Authors: Meg Howrey
It’s not something I can do for myself, though. I sometimes wish I had a me for me, if you know what I mean. Maybe then … well.
You know, if I danced almost anywhere else but here I might be a principal dancer. If I went to Philly, or Cleveland, or Boston? I might dance Odette/Odile, and Juliet, and Giselle. Might. Maybe. It’s hard to say just now because I’ve kind of lost track of where I am, but definitely this used to be the case.
But it’s too late now. I’d always know the truth. My stardom would be conditional. How could I have the balls to step forward and accept roses and ovations at the end of
Swan Lake
when I know that I am only wearing the crown because I have shrunk my
Lake
down to a manageable size? Odette, Queen of the Puddle.
I’m not really clear on what it is I am supposed to do now.
Oh yeah, what I should do is focus on myself now, right? Get out from under my sister’s shadow? Spread my wings and learn to fly? Fuck you.
Now don’t get excited. I’m not crazy. I know this because although I keep talking and talking to you, I don’t really imagine that you are saying anything back.
I like how quiet you are, which allows me to go on performing.
• • •
After rehearsal I met Mara for a chat and a bite to eat. Another ritual. You can trace the trajectories of our lives through the progression of our “bites.” First they were blueberry muffins toasted with butter, or chocolate croissants. A once-a-week treat. Then it was whole-wheat toast. Then fruit salad. Now it’s usually just tea lattes. Green tea for the antioxidants. Soy milk. So it’s really more of a deterioration than a progression.
But I’m grateful that Mara and I have more or less kept our friendship intact. It hasn’t always been easy. I know she thinks that Gwen and I have a fucked-up relationship. I know she would take my side if I ever complained about Gwen, which is one of the reasons I never do. There’s also the difference in our careers.
Something happened to us both in our first year in the company. What happened with Mara was that she went on for an injured girl in
Giselle
with only five minutes’ notice. The girl’s position downstage left meant that Mara had to reverse every step from her own position upstage right, and reverse every swirly corps traffic pattern, and in some cases move eight counts earlier in the music than she was used to, or four counts later. She didn’t make a single mistake. This sealed her fate. Mara became “dependable” and “useful.” The girl you could go to in any jam, the girl who could teach incoming corps girls the choreography. It changed her. I mean physically changed her. She has become more square, more solid looking. Inasmuch as an underweight ballerina can look substantial, she looks substantial. She no longer makes fun of herself, and is only occasionally sarcastic. It’s
not good when you feel you can no longer afford to be self-deprecating.
What happened to me in our first year was that I was given the second cast lead in a new ballet, a world premiere, by an important German choreographer. Being second cast meant that I would get to dance all the matinees and the Wednesday nights. A huge honor for a new girl.
The ballet was called
Those Who Are Left Behind
. Very modern, which in dance tends to mean no pointe shoes and everyone wearing drab costumes in colors like mustard and olive, and lifts where you’re held by something odd, like your knee. I played the role of a young girl whose fiancé must go off and join the military (green tunics with black sashes) because there is War. The village of the girl is then destroyed by the attacking army (all in puce with beige sashes), after which she is forced into prostitution (red sash) to save her family. At the end, the soldier returns, but the girl is too ashamed and broken to face him. War has killed their love (and, apparently, wiped out the supply of sashes). In the last moment of the ballet, I had a little limping step that carried me downstage away from my soldier love. Then I had to pause, begin to turn around, decide not to, then limp slowly offstage. A moment that the
New York Times
would say “contained all the pathos, the loss, the brutality of war itself. This is the new dancer to watch.”
It wasn’t a great ballet—the little meaningful gestures were not terribly original, the music was on the wrong side of atonal, and the sashes were a bloody nuisance—but I loved it anyway. I had hung on every word the choreographer said during rehearsals and read books set during World War II to try to get myself “into” the role. I thought about it all the time, although
I suspect that the little limping movement at the end of the ballet had more to do with the pathos of my own ambition than the pathos of war. But I had that moment onstage, that moment when you’re not thinking about steps, and you’re not counting music, and dance—real dance—comes out of your body and you are extraordinary and it is beyond any small, dull word like “happiness” or “satisfaction.” You make the gods jealous in such a moment, I suppose.
To keep the gods from destroying me, I’ve held on to my sarcasm and my self-deprecation. And they’ve become my alibi for whenever it occurs to me that I have not quite become the person I wanted to be. I suppose I do have rivals in the company, but none of them is as challenging as the ever-present, alternate version of me: always one giant unreachable step ahead. And then there’s Gwen. Even with a splintered knee and god knows what swirling around in her head, she will be forever better than messy, middling me, and we both know it.
When I got to Café Margot later this afternoon, Mara had a table and was flipping through a brochure.
“Columbia,” she said, turning it over so I could see the cover. “They have that program for performing artists? I’m thinking of taking some classes.”
“Really?” I dumped my bag in the extra chair, on top of Mara’s bag. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Mike and I have been talking about it. I’ve also been thinking about … you know.… maybe. Having a kid.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I know, I know,” Mara said. “But I feel something changing in me. It’s weird.”
“Actually, it’s natural, right? It’s a normal thing for a woman? To want to have a baby? I feel like I read that somewhere.”
Mara laughed and put her elbows on the table, cupping her chin with one hand. She’s got the mother of all diamond rings. Her husband, Mike, is a hedge fund dude. He and Andrew really bonded over the whole “being an outsider in the ballet world” thing. At gala events they would beeline for each other. I think Mike was more upset than I was that Andrew and I broke up. And that’s another thing that keeps things cool with Mara and me, I guess. I may be a soloist, and she’s still corps and unlikely to ever be promoted, but she’s got a loft in Soho. And someone who loves her. And maybe a shot at being happy with a normal life.
“So what’s going on?” Mara asked.
I’ve been sort of waiting for Mara to instigate a big “talk” about Gwen. She should think about taking some psychology classes at Columbia, she’s really good with all that shit. And she’s pretty much the only one who has a clue about how things really are with my sister and me. I appreciate her perspective, but Gwen isn’t her sister. She can’t understand.
“Gwen’s doing really well, actually. But the doctors want her to take her time rehabbing.”
“I meant with you,” Mara said.
“A pinched nerve, I think,” I said. “Iri worked on me for a bit. It’s not great but I think I can muscle through it.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”
I didn’t, and so I shrugged and changed the subject and
Mara let it pass. But, for a second it was like a little window opened up between us. And I could see through it to Mara and a place where we could be truly good friends, truly important to each other and intimate and trusting. Almost like a time portal, back to the days when it was just me and her and there were no husbands or sisters or ballets I got and she didn’t, or visions in mirrors we couldn’t escape or smash.
There is always a beginning to everything. The house lights go down and the audience settles into their seats. The conductor comes out in a spotlight. The people in the first few rows applaud the conductor and the rest of the audience starts clapping too, even though they don’t see him yet. The conductor bows, turns to the orchestra. There’s usually a nice moment where he seems to be taking them in, focusing their attention. Then he raises his arms, inhales, and the overture begins.
In life though, most beginnings are so quiet you don’t even know that they are happening. Suddenly you’re in the middle of things as if there were no beginning at all. Maybe you’ll try to retrace your steps, but it’s a useless endeavor because you’re always going to miss the essential, initial clue. You might say, “Oh, here is where it all began,” but you’re always going to be too late.
My second year in New York. Gwen was at the school and Mara and I were in the company and the three of us shared this apartment.
Mara and I took the bedroom and Gwen slept on a futon in the living room because she was the neatest and if it had been me, certainly, the thing would never have gotten folded up or the bedding put away in the closet. Mara’s parents cosigned the lease for us, and gave us some old furniture, even though they were upset that their daughter felt the need to move out. City parents are very protective, maybe because they know more about what can happen. Our parents were still operating under the impression that my life in New York—and now Gwen’s—consisted of one Teflon-coated bubble of ballet. This was largely true, but there were all kinds of things inside that bubble with us. Just because you are in a nunnery doesn’t mean you won’t get fucked.
It started with small things. I wonder how many of them I missed before I noticed the “first” one?
Mara and I had come home early from rehearsal. Gwen was still at the school. We were doing Pilates in the living room and needed an extra pillow. Get Gwen’s, I told Mara. She went to the closet.
“Kate, come here.”
Mara was holding Gwen’s pillowcase. Only there wasn’t any pillow in it. It was stuffed with paper. Paper dolls, that is. The kind you cut out from books like
First Ladies of the United States
or
Film Stars of the Golden Age
. Mara handed me one—a Josephine Baker costume, maybe. Meticulously cut along every thin line and around every octagonal bead and with every feather expertly delineated.
“Your sister plays with dolls?” Mara whispered, laughing. She wasn’t being mean. She liked Gwen. But it was so odd.
“Oh god, no,” I said. I was mortified for Gwen. “That’s her old collection from home.”
“There’s like, a thousand of them in here,” Mara said.
I had never seen Gwen cut out a paper doll in my life and I knew that she hadn’t moved in with these things because I had helped her unpack. I was surprised, though my concern was not so much for my sister but for how she might be perceived by others.
“Yeah, it took her years,” I said.
“And now she sleeps on them?”
“She must have just put them in there. Look, here’s her pillow.”
Later I asked Gwen about it and she told me that she couldn’t sleep at night and it was just something to do with her hands. She assured me that she didn’t
play
with the dolls. She couldn’t turn on the TV because it might wake us up, and she needed to do something. She would knit, she said, if she knew how.
“You could do your homework,” I suggested. Gwen was taking the same correspondence course that I had done.
“That takes me like, five minutes,” she said.
I didn’t really buy this because Gwen had never been that great at school, but I let it go. I told her that if Mara asked, it was an old collection that she hung on to for sentimental reasons. Gwen asked if there was something wrong with cutting out paper dolls and I asked why she hid them if she didn’t think it was weird. Gwen did not reply to this, and, impressed with my sophistry, I forgot to ask her why she couldn’t sleep, or if she was in fact sleeping on Eleanor Roosevelt and her collection of hats.
Maybe the second thing was the baths. There is only one bathroom, and since we all needed to soak our muscles there were rules. Twenty-five minutes, tops. Long enough for the
Epsom salts to dissolve. No adding more hot water once you were in and depriving the next person of a necessary scald. Still, by the third fill the water was noticeably less hot, so legal-minded Mara suggested we rotate bath order. But Gwen said she liked going last, she didn’t mind.
Gwen started staying in there for a really long time. She took a little portable boom box and played music. At first I assumed she was masturbating, frankly. Since I shared a bed with Mara I had to take care of my own business on the bathroom rug, lying on a towel in the fetal position that I still use today for such purposes. Anyway, halfway through the year Mara started dating this boy in the company, Fabrice, and on the nights she spent with him I would hear Gwen in the bathroom talking to herself, a steady monotone under the music. If I knocked on the door or called out, “Gwen, what are you doing?” she would say, “Nothing,” and then after a moment start mumbling again. After I complained about needing to pee and brush my teeth, she started waiting until I had gone to bed. Sometimes she didn’t even turn the water on, she’d just go in, shut the door, and monologue, or whatever. For hours.
I didn’t tell Mara about it, but eventually Gwen started doing it when she was there, so I invented a story about Gwen reading aloud to herself because it helped her dyslexia. I thought this was such a good idea that I convinced myself it was true. And I started reading out loud to myself when I was in the tub. I liked the way my voice sounded with the acoustics.
But the big thing turned out to be the mouse. We all saw it one night, in the kitchen, and we all screamed and jumped on chairs, like cartoon housewives. Then there was a big debate over what to do, and we ended up getting one of those humane
traps because none of us was prepared to deal with some sort of mouse carcass or chewed-off leg or something. The guy at the hardware store gave us a rough time about the stupidity of releasing a mouse into our rodent-choked city, but we held firm. The trap was a simple little boxcar-like thing, weighted so that the door would shut on our unsuspecting guest once he had wandered in to grab his cheese. We had to upgrade the bait twice. In New York City, even vermin have aspirations. The little bastard ended up with Roquefort.