by C. L. Donley
I expected Dale to get emotional, but he wasn’t. Not really.
When I ask him about it after, he just shrugs and says, “I don’t know. I came fully expecting Mya to rip my heart out. She was good, but it wasn’t like what I saw in the ballroom.”
Mya
I’m up early the next day after my first performance of the season, doing my hours long stretch routine before practice.
Other dancers like to balk at my tedious stretch routine— not counting cool down— but I can’t hear those other dancers over the sound of their crutches and casts and painful screams.
I haven’t once sustained so much as a sprain in my career.
Many people say it’s impossible to keep up with. Those people simply have too many other things to do.
I have nothing else to do. Nothing to do but stretch. And wait.
Wait for someone to underestimate their workload and overestimate their body.
It doesn’t happen much anymore, not at this level. But every once and while, I catch a poor schmuck slipping. And soon, I’m rehearsing their part.
They know what I’m doing. I’m not a principal, I’m not their understudy. I’m some lesser part, or someone else’s understudy. But I’ve long ignored the dirty looks.
If they want to keep their place, the ball is entirely in their court. I’ve no control over their actions, only my own.
Maybe I psych them out a little, but who at this stage couldn’t handle that type of pressure?
At any rate, this is the way I ended up with the part of Hermia.
I didn’t want it bad enough to taste it, not like Swan Lake, but I’d caught a bitch slipping.
The description said Hermia was short with brown hair. Didn’t say what ethnicity she was. They shouldn’t take issue. If they did, I saw no signs of it.
My friend Hana is Asian, and also fit the description, but was not chosen even as an understudy.
Two weeks before the debut, the dancer playing Hermia sustained an injury and decided not to dance through it. And the understudy didn’t know her part.
Well, she did but… not to her bones.
Not to the point where, in rehearsal, when the director asked, “Who can execute this right now?” she had the confidence to beat me to the punch in raising my hand and saying “I can.”
It had just been for the sake of rehearsals. But then I’d taken the part.
I can’t help it that the understudy was content to be the understudy.
“Yaas, bitch!” my friend Hana said at the news.
The next morning after the first show, the rehearsal room is all a chatter, and when I walk in everyone claps.
I smile, shrinking at the attention and a little wary, my duffle bag over one hiked shoulder as I find a space near the beam.
“We made the papers!” they say.
“You mean the internet?” I correct.
The headline reads: Ballet is Officially Cool Again, citing the SF performing arts center’s resurrection of Midsummer Night’s Dream as one of the best favors the city had done for pop culture.
“Whaaat?” I marvel, looking at the dancer’s phone who plays Lysander. I see an amazing high quality close up of me and him on stage, the emotion on our faces compelling and expressive.
“Yo, can I get a copy of this picture?” I ask.
“Right?” Lysander responds.
“The guy that runs Webster now was in the audience last night,” someone else pipes up.
I stiffen, not responding as they talk, their voices fading into background noise.
My heart sends a potent bout of adrenaline through my body.
Dale came to see me dance.
I suddenly feel butterflies. Nerves. At rehearsal.
What the hell, he’s already been to a show Mya. You’re free to relax. I try telling myself.
What did he think? Oh God, had he brought his mom??
Why did I care? I know I did well. I was on, I felt it. I didn’t even get nervous when my family came to shows.
But then again, none of them really like ballet.
But Dale cares. If not about me, about the dance. About the gift. And about how well I utilize it.
I think back to his face, about lying in bed draped across him as he tells me that I have a gift. His face when he caught me in the ballroom. Tears sting my eyes as I practice, thinking about pre-sex Dale. So foreign to me. So white. I giggle out loud at the memory and the class gives me a look. I wish now that I’d had more of those moments with him before we slept together. Why had I refused to get to know him at all? My luggage from the trip is still unpacked. Every time I unzip it I can still smell him.
The memory of his moans alone cause a forceful jolt of wetness to my groin. I try to focus on rehearsal. Our instructor is giving us direction, five at a time in front of the piano but I’m a million miles away, trying to remember the scent of sweat in his hair. The isolated movements of his hips as he looms over me, the sight of his glowing white fingers against my skin while he tightly grips my legs at 10 and 2. Fuck. Still two more hours of rehearsal. I’m gonna need a good need a good long time in the showers today.
I wonder if I’ll get a phone call. My heart gallops at the thought. He doesn’t know my number, but he could obviously get it. And I his, too. My pride hasn’t let me make the first move, but at least now I’ll have an excuse to call him after I’d refused him.
God, I’m an idiot.
Why did I think I was freaking all that after one weekend??
I did not get any more laid after that. Foolishly I’d used a few of my precious days off to go out with some in my troupe, new to this sex habit that everyone else has. I had some takers, but they were all wrong. They were just… doing too much and yet not enough. Too eager and not even the hint of a further relationship. And I’m just too busy to suffer a bad weekend thing. Even though sometimes I’m so racked with longing, so haunted by Spanish memories and desperate to move on that I just feel like saying “to hell with it.” But in the moment I just… can’t.
I’m too ashamed to go sniffing around for Dale. And if I contact him, or otherwise find he’s moved on as easy as I suspect it is for him, I fear I’ll turn into a bunny boiling crazy person.
Amara said to expect him at Swan Lake in a few months.
But no. He’d seen the very first show of the year.
Suddenly I have a thought, a thought that brings hope buoying up to the surface of my face.
What if I could dance myself right back into his heart?
Yes, I refused him, but that was out of fear. Fear of what people thought, fear of better options, whatever the hell I thought those were. Dale was so laid back about the whole thing. He just let me walk right out of his life.
Once reality hit—the one he’s known about for awhile now— that it’s hard out here in these streets, I suspect his decision was more of a “told you so.” Let the bitch go out there and do better, he probably thought.
No, Dale isn’t like that. He simply gave me a choice. It was mature and decent. And he’s holding up his end. Any girl would be an idiot to give that up. And I am that idiot. He’s probably waiting for me to come crawling back. Damn, I wish. What are the odds he’d take me back after I rejected him like he was a dime a dozen?
But if I can dance for him, if I can have him declaring his love for me, I might have a chance.
The only problem is, I don’t know when he’ll be in the audience again, if ever.
Then you’d better dance like hell at every show, I tell myself.
Done.
For the next two weeks I give it my all like I haven’t in years. Even if it’s a 2 pm show, I dance.
On these days I imagine Dale taking off work in the middle of the day, putting everything on hold, desperate to see me again. And then suddenly he finds me backstage and makes love to me right there and then.
Everything I do is to that end.
Even if I’m completely out of my mind, it’s a damn good motivator
. Stretching has never seemed so fruitful, eight hours of daily practice is practically foreplay. And when I get out in front of the hot lights it’s as though I’m diving in an electric current. It’s become exhilarating. I’ve become exhilarating. And before long, people other than Dale start to take notice.
Thirty One
Chapter 31
Dale
In the two and a half weeks that Midsummer runs, I see it three times.
The first time, I was afraid, nervous. I’d seen her in the ballroom when she was just screwing around, not at the height of her powers. I didn’t know what her performance would do to me. But it turned out to be okay. She was brilliant, but she wasn’t free. She was in her element, but not unobserved. She was, in essence, at work. It wasn’t the same.
But then, the second time had been better than the first and I couldn’t believe it.
The third time, I invite my father and my oldest sister Caroline. Dad declines, but Caroline agrees to come. And it’s there that I feel my emotions come undone.
In the end, I’m glad my dad didn’t come. I can be a basket case in front of Caroline, but not in front of Dad. Especially if he also needed to be a basket case in that moment. I don’t think my dad will ever attend another ballet.
It’s 2 pm on a Sunday. Not even the paparazzi are out and about today.
The balcony is empty. The lights go dim to a smattering of applause. The first act begins suddenly like a rocket launch as I wait for Mya’s entrance. Then I watch her. I focus on her, until the wound over my heart is fully exposed, peeled back and seeping.
Mya tears clean into me with her movements.
I could’ve coped my entire life with the loss of my mother had I never seen Mya dance.
For me, the most miserable part about her death has been that I hadn’t known much about her. Not really.
She took care of us. I grew up. I went to college. Then Webster took off and I took care of her. I loved her.
But I hadn’t known her.
My father had nearly forty years with her and now is merely existing in painful desolation. I’d selfishly been glad to avoid the pain of the loss I see him suffering with. But there’s a queer kind of suffering that comes with loving a person that you never took the time to know.
Mya has simply made me realize that I’m desperate to know someone that I didn’t have the chance to— or rather squandered the opportunity— but still loved. I want to see my mother’s face right now. Desperately.
We all appreciate ballet in varying degrees, but Mom lived it and lived for it. And hushed us when it got to the part where Oberon confronts Puck in the forest. Every time.
What would she say now? What kind of bliss would she be in right now, seeing Mya being faultless and other worldly on stage? I would easily give away every penny I had for two seconds worth of my mom, of a memory that will never happen.
I shake and weep, and let Caroline hold my hand. Caroline’s the oldest by ten years and the closest thing now to a mother, the one who had ten more years with mom than me.
I cried before at the hospital, at hospice, at the funeral. But that was anger. I was angry at cancer, that it wasn’t a company to be sued or a person to beat to death.
But now I’m sad. Now I’m grieving. I wasted that time I had with someone I loved, and now I know it. Now I’m living with it, as Mya dances.
“Her lines are so clean,” Caroline whispers, her face tear streaked.
I laugh through my tears, remembering my mother’s repetitive phrase.
It suddenly feels good to acknowledge her.
I laugh some more. I laugh a lot.
“What’s so funny?”
“Mom just got me to go to this fucking ballet three times,” I sniff.
Caroline snorts at that.
“Remember when dad taped over the middle of it with ER?” Caroline giggles.
“Of course I remember, you weren’t even there. I told you the story.”
“That was one bitchin’ tape. At least 25 years old.”
“If she hadn’t tried to keep it safe at the dance studio, we might still be watching it.”
“Cremation was definitely the best way for it to go,” Caroline mutters. I laugh again.
When the show is over the entire cast comes out to take their bows.
“You wanna wait backstage?” Caroline asks as we file out of the balcony.
“We’ve got dinner reservations, remember?” I say, feeling a bit pukey.
Of course I want to see her. I want to see her, touch her, kiss her, and all manner of things. But it’s been nearly three months since we’ve seen each other at this point, and I’m afraid of what— or more specifically who— I might find if I show up unannounced.
I should’ve already contacted her by now, but I’ve been busy. Really. Well, maybe part of me is putting it off. I thought it was fear but I think perhaps it’s pride that’s gotten in the way, pride that was wounded when she’d said “no thanks.” Every woman wants love, Grayson had wisely boiled down. I know Mya does, down to my marrow.
“It’ll only take a minute, it’s mid afternoon on a Sunday,” Caroline persuades me.
“No, I don’t wanna be late. Plus, I look like a schlub, I didn’t even take a shower this morning.”
Caroline stops and looks at me, her self-made billionaire little brother who’s been throwing his weight around for a decade, and now I’m essentially telling her that I’m afraid of a 5’6” ballet dancer. I know I won’t be able to hide anything once her eyes probe mine. She puts her hands on my shoulders and I roll my eyes as hers become misty. She shakes me as furiously as she can while I laugh.
“I’ve never seen you like this! Have you ever been like this?!” she half screams half whispers.
I chuckle. “I can’t say that I have,” I confess.
“Oh…my God Dale, she’s so sweet. She’s fun, she’s so caring, so attentive. She took care of Amara the whole weekend, she did our hair… she’s beautiful…”
“I’m gonna be honest with you right now, you sound a little racist,” I say.
“How do I sound racist??”
“I don’t know just…you going on and on about her attributes. It sounds like you want to purchase her.”
“I don’t want to purchase her, I want you to have sex with her, so you can finally have a baby— a gorgeous baby— and put her in ballet class!!”
“Her or him,” I correct her. It only makes her commence shaking me again.
“You’re really in love! This is happening! It’s a miracle! Right??!”
“I wouldn’t call it a ‘miracle,’ Caroline.”
“Oh stop it, just because you kept shoving Avery down all our throats doesn’t mean you were in love with her, it means you were desperate. And you’ve got Amber on this pedestal, I mean, Jesus you were 16 years old and you know what? Frankly, she was a klepto.”
“She had a lot of… inner turmoil,” I defend her, “she got over it.”
“Can I speak freely?”
“What were you doing before now?”
“You keep picking these Miss America pageant queens that come from money or whatever, but that’s not who you are, and if that’s not who you are, then of course it’s going to fall apart. Marriage is an endurance race, Dale. I mean, the money helps I guess, but in some ways it makes it worse.” Caroline is on her second marriage and speaking from experience, I can tell.
“You don’t say, Caroline, tell me more. Hold on, let me grab a pen,” I answer sarcastically.
“Yeah, get one, asshole. Because you need help. You’re a computer engineer who built Webster. But your dating history is fucking dismal. Honestly, when Avery left, we all breathed a sigh of relief.”
I laugh, inwardly grateful that she both held her peace then and is confessing her true feelings now.”
“At this stage in your life, I was worried you’d have to settle.”
“We’re getting waaaay ahead of ourselves here,” I sigh. “It’s
a little early for ‘mission accomplished’ speeches.”
“Mya totally deserves a guy like you. Her best friend’s husband is Grayson Davis, so I doubt she’d be after your money.”
I laugh at the idea of a gold-digging Mya. “Yeah, no, I’m not worried about that. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a bit of a problem.”
“Oh my gosh, Dale this is huge. Huge! Dad would freak out at first, I think… but Mya would absolutely melt him. Melt him. Don’t you agree?”
“I’m glad you approve. Really. It’s new,” I smile. Caroline’s warm wise encouragement solidifies my instincts.
“Let’s go tell her the news!” Caroline is bursting.
“She doesn’t know we’re here.”
“You’re afraid she’ll be upset? You can’t possibly think she’ll turn you down.”
“She already did.”
“Oh my God, Dale, you are literally Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
“Who is that, and what does that mean.”
Caroline shakes her head dismissively. “She’ll come around. You just gotta knock her off her feet.”
“That’s great advice, Caroline.”
“I’m gonna butt all the way out now. Starting now,” Caroline says.
“Would you? Thanks,” I say as we walk. She grabs my arm enthusiastically and squeezes until she cuts off my circulation.
I’ll figure out a way to tell Mya personally what her performances meant to me. And probably more. The whole experience has given me a newfound carpe diem attitude. I’ve no idea if this could work, but so fucking what. If Mya died tomorrow I’d never get out of bed again. And that’s all that matters.
Mya
“When’s your next day off?”
“Thursday,” I inform Amara.
Amara can always be counted upon at times like these.
Like some kind of homing pigeon device, she always knows when to call, and it’s usually when I want nothing more than to rot away in front of the tv on my day off.