Chapter 4 Ambrose
Ambrose
Lily wants to live in the old days. Her mom Debra says no you don’t, because in the old days all you did was cook and sew and die in childbirth, but Lily still wishes she could travel back in time.
Her older sister Sophie says stop you just hate school, and that is true.
Lily hates sixth grade. However, Lily hates other things too, like parties and kissing games, and boys keeping score.
Guess what? Sophie says. There were parties in the old days too.
Sophie is more pragmatic than Lily. Debra says so on the phone late at night. Lily is more anxious, Debra says. Then Lily thinks, Am I? She sits up in bed and strains to hear her mom’s voice downstairs.
“Yeah,” her mom says. “Yeah, I know. Well, she’s upset.”
She’s wrong, though. Lily is not upset. She just wants to live in a castle, or a secret cottage in the woods.
She is writing a novel about a girl named Ambrose who becomes a swan at night.
The novel is in a journal her teacher gave her.
It’s a black-and-white composition book for her feelings, or whatever she wants to say.
East of the sun and west of the moon lived Princess Ambrose with her mother the Queen, her father the King, and her eleven sisters. She was a regular princess except for one thing. Every night at dusk she turned into a swan.
“How?” says Sophie, but Lily’s teacher comments in green pen, Lily, what a wonderful story! Tell me more about the swan.
“Why is her name Ambrose?” Lily’s dad Richard asks when she’s at his house that weekend.
“It’s short for Amber Rose,” Lily explains.
He says, “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Ambrose kept her wings under her bed and at night she slipped them over her shoulders to fly across the sky and gather tiny stars.
She poured the stars into the drawer of her nightstand where they sparkled secretly.
She loved to look at them but in the morning she must sit at her loom with her eleven sisters and weave nonstop.
Her mother is always telling her, hurry up, work faster.
“Oh wonderful,” Debra says. “Is that supposed to be me?”
What are the sisters weaving? Lily’s teacher asks in green.
Lily doesn’t answer questions. Home with her mom, she cuts pictures of flowers and swans and diamonds from magazines.
First, she glues roses and sunflowers and red poppies to the cardboard cover of her composition book.
Then she adds the diamonds. Finally, she pastes a swan with outstretched wings.
The swan is much smaller than the roses and poppies, but that’s just perspective.
When Lily is done gluing her pictures, Debra says it’s beautiful, but you need to protect the edges, so they drive to Michael’s and buy Mod Podge to brush over the collage.
“Just keep it on the newspaper,” Lily’s mom tells her.
Lily shoots her mom a look because everyone remembers how Lily opened nail polish on the couch and splattered the cushions, but she has not ruined anything in years.
She is named after her Great-Grandma Lillian who made all her own clothes, including her coats.
Not only that, but she upholstered her own furniture and sewed all the curtains for her house.
And they were lined. Lillian went to the Lower East Side and bought Schumacher fabric covered with roses.
Her house in Brooklyn was filled with roses on the curtains and the sofa.
When she and Great-Grandpa Morris moved to Brookline, Lillian cut roses from her garden.
The Brookline house was always blossoming.
In the dining room, Lillian polished her silver until it gleamed.
In the kitchen, she baked rugelach, Linzer tortes, and mandelbrot.
For dinner parties she served her own napoleons, and then she was so exhausted she had to lie down.
Lily imagines Lillian lying on a bed of roses.
At night when she is supposed to be doing her homework Lily lies on the couch and writes.
She loved to feel the wind in her feathers, but she was always looking for something where were the other swans?
Her teacher comments, I hope she finds them! (Watch out for run-on sentences.)
In her cement and glass school, Lily opens her book, now covered with roses and red poppies.
All day long, Ambrose waited to change into a swan and fly again. After waiting for her eleven sisters to brush their teeth, she locked herself in the bathroom and fastened her wings.
During lunch, Lily hides in her empty classroom and writes.
The reason she flew all night was to look for the other swan girls who she knew were in the sky if only she could find them. She flew and flew until finally she saw a large bird coming toward her.
“Lily?” says Mrs. Berman. “What are you doing?”
“Working,” Lily says.
“But at lunch, you need to be in the lunchroom, honey.”
When she’s supposed to be at Assembly, Lily sits in the hall and writes.
Ambrose flapped her wings and quickly met the other bird in midair. Are you a swan? she asked. No I am not said the other bird. Sorry about that I am a pelican but don’t lose heart. Go! Fly to the…
“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Berman almost trips over her. “Lily? Why are you sitting out here?”
“So I can concentrate,” says Lily.
“I hear what you are saying,” Mrs. Berman says. “It’s hard to concentrate sometimes.”
“Yes,” says Lily.
“Come on into the auditorium.”
“No thank you,” says Lily.
“That wasn’t a question,” Mrs. Berman tells her.
“Just a second.” Lily is trying to finish her sentence.
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you take your notebook with you?” says Mrs. Berman.
Then Lily scrambles to her feet, because that is also not a question.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Berman says. “I want you to know we are all on the same side.” But later that week, she calls a team meeting.
The team is Mrs. Berman, and Dr. C. from the Learning Center, and Lily, and both of Lily’s parents.
She can’t stop staring at her mom and dad sitting on the same side of the table.
First of all, Mrs. Berman explains, this meeting is about safety.
It is about respecting Lily’s needs and at the same time making sure everybody knows where she is.
There might be a way for Lily to alert a teacher that she needs a break from an activity like lunch, and if there is staff available, she might be able to step outside for a few minutes and come back when she is ready.
Lily’s parents are nodding while Lily wonders what second of all is going to be. There should be a second, but Mrs. Berman never gets to it. She just keeps talking. If you were an animal, Lily asks Mrs. Berman silently, what kind would you be?
Debra and Richard turn toward Mrs. Berman at the same time, but Richard starts drumming his fingers on the table and ruins the symmetry.
“Dad!” Lily whispers. “Stop that!” He looks confused, and she says, “Stop fidgeting.”
In the car, on the way to ballet, Lily’s mom says, “Were you even paying attention?”
“Yes.” Lily pulls on her tights and leotard in the back seat because she had no time to change at school.
“What did Mrs. Berman say?”
“I can alert a teacher.”
“Why?” asks Sophie from the front seat. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!” Lily is pinning her bun as fast as she can. Sophie is fine because Level Seven starts later, but Lily needs split-second timing.
As soon as her mom pulls up at the studio, Lily jumps out.
Inside the studio building, she races up carpeted stairs with her dance bag and backpack.
She can’t be late. She’s already been late twice, and her teacher Gwen says if you are late again you can’t come in.
But it’s not Lily’s fault she had to go to a team meeting.
In the waiting room she pulls off her boots and stuffs her feet into ballet slippers. Through the glass studio wall, she can see everybody standing at the barre. Softly, she opens the inner door.
“Lily!” Gwen snaps. “No. Just no.”
Lily retreats and sinks into the waiting room couch. If she could have explained—but no excuses is her teacher’s motto. Gwen’s hair is short, and she has a short temper. She chops off everything, even her own name, which should be Guinevere.
If Lily were in Level Seven, she would be early.
She would be changing with Sophie in the dressing room.
Lily watches the girls of Level Seven walk like ducks in their pointe shoes to the big studio.
As they pass through the waiting room, Lily tucks her legs under her, so she’ll be inconspicuous—but Sophie’s teacher sees her.
Sophie’s teacher Nastia owns the studio, and she sees everything, even a speck of lint, because she trained at the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg where you had to work even when you were tiny children.
Nastia wears black tracksuits. Only black.
Her voice is harsh, even as she says, “What’s wrong, sweetie? ”
“I was late,” Lily confesses. For a second, she hopes Nastia will take her to class and tell Gwen to let her in—but no.
Nastia declares, “Late students waste everybody’s time.”
And so, Lily spends ninety minutes on the couch with two mothers sewing spangles onto tutus. One tutu is lilac and silver for the Lilac Fairy. The other is crimson and jet black for Don Q.
“This was Hannah’s,” the lilac mother says, “but I had to get it altered for Olivia.”
“You can’t win,” says the crimson mother. “I had to get this altered and it’s new.”
“They keep growing,” the lilac mother says as Chopin seeps from the big studio.
When Level Six is done, Maddy and Scarlett rush out to tell Lily they feel so bad and Gwen is so mean, but then they zip up their coats and run downstairs because their moms are waiting. All the girls run down, but Lily has to wait for Sophie’s class to finish before her mom comes.
She pulls out her book and violet gel pen.