by Amina Cain
LIFE WENT ON WITHOUT HER and I became the person I was when I was married to someone, when I lived with someone and shared a bed. I did things I had never done before, that I had always been curious about. I tried to talk about my feelings. I gave my husband oral sex. I attended a lecture given by a famous psychotherapist. I attended concerts and plays, keeping a list of all the performances in my notebook, and one evening my husband finally came home with tickets to the ballet. Weeks before that I had told him I wanted to go, but because it took so long for him to get them, I thought he had forgotten. I was happy; it would be my first time going to the ballet and I added it to my list. As Solange was getting ready for bed, we were getting ready to leave. She was even quieter that night than usual.
After my bath, I sat in front of my mirror and thought about death. I had begun to worry about it, though I didn’t want to, especially not in a moment such as that one. I put on a red silk dress and pulled my hair back from my face with gold combs. I had a gold necklace with stars on it.
We walked to the theater in the warm spring night, and I felt we were already hearing the music though we were still blocks away. It was drawing me to it.
Once there, my husband talked to a boring couple he knew, and I instinctively looked around for Antoinette. The theater was full and noisy. I knew I wouldn’t see her, but what if her luck had changed? Now I regretted even more not telling her of my marriage, not having said goodbye.
Still, I enjoyed myself. How could I not? Our seats were close to the front; we could watch everything closely. When the lights came up onstage, eight dancers appeared, dressed in black. At first they were still, then in twos they began moving. Even that first moment made my heart beat.
Then another dancer appeared, wearing the mask of a horse, her hair sticking out of the back of the mask like a mane.
After that I went to the ballet as often as I could, all that spring. I didn’t tell my husband it helped me to write, that I was inspired by it. I told him only that I loved it, that I enjoyed dressing up at night and going out into the city, both of which were true.
There was the dancing, but the music too enchanted me, and the sets, though flat, were also real. I wanted to go inside the wooden buildings meant to conjure the street of a village. I was there in that village, though I was also still in my seat, completely taken in, the way I was so often taken in by scenes in paintings.
I ASKED TO TAKE BALLET CLASSES. I had to ask my husband for everything, though he always said yes. So much of the time I was either taking my long walks or sitting still, and I wanted to feel my body doing something else. I liked the stretching more than anything else. The dancing itself was more about discipline than freedom, and I knew discipline already, I knew about long hours and repeating some action again and again. Still, I think it was good for me. I felt clearheaded during that period.
I would stand at the barre and do my turning. I would watch myself doing it in the mirror. I liked the instructions being called out while we listened to the music. I liked it aesthetically. The teacher’s voice, the piano, the room itself, the other dancers looking at themselves in the mirror too. I had not seen this kind of radiance before and I made note of it and tried to describe it. The teacher was radiant too, though I was sure she was quite old. All of it made me want to write.
One morning in class the teacher paid me a compliment: “You look like a dancer, even if you are always one step behind.” I began to take pride in this. I was not at a point where I worried about having an ego. Then, when I went to the performances, my relationship to them was different. Still ecstatic, but with a calm sense that I belonged there, in the auditorium at night, with my thoughts and my writing. I understood something about ballet easily, and this caused me to change.
There wasn’t much time for talking with the other students in the class, but sometimes when we were waiting for the teacher, or standing outside the studio on our breaks, we spoke about the class and how difficult it was.
“I think I sprained my ankle,” one of the students said.
“You should put ice on it right away,” I responded.
“My legs are sore,” another student said.
“It means you have worked hard,” I told her.
I especially liked talking to a student named Dana. I thought she should dance professionally. The teacher complimented her constantly, and then Dana seemed to concentrate even harder. She never smiled. But I did. I smiled at her concentration.
Once I saw her at the ballet, wearing a white dress, her hair soft. In class, it was always severe. From her seat in the audience she watched the performance with her same focus, the same seriousness.
I wanted to talk to Dana about dance and writing and paintings and music, though I didn’t know how to start a conversation like that. I didn’t always find talking easy, and I had never spoken to anyone about these kinds of things before. How should I begin?
With each new pose, we took turns practicing for our teacher. In those moments I was nervous to be the only one being looked at, but it helped me to watch Dana. In her body I saw what ballet was supposed to look like, how the arm should be held, what the hand should do. And I liked having a class to go to. In the same way I had always enjoyed school, for instance, and my family had distracted me from it. No one cared I had homework; I was expected to take care of my siblings instead. When I tried to read, I was always interrupted, so I had to do it where my family couldn’t find me. Under a tree that took me thirty minutes to walk to. If I had stayed in that town with them, I would never have written a single word.
Now, after every class, I went home and, if no one paid me a visit, wrote.
Giant trees covered in snow. And then the background changes. Giant cakes.
After I had written, I would sit in the garden enjoying the evening, the warm air. Solange preparing dinner, cooking sounds coming from the kitchen window, my husband not yet home from work. I would listen to a bird cry, or the cat and the dog scratching around. In those moments I felt like a giant ear.
ONE DAY IN CLASS I asked Dana if she would like to go to the ballet with me, and from that point on we often went together. It was much nicer than going with my husband, who never seemed to pay attention to it, or the other young women with whom I had sometimes been forced to go, those women with whom I was supposed to be friends, who looked constantly around the theater to see who was in attendance, who only clapped or stood up when everyone else did. I stood and clapped whenever I wanted.
Dana and I would meet outside the dance studio and walk the two blocks to the theater, and I would ask her about her dancing, about her life.
“I’m afraid it’s too late,” she said early on in our conversations. “I didn’t start young enough.”
“But you’re so good,” I insisted. “You should never stop, even if you marry.”
She smiled, and it seemed as if a secret was in her smile. “I won’t stop dancing, but I don’t know how far I’ll get.”
“You have already gotten very far indeed.” I took her hand and pressed it in my own.
I wanted to tell her about my writing, but I was afraid she would think I was exaggerating my relationship to it, that I was lying. After all, I wasn’t a real writer, yet I wrote every day. Though I hadn’t cleaned for a while, to say that I was a maid would probably have been a more accurate way to explain who I was.
As we walked, the auditorium came into view, across from the park. Colorful streamers hung from the windows in blues and yellows, fluttering in the light breeze.
When I am here, I am like the streamers, I thought. I’m connected to something, but then I am also connected to something else. It is always like that. I am flowing toward it.
THE GREEN GRASS COMBINED with the pink sky. A restaurant lit brightly. But the restaurant is one feeling, the grass another.
I write this in my time in the country, in my time of country walks.
Soon after we were married, my husband took me to the desert. Solange ca
me with us. We stayed in tents, and every morning we came out into the sun and looked at a date farm in the distance. Solange came out of her tent too. The farm reminded me of a setting for a novel; it was so mysterious. Who would live there? And we became its characters. What had brought us together?
I pulled my hair into a loose bun, but not as a dancer would do it. At night the fronds of the date trees moved up and down—they didn’t move at all during the day. I learned from them, learned how to carry myself in the evenings. I was connected to that younger me, the one of emptiness, and something of that was also in my walking.
You see, everything came to me in the evenings and I wasn’t doing anything, I wasn’t writing, I was just learning how to walk differently, and how to live in a tent. Hot springs were near us, with grass growing all around. This was the only grass to see. My husband and I would soak in the water, Solange nearby with our towels. Before, I had hardly known that places like this existed, and now here I was, seeing them.
WHILE READING IN BED AT NIGHT, sometimes I could hear Solange moving about in her room. She was always doing something. Maybe that was her energy. More industrious than Antoinette, than me. More dedicated to something. My husband already sleeping, I would rise from our bed and sit next to the window, where the air outside made contact with the room.
On her days off, Solange got up early and was gone before we ourselves had risen. I wondered where she went but she never told us. She needn’t have and I’m glad she never did. As much as I still wanted to know her, she still didn’t want to know me.
When she got back in the evenings, she often cleaned her own rooms. They were even cleaner than I had kept mine, and she didn’t decorate them, not even a book or a leaf. She must have liked that emptiness too, or else for her the house felt the opposite of a home and so she didn’t treat it as one. It was simply the place where she worked and unfortunately she also had to live there. Or she didn’t want to leave a trace or an impression of her life.
Once in a while I would see her look longer than normal at my husband; I didn’t know what that was about. Only rarely did I see her in repose, sitting in the garden with a newspaper in her lap, eating food sent to her by her family. I would watch her eat and then try to move my thoughts to something else, but sometimes they brought me back to her.
A woman stands in a room facing away from the viewer. Her dress is black, with either a white apron or cord tied around her waist. We can’t tell which, but it affects how we see her all the same. It gives her shape; it separates her from her surroundings, which is not always so. At the bottom of the painting, for instance, her dress blends into the shadows on the floor.
We see also her white neck, her brown hair pulled back from it; she is looking down, but not completely. Maybe she is reading a letter.
The room is almost bare, except for a chair she’s standing next to, in front of her a table, and beyond the table a furnace. Two white doors, closed, lead to other rooms, other feelings, or else a continuation of this one.
I am always fooled by these suggestions of other rooms we might go into, but never can, never will. Another space, but it is closed to us, even if it feels open. Thought of in a different way, if it is all suggestion, what is in the rooms is ours.
THE WEATHER BECAME BEAUTIFUL. Hotter than any summer I had known. I was going to dance classes, the museum, the library, the ballet. I was writing, entertaining hardly at all, my husband gone safely to work, where he couldn’t interfere with my days.
I would walk around the city feeling as if I were on an island. Some tropical place. Wearing a light blouse, a light skirt, my hair pulled back from my face or in a loose bun. Through the park, along the busy streets, the river, and then the lake, which was so large it looked more like an ocean. The botanical gardens. There I could look at the tropical plants. I could sit and write among their green, rubbery leaves. And the desert plants. Among the spikes that rose out of the cacti. The spikes that rose out of me.
Occasionally a man would walk by and ask what I was doing. “A menu for a dinner party,” I would say. Or, “I am writing down my dreams.” When too many men had walked by with this same question, or some version of it, I said, “Your face looks like the butt of a wolf and it’s interfering with my concentration.” I was a rich woman now; I could say these things.
Then I would walk again, in a trance from the heat. I would go into a shop I’d never been to, wanting to costume myself in something, having seen the costumes of ballerinas and of actresses. Dressed for another time, another place. Hidden behind their makeup, cloaked, inaccessible. The distance didn’t bother me in the way it did with Solange; I was drawn to their mysteriousness. Solange was a wall.
As the weeks went on in this way, I became more and more decadent, or at least it felt like decadence. Not through money. Though if I am honest, I became decadent in that way too. But when I was at home, if I wasn’t at my desk or eating a meal, I was lying down, the dog and the cat lying next to me. In the back garden, in the bedroom, even in the room where I wrote. What luxury to lie around like that.
I especially didn’t want Solange to see me. What would she think I was doing, and would she resent me for it? My husband expected it of me, so I didn’t have to feel self-conscious around him. He had wanted me to take it easy. That was what he had wanted most of all.
In some ways it was good for me, and useful. In this lying down I became another part of myself, the part that was more like a tropical bird, and this helped with my writing. This is what I was, what I am, if that part of me is still in existence.
But when I was that relaxed, I didn’t think of Antoinette. A part of me was forgetting her.
I became addicted to my trances. I went into them so easily.
As I became more decadent, Dana became more serious. We were no longer in class together because I had stayed a beginner and she had become more advanced. But we still went to the ballet together, and sometimes she came to our house. We would sit in my writing room and I would ask Solange to bring food and she would bring it.
That summer, Dana told me about her life, and I began to tell her about mine. She narrated her childhood, how her sisters had found her odd and she had found them shallow. She told me how she discovered dance:
“I didn’t think about it when I was younger. I liked going to the ballet with my family, but it didn’t occur to me I might want to be onstage too. I knew there was something I should be doing and that I was incomplete not doing it, but I thought I had time to figure it out, and it was exciting to have something like that to uncover. I took an acting class and at first I liked it, but I didn’t truly belong. I didn’t want to talk all the time.”
“I wanted to write, always,” I blurted out. I could not stop myself from saying this.
“Then we’ve both found what makes us happy.”
“We have. Isn’t that amazing?”
AT THE END OF JULY my husband took me to the ocean, we were to have a vacation, and Dana arranged to go at the same time. She only had to convince her sisters and that was easy. They were bored in the city; they always saw the same men.
It became something, sitting together on a blanket in the sand, sisters looking for husbands, husband going off somewhere to work and joining me at night. Solange was on vacation too, but not with us. I didn’t want someone to wait on me. I wanted to walk on the beach. I wanted to look at things in the distance, be faced with the water; I wanted to swim. I had never spent time at the ocean before. Finally I saw it at night when I closed my eyes to sleep.
Dana and I would swim out and look at the horizon and tread water. Later we’d come back to our towels and fall asleep on the sand. We put on our light dresses and talked. I told her about my writing and we went for ice cream and I felt I was in heaven.
One morning jellyfish were floating on the surface of the water, white things taking their shape from the waves that washed under them, then becoming flat again when the ocean became flat. We watched them for a while, fasc
inated, then Dana got impatient; she couldn’t swim, so she wandered off and suddenly I had the day to myself.
I walked along the shore. I took a path that ran into a garden thick with palm trees and birds-of-paradise and hibiscus and jasmine. I had never seen plants like this, not quite in this way, not outside a greenhouse, and I added the experience to my list. The garden was so dense and the leaves of the plants as substantial and alive as the ocean itself. It was good to see that plants too could have such presence. I understood how drugs were made from them, how they might transport people or keep them alive.
Later I sat quietly in a restaurant and, while I waited for my lunch—it was past lunchtime and the restaurant was nearly empty—looked at the water and wrote in my notebook. Only once or twice did I say exactly what I wanted, but I kept going regardless.
The perspective of the painting is one of gazing at, not taking part in, a service. Where the viewer is there are no lights, not even a single candle. Where the people are worshipping, it is bright, though some stand partly in the shadows. You look at the painting and you want to go farther into the room; there is something comforting about both the light and the dark that draws you. And where there is light, it goes all the way up to the high ceilings. The inside of the chapel is pretty (it is a side chapel, not the main part of the church), with intricately carved wooden walls and columns; Gothic, but not heavily, with tall windows. The perfect place to be on a cold evening.
All of the windows in the restaurant were open, and as I wrote, the waves were crashing right outside them. It began to help me. I began to feel I was in a trance of writing. All around me were plump insects. They too were very alive, beating their wings, landing.
THAT NIGHT I tied my husband to a chair. He always had sex the way I wanted; he didn’t try to control it and he seemed to like that. It was one of the few things I had control of when it came to him and me.