Authors: Meg Howrey
“At this point, what’s the difference?” He looked down at his T-shirt, drenched with the both of us. I brought a knee up and knocked him gently against his ribs.
“That’s my boy,” I said. “Well done.”
“Dude,” he said. “That was pretty awesome.”
“Don’t call me dude.”
“Yes, my lady. Hey. For a minute there I thought you were going to rip Nina a new one.”
“Mhmmm. Help me up?”
Klaus pulled me up. I felt a little metallic taste in my mouth.
“I think I bit my tongue,” I said.
I experienced a drowsy desire to … have sex, bizarrely.
“Rub my neck for two seconds?”
“This isn’t my fault, is it? I know I’ve been a bit rough.” Klaus turned me around and placed one hand on my sternum so he could pull me back into the tips of the fingers of his other hand, which traveled up and down my neck.
“It wasn’t me, was it?” he murmured. Actually murmured. Do they teach this sort of thing at hottie school? “I didn’t hurt you, baby, did I?” he asked softly.
No, it’s sexual, but also maternal, what I feel for Klaus. But no, not maternal. It’s more sort of … fatherly. Or something. I was confused, so I turned around and gave Klaus a kiss. He still had a grip on me, so it was slightly more than a peck. I made the gesture for fondness, cupping his face with my hands.
After rehearsal I headed down to Capezio for some new dancing duds. And who should I see there but Bryce, the little girl from the school who is my fan, looking at a rack of leotards. I almost didn’t recognize her in normal clothes and with all her hair down. I hid myself behind a rotisserie of leg warmers. I’m not sure why. I suppose I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of someone looking up to me. Also, she was with a woman who I assumed was her mom, and ballet moms can be a little
hard to take. They gush and roll their eyes, and their own particular daughter is always very special and gifted.
I am guessing Bryce is about eleven, but I am not very good at figuring ages. At any rate she has that kind of body that happens around eleven or twelve. Just past the overgrown-puppy look that is so cute, and not quite into the awkward stage that can go on for years.
Bryce had on a blue cardigan sweater, a khaki miniskirt, and pink tennis shoes. I appreciated the outfit’s lack of sexuality. It looked like something Nancy Drew might have worn. Bryce’s light brown hair (a few years away from being highlighted red or blond, depending on her personality) is shoulder length and a little bit bushy. She should grow it a little longer so it won’t do that awkward triangle thing. Her skin still has that creamy look of youth, but she isn’t exactly beautiful. Her face is too changeable. Really pretty girls always look the same. She will be just lovely when she grows up, but these years of not being beautiful will get in the way of her recognizing it. When she is a teenager, she’ll wear too much makeup. Her mom, because it was her mom who was with her, is absolutely beautiful: tall and thin and expensively dressed in cashmere. I circled around the leg warmers. Bryce disappeared into a dressing room with some leotards. Her mother hovered outside the curtain of her cubicle, peeped in, was evidently rebuffed. She turned around, and our eyes met.
“Oh, hello!” she said, advancing with a perfectly manicured hand. “I’m Jane Pritchett Ford. We met briefly last year at the Winter Gala. I’m on the board of the company. Congratulations, by the way. On Titania.”
Not just a ballet mom, but a power ballet mom. I didn’t, in
fact, remember meeting Jane Pritchett Ford, but I made the gesture for “Ah, yes.”
“My daughter Bryce,” Jane pointed at the dressing room, “has convinced me of the utmost necessity of getting a new leotard for Friday.” She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m sure the fact that you will be there is a factor. She has your shoes wrapped around her bedpost.”
On Friday we have a full studio run-through of
Dream
, and that means the little fairies will be rehearsing with us.
“I’ll just be doing Helena for that rehearsal,” I told Jane. “I’m still learning Titania.”
“Ah, well, you’ll make a great Helena too. But I’m really excited to see what you do with Titania. And what Marius has done with the whole ballet. It’s time for something new.” I liked the way she said it. I liked that she’s wasn’t asking me about Gwen, which was what I expected.
“I don’t know what I’m doing yet,” I said. “It’s … tricky. Like, in the play, Titania is a mess in the beginning. She’s just become a mother to the changeling boy. Oberon is jealous that she has shifted all her attentions away from him to the child. They’re fighting and it’s throwing everything in the natural world off-balance.
‘The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud!’
I kind of wish Titania would come on with some sort of frizzy hairdo and food on her clothes, all sweaty and irritable.”
“Like a new mother,” Jane said, getting it. “That’s very interesting. I mean, you’re very articulate about it. That’s unusual, if you don’t mind my saying. With dancers.”
“Oh, some of us can talk,” I said. “It’s just easier not to.”
Jane laughed.
“I should stop talking to you,” she said. “Because Bryce saw
you earlier and I told her she should go up and say hello, and that was apparently just too incredibly gauche and mortifying and uncool. I think she’s afraid I will embarrass her. She’s hiding now in the dressing room. And when she comes out, please pretend this conversation never happened.”
I laughed and Jane smiled and mouthed “Thank you” at me. She went back to the curtained cubicle. I grabbed a few things off a rack and ducked into another dressing room. After a bit, I could hear Bryce and Jane leaving.
I sat down in the dressing room at Capezio, suddenly exhausted. And missing Gwen.
There must be tension before there is release
. That’s what Marius said.
Otherwise it is boring
.
But it’s Gwen who provided the tension and the release. Without her it’s just … silence. I don’t know where I am. Before a storm, or behind it.
“It goes away,” Gwen said to me once, after a crisis. We were standing in adjacent dressing rooms, at some boutique in Soho. I was struggling into a dress Gwen had insisted I try on, something I would never have pulled off the rack for myself.
“What goes away?” I asked. We had just been laughing over a dress I had picked out, which, when on, had been so spectacularly awful that we had both cracked up when I had revealed myself.
“Take it off!” Gwen had shrieked. “Oh my god! Get it off your body!”
“It goes away,” she repeated, tapping on the wall that separated us. “Kate, it always goes away.”
“Yeah,” I said, to the wall. “Yeah, I know it does.”
Five months before, we had been on tour in Spain, and Gwen had refused to unpack her suitcase, or let me unpack mine, because everything was “unsafe.” A few weeks after that, we were vacationing in Ibiza and staying up all night in clubs, and Gwen, tanned, blissful, smiling, kicked off her shoes, and we danced all night. “Happiness!” she screamed, over the music. And then we were back in New York and the long baths and the talking to herself started up again, and I found myself holding my breath whenever I saw her with a pair of scissors in her hands, or a knife.
And then. And then. And then.
But that day in the dressing room, I stepped out of my cubicle in the dress Gwen had picked out for me and she held me by the shoulders and examined the length of my body, turned me around to face the mirror.
“You see?” She grinned, exultant. “I was right. It’s perfect.”
“You were right,” I agreed.
“Who knows you better than me?”
“Nobody.”
She pressed her cheek against mine hard, before letting go.
I went early this morning to Dr. Ken’s office to look at my X-rays. It’s weird to look at your own skeleton. It’s so much smaller than you think and that’s sort of sad. Like a dog standing forlornly in a bathtub, dripping wet, revealed to be quite puny without all the fluff.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking at, but Dr. Ken put an X-ray of a “normal” person next to mine so I could see the contrast.
“So, should I have that curve?” I asked, pointing to the civilian skeleton’s neck, which had an
S
shape. Mine was pretty straight. You would think that straight is better; it looks more stable. You can’t build anything on an S.
“Your life would be considerably less painful if you did,” Dr. Ken said cheerfully. “Now look at this.”
He slid another X-ray next to mine, and this skeleton had the same straight line of vertebrae as mine. Dr. Ken tapped it with his finger.
“This is a person who has whiplash,” he said, like he was giving me the punch line of a joke. “Fairly serious car accident.”
“I have whiplash?”
“Most people who are in the amount of distress you are in are given a neck brace and kept more or less immobile. I’m not really certain how you are dealing with the pain, in fact.”
I smiled modestly.
“My concern,” Dr. Ken continued, “is that you will go on working in this condition, and do permanent damage to yourself.” He explained how an
S
absorbs shock and how I have blown back my
S
so completely that it’s now slightly bowed in the other direction. That this is the actual problem, and the pinched nerve is just a symptom.
I gazed at the bones on the screen. Is it really so bad? They all appeared to be there. Once again I was struck by how small my skull is. I can’t believe you can fit a whole personality in there. How do you stuff everything you own or have ever owned and all the things you will own in the future till the end of your life into something smaller than a handbag?
“I don’t want to alarm you, but we should approach this very seriously,” Dr. Ken said.
“Well, we need to make a deal,” I told him. “Because
I
need to make it to the end of the season. That’s a few more weeks. After that I’ll take a good rest, but not now.”
Dr. Ken crossed his arms in front of him and took a wider stance, rocking back and forth, flattening out the pleats in the pants, considering.
“You know, now that I can conceptualize what the problem is,” I told him, “it’s great, because I can sort of see what I might be doing that’s causing it. I feel like if I adjust my technique
and stay really mindful and aware then I can protect myself.” I brought my hands up to the occipital bones and gently bobbled my head, demonstrating how I am going to balance it out.
“If you can, stay off the rest of the week.” Dr. Ken sighed. “Come see me every day and I’ll keep giving you adjustments. Let’s fit you with some orthopedic pads. I want you wearing these every moment you’re not in toe shoes. I know you dancers think anything can be cured by icing, but it’s not necessary. Stretch it gently. I’ll give you some exercises. After the season is over, then we’ll evaluate. There’s something fundamental about the way you are working that needs to be changed.”
I stood on this weird fibrous substance so Dr. Ken could get exact measurements of my feet for the orthopedic pads. He gave me a good cracking and fifteen minutes on the stim machine. I lay there, the muscles in my neck jumping slightly.
Gwen, you look too fragile, there
.
We were rehearsing the ballet
Giselle
, another classic from the Douchebag Prince/Betrayed Maiden archive. Giselle is a young peasant girl with a heart condition. (Seriously, there’s choreography where she has to stop dancing and sort of clutch her heart and be tremulous and fainty.) There is a sweet local boy, Hilarion (no really, that’s his name), who is in love with Giselle. But Giselle has met and fallen in love with another boy, a peasant just like her but from another village. He visits her in secret, and promises to marry her, but jealous Hilarion spies on them, and he is suspicious. He follows the stranger and sees that he’s not really a peasant at all. He’s Prince Albrecht, wearing a disguise. It seems Albrecht is already engaged to a
noblewoman and he’s just amusing himself with Giselle. Hilarion exposes Albrecht in front of the entire village and Giselle goes mad and kills herself. With a sword. Although possibly she had a heart attack too—preexisting medical conditions. Anyway, that’s Act I. In Act II a stricken and grieving Albrecht visits the grave of Giselle and is attacked by the “Willies.” I am not making this up! Willies are the ghosts of women who died before their wedding day. Gotta love a ballet that literally gives you the willies.
Gwen was Giselle.
Gwen, you look too fragile there
.
What do you mean?
You look too … vulnerable
.
I am vulnerable
, she insisted.
I’ve got a heart condition, remember?
Yeah
, I said.
But you’re in denial about it. And you’re a peasant. A sturdy peasant girl, filled with life. When your mother tries to stop you from dancing, you’ve got to really push her away
.
I pantomimed the mother’s actions: grabbing Gwen’s hands, insisting. Gwen gave me a big shove and then flipped me off with her middle finger. We both laughed.
You can really be irritated with her, though
, I said.
You want to dance. She wants you to sit still. She’s being a pest. You think you’re going to live forever
.
Okay, do it again
.
That’s it. That’s better
.
• • •
I did take a Vicodin after leaving Dr. Ken’s, but I had a very full day. Two hours for
Leaves
, then a little break, then two more hours with Claudette to start learning Titania’s solos, and then the final performance of
Swan Lake
tonight.
Hilel came up to me in
Leaves
rehearsal and asked if I read the review.
“Where?”
“Times.”
“Walter or Pauline?”
“Walter.”
“When was he here?”
“Plague Cast night. Me and Gia. You should read it.”
“He doesn’t talk about Mara falling, does he?”
“He mentioned it, but he didn’t say her name. He had an interesting thing to say about you, though.”