Dont think dear, p.22
Don't Think, Dear, page 22
Lily, meanwhile, is working to change the system that hurt her. In the five years since she stopped performing full-time, she has opened a ballet school in Antwerp, moved back to the United States, and mentored young dancers around the country. (She attributes her soaring energy levels to finally allowing herself to eat.) She urges her students not to worry about the way they look and to focus on the way their bodies move. “Ten pounds is not going to break your career,” she tells them. “Just try to be healthy.” When her students are injured, she tells them to rest; she does not let them come back to class until they are fully recovered. A few years ago, Lily was hired to start a new dance program at a West Texas Christian university so conservative that, until recently, dancing was forbidden on campus. It was an unlikely proposition—but, against all odds, Lily built the department into a local magnet, drawing students from as far as London and California. She has also been exploring her academic interests, studying toward an English degree at the university. “I wake up excited every morning,” she told me. In 2022, she started an even bigger job as the assistant director of an established preprofessional ballet school in Lubbock, Texas. She is helping to revamp the school’s curriculum—and she is implementing a Balanchine-centric program. I asked her why, after everything she has been through, she would choose to do this. She clarified that she teaches “Balanchine, but healthy.” She never forces her students’ turnout or pushes their legs higher than they are ready to go. One of her favorite classes is her ten-year-olds; she loves how inquisitive they are. “They are allowed to ask questions?” I asked. This is still, somehow, difficult to imagine. “I don’t yell at them when they breathe too loud,” Lily said.
The stress fracture she incurred at twelve—the one for which she was banished to the front of the room, and from which she never had time to heal—has continued to haunt her. Years after she retired from dancing, her metatarsal still hurt most of the time. When it went numb a few years ago, she finally went to the doctor, who told her that her bone was decaying. If I were diagnosed with a necrotic toe, I would Google Image it before I was out of the waiting room, see the pictures of blackened toes and dead flesh, and hail a cab to the emergency room. But Lily still has a dancer’s approach to pain. “If I’ve waited this long, I can wait longer,” she figured, and went back to a busy semester. Other scars, she has simply adapted to. In a concession to the labral tears in her hips, she rarely lifts her leg higher than ninety degrees. Her knees “will never be quite what they used to be,” but she’s grateful that they no longer hurt.
Rachel was back at home in 2012, wondering what she was going to do with her life, when a friend suggested she sign up with Central Casting: anyone could be an extra, and she was already comfortable on sets. Soon, Rachel had steady work as a stand-in. Her job, she explained to me, was “to be a mannequin”—to walk through scenes before the actors arrived, giving the camera and lighting crews a chance to rehearse. She says this work is empowering. She feels more respected than she ever did at ballet, and she makes more money. She has opportunities to travel; she spent six months working on a TV show in Morocco, and another half a year living in London and working as a stand-in for a celebrity she resembles. “To say it’s been more fun is possibly the biggest understatement of my life.”
Rachel’s confidence has soared since she quit ballet, and she has had boyfriends and even, for a while, a fiancé. But she still has trouble recognizing romantic cues and accepting that men are interested in her. Rachel long ago lopped off her long, regulation dancer hair in favor of a stylish bob, but she still moves with the telltale poise of a dancer. She says she wants to find love, and has downloaded the usual array of dating apps, but she rarely replies to men’s messages, let alone starts a conversation. Rachel is thirty and could pass for a teenager, but she refers to herself as a “granny,” as though preemptively removing herself from the dating pool.
Sometimes, on set, a cameraman will ask for permission before moving her body. Rachel can’t get over it. “Yes,” Rachel responds, and thinks: Why are you asking? Recently, her therapist—who has been trying to teach her to set limits—asked her to reflect on her physical boundaries. “I don’t know what those are,” Rachel says. She sounds bewildered as she recalls a question her therapist asked: “‘Do you feel you’ve been taken advantage of in a physical boundary?’ I don’t know.” Growing up, she never had a choice about being touched. “Have I just been trained to let whatever it is happen?” she wonders.
* * *
Several years ago, the novelist Sigrid Nunez spoke with the literary magazine the Morning News about her latest book tour and her evolution as a writer. Nunez was in her fifties then, and she had the kind of success that I once imagined would lead to happiness, or at least contentment; I imagined that a person like her—with five books published to critical acclaim and teaching appointments at Ivy League schools—would look back on her career and feel pretty great.
And yet, Nunez confessed, she was still haunted by her childhood dream. “I wanted to be a dancer when I was young,” she said. “And I failed at that. I have never gotten over that. I’ll never get over that.” The interviewer—a fellow writer—seemed confused. “Meaning you feel badly about yourself?” he asked. I imagine Nunez testy as she repeated herself. “I don’t know how else to put it except to say that I wanted to be a dancer and I failed at that and I’ll never get over that,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a terrible thing that I will never get over it. I don’t see why I would get over it.” So did that failure weigh her down? the interviewer pressed. Nunez tried again. Imagine you were young and you fell in love, she said, and then you broke up. “Though you move on you don’t ever completely get over it. That loss is part of your life and who you are forever.”
I came across this interview shortly after reading Nunez’s novel The Friend, in which a staid New York writer reluctantly inherits a late friend’s needy Great Dane. I had been thinking a lot about dogs at the time: like Nunez’s narrator, I had recently acquired my first canine roommate, and the novel spoke to me so intensely I imagined it had been written for me alone.
After turning the last page, I began reading through Nunez’s back catalog, with the same sense of pleasure I might take in getting to know a new friend. When I had worked my way back to Nunez’s first book—a thinly veiled memoir about growing up in the projects of Staten Island—I was stunned to learn that she had spent much of her childhood riding the subway back and forth to Manhattan for ballet classes. She even seemed to understand my own original attraction to ballet: “The dream of being a ballerina begins with the dream of being beautiful.”
So when I read that Nunez, more than thirty years after quitting ballet, still hadn’t recovered from the loss, I felt vindicated. Of course I had not gotten over it; even Sigrid Nunez had not gotten over it. Like me, she still ruminated on what might have gone differently, looked back on her career like a coach rewinding the tape of an athlete’s latest game. Except, of course, there would be no redo; the season was over.
But I also felt hopeless: if Sigrid Nunez, with all her talent and literary success, still regretted her failure in ballet, then what chance did I have? It dawned on me that I would live with this for the rest of my life, that this scar might never disappear.
“By age twelve any girl left at the barre wanted to be Margot Fonteyn and believed she could be,” wrote Adrienne Sharp, a novelist and onetime dancer who in her fiction returns, again and again, to ballet. “Quit at this age, or at fourteen or fifteen or sixteen, and you’d be haunted by dancing the rest of your life.”
I am thrilled to have a career as a writer. I am often amazed at my own good luck.
And yet.
“One of the most significant facts about us,” wrote the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.”
The litany of counterfactuals is loudest after taking a class or going to see the ballet. If only I’d gone to Miami that one year I got in. If only I’d had a different coach. If only I hadn’t given up.
“You stop dancing and your body tightens,” wrote Sigrid Nunez. “You feel like a piece of clothing that has shrunk in the wash. A sensation worse than any muscle ache.” Almost every night, before bed, I stretch. I stretch the way you’re not supposed to, sitting down into a split without warming up. With my right leg in front, I count to five; I bend forward and back, switch legs, repeat. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, ever since I stopped going to class: I was determined not to lose this ability. I was determined that my body would remain different—special. Marked. I catch myself practicing in quiet moments, too—pointing and flexing while I’m on the phone, absentminded fondues while I brush my teeth.
Children dream of being baseball players and movie stars and astronauts. Most of us, at some point, must face our limitations. But the closer we come to making it, the harder it is to accept our failure—at every level. Athletes who come in second feel worse than those who finish third. (A 1995 analysis by Cornell University psychologists found that Olympic silver medalists looked less happy on the podium than those who had won bronze, and were more likely to speak in postgame interviews about what “almost” happened.)
Some of my old classmates rigorously avoid ballet—watching it, doing it, talking about it. Some of them didn’t want to participate in this book. They find it too painful: a reminder of all they have lost.
The Canadian artist Leanne Shapton spent her youth as a competitive swimmer, making it as far as the Olympic trials but not quite qualifying for the national team. Twenty years later, she published a memoir, Swimming Studies, in which she grappled with the role swimming had played in her life. She was in her late thirties then, with an enviable career—she had written several books and been an art director for the New York Times; her textile designs had appeared on high-fashion runways—and yet she still defined herself by her “brief, intense years as an athlete.” As a young woman, she fell into all-consuming relationships with male bosses and lovers that reminded her of the dynamic she’d once had with her coach. As an artist, she drew on the discipline and self-awareness she had developed through training. She knew, intuitively, how to gear up for a deadline or a big event; when to rest and when to push on. And even after she stopped training formally, she never stopped swimming. “I’m drawn to swimming pools, all swimming pools, no matter how small or murky,” she writes. She plunges into the freezing Ladies’ Pond in London’s Hampstead Heath, swims compulsive laps in hotel pools, follows the naked locals into a swimming pavilion in Sweden. But her laps are tinged with regret. “When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar.” Unsure of “what to do with something I do well but no longer have any use for,” she sometimes competes with recreational teams—setting early alarms for practice and carbo-loading before meets, resuming her old habits like “an outgrown winter coat.” Three nights a week, she dreams about swimming.
I dream that I’m auditioning for the Bolshoi. I know it’s unusual that they would consider me at the advanced age of twenty-eight, but I’m delighted to find that I can still execute all the steps. I’ve had ten years off, I think, but I’m back.
I dream that I have been cast in Serenade—one of my favorite ballets, a moonlit Balanchine masterpiece. I don’t feel confident that I know my part—in fact, I am trying to learn it from YouTube as the curtain rises—but I decide not to worry about it too much: this is the best moment of my life.
I dream that I attend an SAB fundraiser and afterward have sex with Balanchine, who is eighty-five years old. He mentions his girlfriend. I hope he will leave her for me.
I dream that I have been cast as Marie in The Nutcracker. I wonder if it will look odd that I’m so much bigger than the prince; I am thirty, after all, and he is eleven. Or that it will be a problem that I haven’t been to any of the rehearsals and don’t know the part. But the casting mistress is unconcerned. “Just make something up,” she suggests.
I dream that I’m wearing a leotard with a number pinned to the front, and I’m dancing: piqués across the floor, pirouettes en pointe. A man sits at the front of the room with a clipboard, watching. I am both twenty-seven and seventeen, and I am auditioning for SAB. I feel so lucky to have a second chance, and I’m determined to make it count. I’m dancing better than ever and I know I’ll be chosen.
The details don’t matter. What matters is this: the euphoria, the relief, as I discover that it’s not too late, after all. The exquisite pain of waking up, of remembering that it was just a dream. That I am not a dancer after all.
I read Pointe magazine’s “Five Tips for Mastering Your Double Pirouette” and “What Are the Best Preperformance Snacks?” and imagine that they are relevant to my life. I travel with my ballet slippers tucked in the zipper pocket of my suitcase; I look up the local studio in foreign cities. I open my calendar and pencil in the classes I might attend. I usually don’t, but I like knowing that I could.
Sometimes, when I’m in an open class, I catch myself daydreaming that the teacher stops me on my way out to ask me who I am, what’s my story, how did someone with so much talent end up here? Out of loyalty to Balanchine, I keep my fourth-position back leg straight as I prepare for a pirouette. (Classically trained dancers take off from two bent knees—an easier position from which to push off the ground—but Balanchine dancers pride themselves on the ability to spring up from an off-kilter pose.)
When I read that Balanchine chose Guerlain’s “L’Heure Bleue” for his then-muse Maria Tallchief, I looked up the fragrance online. I saw that it was still being produced—the website said it had notes of iris and vanilla—and I ordered it. The liquid inside the bottle was golden yellow, and the top resembled an old-fashioned glass stopper. My first thought, when I sprayed it in the bathroom, was that it would be a good choice for keeping track of someone’s whereabouts in the theater—the smell is overwhelming. It’s loud and sweet and a little fusty; it makes me think of apothecaries and leather suitcases and the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut. All day, I kept sniffing my wrists, feeling both glamorous and creepy.
I think about how my early immersion in the legend of Balanchine shaped my own beliefs about creative work. My appreciation for his pragmatism has only grown as I have fought to establish a writing routine. I think about how he used constraints—the dimensions of a borrowed stage; the shortcomings of a particular dancer—to spur his creativity. (When NYCB moved from City Center to the much bigger Lincoln Center, the size of the dancers’ steps increased accordingly.) I think about how he found inspiration everywhere, from Greek mythology and Bible stories to orange groves and commercial airline jingles. About how he shrugged off bad reviews. I force myself to sit down at my desk even when I’m afraid I have nothing to say, and I think of Balanchine’s motto: “My muse must come to me on union time.” I want to give up, and I hear Carol channeling Balanchine: “What are you saving it for? Do it now!” I feel like I’m choking on my own ambitions, and I think of his modesty. “If you set out to make a masterpiece,” he once asked, “how will you ever get it finished?” His humble approach was much more effective. “Today, I think I’ll make a little something,” he said one day, and began arranging his seventeen students into a double-diamond configuration—the iconic opening of Serenade.
A group of women has gathered in a friend’s living room. Coats and shoes come off; feet go up on the coffee table. Reflexively, I appraise my friends’ socked arches. I feel like a lecherous man giving women on the street a once-over, but I can’t help it. B’s are almost flat, but I doubt it’s ever bothered her. K’s are high—so high that, if she just stood up, she would be halfway up to pointe. I’m jealous of her. What a waste, I think. She doesn’t even know how lucky she is. I doubt she appreciates her feet; I wonder if she has ever even noticed.
A few weeks ago, I ate a big dinner and then I went to the ballet. When the dancers started moving, I thought, Oh no: I’m too full.
I’m not sure what I wanted to find when I went digging for old photos in the storage boxes beneath my childhood bed. Did I want to see confirmation of what I suspected—that I’d never been very good at ballet? Or did I want to find evidence that I’d been better than I remembered—that those years of devotion hadn’t been totally deluded?
Digital cameras were not yet in everyone’s pockets in the early aughts, and my parents shot few home videos. If there were Polaroids, they have been lost to time or periodic bedroom purges. I turned up a few grainy VHS tapes of summer-program recitals, but I couldn’t pick myself out of the pixelated lineup; I was one of many indistinguishable figures in the back.
It was in my old, defunct email inbox (“sugarplumfairy54” at yahoo) that, after guessing the answers to a few ancient security questions, I found them: the audition photos I had submitted to summer programs at thirteen. I wore a plain black leotard in front of a blank studio wall—costumes or busy backdrops would have been frowned on—and struck a few basic poses: my legs crossed demurely in fourth position on pointe; one leg raised in a shallow V in attitude derriere.
I look different than I’d imagined. My feet look decent, although I suspect I wore broken-down pointe shoes to make my arches look more pronounced. My placement is passable, if my back is a bit too bent. But the biggest surprise is my body. My hips are not the monstrosities I remember. The problem is the opposite: I look weak. My arms are droopy and my balance looks precarious, as though my stringy legs might not be strong enough to hold up the weight of my body: I don’t appear to be dancing so much as clenching my muscles and hoping I don’t tip over. I wonder if I fell off pointe as soon as this photo was snapped. The tendons in my neck are popping, and my lips are pursed. I look miserable.
