Long Bright River: A Novel by Liz Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

who’s actually a good guy, and he gives her a doll. It’s called a nutcracker, and you can go ahead and get over that too. That night she falls asleep and has a long dream and that’s the rest of the ballet, he said. The nutcracker doll comes to life and becomes a prince and he fights off giant mice, takes her to a land of snowflakes, and then takes her to a place I forget the name of. It’s like Candy Land. The little girl and the prince watch while a few different dances are performed. The end, said Mr. Johns.
    —Does she go back to real life after that? asked a boy in my class.
    —I forget, said Mr. Johns. I think so.
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    —
    We had grown up less than three miles from the center of Philadelphia, but we only went there once a year, on New Year’s Day, to watch a dozen of our cousins and uncles and uncles’ bosses and uncles’ friends march in the Mummers Parade. It is possible, therefore, that I had laid eyes on the Academy of Music before—it’s right on Broad Street, part of the parade route—but I had certainly never been inside it. It’s a pretty brick building with high, arched windows and old-fashioned lanterns that burn unflaggingly near its front doors.
    As we filed off the bus, our teachers lined up along the edge of the sidewalk, inserting themselves between the students and the traffic, ushering us with mittened or gloved hands into the lobby.
    Again, I trailed Kacey, who, I noticed, was scuffing her feet: I could hear it on the sidewalk. Gee would be mad at her later. Kacey was like this, always: doing what she shouldn’t do, demanding a rebuke, daring the adults in her life to come down harder and harder on her, testing the limits of their anger. Whenever I could, I tried to distract her from this pursuit, hating to watch the punishment she inevitably received.
    We entered the lobby and were stopped by the crowd. Today, what I remember most is the number of little girls who were there with their mothers, right in the middle of a school day. They were the same age as us, or a little younger. Every one of them was white. In comparison, our school group looked like the United Nations. They’d come in from the Main Line: I knew this even then. They were wearing beautiful knee-length coats in bright colors and, beneath them, dresses that looked like they were made for dolls: frilled, satin, silk, velvet, lace-trimmed and puff-sleeved. In them, they looked like jewels or flowers or stars. They wore white tights and black, polished, patent-leather Mary Janes, all of them, as if they were following some rule that only they knew about. Many of them had their hair pulled back tightly into buns, the kind I would later see the ballerinas wearing.
    There were sixty or eighty Hanover grade school students in the lobby. We were clogging it. We didn’t know where to go.
    —Go on ahead, said Mr. Johns, but he, too, looked uncertain. Finally an usher came over to him, smiling, and asked if he was from the Hanover grade school, and he looked relieved and said yes.
    —Right this way, said the usher.
    We filed by those girls and their mothers, who stared back at us, openmouthed, even the grown-ups. They stared at our puffy down jackets, our sneakers, our hair. It occurred to me that the mothers, too, must have taken the day off from their jobs. What did not cross my mind then was the possibility that they did not work at all. Every grown woman I knew had a job—or, more often, multiple jobs. About half of the men did.
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    —
    I will never forget the moment the curtain rose. From the start, I was transfixed. There was snow—real snow, it seemed to me—falling onto the stage. Nothing could have prepared me for this. The exterior, and then the interior, of a large and beautiful house was shown, and inside that house were well-dressed children who were tended to by well-dressed adults. The children were given beautiful presents and then entertained by a series of life-sized doll-dancers. When the children