The Guest Room(17)

But we’ll never know. Maybe I’m just kidding myself.

Vasily said the plan was for me to train for the audition with a special coach he knew in Moscow. I would train for three months before the audition. He promised my grandmother that I would go to school, too. All the girls and boys in the company did. The dancers, he said, were all very good students. Most made it into the company, but the few (and he said it was very small number) who did not become dancers came home with very good educations. He said this was a detail that he knew would have been important to my mother, but he looked at me like this was not something I needed to worry about. His eyes said I would be a dancer for sure. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was setting and the big room that was the only room other than the kitchen and our two bedrooms was getting dark. I remember thinking that moment how much I missed my mother. I had been living alone with Grandmother since my mother had gone to hospital for the last time. My grandmother was sixty-two and had seemed to age many years in the last months of my mother’s life. It wasn’t just that her hair now was the gray of cigarette ash. Her eyes were red because she seemed to begin and end her day with tears, and she seemed always to have a cold. She seemed always to have sores on her arms. I worried that I was a burden, since obviously nurses do not make oligarch kinds of money. Besides, it was almost time for her to retire.

So, going with Vasily and his marble column bodyguards to Russia to become a ballet dancer was no-brainer. It really was. I went.

…

When I was twelve, I sold my Barbies on a folding table on a street in Yerevan. I was too old for them. I sold them to tourists for lots of money, which probably sounds crazy since tourists come from places where you can buy all the Barbies you want. But if I sold them to younger girls or their mothers or fathers in my neighborhood, I wouldn’t have made very much money. Those people didn’t have very much money. It wouldn’t have been worth it. The tourists from California and New Jersey bought my Barbies because my mother and I dressed them up in traditional Armenian clothes we made ourselves. For instance, for one doll we sewed an ankle length red wedding dress with a gold lace apron. For others, we embroidered beautiful white lace scarves and shawls. We cut out elegant blue velvet vests and trimmed tiny strips of leather into tiny belts.

I was allowed to keep all the money I made because we didn’t need it for food or the rent. Both my mother and my grandmother were working. We weren’t rich, but two jobs is two jobs. We did okay. I bought my mother some earrings and a necklace from a vernissage vendor as gifts to thank her for helping me make all those clothes and because I loved her. I bought my grandmother a new dress. For me, I bought blue jeans and a handbag and new leotards. I bought new ballet slippers.

And while I had a big collection, I was never the most loony of Russian or Armenian Barbie doll lovers. There were far worse. I read about one girl in the Ukraine who, when she was a young woman, dieted and worked out and dieted some more, and then had her boobs done so she would look like human Barbie. Vasily, if he had known how much I loved Barbies, would probably have paid whatever it cost to make me look like human Barbie, too. I still remember the first time I heard a boob job referred to as “plastic surgery.” I smiled because my brain made a big jump to the dolls I had loved when I was a little girl.

A few days after I sold the dolls, when I was beside my mother’s desk at the brandy factory—just visiting for some reason before dance class—Vasily would compliment me on my new jeans. My mother got seriously pissed: at him and at me. The jeans were tight, which was why I liked them.

I don’t know, maybe this was the beginning of my end. It was the first time that Vasily took notice of me as, well, a hot chick. But I really was only twelve.

Maybe I just should have given away all those Barbies to the girls in the classes behind me at school. Maybe everything would have been different.

But maybe not. Maybe I was just destined for badness.

You’ll see.

…

This is how insane things were for me and how quickly my life changed: one afternoon I was walking like I did most days each week from my school to the dance studio. I had a little canvas dance bag with my ballet slippers and toe shoes inside it over my shoulder. The next afternoon I was on an airplane for the first time in my life. I was going to Moscow. Now my ballet slippers and toe shoes were in a handsome black suitcase that Vasily gave me. He called it a “rollie” because it had wheels, and we both laughed.

I stood for a long time at the big windows by a gate at the Yerevan airport and looked at Ararat, thinking how maybe when I next saw the mountain I would be on my way to becoming a ballerina at the opera house. Maybe I would be a ballerina at the opera house. I thought this to myself: someday I will bathe in the footlights like a star.

And maybe it was the word star, which is just a sun, but then I thought of Icarus and I had a little shudder of fear. Maybe I was more like Icarus than Velvet Bird, and my wings were just wax. Maybe they would melt in the hot lights and I would fall.

…

Vasily’s assistant and I boarded the plane together. His name was Andrei, which is very common Russian name, and he had been with me since picking me up at my home in a black stretch limousine. (He called it a “stretchie.” Looking back, how innocent does a world seem where grown men use words like rollie and stretchie?) We sat in the very back of the car, but in the very front of the airplane. I only saw the face of our stretchie’s driver when he took our rollies and put them in the trunk, and when he opened the back doors for us. In the car, I focused on the refrigerator built into the seat, which was no less glamorous to me because it was empty, and the side or the back of Andrei’s massive neck as he looked at the streets and casinos and the clubs with the strippers—neon versions of naked women over their entrances—on the way to the Yerevan airport.