Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (8 page)

Meg and Katey came down to visit me and offer encouragement. They checked out my stage makeup and told me it was fine. I slicked my frizzy hair back with an enormous amount of hair spray, until it was hard and shiny. If I was anxious about a performance, I usually took my nerves out on my poor hair. I felt a surge of confidence, knowing that at least I could depend on my hair not to pop out of my bun and let me down. I don’t remember warming up or putting on my costume. All of a sudden I was backstage, waiting the final ten minutes before
Serenade
would begin.

Suki came up to me and assessed my appearance.

“You look good! Good luck,” she said encouragingly. Then she cocked her head and started brushing the hair on my forehead downward, against the hair spray. “You could do your hair a little softer though, you know.” She gave my hair a dissatisfied grimace and moved on to another girl.

I silently screamed inside my head.

I ran to a backstage mirror and was horrified to see that she had made my hair stick up like Alfalfa’s in
The Little Rascals
. Breathless, I took water from the water fountain and attempted to reslick my hair. Luckily, the quantity of hair spray I’d applied made my hair like glue, and my problem was quickly solved.

Arch appeared beside me.

“Do my shoes look the right color?” he asked, looking panicked. “They told me to dye them blue to match the unitard, but there were a million shades of blue spray paint! I tried to mix colors, but I don’t know . . . and I think I did it too late. My shoes are still wet! And look, my hands are BLUE!” I later learned that for the boys,
Serenade
blue is a notoriously difficult color to achieve on ballet slippers. And no one had told Arch to wear protective gloves.

He held his shaking hands up to my eyes. Obviously I wasn’t the only one trying not to freak out.

“I’m sure you won’t be able to see that from the stage,” I told him, trying to reassure him. I needed a calm partner. It was too late to worry about blue hands.

“Places, please,” we heard the stage manager call. Feeling unreal, I went to stand in my place at the front of one of the two diamond formations. The audience noise dwindled to silence. The stage lights went blue. For our excerpt, we were starting with the Waltz section. While the other girls turned and walked offstage, trailing their hands behind them as I had done as a student at Washington Ballet, I would stay onstage, repeating the famous arm movements that began the ballet, and wait for Arch to come and tap me on the shoulder so that we could begin our dance together.

Just feet away from me, on the other side of the lowered curtain, the strings burst forth with Tchaikovsky’s opening chords, like cries of the heart. My stomach rose into my neck, making it impossible to breathe for a moment. I raised my right hand toward the lights, a gesture that half reached, half shielded. Then the curtain rose with a quiet, zipping hum. I felt the breeze from the rising curtain blow my skirts gently around my ankles.

A strange thing happened when I looked out from the New York State Theater stage for the first time. The audience looked warm and inviting. The large jewel-like lights placed along the different audience levels glowed gently. The floor felt soft under my pointe shoes. My nerves suddenly left me, and I felt comfortable, at home. I felt a gladness rise up in me, and I knew that I was going to be able to dance with ease and confidence.

The whole performance was a joy that ended all too quickly. Arch and I danced like soul mates, everything going perfectly. I made my double pirouettes and got through those
jetés battus
that Suki had been worried about. I felt as if I were flying, lifted up on soaring winds. I wanted to do it again, right away if possible.

I could hardly sleep that night, reliving the entire day over and over in my head. After the experience of dancing on that stage, I craved a repeat
and started to dream of being asked into City Ballet right away. Yes, I was young. But I thought I was ready. I wanted to be a City Ballet dancer.

And then the next week started, and it was as if nothing had happened. I was back to the normal routine. However, Peter was apparently impressed enough with my performance that he wanted to change my casting in the Workshop performance. To my surprise, Susan informed me that I would now be learning the principal women in both the second and third movements of Balanchine’s
Symphony in C
.

I was of course excited by this, but also a little daunted. It didn’t mean I was going to perform the roles, but there was a good chance I would if Peter had asked that I learn them. I knew Susan was skeptical that I was strong enough, so I felt that I had a lot to prove. Also, the girls already doing these parts were currently the unspoken stars of my class; Elizabeth was dancing the third movement, and Monique was dancing the second movement. Both of them intimidated me; when I watched them dance I saw everywhere I was lacking.

I pushed myself, though, and felt that I could rise to the occasion. I was used to succeeding, and after the performance at the State Theater, I had more confidence.

Then disaster struck.

It was springtime, and a few weeks before Workshop. I had just turned sixteen and was taking Susan’s class. She had stopped the class to give me a correction on my
ballonnées
, scissorlike pointe steps. I was trying to do them sharper and cleaner and stronger. Something happened, and I kicked my working leg so hard that it pulled my standing leg out from under me and I fell.

Embarrassed, I got up, but I couldn’t put weight on my foot. I looked at Suzy, who cared intensely about her students. She looked horrified.

“Sit down,” she told me. “We’ll get some ice.”

She looked very upset, and I sat against the wall under the barre, trying not to cry. I was brought a pack of ice and watched the class with
blank eyes as it resumed, not really seeing anything. I took the ice off my foot to check on it. It was turning purple, and a ridge of swollen skin was rising as if it were on a fault line.

In disbelief, I called my mom to come pick me up. She was just as devastated as I was and in full protective mode. She refused the offer of crutches, probably because that would mean we were admitting defeat. We went to a doctor in a taxi.

He took X-rays and then presented us with the news.

“Looks like you’ve broken your fifth metatarsal,” he told me kindly. “Now, it’s just a hairline fracture, so if you really want to do those performances, I can tape you up real good so that you can do it.”

I looked at the doctor for a moment, taken aback. Is that what real dancers did? Did they dance on broken bones? Should I do that? Perhaps he was just testing me. I couldn’t tell. I knew that Workshop was the most important event of an SAB student’s year. I knew that to be asked into the New York City Ballet, or any other company of repute, for that matter, I had to dance Workshop. I knew that if I didn’t do Workshop, I would have to put my dreams on hold and come back next year to try again. It was a devastating thought.

But my foot
hurt.
I couldn’t bear to stand on it at all. It looked like an eggplant. I knew there was no way I could dance on it, and I knew that even Workshop was not important enough to make me crazy enough to dance on a broken foot.

I was given crutches and sent home. That night my mom somehow sweet-talked another doctor, Dr. Louis Galli, into paying a house call to give us a second opinion. I believe it was Dr. Galli’s first and only house call, and he became my favorite doctor for the rest of my career. He often reminds me of how he came to my pink bedroom and looked at my eggplant foot while I was in my flowered pajamas. Dr. Galli confirmed the diagnosis, and I resigned myself to six weeks without dance to allow my foot to heal.

I didn’t go to watch Workshop. It was just too hard to be missing it.

—

I
n a lot of ways, that first catastrophic injury was good for me. I learned a lot of lessons during the recovery that I was able to apply during the course of future injuries. Even while my foot was broken, I learned there were other things I could do to stay strong. Since the year was almost over at SAB, I didn’t have to go and watch classes while I recuperated. The teachers told me to heal and come and take the summer course classes when I was ready. I started going to Pilates and discovered that I could hop one-legged around the studio from machine to machine. The instructors would put a cuff around my ankle so that I wouldn’t use my foot. They loved having ballerinas and would come up with all kinds of crazy exercises to confound me and make me sore. This was probably the first time I realized I had stomach muscles.

I also learned that it was important to come back slowly and methodically from injuries. Stanley Williams saw me on the sidewalk one day, and in his typical Zen master fashion he gave me a nugget of wisdom to take home with me.

“The slower you come back, the faster you come back,” he said, gazing at me with his deep brown eyes. I smiled and nodded, but didn’t understand his advice.

As soon as I could, I was back in ballet class and even in rehearsals, trying to be ready to go on a fantastic trip SAB was taking to Holland in order to perform with the Kirov Ballet School as part of an early fall festival. I was to dance
Serenade
and the lead in another Balanchine ballet,
Valse-Fantasie.
But in the middle of one of my rehearsals, my foot began to hurt again.

This time I had a stress reaction on one of my metatarsals, a precursor to a stress fracture. It came from coming back to ballet too quickly and not having the muscular support around my bones to protect them from the difficult physical activity. I was sidelined again, though I was allowed to go to Holland with the group anyway, since my ticket was paid for.

I was happy to be going to Holland with the school because I’d never been overseas and all of my good friends were going. But I was bitterly disappointed and felt worthless. I was surrounded by dancers preparing for performances and talking about their roles; all I could do was take part of their ballet classes, and even the steps I was allowed to dance with my injury I couldn’t do very well because I was not in the top form that all of the other students were in.

It was from this trip that I have my first memory of compulsively eating. It was not what I ate or how much of it I ate, but how I
felt
about the food and how the food would make me feel after I ate it. We would eat in a cafeteria for every meal, and I remember eating a lot of the fried cheese sticks they had there. I didn’t overdo it necessarily, but I had a strange need to eat them, and I knew they were not the healthiest choice I could have been making. I was unhappy to be on this fabulous trip as just an observer. There was something about those cheese sticks that I ate every day that made me feel better. I looked forward to them because they made me feel happy.

Around this time I also became aware of my body’s appearance for the first time. Up until then, I really hadn’t put a lot of thought into my shape. I was confident in myself and felt pretty. I knew that every young woman came in a different shape and size, but I just assumed that everyone felt comfortable in her own body. God made us all different, and our differences were part of what defined us and made us unique. I suppose I was a bit Pollyanna-ish in that respect. I didn’t look critically at myself, just as I didn’t look critically at others. It was just not in my thought process to assess and compare and critique.

But during my sixteenth summer I began seeing changes in my body. I had been injured and so was not as physically active as I had been. Also, I’d only recently started my period and was beginning to see myself cross the line from girlhood into womanhood. My leotards were not fitting me the same, and I began to worry about parts of my body peeking out if my dance clothes were too small. In regular clothes I felt fine,
but in the more revealing ballet wear, I was seeing my body blossom and I didn’t feel comfortable with it.

I remember being taken aback by some conversations with my mother.

“You may need to watch what you eat more now that you are older and your metabolism is changing,” she remarked offhandedly one day. The comment made me feel a little resentful and controlled, even though she couldn’t have said it in a milder way.

Another day she said, “I see a difference in your thighs since you have been injured. It might be something you need to watch in terms of ballet.” She said it as casually as she could, but she was worried about the possibility of my being criticized by SAB and wanted to somehow protect me. My mother loves her family fiercely and has always been our staunchest advocate. She had an idea of the body issues facing young women in the ballet world and was hoping I could avoid them altogether.

But her comment gave me pause. My thighs? I hadn’t thought about my thighs. I went to the mirror and looked at my legs. Yes, my thighs were different. My hips were now more womanly, and my thighs were now thicker at the top than they were at the bottom. Was that bad? Should I not feel good about that? It was confusing, and instead of talking to my mother about it, I kept my insecurities to myself.

Much has been written about what the perfect ballet body is, and what Balanchine’s ideal of the perfect ballerina was: small head, long neck and limbs, slim hips, arched feet, tall and very thin. I knew all of this and had always felt that my body was a close approximation to this ideal. I wasn’t tall and my torso was probably a little longer than it should be, but all in all I thought I was pretty good.

I’d been around enough now that I’d heard the girls in the school talking about their weight and how they would eat a lot one day and then not eat the next, but I never put much thought into it. I had my head in the clouds much of the time, and the girls who were my closest friends were all pretty normal with their eating. They were healthy. But
most of us, because of our low body weights due to all the physical activity we did throughout the day, tended to start our periods later than the norm, and so we were only now, at fifteen and sixteen, beginning to see changes in our bodies. Would I still have a “ballet body” in a year? I wondered if the other girls were having similar feelings. But I didn’t talk to anyone about it.