Dancing with Butterflies: A Novel - Softcover

Grande, Reyna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1439109060 ISBN 13: 9781439109069

Publisher: Washington Square Press, 2009

Synopsis

Dancing with Butterflies uses the alternating voices of four very different women whose lives interconnect through a common passion for their Mexican heritage and a dance company called Alegría. Yesenia, who founded Alegría with her husband, Eduardo, sabotages her own efforts to remain a vital, vibrant woman when she travels back and forth across the Mexican border for cheap plastic surgery. Elena, grief stricken by the death of her only child and the end of her marriage, finds herself falling dangerously in love with one of her underage students. Elena's sister, Adriana, wears the wounds of abandonment by a dys-functional family and becomes unable to discern love from abuse. Soledad, the sweet-tempered illegal immigrant who designs costumes for Alegría, finds herself stuck back in Mexico, where she returns to see her dying grandmother.

Reyna Grande has brought these fictional characters so convincingly to life that readers will imagine they know them.

About this title

About the Author:

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author, motivational speaker, and writing teacher. As a girl, she crossed the US–Mexico border to join her family in Los Angeles, a harrowing journey chronicled in The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist that has been adopted as the common read selection by over twenty schools and colleges and fourteen cities across the country. Her other books include the novels Across a Hundred Mountains, winner of a 2007 American Book Award, and Dancing with Butterflies, and The Distance Between Us, Young Reader’s Version. She lives in Woodland, CA with her husband and two children. Visit ReynaGrande.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Dancing with Butterflies CHAPTER ONE

A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish.

—MARTHA GRAHAM

THIS is what it comes down to.

The sweat. The blisters on your feet. The aching of your arms from practicing the skirtwork. The hours and hours rehearsing the same song until the music buries itself so deeply in your brain you hear it even in your sleep. The constant need to coax your body to move past the hurt, the frustration, the exhaustion, and convince it that it can do more . . .

All that is worth this moment.

To be up here onstage, bathed in the red, blue, and yellow stage lights. A thousand eyes look at you, admiring your flawless movements. Your feet seem to float over the floor as you twirl and twirl around and around before jumping into the arms of your partner.

Applause erupts out of the darkness, and you close your eyes and listen to it, let it envelop you. It gives you strength. Three seconds to catch your breath before the next polka, “El Circo,” begins, and your heart beats hard against your chest, but you can’t hear it above the sounds of the norteño band playing upstage, the musician’s fingers dance over the keys of his accordion as quickly as your feet stomp on the floor. As you and your partner move together, you feel the heat of his body, the intensity of his dancing. You look in his eyes and don’t let him see that despite the adrenaline rushing through you, you’re becoming more aware of the stabbing pain in your knee. You force yourself to keep smiling. He’ll know for sure you lied—to him, to yourself, thinking that you could perform like this.

The stage is a flurry of dancers whirling and stomping. The audience breaks into a rhythmic clapping as they follow the lively song in 2/4 beat. On the fourth spin your knee buckles from under you and suddenly you’re on the floor, the eleven other couples try not to step on you because after all, the dance must go on.

You try to get up and continue, but your legs no longer obey. You stare at the audience, yet all you see is darkness. The Exit signs like evil red eyes mock you. How is this possible? How did it get to this point? Your partner scoops you up into his arms and whisks you off the stage. Despite the pulsing pain in your knee all you can think about is that you’ve ruined the choreography. There will be a gap where there shouldn’t be.

The dancers waiting in the wings rush over, looking beautiful in their black Chiapas dresses embroidered with big colorful flowers. You want them to go away, to stop looking at you with pity. You’re used to the awe, the admiration, the envy. But not their pity.

“What happened?” they ask.

You take a deep breath, trying to come up with something, anything except the truth. “I’m okay, I’m okay. Don’t worry. I landed on my ankle the wrong way. Now stop fussing over me and go back to your places.”

“Is it your knee?” your partner asks as he helps you to the dressing room.

You shake your head no, glad that your Nuevo León skirt is long enough that he can’t see your right knee has swollen to the size of a grapefruit. You find yourself unable to tell him the truth, even if he’s your husband. Because once you admit it to him, you will have to admit it to yourself as well.

The pain will go away. It has to.
Yesenia

We’ve just finished warm-ups and are now taking a short break before moving on to the Azteca danzas, but I’m at the barre doing tendus. I need to believe warming up longer will help. That and Advil should help me get through practice, but lately that hasn’t been the case. I feel my kneebones grinding against each other, and I’ve started wearing a brace and keep it hidden under my sweatpants—which I’ve been using now instead of my Lycra pants—and although the brace relieves some of the pressure, my right knee still stiffens and swells.

My son, Memo, comes to stand by me and stretches as far as he can, yet his fingertips are two inches shy of his toes. It makes me feel better that at twenty, Memo isn’t that much more flexible than I am.

“I’m making chile verde for dinner,” I say.

“Ah, Mom, I’m going out with my friends tonight.”

“Where are you going on a Sunday night? Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“To the Arclight. The director is going to be there for a Q and A after the movie. I’ll come straight home afterward. Besides, my first class isn’t until eleven.”

“You can have the leftovers tomorrow, then. That is, if your father and I don’t eat it all.”

Memo laughs and runs his fingers through his long hair. I brush it off his forehead, wishing he would cut it. He won’t, though, no matter how much I complain that it doesn’t look good onstage. The audience could think he’s a girl dressed up in men’s clothes.

“Guess what?” Adriana, one of my dancers, says as she joins us at the barre. “I got a job!”

“Great!” I say, suppressing a sigh of relief. Finally, Adriana will start paying her dues and stop begging her sister for rent money. “How about I take you to La Perla to celebrate?”

My husband, Eduardo, picks up the atecocolli and brings it to his lips. When he blows into the shell the dancers peel themselves off the walls or get on their feet and head to the floor. “Tomorrow after work, okay?” I say to Adriana. As Eduardo pounds on his drum, the studio comes alive with movement. Memo remains by my side, and as we dance I can’t help but remember the child he once was. Three years old, and already he had learned to do a zapateado. And now, he dances flawlessly. Gives in to the music of his ancestors, and when he turns to me and smiles, I feel a rush of pride. This tall young man is my little boy, whom I taught to walk, to dance, to love Folklórico.

I look at the dancers around me. In the row in front of me is Stephanie, who at seventeen is the youngest in the professional group. In the row behind me is Olivia, who at thirty-six is the second-oldest dancer, six years younger than me. The women always leave. Start getting married. Having children. Pursuing a career. Little by little letting go of their passion for Folklórico.

I’ve been the co-director of my own dance group for nine years. Eduardo and I have worked so hard to get it where it is now. There are about a hundred Folklórico groups in Los Angeles, and Grupo Folklórico Alegría is one of the best. We have forty-five dancers, and in every one of our big shows there are always at least twelve couples on the stage.

When we finish practicing the Azteca danzas, I put on my dance shoes and my red practice skirt, which is made of fourteen yards of poplin and falls right below my ankles. Lately, whenever it’s my turn to teach I focus on the skirtwork even more than the footwork because it gives me a chance to rest my knee.

“You hold up your skirt like this,” I say, standing before the female dancers, my back to the mirrors. “Stop holding it as if it were a rag you clean your kitchen counter with! Veracruz is supposed to be danced with grace. You hold up the skirt delicately, as if it were sea foam, light in your hands. But your feet are fast, like the current.”

Even though our next performance isn’t one of our big shows but rather an adult school assembly, I won’t let the dancers go until I’m pleased with what I see. “This isn’t the time to learn but to perfect,” I say. “Last year we gave an excellent show at this school and this year I want it to be even better.”

We do another run-through of the Veracruz Cuadro Eduardo and I choreographed, except I don’t finish the suite. At the beginning of “Coco,” the last song of the cuadro, I step to the side and pretend my skirt has become loose. I wrap one strap around my waist, and then the other, slowly, breathing in and out. Eduardo glances at me, and so does Memo, the same worried look on their faces. I stand on the side and watch the dancers do the complex combination of steps. Sweating bodies flow in graceful rhythms, turning and turning, feet tapping faster and faster. I listen to the joyful music: the harp playing the melody, the jarana marking the rhythm, the requinto providing the counterpoint. To hell with my rebellious knee! I quickly pick up the sides of my skirt and join the dancers again. But by the end of the song, my feet hardly move. I do the skirt movements and hope no one can tell I’m only marking the steps the way some of the lazy dancers do, the way Adriana is doing now. How often have I told her she must dance at practice the way she would dance onstage?

I don’t correct her today. How can I? My feet aren’t as fast as the current anymore.



After practice I go home and head straight to the freezer; I sit on the recliner with an ice pack on my knee. Eduardo comes out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist. At forty-two he still has the body of a young dancer, slender and agile, so much like Memo’s. I’ve always been jealous that he can eat anything he wants without gaining weight. Unlike me, who puts on pounds just by looking at food.

“I’m worried about you, Yessy,” he says. He isn’t a tall man; at five feet five he stands two inches shorter than me, and his thin body makes me feel like a beluga whale when standing next to him, but his deep, booming voice makes him seem larger than life. His poise conveys confidence, power. That’s what attracted me to him the first time we met when we were kids. He isn’t a good-looking man, but the way he carries himself always makes women turn to look in admiration.

“I’ll be fine, you’ll see. It’s nothing to worry about,” I say.

“You’ve let it go on for too long now. It could get worse.” He comes to stand behind me and massages my neck. “Dancing isn’t forever. When our time comes, we have to let it go.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not ready to let it go. This will pass. It always does.” I stand up and put the ice pack back in the freezer and begin preparations for a lonely dinner without Memo.



After a shower I tuck myself under the blankets and wrap my arms around Eduardo. “I’m scared,” I confess. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

He squeezes my hand and says, “I know, honey. I know. But you have to do something about it, Yessy. If you keep pushing yourself the way you’ve been doing, it could get worse.”

“It can’t be that bad, can it? Maybe if I take it easy these next few days . . .”

“You need to see a doctor. Even though the pain does go away, it always comes back—and it’s worse.”

I turn around to face the wall and sigh.

“No matter what happens, you’ll always have Alegría,” Eduardo says. “The group will always be yours.”

I dreamed of starting my own group for a long time. When Memo was in sixth grade, Eduardo and I finally got serious about it and began to look for a studio to rent. Eduardo had just inherited his father’s electrical business and didn’t have much time for the group. Teaching and choreographing was all he could do, so I devoted myself to recruiting dancers, acquiring the costumes, looking for performance venues, hiring the musicians. I spent day after day writing grant proposals to get funding. Before finally forming a committee and assigning responsibilities to some of the other dancers, I was the one who spent countless hours on the phone trying to book performances, receiving the dancers’ dues, making deposits, paying the rent for the studio, worrying about the constant shortage of money. Grupo Folklórico Alegría is mine as much as it is his.

I sigh in the darkness, trying to fight the nostalgia that lately has been visiting me at night. I get out of bed, careful not to wake him. Eduardo can fall asleep within minutes, whereas I have a hard time getting my mind to stop thinking. As I make my way to the kitchen to get a drink of water I notice the light seeping through the crack under Memo’s door. I wonder if he had a good time tonight, but just as I’m about to knock I hear him talking on the phone, laughing once in a while. He’s graduating from Pasadena City College in a few months, and in August he’s moving to Riverside before the school year starts at UCR. I move away from his bedroom door. As I walk down the dark hallway, I try not to think about life without Memo at home.



Mondays at the AAA office are usually busy. By the time lunchtime comes around I’ve sold three new auto policies and five memberships. As I’m getting ready to finally take my lunch break, a client comes into the office. From the corner of my eye I see him checking in at the front. I want to rush out the door and later claim I didn’t see him. But his name appears on my computer screen, and I have no choice but to get up and call him to my cubicle. He walks toward me with determined steps, and I notice that his right arm ends right above the elbow in a stump.

“Hi, my name is Yesenia.” I awkwardly shake his left hand and offer him a seat. I sit at my computer and say, “How can I help you?”

“I want to get a quote for car insurance.”

I ask him a series of questions that will help me determine his premium. I try not to glance at the stump and hope he can’t see the disgust I feel. He should at least wear long-sleeve shirts to hide it.

“Does it bother you?” he asks.

“No, no, of course not.”

He chuckles. “It’s okay; I’m used to it by now.”

“Were you in a bad accident?” I try to keep my eyes on my computer.

“No, actually, I was bitten by a cat.”

I turn to look at him. “You serious?” I was imagining different scenarios; maybe he lost his arm in the war or performing some heroic deed, like Antonio Banderas trying to save Salma Hayek in that movie about a mariachi.

As I write his policy he tells me what happened—he didn’t pay much attention to the bite, cleaning it with hydrogen peroxide, thinking the infection would go away, but it kept getting worse. Soon, his arm was so swollen he couldn’t put it off any longer and went to see the doctor.

“Why didn’t you go sooner?”

“Because I thought a cat’s bite was no big deal,” he says. He’d been hurt worse before. Stepped on a rusty nail once when he was walking around his yard barefoot, and nothing happened to him then, although his wife kept telling him he might get tetanus. So what was a bite of a stray cat going to do to him?

“The doctor said a cat’s bite is much worse than a dog’s bite,” he says. “Cats have a lot of bacteria in their mouths because they’re constantly licking themselves, even their butts. So the bacteria had spread so much there was nothing he could do but cut off my arm.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You know what the worst part is?” he asks. I shake my head. “Sometimes I wake up and reach for my glasses, thinking my arm is still whole. And I see this instead . . .” He lifts up his arm so that I can see the stump up close.



I pick up Adriana after work and we head to El Mercadito in East L.A.

“How long was it this time?” I ask.

“Three months, two weeks, and three days,” she says as she lowers the window. She’s wearing a hot pink blouse with lace around the collar, purple ribbons on her braids, silver chandelier earrings, and bright red lipstick. Every time I s...

About this edition

• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1439109060
• ISBN 13: 9781439109069
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 392