The rest of us gave speeches at Dad’s funeral. My sister Moe’s eulogy took the form of an interpretive dance. I can still picture Moe sitting next to her dance teacher in the pews, dashing to the back of the church when it was time for her costume change and returning in a white dress with an artfully shredded skirt and a white leotard, like a contestant on her favorite TV show, So You Think You Can Dance.
The thing is, Moe really can dance.
My brother Danny, an uncle, and a cousin moved a table full of flowers aside on the altar and the first piano chords of a muffled indie pop ballad came on. Pastor Erin, the solemn and berobed minister of the United Church of Christ, sat as neutral as onlooking royalty at the back of the altar. Moe wouldn’t stop referring to this mild woman of the cloth as a slut for believing in a higher power that clearly didn’t exist. The reason for her doubt: the untimely funeral of a beloved fifty-five-year-old marathon runner who was not just our dad but also the only certifiably sane member of our immediate family, and an atheist to boot.
On the makeshift stage, Moe didn’t look that different from any other girl of seventeen, tumbling and kicking her long legs. She had compressed the choreography from one of her competition solos for this smaller performance space, her movements shy yet explosive, the powerful pre-flight practice flaps of a pelican. I worried not that Moe might stop but that she might soar, Kung Fu-style, an errant heel or taloned toe striking Pastor Erin in some soft, holy part. Moe grieved wordlessly and with her whole body, or else not at all.
I’d seen her cry exactly once during my dad’s two-year battle with ALS and that was literally as he was dying, when his doctor unplugged the respirator. I suspect she may only have cried then because the rest of us were losing it around her. More likely than not, Moe was mimicking emotion as much as feeling it, but it was her off-the-wall humor and sweetness that had helped see us through, the way she laughed hysterically at my brother’s fart jokes, the way she danced around my dad’s life-support equipment like it was nothing. Sometimes I wanted to shake her. Other times, hug her.
Moe’s straightened brown hair swung and splashed around the smile she’d been trained to keep frozen on her face while performing, even at her own dad’s funeral. She could roll her ankle doing a relevé and her lips wouldn’t lose a millimeter of altitude.
The music stopped and Moe sprang up from the floor, head down, hair covering her face as she slouched to the altar steps and back into the pews, no chest-heaving pose held for applause or bow to distract from the divine hush. It was just like my mom to let Moe turn Dad’s glum send-off into a high school talent show, for that somehow to be the right move. Seeing Moe dance, I cried along with everyone else.
The youngest of the five of us kids, Moe’s full family nickname is Baby Moeham, a moniker given to her for pretty random reasons: Danny’s first words as a toddler, a request for “more ham,” came out as “moe ham.” In the nonsensical way of families, this ham-crazed utterance became Moe’s nickname when she arrived on the scene nearly a decade later. My mom called Moe a later-in-life, whoopsie baby. My siblings and I called her Monster Moe because calling her a little shit was not going to fly in Utah. We didn’t think of her as being on the autism spectrum until her mid-teens.
Long before Monster Moe was calling a pastor a slut, there were clues she wasn’t like other little girls. She licked the salt off all the pretzels in the pantry and put them back, chewed her hair, picked at her face, ate with her fingers, and slept with my parents, physically between them, until she was fifteen and Dad went on a BiPAP to help him breathe at night. Her most enduring trait, her obsession with dance, was probably the most neurotypical thing about her, and I’m partially responsible for it. One of Moe’s early introductions to what can loosely be defined as “choreography” came from my singing and acting troupe. And the funny thing is when Mom signed Moe up for Up With Kids, I was insulted. Moe wasn’t the actor in the family. I was.
I suspect it was different elsewhere, but in Utah in the nineties there was only one reason to introduce your kids to the performing arts, and that was that they couldn’t play sports. And they couldn’t play sports either because they were girls (Moe) or because witch hats and leg braces weren’t permitted on the field (me). “She just has some catching up to do,” Mom said. “And I think the class would be good for her. It’s been good for you, hasn’t it?”
A born storyteller with a regionally syndicated feature column called “Silver Linings,” my mom frequently wrote about her battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma for subscribers in Utah, Idaho and Washington. She also wrote about her amazing, resilient kids. Mom had the annoying habit of framing Moe’s life as the inspirational sequel to mine, the same basic story retread for a new era but with the stakes jacked up to the nth degree.
I’ve always walked with a limp, and I spent a portion of my boyhood and teens in casts, leg braces and physical therapy. But rather than saddle me with a diagnosis that might make me feel bad about myself and attract stigma, my parents simply told me I had “tight tendons” when I was growing up and left it at that, making it sound like I suffered from a physical ailment rather than a neurological one. I didn’t find out that my tight tendons were the result of mild cerebral palsy until I was nearly thirty and applying for private health insurance in 2014, a process that required tracking down my childhood medical records.
Looking back, I’d think of my first months knowing about my secret-to-me case of CP as an accelerated version of coming out as gay a decade earlier, exhilarating and exhausting. I tried to skip the part where I was angry about being lied to and go straight to self-enlightenment. I didn’t want to waste more time. Google taught me words like “spastic,” which refers to both tight muscles and a clumsy, awkward person. I’d never made the connection between my tight tendons and a slur kids spat at me in junior high: spaz. My bullies knew me better than I did.
For months, I jerked myself around town by my hair, pointing out the world’s unfairness: cracked sidewalks, uneven stairs. “That’s ableism!” I told my boyfriend. I looked up Geri Jewell, the first actor with CP to have a recurring role on a TV show, the 1980s sitcom “The Facts of Life.” I re-watched the episode of “Breaking Bad” where Walter teaches Walter Jr. to drive, this time with tears in my eyes: I too had experimented with using both feet, my left foot on the gas and my right foot on the brake. I thought about the ways I had stumbled through play auditions, school trips, first dates, hookups and job interviews, always circling the question of what was wrong with me. I thought about my sister Moe.
In her column, Mom presented my tight tendons like many proud Utah moms would have: in terms of my perseverance and heroism. It was no different for the bagger at our local grocery store with Down syndrome or the girl up the street with muscular dystrophy and an elevator in her house. If you wanted to know what great people we were, all you had to do was watch us try to ski or wear a pair of flipflops. Both in and out of print, on my birthday and not, I was the little boy that could. With my enthusiastic participation, “Silver Linings” chronicled my terrible junior high poetry and the many obstacles I’d overcome, how I defied a series of doctors who predicted a life of wheelchairs and incontinence. (Mom may have left out the CP in her columns but she always made sure to include the incontinence.)
“Instead of a child with a disability, he became a child with a quick wit and an incredible sense of humor,” she wrote, an aspiring actor who starred in school plays, raised his hand to give oral presentations, and wandered around the house practicing his broadcaster voice. “To call him a ham would be too limiting.” Mom concluded a column about my sixth-grade graduation as follows: “Greg doesn’t worry about walking with a limp. His concerns are that of any twelve year old: acne, a lousy score on a math quiz, hoping the girls notice him some day.”
The girls? There are limits to maternal intuition.
My mom’s columns about Moe were far more dramatic, and I read them with the grim determination Danny brought to the sports section the morning after the Jazz suffered a blowout: an immense sense of pride and loyalty mixed with a queasy feeling, my leg rigid beneath me. “She clung precariously to life following a heroic four-hour surgery,” Mom began one typically breathless installment of “Silver Linings.” “Doctors gave her a five-percent chance of survival. The fact that she was still alive was a miracle.”
I can see now that my mom was downplaying my tight tendons at the same time she was playing up Moe’s harrowing beginning. Both were well-meaning maternal sleights of hand. That’s not how I took it. If you’ll forgive one more basketball analogy, reading those columns was like studying a lopsided stat sheet. Moe filled hers out like a superstar. I was premature, but Moe was more premature, by a month. Moe had a lower birth weight than I did. She stayed in the NICU twice as long. I had my first leg surgeries at four. Moe went under the knife within days of being born: once to remove her ruptured appendix and another time to get rid of a piece of dead intestine.
“Soon Moe returned to the university hospital, where she had begun her arduous journey a month earlier,” Mom wrote. “They informed us she had suffered several hemorrhages in her brain, which could cause mental retardation or cerebral palsy. They’d administered a drug which could cause deafness, and cautioned she may be blind or severely sight-impaired. I refused to listen. It didn’t matter WHAT was wrong with our daughter; all that mattered was that she was alive.”
The fact that I can still look all this up on Xeroxed copies of my mom’s column more than twenty years later tells you what you need to know about my twisted kid logic: Moe had upstaged me. What were tight tendons compared to brain hemorrhages? What was learning to walk compared to valiantly fending off death? If I was special, Moe was the special-est. If I was my family’s first true ham, Moe was more of it. More ham.
As it turned out, my pipsqueak sister and I were only in a handful of Up With Kids productions together. Moe played Cinderella’s dirty laundry to my Prince Charming, a munchkin to my Wizard of Oz. For a few summer choral shows, on out-of-the-way amusement parks stages, Moe and I wore white jean shorts and raised our hands, along with our chins, slowly to the sky to try to spot our parents from behind the soloists.
And then I was done.
I surrendered my aspirations of a life on the stage at fifteen, around the time my brother said he could see the outline of my nuts in tights. Debate, poetry, looking up pictures of Ben Affleck on my family’s PC—there were so many other ways to pass the time, most of them from the comfort of a chair. Once I figured out I wasn’t going to be a professional actor, I worked for the newspaper and literary magazine. Casting my theatrical smile toward student government, I got elected president of my high school, all the while making sure my tight tendons were the last thing anyone noticed about me. I didn’t like walking in front of anyone, and I still don’t. Performing in front of them was out of the question. It was about my leg and it wasn’t. The costumes and makeup of the stage, the corny showtunes and stiffly delivered lines had come to seem childish to me, a kind of trap.
Singing and acting with Up With Kids didn’t end up being Moe’s jam either, but she fell in love with dance with a ferocity she normally reserved for anything pink. By the time she was in junior high, Moe didn’t talk about anything else, usually an inch from your face as spit bubbles gathered at the corners of her mouth. Ballet, modern, tap, hip-hop—Moe took all kinds of classes, the only rule being that these classes had to be taught at dance studios across town from each other, one right after the other, from about three o’clock in the afternoon to eight or nine at night. Bonus points if my sister Tiffany or I had to drive her.
My dad was the only one of us who could get her to shut up about it or stop moving, and that was by telling her he had danced for the New York City Ballet. I’m not sure how this father-daughter gag started—Moe doubtful but not entirely disbelieving, my Dad playfully insistent, bending his knees, circling his arms above him—only that they revisited it every time they talked to each other for years, both with big grins on their faces and mischief in their eyes. The rest of us didn’t find it all that funny. We were danced out.
In practical terms, Moe’s love of dance meant one thing: “The Nutcracker.” She was in a local ballet studio’s version of the Christmas staple every year, playing every off-brand part, every part that wasn’t Clara or The Sugar Plum Fairy: a Rag Doll, a Poinsettia, an Icicle, a Hurricane. She played a Toy Soldier, a Piece of Marzipan, an Elf. I remember one year she auditioned for “The Nutcracker” at Ballet West, a professional dance company in downtown Salt Lake, and made the first Party Girl cut but not the second. She came home in tears that turned to honking laughter when she told us how an instructor, a local dance legend in her eighties, had done a cartwheel into the splits for the nervous auditionees. “That’s one way to pass the time,” my dad said. “I cartwheeled into the splits at least twice a day when I danced for the New York City Ballet.”
“I’m going to cartwheel into the splits three times a day when I dance for the New York City Ballet,” Moe replied, and bust out laughing.
That first Christmas without Dad, Moe’s dance teacher, the same lady who had sat with her in the pews at the funeral, cast Moe as a pig in her production of “The Nutcracker” and tried to cut Moe from the show entirely for missing too many rehearsals. Moe hadn’t wanted to miss the rehearsals, of course. We’d had to ground her from dance the week of my dad’s death, practically strap her to his commode, a punishment she accepted only because she was scared to drive herself. Mom saved Moe’s pig from metaphysical slaughter by stopping by the studio and chewing the dance teacher out as Moe and I sang Christmas carols in the car. As was so often the case in my family, pain turned into amusement, a funny story: Moe played a pig. She had a part outside the pig pen, too, this one in the Stahlbaum’s living room after the party in Act One. The guests had departed, Mama and Papa had retired to bed, and Clara was passed out on the couch, cradling her broken nutcracker. With the humans away, the mice came out to play. Baby mice, that is, tumbling out from under the Christmas tree, then jumping up and saying, “Shhh!”
The dance was cute and, for once, Moe wasn’t stashed in the back corner, leaping nearly offstage. The tallest kid up there by a foot, my sister wasn’t hard to spot. Gangly as all get-out, she towered over the other dancers in her mouse ears, whiskers painted on her cheeks. These other dancers were younger than Moe, I quickly realized, much younger. Moe—an old-for-her-grade sophomore in high school—was in a number with first- and second-graders.
Thinking back on this time, I’m reminded of how impatient I was to move on with my life. Dad had died three months earlier. It felt like three years. Now I was responsible for my mom and Moe. It didn’t help that Moe occasionally reverted to her toddler Monster self. Like every other human being, her existence was more than quirky asides. There was a bratty slant to her spectrum. As long as she could stick to her routine of school and dance she was easy to be around. But any deviation could lead to a tailspin. If she wasn’t feeling well and had to go to the doctor you could expect a days-long tantrum. If she opened a Christmas card and had to touch money, a phobia of hers, she’d shriek and run upstairs for a shower.
During this rocky time, there was no bigger deviation from the routine than my mom’s relationship with Claire. Claire, a reconstructive plastic surgeon, had scraped a series of basal cell carcinomas off the top of my mom’s head when I was in high school, and the two had stayed in touch after Claire moved home to the Midwest. In the wake of my dad’s death, my mom sent Claire a letter pleading for help. A silver-haired angel wearing a Human Rights Campaign baseball cap and a fanny pack, Claire didn’t show up as much as she materialized one weekend and got to work weaning my suicidal, sick mom off the fentanyl patches she was using to manage her grief and her lymphoma-related bone pain.
One long weekend led to another, and soon the two were spending a lot of time together. Moe picked up on the intimacy and urgency of Mom and Claire’s unlikely reconnection and saw it not as a sapphic deus ex machina but as a threat. This wasn’t “Touched by an Angel.” It was “Touched by a Lesbian.” Claire wasn’t saving my mom’s life; she was taking Mom away from us. In addition to dance, Moe developed a new obsession: hating Claire. She found Claire revolting, disgusting, a total bitch, an asshole, an animal, a pig. “She’s a lesbian!” Moe would moan, half smiling and half totally serious, trying to get under my mom’s skin. “It’s disgusting. She’s trying to turn Mom into a lesbian.”
“But Chelsea, I’m gay,” I’d tell her. “It’s the same thing.”
“Two guys is fine but two girls is disgusting.”
When Claire visited Utah, she would sleep on my dad’s side of the bed, which was nearest the door just in case there was a break in, not from a rapist but from Moe, who could usually be seen outside Mom’s bedroom door on her back. At first, you’d think she was stretching, maybe pretending to do the backstroke. Only when you got closer would you see she was trying to kick down the door with her powerful dancer legs.
“What? Claire’s a bitch,” Moe would say. “They’re naked in there. It’s gross.”
It would always seem like Moe was about to laugh, like this acting out was an elaborate prank. I imagined her jumping up from the floor, becoming a completely different person. “I’m messing with you, dude,” she’d say. “I’m just happy Mom is alive and not slowly committing suicide with opioids in patch form. And if she’s gay now, a few months after Dad’s tragic death? Great. He would want her to find peace and companionship.”
It never happened.
Mom’s door had a splinter running down the middle from Moe trying to beat it down.
One time Mom was packing for a trip to visit Claire and Moe got so violent I had to drag her down the stairs by her ankles and lock her outside until she calmed down, though more often I bear-hugged her and told her to relax and breathe, that everything would be all right, as she tried to punch and bite me, my leg shaking like a scared dog.
What Moe needed was a father figure. Sadly, I made a terrible one. Rather than finding serenity in my dad’s example, I felt less sure of my own future than ever. I was twenty-four and working at a community newspaper up the canyon in Park City. When Dad was my age, he was just four years away from the midway point of his life, twenty-eight, and he didn’t waste it driving his little sister to dance and sitting through a ballet school’s production of “The Nutcracker.” I was burned out from being a caregiver and worried, as the dutiful gay son, that I’d be the one stuck caring for Mom and Moe. I wanted out of Little Girl Land at the very moment my sister needed it the most. Every show, it was the same guilt trip. “You have to come see Moe dance,” Mom would beg. “She has no one else. We’re it.”
So there I sat on a December night in a theater in downtown Salt Lake as baby mice invaded the Stahlbaum’s living room, which was now going blurry. I held my breath.
“Are you crying?” Mom asked. The flowers she had heaped on her lap to give Moe after the show rustled in their cellophane and tissue paper. I wiped my eyes and let out a mouse-like squeak. Mom said, “Are you crying because Moe is doing such a great job and it’s remarkable to see her dance?” A moment later she revised her hypothesis, her voice more serious. “Are you crying because Moe is a teenager and she’s rolling around the stage with six-year-olds?”
“She’s an honors student,” I gasped. “Why is she up there with little kids?”
It was only later that I’d read that girls have historically been far less likely than their male counterparts to be diagnosed with what is now called autism spectrum disorder. If this sounds like too tidy an explanation, so was my family’s explanation that Moe was simply immature because she was premature.
Around the time my dad had been diagnosed with ALS, an aunt of ours had floated the possibility that Moe had Asperger’s syndrome, but things had escalated quickly with my dad and my mom, a perennial cancer patient, had started another round of chemo. Most of our energy went into keeping our parents alive and getting Moe to her three dance classes a night. I remembered our cranky non-Mormon neighbor, Ralph, visiting our dad one day near the end of Dad’s life and his being bewildered that Moe was not in special ed. “You’re telling me that kid is in normal school?” Ralph asked, watching my sister clap and high-kick next to my dad’s respirator. “Straight A’s,” I said, pissed at him for being so rude. I’d tried to think of age as just a number for Moe, to not compare her to other kids. I didn’t think I did until I saw her doing forward rolls and giving her all with baby mice in “The Nutcracker.”
I tried to talk to my mom and Moe about seeking help. It bugged me that my little sister felt the need to slick her hair into a headache-inducing bun, stick contacts in her eyes, and put on a pound of makeup to do what she loved. It had taken me years to talk about my tight tendons without limping out of the room in tears. I didn’t want Moe to follow in my plodding footsteps, such as they were. I wanted her to see a counselor and an occupational therapist, like the kind Dad had been assigned when his hands had stopped working. We could buy Moe Pee-wee Herman-sized forks and grippers for her keys, get her a pair of super cool nerd glasses and extra time on tests. “If nothing else, it’ll make for a killer college essay,” I tried.
Why I chose to undertake this conversation in the car in a crowded mall parking lot in December I can’t remember. Moe got a mad glint in her eyes and I knew we were headed for trouble. “Fuck you, Greg, you have social anxiety,” she said, her voice full of hurt. “You need therapy.” It was the meanest thing she could think to say, and accurate.
After trying to channel my mellow Dad, I got frustrated and started channeling myself: a bitter, exhausted brother. I was tired of Moe beating Mom up, hearing screams and sobs anytime I walked through the door. “We just need to find out what the fuck is wrong with you, Moe, and deal with it,” I snapped. “You’re not a little girl anymore.”
I pointed out that Moe had been doing jumping jacks in the kitchen at three that morning while nearly burning down the house making fudge. Mom countered that I’d only noticed the jumping jacks because I was smoking pot with my friends in the basement directly beneath the kitchen. “I don’t need to hear about how Moe must feel trapped in her body, Greg,” Mom said. “We don’t need you to fix us. We just need you to love us.” “Diagnosis” was just another word for label to my mom. Moe was better off without one.
The Utah was strong in Mom.
“It’s like Moe still believes in Santa Claus and we all have to play along,” I grumbled to Danny over drinks in the basement that night.
The thing was, I knew where Moe was coming from. There was still an Up With Kids child star inside me, one who had been deranged by thwarted ambition and talentlessness and brought back to sputtering life by the drag queens I’d seen perform in Boystown in college. I resolved to stop trying to be a sucky Dad replacement and decided to be a drag queen. Resolved is probably too strong a word. Without even realizing I was doing it, I found myself responding to Moe’s obsessive dance talk by giving it right back to her, not with acrimony or anger but with over-the-top enthusiasm, razzing her in a keyed-up, sibilant Utah-drama-coach of a voice that made us both laugh in spite of ourselves.
Say Moe shattered a glass on the kitchen floor and leapt right over it. Instead of yelling at her in my mean dad voice, I’d squeal in a relentlessly chipper falsetto that she was doing absolutely awesome awesome AWESOME leaping and holding her leg over her head but if she could unwrap her tongue from her front teeth and sweep the dangerous pool of shards she’d created into a dustpan that would be super-duper, baby cakes! It was either camp it up or slap her across the face.
Your average high schooler would be horrified at her gay brother offering bromides about shooting for the stars, saying she was awesome, calling her a big dill. Moe loved it. I did too, this special shared language. It meant: I see you. It meant: let’s not take this all too seriously.
Once I laid off Moe, a wonderful thing happened. We became each other’s biggest fans. We couldn’t walk by one another in the kitchen without bursting into song or attempting a round of “Down by the Banks of the Hanky Panky.” Our interactions turned into dance routines and clapping choirs. Moe didn’t want me to fix her. She just wanted me to perform with her.
Asperger’s or not, I marveled at Moe’s determination to be a great ballerina, the way she anticipated going on pointe the way most teenagers anticipated getting fake IDs. She dreamed of the barre the way I dreamed of there being a good gay bar in Salt Lake. Moe became her own taskmaster, shouting incoherent French phrases in the kitchen. “Posse into relevé!” you’d hear her cry as she slapped her tiny, scarred abs, and then she’d count to four, six or eight. Moe even danced when she watched TV, spinning her glitter-speckled finger to show the rest of her body what to do. “Come on, Moe, focus,” she’d say. “Get your ass in gear.”
Even if my little sister was neuroatypical, I figured we were off the hook “Nutcracker”-wise once she was in college at the University of Utah, living in the honors dorm. She had auditioned to be a dance major—first in ballet and then in modern—and been rejected from both programs. She settled on studying psychology and spent her days volunteering in labs and participating in experiments. Too old for most children’s dance studios in town, Moe found a Chilean danseur who was teaching ballet out of an office building not far from her dorm. His name was Cristóbal but everyone in Utah said it like a first and last name, Chris Stobel.
My mom bought Moe a used Subaru and told her that if she wanted to go to dance, she’d have to start driving herself. My sister put the dents and speeding tickets I’d racked up driving my dad’s old Lexus to shame. Not long into Moe’s freshman year, a cop pulled her over for driving without her headlights on at night. Moe couldn’t figure out how to roll down her window so she went ahead and opened the driver’s side door to talk to him. The officer shined a light in her face and asked if she had come from a party. Had she been drinking or smoking reefer? Did she know what reefer was?
Moe’s eyes were red from wearing contacts all day, though she was in tights and a leotard, so she had a plausible case to make for the truth, which was that she was just coming from one of Cristóbal’s dance classes. The officer breathalyzed her, made her stand on one foot, walk a straight line, touch her nose. Moe passed every part of the sobriety test like it was a dance move she’d done a millions times. The officer asked, with new worry in his voice, if she was all right in the head. Who knows what she told him, but the cop showed her how to turn on her headlights and let her off with a warning. Then he followed her all the way to her dorm. “That fucker!” she told me later, a smile on her face. “Why was he following me?”
Danny and I, dickhead brothers that we were, called Moe Mrs. Magoo for her misadventures behind the wheel. Moe was always wandering cheerfully into trouble and finding her way out of it. It was like if you took a straight-A psych major and gave her a weed brownie every day of her life. “Just think of her as being too high to function right now,” a friend advised, passing me a bowl in the backyard. “Sort of like you are.”
Cristóbal’s “Nutcracker”s were entertaining because his boyfriend, a local drag queen, played Mother Ginger. Meanwhile, Cristóbal partnered with the Snow Queen—a role taken on by a former star student home for the holidays—for one of the ballet’s climactic numbers. He’d cram his shapely, middle-aged body into white tights and squash his sizable manhood under a dance belt the size and ruffled texture of a greasy paper plate.
“See, that’s why I quit acting,” I’d stage-whisper to Tiffany.
One of Moe’s arms didn’t extend all the way, so she often performed in elbow-length gloves and regularly carried a prop—a flute, a fan, a mask on a stick, a rifle—or stuck both hands into a muff. I’d sit in the dark, the fattest, gayest novel I could find on my lap, and imagine newspaper headlines like “How My Little Sister Overcame Osteoporosis to Tumble out of Mother Ginger’s Dress the Eighty-Ninth Time.” I could picture Moe a very old woman, her ballet bun gone silver, that breast-hiding slouch from her teens now the result of aging. She’d hop around the stage from one knee-replacement to the other playing a stale piece of marzipan. At ninety, she’d still be working on her turnout.
When smartphones became a thing, Tiffany and I dreamed up a million-dollar idea called the Nutcracker App. It would track your Candy Cane or Reindeer, your Arabian or Chinese dancer, and send you an alert when it was getting close to her turn on stage, thereby reducing Tchaikovsky’s four-hour wintry mix into a few manageable minutes.
It was hard to believe we used to have Christmases like Clara’s—too many presents, a tree so tall it had to be shaved down to make room for an angel. We’d done the Twelve Days of Christmas, advent calendars, midnight Mass, spiked eggnog, Christmas cards and sleigh rides. We’d had a dad to put up twinkling Christmas lights. Now all we had was “The Nutcracker.”
My mom often said that Moe wasn’t challenged, she was exceptional. Watching her dance, I had to fight the urge to yank her off stage. I didn’t want my sister to be exceptionalin that way. I didn’t want her to spend her life surrounded by bitches, smelling like feet, lost in another, prettier girl’s dream, the screwball comedian in the background. I wanted her to sneak out the backstage door. It’s one thing to stick around year after year when you’re the star. The prima ballerina. It’s another, I figured, if you were Moe. If you were Moe, you did it for the joy. That’s the part that concerned me. Dance like no one is watching, read one of the stenciled canvases in her room. Moe really did. The way I saw it, people like my sister and me had one major role in life, and that was to make sure no one was watching. Our role was to disappear.
Cristóbal took a real interest in Moe and trained her so well she started auditioning for summer dance programs called intensives. Her dance bag was always soaked because she couldn’t screw the cap on a bottle of water. She also struggled with putting a lid on the superglue she used to reinforce her pointe shoes and fused them to the floor during one audition.
Slip-ups didn’t derail Moe’s dreams. She kept getting into these dance intensives, and she kept going to them. Mom would stay in a hotel near Moe’s dorm, on hand to help with hair and makeup, and they would spend summers in Boston, Orlando and Midtown Manhattan.
I’d kept my newspaper job in Park City for a year after my dad died, then bounced from Los Angeles to Austin to get an MFA. My aim of becoming a professional creative writer was about as practical as Moe wanting to dance for the New York City Ballet, but I didn’t know that yet. I kept writing; Moe moved home from her dorm and kept dancing. I still fielded my mom’s upset phone calls, Moe’s rages reported like minor earthquakes, but they were more manageable now that I wasn’t in the thick of them myself.
Our big family house in Salt Lake was lonely for my mom and sister with just the two of them living there—the two of them, our golden retrievers, and an ancient cat named Brighton who was so good at keeping to herself she got trapped in our pool shed for two weeks without anyone noticing. My brother called our house a museum of the nineties. A menagerie was more like it, once the dog shit started piling up. The gutters were filled with twigs and leaves and the furniture was covered in dog hair. “I’m worried that I’ll get sick and Moe will be stuck caring for me,” Mom said. “And then I’ll die and she’ll have no life.”
Moe got her chance at a life the spring of her junior year of college: she auditioned for the trainee program at the Joffrey School of Ballet in New York. I imagined a gang of anorexic, cigarette-smoking youngsters who had aged out of behavioral bootcamps or escaped from conversion therapy. I suspected such a school was well out of Moe’s reach. She was twenty-two and still didn’t eat with a fork. I kept my phone nearby that afternoon, ready to console her when the inevitable rejection came. Hours after the audition, she called me sobbing and laughing from the emergency room, just like in the olden days when she used to audition for Ballet West. She had broken her thumb in the middle of the tryout. “What a fucking disaster,” she said.
To make matters worse, Moe twisted her ankle during an adult dance class a few days later. Not long after that she called again. “What bone did you break today?” I asked. None, she said. She had been accepted into Joffrey’s trainee program. Mom and Moe were moving to New York. She could finish her last year of college at the U by taking her remaining credits online. “Shouldn’t you at least get off your crutches first?” I asked.
There was still the house and the dogs to think about, but rather than let that stop them, my mom started making calls. Her water aerobics instructor’s kid would check on Berkeley and Mazie every morning and night and let them out to go to the bathroom, and Tiffany, who still lived in Salt Lake, would come over and take them for walks every now and again. “Mom, that can’t be your solution,” I said. “Berkeley and Mazie are members of our family. Leaving them alone for basically the entire day is just not going to work.”
“It is going to work,” my mom said, “because Moe and I can’t stay in this house living like this for one more second. If you want the dogs so bad, come and get them.”
“Well, I’m sure they’ll be fine,” I said.
By that August, Moe had moved into a dorm in Brooklyn Heights and my mom had taken up residence in the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott a few blocks away, where she would stay, off and on, for the next two years. She rode the subway into Manhattan with Moe no fewer than twenty times before she let her no-sense-of-direction daughter do it alone, and even then Moe wasn’t really alone because my mom followed her, jumping out of the bushes. “Hey ding-ding,” she’d shout, “you’re going the wrong way.”
I was terrified for Moe at first. We have similar brains. I may know to roll down the window if a cop pulls me over rather than opening the driver’s side door, but I also know what it’s like to love your mind and not trust it. A break in routine can feel catastrophic or lead instantly to panic for me, too. Simple directions can be baffling. I have to take pictures of where I park to find my car, and it’s bright yellow. Street addresses, subway signs—they may as well be written in math. It seemed cruel to drop Moe in the middle of New York and tell her to find her way. “Here’s the deal, Moeham,” Mom would say whenever I was around. “Greg and your other siblings think we’re too stupid and weird to live in a big city. They don’t think we can do this. We have to prove them wrong.”
“We will,” Moe would reply, dancing around.
I visited them for the first time in the fall of 2013. Let’s just say I was impressed. While I wistfully sang the Liza Minelli song about vagabond shoes longing to stray, Moe led me on the subway to her dance studio in the West Village and to her favorite smoothie shop. Her goofy style of sundresses and galoshes, headbands and tights, big pink purses and big pink sunglasses would have gotten her sent to a psych ward back in Salt Lake, but in New York her hodge-podge fashion was unremarkable. Mom was always telling us that before she died, she needed to know that Moe could stand up for herself. If a teacher stuck Moe in the back of a class or, worse, didn’t offer her any corrections at all, Mom encouraged my timid-in-public sister to “reach down deep, deep within yourself and find your inner bitch.”
This always made Moe laugh. New York was having the opposite effect on her. Though she couldn’t resist referring to Claire as a bitch a couple times in passing, I could tell her heart wasn’t in it: Moe had a huge smile, and not one rage, during my stay.
My mom embraced the freedom of living in a big city, too, and talked openly about being in a relationship with a woman. She traded in her Mormon-friendly Coldwater Creek blazers and capris for an Adidas windbreaker, black leggings and sparkly gold platform boots. The lady at the Marriott concierge desk liked Mom so much that when Mom complained about her thinning hair, the result of aging and epic doses of chemo over the years, the lady took her to her favorite wig shop in Harlem. “It’s warmer than a hat!” Mom said, pulling her bangs down on the subway when I signaled that they were riding a little high and you could see the dark netting underneath.
It was only October and Moe was already doing eight hours of “Nutcracker” rehearsals a day. She passed on stories about how her Russian-born instructor, Era, had been in a coma for a year following a serious car accident, how she’d danced for the Bolshoi and, even in her fifties with the accident and all her injuries, she could lunge and spin around the room. “But can she do a cartwheel into splits?” I asked. Moe started meeting up with a lanky boy in her dorm who helped her with makeup, taught her to twerk and called her sis. She started saying yass queen and werk. Her inner bitch must have been proud. Mine was. Moe had made her first gay friend.
Moe’s roommate, Anna, was another story. Anna was from Luxembourg. She would choke down her antipsychotics and then drink two cases of water in an hour, jump on her bed in her character shoes and throw plates and mugs at the wall. “Is everything OK over there?” Moe would ask in the groggy, shy voice she used with non-family members, and from her side of the room Anna would turn to her and start chanting like a Bulgarian witch. (For some reason whenever Moe told me this part of the story, the chants were Bulgarian as opposed to Luxembourgian.)
Moe went to get help one night when Anna was having a breakdown and Anna ran into the hall and screamed after her, “She’s calling the cops on me!” like they were doing a scene together. A minute later, Moe came back with a security guard from the front desk. Anna was in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, the room a disaster around her. “Everything’s fine in here!”
“No one believes me,” Moe complained. “They think Anna’s just homesick.”
Anna would leave out plates of spoiled meat on her desk and then tell Moe she smelled. She wouldn’t let Moe turn on the lights or throw out the trash. The consensus was that all this wasn’t such a bad thing. “Your roommate is way weirder than you are,” Mom said. “Enjoy being the normal one for once.”
Then Anna crossed the line by posting a cartoon of her holding a bloody knife to Moe’s throat. She even tagged Moe in it on Facebook. “We don’t do things like that in this country,” Moe told her, and Anna started chanting like a witch.
Near the conclusion of my New York visit, Mom and I came to Moe’s dorm to have a little chat with Anna. Mom liked to drag me to Moe’s dance studios and places of employment because she wanted people to see that Moe had a family, that she wasn’t a squirrely orphan. “You’re hot!” Mom would tell me. “You make Moe look cool.” I wondered if I didn’t just make all of us look weirder, a man in his late twenties wearing his dad’s vintage leather jacket, all cuffed sleeves and Frappuccino stains, talking like a repressed drag queen, referring to his white sister as “Moesha.” Did they see me arguing with my wig-wearing mom on the street and, when I’d lost the argument, pasting on a smile and limping inside to say hello?
My mom tried to take a reasonable tone with Anna at first, like she does before going ballistic. “You girls have some things to work out,” she said. “So what can we do to make things better?” Anna had a round, babyish face and full lips. She wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. She just seemed out of it. She fake-coughed a lot and rocked on her bed, hardly saying anything. We left things unresolved, though weeks later Anna went berserk at a rehearsal, threw a dance bag at Era’s head, and was finally kicked out of the program and sent home. Moe celebrated surviving her first big-city roommate by almost lighting the communal kitchen on fire making pizza, but survive she had, with tales to share with her fellow dancers.
More of a New Yorker every day, my little sister developed a funny bowlegged walk. She still goobered her phone and computer to death every six months; lost her credit card; broke her glasses; lit the microwave on fire; fainted; got kicked in the face, an injury that required lip stitches; sliced her thumb with a butter knife; went to sleep with her dorm door wide open and her purse in the hall; and burned through a year’s supply of contacts in a month. But aside from these minor hiccups, anyone could see that New York was the place for Moe. She was a different person there, more outgoing, no longer scared to leave the house because of her awful driving. She even lost her virginity courtesy of a sleazy Russian guy who lived down the hall from her. He was majoring in computer programming at NYU and went by the name Emile Neo.
“What’s his real name?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Moe asked.
A Russian dude with a fake name cribbed either from a Eurotrash DJ or The Matrix wasn’t the person I would have chosen to take my little sister’s virginity, but really, who would have been? And it’s not like Moe was complaining—not until she found out Emile Neo had a long-distance girlfriend and a son. Rather than get discouraged, Moe joined a dating app and started seeing guys more like her.
“Being here isn’t about dance,” Mom said. “It’s about life.”
“No, it’s about dance,” Moe said, clutching me. “Greg and I are going to be on Broadway. Can’t you just see us under the lights?”
I told Moe I’d write her one-woman show if she’d star in it.
Anything but “The Nutcracker.”
“The Nut Cracker.” Moe barked out a laugh and poked me in the stomach. “Get it?”
“Nutcracker” rehearsals stretched to twelve hours a day in November, including weekends, and sometimes Moe didn’t get back to her dorm until two in the morning. The grind of the dance life took a toll on her. She was always nursing a sore neck, a cough, a stomachache or a sprained ankle, and Mom was having her doctors back home call in antibiotics. “I’m tired of the fucking ‘Nutcracker,’” Moe would moan.
“Not as tired as we are,” I’d tell her.
Moe played a Rat and a Parent in the party scene that first year. Not wanting to make another dress just for Moe, who was smaller than the Parents in other casts, the costume lady pinned her into a curtain of fabric. Moe’s first performance, with my mom and Tiffany in the audience, the curtain fell off, leaving her to prance around in her tights and leotard. After the show, a girl from the audience asked for Moe’s autograph. “I don’t know why,” Moe told me when I called. “It’s not like I was Clara.”
“That Clara is a skank,” Mom said in the background. “She just wishes her costume fell off.”
For her birthday in March, Moe bought herself a photoshoot with my mom’s credit card. Pictures popped up on my phone of my little sister leaping into the bike lane on the Brooklyn Bridge and going on pointe in front of subway grates and twirling through Central Park. In one shot, Moe pirouetted on the sidewalk with a guy who was experiencing both homelessness and the spirit of dance, his hands steepled over his head.
Moe completed her online courses that spring and flew home to walk at the University of Utah’s commencement. For pictures after the ceremony, she put on her beaten-up pointe shoes and posed with her diploma, cap and gown. She had graduated summa cum laude with a degree in psychology, a major she’d chosen for the sole purpose of telling us that Asperger’s didn’t exist anymore as a diagnosis. She beamed when she said this, like Asperger’s was a deadly form of cancer she’d beaten.
In August, my mom sold the big house in Salt Lake to our Mormon neighbors, a clan commonly known in my potty-mouthed family as “the whores up the street.” They’d earned this label not because they were Mormons or sex workers but because their daughter had bullied Moe when they were girls. Mom took their money and rented a two-bedroom apartment closer to the hospital where she gets chemo and IVIG, planning to split her time between Salt Lake and New York. She set up Moe’s room as it had been at the house, everything pink and covered with dance trophies and inspirational sayings. Stubborn as ever, Moe didn’t come back for any of it. At first, she said she didn’t have a home, and then she revised her statement to something truer: “New York is my home now.”
Before we knew it, it was “Nutcracker” season again: August. I visited New York the week before Christmas so I could see Moe dance. She was supposed to be a Snowflake, but they cut her after the last dress rehearsal. Fortunately, Moe had two other parts: a Caroler and a Russian. Minus the psycho roommate, rehearsals were just as intense her second year at Joffrey as they had been her first. Sometimes, they ran the show five full times a day. Mom and I walked around Rockefeller Plaza and went to “Aladdin”on Broadway. Moe remained stuck in the land of sugar plums and snow. She didn’t have any costume malfunctions that year, just walking pneumonia. Being ill didn’t stop her, though by her fourth and final show, Moe was as exhausted by the whole enterprise as we were.
Mom and I skipped Act One entirely that day in favor of to-go salads at Dean & Deluca and then we wandered back to the theater. There was a peaceful protest in Washington Square Park following the acquittal of the cop who killed Eric Garner and, because of the congestion, we had to hustle to made it back to the theater in time for Moe’s dance.
We were still unwinding our scarves and settling into our seats when the house lights dimmed and the familiar jump of Tchaikovsky’s strings told us Moe would soon come flying in from the wings in her peasant blouse and black skirt. She looked wan under her makeup, her Cheshire grin painted on with effort. The choreography was rapid, every half-second a new lunge, squat or kick. I felt my leg go stiff under me, my foot cramp in my tennis shoe.
The normies onstage, not to mention their families in the audience, would have no idea what it had taken Moe to make it to her seventeenth “Nutcracker.” No idea, no interest. They’d only remember her if her costume fell off, if she leapt so high she smacked her head into a light. She’d be the little squirt in the back of a hundred cast selfies, the one untagged girl with the giant red-lipped smile. Some things Moe would never know, either, like how I danced with her from my seat every time she was up there, my bad leg hanging on her every plié. Moe, who looked up to me even when I didn’t deserve it.
You see “The Nutcracker” enough times and your mind starts to wander. You start imagining things turning out different. A dad leaps from his hospital bed and cartwheels into the splits. A star sister with a smile as big as her heart never gets cut from a dance or put in the back or told to play a pig. A brother with a limp keeps acting anyway, even though you can definitely see his nuts in tights. You sit there long enough and it’s like you become the dream. All seventeen “Nutcrackers” play at once, a show belonging not to Balanchine but entirely to Moe: Moe the Icicle, Moe the Poinsettia, the Hurricane, the Rag Doll, the Rat, the Toy Soldier, and finally the Bolshevik. I’d been so worried my little sister would never grow up I’d failed to see that she had. Her life wasn’t a sequel to mine. It was a ballet. Here she was, dancing in New York just like her dad.
We heaped flowers on her in the lobby after the show. She wheezed out a thank you and I picked her up, straining every muscle in my body, and swung her around. The wheeze turned to honking laughter as Mom took pictures of us in front of a giant wreath. “You did awesome, babe,” I said, ever the deranged drama coach.
The pneumonia “Nutcracker” turned out to be Moe’s last. That spring, she was accepted into a master’s program in early childhood development at Columbia’s Teachers College. Mom grudgingly decamped from the Marriott in Brooklyn to a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. For the first winter in a long time, Moe was not trapped in a snow globe of a ballet but in a preschool, student-teaching special needs kids in Harlem. We spent that Christmas as a family in New York. Moe decorated the tree with dry Swiffer pads instead of ornaments and we didn’t go to a single “Nutcracker.” Thank God.