Music played from a stereo on the piano and we began to dance, our feet tapping in sequence. Next we were supposed to leap, reach upward and spin. My feet remained planted. Instead of flinging my arms above my head, I lifted them only to my shoulders. When the other girls crouched to slap the stage, I tilted; when we were to cartwheel, I swayed, refusing to allow gravity to do its work, to draw the sweatshirt any higher up my legs.
The music ended. The girls glared at me as we left the stage—I had ruined the performance—but I could barely see them. Only one person in that room felt real to me, and that was Dad. I searched the audience and recognized him easily. He was standing in the back, the lights from the stage flickering off his square glasses. His expression was stiff, impassive, but I could see anger in it.
The drive home was only a mile; it felt like a hundred. I sat in the backseat and listened to my father shout. How could Mother have let me sin so openly? Was this why she’d kept the recital from him? Mother listened for a moment, chewing her lip, then threw her hands in the air and said that she’d had no idea the costume would be so immodest. “I’m furious with Caroline Moyle!” she said.
I leaned forward to see Mother’s face, wanting her to look at me, to see the question I was mentally asking her, because I didn’t understand, not at all. I knew Mother wasn’t furious with Caroline, because I knew Mother had seen the sweatshirt days before. She had even called Caroline and thanked her for choosing a costume I could wear. Mother turned her head toward the window.
I stared at the gray hairs on the back of Dad’s head. He was sitting quietly, listening to Mother, who continued to insult Caroline, to say how shocking the costumes were, how obscene. Dad nodded as we bumped up the icy driveway, becoming less angry with every word from Mother.
The rest of the night was taken up by my father’s lecture. He said Caroline’s class was one of Satan’s deceptions, like the public school, because it claimed to be one thing when really it was another. It claimed to teach dance, but instead it taught immodesty, promiscuity. Satan was shrewd, Dad said. By calling it “dance,” he had convinced good Mormons to accept the sight of their daughters jumping about like whores in the Lord’s house. That fact offended Dad more than anything else: that such a lewd display had taken place in a church.
After he had worn himself out and gone to bed, I crawled under my covers and stared into the black. There was a knock at my door. It was Mother. “I should have known better,” she said. “I should have seen that class for what it was.”
* * *
—
MOTHER MUST HAVE FELT guilty after the recital, because in the weeks that followed she searched for something else I could do, something Dad wouldn’t forbid. She’d noticed the hours I spent in my room with Tyler’s old boom box, listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, so she began looking for a voice teacher. It took a few weeks to find one, and another few weeks to persuade the teacher to take me. The lessons were much more expensive than the dance class had been, but Mother paid for them with the money she made selling oils.
The teacher was tall and thin, with long fingernails that clicked as they flew across the piano keys. She straightened my posture by pulling the hair at the base of my neck until I’d tucked in my chin, then she stretched me out on the floor and stepped on my stomach to strengthen my diaphragm. She was obsessed with balance and often slapped my knees to remind me to stand powerfully, to take up my own space.
After a few lessons, she announced that I was ready to sing in church. It was arranged, she said. I would sing a hymn in front of the congregation that Sunday.
The days slipped away quickly, as days do when you’re dreading something. On Sunday morning, I stood at the pulpit and stared into the faces of the people below. There was Myrna and Papa Jay, and behind them Mary and Caroline. They looked sorry for me, like they thought I might humiliate myself.