You in Five Acts

by Una LaMarche

  • • •

  Alphabetically, Juliet Allison went first, even though everybody knew her last name was really Zenkman (but stage names had just been covered in our senior career-management seminar, and besides, who could blame her?). She stepped into the center of the room and assumed fourth position, staring out calmly at a far-off focal point with her dark doe eyes.

  I often wondered what the other girls thought about when they were getting ready to dance. Was it mundane stuff, like counting the music, or wondering if they’d properly hammered out the boxes of their pointe shoes enough to keep their toes from killing? Or did they picture some vague montage of success, a never-ending loop of tulle and satin and grand jetés and roses littering the stage? Whatever Juliet was thinking right then, I knew it wasn’t 1 in 1,086. That’s the only thing that ran through my mind when I danced, because that’s how many black ballerinas were principal dancers at an American company. One. And it wasn’t just present-day. That’s as many as there had ever been. In history. One.

  I knew that statistic inside and out because I’d looked up a list freshman year, just sat down and googled a Wikipedia roster of every notable ballet company in the country (133, although a handful of them, like, for example the American Negro Ballet Company, were defunct). I’d gone to every single website, scrolling down the faces, counting, writing down numbers—although often there was nothing to write. At the end of my project, out of 1,086 female ballet dancers in the country, I’d seen only 39 black faces . . . and out of the 106 female principal dancers, zero. In 2015, when I marked down an X for Misty Copeland, I actually cried, even though I still had less than a fraction of a 1 percent shot at principal. One in 1,086.

  My father, a cultural anthropology professor at Columbia, made it his business to know about human culture—especially the specific culture of specific humans his only daughter was looking to be a part of. Dad didn’t see 1 out of 1,086 as inspirational, as the start of a revolution. He saw it as just plain racist. When we got into it over dinner—which we’d done almost every night during winter break, since College versus Company was the reigning Family Fight Topic—he would rail about systemic oppression and institutional elitism while I just shouted names into the spaces between words: Olivia Boisson. Francesca Hayward. Aesha Ash. Misty, Misty, Misty.

  Mom, for her part, usually waited until things had quieted down before launching into a stealthier attack—fitting for a psychologist. “Even if you do make it,” she’d say, her tone reminding me that this dream was just shy of opening a water park on Mars in terms of probability (what would that be, 1 in 1,087?), “what’s the long-term plan? Most dancers can’t work past their late thirties, right?” This was dad’s cue to jump in with a plug for school, any school. He and my mom couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t at least audition for Juilliard, if I insisted on continuing to dance. They didn’t get that I would be wasting four of my best years. A conservatory program was for serious actors, singers, and musicians. Serious dancers didn’t have time to waste. We had, as Ms. Adair was fond of saying, “the life cycle of a fruit fly.” She was full of uninspirational zingers. I wondered if she practiced at home, spirit-breaking the way some people do jumping jacks.

  My ballet life cycle had started when I was six. I’d seen a class practicing through an open door at the dance studio my mom went to every Monday for her old-school aerobics. One look at the tutus and the tights and I was all in, shattering my parents’ dream that I would throw myself into team sports and science like everyone else in the family. They famously tried to bribe me to take piano instead, but I’d been adamant and unwavering—“stubborn,” if you asked my dad. I informed them that I wanted to dance “in a bathing suit,” meaning a leotard. So they’d lectured me about intersectionality and traditional gender roles and finally said yes to one class, which became another class. They told me I had to keep my room clean to keep taking ballet (I did). They told me I had to get straight As to keep taking ballet (no problem). They told me I had to start paying for my own classes, so I spent a whole summer selling lemonade to the runners on Riverside Drive. Finally, though, when I asked to audition for the School of American Ballet at age ten, they drew a hard line. I could dance, but my life wasn’t going to revolve around dance, not while I was living under their roof. They’d only let me try out for Janus in the first place because it was A) free and B) they never thought I’d get in.

  Oops. Sorry not sorry.

  What they really wanted for me, though, was the dance history program at Barnard College, which would still fall under my dad’s faculty tuition discount from Columbia. History—now, that was academic. That was social science. That was something my parents could get behind, something they could brag on the way they bragged on my twin brothers’ twin MBAs. In the Rogers-Wilson family, a ballerina wasn’t something a serious person aspired to. She was just a little plastic white girl who spun when you opened a music box.

  Julia finished a fluttery bourrée and everyone started clapping. Her sixty seconds were over . . . which meant that mine were that much closer to starting. I pulled my knees up to my chest and pressed my thumb gently into the flesh of my right ankle. There was a dull ache—not unusual, but troublesome. I’d been dancing hard all through break, prepping for the audition, but I hadn’t been resting enough and was starting to get the feeling that something was off with my foot, the way you can feel a cold coming on. It didn’t seem like there was any time to stop, though; when I wasn’t dancing I was studying, tutoring, writing papers, submitting essays to Barnard and Brown and Wesleyan so that I would have something to fall back on if everyone else was right, and I wasn’t good enough. I pointed and flexed my feet, feeling the blood race up my legs toward my thundering heart.

  Lolly went next, and when Mr. Stratechuck announced her selection, my head nearly exploded: she had chosen the same music as me, the Kitri variation from Don Quixote. I had picked it because Kitri is one of the few leading female roles that’s technically supposed to be nonwhite; she’s a Spanish flamenco dancer type, which is frankly as close to black as anyone can get in classical ballet unless they feel like playing an evil Muslim or a character called “the Blackamoor,” who prays to a coconut. We were supposed to showcase our strengths, and I had been planning on owning everything that supposedly made me so different by embodying a character who was more peacock than swan. But now Lolly had gotten there first. And she’d even brought a fan as a prop, which she popped open with a flick of her dainty wrist as she launched into her routine.

  I wished Liv had been there to give me one of her pep talks, or even just to whisper something bitchy, like that Lolly was about as Latina as Taylor Swift eating an empanada—which is a real thing she said once after peeking in on our ballroom class the day we learned merengue. But all I had was the back of Eunice Lee’s head, so instead I focused on deep breathing as I watched Lolly triumphantly rise into a series of perfect arabesques, flapping that fan like she was fighting off a bee. She got more applause than Juliet, and I even saw Ms. Adair clapping discreetly against her notebook. The instructors were supposed to be neutral; that was not a good sign.

  One by one the auditions came and went, as my nerves soared, panic rising slowly but surely in my chest, each second unleashing new tangles of branches, like the big reveal of the Nutcracker Christmas tree. I distracted myself by counting how many times people did passés (eight), sauté arabesques (ten), entrechats (eleven; Ana Kulikov did four in hers alone), grand jetés (thirteen), and pirouettes (seventeen). And that was only A through M. It was kind of amazing, actually, how similar all of the dancing looked given that we had supposedly choreographed our steps in isolation. Then again, we’d all been trained to give the ballet masters what they wanted. So while Ms. Adair had asked us to show them who we were, it made sense that most people were showing them who they thought they should be instead.

  But then it was your turn, and for the first time all day I stopped feeling nervo
us. You walked out like you were walking up to meet me at my locker—rounded shoulders, relaxed gait, big smile, shaggy brown hair hanging always a little bit in your eyes because for some reason you happily wore ballet slippers but drew the line at headbands. Watching you in the seconds before you danced made it easy to see how consciously you changed from Diego the boy from East Harlem, raised with two brothers by a single mom, who could only dance the salsa—and only then at family functions, and only then under duress—to Diego the prodigy, who’d been discovered by an after-school teacher hired to introduce fine arts to inner-city kids. You were twelve, too old by most standards to start training seriously, but you had such a natural gift they fast-tracked you; you got your acceptance letter from Janus eighteen months after you did your first plié.

  You’d picked Don Quixote, too, the Basilio solo, and as soon as the piano started, you transformed, eyes sparkling, shoulders squared, posture like a matador. You launched immediately into a series of powerful cabrioles, getting so much height that if I hadn’t known any better I’d have thought the floor was rubberized. Everyone was quiet; the air in the room seemed to change. You weren’t flawless, but you were better than flawless—you were alive. It was like your body just knew what it needed to do. It didn’t seem forced, or even choreographed. Sometimes, when Dad and I were arguing, he’d try to tell me that ballet wasn’t about talent, that it was pay to play, and that no one without money could ever make it. I wanted to tell him that he just needed to see you dance to see that no overstuffed bank account could make anyone else even half as good as you. And you had more to gain—or lose—than anyone. If I didn’t become a professional dancer, I’d go to a liberal arts college and pick some nice white-collar career. Cry me a river. If you didn’t get a scholarship, or a place in a company, there was no money for school. You’d end up making minimum wage at some crappy job that didn’t deserve you. But if any of that was on your mind, it wasn’t showing. You were on fire. I had to contain my own howl as you nailed eight pirouettes at the end of your routine. Mr. Dyshlenko looked like he might weep.

  “Oh my God, he’s so cute,” I heard Maple Rhodes whisper to Lolly as you jogged back to your place across the room. “When you dance the Showcase with him, can you please, please get on that and then tell me all about it?” Then, a few turns later, Maple got up and did a completely lackluster dance to—of all possible things—the Sugarplum Fairy solo. It made me feel much better. Until they called my name.

  I’d been imagining the moment of my Showcase audition for four entire years, so actually living it was incredibly surreal, like a dream, or a nightmare—maybe both at once. I walked out to take my starting position, my brain reeling off a laundry list of reminders: Pas de couru, tombé, manège of piqué pirouettes. Relax your face! Smile, but not too much! Keep your chest lifted! Tighten your core! Squeeze your glutes! Remember your turnout! Don’t roll your ankle! Don’t overthink it! I shook out my legs, hoping the thoughts would go with them.

  “You’ll just have to give us a moment, Joy,” Mr. Stratechuck said, peering under the piano lid. “One of the hammers has been giving me trouble.” I nodded and smiled tightly, feeling like an idiot for standing in front of everyone for longer than I needed to. I was facing the teachers, which meant that Lolly and Maple and pretty much everyone had a nice front-row view of my butt. Much like my chest, my butt had not gotten the memo that it was not supposed to be a distraction. It was not a flat line, but then again, I didn’t want my heart to flatline either, from eating nothing but rice cakes and Diet Coke. Having a healthy body was not something I was willing to sacrifice, for anyone or anything.

  While Mr. Stratechuck fiddled with the piano guts, people relaxed and started talking. Suddenly my moment seemed a lot more like a pause.

  “Should I sit back down?” I asked.

  “No, no,” Ms. Adair said. “You’re fine where you are.” Then she looked me up and down. It was no more than a blink, really, almost imperceptible. I felt it more than I saw it. But then she gave me a stern look. “You need to trim down before May.”

  My mouth nearly dropped open. Ms. Adair could be a bitch, but she almost never called anyone out publicly; she liked to whisper things, make a point of coming up during class and getting all cloak and dagger with her insults. Somewhere behind me came a burst of laughter, and Ms. Adair pursed her lips.

  “It’s not a joke,” she said, addressing the whole class this time. “George Balanchine said that dancers are instruments, and it’s true. You all should treat your bodies with the care that you would use to tune an instrument.”

  “Speaking of which, I’m ready when you are,” Mr. Stratechuck said, banging out a few high Cs on the piano.

  Nervous adrenaline flooded my system, and I felt the words coming before I could swallow them: “Balanchine also said ballerinas should have skin the color of a peeled apple,” I said. “So if it’s OK with you, I think I’ll be selective with his advice.”

  Before the shock could register on Ms. Adair’s face, I nodded at Mr. Stratechuck, who started to play. As soon as the first note rang out, I wasn’t thinking anymore about my face, or my body, or my weak right ankle. All I was thinking was that I needed to show Ms. Adair—show everyone—what it was that I really wanted to do.

  I wanted to become 1 in 1,086. But before I did that, I wanted to blow the doors off that room.

  Chapter Three

  January 6

  127 days left

  “TONIGHT IS GOING TO BE CRAZY,” Liv said, stepping back to take another picture of the mantel. Before a party, Liv always took down anything breakable, stashing framed photos, vases, and various precious family knickknacks in a laundry bag at the back of her closet. But first, she took photos of everything so that she could put it all back perfectly before her parents got home from wherever they had gone off to. It was pretty impressive, but also kind of messed up given how many opportunities she’d had to perfect her system.

  “Crazy like fun, or crazy like fire hazard?” I asked, taking a sip from the red Solo cup full of water I had already marked with my name even though we were the only people in the house. I didn’t want to risk taking an accidental glug of Liv’s drink, an amaretto and Coke mixture she’d gleefully dubbed “the Amaghetto.”

  “Well, some junior I’ve never met before invited me to my own party, so . . .” She raised her eyebrows excitedly and then turned to photograph the wall lined with her mom’s collection of African masks. She was wearing a sleeveless, skintight sweater dress, which was such a Liv thing to buy: its form completely undermined its function. She also owned more than one pair of open-toed boots.

  “Doesn’t that make you nervous?” I asked.

  Liv put down her phone and drained her cocktail. “No, it makes you nervous,” she said. “Come on, you know it’s always fine. Hector knows what’s up—and he’s basically legally blind—the apartment across the hall is being renovated, and the people with the baby next door are still on vacation in Miami.” Hector was the building’s near-sighted night doorman, whose loyalty Liv purchased with care packages of cookies and long conversations in Spanish about his sick grandmother. “Besides,” she said, splashing some more amaretto into her cup, “If anyone needs to relax tonight it’s you. You’ve been so uptight about the audition, and now it’s over.” She raised the drink in a “cheers” motion, fixing me with an expectant smile.

  “It’s definitely over.” I crossed my arms and stared down at the Oriental rug, a dizzying blood-red pattern of interlocking vines. Liv and I had already gone over what had happened with Ms. Adair numerous times, and I knew she was desperate for me to move on and focus on the party. But I couldn’t shake the ache of humiliated anger I felt, not only at being body-shamed in front of the entire ballet program, but also at being so quick to talk back. “They’ll never give me a solo now,” I said morosely. “I’ll be lucky if I’m, like, a tree in the background.”

  “Yo
u are not a tree!” Liv said. “You are a total badass. Everyone will be talking about how you shut down that bitch.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not really what I wanted everyone to focus on.” I sipped my water again, shifting uncomfortably in the fleece-lined boots I hadn’t thought to change out of. Compared to Liv, I felt like a lumberjack in my hoodie and cords.

  “Fuck them,” Liv said dismissively, arranging stacks of cups on the dining table around the bottles she’d had her downstairs neighbor Kyle—a balding twenty-six-year-old who still lived with his parents—buy for her. “If they don’t think you’re perfect the way you are, they don’t deserve you. And I bet you danced the shit out of Don Coyote or whatever.”

  That made me smile for the first time in hours. “I did dance the shit out of it,” I said. The looks on some of the girls’ faces had been priceless. It was like their features were confused, trying to figure out how to express slay but not having the cultural reference.

  “See?” Liv smiled. “We’re celebrating. Now please have a drink with me so I don’t feel like an alchy.”

  “Oh, hey, how was your audition, by the way?” I asked, trying to stall. “All day I’ve just been complaining about mine.” Aside from keeping myself Amaghetto-free for the time being, I really did want to know what had gone down at the Drama Showcase tryouts. I was sure Liv had sailed through—everyone knew Ethan had written the part for her—but there was someone else I was a little more curious about.

  “It was fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You know how Ethan is. He made us do it like five thousand different ways with different ‘motivations.’”

  I fanned out some cocktail napkins. “Which guy do you think will get it?”

  Liv gave me a look. “Oh my God, you’re so obvious,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You’re fishing.” She wiggled her perfectly waxed eyebrows. “For a big, shiny Californian catch.”