Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  Zhemkuzhnaya was in her fifties. She was built like an ox. She dressed in navy-blue pants suits and white turtlenecks. She wore her dyed red hair piled on her head and she clattered through the school on platform heels. She claimed to have danced with the Bolshoi, but not even the students believed her. ‘Look at her,’ they would whisper. ‘Tell me she danced with anyone.’

  Steph and Chris went to see both women’s dancers in performance.

  Zhemkuzhnaya’s dancers had strength; Lvovna’s had lyricism. Zhemkuzhnaya’s looked like gymnasts; Lvovna’s looked like tuberculars. Zhemkuzhnaya’s were bulky little machines who could be miracles on brute strength alone. They could pirouette any number of times, barrel turn, leap, get from any position to any other; the movement was choppy, but they got screams and applause. Lvovna’s were gazelles who could balance and sustain and tie eighteen movements into a single flow. They got breath-held silence and applause.

  It struck Steph as the difference between grabbing and sustaining, between filibustering and mesmerizing. She decided she wanted to sustain and mesmerize.

  ‘I’m going to study with Lvovna,’ she told her mother.

  ‘Why not?’ Anna said. ‘Lvovna has good contacts.’

  Chris said, ‘Then I’ll study with Lvovna too.’

  Lvovna had her own way of doing everything.

  At the very first closed class, after it was too late for the student to transfer out, she rapped her cane on the floor. ‘Now you will unlearn all that you have learned—or what you have been pleased to call learning.’

  Madame was too old to demonstrate movements herself. She sat on a chair and watched, hawklike, while a professional student demonstrated. In ballet classes the world over you began with your left hand on the barre and exercised the right side of your body first. In Lvovna’s, you began with your right hand on the barre.

  Occasionally her cane would snap up at a girl. ‘You—turn your leg out more.’ Madame demanded a perfect turn-out. It struck Steph as too perfect, an exaggeration that ground your knees and hips to powder. But she wanted to please Madame and she did as told.

  ‘Don’t balance too long,’ Lvovna would say, pointing the cane. ‘You get ugly calves like Zhemkuzhnaya.’ Steph was careful not to balance too long.

  Madame demanded impossible stretches at the barre that became less impossible with time. If you weren’t extending far enough in balance she would grab you and yank you further. If you angered her she would chase you around the room and spank you with the cane.

  There was an unwritten colour code in class. Madame once sent a girl home for wearing a red blouse and she made Steph leave her red plastic leg warmers in the corridor.

  ‘Red is Soviet,’ she stated. ‘Not artistic.’

  All sorts of people came to Lvovna’s class to be humiliated. Steph once found herself doing tendus next to Dame Margot Fonteyn, and in February of her first year the dancers from a Broadway musical began showing up.

  One day Madame covered the mirrors in black cloth. At first Steph thought it was because of a national hero who had died the day before. But that was not the case.

  ‘A true dancer should not need to see himself,’ Madame said. ‘He should feel. A great dancer should be able to dance blind. And very soon I am going to blindfold all of you.’

  Madame never went that far, but she did things almost as bad.

  She exploded at a girl who could not pronounce port de bras, the French term describing the movement of the arms in classical ballet.

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Here, Madame.’

  ‘New York City? Bronx? Brooklyn?’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  T do not care that your English is vile—utterly vile. But for a dancer not to speak French is inexcusable! French is the language of dance! You will take French lessons if you expect to continue in this class!’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  Another time she exploded at Chris, not for the way she pronounced port de bras, but for the way she executed it.

  ‘What do you call that monstrous movement with those paws?’

  ‘I was going into second position en haut, Madame.’

  ‘A wheat field in a hurricane has more grace. If you have not grace it means you have not control, which means you will never dance, never.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Madame.’

  ‘And I am sorry—for you.’

  Chris dragged herself home like a broken-backed kitten. ‘Is my port de bras that awful?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Steph said.

  ‘Then why does Madame pick on me?’

  It seemed to Steph that every dancer had to have an inner preserve of serenity, some private space to escape the world. In some dancers it took the form of stupidity; in others, a sense of humour or an ability to drop off to sleep anywhere, any time. Chris did not seem to have any sort of serenity at all, and it worried Steph.

  ‘Madame does it to everyone,’ Steph said. ‘She does it to make us strong.’

  ‘All it does is make me smoke more cigarettes. I’ve gone through a pack since she screamed at me.’

  Steph looked at Chris’s pale skin that seemed to tremble with each heartbeat. ‘You can’t take it personally,’ she said. ‘Madame was screaming at your body, not you.’

  But she knew exactly what Chris was going through.

  Like most dancers, Steph herself was up to a pack of cigarettes and five cups of coffee a day. Ballet school was a nervous life, a constant war with your body. You looked in the mirror and you didn’t see Stephanie Lang: you saw a foot that didn’t arch far enough and a left turn-out that kept slipping and an ass with just a hint of jelly when you went into arabesque. You saw eyes that would never project to the back of a high school auditorium, let alone the Met, a mouth that needed a pout-transplant if you ever expected to dance a Black Swan, breasts that you’d just as soon give to the girl next door, because the one thing you didn’t need in ballet was a bust.

  When you looked at a boy, you didn’t think, He’s nice or He’s sexy, you thought, How would he look partnering me? If he was broad-shouldered, which most were, and tall, which most weren’t, and strong, which they all were, and had long muscles, not the knotty bulges half of them developed, and if he could dance, you said: ‘That is for me’—because that was all that mattered in the opposite sex.

  When you weren’t arguing with your body or inspecting your feet for fungus and bunions you were washing leotards or slamming doors on pointe shoes to break them in or putting stitches in the toes to make them last longer. Everything became dance, and there were days when you didn’t have time to read a newspaper or even the energy to turn on the TV. Some of the students didn’t know or care who the Vice-President of the United States was, and Steph had stopped caring too.

  Dance demanded everything and gave no guarantees, no refunds. There was nothing fair about it. Nothing predictable, either. Steph saw some girls work themselves to death and get nowhere. She saw others work half as hard and get twice as far.

  Some dancers were disqualified by their own bodies. A girl over five foot seven might have the most beautiful form in the world, but she’d never get a job; the big companies were scaling themselves to their Russian defectors, hiring Munchkins only. Or you might be overextended, with joints too flexible. You could do every leap and turn and stretch in ballet, but your line was broken, not classical, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do to correct it.

  Some dancers were disqualified by their own zeal. There was an exercise called ‘the frog’ to help stretch the legs: you lay on your stomach, legs to the side, bent at the knees—and risked wrecking your hip for life. If turn-out was your obsession, you went to sleep with telephone books on your knees—and dislocated your kneecaps.

  If you were worried about weight you wore plastic sweat pants and put Saran Wrap around your legs and tried one of the diet fads that swept the school like measles: water, or water and wheat germ, or a carrot, a stick of celery, and a carton
of plain yoghurt. The diets took their toll. In Steph’s first term two girls came down with mononucleosis and a third developed myasthenia gravis.

  Some girls took birth control pills to cut out their periods. The pain of menstruation wasn’t a problem—dancers routinely put up with far worse discomfort in every class and performance—but the embarrassment of having your period come unexpectedly was a problem. Ballet folklore was full of horror stories of White Swans caught in the climatics pas de deux without a Tampax. One girl in Steph’s class, Marie-Claude from Switzerland, took the pill and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. She came down with severe blood clots, lost sensation in her right arm. She left school to go to the hospital for surgery and never returned.

  The school warned you that three classes a day were enough, but there were girls who sneaked off and took extra classes outside school and wound up with tendonitis and arthritis at age nineteen.

  Some students worked out on their own, unsupervised, and there were accidents. An Argentinian girl attempted a tour jeté, a leaping turn in the air, and her partner wasn’t paying attention. She landed on the floor and snapped her Achilles’ tendon. A girl from Wisconsin did the same thing and broke her toe. Neither girl danced again.

  Even in the supervised classes there were accidents, some of them crippling. One girl did a tour into a boy’s testicles. He had forgotten to wear his guard. He had to give up dance. One warm April day when a window at barre level was open, a boy from Arizona did a piqué arabesque turn, lost his balance, and went into the courtyard. He tried to plié, but it didn’t save his legs.

  There were times when Steph was sick of the risks, sick of the aches, times when the smell of sweaty exercise clothes and the sound of a thumping practice piano filled her with an almost hysterical nausea.

  Is this what I’ve given my life to? a voice within her screeched. Where’s the joy; where’s the fulfilment?

  There were times when she wanted to eat a strawberry shortcake or get drunk or smoke pot or have a lover or go to the theatre or read a book about people who didn’t dance. There were times when it seemed she had nothing, no friends, no hobbies, no ideas she could call her own, nothing but bunions and a turn-out and a pirouette.

  There was a time, when Madame stopped her in mid-pirouette, when it seemed that all she had was the bunions.

  ‘But, my dear,’ Madame said softly, ‘you are not remembering.’

  They were in class, and if Madame had come stumbling at her, the sure tip-off of a spanking, Steph would have run. But Madame approached with almost even steps and Steph stood holding her breath. The cane struck her, almost gently, buttock and stomach.

  ‘Balance,’ said Madame. The cane struck Steph’s left foot, not so gently.

  ‘Keep from sickling.’ It was called ‘sickling' when the foot slid out of position. ‘Ribs in! Knee out! Drop your pelvis!’

  The cane gave successive and successively less gentle taps on each part of Steph’s body as Madame reeled off its particular crime.

  ‘Weight forward! Head up! Shoulders down! Abdomen in; back in; chest up! Hold your turn-out; keep your legs straight; and spot correctly!’

  Steph tried, but it was impossible to remember everything with Madame standing there shouting. For ten minutes Steph was the centre of attention, class dunce, trying and failing time after time. Scorched with humiliation, she remained after the others had gone.

  ‘Madame,’ she said, ‘is there such a thing as a perfect ballet body?’

  Madame’s eyebrows arched. ‘Is no one perfect ballet body, no. It helps if limbs are long, torso short. Like yours.’

  ‘If there’s no perfect ballet body, how can there be a perfect pirouette?’

  ‘Are many different perfections.’

  Steph felt cold and exhausted, beyond help. ‘And do you expect them all of me?’

  Madame stared at her. ‘Of course. Don’t you?’

  ‘Sometimes Madame makes me think—I should have studied nursing.’

  ‘Why not? So long as you are perfect nurse.’

  ‘I’ve seen performances—I’ve seen ballerinas, Madame’s own students—who weren’t perfect. Why must I be perfect?’

  A dark vertical line appeared between Madame’s eyes. ‘But naturally you see imperfect performances. It takes fifty Giselles, three dozen Auroras, before dancer can begin to call herself ballerina.’

  ‘Then why can’t I be imperfect?’

  Madame closed her eyes. A sigh whispered out of her. Sometimes they forgot who and what she was. She was a grandmother, an artist who had trained artists who had gone on to train other artists. She had had her firsts: there was Tmouravaya, her first ballerina, and there was Windermere, who was Tmouravaya’s first. There could be only one first child and one first grandchild, and yet the students still came to her, asking to be her children, asking to be first. She had no room for firsts any more.

  However, there was something special about the Lang girl. Something that entitled her to an honest answer.

  ‘Ten thousand girls are trying to be dancers. One hundred of them are dancers. There are positions for ten of them. I want you to have one of those positions. When you are with a company, on the stage at Lincoln Center, when you are dancing Aurora and Giselle, then you can cheat. But not in this classroom. My dear, I would not be hard on you if I did not think there was hope.’

  Steph bowed her head. There was shame in her but there was happiness too and together they hardened into a fierce determination.

  ‘Thank you, Madame.’

  Madame stayed behind to stare out of the window. Halfway through her mentholated cigarette she saw the Lang girl hurrying up Sixty-sixth Street. There was no question in Madame’s mind. The Lang girl had every sign of talent. She did not need Madame constantly at her side to solve every difficulty and correct every error. Quite the opposite. The girl learned through her skin. She watched this one’s mistake, that one’s success. She listened to Madame’s shrieks and—most important—to Madame’s silences. It took but a hint, and the girl understood.

  The most Madame could do with such a student was to direct her a little here and there, shout at her now and then to keep her from getting lazy.

  The Avery girl was a different case. She had ability potentially as great as Lang’s, but she learned unpredictably. She had areas of fantastic intuition, areas of breath-taking incompetence. The most Madame could do with a case like Avery was to knock her like a punching bag.

  Madame sighed. Soon it would be spring recital time, and Avery and Lang would be ready.

  I shall lose them, she thought. I have come to know their bodies and, a little bit, their souls; and, a little bit, I love them. I have given them their style. Whether they dance in Buenos Aires or Moscow or Chicago, they are Lvovna dancers. There is no more I can do. I must hold them like prize horses at the starting gate and point them in the right direction.

  She wondered what the right direction would be for Lang; and for Avery.

  ‘For you,’ Madame told the Lang girl two months before the recital, ‘the Don Quixote pas de deux—simplified, I regret to say, but very worthy simplification—Marius Volmar did it for me.’

  Madame turned to the Avery girl, whose eyes were stretched with almost pained expectancy.

  ‘And for you, Snow pas de deux from Nutcracker.’

  ‘But, Madame—’ the Avery girl stammered. It sounded like a protest and Madame nipped it.

  ‘You will have good partners—best I can steal from Zhemkuzhnaya. You will look extremely lyric. Companies are looking for extremely lyric girls. I will coach you myself. It will mean working evenings, but if company takes you, you will have to get used to that anyway.’

  ‘Will a company take us?’ the Avery girl asked. She stared at Madame with eyes that were dark and starved and eager and Madame stared back at her indignantly.

  ‘How do I know?’

  The child’s gaze sank slowly to a crouching position. ‘But don’t you have any idea?’
>
  A wind of annoyance gusted through Madame. She rewarded persistence at the barre, not in cross-examination. She arranged her reply carefully. ‘I suppose company might be persuaded to take one of you. It should not astonish me too greatly.’

  Madame turned her back, ending the absurd conversation. For a moment neither Chris nor Steph spoke.

  ‘One of us....’ Chris’s voice was pale and her lips were trembling.

  Something was still waiting to be said. The two girls could feel it, like a presence outside a door whose bell had just softly rung. For two bone-crunching years they had been allies. It had never occurred to either of them that the alliance might one day have to end.

  ‘Maybe a company will take us both,’ Steph said hopefully.

  Chris’s head was lowered. In her face was a gentle determination that seemed to reach out and touch the world. ‘I won’t join a company that doesn’t.’

  She’d give up her chance for me, Steph thought. How odd and wonderful and brave. And foolish. And I love her for it.

  Steph took Chris’s hand. ‘Then I won’t either.’

  Steph told her mother about the promise the next day. They were sitting at breakfast. Steph was dribbling honey onto the health-food cereal that one of her friends in toe class had said was good for energy.

  ‘We gave each other our word of honour.’

  The child’s face was serious. Eighteen years old and grim as an old woman. A red stop sign went up in Anna’s brain.

  ‘Eat some cottage cheese. I don’t trust the protein in that stuff.’

  Anna went to the refrigerator. She ripped the lid off a Tupperware bowl and dolloped six tablespoons of cottage cheese onto a plate.

  ‘Mom, she’s my best friend.’

  ‘She’s your only friend, which, please God, is a situation you’ll wake up and change.’

  Steph gave her a questioning look. ‘Why don’t you like Chris?’

  ‘Chris is an angel. I just want you to have friends like any other adult eighteen-year-old girl. And you don’t need to go around throwing promises like autographs. What if you get an offer from a company and she doesn’t? Where’ll you be then?’