Authors: Meg Howrey
I
was
fine, mostly. I located the Gristedes the next day and purchased cereal, carrot sticks, boxes of raisins, yogurt, Melba toast, and all manner of Lean Cuisines. For the entire year, I did not so much as scramble an egg in the kitchen. Sometimes, as a treat, I got an Entenmann’s Low-Fat Raspberry Strudel and ate most of the entire thing in one sitting, carrying the remains in my dance bag to dispose of in an anonymous trash receptacle on the way to class.
To get to the school I had to either walk across Central Park or take a bus that cut through it. Nervous of both, the first time I decided to walk, giving myself two hours to make it across. I could see the buildings of where I needed to go above the tree-tops, but the paths were curved, and I didn’t want to venture into any of the low tunnels, most of which contained huddled forms of homeless people and reeked of urine, even from a safe distance. I all but ran across the park and made it to the school in thirty minutes, drenched in sweat and thoroughly freaked out. I was eager to get into something safe and familiar, like ballet class.
I wasn’t afraid of stepping into a class of strangers. I wasn’t afraid of competition. I had always been the best in the room, or if not the best, then so much younger than everybody else that it was remarkable I was even there. It had always been like that although my confidence had been a little bit shaken over the summer at Boston Ballet because I was now sixteen. To be amazing at sixteen is not as amazing as being
amazing at fourteen. This was very clear to me because I had spent eight weeks listening to people tell me how
uh-mazing
Gwen was and overhearing things like
Can you believe that girl Gwen, she’s only fourteen! She’s a diva. And only fourteen! Fourteen years old, doesn’t that make you sick?
But I still got a lot of attention. I still was envied and hated and courted. And Gwen was back home (turning fifteen, by the way) and I was
here
. This was
my
moment.
By the end of the first class my confidence had taken a second and larger hit. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by versions of myself. They were
all
the best girls in the room. They were all the girls that always got in, always got the full scholarship, the good part. They were all my age and they were all amazing. I was in a class of me, times fourteen. It was profoundly unsettling.
Our main teacher was Madame Dombrovski, who appeared to date from early-nineteenth-century Russia and after thirty years in America could still only speak about a dozen words or phrases in English. Oddly, one of them was “ice cream” which she used to describe things both bad and good. “Guhls (shudder, pained expression), your feet like … ice cream. Make better.” Or “Guhls (puckering of her tiny rosebud lips), make arms nice like ice cream.” She called me Katya. She was always dressed in black with thick, soft snow boots on her feet. There was a rumor (unverified) that her ankles had been broken by the KGB when she tried to defect. She didn’t demonstrate combinations but muttered in French what she wanted us to do, or used her forearms and hands, standard practice in ballet class, but sometimes it was hard to believe that she was seriously asking us to do those impossible things. Her class was devastatingly
hard. During grande allegro she scurried behind and shoved if we were not moving big enough. She also slapped, swatted, and pinched. Sometimes she would watch and then roll her eyes and walk away, muttering ominous Russian things that sounded like
“Plutzchushni donya snyat.”
This always sounded far more horrible than the standard horrible things other teachers said in English.
Our other main teacher was Dana Gopnick—a too recently retired soloist from the company who barely noticed us at all, so intent was she on following her own still capable image in the mirror. Everyone professed to “love” her, but nobody really did. Her one main insult: “Well, you can always quit and go have babies” did not resonate particularly. None of us was going to quit, and there was already a woman in the company who had a baby and continued dancing. Dana wore full ballet attire for class: leotard, tights, flowered skirt, a shellacked French twist to her hair, painted-in eyebrows, and liquid eyeliner. She wanted all of us to look up to and emulate her, but I considered her to be a cautionary tale. For excessive eyebrow tweezing, if nothing else.
Of the fourteen other girls in my class, five had been at the school for their entire training, and the rest had been there for at least two years. I was the only new girl. This was the top level of the school and conditions were tense. After this year, selections would be made about who would get into the company and who would not. My late wild-card entry into the game was not welcomed.
By the end of my first week at the school I was deeply embroiled in class competition and speculation, which intensified as the year continued. Gradually, the fourteen versions of
me began to separate into distinct entities and I was able to spot weaknesses. Suzanne was prone to injury. Laurel had great feet and legs, but her technique was weak, Paula’s eating disorder was a little out of control. Shin-Li might not have enough “presence,” none of the teachers seemed to really like Jenny for some reason, and Noelle was just a little too tall. Mara, Tarine, and Rachel were maybe the best of the best. Rachel was maybe the best of those three, but four months into the year she dislocated her hip in a truly god-awful way—in class—much screaming—and went home to Santa Fe. She returned near the end of the year, and struggled tearfully for a month before leaving again. We all said we felt so bad for her.
Where was I in the mix? I couldn’t tell, which was also new to me. I seemed to be getting a lot of attention, but nearly every day there was a moment where I felt like I was a horrible hideous lump. I was also occasionally told, more or less, that I was a horrible hideous lump. I was also told, much more often, that I was “very good” and “excellent” and “beautiful.” But the criticism, aligning as it did with my most secret fears, seemed much more valid than the praise. This was as disorienting as anything else. I had felt bad about myself before, but not with this level of sincerity. To combat my insecurity I developed a sturdier veneer: lipstick, nail polish, perfume, with an all-weather topcoat of superciliousness. I stared and stared and stared at myself in the mirror, and my imagined movie audience stared too, except for the times when I said something stupid or gauche, danced badly, used the bathroom, masturbated, or ate baked goods. During those times I pretended that some sort of electrical interference blocked their reception. This happened a lot.
That year I made friends with Mara. She was a City girl,
grew up twelve blocks from the school, had been training there since she was seven. Both her parents were lawyers. Mara knew everything about the company, all the dancers, the gossip. She had been to Paris and London and the Bahamas on vacation. She had a favorite room at the Met. She had read Camus. She could play the piano. I could not believe she was shy, because in her place I would have felt so confident, having and knowing all those things. We both made fun of ourselves and other people but never of each other. We said that the best thing that could happen was if we
both
got into the company. Once I said to her, “I won’t be happy if I get in and you don’t,” and Mara gave me a look and said, “Yes you will.” I realized that she was right and that needing people and caring about them were two very different things. I tucked this thought inside me like a fortune into a cookie. It was a secret and it made me feel powerful, even though I didn’t understand why.
I mailed my weekly assignments to my correspondence course, which I considered to be a vast improvement over traditional schooling. I could hardly believe I had suffered through the tedium of sitting in chairs and listening to other people yap when I could simply read, answer, and write while stretching, listening to music, or eating Melba toast. David, one of the boys at the school who was doing the same correspondence course as I was, asked if he could pay me to do our English requirement. I was desperately short of cash because my parents had no understanding of the different world I was living in and I had no intention of enlightening them. (Mom told me to write down all my expenses and send them a monthly report, but how could I have explained Chanel lipstick, a pack of cigarettes,
a pashmina like everyone else had, cab fare from downtown after Mara and I got drunk with Christophe and Jenny?) I agreed to do the Novel in the Twentieth Century class for David. Another boy, Seth, who was sending stuff to his high school back in Arizona, paid me even more to do his Modern American Drama. I didn’t bother creating a distinctive writing style for David. “His” papers—on Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
or whatever—were usually just the first drafts of my papers on the same subject. I gave him a better command of punctuation to make up the difference, and we received the same grades from our unknown and unimagined teachers. I loved Seth’s Modern American Drama assignments and was sad that I couldn’t write really great papers for him, lest his teachers get suspicious.
Sex was in the air but not on the ground. Baryshnikov made it okay for boys of my generation to take ballet, and there are more heterosexuals around than you might think. They wear tights and leg warmers but they’re essentially jocks, and at that age they spent more time trying to impress each other than us. The erotic charge of half-naked sweating teenagers sliding their hands all over each other is also not quite what you would think. You need to imagine those teenagers under fluorescent lighting, with a giant mirror in front of them, timing their actions to musical cues, while being scrutinized by a portly Ukrainian who shouts things like “Put her down, but not like sack of potatoes, you
id-i-ot
.” The girls were more enthusiastic about partnering class than the boys, except for David, who was the tallest and strongest and was thankful to have one class where he wasn’t being yelled at about his feet. Everyone wanted to dance with him. Talent equaled desirability. Talent trumped
good looks or a halfway decent personality. Talent
was
a personality.
Occasionally I ran into Wendy Griston Hedges in her apartment. This embarrassed us less over time. Discovering me once with a book in my hand, she told me that she too was a reader and I was welcome to use the library.
“Oh, great,” I said. “I need to get a card, I guess.”
“Oh, you don’t need a card. You can just take things and bring them back.”
“Really? You don’t need a card here?”
“Oh, heavens, no.”
I paid a visit to a branch of the NYC Public Library under the firm impression that I did not need a card and suffered quite an embarrassment at the front desk. About a week later I discovered that Wendy was referring to her own personal library, a very comfortable room on the other side of the unlived-in living room. I would often find intriguing signs of life in the library before the maid service came in on Mondays: a dry-cleaning bill on the desk that had been doodled over with really good renderings of miniature horses, the marshmallow moons and stars of Lucky Charms cereal between the crevice of a corduroy seat cushion and armrest, a fencing foil left on the window ledge. These breadcrumby clues to the inner life of Wendy Griston Hedges all seemed to lead in different directions. They made me feel fond, almost protective of my patron, who was definitely eccentric, but discreetly so. This gave her dignity.
I went home for two weeks during Christmas break. I hadn’t missed my family at all until I saw them again and I became instantly homesick even though I was now at home. I felt like I
had been gone a thousand years and walked around touching Christmas ornaments and holiday hand towels with a combination of condescension and nostalgia. I expected my visit to be equally meaningful for my family, but my parents seemed oddly concerned with their own lives and content to just know I was somewhere in the house. “Here we all are! All together!” Mom chirped from time to time, while she launched Christmas lights at the tree and muscled cookies out of the oven. It was as if I hadn’t been gone at all. Keith was in a snit because Mom and Dad had told him he couldn’t go skiing in Idaho with his friend Wes because “your sister will be home” and he either ignored me totally or stared at me with goggle-eyed fake rapture at meals.
I would have been really pissed if it hadn’t been for Gwen, who couldn’t get enough details. She made me describe every girl in my class as if she were memorizing them. She wanted to know how everything worked: what did we do for lunch, did we pick partners for adagio class or did the teacher match girls to boys, when would the casting for the school’s top-level spring gala go up, what did I think my chances were, were there any cute boys, did everyone wear makeup for class? It seemed natural that I would be the one doing all the talking. What, after all, could have happened to Gwen in Michigan?
On my third night home I went to see Gwen perform in the same Grand Rapids Ballet
Nutcracker
we had both danced in for the past six years. My parents and Keith had already been to two of the five performances by the time I got home. (Uncharacteristically, Keith never complained about going to see us dance. Possibly there was some sort of bribe involved.) Dad
elected to drive me there as the night was icy and I hadn’t been behind a wheel since passing my driver’s test in May.
The company had only recently become professional, with salaried dancers, so
The Nutcracker
was still mainly a chance for the schoolchildren’s parents to earn back their tuition fees with a chance at seeing little Jenny and little Darla cutely outfitted as mice or toy soldiers. Oh, those Jennys and Darlas … thrilled to have Mommy apply splatches of blush on their cheeks, self-importantly managing a ponytail full of rollers for the evening’s required First Act Party Child ringlets. You can measure out the progress of time by your personal relationship to
The Nutcracker
.
Gwen was dancing the Dew Drop Fairy, sort of a runner-up to the Miss America role of Sugarplum Fairy. I was a little surprised that they had given Dew Drop to her, since now that Grand Rapids could actually hire dancers the leading roles went to them.
I
hadn’t ever danced it. Last year Gwen and I had been matching Mirliton soloists, the best a student could get. Of course she was the star of the school (now that I was gone, the only star), but she was still a student.