by Meg Howrey
“And you know, after I said it,” Mara continued. “To Mike? I just felt so happy and I thought, if I get pregnant in Venice then I won’t come back next season. And then I thought, well, maybe I’ll just retire altogether.”
“Wait. What? Retire?”
“Yup.” Mara extended a leg out in front of her. Three of her toes were taped up, there was a bruise on her knee, and clusters of lavender spider veins traced their way down her shin. But this is how we look. These are the signs of our commitment.
“I thought,” I said. “I thought you were feeling good about things. The other day, you were talking about Symphony and saying how great it felt to be dancing that. And I mean, you look great, you’re not injured …”
“In a way, that’s sort of a reason to quit now,” Mara said. “Finish with dance before dance finishes with me, you know?”
I breathed in nausea.
“This isn’t about what happened in Swan Lake?” I asked. “When you fell? Because that happens to everybody, and you were dancing beautifully. It was a total freak accident.”
I looked at the topography of Mara’s bent-over back. Stone footpaths of vertebrae. Cresting ribs like sand dunes. Shoulder-blade cliffs. When she pulled at the tape around her big toe, the muscles of her back volcanoed new islands into the valley. It’s not the terrain of a retirement village. Or a nursery.
“No,” Mara said, straightening up. “Of course not. I’m not that egotistical. It’s just that when I think about all the things I want now from life, they’re more like, life things, you know?”
“You can have life things and still dance, though,” I said, blinking sweat out of my eyes. “It’s not either/or. People have babies. People take classes, get degrees. Sometimes it’s better, right? You have more to give onstage when you have a full life.”
“Okay, why are you being like this?” Mara asked. “Are you seriously trying to talk me into more dancing? When I’m actually feeling happy about the thought of doing something new with my life?”
“No, I know, it’s just that it seems really sudden,” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t get carried away, like you said, in the heat of the moment? He pulls out the whole spread, he’s booked this great vacation, you’re feeling the postcoital glow … you were in a chemical rush.”
“I’m in a chemical rush?” Mara asked pointedly.
I waved that away.
“Guess I just feel like I missed a chapter in a book,” I said. “We haven’t really talked about any of this.”
“That’s not my fault.”
And just like that, we were in a fight. Neither one of us is a yeller or screamer and since we were both physically exhausted and in a public sweat lodge, there was no arm waving or extra energy being expended. We basically sat very still, perspired, and spoke sedately of betrayal.
“You know, Mara, I’ve had a few things of my own going on.”
“And you shut me down every single time I try to talk to you about Gwen.”
“Because I don’t want to talk about her. Sorry. I know I should. But I don’t want to right now. How hard is that to understand? I’m not like, obligated to talk about it.”
“I don’t think you realize how difficult it is to be friends with you.”
“Because I don’t dump my problems on everybody?”
“Because you’re sad and you won’t talk about it.”
“I’m not sad all the time.”
“No, lately you’re high all the time.”
“It’s Vicodin. It’s not heroin.”
“It actually does affect your personality. I know you don’t want to believe that, but it does.”
“Well, according to you I have a bad personality anyway.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You know, I haven’t really noticed that you’ve made some huge effort to reach out to me.”
“That’s what I’m saying. You make it impossible.”
“God, that’s what Andrew said.”
“This isn’t because I’m jealous, Kate.”
“What? Who said you were jealous?”
“You think I’m being hard on you because I’m jealous.”
“Can we just get past this idea that you might be jealous of me?”
“I am jealous of you. But that’s not why you’re pissing me off.”
“God,” I said. “Jealous of me. What a fucking joke.”
Mara stood up and left the sauna.
I sat there dripping sweat for a few minutes. I had that special kind of rage that comes when you’ve ruined your legitimate right to be mad by being an asshole. I stood up and clambered down from the benches, cartilage in my knees creaking, dizzy and desperate for water. I pushed open the sauna door. Mara was standing right outside it. She pointed to the shower cubicle. In one hand she held a bucket.
“Stand in there.”
“What? No.” I tried to walk past her, but she was blocking me.
“Stand in there,” she repeated.
“You’re not throwing that on me.” Mara knows I absolutely hate cold plunges. They make me feel like I’m having a heart attack.
“Go.” Mara put a hand on my shoulder and shoved. She shoved me into a shower like we were a couple of frat boys. She didn’t look crazy, exactly, but she did seem very determined.
“Okay, seriously, stop this. I’m injured.” I tried to brace myself against the wall, but my hands and feet were slippery with sweat and I couldn’t get any traction on the floor.
“You can’t do this,” I said. “This is … this is stupid. What’s wrong with you?”
Mara held up the bucket.
“Don’t do this,” I said.
She started to swing the bucket backward.
“This could actually kill me,” I said. “I MEAN IT.”
Mara threw the ice water straight into my face.
I took a huge shuddering inhalation and groped blindly for the sides of the shower stall. I could feel my heart jump up into my throat and it didn’t stop. I could feel my heart on the back of my tongue, in my nose, my forehead. My lungs sucked in more air and my knees collapsed a little. I could sense movement in front of me and hear the slosh of water and a metallic bang.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Oh my god.” I was too dehydrated to cry tears, but my lungs and throat started crying.
She did it again, only I was a little bent over, so she emptied the bucket on my shoulders and the water coursed down my back. It was horrible, outrageous. Like being flayed by ice. I could hardly get enough air in my lungs to deal with the violence of it. My heart was banging against the top of my head, like a bat in a shoebox. I made a huge effort and stood a little more upright. Spit some water out of my mouth. I looked at Mara, who was still holding the bucket. “Okay, one more,” I choked out.
The third time she tipped the ice water almost tenderly over my head.
“John the Baptist,” I said to Mara, fighting for breath. “Come-to-Jesus moment. Right? Where I admit. I’m a drug addict. And my sister. Has gone insane. And I knew. I knew it was happening and did nothing. To stop it.”
I rubbed my eyes. Wrung out my hair. Two enormous Armenian men walked by, and their dark eyes flickered over us with instant assessments: women, too skinny, emotional, keep moving. They entered the sauna.
“Kate, I’m really sorry.” Mara handed me a towel. She was crying a little bit. “This thing with Gwen … it’s not your fault. You have to know that.”
“I can’t talk about it,” I said.
“Okay. It’s okay.”
“Really, Mara. The only thing that helps right now is … I don’t know. Please don’t cry.”
“I don’t even know why I’m crying,” Mara said.
“Can we go to the Turkish room now?”
Mara nodded.
The Turkish room is not steamy, just warm, and almost always empty, which means you can stretch on the heated benches and not worry that you’re putting your foot in someone’s face. Mara and I spread
out towels and lay on our backs. I pulled my knees to my chest, wiggling so the knobs of my spine fit into a break in the wooden slats of the bench. I reached over and brushed Mara’s arm.
“I think you should have wild unprotected sex with Mike in Venice,” I said. “But what if you don’t get pregnant right away? Will you come back after the break?”
“I haven’t decided. Maybe not, maybe I’ll start school, see what happens. I’m going to the doctor this week, make sure everything is okay in there.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “I’m sure it’s perfect.”
20.
“Is better,” Irina said, prodding my neck.
“Oh. Is it?” I asked, trying to concentrate.
“What? You no feel?”
“That’s sort of a complicated question.”
Irina sighed.
“Dr. Ken says I have what, in a normal person, is like whiplash,” I said, defensively.
“So?” Iri sniffed. “Normal person is not you. Is not important, the bones, if they are not normal. If the muscles work, then bones can be anything.”
“Huh. Maybe you’re right,” I said, because this sounded better than “We need to treat this seriously.”
“Normal.” Irina dismissed the word with some majestic r rolling. “Some people think I’m bad mother, for not letting Alisa have normal life. She should lie on couch at home. Watch television and eat Twinkie.”
“She doesn’t want to do that, does she?” I asked, gripping the sides of the massage table.
“She want to be gymnast.” Irina reached under my back and moved my scapula about four feet. “She can be normal later if she want, but at least then she’ll have medal.”
Unless, of course, she doesn’t get a medal. But it’s probably too late for that. If she quits, she’ll always wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t. If she tries and does not succeed, she’ll spend the rest of her life feeling like a failure for events that occurred while she was a teenager. The only good outcome would be getting a medal.
“You have to try to be more soft,” Irina said sternly.
“More soft?”
“Yes. Make soft.”
I took a shaky breath and tried to imagine the muscles of my neck melting. I thought of those cold packets of butter they give you in delis that are such a nuisance. You can’t spread them. You can only roughly chop them up with your plastic knife and then you get too much butter on some things and not enough butter on others. Of course, I no longer spread butter on anything.
“Make soft!” Iri commanded.
I tried loosening my jaw, which has become increasingly hard to do because of the whole Vicodin thing.
After leaving Irina, I had about an hour to kill before Dream rehearsal and I was consumed with a desire for one of those giant deli muffins. Blueberry. With butter. If you ask, they will grill it for you and slather butter on, and you can avoid the butter-packet disappointment. I told myself that it was okay to go and get one of those muffins because I’ve been losing weight recently and Vicodin on an empty stomach is a bad idea and if anyone caught me I could claim that I was having low blood sugar.
Today was the first truly nice day of spring we’ve had, so every New Yorker was in a frenzy to soak up the sun. I sat in one of the iron chairs in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theater and hugged my muffin bag to my chest like a wino. I kicked off my shoes and stretched my legs out so the tips of my feet could get some sun.
I watched the tourists. I listened to chatter from a passing group of students—Juilliard actors probably, from the animated way they pronounced their vowels. I watched a young man with brown curls pushing a cello in front of him. I watched an older man go up to our box office and pull out his wallet. Was he buying seats for himself and his wife? His companion? His mother? Will he come alone to the ballet tonight, sit quietly in his seat during intermission, reading the names of all the dancers in the next piece, which is his favorite? From a chair at Lincoln Center, humanity doesn’t look so bad, especially if you squint your eyes and imagine that what you are seeing is all there is, and that nobody has anything concealed.
I broke the muffin up in the bag so I could extract discreet pieces at a time, and just as I was about to take my first delicious bite (my god, my mouth was watering so much it hurt) I saw my little fan, Bryce, sitting on a chair near mine. She had a book in her lap and there was a white paper bag next to her on the table. I was annoyed, since I really wasn’t in the mood to be someone’s idol. I just wanted to eat my goddamn muffin.
Bryce turned a page of her book and looked up, and even though I was glaring at my own feet in an attempt to create some sort of invisibility barrier, I could see out of the corner of my eye that she had seen me. I tensed myself, waiting.
But no. Bryce ducked her head down and twisted her shoulders away from me. She scrunched up her paper bag and crammed it into the backpack at her feet.
“Hey, Bryce?” It was out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Oh, hi!” she said, doing a fairly credible job at surprise. Her little face turned pink.
“How … how are you?” I called out. There was about six feet in between our chairs.
“I’m good,” she said, fiddling with her dance bag. She was trying to stuff her book inside it, but it was too full.
“We should be sitting in the sun,” I said, pointing to the sun, like she might not know what I was talking about.
“I don’t have any sunblock,” she answered, solemnly. “And Mrs. Darya told us that if anyone got sunburn or tan lines she would take us out of Dream.”
Mrs. Darya is the director of the company school. She was director when I was there too. She will probably be director of the company school until the apocalypse, and when there is nothing left on earth but cockroaches she will organize them into levels, assign them colored leotards, and make them feel insecure.
“Do you know what Mrs. Darya told me once?” I said, leaning forward in my chair so we were closer. Bryce scooted her chair toward mine.
“She called me into her office,” I started, “and told me I needed to dress better. Not for class, mind you, but just for walking around. Just in my normal clothes.”
“Why?” Bryce asked, round-eyed.
“She sat me down,” I said, warming to the story. I’ve been telling this one for a decade. People request it at parties. “And she said, ‘Kate, dear, you need to wear nicer street clothes. And more rouge. For class. Because you’re plain, dear.’ And then she took a moment and it was like she was actually suffering over how plain I was. Like it physically pained her. And then she shook her head and sighed and said, ‘So very plain.’ ”
Bryce looked horrified. I realized that you kind of have to be on the safe side of adolescent agony to find this story funny. When I tell it at parties, people howl. Then they tell their own Darya or a similar ballet-school-sadist tale.
“But,” Bryce said. “But you’re so pretty!”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I mean, that’s sweet, but … anyway, my point is that you don’t have to listen to everything Mrs. Darya says.”
“So you didn’t like, start wearing different clothes?” she asked.
Actually I did. I started borrowing Mara’s clothes. And I wore more makeup.
“No,” I told Bryce. “I was kind of a rebel. But I got into the company anyway so you see, it’s more important that you be yourself.”
“I hope I get in the company someday,” Bryce said. “It’s all I want.”
She wants everything I have. I could see that. Of course she does. I want everything I have too.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
Bryce turned from pink to red.
“Oh, just … something. I …”
“What is it? I’m a reader too.” I was using this silly voice like I was some sort of exceptionally kind person. Reluctantly, Bryce slid her book out of her bag so I could see the title.
Little Women.
I couldn’t help
smiling.
“I’ve read it before,” Bryce defended. “When I was younger. I was just like, kind of in the mood for it today. Whatever.”
Bryce looked nervously over her shoulder and I noticed a couple of company school girls clustered together a few tables away. Bryce’s classmates, I figured from their ages. They were all looking at us. What is the collective noun for a group of ballet students? A pride of ballerinas? A threat of ballerinas? And here Bryce was, reading alone with very possibly a blueberry muffin stuffed in her bag. I picked up my things and sat on the other side of Bryce, shielding her from the threat of ballerinas.
“What kind of mood are you in?” I asked.
“Sometimes I wish I had sisters.”
I felt a chunk of my heart break off. There must have already been a substantial tear, I think, for it to come apart so easily. Is there a single thing Bryce dreams of that would be as good in reality as it is in her dream? If only we could crawl inside our dreams and live there. Why can’t I live inside my dream? Why couldn’t Gwen, whose reality was even better than mine?
“It’s a really good book, Little Women,” I said. “What part were you reading? What’s happening now?”
“Um, it’s the part where they go for a picnic with Laurie and the Vaughns and Mr. Brooke talks to Meg. And Jo …”
“… gets mad during the croquet game and they all play that game where they take turns telling a story,” I finished.
“Yeah.” Bryce nodded, all unembarrassed enthusiasm now. “And you can totally tell that Mr. Brooke is in love with Meg. I wish we all dressed like that still.”
“Totally. Which girl do you like best?”
“I like Meg, but she just ends up getting married and having babies. I wish Amy became like, a really great painter. I mean, I’m happy that she ends up with Laurie but it’s sad that she doesn’t get to be a real artist.”
It is sad. It’s Jo who gets to have fulfillment as an artist. But only after she goes through great pain. Loneliness. Struggle. The death of her beloved sister Beth, who was just too delicate, just wasn’t meant for this world.