Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (2 page)

T
iptoe, tiptoe, tiptoe . . .
my seven-year-old feet stabbed into the carpet as I wandered through the house looking for my mother. I had a plan for the next bit of time, and she needed to be informed. I finally found her coming out of her bathroom with a towel wrapped around her head.

“Mommy,” I said gravely, “I’m going to be in my room dancing, so if you call me, I won’t hear you.”

She looked at me for a second, her expression not changing. This was very important to me because I wanted to dance to very loud music, and it was an established rule in our house that when the parents called for the children, the children must respond immediately.

“I won’t hear you because of the music, Mom. So you will have to come to my room to get me if you need me.”

She smiled slightly. “Okay, sweetheart.”

Relieved that I had solved my one little worry, I pranced back to my bedroom and closed the door. Under my window, waiting openmouthed, was my record player with the front panel disco lights. I turned out my lights and closed my curtains to dim the outside sunshine as much as I could. Then I turned to my record collection. I had only a couple of records, but one was always on top, and that was the one I now chose. The magical-looking singers from ABBA grinned at me from the cover.

I lovingly put the record on the turntable and set the pin onto my favorite track. With the first downward swoop of the piano, the lights on the front panel of the record player began to pulse. I turned up the volume. The lights grew brighter. Soon my room was changing colors with
every beat of “Dancing Queen” and I was dancing wildly; there was no technique or thought involved. I spun and leaped and rolled on my yellow carpet in pure instinctual reaction to the music. I ricocheted off my bed and then bounced on top of it to flop and flip like a fish on land. I climbed off the end of the bed and onto my trunk and then jumped to the floor like a cat. When the song ended, I was sweaty and out of breath. I immediately started the song all over again.

This dancing was serious business to me. I loved it and danced every chance I got, but it was wrapped up in my imaginary world where I was a beautiful princess, a real dancing queen, who had adventures and needed rescuing and wore beautiful dresses all the time. I was always pretending to be a part of some story or another and was very happy to be alone in worlds of my own creation. I was not picturing myself as an actual dancer or ballerina; in my “pretends” I was not identifying myself as someone who danced for a living. I just danced for the joy of it.

Weeksville, North Carolina, was a perfect place for a girl with a vivid imagination. It was small and quiet and had few organized activities; children had to entertain themselves. We lived down a long gravel road that took us far away from any town. My dad used to let my sister and me sit on his lap and steer our pickup truck as we left a dust trail rising in our wake. Beside our house was a neighbor’s orchard. Behind was a soybean field. To the left of us was an empty lot overgrown with waist-high grass and threaded with paths for the neighborhood children to run along. Across the street, behind another row of houses, was a wide, gentle river. In our yard was a giant wooden and rope swing set, complete with monkey bars and a balance beam. My father had built it by hand. In the summers, I would leave the house and wander the neighborhood, running wild or coercing the neighboring children to play parts in my pretend games, not coming home until the sun was setting and my mom issued her high-pitched clarion call to return to the house for dinner.

If I was stuck inside, I would dress up in my “princess outfits,” which consisted of a collection of my mom’s old nightgowns and my prized floor-length red-velvet Christmas dress. Or I would spend hours in my
walk-in closet, acting out some kind of scenario with my favorite dolls. My family jokes that they never saw me or knew what I was doing; I was always in my room by myself.

With such a temperament, it would seem that dance classes were a perfect fit for me. So when I was five, my mother took me to a local dance studio for classes. Though I tried some and enjoyed the tap and jazz and baton twirling, ultimately I found them boring; we spent all our time learning our routines for the recitals. The performances themselves were a blast, but they were too few. And the one time I tried ballet, I thought I had never known a more boring hour in my life. Why was I just hanging on to a pole on the wall, repeatedly bending my knees? This was no way for the Dancing Queen to spend her time.

I had a lot of energy and imagination, but I wasn’t actually that healthy as a very young child, and spent much of my first-grade year of school home sick with a string of viruses. My parents were very worried, but I didn’t mind much; I found school boring. I have a memory of donning my Christmas dress and sitting down to put my new tiara on my head, only to be disappointed because of the chicken pox bumps all over my face. Then I remember my mom coming to me one day and saying gently that she thought there was a chance that some part of me actually wanted to be sick so I would have to miss school. She was not being harsh and did not disbelieve that I was really sick; she just wanted to pray with me about it.

My parents were Christians and were doing their best to raise their daughters in a stable family centered on a strong faith. When I was young, I think my parents were just becoming more serious about their own faith and were trying to incorporate Christianity more strongly into our family. There were bumps and inconsistencies, but my mother, particularly, was determined, and we started to go to church regularly. It became a habit—it was just something we did every Sunday. And when we had struggles or uncertainties, we began to pray about them.

I have a vivid memory of my mother sitting beside me as I lay in bed and telling me that if I opened up the doors of my heart and asked Jesus
to come in, He would come into my heart. I really wanted it, and I did ask, and felt that something was different afterward. Though I was a child, I knew that something important had happened.

So even at a young age, when my mom suggested I pray about the possibility of wanting to be sick and therefore resisting getting well, I did. I told God that I was ready to stop being sick and wanted to be well again. And it happened—I became a very healthy child who rarely got sick. I went back to school consistently. I do not believe my parents said anything to the school about my being bored or uninterested, but the next thing I knew, I was sitting in a room with a very nice lady, answering questions and solving problems for her. I enjoyed it because I was missing my regular classroom time. Soon thereafter I was told I would skip second grade and go directly into third grade when school started again.

My first day in third grade was rocky; the teacher announced to the class, “This is Jennifer Ringer. She is new in our grade this year because she skipped over second grade.”

Every head swiveled toward me, and I was fixed with the blank-faced stares of big third-grader eyes. I got along as best I could without drawing too much attention to myself—until it came time for our writing exercise. The teacher came by my desk, stopped, and proclaimed loudly, “Oh, here in the third grade, we write small, in only one line, not two.” I was mortified as every student in the class once again stared at me. Perhaps that is why my handwriting is so bad even today.

But despite my embarrassing start, I flourished in third grade and had made a good start in fourth grade when we suddenly moved in the middle of the year to Summerville, South Carolina. My father, a marine biologist, had taken a new job with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and been transferred once again. We had always moved around a lot for his work, so this move was not that big a deal to me. And Summerville, just outside Charleston, was a great place for our family.

I brought with me to Summerville my love for dance, though I had stopped taking dance lessons because they were just too tedious. I moved on to other things: cheerleading, softball, tennis, piano. My sister, Becky,
who is four years older than I, was very athletic and talented in many areas. She made everything look easy: she was a gifted pianist who would later go on to get her doctorate in musicology, she was captain of her tennis team, she played first base and shortstop on her softball team, and she won many of her heats on the swim team. I would go to all of her events and watch her and think, That looks fun. I’m going to do that too.

Well, it turns out that sports were not necessarily for me. I was good enough at them when I applied myself, but they just didn’t capture my fancy, and all the ability in the world gets you nowhere if you’re not motivated or focused. My softball coaches would yell at me because while I was out in right field, instead of paying attention to the game and thinking about my position, they’d find me turning cartwheels or seeing how high I could throw my glove and still catch it. In tennis, my wrist would give out every time I tried to whack the ball, leaving me feeling unsatisfied. During piano recitals, I would unconsciously swing my legs so wildly that they would kick the piano, resulting in a loud discordant
gonk
of a sound. Cheerleading was more fun for me; I enjoyed kicking my legs and learning cheers that I got to yell at the top of my lungs. But then they decided to make me the top of all the pyramids, and I really didn’t trust my fellow nine-year-olds to hold me up. Sports star, then, did not seem my destiny.

I was more interested in the actual academics in school, and was in the “good” crowd that got straight A’s. I got along well with my classmates and threw myself into extracurricular activities of the non-athletic sort. I was voted onto the student council and eventually became president, which meant I read the morning announcements to the whole school over the loudspeaker and got my picture in the local paper when the school started a program for planting trees. I continued to be an overachieving student—one of my good friends and I shared an exclusive prize called the Fred L. Day Award for academic excellence. And I even won a prize at the regional science fair because of some icky experiment I did, with my dad’s help, where we tested for the bacteria
that came off cooked and uncooked meats. To this day, I am afraid of raw meat and wash my hands and my entire kitchen repeatedly if a package of meat is even cracked open. The things that grew in those petri dishes . . .

My best friend at the time was Tanya Nikitas. She was the one who had gotten me into cheerleading. We were mostly inseparable, except for the times that, like all young girls, we suddenly got mad at each other for who knows what reason and had to air out our problems. The rest of the time, we were tape-recording ourselves singing popular songs or working on our dance routine for the school’s talent show. Tanya loved to dance, too, and was taking ballet lessons at a studio in Summerville. One day she asked me to come and spend the night at her house, and our moms arranged for me to be dropped off at Tanya’s ballet school to wait for her to finish her class. This little bit of scheduling between two moms would turn out to change my life.

I remember walking up a long stairway. The building wasn’t in the best condition, and the stairway was dusty and dark. Then I walked down the hallway to a door through which I could hear classical music playing. The door opened directly into the ballet studio. I paused uncertainly at the threshold, looking at Tanya and the other girls in their leotards holding on to long wooden bars—or as I eventually learned to spell them, barres—that ran the length of the long rectangular room. The floor was wooden as well, and there were pictures and posters of dancers on the walls. The teacher was a petite blond woman wearing a thick sweater unitard and smoking a cigarette. She spoke with a confident British accent.

Someone directed me to the dressing room area, where I could sit and wait for Tanya to finish class. Through the door of the dressing room, I could see the class proceeding. I sat on a bench and cracked open my giant schoolbooks so that I could get a head start on my weekend homework. Wouldn’t it be great if I finished it all now and then had the whole weekend free? But before long, I was distracted by what was going on in the studio.