A Lotus Grows in the Mud Read Free Page B

up?”
    “Happy,” I would reply, looking in their eyes.
    “No, no,” they’d laugh. “That’s really sweet, but I mean…what do you want to be? A ballerina? An actress maybe?”
    “I just want to be happy.”
    And “Sleigh Ride” makes me happy.
    The day before the show, all the contestants are gathered in the school gymnasium. “Wait here for Mrs. Toomey,” a teacher tells us. “She’ll be along in just a minute.”
    Mrs. Toomey is a very severe woman, with gray hair and bony fingers. I am a little scared of her, to tell you the truth. Sitting on the wooden basketball floor, I can hear her shoes clunking along the corridor toward us, and then, suddenly, she appears, standing over us ominously.
    “Now, children, this is very exciting, and we are going to have a wonderful show. I am glad you are all here, but I want you to know that you must be absolutely perfect,” she says, peering at us sternly with steel blue eyes.
    Perfect? I think, the blood draining from my face. But I’m not perfect. I will be improvising to music. Anything could happen. I feel stricken.
    “Your moms and dads and lots of people will be watching, and I don’t want them to see any mistakes.”
    Panic-stricken, I keep thinking about what she said. Perfect? I won’t be able to do that. To me, perfect is doing a pirouette without falling over, and I can’t always manage that. My mind flashes hotly back to the maypole dance the previous year in this very gymnasium. I accidentally took a wrong turn and wound my ribbon on the outside instead of inside. Mrs. Toomey got so mad and started screaming at me, but I tried to hold on and not cry. The problem is that I can’t control the tears that are streaming down my cheeks.
    Walking home from school, I think long and hard about what she said, her words spinning round and round in my mind.
    Perfect? I ask myself as I pass the old woman who always sits in her window crocheting. I wave and smile.
    Perfect? What is perfect? I pass the man who constantly mows his lawn, with his pipe posted between his lips.
    Perfect. Like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers?
    I climb the front porch, where Nixi is waiting for me. We walk together into our home. I don’t feel like climbing the chain-link fence to David Fisher’s today. Instead, I go upstairs to my bedroom, where I sit staring at my dolls, waiting for Mom to come home.
    Sitting at the kitchen table when she finally does, I plunk my elbows on it and rest my head in my hands. “Mommy, what is ‘perfect’?”
    “‘Perfect’ is when people don’t make any mistakes, I guess.” She purses her lips and looks at me askance.
    “Okay, then I’m not doing the talent show.”
    “What? Goldie Jeanne, what do you mean you’re not doing the talent show? Honey, you have to do the talent show; you’re the only one up there who can do anything. You have practiced and practiced every night in the living room. You looked beautiful. You didn’t make a single mistake.”
    “But I’m not perfect, Mommy.”
    “Well, nobody’s perfect. Who said anything about perfect?”
    “Mrs. Toomey said.”
    My mother raises her eyes to the heavens and shakes her head. “Oh boy. Here we go. Another trip to the school.”
    The next morning my mother picks up our precious copy of “Sleigh Ride” and escorts me to the school with it tucked firmly under her arm. We sit side by side in a small room with Mrs. Toomey, who seems a little panicked that my mother has come to see her. She leans forward in her chair and gives me a thin smile.
    “Now, Goldie, I’m sure I didn’t say ‘perfect,’ ” she says defensively.
    “Oh yes you did, Mrs. Toomey,” I counter. “You said ‘perfect,’ and I’m not perfect.”
    My mother shakes her head in exasperation. “Now, Goldie, clearly Mrs. Toomey didn’t mean you have to do everything exactly right.”
    Mrs. Toomey chimes in, groping for words. “Yes, that’s right, honey. I just meant you have to be the best you can be.