Girl Through Glass (29 page)

I stand backstage waiting. The lights in the auditorium dim. A hush falls over the audience. The series organizer takes the stage to introduce me—the final presenter in the New York Library for the Performing Arts spring lecture series,
Women in Dance Through the Ages
:
Goddesses, Sylphs, and Superheroes
.

The room is filled, I'm pleased to see. “For today's lecture,” the organizer, George, says, “We are honored to have a special guest, one who straddles two worlds. Kate Randell trained as a dancer at the School of American Ballet in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the final era of the great George Balanchine's reign. Randell went on to get her PhD in dance history and performance theory from UC at Berkeley. As a feminist scholar, she has written about Balanchine aesthetics. Her book
Corporeality Subverted: The (Dis)embodied Feminine in the Aesthetic of George Balanchine, 1958–1982,
is published by Yale University Press. We are fortunate to have her as a scholar in residence at the New York Library for the Performing Arts this year.”

A healthy burst of applause. “Thank you,” I say and step to the lectern. The back of the room rises into dimness, but I can see the faces in front.

It's been a good year since I left Ohio. I have a nice apartment on the East Side. I have a few friends here, too—I've never needed many. Felicia, Alain, and Kevin, sort of. The beginning of something. Kevin and I have seen each other a half dozen times since I
moved here. We seem to enjoy each other's company, which is a strange thing to say of one's son. But there it is.

An essay on Nijinska, “Modernism's Midwife,” will be coming out in a few months. I seem to have found something in the administrative part of my residency, and there's talk of hiring me as a program director next year. Bernie was kind enough to give me a good recommendation (since this position includes no teaching). I'm starting to be in demand as a speaker. The extra income from the speaker's fees is what has allowed me to buy the shoes I'm wearing tonight, a gorgeous pair of red Manolo Blahniks. I have even been choreographing original work again, for the first time in years. I'm working on a group piece. I've found three young dancers and am renting a studio in Bushwick for our rehearsals.

Sioban withdrew her complaint before it was heard for review. I'll never know exactly why, but I do know that she started seeing a counselor at student services. We met once to discuss her “No Credit” in my class. She sat across from me and swiveled her body this way and that. She looked at me with her intense face, as if she were searching for something. I tried to hold my ground. She gave me a grimace that I realized was meant to be a smile. “I have abandonment issues,” she said. She gathered her hair into a tighter ponytail. She had her sober scientist-student face on, pale except for her excitable acne scars. “But you
left,
and I didn't
die
.” She makes her grimace-smile again. “That's progress.”

Yes
,
I thought,
you didn't die
. I wanted to say
thank you
to her but I couldn't. It was impossible. Still, I thanked her in my mind. I feel gratitude toward her. I will never forget the press of her long body into mine, and the taste of her, and how our moment together strangely spurred in me some tenderness for myself that I haven't lost.

I know why now. Why she, of all my students. It was the simplicity of her beautiful unencumbered form bringing me back to the time when the body—my body—was elemental. The world was elemental, too. I moved through it like each step mattered. And maybe because it did to
him
. To one man. Maurice. That was the gift he gave me.

Now at the lectern, I pick up my clicker and begin my talk: “We all
know by now how the Balanchine myth begins—in 1946, Lincoln Kirstein freed George Balanchine from his duties as a choreographer of circus elephants and placed him in charge of the first great American ballet company. This became the New York City Ballet.” A few knowing exclamations, and I say, “I see I'm among friends here. Balanchine has become a legend for modernizing ballet for America. Except for trotting out the party dresses for the annual
Nutcracker
bonanza (which could fund an entire NYC Ballet season), he eschewed the old stories and dramas. No
Giselle
. No
Swan Lake
. He is credited with inventing the ‘Balanchine look'—the
pinhead
ballerina—hipless girls with long, lean limbs, and skin, as he once famously said, ‘the color of a peeled apple.' In the Balanchine universe, the ballerina did not think. She became a vessel for his genius. Thus, the master chose his dancers young, driven only by an animal instinct to dance. She appears onstage in a simple unitard, perhaps a few feathers in her hair. She is no princess, no swan lady, she is simply female; she dances. ‘Ballet is woman,' Balanchine opined. She is a chord on his piano, a drumstick to his drum. Balanchine looked for girls whose servitude to Terpsichore, goddess of dance, made her worthy of worship. But where to find her? And what did she look like? What did that mean for ballet in America?”

I click through my images of Balanchine history—the early years: Tanaquil Le Clercq in
Stars and Stripes.
When I reach the 1950s and Maria Tallchief, I pause. Look around the room. The faces are interested. I move on to more examples from the middle period of the 1960s, Balanchine's minimalist leotard-and-tights stage, severe lines and classical myths, his Martha Graham moment. I click to a screen of Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, at their most Olympian, in
Agon
. A few gasps at the extraordinary bodies on view. “But what of the Balanchine body?” I say. “Much has been made of it, but it bears reexamining from a feminist perspective. In Balanchine's
choreography, no longer was the woman pirouetted on the arm of the prince. She stepped forward on her own by embodying her own physical power. It was no longer sublimated.” I switch to the famous photo of Allegra Kent leaping with abandon in
Seven Deadly Sins
.

“Kirstein wrote, ‘American young girls were not sylphides; they were basketball champions and queens of the tennis court, whose proper domain was athletics. They were long-legged, long-necked, slim-hipped, and capable of endless acrobatic virtuosity. The drum majorettes, the cheerleader of the high-school football team of the thirties filled Balanchine's eye. . . . The pathos and suavity of the dying swan, the purity and regal behavior of the elder ballerina, were to be replaced by a raciness and alert celerity which claimed as its own the gaiety of sport and the skills of the champion athlete.'”

I click and the final image comes up—a sixteen-year-old Darci Kistler in class leaping, her colt's legs flying apart, her wholesome face gleaming. I like to leave this one up on the screen. While I finish out my presentation, I let them drink in her bright exertion. Do they notice her half-lidded eyes, her slack cheeks—the shock that comes with seeing someone so far off the ground looking like they are asleep? She looks as if she were sleepwalking.

I'm nearing the home stretch. This kind of lecturing is not really like teaching—it's more like the performances of the old days—the warm lights, and the knowing darkness and intimacies of anonymous faces in the audience.

The applause splits the silence—it feels real, enthusiastic.

Next is the Q&A. They raise the lights, and a microphone is brought into the aisle. The curator of the Balanchine archives asks a question about the images, a graduate student asks me to clarify a point from my book, someone asks a question about dance notation systems that has nothing to do with my talk and doesn't seem to really have a question in it. Just when I am wondering if anyone really was listening at all, a wisp of a girl steps up to the microphone. She wears her hair long, her feet are splayed duck-like, and she is dressed in cutoff jean shorts and a T-shirt over tights and espadrilles. She's
clearly a bunhead, and I'm amazed that she is here, at my lecture. She has a soft voice.
What do you remember about—
I have to strain to hear her halting words—
being a student at SAB when
—here she fades out again—
Mr. B was still alive.
She says this like a statement, not a question.

It all comes back to me then: this feeling of flying through the air, Mr. B saying: “Don't think—do!” And the Tchaikovsky music behind us as we flew across the floor, the long narrow lockers and the averted stares of the other girls, the skylights, the cracked and broken pointe shoes, the blisters and calluses, the scent of Mr. B's ballerinas in the elevator, the feeling of becoming something irrefutable, becoming beautiful, defying life.

I smile. “It was a long time ago, another world. But you're a bunhead—right—I mean, a dancer?” Laughter from the good-size crowd that remains.

“As a student at SAB, I learned from Mr. B, as we called him, the great power of my body, but I did not have the ability to understand that power. I loved going to class because I loved to feel what my body was capable of doing. It amazed me. But when it was over—in my case, I had to leave the school for external circumstances—it was gone. Maybe I wrote my book to get it back.”

“So you don't hate him—Mr. B?” I'm shocked that she would ask this of an academic. The bizarre simplicity of it.

As a child, I had too much power, a strange power, the power of the object. It is passive, but it is total. When I hear the gorgeous notes of a child pianist or the lyrical call of a child violinist, I think,
poor child;
I think,
lucky child
. Now that I am a grown person—a
grown-up
—I see what we desire from them. I think of Maurice saying, “You were bright, you shone.” It's like pebbles of fire. They eat it and they burn.

So you don't hate him?

But that is what some of us want and must have: to burn, to burn up,
to expire in flame.
I see an image of the earliest ballerinas who donned their shin-length tulle tutus to evoke the spirits of the other-
world at the all-too-common risk of catching fire in the gas lamps at the edge of the stage. Their offering was to make themselves combustible. And many of them died. Maurice was the first to tell me that. But it was later confirmed in the headlines I found in microfiche while researching an article on the earliest ballerinas:
Another ballerina goes up in flames, suffers third-degree burns
.

Yes, I loved him as only a girl could love him with stars in her eyes, with dreams in her head.
And he gave me ashes.

But first he showed me the fire. And for a moment it burned. And I stood in it, it was all around me.

I hear myself saying, “No, I don't hate Mr. B.”

I look at this young girl and I feel like I'm seeing myself thirty years ago. Her hair is pulled back, her eyes are hooded, her cheeks without blemish, her body articulated and slight. She has the sinewy ethereal quality of a serious dancer. I know how hard she has worked to obtain it. Now I'm up here on this podium, shifting in my red high heels and black suit. What do we have in common? That girl is still in me. She is
back
in me. And as I open my mouth I find that I can't say what I've planned. This year away from academia, getting to know my son, has been like a long sleep that has left me refreshed. I feel like I have finally woken up.

What of that time in my life? It is finally past. The guilt is past. And the straining after beauty. But do I regret it? I find, with surprise, that I can't.

I give her a gift I never thought I could. I say, “I loved him as only a girl could love him. With stars in her eyes, with dreams in her head,” I say.

I smile and I mean it. I close my laptop and pack up my things.

I owe a great debt to many people for bringing this novel to fruition and helping to bring it into the world. Gratitude to my terrific agent, PJ Mark, for his sustaining vision and perceptive advice, and my brilliant editor, Terry Karten, for her confidence in me as a writer and uncompromising belief in this novel's potential. I am fortunate to have found them both. They have made this book more than I ever thought it could be. Thanks also to Shelly Perron for her keen eye and attention to the logic of my fictional worlds. I am also grateful to my many readers of the various drafts: Jacob Molyneux, whose perceptive readings gave this book a focus, and Jean Kwok, without whom it's safe to say this book would not have happened, and to my mother, Nancy Wilson, whose steadfast encouragement and keen literary sensibility have made all the difference. Marya Spence, who pulled it from the slush pile, and Tori Marlan, Joy Katz, Zoe Zolbrod, Eliza Amon, Samantha McFerrin, Natasha Chuk, Travis Holland and the Knight-Wallace Fellows writers workshop, Len Neufeld, and Randee Falk for all their insights and generous gifts of time. And to Jill Dearman, a great coach. To my wonderful husband, Josh Neufeld, my first reader, and with me every step of the way, thank you.

Special thanks to my advisers and interpreters of the dance world, whose insights (especially into SAB) helped give this book a depth and richness that augmented my own dance experience: Jennifer Scanlon, Maydelle Liss, Karina Beznicki, Carolyn Hall, and Laura Flowers. For a window into academia and dance, I am grateful to UCLA professor Lionel Popkin and University of Michigan professor Beth Genne.

For granting me time for writing, I am deeply grateful to the Patricia Rowe Willrich Fellowship at Stanford University, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, Byrdcliffe Art Colony, and The Corporation of Yaddo.

I am also grateful to my teachers and mentors, from whom I've learned so much and whose words have resonated through the years: Tobias Wolff, John L'Heureux, Elizabeth Tallent, Gilbert Sorrentino, Daniel Orozco, Jaimy Gordon, Roger Skillings, the Stegner Fellows, Amy Davis, and Charles and Julia Eisendrath.

Though this book is fiction and I myself lived—and danced—as a child in the late 1970s and 1980s, the following books especially helped me fill out my understanding and gave me historical context:
Balanchine: A Biography
by Bernard Taper;
Balletomania: Then and Now
by Arnold Haskell;
Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal
by Toni Bentley;
Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet
by Jennifer Homans;
Victorian Ballet-girl: The Tragic Story of Clara Webster
by Ivor Guest;
But First a School: The First Fifty Years of the School of American Ballet
by Jennifer Dunning;
Dance: A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing
by Lincoln Kirstein;
Once a Dancer: An Autobiography
by Allegra Kent; and the absolutely terrific documentary
Ballets Russes
. As well, repeated visits to the dance collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts provided invaluable insights. I am indebted to all of the dance scholars, reviewers, and dance lovers who have transmitted their curiosity and passion through words, have written about dance, a most ephemeral art, and in doing so have helped me understand just a little bit more about the fascinating history that I brushed against as a child. My deep gratitude to them all.

I stole liberally from my childhood in creating Mira's fictional world. I am so grateful for the love and support of my whole family,
and especially my own wonderful parents, Nancy and Robert Wilson, for giving me a childhood of abiding love and security, so different from Mira's. Thank you to Martha Rosler for inspiration. Sandhya Nankani for teaching me the ways of a detective. And Warren Wilson for saving those files. Also: Jill Verrillo, Julia Targ, Patricia Flynn, Joan Arnold, Sarah Dohrmann, Susan Karwoska, Katherine Burger, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Ashley van der Grinten, and Creative Conversations. And my wonderful daughter, Phoebe, for patiently understanding my long attention to this book.