The Art of Falling (7 page)

“Dmitri knows what he’s doing, you know. He doesn’t need creative input from you.”

The line went silent for a moment. “Oh.”

“Dmitri says an artist needs to listen to the voice that arises from the soul.”

“I have a soul.”

“But you aren’t a member of the company.”

“Didn’t you think I had a good idea?”

“That’s beside the point. This residency is an opportunity for Dmitri to grow as an artist. He says it can be an opportunity for me, too, if I listen for that inner voice—”

“Well of course—”

“My voice. As opposed to yours.”

“Pfft. He may know artistry, but what does he know about mothers and daughters? We’re a team. Where was he all those years I drove you to dance lessons?”

“In France, learning dance from one of the most famous ballerinas in the world.”

“You trusted me with your career back then.”

“An eight-year-old
has
to depend on a parent, Mom. I couldn’t drive myself to lessons any more than I could pay for them. But I’m at a whole new level now. Dmitri is my artistic director. I have to put my faith in him.”

A frosty silence crystallized between us. “Mom, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“I’m done talking about this, but I don’t want to hang up if you’re mad at me. Tell me how things are going at the candy factory.”

“You don’t care about the damned factory and never have. You’ve never even come to see the new facility. Our whole relationship is based on dance—what else have we ever talked about?”

The despair I heard in her voice was exactly the reason we’d never before had this conversation. But it was now clear: I needed to create this boundary, and enforce it. “I just need some space.”

“We’re breaking up?”

My mother always could make me laugh. “It won’t be forever.”

“But this isn’t fair. We’ve worked so long for this, and I’ve suffered with you through every setback—don’t I get to share the good part, too?”

“Let me call you. When I’m ready. Give me a chance to try my wings, okay? I love you.”

I heard a knock on the door. Dmitri stuck his head in. “We are going out to eat. You coming?”

I put up a finger and said into the phone, “Sorry, I’ve got to go.”

Dmitri mouthed,
Your
mother?

I nodded, and rolled my eyes for effect.

“Penny. I need this. You don’t know what it’s like for me to worry about you from afar.”

“Gotta go.”

“Don’t shut me out. Something could still go wrong.”

“I called with good news, remember?”

“Say you’ll call me if you need me. Otherwise I’ll be a wreck.”

“If I need anything, I’ll figure it out. That’s what this is all about. Bye.”

“Penny, don’t hang up—”

I hung up, grabbed my jacket, and turned toward my future.

I hid out in my bedroom all afternoon after my little trip around the living room, too embarrassed to face my mother. I felt like a dancer who hadn’t heard her number dismissed and showed up, unwanted, for the second stage of the audition—and my mother had witnessed the whole thing. And if she said one thing about Graham or Balanchine or Patrick Bissell, I would lose it.

Dancing again was too much to ask. Mauricio had said so. And circumnavigating the living room was nothing like the controlled abandon of real dancing. And what if that was all I’d ever have—just enough movement to keep the shadows inside me all churned up, but not enough to set them free?

The doorbell rang. I waited for my mother to get it, but a sharp rap on the door soon followed. When I opened the front door, I found Margaret MacArthur, decked out in her red pillbox hat and red leather gloves. I looked past her to the driveway. My mother’s car was gone.

MacArthur seemed content to wait for me to speak first. “I don’t buy Girl Scout cookies,” I said.

“Wit returns. A good sign. How are you doing?”

“You are one nosy—”

“I was simply being polite. Even critics possess social grace, Penelope.”

“Oh.” I stood between the door and its frame, holding both MacArthur and the cold April air at bay, wondering whether to believe this. “And how are you?”

“Right, let’s skip the niceties. Ignore me all you want, but you will not stop me from writing an exposé on the harsh treatment of women in the dance world. I’m here to tell you why. May I come in?”

When I stood back, MacArthur walked into the living room and planted her tiny frame in the middle of the plaid love seat. I took it as a good sign when she didn’t remove her coat, or produce a notepad. But I was determined not to let down my guard. I perched on the edge of the ladder-back.

“You opened and shut the door with fluidity, you walked into the room with a steady rhythm, and now you are balanced well, if somewhat recklessly, on the edge of your chair.”

“If I knew you were reviewing, I would have thrown in a head roll.”

MacArthur removed her gloves and twisted them; without note-taking it appeared she didn’t know what else to do with her hands. “I want to tell you about my sister Laura. She and I both danced. I was a scrawny little thing, but she was tall and stalwart. She was the one with the talent. Watching her inspired more kinesthetic sensation within me than my own movement ever did.”

I thought I heard MacArthur’s voice catch, but she covered with a quick cough.

“Laura’s movements began in a more spiritual realm. Her body didn’t rise up as a function of foot pressing against floor as did mine; she harnessed unseen powers from beneath the floor. Her love of the space alone held her aloft. I could only approximate the effect, but I somehow won a scholarship to a summer program in France, so when she graduated I went, thinking the change might inspire me. That’s where I studied with Ekaterina Ivanovna, Dmitri’s mother. By the time I left, Laura had stopped dancing.”

Dmitri. I envied her casual use of the name that still clutched my heart, her inference that the man who’d been at the center of my world could be peripheral to any story. I cleared my throat. “She sounds extraordinary. Why did she stop?”

“While I was in Paris, a London company hired Laura as an apprentice.” MacArthur smoothed the coat over her lap, as if it were possible to press flat its nubby surface. “Under the condition she lose weight. By the time I found out why she had left the company and where she’d gone, she had developed anorexia that had spiraled out of control. One day she was found passed out beside her oven. It was a miracle the place hadn’t exploded.”

I could think of only one reason MacArthur had driven all the way up here to tell me this: she assumed my story was like her sister’s. I had enough self-control not to argue with a woman with the power to memorialize words I might want to take back. “And you’re hoping I’ll help you get the scoop? ‘Big, Disenfranchised Dancers Speak Out’?”

“Do you want this to happen to anyone else? We have a chance to influence change. To open people’s eyes to their prejudices about ideal size.”

“Yet you’re the one who called me an Amazon in the paper.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“In your first review of Dance DeLaval. An Amazon is hardly a flattering image for a dancer.”

MacArthur sighed. “I wrote that review on a deadline, you know. In about forty minutes. And I was watching Dmitri’s work for the first time. Trying to orient myself, seek meaning. That you were larger than the rest was simple fact, not accusation. But your own assumption proves my point. That’s why I want to do this interview.”

I was larger.
Simple
fact
. I slid my hand over my stomach and fingered the comforting edges of my rib cage. I tried to respect her candor about my size, because in many ways I’d needed to have this conversation with someone my whole life. Someone who saw me and recognized the challenges of my shape instead of treating me like the elephant in the room no one dared mention.

But the conversation wouldn’t happen here, and not with MacArthur. Why would I share with the press what I couldn’t face sharing with those I wanted to be close to? Plus, my mother would be back soon, and I really didn’t want her and MacArthur to meet. I stood up to signal an end to the conversation, but the move wasn’t as bold as I would have hoped. My joints, already stiffening from my earlier walk and attempt at dance and now wrung out from MacArthur’s audacity, shook with the effort.

I steadied my large self on the ladder-back. “Here’s my advice on this whole interview thing: give up. You’re the word warrior, not me. I speak through movement. If I can’t open the audience’s eyes through my work, I’m of no use.”

MacArthur stood as well. “Then open your own eyes and get back to work.”

“That’s not fair—”

“Spare me. You can move, my sister can’t. The brain damage she sustained has rendered her virtually inert. It’s permanent. Your injury, on the other hand, is healing.”

“You haven’t spoken to my physical therapist.”

“Taking yourself out of the dance won’t solve a thing.”

“Why do you care?”

MacArthur wriggled into her blood-red gloves as her voice took on a surgical precision. “For decades I’d been scanning the stages to find a performer who excited me as much as my sister did. Then one day I recognized her way of moving again. It was while I was in the wings at the Joyce interviewing Dmitri after a show. His rehearsal mistress was onstage, demonstrating something for the company. They had been moving arms and legs through his choreography, but she was showing them how to move heart and soul. It was as if I’d found my sister again—in you.”

She went to the door, opened it, and spoke once more before crossing the threshold. Her voice sounded smaller, facing away from me as she now was, casting her words to the winds of spring. “I was the one who found my sister, Penelope. Thankfully she hadn’t thrown the deadbolt. I was able to get into her flat and drag her to safety. I will not witness an implosion of such talent again. It diminishes us all.”

Without a word of good-bye, MacArthur walked to her car. I watched until she pulled out of the driveway—some small acknowledgment, perhaps, that I had heard her.

And when I shut the door, I stopped short of flipping the deadbolt.

• • •

In the dining room, my mother served up a platter of fatty beef slices. Why did she insist on sharing these evening meals? We had little to talk about. Between my elusive memory and her reckless optimism, my fall stretched between us. We twirled around it, shimmied under it, and leaped over it in awkward silence.

I raked my fork through my potatoes and thought about the way MacArthur had gouged me. How dare she come here and ask so much of me? As if my injuries and rehabilitation were all about her and her sister and the rest of the goddamned dance world. If I could pull the pain from my body, I’d gladly share it so they could all have a taste. And how nice of her to point out my lack of contribution. Like that was so easy to figure out in the shape I was in! Couldn’t she see how my muscles had atrophied? My stomach had been churning ever since she left.

What exactly was I holding on to here? My nonexistent dance career? Hell, I might as well eat.

I raised the beef to my lips. A caramelized onion, still glistening from its butter bath, fell to my lap. Meanwhile, my mother dredged her meat through her potatoes and shoveled forkful after forkful into her mouth.

My fork froze for a moment longer—then fell to my plate. I couldn’t do it. Denying myself food was the one small element I could control in a life dictated by everything I couldn’t. Like body type. Talent. Luck. Oversized mothers, and bulldog critics. The only way I knew to reach my potential was to exercise hard and deny myself the foods that had led to my mother’s obesity. Restricting was the closest feeling I’d ever had to self-love, and I would not abandon it.

Anyway, this was my mother’s food. What I put into my body should be mine. I got up from the table and sliced a banana into a bowl of yogurt.

“While you’re up, would you get the butter?” she said.

“You don’t need any more butter.”

“Why the hell do you care if I want butter on my potatoes?”

“Because YOU—ARE—FAT!” I wanted to smack her with this proclamation and all of its implications: that I no longer could witness this long slow death. That she should care more about herself. That she’d been a crappy role model and an embarrassment. That I hated my body because I feared its similarity to hers.

Maybe her layers of fat protected her from all this subtext. She folded her napkin and placed it beside her plate. “Not all dancers are so allergic to food, you know. Jock Soto loves to cook. This recipe is from his book.”

“Really. Jock Soto suggested dripping onions? The gravy? The jelly? That stack of white bread waiting to sop up your plate?”

Her chair scraped across the wood floor. “No, Penny, this is Soto’s skirt steak marinade. But you’ve got to fill up on something. If handing me the butter is too much to ask, I’ll get it myself.”

Could I say anything to pierce that fatty armor and make the woman hidden inside hear me? She waddled over to the refrigerator; I feared never being able to eat again.

Her voice came to me from inside the fridge: “You know, Jock had an earlier cookbook with Heather Watts. Of course she had retired from the New York City Ballet by that point, but what a career she had—”

“Shut up. Now!”

My mother turned, butter in hand. “What’s gotten into you?”

I stood, shaking with rage. “If you compare my life to one more famous person, I will scream.”

I left the table and marched toward my room but could not get past those damned posters. Judging me from the security of their international fame and airbrushed perfection. Holding positions they’d practiced for so many years they’d better damn well have them perfect. Behind their glass, as untouchable as my mother. I would never be able to compete with these silent, more perfect children.
I
don’t fit in here. I am alive, Mother, and changing, and life is messy. I have skin and organs and I feel things deeply and I’m scared that I’ve lost more than my career, maybe my entire self, because all I loved is gone and you can’t fix that.
What did my mother know of risk? She stayed at home behind the bulletproof glass of her inherited career and steady paycheck, with no clue of what it felt like for me to again and again expose myself to another artistic firing squad.
Mother, I am riddled with bullets
.

I pulled down Baryshnikov. Not for one minute more would he stay stuck to our wall—the man was made to leap through the air. I sent the poster flying, and damned if he didn’t look good doing it before he crashed to the dining room floor.

“What was that?” my mother called from the kitchen. “Penny?”

Jacques d’Amboise: I imagined the trademark fluttering of his
entrechat
huit
as he followed Baryshnikov’s arc.

My mother appeared. Frozen in the frame between dining room and kitchen. “Oh my god, Penny. What are you doing?”

“Just making room, Mom.” I gripped a trio of ballet dancers, took a few running steps, and heaved. Was that my mother shouting, or the roaring “Brava!” of the dancers?
Friends, you need hold these positions no longer!
Granitelike glutes relaxed so they might contract again; calves uncramped from relentless
relevé
. Setting these dancers free to move again felt like one of the truest things I’d ever done.

When I hit the wall of moderns, I found the rhythm and form and purpose that had deserted me. Taylor—
Smash!
Morris—
Smash!
Cunningham—I gave him a flip across a longer trajectory—
Smash!
My mother’s voice was laced with hysteria. “Stop, Penny, please, my posters. They were our dream. You can’t throw it all away.”

“Only now you hear me? Because I’m threatening your posters?” I had never before inspired such emotion in my mother. She took advantage of the lull to rush forward and pry Edward Villella from my hands.
Worth
a
try, Mom—Smash!

My mother was racked with such big heaving sobs that I held the last few posters over my head until the quiet caught her attention. She looked up at me.
Do
you
see
me
now, Mother? I am Penelope Sparrow.
I smashed the posters onto the pile.

Only one poster remained: Nureyev as Petrushka. My adrenaline ebbed in empathy for that soul struggling to emerge, from a puppet whose awkward appendages recall their strings. I placed my hand on his chest and waited for a heartbeat. An inhalation. Warmth. Something. Finally I took him down. I’d return him to my room where he belonged; he was all the inspiration I’d ever needed.

My mother skirted the mess and walked toward me, her sobs now soft hiccups. The three of us—she, Petrushka, and I—surveyed the empty hallway.

“You’ve erased our life,” she said.