My eyes search Bea’s pretty, freckled face. I can’t believe that she, of all people, is defending Zoe—she doesn’t even like her that much. “What are you talking about? I’ve worked my ass off! I can’t imagine dedicating myself more than I already do.”
“But you’re conflicted every day. I can see it,” she says gently.
“No, I’m not.” I can feel my face burning.
Bea sits back and crosses her arms. “Han, you know I love you, but at least be honest with yourself, if not me. I know you love dancing, but are you sure you even want to be promoted?”
“Are you kidding? Of course I do!” I leap up from the sofa and start pacing the room. “What do think I’ve been chasing my whole life?” I knock over a stack of old magazines, but I don’t care. “I didn’t have a prom! I’ve never had a boyfriend! I’ve hardly seen my parents since I was fourteen! I can’t even finish one damn book!” I feel hot tears burning my cheeks. “I’m exhausted all the time, every single day. What more am I supposed to do?” The tears stream down my face.
Bea looks at me, her blue eyes affectionate and warm. “But what do you think happens after you get promoted, Hannah?” she asks softly. “You have even less of a life than before. It only gets harder.” She stands to face me and holds my gaze. “The Rubies solo is huge. And you probably are on your way to being promoted. But you have to make up your mind. You can either have a life, or you can dance. But you can’t have it both ways.”
“But I don’t want to choose,” I moan.
A tear sparkles in the corner of her eye as she answers. “But you have to, Hannah. You have to make a choice.”
I feel a lump in my throat as I try to catch my breath. “Maybe you’re right,” I whisper.
“It’s okay, Hannah. It’s really okay.”
I nod silently. And I realize I’m covered in snot.
Then Bea puts her arms around me and gives me a long, hard hug. “Now, I don’t know about you,” she says, pulling back, “but I am famished. Let’s order some goddamn sushi, and we’ll open a bottle of red.”
“Takeout menus are in the kitchen,” I say, still sniffling.
Bea smiles at me. “That’s my girl,” she says.
The next morning I go to the dressing room before class to see Daisy, red in the face, flinging things out of her theater case. Leg warmers, socks, and T-shirts land all over the room. A pair of pointe shoes goes whizzing past my head and collides with the cinder-block wall. She’s cursing like a truck driver stuck in rush hour traffic on the BQE.
The reason? Caleb has kissed another girl.
Though she’s not exactly a girl: Her name is Margaret, she’s twenty-seven, and she’s one of the Manhattan Ballet soloists. She dances Odette in Swan Lake, and last year the New York Times called her “a dancer of thrilling athleticism.”
“I can’t believe he found someone he likes better than me,” Daisy whines. “Do you think he’s been ogling her ass the whole time or what?”
“I still can’t believe he’s not gay,” Zoe whispers.
I feel terrible for Daisy, and I try to give her a hug, but she shrugs me off.
“Do you think his mother knows he’s a cheating, lying bastard?” she hisses. “I’m going to call his mother.”
“Don’t,” says Bea quietly from the corner, where she has gone to avoid being hit by Daisy’s warm-up clothes and pointe shoes. “Tattling isn’t the answer. Caleb is the person you need to confront.”
Daisy rolls her eyes and looks over at me. “Who invited Dr. Phil here?” she demands, picking up a shoe and then throwing it down again.
“She has a point, Daze,” I say.
Daisy ignores us both and huffs over to the door. “I’m going to vending,” she says. “I need a Diet Coke and a bag of Fritos.”
The door slams behind her, and the dressing room is suddenly silent. Bea gets up from the corner and begins to pick up Daisy’s things and fold them. I’ve never, ever seen her fold clothes before. “I feel really bad for her,” she says.
I nod. As I bend to help Bea gather Daisy’s scattered clothes, I try to will Daisy strength.
“She’ll be okay,” Bea says, as if reading my thoughts. “But it’s funny in a way. How it takes something like this to remember that there’s more to life besides ballet.”
And Bea’s right, of course. We forget that the world doesn’t revolve around us and our pointe shoes, and that our disappointments (and our triumphs) don’t all stem from casting decisions and Otto’s whims.
And this makes me think of Jacob.
39
On Monday, the May sun is shining after days of rain, and the air feels almost like summer. I slip on a little cotton shift and a pair of ballet flats (it always seems weird to me that they’re called that) and take the subway downtown.
I asked Jacob to meet me for coffee after his last class of the day, and because I’m early, I sit on the steps outside the building and watch the NYU students scurrying to and from their lectures, their backpacks and satchels crammed with books and pencils and laptops. Most of them are wearing jeans and tennis shoes. Some students are talking on their cell phones, some are walking with friends, and some are trying frantically to catch up on their reading while threading their way through the crowd of their peers.
Zoe’s voice comes back to me, faint and faintly mocking. “Pedestrians go to college, Han.”
A kid who doesn’t look a day older than sixteen plops down on a step near me, lights a cigarette, and opens a dog-eared book. Ironically, it’s Frankenstein. His syllabus slides out from one of the pages and blows against my shoe. Before I hand it back to him, I have a chance to see the course title: The Feminine and the Fantastical: Mothers, Monsters, and Mad Women in Nineteenth-Century Literature.
Jacob approaches me, squinting from the sun, but his face is otherwise unreadable. “Hey,” he says.
I stand up. “Hey.”
There’s an awkward silence. I dig the toe of my shoe into the steps, scuffing it a little.
“Well,” he says. His hands are shoved in his pockets. “So you wanted to get coffee or something?” he asks eventually.
I nod. “I wanted to talk to you. I need some perspective.”
He raises his eyebrows. “So you didn’t come here to apologize for being so impossible.” But he smiles after he says this. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”
“Please.”
He holds out his arm, elbow bent, and I link my arm with his. To touch him fills me with something inexpressible—a mixture of anticipation and longing. It feels like he’s impossibly far away, even though he’s right beside me. The sun shines on his dark hair, and the wind blows it into his eyes.
We walk west, past boutiques and cafés, past shoe repair shops and dry cleaners. Girls are out in their first summer dresses; they seem shy to show their pale arms, their delicate white necks. Every corner deli has buckets of flowers out front: tulips, irises, freesias.
“Where are we going?” I ask. It’s the first thing I’ve said in blocks.
“To the river,” Jacob says. He takes my hand as we cross the West Side Highway, but it doesn’t feel romantic. It feels merely protective, the way he might hold one of his students’ hands to keep him or her from running into traffic.
On the other side, we’re right at the water. I always forget that Manhattan is an island. It seems so solid, so gigantic—how could it be one small piece of land sandwiched between rivers? You hear the word island and you think of sand, palm trees.
We sit down on a bench. The sun glints on the river. Depending on where you look, the water seems either brown or blue.
I have so much to say to him that I don’t have any idea where to begin. The breeze whistles by us, a few gulls turning lazily in it.
“So,” Jacob says.
“So,” I say. I fiddle with the edge of my skirt. I don’t know why I can’t find the right words to begin. It’s not that Jacob makes me feel uncomfortable—it’s the opposite of that.
He makes me feel calm; it’s my own self that’s making me feel anxious.
“So something happened,” I say. “Zoe got promoted to soloist—”
“Wow, okay,” he says, nodding.
“Yeah, and I got this really great part.”
Jacob’s eyebrows rise. “That’s fantastic, Hannah!”
“Yeah, it’s great,” I say. “And I’m probably going to be promoted, too… at some point. But I talked to Bea about it, and she kind of made me see that I’ve been feeling ambivalent about that for a while now.”
Jacob looks slightly confused. “It seems to me like you’ve been pretty damn dedicated.”
“Yeah, I have been. But don’t you see? Getting promoted will only make it worse. I’ll have even less time for anything. And I’m realizing that there are just so many other things I want to do and see and learn about.” I shake my head. “The truth is that I’m not willing to do whatever it takes to be a ballerina.”
Jacob nods his head slowly. “So, what would you do if you left?”
“Who knows?” I cry. “But I was sort of thinking about it, and I remembered that I used to love reading, like, biographies of famous women. Helen Keller and Amelia Earhart. And I had this fantasy about spending some time in India. But right now? I’m the kind of person who doesn’t even know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich.” I look into his blue eyes. “I’m envious of all you’re able to explore and learn. And I want that. I want to learn Italian, too, but for real, and I want to have the time to go see really amazing art. And I want to get to know my parents.”
My eyes suddenly fill with tears. I stare out over the blurry river, and a few silent minutes go by. The water laps at the shore as a seagull floats above us.
“But the idea of leaving terrifies me,” I say eventually. “Leaving would be like going into a witness-protection program or something; I wouldn’t ever see the people in my life anymore, because I’d be on the outside, in the real world. It would be like starting from scratch… like moving to Kansas or Idaho or… New Jersey.”
“You know, New Jersey’s right over there,” Jacob says, smiling. He points across the river. “So that’s not so bad.”
I can’t help but smile back.
Jacob puts his hand on my knee and squeezes it lightly. “But dancing will always be a part of you. There’s dance outside of this particular company, right?”
I nod, but I’m quiet for another moment as the tears run down my cheeks. Then I wipe them away with my sleeve.
“Come here.” Jacob opens his arms, and I sink into them. “Can I kiss you now?” he asks softly.
But he doesn’t wait for an answer. He just does.
40
“Ladies, ladies,” Christine says, snapping her fingers at us. She’s chewing gum so quickly it looks like some kind of facial tic, which is apparently her new way of combating the stress of her job. “Emeralds is up. Rubies goes in twenty minutes. What in the world are you doing, Adriana? You’re not in this. Shoo!”
“We’re fine, Christine,” someone calls.
“God, I hope so.” Christine sighs, then turns around and heads down the hall.
Laura smiles at me as she fits me into my short, red, jewel-encrusted costume. I check my makeup and bun in the mirror. In a moment begins my inaugural performance of Rubies.
“Merde,” Laura says. “You’re going to be amazing.”
I smile. When you think about it, it’s a really beautiful thing that we do. The company is a collection of one hundred very different people, from all over the world, but we all believe in the power and importance of art. That’s what binds us, keeps us together, through the effort and the intensity and the competition.
I blow Laura a kiss and then scurry down the hall to the backstage area. Harry lingers by the boom, and he mimes a standing ovation as I pass by. Then he clambers up to the flies, where Bea is waiting for the performance to begin.
My parents, who refused to remain in Massachusetts when their one and only offspring was dancing her first solo, are somewhere in the invisible audience. And Jacob is, too, with an armful of roses so big he can barely hold them (he ruined the surprise by texting me a picture).
Before the curtain goes up, I stand alone in the darkness in the center of the stage and listen to the sound of my breath. Sometimes—and maybe this is one of the magic times—the pause before the opening notes can dilate, and the seconds seem to stretch into minutes, hours.
I think about the moment I fell in love with dance as I leaped over chiffon scarves when I was seven. I think about my mom driving me to ballet lessons in downtown Boston, and my dad hand-sewing the elastics onto my ballet slippers. He obsessed over making sure they were just perfect.
On the other side of the red velvet curtain, the conductor taps his stand and raises his arms. The audience waits. I take a deep breath and imagine the air filling my lungs. I nod to Christine and step into a sous-sous. I hear the opening strains of the violins.
The curtain rises. I feel the lights hit my skin. For the first time, I’m alone onstage, as I’d always dreamed. There’s no other dancer to share the moment with—only the invisible audience. There’s a terrific sense of freedom, but I’m caught off guard by how lonely it is.
I take a deep breath.
Then I stare straight ahead and charge downstage.
Even as kids we were warned of the brevity of dance careers. When I was in third grade, my teacher, pretty, willowy Mrs. Eaton, would say, “Dance each step as if it were your last.” We looked at her blankly. What did we understand of that then? We were eight years old: A single school day felt interminable, and childhood seemed like it would go on forever.
It was another ten years before I understood what Mrs. Eaton had been saying. What she meant was: Time is precious. And it speeds up.
There are a few more weeks of spring season, and then it’s over, all of it. I’ll pack up my theater case, and I’ll take down the pictures and notes tacked up around my mirror. When I leave the dressing room, it will be for the last time.
A few days ago I walked determinedly down the long hallway to Otto’s office. I ignored his secretary—who told me firmly that he was busy—placed my hand on the doorknob, and turned it.
I’d never been in his office before, never approached him uninvited. He had his feet up on a massive mahogany desk, but he lowered them as he hung up the phone. He looked down his nose at me, and his dark eyes were cool and only vaguely interested.
There was a chair next to me, but it seemed too presumptuous to sit. And anyway, what I had to say wouldn’t take long. I took a breath and began. “I’ve always dreamed of dancing Rubies, and now I have, and I danced better than I ever have before. In fact I had the time of my life.”
“And if you keep up that level of work and dedication—”
I put up my hand to stop him. “No.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to. I’ve sacrificed enough already.” I pointed to the window overlooking the city. It was one of the only windows in the whole theater. “There’s a whole world out there that I don’t know anything about. I owe it to myself to learn as much about it as I possibly can. I want to lead an extraordinary life, a life that isn’t contained inside a single theater.”
Otto stared at me as if he had no idea who I was, and I realized in that moment that he didn’t.
So probably he didn’t care what plans I had for my life, but I told him anyway. “I’m going to college,” I said. “I’m going to be a part of the world.” Then I extended my hand and shook his firmly. “Thank you for this adventure, but it’s time for me to go explore something else.”
And Otto said nothing. He merely nodded at me, a tiny, bemused smile on his lips.
As I walked down the hallway, I began to cry—not because I was sad, but because I knew my life would never be the same again. I was scared as hell. But I was also free.
This morning I got the application packet for NYU. There is an undergraduate creative-writing program that I think mi
ght be perfect. In addition to my high school transcript and three letters of recommendation, I’m supposed to include an essay about an experience that made me who I am.
My name is Hannah Ward, I’ll write. Don’t call me a ballerina.
Epilogue: Fall Semester
“Here, let me help you,” Jacob says, reaching over to grab a stack of papers from my arms. “What is all this, anyway?”
I shift my bag to my other shoulder and take a sip of iced coffee. “Short stories,” I tell him. “From my fiction workshop.”
“Is there one of yours in here?” he asks, thumbing through them.
“Mine’s due next week.”
“I hope it’s going to be about me,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to be featured in fiction.”
I laugh. “Maybe if you write another song about me, I’ll write a story about you. Although since a story is longer, you’ll probably have to write two or three more songs to be fair.”
“Oh, Hannah was a dancer and not an equestrian, but then she went to college and became a pedestrian,” Jacob sings.
“Very funny,” I say, giving him a little shove.
“Wait, there’s more.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I laugh. “Come on, I’m going to be late.”
He takes my hand and we walk south to the edge of Chinatown, near the park where the old men play chess.
“So, remember, I’m playing at Gene’s tonight at eight, if you want to catch my set,” Jacob says.
“I’ll be there,” I say. “I’ll ask Meg if she wants to come.”
“Who’s Meg?” he asks, looking at me quizzically.
I grin. “She’s my new friend. I met her in art history class.” And she doesn’t know a piqué from a bourrée, I think but don’t add. “You’ll love her.”
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