Before her lay a room surrounded by glittering mirrors bathed in a soft, warm light. The wooden floor was fitted with state-of-the-art springs that made it seem as if she were walking on air. There was a piano tucked into the corner, and in the middle of the dance floor she noticed something special.
Cynthia bolted the door and paused with her head bowed before she skimmed across the floor. She saw the costume, the same blues and greens that she remembered from a hundred years ago. With it was a tape recorder, and then she saw a dozen roses spread on a beautiful silver tray with a note that read:
Dear Friend,
To dance is to sing
is to pray
is to be alive
is to see your soul
as it was truly meant to be seen . . .
after this, when you have landed . . .
I will be here
to help you
to be your friend
for whatever whenever whoever
comes next . . .
Congratulations on your first recital . . .
Your Forever Friend,
Carolyn
Sister Cynthia stopped for just a moment and held the note to her heart. She spun around in a circle, nudged her foot against the roses, first one and then another, until she had touched every flower. Then she bent down and lifted the outfit so it was eye level.
“Oh, it's so beautiful, just like I remember it. Oh.”
The next step was perhaps the hardest. To lift off her blouse and drop her skirt and to look into a mirror where she could see her entire naked body for the first time in twenty-five years. Cynthia did it quickly before she could change her mind. She flipped off her blouse with the worn collar and the missing button and stretched her arms back to release her bra. When it dropped to the floor, she pulled down her nylons and unhinged her skirt. Next came her underpants, until she rose with her eyes closed.
Slowly, slowly, she opened them to see the skin of herself and a body that still looked as if it had been born to dance. There were no stretch marks, and her breasts were firm and high and exactly perfect for a woman who was meant to fly. There were no veins or lines in her legs, no scars from knee or ankle surgery, no tattoos—just the soft untouched lines of a woman who would take the breath away from anyone who was lucky enough to see her this way.
Cynthia turned once and saw that her rear end did not bounce and that her waist tapered in a narrow line, just like that one dancer she had seen. She wanted to touch her own breasts, her legs, the soft part of her stomach and she almost did, but she stopped and ran her hands from her head to her shoulders and along her entire body, just an inch away from her own skin, until she reached the floor with her palms down, not even realizing that most women are not limber enough to do this.
Then Cynthia smiled and pulled on the costume, a bodysuit with streamers and a skirt designed to sway and move with just the slightest hint of the dancer's movement. She did not recognize herself when she looked up, but imagined what it would be like to grow her hair black and long, the way it always appeared in her dreams, running down her back and touching just below her breasts when she leaned forward.
Cynthia had no idea in that moment how incredibly beautiful she was. She had no idea that the world could be hers, and that she could go anywhere or do anything or be anyone. She only knew that it made her chest heave to see herself like this and that she would never, ever be the same after these revealing, sacred moments.
When she clicked on the tape recorder, the music was something she had never heard before. Jazz, maybe? With a guitar and a saxophone that whirled in an exotic and sensual tone that involuntarily made her feet move and her hips rotate.
First Cynthia lay on the floor, feeling the cool wood under her buttocks and on her bare arms and legs. She rotated her head at her neck and began moving—first one shoulder and then the next, then her elbows and lower arms and then her hands, her hips, her knees and legs, until she was dancing, dancing, while lying on the floor. Without willing it to happen, without knowing that she was actually doing it, Cynthia rose from the floor and opened her eyes.
She saw for the first time in thirty years that she had grown into a woman and that she was a dancer. She was a dancer.
While the morning simmered in its beginnings and while Carolyn rolled off her right hip, dressed, and prepared to walk herself to that dance studio, Sister Cynthia danced. She placed her hands on the mirrors and she looked into her own eyes and she glided across the floor and then back stepped, with the music, always with the music, until she saw herself from a distance and could not have recognized even her own eyes, her own smile.
She danced while Carolyn kissed her husband good-bye and then dropped her son at orchestra practice and found a place to park in front of the recital hall building. She danced for an hour, and then another hour. Pools of sweat soaked through the silky costume material and then fell in wild drops onto the floor.
Out in her car, Carolyn saw the first student crossing the grassy field that separated the recital hall from the engineering department. She knew the secret she shared with Cynthia had come to fruition, and with a sigh of contentment, she walked into the dance building.
Even through the soundproof walls, she could hear the music. She stopped at the door, resting her head on her hand and her hand on the door for just a minute. Then she knocked. Before Sister Cynthia skidded over to the door, knowing full well who had come, she stopped and prayed. She offered a thank-you prayer to the God she loved and to the walkers, to the Wisconsin walkers.
Then Cynthia opened the door, welcomed Carolyn into the music, and then both of them were dancing, dancing, dancing.
New Woman Magazine,
June 23, 1997
Editor's note—For full story and accompanying sidebars, check
New Woman
website.
FORGET TRADITION—WOMEN ARE
DESIGNING “NEW” LIVES
By Rebecca Monley
The female customers in St. Mary's Bordeaux, a chic New York wine bar, were not talking about their promotions, the latest fashions from the West Side, who got married during the Christmas holidays, or where their stock portfolios were hovering last Friday night. The conversation was more serious than that. “Sex and the City” this was not. Definitely not.
“I don't care if I ever get married,” said Tracy Brenks, a investment banker from Manhattan who is thirty-seven, has never been married, and says she's happy, fulfilled and unwilling to settle—for anything. “I like to give people who gasp when I say I don't care about getting married what I call The Three-Minute Test. Quick, in three minutes give me the names of three or four happily married couples. I rarely find anyone who can identify more than couple number one.”
Brenks and her pals at St. Mary's may be onto something. The test is a killer, and Suzanne Hamlin, forty-one, a news writer for
New Wisdom
magazine and a regular at the bar's Friday “women only” nights, says she made a decision when she was in her twenties to stay single and be and do what she wants. Hamlin is also a mother who says the rules society laid out for everyone to follow centuries ago need not be followed.
“How dare anyone tell me that I have to get married and live in a house in the suburbs and be and look like everyone else,” said Hamlin. “I have a full life, fabulous friends, a family and I have a career that keeps me abreast of what is happening all over the world. If everyone learned to be happy alone before they rush out to grab on to someone else, the world would be a very amazing place.”
Brenks and Hamlin are not alone in their views about how to live life, but Dr. Lynn Evans, a clinical psychologist with the Women's Medical Center in Los Angeles, said being true to who you are is no easier now than it was when our mothers were watching June Cleaver prepare dinner for Ward, Wally and the Beave.
“Even with all the strides we have taken as women and even with all the choices that are now available to women—that doesn't mean living how you want to live is going to be easy,” said Evans. “For example, it takes great courage for a married woman to divorce and decide to live her life as a lesbian, or for a single woman to decide to have a baby without a life partner, or for a woman to simply declare that she is staying single because she wants to stay single.”
While Evans and other relationship experts, including Dr. Kathrine Harris, a psychiatrist and author of
What Did You Say I Can't Do?,
agree that times have changed, they also agree that society still outlines a fairly conventional lifestyle that has not altered much during the past few decades.
“Women are living a variety of lifestyles throughout this country and the world, but that doesn't mean it's easy or simple,” said Harris. “It's damned hard to follow your heart, to wake up every morning and know that you are true to who you are, and not to tremble when you think of what you might face when you open your door.”
But Harris said it's women like Corissa Sanchez, thirty-six, a secretary from Santa Fe, New Mexico, who are helping to shatter the rules and regulations of life that seem to have been authored in the Dark Ages. Sanchez, the mother of two, married twice, divorced twice, remained single for five years and is now in a long-term relationship with another woman. She said her family at first disowned her for divorcing, then again for being involved with a woman, but now they have changed their minds.
“We don't all find out who we are the day we turn twenty-two or twenty-six,” said Sanchez, who also runs a domestic violence program, teaches homeless men how to read, and is attending graduate school. “I am not the same woman I was twenty years ago, and I won't be the same woman I am now in ten years, or even in a month.”
—30—
The Elegant Gathering: Susan
There were times, just days ago, when I would stand in front of the mirror in the tiny bathroom just off the kitchen, push my hips against the side of the counter and look into my own eyes—wondering just who in the world I was looking at. Knowing in that same instant that somehow, somewhere along the road of my life I have lost myself. I have misplaced my soul, my heart, the entire direction of my being.
Truth be told, I am so embarrassed and sad that I am pregnant and that I have let all those years of my life slip away that it would be so easy for me to run away and hide and never come back. Thankfully my friends have held me up and carried me across my own kitchen floor to these glorious days on the road. They have really saved me by giving me hope and unconditional love. Now, it's my turn, my turn to put my life back together.
I really don't know what happened to me. I don't know why I married the wrong man, and then never had the courage to leave. I don't know why I picked up with another man just because he was good in bed. I could guess at all these answers, and in the end my decisions would all come back to me, and that is the only truth I know for sure. Whatever has happened to me has been my own doing.
This baby that I had no business creating has brought me to this decision and the true test of what I really need to do with my life. Is it too late? Is it ever too late for any of us to start over and try again? My life is a question, or it has been a question, and the end to all of that feels so close. As close as anything I have ever held to my heart.
Still there is no clear moment in my head after all these days of thinking and walking and talking that I know for sure where my heart scattered.
I suppose now, now that I know about the world and about sorrow, about the fact that not all of us can control who and how we love, I suppose I could have known even then that I was marrying a man who would always be looking over his shoulder for something or someone better.
God almighty, we were young. I was nineteen and John was barely twenty, and we were both desperate for something. We thought that must have been each other. We had been friends all through grade school and high school, and then into those first few years of college. Friends, but not close enough even then. “I just need you,” he told me over and over again. “Please, please marry me.”
John never did say that he loved me but in my heart, my unwise and young and very tender heart, I had loved him for forever. So I said yes, and we literally got up from the floor of his apartment and walked downtown and got married. It took about twenty minutes. Then as quick as you can close a door or turn a page or change directions on a highway, the course of my own life was moved in a way that I could never have imagined all those years ago.
The story is much simpler than it might seem now. Now that I have turned down a different road and then again onto this highway that has seemed like heaven to me this past week. It has been hard, especially this last day or so, to think that something like this, this walking and talking and these precious moments, was always there for the having . . . always right outside my door, and I never once thought to grab it up and run for the hills. But I have learned in these days to stop lingering on what could have been and to simply head for what I need now.
What's whacked is that John did love me, and I'm sure in his own perverted way, he probably still does love me. Mostly because we are connected by our children, by the son and daughter who came so quickly I barely had time to stop and recall how they were conceived. Some of my friends laugh when I say that at least John was a good father. They laugh because he was in and out of our lives so much they can't imagine how it worked, and how my children ended up with college scholarships and goals in their lives.