The Cranes Dance (12 page)

But lo and behold, one day we all trouped in from doing laundry and the trapdoor was down on the cage and the thing was rattling, sliding a bit over the floor. Again with the screaming and the leaping onto chairs.

Mara and I just started laughing hysterically, arguing over who was going to take it downstairs: “Pick it up!” “No, you pick it up!” “I don’t want to touch it!” “Well, I’m not touching it!” I started to pick it up, but my hands were shaking and I dropped it. Mara screamed. I screamed. The mouse screamed.

And that’s when Mara and I noticed Gwen. She was cowering in the corner of our apartment and like, clawing the wall. Literally standing with her face to the wall and … scraping it, and sort of squealing. Like she was the one in the trap.

“Oh my god, stop!” Mara said. “Gwen! Stop! That’s so creepy!” Mara was still sort of laughing. She thought Gwen was being funny.

I knew that it wasn’t Gwen’s sense of humor, to do something like that. But it was so outlandish and over the top that I was laughing too.

“Oh my god, she’s freaking out!” I shouted to Mara. “Quick, help me pick this up.”

But we were both sort of … transfixed by Gwen. It almost seemed as if she was pretending, but she didn’t stop. You know how in sci-fi movies a robot might malfunction and start sparking off electricity or repeating “System failure, repeat, system failure” while it runs itself into a wall? That’s what it looked like. Like a gizmo inside Gwen had busted.

“Wait, is she for real?” Mara asked me. “Gwen? Gwen, calm down. It’s just a mouse.”

“Gwen, stop it,” I said.

But she didn’t.

“Kate?” Mara looked at me.

“Let’s take the mouse down,” I said. “Gwen, we are taking the mouse away, okay? We’ll be right back. It’s
fine
.” I found the dustpan and slid it under the trap and turned with it to the door. Mara was trying to put her hand on Gwen’s back, but Gwen crouched down and covered her head with her hands. She wasn’t screaming exactly, because her mouth was closed, and the sound was coming out of her nose.

“GWEN, STOP IT,” I shouted.

“DON’T YELL AT HER,” Mara shouted.

Gwen started beating her head against the wall.

“Oh my god,” said Mara. “Oh my god, Kate, you have to stop her.”

“FUCK,” I yelled. “OPEN UP THE FUCKING WINDOW.”

The window of the living room opens onto a fire escape, so you have to unlatch the door with bars first, and swing that open. Mara did this and I crawled out the window, holding the dustpan in front of me. This apartment is on the fourth floor, the back of the building. Below us are the trash cans and a locked storage unit that belong to the building’s superintendent.

I threw the trap with the panicked mouse still freaking out inside it into the alleyway as hard as I could. Actually, I served it, overhand, like a tennis ball. It smacked against the storage unit and broke apart. I was already crawling back inside.

Mara was standing in the living room with the phone in her hands. Gwen was still mewling in the corner and bumping her head against the wall.

“I think we should call someone,” Mara whispered.

I went over to the corner and crouched down next to Gwen.

“You want me to call Mom and Dad?” I asked her. I put my hand between the wall and her head. “Is that what you want? Because if you don’t stop right now then I’m calling them.”

Well, she heard that all right. She quieted down instantly.

“Kate, seriously,” Mara said.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “She’s fine.”

I patted her back for a while and Mara came over and sat with us and we both said things like “Talk to us” and “The mouse is gone” and “We were scared too.” Eventually Gwen unfurled herself and went into the bathroom and shut the door and we heard the water turning on.

“Should we let her do that?” Mara whispered.

“I’m just going to take a bath,” Gwen called through the door. And then, after a moment, “Sorry.”

Mara and I had both started smoking that year although we hid it from Gwen. We stared at the bathroom door for a moment and then at each other. Mara mimed taking a drag. I nodded.

We crawled out onto the fire escape and mostly shut the window, something we had done before. We lit cigarettes and peered down into the alley, but it was getting dark and we couldn’t see anything.

“We should get a cat,” I said.

And we just smoked and then went back in and sprayed body mist around the living room, and eventually Gwen came out of the bathroom and Mara asked her if she was feeling better and Gwen said yes and that she didn’t really know what happened and I think we all played cards or something like that. By the time we went to bed it was more or less okay.

But the next day, Mara told me that she thought Gwen should go to therapy. Mara’s mom went to therapy every week, and she had sent Mara to a psychiatrist when Mara was twelve and her mom thought she was crying too much. We spoke very seriously about it, in the kinds of voices that women use when they are talking to other women about issues. This was new to me. Mostly I made jokes or complained or imitated other people or was sarcastic. So I really enjoyed listening to myself be so thoughtful and adult.

Later, I tried out the voice on Gwen. It seemed to work pretty well, and she agreed to go to therapy if I promised not to tell Mom and Dad.

“They’ll just want me to come home,” she said, which was true enough.

Mara got the name of a doctor, and I made the appointment. I went with Gwen to make sure she actually did it, and because I was paying for it. The psychiatrist’s office was on the East Side. Sure enough, Gwen balked outside the building.

“You’re going to have to do it,” she said.

“Gwen, come on,” I said.

“No, you have to be me,” she explained. “You have to go. You’re eighteen. I’m a minor. They’ll need parental consent or something.”

“No, they won’t,” I said. “You don’t even need that for an abortion, I think. It’s like, confidential.”

“They won’t give medication to a minor,” she said.

“It’s talking,” I said to her. “You just talk to them about what you’re feeling.”

“Not if you need medicine,” she said. “Then they have to tell the parents.”

“You don’t need medicine.”

“I do. I know I do.”

So we had this whole long ridiculous argument on the street and I said that if Gwen didn’t go then I would call Mom and Dad, and she said if I called Mom and Dad then that meant I wanted to ruin her life, and we went back and forth and I said, “Well, let’s just forget the whole thing,” and then she started crying.

“Please help me,” she said. “Please just this one time. I would do it for you. You’re the only one I trust.”

It’s a heady thing, to be handed a role like that. Or maybe I thought I really was helping her. It all seems kind of insane, now, in a way it didn’t then. Then it seemed like an extension of every other thing that was more or less pretend, which was pretty much my life. My name was on the call-boards for rehearsals, in the programs, on the list for dressing room C, but it never really felt like me.

Also, I didn’t want Gwen to go home.

“My name is Kate Crane,” I told the receptionist. “I have an appointment with Dr. Freiburg?”

And all the girl did was cross out the name Gwen and write Kate. While my sister and I waited in the chairs, we wrote notes to each other.

But of course it wasn’t.

My first session with Dr. Freiburg went well. I was nervous, so it was a pretty realistic performance. She had to keep telling me to breathe and I actually cried a little at one point. We talked about my history and being in a ballet company, and the stress and how I felt about it. She asked me to describe my panic attacks and what techniques I used to calm myself down. I did a lot of shrugging and gripping the arms of the chair. At the end of it all she told me that she wanted to see me once a week and that I should practice the breathing/counting thing she had demonstrated and we’d see “where we were” in a couple of sessions. There were “things” she could give me, she explained, to help, but there were side effects with these and it was always best to try other methods first.

“You’ll have to go back,” Gwen said, when I told her about the counting method. When we got home, Mara asked how it went and Gwen gave her a big hug and said that she was really
grateful that Mara had suggested it. Mara said she was very proud of her. And that night Gwen didn’t take a freakishly long bath. The three of us played cards and watched television, and Gwen seemed relaxed and happy.

“I feel better, don’t you?” Mara said, as we went to bed. “I think she’ll be okay.”

I didn’t sleep much that night. Or the next. But I won’t lie. Eventually I started sleeping just fine.

It took two more sessions before Dr. Freiburg prescribed benzodiazepines for me/Gwen. By that time I had opened up a little in our sessions. By this I mean that I had started inventing things. Conversations, situations, dreams. I was very careful not to tell Dr. Freiburg anything that I actually felt, because then it would be like I really
was
in therapy, which I obviously didn’t need. And I couldn’t tell the doctor what
Gwen
was feeling, because when I asked Gwen, she wouldn’t ever describe it beyond saying that she just got stuck in her head sometimes, and it wasn’t a big deal but she needed something to help with the feeling so she could sleep. Dr. Freiburg told me that the drug enhanced a natural chemical in the body that would help calm me down.

Dr. Freiburg wasn’t all that sharp. She never smelled a rat (or a smashed mouse). Not even when my fount of invention ran dry and I started describing feelings cribbed from Ibsen or Chekhov. “Sometimes I feel like I am a seagull,” I told her. “Oh, that’s interesting,” she said.

Every six weeks I got my/Gwen’s prescription filled. At first I doled out the pill to her every morning, but eventually I just handed her the bottle. If you do something like take a whole bunch and overdose, I told her, I will absolutely never forgive
you. She said she would never betray my trust like that. She said it in the adult woman discussing serious issues voice, which I guess she learned from me.

There are things you do when you are a teenager, or a dancer, or just a girl, I guess.
You cut your food up in special ways, or you cut yourself, or paper dolls. You pretend that there is an invisible audience watching you all the time, and you do things to impress them or pretend that they didn’t see what you just did because their live video feed was interrupted somehow. You steal things or tell lies or speak to strangers in a Russian accent. You have sex with someone you love, or with someone who gets you really drunk. You lie to your parents, your boyfriend, yourself, your therapist. You cheat on your homework or do other people’s homework for money. You get up, you take class, you rehearse, you perform, you go to bed. How do you decide which of these things are truly crazy and which are just being alive?

You realize, too late, that you are that sneakiest of all beings. You are a giver. You gave your sister drugs. You started her on a path from which there is possibly no return. You should have said no. You should have ruined her life then, instead of letting her ruin it in much worse ways later on.

But Gwen got better that year. She seemed fine. She seemed happy, or at least not unhappier than anybody else. Who’s happy? Gwen didn’t make a ton of friends in her class, but she was so clearly a star in the making that it would have been impossible anyway. There were no more hysterical scenes. For Gwen’s birthday, Mara and I got her a cat, and she named it Clive. She even made jokes about it catching mice, although we never saw one again. At the end-of-the-year performance,
Gwen made my heart stop, she was so beautiful, so serene, so absolutely perfect. When Marius gave her a contract I was waiting outside in the hallway and she flew into my arms and we jumped up and down, hugging each other. She told me that I didn’t have to go to therapy anymore.

And she became a star for real.

You buy a humane trap and you end up killing the thing anyway.

I’ve been ignoring the pain in my neck, which I can’t do anymore. I need to get out of here. But to get up and leave would be to pass the corner where Gwen crouched and banged her head against the wall. I shouldn’t have left her here when I moved in with Andrew. I should have forced her to move someplace else. Oh, the things I should have done.

If you were recording my story, this tape would be Exhibit A.

Oh Gwen.

Okay so when you’re trying to sort out what’s crazy and what’s not and where you might lie on the spectrum and how much guilt you can absorb, it is possible that ballet is not the most useful arena in which to position yourself for perspective.

You have to keep your head in the game. Keith, who is unabashed about his clichés, always says that. When you’re in the middle of a match, you can’t start doubting yourself or your ability, or imagining how the commentators are ripping you a new one on ESPN, or getting upset over how the trash talk that went down in the locker room is going to make you look like an ineffectual ass when you blow the match, or how when this whole bloody mess is over you’re going to relive every single point while you lie next to your palely disappointed Icelandic girlfriend, and you’re still going to have to get up the next day and hit balls, and it just never really ends or gets any easier.

My nerves felt flayed today. Everybody bothered me. Company class. Joan with her pile of pointe shoes and therapy tools,
rolling and stretching away and sewing ribbons with that goddamn earnest conscientious look on her face. Yuri and his ridiculous warm-up pants in DayGlo colors. Simone with her sexy leotard and her perfect glossy bob and her air of living a considerably better life than everyone else because she’s married to a gazillionaire and does live a considerably better life than everyone else. All the gay guys being so gay. All the straight guys being so straight. All the South Americans being so South American. Everybody who seemed perfectly fine about taking class and not at all tortured. Like Andrea, who never just throws her hair up in a clip, but always has this perfect cinnamon roll of a bun. The upside-down Us of each and every one of her symmetrically rayed hairpins oppressed me all through barre. And Nicole was teaching because she’s rehearsing this Balanchine ballet we’ll be doing in rep in a few weeks and so we all have to suffer through her ridiculous class, even those of us who aren’t cast in that ballet. Former Balanchine ballerinas make me crazy. None of them have ever recovered from being in the presence of the Master, and they have this weird mystical sexual love of dance that utterly confounds me. I would envy it if it looked less fucked up … like they weren’t all still hoping Mr. B will stop by and pat them on the head, that their entire lives weren’t an offering to a dead man, that they all didn’t still get up every morning, draw on black liquid eyeliner, brush out the dry ends of their waist-length hair like it was 1969 and they’re still wondering why you can’t get Tab anymore.