.

 I held up the scissors and sliced the air in a sharp snip. “Well, either I cut your hair, or you live the rest of your days as a ‘real islander’ who’s also really sticky.”

Still Reya hesitated. I imagined the thoughts rolling through her head: the girls in her hula class with their effortless cultural connection, the videos of her mother with flowing curls floating around her shoulders. Maybe she thought of me, looked at my limp lob and pink tights as evidence of my separation from our culture.

But then she put on the same face she always wore right before we went on stage: tight lips, narrowed eyes, furrowed brows. Scared and brave at the same time. “Just do it.”

Reya didn’t belong in a house where she barely had room to point her toes, I decided. Reya belonged in a mansion with its own theater, somewhere she could stage full productions of her own Nutcracker, somewhere she could be the main character of every dance, every show, over and over again.

I watched the wad of blue filth fall with her curly locks and I wondered whether she knew.

“I wish you could do ballet and hula at the same time,” I told her.

“My mom says we can’t this year.” Sheepishly, she offered, “Maybe you can do hula, too.”

I shook my head. “My mom wants me to go to competitions with the big girls this year, so I have to start doing more classes at the studio.”

“Oh.” She looked down at the floor, where her hair lay in a gummy heap on the chipped tile floor. “My mom says I gotta choose one.”

“Oh.”

Even in that little bathroom, she seemed far away.

“Maybe,” I said, “if you come over, we can put on our own performance. At my house. We can call it Coconutcracker, or something. Get it?”

The gears turned in her head. Then she smiled. Then she laughed, just a little, like air escaping a balloon. That set the laughter bubbling out of me. I slumped over the sink, nose against her knees, doubled over with laughter, and she collapsed on top of me, laughing until she gasped for air, until I felt a wetness on my shoulder.

“I didn’t want to cut my hair.”

“I know.”

“And I miss dancing with you.”

“Me too.”

Whether she had shiny new slippers or danced barefoot, whether she played Clara, a cockatoo, or a shoelace, Reya was always the main character to me.

We walked into the hall together.

When we were little, Reya and I used to dance up and down that hallway. We practiced our ballet combinations — tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, saut de chat. We made up our own dances, chassé- and pique-turned, banged up against the wall every few steps, crashed into each other and melted into a pile of giggles.

We couldn’t dance in this narrow hallway anymore. Already we could barely walk side by side. But still we pushed forward, light of foot, holding hands the whole way.

This work was selected to receive the 2020 Bernice Kilduff White & John J. White Creative Writing Prize.

“Hallways“ will be published under the title of “Pas De Deux” in the Spring 2020 issue of the Ampersand Literary Magazine at Fordham University.