Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  Sometimes while I’m sitting there, she’ll abandon her exercises and dance for me. Today she began with Clara’s first solo from The Nutcracker. It’s a pretty little divertissement, quick and pert, and I remember how it delighted the Christmas crowds the year she danced it.

  But just before she reached the point where Fritz is supposed to snatch the nutcracker from her hands, her steps changed, and she was dancing something I had never seen, a haunting, jarring dance that began with a series of slow, pensive arabesques from which she collapsed into a knock-kneed, flat-footed second position. Then, with her feet still spread in second, she rose en pointe, her open legs making her look unsettlingly strong and tall. From there she flung herself into a run of quick, tight, classical turns, ending again with her heels out, her ankles cocked, her elbows up. Then again she rose into a faultless arabesque.

  So compelling was her dancing that at some point as I was watching her, I found myself believing I could hear the music she was dancing to, a discordant and disturbing music, a music of contrasts and quick reversals. There was a sense of suppression, a feeling of waiting to it. Yet for all its tight control, there was also the disconcerting feeling of something wild rising, as though some untamed thing were being unleashed by those cocked ankles and crooked elbows, by those clean turns and perfect leaps, as if some wilderness in Eva that I had never known was struggling to surface.

  It was embarrassing to see her dance that way, so unlike my composed and graceful sister, and I was thinking of leaving, of returning to the 2?’s, when suddenly she stopped, her hands on her hips, her left foot pointed out in second, her head turned to the right. She held that pose for a beat, and then she shifted her weight to her left foot, her right foot shot out, and her head snapped in the opposite direction, as though she could sense something approaching behind her which she wasn’t yet ready to turn and face. Then she dropped her hands, rolled her head, and broke the moment by gasping, “What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure,” I answered. “It’s good, I guess. Anyhow, it’s different. Interesting. Why don’t you keep going?”

  She gave an ironic half-laugh and said, between deep breaths, “That’s when my partner’s supposed to make his entrance. Then comes the pas de deux.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “The opening of Tzigane. Katherine Lee was understudying it, and I used to watch her work on it till my bus came. So I picked up a little of it myself.”

  “Did you ever dance it with a partner?”

  “No.” We were both silent for a moment, and then she said, “But that’s okay. I always liked leaps better than lifts, anyway. Stupid partners, sweating on you and heaving you around like a hunk of meat.”

  She gave a glissade and a plié and flung herself into a grand jeté so high and wide that she seemed suspended in both air and time. When she finally consented to return to earth, she came down in a plié so easy that only the thump of her shoes on the floor gave any clue effort was involved in her leap. Then she broke into one of the peasant dances from Giselle, a sprightly little thing, with quick steps, a tossed head, and arms lithe and teasing. It was a wonderfully deceptive dance, a dance so apparently simple it was hard to remember that every movement was part of an aesthetics that defies both physics and anatomy.

  “Bravo!” I cried when she finished, though my voice sounded too small to fill the void her dancing had left. She gave me a wry little country curtsey, and I left her to stretch out her legs, mop the sweat from her face, remove the shreds of her renovated shoes, and come out to fix dinner with me in the last of the day’s dim light.

  The spring Eva was twelve, when our family made its semi-yearly trek to San Francisco to the ballet, she rode home as silent and distant as our mother, staring out the car window beyond the faint reflection of her face to the moving, light-spangled darkness. While our mother’s moodiness evaporated in a day or so, Eva’s remained. And intensified. She began to talk about ballet lessons.

  “No, sweet,” our mother said, “I won’t let you ruin your life like that. Ballet’s horrible for you. It’ll make you neurotic and anorexic and narcissistic and arthritic and illiterate. It’s unnatural. Look at what it did to me.”

  Our father looked up from his paper to ask, “What did it do to you?” and Eva said, “Please—”

  “It’s too far. To find decent classes, we’d have to drive at least to San Francisco. I won’t have your feet ruined by some wannabe teacher in Redwood who can’t wait to get you en pointe.”

  “I could ride into Redwood with Father and then take the bus from there.”

  “You’re too young.”

  “Why don’t you give me lessons?” Eva asked.

  “I always hated teaching. I hated putting up with all the little girls who just wanted to wear pink tutus, and I hated having to tyrannize the few girls who were any good. It’s brutally hard work.

  “And besides,” she added, playing what she considered her trump card, “you’re too old to start dancing. Any dancer with any chance at all began when she was five or six—eight at the very latest. There’ll be no more dancers in this family, and that’s final.”

  But a day or two later she was calling down to her friends in the city, trying to get recommendations for a ballet school. She swore—and our father laughed—when she learned that the best teacher north of the city had her studio in Redwood.

  “Well,” she sighed, “Eva’s her own person.”

  “And she’s certainly your daughter,” added our father.

  The following week, Eva attended her first lesson, all gangling knees and elbows in a class of swaybacked, potbellied six-year-olds. It was our mother’s hope that Eva was attracted to the lights and sequins and not to the dance itself. She wanted to believe that the pain and tedium of practice would make Eva lose interest. But Eva loved that mix of work and sweat. She loved the freedom and demand of dance, and she loved dancing—both for herself and for an audience. She loved to share her passion with us earthbound, wordbound mortals.

  From the beginning she lived to practice, and in six months she was outdancing the girls her age who had been taking lessons since they were preschoolers. Six months later she had the lead in the school’s recital, and six months after that she began to take the bus down to the city two days a week for classes with the San Francisco Ballet School. Her Redwood teacher was thrilled, her teacher in San Francisco said she had promise, and even our mother had to admit Eva had a good extension and a strong turnout.

  But when her periods became inconsistent and she danced until her blisters bled, our mother showed her own twisted feet to Eva and begged her to give up ballet. “It’s no life,” she said. “Please don’t be a dancer, sweet. There’s too much of you to give it all to one thing. And what will you do when you’re thirty-five, and your career’s over, when all you know is ballet, and you can’t even walk?”

  When Eva first announced that she wanted lessons, I hardly noticed, although, as always, I was automatically on her side. After all, Eva was my sister. She was my playmate, my best friend, my should-have-been-twin, and whatever she wanted, I wanted unquestioningly for her. But after she had been dancing for a while, my enthusiasm began to pale even as hers grew. The hours she used to spend with me—playing in the forest, working in the house on one of our many projects, or spinning out never-ending games of Pretend in the clearing—were now the hours she devoted to lessons and practice. At first I felt puzzled and a little hurt, and I, too, kept waiting for Eva to give up ballet and return to me.

  Later, when it was clear that no matter how I pleaded or what I promised, Eva would not quit dancing, I cut the ribbons off her first pair of toe shoes. She was furious when she discovered what I had done to the slippers she had coveted for so long.

  “Nell’s ruined my life,” she shrieked, racing into the workroom where Mother was bent over her loom and I was hanging around in a state of restless boredom.

  “Well, Eva’s ruined mine!” I flared.

>   My mother took one look at the severed ribbons, sighed, and set down the butterfly of silk she had been using for weft. “No one can ruin anyone else’s life,” she said. “Settle down, Eva. Penelope, bring me the sewing basket.”

  While she sewed the ribbons back into place, and Eva sulked in her bedroom, Mother talked to me.

  “Why the sabotage, Nellie?” she asked, threading a needle with pink thread.

  “Eva won’t play with me. She’s always practicing. And anyway, it’s no good for her.”

  Mother sighed again. “Well, it’s not what I’d have chosen for her either. But if she’s decided to be a dancer, then surely we want her to be the best dancer she can possibly be.”

  “But she never plays with me anymore.”

  “You can’t make her play with you. Nell, I know there’s a gap in your life right now. But it’s up to you to figure out how to fill it.”

  “But—”

  “She’s her own person, sweetheart. And, like it or not, so are you.”

  She raised Eva’s shoe to her lips and bit the thread that anchored the reattached ribbon. “Here,” she said, handing me the mended shoes with a smile so warm it might have melted rock, “go give these to your sister.”

  So despite Mother’s misgivings and my loneliness, Eva kept dancing. She seemed to live on nothing but apples, broccoli, yogurt, and air. But she never got injured, was never sick, and slowly Mother became convinced that perhaps her daughter was meant to be a dancer, and slowly I got used to the fact that my sister had a life that extended beyond my own. For her fourteenth birthday, Father laid Mylar over the hardwood floor in the back room. He hung a barre along one wall, covered the opposite wall with mirrors, and there Eva stayed until someone managed to coax or bribe or command her out.

  By that time we were all in a well-established routine. Every morning Eva rode into town with Father, while I studied and chafed in the still house, and Mother worked on her tapestries. Three days a week Eva took morning and afternoon classes with Miss Markova in Redwood. Tuesdays and Fridays she caught the bus to San Francisco to take classes with the company, and on the weekends she danced at home, trying to give herself a harder workout on her own than either of her teachers would have. Another year, everyone was saying—certainly by next spring—and she’ll be ready to audition with the company. Another year and there will be no stopping her.

  But that summer—the summer Eva turned sixteen—was the summer we first realized that Mother was sick. She died the following spring, and less than a year after that the buses had quit running into the city and there was no longer gas enough to drive to town three times a week for classes. At first, Eva talked of moving to San Francisco, or at least into Redwood where she could live with Miss Markova and keep up with her classes. But our father was so distraught at the thought of her leaving and everyone seemed so certain that things would be back to normal by fall, that nothing ever came of her plans.

  Of everything Eva suffered when the power was fading and the gas was disappearing, I think the hardest part for her wasn’t having to give up classes or postpone her audition or even do without partners or new toe shoes, but was having to dance without music. Every time the power went off, her music died, so that one minute she would be practicing grands jetés to the stately joy of Water Music, and the next she would be plummeting on musicless, as though she had just stumbled off a cliff.

  She got in the habit of making herself dance whenever the lights flickered on. Even if it was midnight, even if she had just eaten or was taking a bath, when the electricity returned, she would jump up, race to her studio, start the music, and dance. But the power came on less and less often and stayed on for shorter and shorter periods, until, despite all her discipline, she despaired.

  One day I heard her crying behind the closed door of her studio, sobbing quietly like a child crying itself to sleep when it has given up hope of any other comfort, and in an odd way it seemed as self-sufficient as everything else about Eva. I stood at the closed door for a long time, afraid to enter and unable to leave, until finally the crying stopped and I crept away, feeling both guilty and unendurably lonely.

  A few days later she burst into the living room where Father and I were each bent silently over our books.

  “I’m losing everything,” she railed. “A dancer’s body starts to lose its condition after seventy-two hours, and I haven’t had a good workout in five days. How will I ever be ready for my audition?”

  Just as I was ready to make Eva’s drama my own, our father spoke. “So, dance,” he said in the practical tone that always infuriated me when it was addressed to me.

  “How?” she moaned.

  “You know”—he lifted his arms over his head in third position and flailed a wobbling, work-booted foot in the air—”like this.”

  She didn’t laugh. “I have to have music,” she said.

  “What do you need music for?”

  “Without music, it’s not dancing—it’s exercise. I need the feel, the emotion.”

  “I’d think a good dancer’d have those things inside her.”

  “But you need music to help them come out.”

  “There were ballerinas long before there was electricity. What did they do?”

  “They had accompanists,” she answered grandly.

  “Well, we don’t have a piano or even a harpsichord, but I might be able to make a workable drum. I think I saw a coffee can and an old innertube floating around here somewhere.”

  “Father,” said Eva with a quiet intensity, “this is my life.”

  “I know, Eva. I know.” He sighed. “Pm just trying to help, is all. Seems like a dancer fine as you could keep the emotion in her head.”

  “How about the rhythm?” she said triumphantly. “How can I keep the beat in my head?”

  Father was silent for a moment and then he said, “I think I’ve got something for you out in my shop. Don’t go away—I’ll be right back.”

  “I don’t want a goddamn drum,” Eva yelled after him, but the door was already closed.

  It was almost dark by the time he returned, but he came in grinning like his old self. He bowed to Eva and handed her a metronome. “This was in the last load I rescued from the dump. It’s a little beat up, I’m afraid. But it still keeps a beat.”

  So she taught herself to dance without music, to dance to the ungiving rhythm of the metronome. She learned to bring her own music to her dance, and I think it has made her dancing finer than ever, although no one but me has yet seen it.

  For a long time Mother worried that Eva would become like other ballerinas with their gaping ambitions, tittering obsessions, and flat minds, but even before our mother died I think it was clear that Eva would remain Eva—no matter how far she went with her dance.

  Eva is always unalterably herself. When she faces herself in the wall of mirrors in her studio, she studies her reflection with neither a dancer’s vanity nor a dancer’s compulsive criticisms. She meets her own eyes with the same candor with which she meets anyone else’s, whereas I scrutinize my reflection, plead with it, get coy. I suck at my cheeks to make their bones more prominent. I wish my nose were narrower and my chin less round. I admire the indigo of my eyes and practice smiling so my teeth don’t show. I try to imagine that I am someone else seeing me.

  The question I bring to my reflection, time and time again, is, Who are you? But it would never cross Eva’s mind to wonder who she is. She knows herself in every bone and cell, and her beauty is not an ornament; it is the element in which she lives.

  Despite her way with fire, Eva always makes me think of water. She’s slender and sparkling as the stream beyond our clearing, and like that stream she seems content to live a part of her life underground, seems sure—even now—that she is headed somewhere.

  When she dances, you can see it. When she dances she is so certain, so alive, it enlivens whoever watches her. When she’s not dancing, she’s quiet, calm-tempered, a little dreamy, as if dancing were
living for her, and as long as she can suffer and exalt in her dance, she has no need of suffering and exaltation when she is simply passing through her days.

  I’m the one with the sour moods, the angry questions. I’m the one who doesn’t fit inside my skin, who can’t read my own face. I’m the one who can’t trust what will happen next, who has to face herself—night after night—when Eva’s already asleep.

  Today I read When Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony, which many believe to be his masterwork, he was almost totally deaf, and I thought of Eva, dancing alone to the music in her head.

  This morning we worked upstairs in the cool dimness of our parents’ bedroom, sorting their clothes and trinkets, taking inventory of all we now own.

  Our mother used to claim that, whereas other families had one junk drawer—in which nails, lock washers, spark plugs, broken earrings, chewed-up pencils, safety pins, seashells, keys, ancient grocery receipts, and other unsortable objects collected—our family had one drawer that wasn’t a junk drawer, and then only because it was in such an awkward place that no one could get to it.

  “It makes everything seem so temporary,” she would complain.

  Our father would answer her gleefully, “Oh no, my darling Gloria. All this junk will last forever—and some of it may even come in handy sometime before then.”

  Whether he is right remains to be seen, I suppose, though each new drawer we open yields something else we might possibly need or use before the stores reopen. Painful as it is, I’m glad we’re finally taking stock of what we’ve got.

  We started only a few weeks before Christmas. All fall we sat on the deck, stunned by the accident that was our father’s death. Down in the orchard the last of the fruit fell to the ground unnoticed, and in the garden the final bounty of the crops our father had planted and hoed and watered with our vague help went to seed, to weed, and then rotted, shriveled, collapsed into itself. All fall we sat stricken, unable to think of either the past or the future while the few maple trees scattered among the evergreens that ring our clearing turned gold, sang against the constant green of the rest of the forest, and then lost their leaves.