The Cranes Dance

by Meg Howrey

  “So what’s going on?” Mara asked.

  I’ve been sort of waiting for Mara to instigate a big “talk” about Gwen. She should think about taking some psychology classes at Columbia, she’s really good with all that shit. And she’s pretty much the only one who has a clue about how things really are with my sister and me. I appreciate her perspective, but Gwen isn’t her sister. She can’t understand.

  “Gwen’s doing really well, actually. But the doctors want her to take her time rehabbing.”

  “I meant with you,” Mara said.

  “A pinched nerve, I think,” I said. “Iri worked on me for a bit. It’s not great but I think I can muscle through it.”

  “You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

  I didn’t, and so I shrugged and changed the subject and Mara let it pass. But, for a second it was like a little window opened up between us. And I could see through it to Mara and a place where we could be truly good friends, truly important to each other and intimate and trusting. Almost like a time portal, back to the days when it was just me and her and there were no husbands or sisters or ballets I got and she didn’t, or visions in mirrors we couldn’t escape or smash.

  6.

  There is always a beginning to everything. The house lights go down and the audience settles into their seats. The conductor comes out in a spotlight. The people in the first few rows applaud the conductor and the rest of the audience starts clapping too, even though they don’t see him yet. The conductor bows, turns to the orchestra. There’s usually a nice moment where he seems to be taking them in, focusing their attention. Then he raises his arms, inhales, and the overture begins.

  In life though, most beginnings are so quiet you don’t even know that they are happening. Suddenly you’re in the middle of things as if there were no beginning at all. Maybe you’ll try to retrace your steps, but it’s a useless endeavor because you’re always going to miss the essential, initial clue. You might say, “Oh, here is where it all began,” but you’re always going to be too late.

  My second year in New York. Gwen was at the school and Mara and I were in the company and the three of us shared this apartment. Mara and I took the bedroom and Gwen slept on a futon in the living room because she was the neatest and if it had been me, certainly, the thing would never have gotten folded up or the bedding put away in the closet. Mara’s parents cosigned the lease for us, and gave us some old furniture, even though they were upset that their daughter felt the need to move out. City parents are very protective, maybe because they know more about what can happen. Our parents were still operating under the impression that my life in New York—and now Gwen’s—consisted of one Teflon-coated bubble of ballet. This was largely true, but there were all kinds of things inside that bubble with us. Just because you are in a nunnery doesn’t mean you won’t get fucked.

  It started with small things. I wonder how many of them I missed before I noticed the “first” one?

  Mara and I had come home early from rehearsal. Gwen was still at the school. We were doing Pilates in the living room and needed an extra pillow. Get Gwen’s, I told Mara. She went to the closet.

  “Kate, come here.”

  Mara was holding Gwen’s pillowcase. Only there wasn’t any pillow in it. It was stuffed with paper. Paper dolls, that is. The kind you cut out from books like First Ladies of the United States or Film Stars of the Golden Age. Mara handed me one—a Josephine Baker costume, maybe. Meticulously cut along every thin line and around every octagonal bead and with every feather expertly delineated.

  “Your sister plays with dolls?” Mara whispered, laughing. She wasn’t being mean. She liked Gwen. But it was so odd.

  “Oh god, no,” I said. I was mortified for Gwen. “That’s her old collection from home.”

  “There’s like, a thousand of them in here,” Mara said.

  I had never seen Gwen cut out a paper doll in my life and I knew that she hadn’t moved in with these things because I had helped her unpack. I was surprised, though my concern was not so much for my sister but for how she might be perceived by others.

  “Yeah, it took her years,” I said.

  “And now she sleeps on them?”

  “She must have just put them in there. Look, here’s her pillow.”

  Later I asked Gwen about it and she told me that she couldn’t sleep at night and it was just something to do with her hands. She assured me that she didn’t play with the dolls. She couldn’t turn on the TV because it might wake us up, and she needed to do something. She would knit, she said, if she knew how.

  “You could do your homework,” I suggested. Gwen was taking the same correspondence course that I had done.

  “That takes me like, five minutes,” she said.

  I didn’t really buy this because Gwen had never been that great at school, but I let it go. I told her that if Mara asked, it was an old collection that she hung on to for sentimental reasons. Gwen asked if there was something wrong with cutting out paper dolls and I asked why she hid them if she didn’t think it was weird. Gwen did not reply to this, and, impressed with my sophistry, I forgot to ask her why she couldn’t sleep, or if she was in fact sleeping on Eleanor Roosevelt and her collection of hats.

  Maybe the second thing was the baths. There is only one bathroom, and since we all needed to soak our muscles there were rules. Twenty-five minutes, tops. Long enough for the Epsom salts to dissolve. No adding more hot water once you were in and depriving the next person of a necessary scald. Still, by the third fill the water was noticeably less hot, so legal-minded Mara suggested we rotate bath order. But Gwen said she liked going last, she didn’t mind.

  Gwen started staying in there for a really long time. She took a little portable boom box and played music. At first I assumed she was masturbating, frankly. Since I shared a bed with Mara I had to take care of my own business on the bathroom rug, lying on a towel in the fetal position that I still use today for such purposes. Anyway, halfway through the year Mara started dating this boy in the company, Fabrice, and on the nights she spent with him I would hear Gwen in the bathroom talking to herself, a steady monotone under the music. If I knocked on the door or called out, “Gwen, what are you doing?” she would say, “Nothing,” and then after a moment start mumbling again. After I complained about needing to pee and brush my teeth, she started waiting until I had gone to bed. Sometimes she didn’t even turn the water on, she’d just go in, shut the door, and monologue, or whatever. For hours.

  I didn’t tell Mara about it, but eventually Gwen started doing it when she was there, so I invented a story about Gwen reading aloud to herself because it helped her dyslexia. I thought this was such a good idea that I convinced myself it was true. And I started reading out loud to myself when I was in the tub. I liked the way my voice sounded with the acoustics.

  But the big thing turned out to be the mouse. We all saw it one night, in the kitchen, and we all screamed and jumped on chairs, like cartoon housewives. Then there was a big debate over what to do, and we ended up getting one of those humane traps because none of us was prepared to deal with some sort of mouse carcass or chewed-off leg or something. The guy at the hardware store gave us a rough time about the stupidity of releasing a mouse into our rodent-choked city, but we held firm. The trap was a simple little boxcar-like thing, weighted so that the door would shut on our unsuspecting guest once he had wandered in to grab his cheese. We had to upgrade the bait twice. In New York City, even vermin have aspirations. The little bastard ended up with Roquefort.

  But lo and behold, one day we all trouped in from doing laundry and the trapdoor was down on the cage and the thing was rattling, sliding a bit over the floor. Again with the screaming and the leaping onto chairs.

  Mara and I just started laughing hysterically, arguing over who was going to take it downstairs: “Pick it up!” “No, you pick it up!” “I don’t want to touch it!” “Well, I’m not touching it!” I started to pick it up, but my hands were shaking and I
dropped it. Mara screamed. I screamed. The mouse screamed.

  And that’s when Mara and I noticed Gwen. She was cowering in the corner of our apartment and like, clawing the wall. Literally standing with her face to the wall and … scraping it, and sort of squealing. Like she was the one in the trap.

  “Oh my god, stop!” Mara said. “Gwen! Stop! That’s so creepy!” Mara was still sort of laughing. She thought Gwen was being funny.

  I knew that it wasn’t Gwen’s sense of humor, to do something like that. But it was so outlandish and over the top that I was laughing too.

  “Oh my god, she’s freaking out!” I shouted to Mara. “Quick, help me pick this up.”

  But we were both sort of … transfixed by Gwen. It almost seemed as if she was pretending, but she didn’t stop. You know how in sci-fi movies a robot might malfunction and start sparking off electricity or repeating “System failure, repeat, system failure” while it runs itself into a wall? That’s what it looked like. Like a gizmo inside Gwen had busted.

  “Wait, is she for real?” Mara asked me. “Gwen? Gwen, calm down. It’s just a mouse.”

  “Gwen, stop it,” I said.

  But she didn’t.

  “Kate?” Mara looked at me.

  “Let’s take the mouse down,” I said. “Gwen, we are taking the mouse away, okay? We’ll be right back. It’s fine.” I found the dustpan and slid it under the trap and turned with it to the door. Mara was trying to put her hand on Gwen’s back, but Gwen crouched down and covered her head with her hands. She wasn’t screaming exactly, because her mouth was closed, and the sound was coming out of her nose.

  “GWEN, STOP IT,” I shouted.

  “DON’T YELL AT HER,” Mara shouted.

  Gwen started beating her head against the wall.

  “Oh my god,” said Mara. “Oh my god, Kate, you have to stop her.”

  “FUCK,” I yelled. “OPEN UP THE FUCKING WINDOW.”

  The window of the living room opens onto a fire escape, so you have to unlatch the door with bars first, and swing that open. Mara did this and I crawled out the window, holding the dustpan in front of me. This apartment is on the fourth floor, the back of the building. Below us are the trash cans and a locked storage unit that belong to the building’s superintendent.

  I threw the trap with the panicked mouse still freaking out inside it into the alleyway as hard as I could. Actually, I served it, overhand, like a tennis ball. It smacked against the storage unit and broke apart. I was already crawling back inside.

  Mara was standing in the living room with the phone in her hands. Gwen was still mewling in the corner and bumping her head against the wall.

  “I think we should call someone,” Mara whispered.

  I went over to the corner and crouched down next to Gwen.

  “You want me to call Mom and Dad?” I asked her. I put my hand between the wall and her head. “Is that what you want? Because if you don’t stop right now then I’m calling them.”

  Well, she heard that all right. She quieted down instantly.

  “Kate, seriously,” Mara said.

  “No, it’s okay,” I said. “She’s fine.”

  I patted her back for a while and Mara came over and sat with us and we both said things like “Talk to us” and “The mouse is gone” and “We were scared too.” Eventually Gwen unfurled herself and went into the bathroom and shut the door and we heard the water turning on.

  “Should we let her do that?” Mara whispered.

  “I’m just going to take a bath,” Gwen called through the door. And then, after a moment, “Sorry.”

  Mara and I had both started smoking that year although we hid it from Gwen. We stared at the bathroom door for a moment and then at each other. Mara mimed taking a drag. I nodded.

  We crawled out onto the fire escape and mostly shut the window, something we had done before. We lit cigarettes and peered down into the alley, but it was getting dark and we couldn’t see anything.

  “We should get a cat,” I said.

  And we just smoked and then went back in and sprayed body mist around the living room, and eventually Gwen came out of the bathroom and Mara asked her if she was feeling better and Gwen said yes and that she didn’t really know what happened and I think we all played cards or something like that. By the time we went to bed it was more or less okay.

  But the next day, Mara told me that she thought Gwen should go to therapy. Mara’s mom went to therapy every week, and she had sent Mara to a psychiatrist when Mara was twelve and her mom thought she was crying too much. We spoke very seriously about it, in the kinds of voices that women use when they are talking to other women about issues. This was new to me. Mostly I made jokes or complained or imitated other people or was sarcastic. So I really enjoyed listening to myself be so thoughtful and adult.

  Later, I tried out the voice on Gwen. It seemed to work pretty well, and she agreed to go to therapy if I promised not to tell Mom and Dad.

  “They’ll just want me to come home,” she said, which was true enough.

  Mara got the name of a doctor, and I made the appointment. I went with Gwen to make sure she actually did it, and because I was paying for it. The psychiatrist’s office was on the East Side. Sure enough, Gwen balked outside the building.

  “You’re going to have to do it,” she said.

  “Gwen, come on,” I said.

  “No, you have to be me,” she explained. “You have to go. You’re eighteen. I’m a minor. They’ll need parental consent or something.”

  “No, they won’t,” I said. “You don’t even need that for an abortion, I think. It’s like, confidential.”

  “They won’t give medication to a minor,” she said.

  “It’s talking,” I said to her. “You just talk to them about what you’re feeling.”

  “Not if you need medicine,” she said. “Then they have to tell the parents.”

  “You don’t need medicine.”

  “I do. I know I do.”

  So we had this whole long ridiculous argument on the street and I said that if Gwen didn’t go then I would call Mom and Dad, and she said if I called Mom and Dad then that meant I wanted to ruin her life, and we went back and forth and I said, “Well, let’s just forget the whole thing,” and then she started crying.

  “Please help me,” she said. “Please just this one time. I would do it for you. You’re the only one I trust.”

  It’s a heady thing, to be handed a role like that. Or maybe I thought I really was helping her. It all seems kind of insane, now, in a way it didn’t then. Then it seemed like an extension of every other thing that was more or less pretend, which was pretty much my life. My name was on the call-boards for rehearsals, in the programs, on the list for dressing room C, but it never really felt like me.

  Also, I didn’t want Gwen to go home.

  “My name is Kate Crane,” I told the receptionist. “I have an appointment with Dr. Freiburg?”

  And all the girl did was cross out the name Gwen and write Kate. While my sister and I waited in the chairs, we wrote notes to each other.

  What do you want me to say?

  Say that you can’t sleep and that you get really nervous and have a hard time calming down.

  What if she asks why?

  You don’t know why—that’s why you’re here

  That’s why you’re here

  Whatever. Don’t overdo it but be really upset

  This is so stupid

  It’s just one time

  But of course it wasn’t.

  My first session with Dr. Freiburg went well. I was nervous, so it was a pretty realistic performance. She had to keep telling me to breathe and I actually cried a little at one point. We talked about my history and being in a ballet company, and the stress and how I felt about it. She asked me to describe my panic attacks and what techniques I used to calm myself down. I did a lot of shrugging and gripping the arms of the chair. At the end of it all she told me that she wanted to see me onc
e a week and that I should practice the breathing/counting thing she had demonstrated and we’d see “where we were” in a couple of sessions. There were “things” she could give me, she explained, to help, but there were side effects with these and it was always best to try other methods first.

  “You’ll have to go back,” Gwen said, when I told her about the counting method. When we got home, Mara asked how it went and Gwen gave her a big hug and said that she was really grateful that Mara had suggested it. Mara said she was very proud of her. And that night Gwen didn’t take a freakishly long bath. The three of us played cards and watched television, and Gwen seemed relaxed and happy.

  “I feel better, don’t you?” Mara said, as we went to bed. “I think she’ll be okay.”

  I didn’t sleep much that night. Or the next. But I won’t lie. Eventually I started sleeping just fine.

  It took two more sessions before Dr. Freiburg prescribed benzodiazepines for me/Gwen. By that time I had opened up a little in our sessions. By this I mean that I had started inventing things. Conversations, situations, dreams. I was very careful not to tell Dr. Freiburg anything that I actually felt, because then it would be like I really was in therapy, which I obviously didn’t need. And I couldn’t tell the doctor what Gwen was feeling, because when I asked Gwen, she wouldn’t ever describe it beyond saying that she just got stuck in her head sometimes, and it wasn’t a big deal but she needed something to help with the feeling so she could sleep. Dr. Freiburg told me that the drug enhanced a natural chemical in the body that would help calm me down.

  Dr. Freiburg wasn’t all that sharp. She never smelled a rat (or a smashed mouse). Not even when my fount of invention ran dry and I started describing feelings cribbed from Ibsen or Chekhov. “Sometimes I feel like I am a seagull,” I told her. “Oh, that’s interesting,” she said.

  Every six weeks I got my/Gwen’s prescription filled. At first I doled out the pill to her every morning, but eventually I just handed her the bottle. If you do something like take a whole bunch and overdose, I told her, I will absolutely never forgive you. She said she would never betray my trust like that. She said it in the adult woman discussing serious issues voice, which I guess she learned from me.