5 Chapter 4 Pianos and Toe Shoes

Chapter 4 Pianos and Toe Shoes As a child, Maria thought of herself as a "typical Indian girl." She was shy and polite and eager to please the adults in her life. Her brother Jerry, however, had a terrible temper like his father. Maria sometimes fought with Jerry. Mostly, she simply ran away from him.

Maria's mother explained to her daughters that Jerry's problems began when he was just four years old. A horse kicked him in the head. Although Jerry seemed to recover, he could not learn the alphabet. He could not read, no matter how many times Ruth pointed and repeated the letters for him. One day, unable to control Jerry's outbursts, Maria's parents decided to send him away to a military school. Now that Jerry had left home, Ruth Tall Chief turned all her attention to her two daughters. One day, she promised herself, she would take her girls away from the reservation and the small town of Fairfax with its clanking oil derricks and dusty roads. She would take them away from their father's frightening binges fueled by oil money. Her girls would perform on stage and become famous. Traditional Indian dancing was not what Ruth Tall Chief had in mind, either. Her girls would dance ballet. During the summer when Maria was three years old, her mother took her for her first lesson. When Marjorie was three, she too began her lessons.

Maria's best friend was her sister. She and Marjorie dressed alike. They did everything together, including learning how to dance. In Fairfax, their teacher was a woman who knew very little about ballet. Mrs. Sabin didn't teach the Tall Chief girls the basic positions and movements. She forced five-year-old Maria to go up on her toes before her feet were strong enough to hold her. Mrs. Sabin did not know that dancing en pointe too early could damage forever a little girl's feet.

Ruth bought satin toe shoes in sizes too large for her girls. That way, they didn't outgrow their dancing slippers so quickly. She stuffed the toes of the slippers with cotton. Pain needled Maria's feet whenever she stood en pointe. She never told her mother about the pain. Ruth sewed the costumes for her daughters' dance routines. For one patriotic dance routine, Ruth made Maria a cape and sewed an American flag on the inside lining. On stage as the record "Stars and Stripes Forever" played, Maria twirled and twirled—sometimes on her toes and sometimes not—until she was dizzy.

A dancer must know music, and so Ruth also hired a piano teacher. While other children played outside after school, Maria now practiced both her piano lessons and her dance steps. Ruth watched her daughters closely. She saw that Marjorie could extend her leg almost to her head. That was much higher than Maria could. On the other hand, Maria could close her eyes and listen to a melody, then immediately identify the notes. "That's a C, that's a G," she'd tell the piano teacher. Then she played the same melody without making a mistake.

"Your daughter has perfect pitch," the piano teacher told Maria's mother. It was a remarkable musical talent. Ruth began to imagine different futures for her daughters. One day Marjorie would become a ballerina. Maria would become a concert pianist. For now, however, the two sisters continued to dance together. Sometimes they performed on stage in their father's movie theater. More often, they performed at county fairs, Boy Scout jamborees, and rodeos. The rodeo especially frightened Maria. The long-horned bulls in their pens snorted and pawed the dirt. The muscles along their flanks quivered