The Cranes Dance

by Meg Howrey

  Where was I in the mix? I couldn’t tell, which was also new to me. I seemed to be getting a lot of attention, but nearly every day there was a moment where I felt like I was a horrible hideous lump. I was also occasionally told, more or less, that I was a horrible hideous lump. I was also told, much more often, that I was “very good” and “excellent” and “beautiful.” But the criticism, aligning as it did with my most secret fears, seemed much more valid than the praise. This was as disorienting as anything else. I had felt bad about myself before, but not with this level of sincerity. To combat my insecurity I developed a sturdier veneer: lipstick, nail polish, perfume, with an all-weather topcoat of superciliousness. I stared and stared and stared at myself in the mirror, and my imagined movie audience stared too, except for the times when I said something stupid or gauche, danced badly, used the bathroom, masturbated, or ate baked goods. During those times I pretended that some sort of electrical interference blocked their reception. This happened a lot.

  That year I made friends with Mara. She was a City girl, grew up twelve blocks from the school, had been training there since she was seven. Both her parents were lawyers. Mara knew everything about the company, all the dancers, the gossip. She had been to Paris and London and the Bahamas on vacation. She had a favorite room at the Met. She had read Camus. She could play the piano. I could not believe she was shy, because in her place I would have felt so confident, having and knowing all those things. We both made fun of ourselves and other people but never of each other. We said that the best thing that could happen was if we both got into the company. Once I said to her, “I won’t be happy if I get in and you don’t,” and Mara gave me a look and said, “Yes you will.” I realized that she was right and that needing people and caring about them were two very different things. I tucked this thought inside me like a fortune into a cookie. It was a secret and it made me feel powerful, even though I didn’t understand why.

  I mailed my weekly assignments to my correspondence course, which I considered to be a vast improvement over traditional schooling. I could hardly believe I had suffered through the tedium of sitting in chairs and listening to other people yap when I could simply read, answer, and write while stretching, listening to music, or eating Melba toast. David, one of the boys at the school who was doing the same correspondence course as I was, asked if he could pay me to do our English requirement. I was desperately short of cash because my parents had no understanding of the different world I was living in and I had no intention of enlightening them. (Mom told me to write down all my expenses and send them a monthly report, but how could I have explained Chanel lipstick, a pack of cigarettes, a pashmina like everyone else had, cab fare from downtown after Mara and I got drunk with Christophe and Jenny?) I agreed to do the Novel in the Twentieth Century class for David. Another boy, Seth, who was sending stuff to his high school back in Arizona, paid me even more to do his Modern American Drama. I didn’t bother creating a distinctive writing style for David. “His” papers—on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or whatever—were usually just the first drafts of my papers on the same subject. I gave him a better command of punctuation to make up the difference, and we received the same grades from our unknown and unimagined teachers. I loved Seth’s Modern American Drama assignments and was sad that I couldn’t write really great papers for him, lest his teachers get suspicious.

  Sex was in the air but not on the ground. Baryshnikov made it okay for boys of my generation to take ballet, and there are more heterosexuals around than you might think. They wear tights and leg warmers but they’re essentially jocks, and at that age they spent more time trying to impress each other than us. The erotic charge of half-naked sweating teenagers sliding their hands all over each other is also not quite what you would think. You need to imagine those teenagers under fluorescent lighting, with a giant mirror in front of them, timing their actions to musical cues, while being scrutinized by a portly Ukrainian who shouts things like “Put her down, but not like sack of potatoes, you id-i-ot.” The girls were more enthusiastic about partnering class than the boys, except for David, who was the tallest and strongest and was thankful to have one class where he wasn’t being yelled at about his feet. Everyone wanted to dance with him. Talent equaled desirability. Talent trumped good looks or a halfway decent personality. Talent was a personality.

  Occasionally I ran into Wendy Griston Hedges in her apartment. This embarrassed us less over time. Discovering me once with a book in my hand, she told me that she too was a reader and I was welcome to use the library.

  “Oh, great,” I said. “I need to get a card, I guess.”

  “Oh, you don’t need a card. You can just take things and bring them back.”

  “Really? You don’t need a card here?”

  “Oh, heavens, no.”

  I paid a visit to a branch of the NYC Public Library under the firm impression that I did not need a card and suffered quite an embarrassment at the front desk. About a week later I discovered that Wendy was referring to her own personal library, a very comfortable room on the other side of the unlived-in living room. I would often find intriguing signs of life in the library before the maid service came in on Mondays: a dry-cleaning bill on the desk that had been doodled over with really good renderings of miniature horses, the marshmallow moons and stars of Lucky Charms cereal between the crevice of a corduroy seat cushion and armrest, a fencing foil left on the window ledge. These breadcrumby clues to the inner life of Wendy Griston Hedges all seemed to lead in different directions. They made me feel fond, almost protective of my patron, who was definitely eccentric, but discreetly so. This gave her dignity.

  I went home for two weeks during Christmas break. I hadn’t missed my family at all until I saw them again and I became instantly homesick even though I was now at home. I felt like I had been gone a thousand years and walked around touching Christmas ornaments and holiday hand towels with a combination of condescension and nostalgia. I expected my visit to be equally meaningful for my family, but my parents seemed oddly concerned with their own lives and content to just know I was somewhere in the house. “Here we all are! All together!” Mom chirped from time to time, while she launched Christmas lights at the tree and muscled cookies out of the oven. It was as if I hadn’t been gone at all. Keith was in a snit because Mom and Dad had told him he couldn’t go skiing in Idaho with his friend Wes because “your sister will be home” and he either ignored me totally or stared at me with goggle-eyed fake rapture at meals.

  I would have been really pissed if it hadn’t been for Gwen, who couldn’t get enough details. She made me describe every girl in my class as if she were memorizing them. She wanted to know how everything worked: what did we do for lunch, did we pick partners for adagio class or did the teacher match girls to boys, when would the casting for the school’s top-level spring gala go up, what did I think my chances were, were there any cute boys, did everyone wear makeup for class? It seemed natural that I would be the one doing all the talking. What, after all, could have happened to Gwen in Michigan?

  On my third night home I went to see Gwen perform in the same Grand Rapids Ballet Nutcracker we had both danced in for the past six years. My parents and Keith had already been to two of the five performances by the time I got home. (Uncharacteristically, Keith never complained about going to see us dance. Possibly there was some sort of bribe involved.) Dad elected to drive me there as the night was icy and I hadn’t been behind a wheel since passing my driver’s test in May.

  The company had only recently become professional, with salaried dancers, so The Nutcracker was still mainly a chance for the schoolchildren’s parents to earn back their tuition fees with a chance at seeing little Jenny and little Darla cutely outfitted as mice or toy soldiers. Oh, those Jennys and Darlas … thrilled to have Mommy apply splatches of blush on their cheeks, self-importantly managing a ponytail full of rollers for the evening’s required First Act Party Child ringlets. You can measure out the progress of time
by your personal relationship to The Nutcracker.

  Gwen was dancing the Dew Drop Fairy, sort of a runner-up to the Miss America role of Sugarplum Fairy. I was a little surprised that they had given Dew Drop to her, since now that Grand Rapids could actually hire dancers the leading roles went to them. I hadn’t ever danced it. Last year Gwen and I had been matching Mirliton soloists, the best a student could get. Of course she was the star of the school (now that I was gone, the only star), but she was still a student.

  “They say that they want to turn this into a world-class company,” my dad said, as we took our seats. “There’s a lot of local support. Maybe you’ll want to come dance here when you’re done with school.”

  “In New York there’s a live orchestra,” I said, as the taped music began.

  Dew Drop Fairy isn’t until nearly the end, during the Waltz of the Flowers. I had applauded patronizingly through the familiar ballet, noting the lack of progress of my former classmates and wincing at the technical mistakes and lack of polish. There was one new guy who was very good, some Polish kid who had inexplicably wound up in Michigan. The super-skinny woman dancing Arabian had great extensions, but her arms were sort of a mess. I saw nothing to threaten my complacency. If I were still here, I thought, I would be the best. Or destined to become the best, which was really the same thing. Then Gwen came on.

  I didn’t so much hold my breath as my breath was somehow taken from me, like there existed some sort of high-powered vacuum from my lungs directly to Gwen’s body, and she drew whatever oxygen I was capable of employing for my own puny needs in a giant powerful whoosh. It was over quickly, too quickly, and as Tchaikovsky fuzzed on through the auditorium’s speaker system and Sugarplum and her Cavalier gamely tipped their way through the ballet’s concluding pas de deux, I tried to compose myself. My hands hurt from applauding. My feet were cold. I had a headache in my neck.

  Somehow, some way, while I had gossiped and scarfed Entenmann’s and flirted with my invisible movie audience and practiced hairstyles and pretended to Mara that I too was familiar with Kandinsky, Gwen had gotten incredibly good. Impossibly good. She was better than Mara, and Tarine, and Rachel even before she blew her hip. She was better than me. She was the best. I didn’t understand this. Had she always been better? Maybe her performance was a fluke. One of those wacky eclipse timing things that sometimes happen where you nail every balance, land like a feather from every jump, where all your single pirouettes become doubles, all your doubles become triples, everything comes easy, easy.

  “I was a little better last week,” was what Gwen said to me, later that night. “I felt a little rickety tonight ’cause I knew you were out there and I was nervous.”

  Makeup removed, the hair down her back still a little clumpy from hairspray and pins, pink-and-white poodle flannel pajamas swamping her skinny frame, Gwen sat on the end of my bed and chattered on. What did I think about so and so, and can you believe such and such and really did I mean it? She was okay?

  “You were amazing,” I kept saying, hating myself and her. She had tricked me. She had pretended to be so fawning and interested and admiring of my New York City life and all the while she was keeping the enormous secret of her coruscating, effortless, obnoxious talent hidden away like a bomb. Tick, tick … boom.

  Under the Christmas tree were my presents for her: a Chanel lipstick, the Capezio sweater everyone in my class had, dangly earrings like I had started wearing. I had bought them in good faith, wishing to bestow a little glamour on my kid sister, be encouraging: this is what you can have too. Now I wanted to sneak out to the family room and take them all back. If Gwen had stuff that was as good as my stuff, then what did I have? I had nothing.

  “You were amazing,” I said, and Gwen curled around my knees and said that her one dream was of us both getting into the company and sharing an apartment in New York City. “I know you’ll get in,” she said.

  I said I wasn’t so sure but that I wouldn’t be happy unless we both got in.

  “I know,” she said. “I feel exactly the same way.”

  Gwen’s Christmas present to me was a huge box of stationery she had made herself, cutting things from magazines and gluing them on the paper. “She’s been working on that since the time you left,” Mom said. All the envelopes and postcards were pre-addressed to Gwen, and stamped too. “You can just throw them in the mailbox,” Gwen explained. “I made enough so that you can write me every week.” I cried a little bit and everybody said, “Awwww,” even though my getting all misty was mostly guilt and shame.

  And love. I can hardly bear now to remember her face, watching eagerly for my reaction as I opened the gift. Of her little shoulders under my hands as I hugged her. We always say it’s the other one’s shoulders that seem tiny. We always press our cheeks hard against each other before we let go.

  Oh Gwen.

  I couldn’t believe that for three months I had basically forgotten about my sister. It was not a mistake I would ever repeat.

  I went back to New York and took everything up a notch.

  The newly appointed artistic director of the company, Marius Lytton, made occasional godlike descents to the school, sometimes accompanied by his balefully countenanced English Bulldog, Ludmilla. It was the wrong dog for him. With his shaggy black hair and neatly trimmed reddish beard, his height, his giant gold watch and ability to wear a neck scarf without looking ridiculous, he should have had a Wolfhound or a Saluki. Marius lounged in the doorway of our class and watched us for a few minutes at a time. We watched him out of the corners of our eyes. Ludmilla investigated her own lady parts.

  We knew Marius’s history: he was a principal dancer with the company in the early ’80s, left to choreograph in Europe, became the artistic director of a company in the Netherlands. Returned to become associate artistic director here and had recently assumed the helm of one of the world’s most significant ballet companies. In those early days his position was precarious, his board was watchful and begrudging of monies, his dancers insecure and therefore vaguely mutinous, but we knew nothing of this. To us he was Christ and we prayed that he would ask us to leave our father’s fishing nets and follow him unto the desert.

  Word circulated that Marius was looking to hire four dancers, two girls and two boys, from our class. Further word was that it might not be from our class, Marius was holding open auditions for the company. Our audition would be the final end-of-year performance, which Marius and a good many other artistic directors from around the country would attend. The open audition came and went. Justin knew a girl who had been there and told him that after twenty minutes Marius had cut everybody except for eight dancers. Eight dancers! He kept that many? Were they good? How many were girls? Did anybody get offers? Justin’s friend didn’t know, she wasn’t one of the final eight but she knew a girl who was. That girl was old—twenty-five!—and already a soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet. There was widespread panic as everyone recalculated the odds. I dug in and dug in deeper. Whenever I felt tired or listless, I thought of Gwen and pushed through. Mara and I both got cast in lead roles for the year-end performance. We knew that we had separated ourselves from the pack a little, but we didn’t know if there was room for both of us to succeed. All during rehearsals we said nothing to each other that wasn’t sarcastic or funny or self-deprecating. It wasn’t really Mara I was judging myself against, though.

  Gwenny! They brought me a practice tutu for rehearsal today so Milos could get used to it—totally makes a difference for partnered pirouettes, and the lifts, etc. This week has been hard. Rain, rain, rain. My skin is horrible and I cut bangs. Whatever you do, don’t cut bangs! (Probably be cute on you, though. Cut bangs!) I’m doing this word-a-day thing now to improve my vocabulary. Today’s word is: noxious. This rain is noxious and so are my attitude turns. But I’ll keep trying! Miss you! Love, K

  At the end of the year it was Mara, David, and I who were asked to join the company, along with some guy Marius found in Brazil whom none o
f us had ever seen. When I was brought into Marius’s office and he offered me a contract he told me that he was excited about working with me, that he saw real potential, that I needed to get more confident, work hard, but that he knew that would happen. He told me that at the end-of-year performance he saw something “deep” in me, and I made a “deep” face for him, for my applauding invisible movie audience, for the me I wished I was. The me who was confident and had already fulfilled her potential.

  I had dreamed that if this moment happened I would be elated and triumphant and flooded with relief, but when you have been keeping company with anxiety and fear for a long time it’s hard to shake them off immediately. Also I hadn’t really thought about anything beyond the immediate goal: getting in. Now I was in and now I was going to have to do this thing, ballet, and not just think about the day I would do it. I realized I still wanted to dream about the person I would become, not actually be her. I was worried that I would work hard and nothing would happen, that I was as good as I would ever be. I wasn’t sure I wanted to work hard anymore. I already felt kind of exhausted.

  I blurted out to Marius that my sister would be auditioning the school and that he would want her too, she was amazing, she was better. I was then immediately embarrassed at my effusiveness and made a misguided attempt to pet Ludmilla, who nearly took my hand off.

  “It’s my wife’s dog, actually,” Marius said. “She hates everybody.”

  “Your wife hates everybody?” I said.

  “No,” Marius started to explain, and then realized I was making a deliberate joke.

  “Oh,” he said, surprised, and then he sealed what would become our eventual relationship. “That’s very funny. You’re a sharp girl.”