I love it when this happens. At the gym, he asks me if I'm a dancer. Outa' the blue, as if there's a sign on my forehead. I like it that all that work shows though, even at my age. All those early morning ballet classes. Split callouses and taped feet. Dancing on Christmas Eve instead of sitting in front of the fire. Until they ask if I do stuff like on "So You Think You Can Dance". That's when I launch into my spiel on the difference between dance as entertainment and dance as art. All the while I'm watching his eyes glaze over like he's imagining me doing a lap dance on his face.
It's pervasive, women saying how they love dance and used to dance themselves when they were younger, and men saying what good exercise it is and thinking I must be a tiger in the sack. I suspect it's one of the most misunderstood professions ever. There's really nothing to compare it with. There's the relentless training of an athlete, but without the competition. And then there's the unabashed sensuality of bodies moving, sweating together, the aesthetic beauty of shape and line, the poignancy of the human condition and the exhilaration of speed and defiance of gravity. It's all there. Everything we need.
I saw it in "The Red Shoes" and it seared itself onto my memory. Over and over I heard in my head, I want that, I want to feel that way. But I had no idea how to get there. There was nothing I felt passionate about other than the rush of my body flying, tumbling, twirling, pushing the limits to see how far I could go. There had to be more to it.
But the summer of 1965 changed that. That fateful, bodyless, interminable stretch of weeks sitting in a chair armed with an elongated hanger to slide down my plaster prison, scratching the ceaseless itching brought on by sweat and inertia. My only escape was to inhabit the life of Holden Caulfield, another kind of outcast, who stretched the edges of my experience and spawned the fusion of my body with my imagination.
Every word I read, every disappointment, every escape ached and churned in my body and all I wanted to do was move to describe what I was feeling. For a minute I considered becoming a writer myself. But when I put pencil to paper to deliver my own story, nothing came forth, nothing made sense enough to harness it for my own telling. Never mind all that sitting. No, it was clear that it was my body that had to extrude my inner longings into the outer.
The world suddenly pulsed with complexity and ambivalence. Boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, madness and sanity blurred, and the uncertainty suited me. It took my confusing life and made it somehow heroic, like the stories I was reading. It made tragedy seem bearable in the telling of it, almost noble. And in the midst of my endless solitude, I constructed my own narrative and brought back the myth of being chosen, imbued with special gifts, vaulting from deficient to exceptional.
I charted my course once I was freed from the bondage of my injury. My path was clear. I would return to ballet class and never again get sidetracked by thrill-seeking. I would stay focused on my goal of becoming a dancer, an artist, of expressing my innermost self with my body. But then the fateful day came when the cast came off and reality smacked me in the face. What was left of my leg was skin and bone, an emaciated, wizened deformity, hairy and scaly. I was breathless at the sight.
In spite of the clarity I had gleaned during my convalescence, my body was far from ready to begin the trajectory I had seen so vividly in my mind's eye. I could barely walk. No strength, no muscle tone whatsoever. There was no physical therapy at that time, at least no one offered it to me. Didn't they know I was a dancer and needed my body whole in order to fulfill my destiny? No, they cleaned me up and sent me on my way. I cried all the way home, my parents assuring me that I would one day be normal again. It felt hopeless, looked disgusting and nobody had the magic pill to get me back to what I was.
Once I pulled myself together still on crutches, I hobbled into the ballet studio. Miss Irene knew of my accident but not the extent of my injury. After an initial inaudible gasp, she set off to plan my recovery. Lots of plies and releves, tendus and degages. It would take time, she said, but I would get there if I worked really hard. So I began the regimen prescribed by Miss Irene, right there and then. My first releve, I saw stars the pain was so unbearable. But my resolve set in and first I did three, then five, ten. Day after day I worked hard to just get back to where I was.
For the first time in my life, I felt deep-seated regret. I deluded myself I could just endure the time in the casts and then go about my business. Leave the doctor's office, jump on my bike and proceed as usual. I had been in denial of the consequences of my actions and treated my body with careless disregard. It was a painful lesson as I was just making the transition into high school. And then, just as I was gaining traction my parents announced that we were moving.
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