Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach Read Free Book Online Page A

hardly breathe. Suddenly, I could think of nothing and no one but Emily. Sylphide’s hug slipped from my mind, the vision of Sylphide on her steps faded, the Kennedy photo and the album cover ceased beating in my closet. Emily Bright, of all girls. Her mother was a South Korean national who barely spoke English when I’d met her at field days in grade school. Her father was Afro-American (everyone knew) and well educated (everyone said). He and Emily’s mother had met when he was a serviceman in the Korean War (everyone explained). Th e whole family traveled to Korea each October for two weeks at a time, some kind of holiday there. Our sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Bobbins, told us that Emily was the product of something called miscegenation, which he said was the mixing of races (he pronounced this rices ), and wrong, against God’s law. Emily was right there in the front row, brightest kid in class. No one would accept her, said Mr. Bobbins, with exaggerated tones of compassion, not the Negroes, not the Orientals, certainly not the Caucasians, and therein lay the tragedy of her existence. “Cruel but true,” he said, then addressed her directly, pityingly: “Your parents should have thought of that.”
    Even then I knew enough to be shocked, we all did.
    Emily, thoroughly self-contained, all of eleven years old, took her time standing, simply gathered her books, her pencils, her wooden, foreign box of lunch, and walked out. Whoa! Later, we learned she marched all the way home.
    Several of us told our moms the whole thing, and these good women told a lot of other people, including Mr. LaRue, the principal. Mr. Bobbins was censured in some obscure way. At any rate, he didn’t talk about the need to contain the Jews anymore, or about the communists inciting the Negroes. He stopped his ranting about Martin Luther King, too, and never said again that it was just as well that JFK was dead. (However, he still occasionally wondered aloud if Linsey Stryker-Stewart—not in our room that year, but next door—should have been euthanized at birth.)
    Th e more obvious upshot of the whole incident was that Emily’s parents took her out of public school and placed her in dance conservatory, a famous program that accepted without prejudice everyone of talent. She lived in Boston all the way through junior high and into high school, only to return to us in the middle of sophomore year, having been reported for curfew violations (out all night, was the rumor) by a jealous rival in her dorm.
    Even gangly as she was, she became the reigning star of “Count” Vasily Derchenko’s Westport School of Ballet, and was known to be taking class nearly daily at Lincoln Center in New York City, even occasionally dancing very small parts in very big productions. Suddenly I was the most ardent ballet fan in New England, or anti-fan, if that would get me closer. I made a point of dropping Sylphide’s name in otherwise quotidian conversations with the drama crowd, hoped my connection to the famous dancer would get back to Emily.
    One of the engines of my crush, of course, was that Emily wanted nothing to do with me. Sophomore year, she’d written a series of antiestablishment opinion pieces for the school paper, in one of which she attacked me as the leader of the football team, called me “reptilian.” I’d been kind of hurt, found myself almost agreeing with her. Th e other guys immediately started calling me Lizard.
    But I felt no anger toward her. In fact, it may have been her argument that had set me on the road to quitting the team. She’d written that the true test of physical strength came in restraint, equipoise, tenderness, compassion. Th ose were dancers’ words, of course, concepts my battling father didn’t know, a form of manhood coaches Powers and Keshevsky wouldn’t recognize.
    In study hall a kid I barely knew, Dwight Leonard, slipped me a copy of