Mother and I pay a visit to an elderly lady from our church. As we drive up to her house I can see she is well off because her house is made of brick and an old Cadillac is parked in her driveway. Mother rings the door bell. The old woman answers and shows us in. Her lovely old Victorian living room furniture, probably inherited from her ancestors in the Deep South, is upholstered in dusty rose-colored velvet. She has gone to all the trouble of polishing her silver tea service and setting out cookies for us. Mother and the elderly lady settle in to visit. I walk around the room in a daze, admiring the old woman's treasures, her collection of dozens of porcelain figures of ballerinas which stand on lace doilies on the polished surfaces of many small tables. The old lady watches me and smiles; she can see that I am keeping my hands to myself, holding one of my small wrists in the opposite hand behind my back, as if I have to forcibly restrain myself from touching.
Then my dream comes true. The old lady says, "You may have your favorite." I look at my mother in disbelief and I can see she already starting to shake her head No, as if to tell me with a coded look that I must be polite and say, "Oh, no, I couldn't!" although I want one of the porcelain ballerinas more than I have ever wanted anything in my young life. My heart races. Everything could go wrong. But then the precious old woman says again, "Please, dear, choose the one you like best and you may take it home with you." Mother starts to say it is too much, that we can't accept, but the old lady is up from her chair now, pointing out her own favorites to me with a yellowed, trembling finger. I look back again at Mother and am relieved to see she's decided to let me have one of the figurines. It is so hard to choose. It is the most difficult decision I've ever had to make in my life. Finally I settle on a ballerina in a short white tutu, with black hair and feathers attached to her headdress as if she is Pavlova in Swan Lake. This is the happiest day of my life.
The old woman wraps the figurine up for me in Kleenex and a page from the newspaper for safe-keeping. When Mother and I get home, I go into my room and unwrap my treasure. It is the most beautiful thing I own. It is the most exquisite thing I have ever seen. I could never even have dreamed up such a thing as lovely as this ballerina, and now it is mine to keep in real life. I place it carefully in the very center of my dresser, beside my cardboard jewelry box. When I need to get a pair of socks or panties from my top drawer, I hold my breath, sliding the drawer of my dresser out gently, gently.
Months pass. I forget to be careful and close the top drawer of my dresser too roughly, and the ballerina falls. One pale arm, extended en arabesque, breaks off. I cry so long and so hard I become hysterical. Mother tells me to hush, that Daddy will fix it when he comes home from work. And, sure enough, after supper, Daddy gets out a tiny tube of glue, the smell of which makes me dizzy and light-headed, and he repairs the fragile ballerina. I am full of joy. I have a second chance. I can't even tell where Daddy rejoined the two pieces of my ballerina's arm. The mend is invisible.
But something goes wrong. After a few days, in the sunlight, I see the glue has yellowed and a bead, like a drop of amber tree sap, deforms the pure, lyrical line of the ballerina's delicate arm. She is broken. I broke her, and she will never be unbroken again. Even if no one else knows the ballerina is broken, I do. I know she is no longer perfect.
Now I don't take special care when I slide the dresser drawer open and shut. Sometimes something bad in me says, Just get it over with now, and I bump my hip into the dresser clumsily. Then one day while I am playing on the floor of my room, I bump into my dresser and the ballerina is knocked off-balance again. She topples. This time her legs are broken at the knees. My heart races. My face is hot, my pupils dilated, but I don't cry this time. No, this time I won't ask Daddy to repair her. I wrap the broken ballerina up in toilet tissue and secretly put her in the garbage can at the curb.
*******
Mother and I ride a chartered Greyhound bus all the way from Texas through the Deep South with the group of teenage church girls my mother chaperones. I love the drugging smell of the diesel exhaust fumes that come out of the bus's blackened tail pipe. I love eating surprise box lunches and pulling into deserted bus terminals in the middle of the night in strange towns whose names I don't even know, and it doesn't matter anyway, because I will probably never return there. I love not sleeping in my own bed and getting breakfast by pulling silver knobs on vending machines.
We stop in Atlanta for the night. The chartered bus pulls up in front of a shabbily genteel brick hotel that stands several stories high. It has a neon sign on top. I have never seen skyscrapers before, and looking up at them gives me vertigo. There is a black man wearing a uniform with shiny buttons and epaulets who takes our suitcases up to our room and unlocks the door for us. There are two glasses wrapped in white paper on a little glass shelf in the bathroom. Mother and I take turns taking cool baths and put on fresh summer dresses against the heat. The whole time we are dressing, and, in fact, the whole night we stay in this hotel, sirens are crying, growing closer, fading away into the distance, growing closer again. Mother and I go downstairs in the elevator. We are going to walk somewhere close by and eat dinner at a restaurant where there is air conditioning and we can get tall Cokes with crushed ice.
After we leave the hotel we soon pass by a plate glass window with a deep display area behind it, just at my eye level. In the window are dozens of porcelain vases made in the shapes of naked women. The women's bodies are beautiful and just as delicate and exquisite as my figurine of a ballerina. Mother follows my gaze to see why I have stopped short in front of this window, and when she sees what I am looking at, she clamps a hand onto my wrist and tries to pull me away. Mother's cheeks are flushed, but I am not embarrassed at all. As she tugs me along after her, I turn my head and fiercely stare at the vases made in the shapes of lovely, lovely women.
