Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (4 page)

As a professional, you have to endure a tremendous amount of criticism and judgment leading up to a performance. You can barely take a step in rehearsal before the dance mistress will clap, stop you, and give you a critique.

But during the actual performance, when the music swells, and the crowd hushes, it’s all up to you—how high you leap, when you breathe. There’s no more time to worry or try to make it better. It either works or it doesn’t. You land with grace or you stumble and fall. That absoluteness, that finality, is freedom. And the stage was the one place where I felt it.

I knew all that even as a child. Only then, the stage wasn’t buffering me from the ballet mistress or dance critics. Instead, it allowed me to forget my worries about not fitting in, my embarrassment about Mommy’s being married so many times, the ache I felt on the days when I couldn’t see Harold.

When I was in the sixth grade, I decided that I would choreograph a dance for my two best friends, Danielle and Reina, and me to perform in the annual Point Fermin Elementary School talent show. Danielle, part Mexican American and part white, with long dark brown hair, towered over our troika. Reina, a mixture of Mexican American and Asian ancestry, was tiny and brown, like me. We three were inseparable. I would go over to Danielle’s house every afternoon after school, and we’d hang out, doing our homework and dancing to New Edition and Boyz II Men. We were sisters, Danielle and Reina and me.

But I didn’t let my affection get in the way of cracking the whip hard during the mandatory rehearsals that I called leading up to the show. We would line up in Danielle’s living room, me in front, and practice our routine. Unfortunately, Danielle and Reina lacked my passion, and on the Friday night when we finally hit the talent show stage, their less-than-enthusiastic preparation was glaringly revealed in the auditorium’s hazy white lights.

As I lip-synched to Mariah Carey’s “I’ve Been Thinking About You,” Reina and Danielle danced awkwardly behind me, mixing up their steps. Disappointment doesn’t begin to describe how I felt. But I didn’t doubt the excellence of my own performance for a moment. Out there, in front of the crowd, under the pinpoint of my elementary school’s spotlight, I felt fierce.

The next time I performed like that, it was the following
school year, and I was the new kid at Dana Middle School, trying to follow Erica’s lead and win a place on the school’s drill team.

Dana’s drill team was legendary. It swept the competitions held throughout the state, and my sister Erica had been one of its stars. She had always been my idol: beautiful, popular, and never seeming to suffer even for a moment the self-doubt that often paralyzed me. I wanted to be just like her. And because the trepidation that dogged every other part of my life seemed to disappear when it came to the thought of performing, I wasn’t aiming just to be part of the team: I wanted to be captain.

Trying out for captain meant I needed to perform two routines: one that all prospective members of the drill team would have to dance, and an individual routine that I would create and perform on my own. Erica agreed to help me with the choreography but warned that the drill team would likely not be the same storied group it had been when she was part of it. The coach who had guided it to so many wins had left the school at the end of the previous school year and a recently hired history teacher, Elizabeth Cantine, was taking her place.

I still wanted to try out. Our family loved George Michael, post-Wham, and we decided I would dance to “I Want Your Sex.” Erica and I practiced every day after school.

But Erica wasn’t happy with my performance. It seems that I wasn’t properly carrying out her creative vision. Eventually, she erupted in frustration.

“You can’t remember anything!” she screamed one afternoon, before she stormed out of the living room, leaving me in tears. It was a curious critique, given that, years later,
choreographers would specifically seek to work with me because of my gift of recalling and mimicking their steps instinctively. But that day, if it had been up to Erica, I wouldn’t have been cast in a low-budget music video, let alone a performance of
Le Corsaire.

I begged her to come back and help, but Erica refused, so I finished working out the routine on my own. Two days later, I showed up for tryouts in the school gym. It was my first audition—the first of what would become a lifetime of proving my skills.

I felt a little intimidated standing before the judging table. Behind it were three school-yard prima donnas who seemed to relish the chance to dish out a bit of what they’d gotten the year before when they’d been the nervous neophytes trying to grab spots on the team. Next to them sat the new coach, Elizabeth. She was birdlike and tiny, like me, with brown curls framing her calm gaze, and her features were as delicate as bone china.

I danced with the dozens of other girls trying out for the team. Then it was time for my solo.

I stood straight, eyes to the ground, hands folded, one knee poked out, waiting for the tape to start.

“
Baaaaby,
” George Michael shouted, and I was off. I stomped, spun, and gyrated my hips for the next three minutes, ending the routine by sliding into a split, my arm stretched out in front of me, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Silence.

“Thank you,” an auburn-haired drill-team diva said curtly, making notes on a yellow legal pad.

But I caught Elizabeth smiling.

Back home that evening, I paced around the living room,
butterflies skittering in my stomach, waiting to find out if I’d been chosen. The phone rang.

Not only had I made the team, I’d been named captain.

Now my days had a new ripple. Drill-team practice was during my sixth-period PE class, which was a good thing because my school day was packed. I was sixth-grade treasurer and also a commodore, Dana Middle School’s fancy name for a hall monitor.

The thirty of us girls who made up the drill squad would gather in a room adjacent to our school gym. We’d wear our gym clothes to practice but put on our school colors for the games, teeny yellow skirts with blue-and-white trim that we made even shorter by rolling them up. We had yellow V-neck tops with thick straps, and white rubber-soled slip-on shoes that resembled Keds. My shirt had
CAPTAIN MISTY
in the corner, embroidered in white thread.

Being drill-team captain made me automatically popular, but I didn’t really feel I fit in with the others on the team. Some of the girls were older than me since my September birthday meant I was among the youngest in my grade. And I was a nerd, still playing with Barbies and having nightmares about showing up for Spanish class unprepared for my oral exam because I’d somehow forgotten that it was finals week.

My drill teammates, on the other hand, were what Mommy called “fast,” slathering on pink and purplish lip gloss and rimming their eyes with black eyeliner. While I was carrying out my duties as hall monitor, making sure everyone was getting to class on time, they were leaning against their lockers talking about who they wanted to make out with on the basketball team.

I never really hung out with those girls outside of practice
or games. My best friend was still Jackie, who, like me, was in student government. We’d sit together at lunch and have sleepovers at her house on weekends.

But my teammates were friendly enough, and more than that, they showed me respect. There was no question that I danced the best and that’s why
I
was captain. When I was in that practice room, I found my voice.

It wasn’t called drill team for nothing.

“Aten-hut!”
I’d yell.
“Left face!”

I was the littlest thing on the team, but the girls listened attentively and did whatever I commanded. I loved that power, but the confidence it brought would disappear and my anxiety would return as soon as practice was over and I went back to a life where I was terrified of losing my footing and crashing down.

There was one other space, however, where I felt at least somewhat comfortable—the San Pedro Boys and Girls Club. Every day after school, I’d walk the two blocks there and hang out with my siblings until Mommy got off work and came to take us home.

DRILL-TEAM PRACTICE WAS NOT
what I’d expected. Elizabeth had been trained in classical ballet as a child, and she incorporated some of its basic technique into warm-ups and choreography. The first day we all got together, I stood on tiptoe as Elizabeth instructed, stepped to my right with arms open, and closed them, spinning around.
Chaîné,
the name of the step, was unfamiliar to me, but the
whoosh
of momentum
when I spun was like the surge I felt when I did a cartwheel in our yard.

Elizabeth taught me to bend my knees, twirl, and quickly shift my weight to one leg, bringing the other up into a bent angle, before landing on my toes. She called that a
piqué.
I thought the names of the steps were unusual, but the movements themselves never felt foreign to me.

A few weeks into the school year, I got the idea of choreographing a routine for the drill team to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It became my obsession. I even put the sewing skills I’d learned from Robert’s mother, Grandma Marie, to good use, making all the costumes myself.

I asked Elizabeth to use some of the drill-team budget to buy us red leotards and I spent a couple weeks sewing little red skirts with fake fur trim. I loved doing things like that: sewing, crafting, imagining, creating. I retrieved red canes, left in the school basement from a long-ago Christmas show, and wrapped them with white tape for us to use as props onstage.

I was determined that the team would have the steps down cold—there would be no repeat of the disastrous talent show with Reina and Danielle. I even ordered rehearsals on the weekends to make sure the performance would be perfect. There were
piqués,
and leaps, and
pirouettes
with the girls’ knees facing forward—like jazz choreography, I later realized—instead of the perfectly aligned turnout that Elizabeth would sometimes have us practice.

It was a mélange of all the new steps that the team had learned from Elizabeth. But for our finale, we used a move as familiar as “Jingle Bells,” lining up like the Radio City Rockettes, kicking our heels high in the air.

The audience gave us a standing ovation.

Our Christmas show came at the end of the semester, and then we were off for the two-week winter break. When we came back, Elizabeth said she wanted to talk with me.

“You know, you have the perfect physique for ballet and a natural ability,” she said. “I know you go to the Boys and Girls Club after school. A friend of mine teaches a ballet class there. Her name is Cindy Bradley. Why don’t you check it out?”

I was caught off guard. Ballet? Why would I want to do that?

I had never even seen one. I can’t remember if I had much of an impression of what one might be like—maybe lyrical and slow like the dance Elizabeth had the drill team do once with giant ribbons?

I’d enjoyed that since all movement was fun for me. But what I found frightening was the thought of going beyond my comfort zone. I didn’t know the ballet teacher at the Boys and Girls Club, and the idea of seeking out this stranger to start learning a dance form I knew nothing about intimidated me.

Still, that afternoon, because my coach had asked me to and I always did what I was told, I dutifully walked to the Boys and Girls Club gym, crept quietly into the bleachers, and sat with my arms wrapped around my knees, watching. For the next week or so, I was an audience of one for a dozen or so girls and a couple of boys, most of whom were younger than me, pointing, tapping, bending, and stretching. One day, their teacher, Cindy, glanced back and walked over.

“I’ve seen you sitting here every day. What are you doing?” she asked me.

“My drill-team coach, Elizabeth Cantine, told me to come check it out,” I said quietly. “She thinks I’d be good at it.”

“She told me about you,” Cindy said, her eyes widening with recognition. “Why don’t you come join us?”

But I couldn’t bring myself to. Not yet. The other girls clearly had been at it for a while. And they also looked the part, with their smooth slippers, crisp pink tights, and colorful leotards. How would I fit in?

“I don’t have a leotard or tights,” I mumbled.

“Don’t worry about that,” Cindy said. “Just wear your gym clothes.”

Another week passed with me sitting and watching. I didn’t tell my brothers and sisters I was going to the gym because I didn’t want them to try to convince me to try something I was scared to do. What if I took the class and made a fool of myself? What would go through the other kids’ minds? What would Elizabeth think when Cindy reported back to her?

“She couldn’t follow a single thing I said,” I imagined Cindy saying, shaking her head, still stunned by how pitiful I was. “This girl needs to stick to the drill team.”

Finally, one afternoon I told myself that if I was going to go to the gym at the Boys and Girls Club anyway, I might as well give it a try. I went into the locker room to change and emerged, slightly embarrassed, in blue cotton shorts long enough to scrape my knees, my white T-shirt, and a pair of old gym socks. I willed myself to walk to the center of the basketball court.