by Kim Wright
“Oh God,” she says, flipping through the program. “There are seven women in my tango and six in waltz. I don’t care about being first. I’d be thrilled with fourth or fifth. I just don’t want to be last.”
“Nik won’t let you be last,” I say, although that’s exactly what I’d have been thinking if I were in her shoes.
“Who are these women?” she says fretfully, peering at the listings through her reading glasses. “Shit, two of them are from California.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re any better than you.”
“If you weren’t good, why would you bother coming all that way?”
She has a point, so I turn my attention back to the dancers and leave her to worry her way through the book. It’s easy for me to think this, since I’m not the one whose ass is on the line, but I’m proud of Nik for not stacking the deck and I agree with him that placing his students in hard heats will make them better dancers. A lot of things are becoming clear to me as I watch the competition, in fact, because everything Nik’s ever said is being acted out before my eyes. He’s always telling me to put power in my steps from the start. This goes against my natural inclination, and probably everyone’s natural inclination. When something is new and you’re uncertain, you want to keep it controlled and careful, at least until you’re sure you’ve memorized the sequence. Nik won’t let me do this. He says things like “We go across room in five steps,” without telling me what those five steps are going to be. And when I beg him to let me learn the routine before I put in the power, he shakes his head.
Power first, then finesse. If you don’t have energy from the very start, then it’s hard to put it in later. By that time you’re proud of your pretty little steps. You don’t want to mess them up or change something that seems to be working, and so you stay small, and now, here before me, all over this ballroom, I can see the truth of what he’s been saying. People who started out careful and never figured out how to get bigger. Their form is correct. Their timing is accurate. They don’t make any obvious mistakes. They’re trying hard not to come in last. But they aren’t really dancing.
Quinn swoops in and says, “Time for round two.” She’s finished dancing with Steve so we’re going back upstairs to get Pamela ready for the Silver heats. Word is she’s even doing a few Gold and I respect her for it, a bit grudgingly.
“I’ve got to go help Quinn,” I tell Jane. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ll get back in time to see you dance.”
“Good,” she says, still staring into the program, her pink highlighter in her hand. “I don’t want anybody to see me. I don’t know why I ever agreed to do any of this. I’m in hell.”
PAMELA, NEEDLESS TO SAY, owns her gown. It is stunning, heavily stoned, a bright red chiffon with a low back that reaches almost to the dimples of her butt cheeks. The sort of thing a woman wears when she is no longer afraid of being noticed.
“It’s amazing,” I tell her.
She shrugs. Pamela and I have only had one conversation in our entire lives, that night in the Esmerelda’s bathroom when she tried to warn me off Nik. I wonder if she even knows I’m the one who walked in on her that day in the instructor’s lounge. “I’m thinking of getting rid of it,” she says.
“Really?” Quinn says. “I’d take it off your hands, but I’m too fat.”
“It might fit you,” Pamela says. It takes me a second to realize she’s talking to me.
Quinn has Pamela in the chair, putting up her hair, and I walk over to the dress hanging on the door. It’s a Doré, which is one of the best. The price of ball gowns seems ridiculous until you learn how much engineering goes into them and then the price still seems ridiculous, but a little less so. They’re sewn together over a skeleton of girdles and bras so that nothing ever slips, even if the dancer does lifts and splits. Looking inside one of these dresses is like opening the hood of a sports car. You see at once where the money went.
“It’s a professional dress,” Pamela tells me, which, thanks to Quinn, I know means that it’s superconstructed, even by ball gown standards. “I saw someone wearing it last year and pitched such a fit that Bob got it for me for Christmas.” She laughs, a high, tinkly sound like a bell you’d ring for a maid.
“Pamela’s husband,” Quinn says, so many bobby pins in her mouth that I can barely understand her, “owns the shopping center the studio is in.”
“Canterbury Commons is one of his properties,” Pamela says primly, a note of correction in her voice.
“Really?” I say. “That’s very cozy.” And then I lift the hanger off the doorframe and nearly drop the dress. Between the beading and the interior construction, it’s much heavier than I would have figured and I’ve been carrying ball gowns around all morning. If you were to put this dress in the corner, it would probably be able to stand there a minute on its own.
“It weighs sixteen pounds,” Pamela says, as if reading my mind. “Do you want to try it on?”
“There isn’t time,” I say, but I hold it up to myself in the mirror and for a second my reflected image gives me pause.
“Red on a blonde is unexpected,” Quinn says. “I’ve never thought about it before, but you two look a little bit alike. You’re both about the same height, I mean. And the hair.”
This is an observation that probably doesn’t please either one of us, but Pamela shifts a little in the chair so that she can see me in the mirror. No one wears dresses like this at the Newcomer level, or even the Bronze, where most of the dancers are still renting or making their own. A dress like this is a statement, a demand for attention, a sign the dancer takes herself seriously. Maybe a little too seriously.
“I’ll let it go for three thousand,” Pamela says.
“Think of it as an early Christmas gift to yourself,” Quinn says, spinning her around in the chair so that she can face the mirror at last. “I bet it would look great on you.”
“And there’s room to let out the seams if it’s tight in the hips,” Pamela says. She is frowning at her reflection and when Quinn hands her the smaller mirror so that Pamela can scrutinize the back of her hair, she catches my eye. She mouths the word “bitch” and I hang the dress back on the door.
PAMELA MAY BE A bitch but the artistry of her dancing astounds me. She and Anatoly begin their quickstep with a running leap into a slide—very tricky, but their timing is perfect. Pamela’s dress flares like a Chinese fan when she leaps.
It’s late in the day, the last heats of the afternoon, and Pamela and Anatoly clearly have it in the bag. The rest of us sit around the table in various states of disrepair. One of Isabel’s eyelashes has come off and the other is still on. Jane stares straight ahead in a kind of stupor. Wilhemina has gone to her room to take a nap and Valentina and her husband have left to drive back to North Carolina. Which is a shame, since Nik just learned she got a first and three seconds. I believe that going up to the judges’ table to get her ribbons would have pleased Valentina very much.
The mood of the ballroom has changed throughout the day, become more businesslike as we’ve moved on to the Silver and Gold heats. People have stopped cheering or lining the floor to take snapshots of their family and friends and started drinking instead. The moves on the floor are getting harder, much more athletic, and at Quinn’s direction, I have brought down a Styrofoam cooler filled with ziplock bags of ice. The pros are exhausted. They are icing themselves every time they come off the floor. Everyone on this level has competed many times, and they’ve met everyone else in their divisions. They seem to know the circuit almost too well, and who is supposed to beat whom. A woman from another studio has just walked by our table in tears, talking loudly into a cell phone. “Tricia took two of my tangos,” she was sobbing to whoever was on the line.
“Well, this is just a great big bucketload of drama,” Isabel says. “Every direction you look. What do you think that woman’s dress cost? Probab
ly more than my car.” I laugh, a little guiltily. Isabel’s gown looks especially shabby in this company, now that most of the newcomers have begun packing and leaving and only the whales remain in the room. “Seriously,” she goes on, “if I’m going to keep doing this, I’m going to have to find a civilian partner. Paying for the heats is one thing but when you add on the instructor fees, it’s killing me.”
“And just where do you plan to find this civilian partner?” Jane asks.
“The group class, of course,” she says, and we all start to giggle, picturing Harry and Lucas decked out in tuxedos and taking the floor.
“Well,” I say, “there’s always Steve.” And this makes us laugh harder for some reason. We’ve all gone punchy with some combination of nerves and vodka and hair spray fumes and sleep deprivation.
“Dr. Boob wouldn’t dance with me if I was the last woman on earth,” says Isabel. “I might make a mistake and God forbid he ends up with a partner who makes a mistake.”
“Steve’s not quite as bad as you think,” I say, and then I ask Jane, who’s been keeping a running total of who’s placing where on her program, how we’re doing on overall points.
“Good,” she says. “But I don’t know about Studio of the Year.” Anatoly really wants that silly trophy but we’re probably too far off our native turf. Some ballroom in Georgia will more likely take it. For the first time in a long time I feel like I’m on the inside of a group. I wish Carolina could be here. I should get my phone and send a few pictures to her.
Nik has been standing right at the edge of the dance floor, watching Pamela compete with Anatoly. She’s one of the dancers whose name is known around the region and it means a lot to the whole studio, but still . . . he shouldn’t be hovering so close or watching her so obviously. The rumor is her husband might show up. Apparently that’s always the rumor, at every comp and showcase, that Pamela’s husband might just swoop in at the last minute and start shooting or something. I glance around the ballroom. The judges are bent, conferring over their score sheets, and Nik rubs the back of his neck. He’s spent, I think. They all are.
I should have danced. Why didn’t I? What am I waiting for? It is just like Nik warned me it would be. I’ve run around all day like one of Cinderella’s mice, sewing rips and painting lips and fetching orange juice and being helpful and hesitant, just like I’ve always been. I may as well scoop up some of these molted feathers and dropped sequins from the floor and make them a goddamn tablescape. I’m the worst kind of hypocrite. I knocked Valentina for taking small steps when I didn’t take any steps at all.
At the table beside us, a woman has sat down while she waits for the callbacks to be announced. She puts her foot on a chair and I can see that she’s bleeding through her shoes. She’s wearing the pretty competition kind, which are made of pale gold silk. They’re designed to be flesh-colored, at least if you’re Caucasian, to imply one long stretch between your foot and leg. But apparently she didn’t break hers in enough before competition and she’s popped blisters. A pattern of blood has run across the top of her shoes, making the outline of each toe distinct.
“God,” I say, “I’m so sorry. Do you want an ice pack?” The ice packs are for our dancers, and she’s probably Pamela’s competition so maybe I shouldn’t have offered. But it comes out of my mouth automatically.
She shakes her head. “No time,” she says. And just then they announce a string of numbers and she rises, her shoe growing redder the moment she puts weight on it. She gives me a look somewhere between a smile and a wince and says, “Only the strong survive.”
They have called Pamela’s number too. Anatoly takes her hand and she seems to glide to the center of the ballroom, the red floats of her gown billowing behind her. She’s smiling even though there’s no guarantee of anything, not at this level, where everyone is good.
Nik is suddenly beside me. He puts his arm across the back of my chair.
“So,” he says, “you are bitten with bug? You will compete next time?”
“Not only that,” I say, “but I’m going to buy your girlfriend’s dress.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CAROLINA IS BACK in hospice. They took her in last night, after exactly what they warned might happen did. She caught a cold, probably from her kids, and her white blood cell count zoomed out of control. She treats it as a temporary setback, but she’s too smart to misread what this really means. Her immune system is shot. She can no longer screen out the everyday toxins of life, so she will spend her last Christmas in Hospice House after all.
“She seems defeated,” the client coordinator told me, but after I saw her, I would have said a better word was “fatalistic.” A lot of cancer patients are like this. People who come in from strokes and heart attacks often have a startled expression, as if they were ambushed, but most cancer patients have been stalked by their disease for months, even years. They’ve tried to hold the truth at bay: skipped tests, ignored symptoms, made excuses for how bad they’ve felt. But deep inside they’ve heard the rustling of the leaves and felt the breath of the beast. When he finally catches up to them, they are not terribly surprised.
“We need to come up with a dance quick,” I tell Nik. “It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be fast. Something we can perform in front of people who don’t know anything about dancing. People who have other things on their minds.”
He considers this for a moment. “We will waltz,” he says. “And we open with three unsupported spins.”
“I don’t do unsupported spins,” I remind him.
And so we spin. My whole private lesson is forty-five minutes of just the opening, practicing how we will get across this broad, flat floor to meet in the middle, and I am still, despite all his council about spotting by looking at a fixed place on the wall and keeping my abdominal muscles tight, coming out of the turns weak and wobbly. Almost falling into his arms.
This has been a frustrating session, but Nik is superstitious. He never lets me move on until I have at least somewhat mastered the step in question. I suppose I can understand it from his point of view—he doesn’t want me to get it in my head that certain steps are impossible—but on the flip side, this philosophy of teaching means that sometimes the lessons never end.
“What are you afraid of?” he asks me.
“Falling. Everything. I’m weak in the gut,” I say. But it’s more than that. I don’t have the stamina I once had and my lungs are aching with effort. My knees are even starting to hurt although I’d die before I’d admit that part. The older women at the studio are always complaining about their knees.
Nik is unimpressed. “You just need practice.” He demonstrates again. A perfect 360.
This time I’m so nervous I underspin, not making it quite all the way around. If we had been in hold, Nik would have been able to use my hand to help rotate me, tugging me the rest of the way through the circle. But in competition, a judge would catch that in a heartbeat, and besides, I can’t always depend on Nik being there. In group class the guys don’t help you at all. It’s every dancer for himself, with half the people overrotating and the rest of them underrotating. Once Lucas and I came out of a spin back to back.
Nik is trying hard to make a point. He spins and tells me to call out a number while he’s turning: 180, 360, 405, 540. No matter what number of degrees I call, he stops right on it, beautifully and without the slightest wobble. He isn’t doing this to show off, but rather to prove to me it can be done.
“Now,” Nik says, “you will push on pole.” We’ve come to the end of our forty-five minutes and he leads me over to the stripper-style pole in the corner that the young girls use to work on their backbends. I need to at least nail the 360, he says, before we can go further. I feel like a kid kept behind after class for bad behavior, and besides, we’ve spun a thousand times and my right foot is already hurting.
“I’m in a bad place wit
h this,” I tell him, and I can feel myself starting to cry.
“Just for a minute, then you can stop,” he says.
“Sometimes people come to their personal limit, you know? My friend Elyse says everybody has a limit.”
“Yes. True. This is not your limit.”
“What makes you so sure?” I say, and to my horror I realize I am truly crying now. It’s not the spinning, or at least not just the spinning. It’s Carolina and finding Daniel on Facebook and the fact that I’m staring down the barrel of another Christmas without Mark. It’s everything.
I stomp out onto the sidewalk and leave him there, frowning at me, probably thinking I’m just one more self-indulgent American who’s never really dug in and worked for anything in her life. I’m so rattled that I’ve walked out in my practice shoes with their suede bottoms and risked ruining them on the sidewalk, so I sit down on the nearest bench to unbuckle them. Steve’s car is in the parking lot. I don’t know many cars, but I know his, this red BMW that screams out everything you need to know about the man. It’s three minutes after three and he’s just sitting there, alone in his car. I’ve always assumed the way he hurries in a few minutes after the hour was an affectation, his way of reminding us that his time is far more important than anyone else’s. But now I see him late but still waiting, until finally, at five minutes past three, he jumps out with his dance shoes in hand and dashes in the door as if he’s just arrived.
He’s scared, I think. He has so much trouble talking to people that he pretends to run late so that he has an excuse for not hanging out.
Maybe I’m a coward but I’ll be damned if I’m as big a coward as Steve. I push to my feet, grab my shoes, open the door, and walk back in. Nik very pointedly ignores me and I ignore him. I walk over to the pole and push off it. I go around in an almost circle, maybe 330 degrees, something like that. Not 360. I push again.