Read Online The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos - Free Book Online Page A

become true ballerinas for some reason or another, like college or babies or short legs or injury or—as in my case—a father whose scorn at a daughter forgoing college and grad school to dance for a living would have been scorching and whose opinion held sway with said daughter long, long after it should have. Plus, I probably wasn’t good enough to become a real ballerina. Plus, I really, really liked to eat.
    And then there was Trillium. By rights, she was one of the beginners, but somehow it was impossible to group her with the others, just as it would turn out to be impossible to group her with anyone ever. On her first day, she sailed into the room like Cleopatra on her goldenbarge, chignoned head held aloft, swathed in a royal purple leotard and layers of legwarmers, chandelier earrings flashing. And then she proceeded to move with such focus and authority and natural rhythm that you almost didn’t notice that she had no idea what she was doing.
    Afterward, in the sedate dressing room, she bestowed hoots, high fives, and bear hugs on us all. Coming from anyone else, this would likely have gone over like a ton of bricks, but because it was Trillium, we felt something akin to blessed. When she turned to me, caught both my hands in hers, and said, “Your ankles and feet are so gorgeous, they make me want to lie down and cry. Will you have coffee?,” it didn’t occur to me to say anything but, “Yes!”
    That coffee led to more coffee, and then drinks, and dinners, and at every get-together, we talked, mostly about Trillium. Not because she was tedious or self-centered, but because at the particular moment I met her, when it came to the story of her life, Trillium was a woman on fire. This hadn’t always been so. For most of her adult life, Trillium had never talked much about her past.
    “It wasn’t because of shame,” she was quick to tell me, resting one long-nailed hand on my arm, “but because I was so softhearted about it. It was so much mine, like a child.”
    But then there came what she refers to as “The Dark Night of the Orange” (which became the title of the introductory chapter of her book), the winter night on which, after decades of devout citrus avoidance, she had come home from a boring date to find a package on her doorstep, a thank-you gift from a student for whom she’d written a letter of recommendation. The box was packed with navel oranges, a dozen, each tucked tenderly inside its individual square cardboard nest of paper grass. They were perfect, softball sized, and so profoundly orange they seemed to give off their own light.
    “They were still cold from sitting on my porch all day. And all I can say is that it came over me that I had to eat one. I couldn’t not.”
    One bite, that first brilliant burst on her tongue, and there it was, all of it, in full color and surround sound, beginning with Trillium atthree years old in the orange grove, screaming inside a cloud of bees.
    Her story filled her; she teemed with it. Two days later, she came to her first ballet class (as a child, she had always wanted to take ballet, had fashioned tutus out of every available material, trash bags, newspapers), and met me, and handed over, in great gleaming swaths, the story of her life. To say we were bonding doesn’t cover it; we were bound: she couldn’t not tell and I couldn’t not hear. It was like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” except that no birds were killed, and the telling was nothing but beautiful for the teller and the listener.
    I laughed. I cried. Sometimes, hours or days after I’d last seen Trillium, some tiny, jewel-colored piece of story would come winging toward me out of the blue, and I would laugh or cry again.
    The story itself was classic Americana, a gritty, sublime, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps tale, punctuated by moments of terror, of heartbreak, of joy and luck and shining grace. Her mother, Elena, was a migrant fruit picker, sixteen years old when