The Art of Falling (5 page)

My therapist unfastened the Velcro on my immobilizer and slipped it from around my chest. It had been a while since a man’s hands had so tenderly removed an article of my clothing. Without it, I felt vulnerable and impetuous and infinitely more alive, right down to the fine hairs now exposed on my arm.

“You won’t need this in here,” he said. “We’ll help your body heal itself through movement, not rest.”

He spoke my language so beautifully I almost giggled. I could tell he had personal experience with the benefits of muscular contraction by the way his knit shirt draped across the rolling landscape of his shoulders and chest. He was about my height, with dark shiny hair. His nametag said “Mauricio T.”

“So, Penelope Sparrow,” he said, reading the name from my chart, “why are you here?”

The very question I’d been asking myself since waking up in University Hospital nine days ago. I pointed to the thick chart in his hands. “Don’t you guys ever read those things?”

He smiled. Handsomely. “I’ve never met a woman whose fourteen-story flying experiment resulted in an unexpected new chapter of life. I guess I want to hear it straight from you.”

“I move like I’m ninety years old. I want to turn the clock back a bit.”

“I imagine we can accomplish that, as long as you’re ready to work. Physical therapy isn’t easy.”

“I’m used to hard work. In fact, I miss it.”

“Is that why you dressed up for the occasion?” He fingered the lace at the collar of my blouse. “Nice touch.”

I tried on a smile for size. “The muscle spasms are the worst. It’s hard to breathe, sleep, walk…did I mention breathe?”

“Have you been using ice?”

“I’d have to stuff myself in a chest freezer to get ice on everything that’s sore.” Mauricio laughed. “I’ve put it on the shoulder, though.”

He had me lie face down on a cushioned massage table and propped my bad arm on a low stool to one side. Already I was more comfortable than I’d been in recent memory. He affixed sticky electrode pads to my upper and lower back, explaining that they would stimulate the muscles along the length of my spine to relax them. On top, he placed a moist heat pack.

The stimulation therapy felt weird. When it came to my muscles, I was used to being in control. But when he dialed up the machine, they became independent, playful caterpillars, climbing over one another under my skin. The heat relaxed me. The caterpillars started to spin a cocoon and I felt…so…so…

“You look so cozy I hate to wake you up.” A dimple in his left cheek punctuated Mauricio’s crooked smile. He peeled the sticky pads off my back, apologizing all the while for tugging at my bruises. “Time to roll onto your back.”

I tried to tuck my good wing under and roll, but halfway through this bravura movement, I slammed into an invisible wall of pain and got stuck. My body, trained over the course of a lifetime to push past the pain, now ignored me.

I didn’t appreciate the way Mauricio studied me as I struggled. “Could I get some help here?”

“I was wondering when you’d ask,” he said. Instead of a hand, he offered verbal prompts. Following them, I climbed off the table, turned around, sat. Holding on to a rail with my good arm, I eased myself to a reclining position. I could grasp the concept of moving within limitations—we all have them—but the smallest effort was now a freaking production number. I felt like an idiot. Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes.

“You okay?”

I took a deep breath and nodded.

“We’re going to bend your knees up to your chest—that’s it—I’ll hold them. Are you sure you’re okay?”

I wanted to move so badly that even if I weren’t okay I wouldn’t have told him. “Yes.”

The stretch hurt in that good kind of way. Like I knew it was doing something positive. Such a small accomplishment, and yet I felt encouraged.

“Now the hamstrings. Relax your right leg. Give me all its weight and let me do the work. We’ll stop when you tell me it hurts.”

He raised my leg until it pointed straight up at the ceiling. “You’re already within normal range. You still with me?”

“Yes,” I said. Or maybe grunted. Normal? Please. “Keep going.”

He pushed another forty-five degrees. “How’s that feeling?”

“I’m good.” It had started to pluck my taut back muscles something wicked, but I didn’t want him to stop. When body motion stops, body judgment begins, and I did not want Mauricio’s opinion of my potential swayed by the size of my thighs. And it was only my back complaining. My leg felt great.

He kept pushing; I kept testing myself.

In another few moments, my back was screaming for mercy and a tear had spilled down my cheek—but my leg was lying on my torso.

“You a dancer or something?”

I was hoping I’d impress him. Extraordinary effort would invite the extraordinary attention I’d need for the results I sought.

Half-inch by half-inch, Mauricio lowered my leg toward the table, allowing my back muscles time to readjust. His pen scratched across the paper as he wrote a lengthy note in my chart, then he looked up at me with an accusing glare.

“The muscles in your back are balled up in knots so big I can see them. What I just did to you must have hurt like the devil. Why didn’t you tell me to stop?”

Pain had never before seemed relevant. In fact, I’d partnered with it. In order to stay in top form, I’d pushed muscles and joints to their limits, and learned to live with a gnawing hunger I’d never fully sated. One time, I broke my big toe during a performance—actually heard it snap—when another dancer blew his entrance and we collided. But what could I do? I taped it up and headed back onstage. Breathed deep to fight the nausea.

All I knew was a whole different kind of pain would result if I left therapy with my sides uneven. So I said, “Can you stretch the other leg, too?”

Mauricio laid down the law: pain must be our guide. I needed to tell him when it hurt. Only I could draw the line, he said, between what might help and what might cause lasting damage.

Later, at home on the living room floor, my mother’s underused exercise mat crackled beneath me as I exchanged the equivalent of a doctorate in movement for Kindergym. I intended to practice gauging my pain response, I really did, but my raised leg was so stiff I once again found myself pushing through the pain. Once it loosened up, I added a syncopated rhythm, lowering the leg slower than I’d raised it. Lift up—two and down—two—three. Up—two and down—two—three.

Two beats up a mountain and a three-beat slide back down.

• • •

The day of my audition for Dmitri’s company in New York City, Suzanna’s daughter, Tina, and I arrived early enough to register before anyone else. I grabbed number “1” and pinned the “2” above her perky, petite breast. I had to hand it to her: at nineteen she kept her body fat so low I wondered if she’d yet started to menstruate.

While we were warming up in the studio, Tina told me what she knew about Dmitri. I found it easier to listen when not looking at her; the blue she’d streaked into one side of her blond hair distracted me. It seemed the buzz surrounding Dmitri was in his genes: his mother, Ekaterina Ivanovna, was the prima ballerina from the Bolshoi who defected to France in the early 1970s. “The media was all over it,” Tina said. I nodded; I’d read about Ivanovna. Her husband was a French diplomat.

“So what’s he done?” I said.

“Nothing, yet. He wants to set up a big modern dance school in Russia and start a company.”

“Then why’s he here in the States?”

“Word is he wants to brush up his choreography before he puts it on the world stage.”

Modern dance was all about the pioneers of expression, and in Russia, a country still wriggling free from the constraints the Communist government placed on artistic content, Dmitri had identified a new frontier. Outside of cultural centers like Moscow and Leningrad, the form had barely been encountered. Fetching the banner of artistic freedom and planting it in Russia was an endeavor I immediately latched on to. Any dance job would have affirmed my mother’s tireless faith in me, but this was more than a job—it was a cause. This would be the sort of achievement my father would be proud of.

Caught up in my own thoughts, I didn’t give Tina any coaching at all before Dmitri entered. He instantly dominated the room. He was tall, over six feet, with the kind of lean, tapered torso that before I met Dmitri I had always called a “swimmer’s body.” Even his hair moved well, with the light skipping off brown, shoulder-length curls. Instead of a pianist, an ensemble had set up an unusual array of instruments.

The sum total of my advice to Suzanna’s daughter consisted of five whispered words: “It begins now. Absorb everything.”

Dmitri tied his hair into a ponytail as a
djembe
player slapped out a seductive beat. A-one-AND-two-AND-three, four. Dmitri faced the mirror and swayed side to side as if to absorb the rhythm, accenting with elbow, shoulder, or head on the upbeats, stroking long through the air with arm or leg on the downbeats. I recognized the same sinuous, earthy movement Bebe had introduced me to; my body couldn’t help but follow along. In the mirror I saw dancers behind me stop their chattering to watch, no doubt fearful they had somehow missed the official start of the audition.

Dmitri signaled for the drummer to pause and turned around.

“Now, please.” He gestured to us with his hands, palms up. “You do.” He turned to the drummer. With a downward stroke of Dmitri’s hand, the drummer once again picked up the beat. Dmitri crossed his arms and waited for us to begin. Several of the dancers watched him back, no doubt hoping he’d turn back to the mirror and repeat the sequence. But I began shifting my weight from one foot to the other, and closed my eyes to let the beat seep through my pores.

When I opened my eyes, I unreeled the memory of Dmitri’s movement like a film in the mirror, matching my body to his, elbow to elbow, stroke to stroke, riding the arc in the beat. His movement fit my low center of gravity like custom-made jeans, accommodating my body and comforting my soul. I was no longer a stack of imperfect bones, but a series of levers coordinating a thrill ride of twists and torques. Others watched, and eventually followed. I set aside both my prior obligation to Tina and any nervousness over the audition’s outcome: it was just mind, heart, muscle, and the unbridled joy of moving my body through space.

By the time I stilled, Dmitri was standing next to me, smiling. “Yes, yes.”

At Dmitri’s prompt, a didgeridoo energized the room by adding an energizing buzz beneath the drumbeat. Dmitri had everyone’s attention now. He crouched low, a dance animal sculpted for strength, flexibility, and speed. I crouched behind him; others followed. By the time the guitarist joined in, he had dozens of dancers following him in waves.

And I was up front, helping to power the tide.

There would be no break. No callbacks. No agonizing wait. Dmitri picked up the sign-in sheet, checked names against numbers, and looked up.

“This is the last United States audition and I am only taking two dancers. I want Penelope Sparrow and Tina Franke.” By way of dismissing the others, but looking right at me, he added, “Thank you very much.”

And with that it was over. Dmitri was a man who knew what he wanted. And he wanted me.
Me!

And Tina, of course. I turned to give my protégé-cum-colleague a quick congratulatory hug, my breast flushed with warmth. In brightening my career with its first rays of hope, Dmitri had won my unwavering support. My body longed to sing his praises. Fresh ideas coiled within my muscles; I could have danced hours more.

After so many years of subsisting on a meager diet of perseverance, I wasn’t yet ready to feast from the full banquet of life. I didn’t call my mother. I would wait until all felt secure.

Right then I wanted to savor the notion that dreams really could come true.

A draft of cold air; the front door had opened. So deeply relaxed after my home therapy my eyelids didn’t flinch. The floor creaked as my mother approached. She stopped—good lord, was she checking to see if I was breathing?—then moved away. Her leather purse plopped onto the hall table; she made room for her coat in the closet with a metallic scrape. She passed by again, pants swishing. The legs of the piano bench whispered across the carpet.

The moody adagio from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” rose from the piano. I felt her fingers crawl over the keys to seek out the yearning that, beneath everything, had always bound us together. I relaxed more deeply and images swirled: Dmitri. His body. The music. The dance. Tina.

Memory pricked me, and I noted the pain.

Then the doorbell rang.

My mother lifted her hands from the keys and spoke gaily when she answered the door, snapping right out of the trance her music induced. I couldn’t. She’d interrupted the sonata before the second movement could lighten the mood, before the urgent third movement could re-invigorate and goad me back to life. So much was unresolved.

With only half my heart in the process, I went through the effortful and awkward actions now required to stand.

“There she is,” a female voice said.

She sounded familiar, but it had been so long since I’d lived in the area I was surprised anyone would know me. I had to move so damned slowly. But as soon as I’d straightened, I recognized them at once: two fresh-faced, exuberant Philadelphians I’d last seen in the hospital.

I stayed where I had risen. “This is a surprise.”

“Penny, your manners. I’m Evelyn Sparrow, Penelope’s mother.” With more animation than I could have possibly mustered, my mother smiled and extended her hand. “And you are?”

“Angela Reed. An absolute pleasure to meet you.” Still in a cast, Angela awkwardly shook hands with my mother. She turned to introduce Marty Kandelbaum, then said, “I was your daughter’s hospital roommate.”

“What are you guys doing here?”

“Penny.” My mother threw me a sharp look before turning back to our guests. “She’s not herself yet.” She took their coats, stowed the mat I’d been using in the closet, and pulled the coffee table back into position.

“I apologize for not calling first,” Kandelbaum said. “Angela stopped in the bakery while I was closing, and driving up to look for you was sort of a spur-of-the-moment adventure. Did you know there are eight Sparrows in the Lehigh Valley phone book?”

“I’m thrilled you’re here,” my mother said. “It’s been so gloomy.”

“What do you expect from me, Mother?” I snapped. “I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“I meant the winter weather, Penny.” She kept her voice light, as if we teased each other this way all the time.

“We’ll try to be the sunshine Mother Nature has denied you,” Kandelbaum said.

“Go on in and sit down,” my mother said. “I’ll get some snacks.”

Angela, surveying the room, spied the dance posters in the hallway beyond. “Oh my gosh, this is like a museum. Look, Marty.”

When Kandelbaum and I joined her, the flawless ballet bodies of Edward Villella, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Fernando Bujones, and Julio Bocca invited us down the hall. A museum—she was right. Each dancer on display, frozen in time, limited by frame, trapped behind glass. Each taunting the viewer with photographic perfection from a distant, untouchable place. Not one moment of messy, glorious, immediate movement to be experienced. It was the opposite of dance.

“Were these all your partners?” Kandelbaum said.

I chuckled. “In my mother’s fantasies, I suppose.”

“Now, Penny,” my mother called, “they could have been, if they weren’t too old for you.”

“Or too short,” I called back.

It suddenly occurred to me—even after my exile from ballet, when my mother switched to buying the modern dance posters that hung in the next leg of the hallway, she only chose male choreographers: Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham. Why had she done this, in a discipline where females far outnumber the males? Where was Martha Graham, I wondered? Trisha Brown? Twyla Tharp?

Neither Angela nor Kandelbaum mentioned the empty hook and the ghostly impression the missing poster had left on the wall near my bedroom door, but it haunted me.

“This one’s different,” Angela said on the return trip, referencing the poster closest to the living room. “It really grips you.”

“Rudolf Nureyev. In
Petrushka
. It’s my favorite as well. See the yellow marks here?” I pointed through the glass. “My mother rescued it from the door of my closet, where I’d taped him.”

“His face is so expressive.”

The role absorbed him: his lips parted and brows raised, hands bent at odd angles, and feet turned inward, he was a tragic doll whose soul struggles to emerge. “It’s like the photographer caught him in a moment of great potential—about to do something—and I never tire of trying to figure out what.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Angela said. “I knew this place would be artsy before we rang the doorbell. We heard the piano—your playing was so moving. Heartbreaking, really.”

I explained that my mother was the piano player.

“Such talent in the family,” Kandelbaum said.

My mother reappeared with a pitcher of grape juice, a plate of sugar cookies, and a glass bowl of cheddar Goldfish. She placed the tray on the coffee table. “Penny’s father bought me that piano the first year his sporting goods store turned a profit.”

“And you never told me?”

She shrugged, as if it were unimportant. She had to know I craved details about my father—and now she was coughing them up for people she’d just met? Even thirty years ago, a baby grand was a considerable investment, and one more clue to my father’s character.

Angela and Kandelbaum took the overstuffed love seat beneath the front window. Kandelbaum popped a whole cookie into his mouth and grabbed a handful of crackers.

It was hard to watch anyone endorse my mother’s nutritional sensibilities. I’d rejected her practices in my teens, knowing they would destroy my health and career options. It was Bebe who taught me how to optimize nutrition within minimal calorie guidelines, and Bebe who introduced me to that slight euphoria that undereating, just a little, could produce—and I loved her for it. By taking me from this home of excesses and into her studio and its apartment, where austerity was a way of life as well as a diet, I could create the body I sought. She made me believe that with religious adherence to the right program of exercise and nutrition, I could capitalize on my father’s half of my gene pool and fend off obesity.

Despite the crumbs on his shirt, Kandelbaum and Angela did look cute sitting across the coffee table from me, their cheeks rosy from the March cold and eyes twinkling like snowflakes in a streetlight. From a cold ladder-back, I watched as their arms and hips touched in a comfortable familiarity that full-body pain, if not life itself, seemed determined to deny me.

Angela said, “Would you play for us, Mrs. Sparrow?”

“I haven’t played much since Penny left home…”

“Please?” Angela said.

“I’m really rusty.”

“Go ahead, Mom,” I said. “It would be nice.”

She played one song, then another, then another, her fingers loosening and finding their way. Through grace notes, arpeggios, and thunderous chords, the spirit of music moved through us, reminding me of a time when camaraderie and human touch were part of my daily existence.

• • •

The music ended, and the debut of Dance DeLaval was behind us. Applause still reverberated through our bodies. The six of us awaited the early morning review in the
Philadelphia
Sentinel
while piled on Dmitri’s couches at his Independence Suites apartment. My hands, Mitch’s head, Karly’s feet, Tina’s torso—these body parts were the instruments with which we had built the performance, and we valued them in a spirit of joint ownership. We fell asleep against one another, stage makeup still on, well before the
Sentinel
’s review hit the stands.

The next morning, Dmitri ran out to get the paper while the rest of us took turns in the shower. Lars cooked breakfast; Dmitri scanned the review. The others ate ravenously. I dissected my eggs, whisking the yolks away and laying the whites on top of dry toast, taking small bites to make it last. I listened for the critic’s judgment with keen interest. It had been two months since I joined the company, and I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to tell my mother. She wanted my success so badly—I couldn’t let her down again. And I couldn’t bear to hear her say I’d made the wrong decision in casting my fate with the untried Dance DeLaval.

Dmitri tried to read aloud to us, but his English was so choppy Karly yanked the paper from his hands and took over.

“First of all, Dmitri, you have to start with the headline. ‘Dance DeLaval refreshing addition to Philly dance scene.’ How about that?”

We whooped and clapped.

“Get on with it,” Lars said. His Scandinavian lilt always sounded boozy, even when he was sober.

“Okay, here we go: ‘In a city the size of Philadelphia, dance companies come and go with some regularity. Making predictions about such a changeable scene can be foolish. But I will venture a guess that when Dance DeLaval leaves Philadelphia at the end of its three-year residency at the University of the Arts, our audiences will not want to see the company go.’”

“You can’t ask for much better,” Tina said.

Karly scanned down the page. “Then she goes on to give Dmitri’s background…looks like it’s straight from the program notes…then it jumps to an inside page.”

“Just read the underlined parts. The good stuff,” Dmitri said.

Karly opened the paper and refolded it to the right spot. “I can’t believe it—you did underline, you control freak.”

“This is how you do advertising in America, no?”

“Okay, let’s see.
Smoldering
athleticism
…she’s talking about you, Dmitri. She must want you bad—”

Mitch and Lars howled; Dmitri flushed.

“…
style
which
fingers
the
edges
of
human
kinetic
potential
—”

Dmitri and I caught each other’s eyes and smiled. That one meant a lot to him.

“…
a
broad
range
of
subject
matter…a disparate group of bodies
—”

“Desperate bodies? This is good, no? Shows hunger for movement?” Dmitri said. His wordplay raised a hearty laugh from the group.

I set down my toast. I had already started to feel queasy when I heard the word “broad.” For the most part, Dmitri had chosen his dancers for their
lack
of disparity. The men were tall and thin, the women a few inches shorter and thin—except Tina, who was very short and thin. Thin, thin, thin, the dance world mandate. The American ideal.

Then there was me. Dmitri’s movement inspired a fierce confidence in my body—from the inside looking out, I felt equal to any challenge—but critical evaluation of my performance brought back all my fears. Mine was the desperate body. I didn’t want to have food in my mouth if I was about to hear MacArthur say my chunky bottom was responsible for creating her sense of the company’s disparateness.

Although she hardly seemed finished, Karly folded the paper and dropped it onto the couch. “It’s all good news. So, who’s using the phone?”

Mitch reached it first and called Evan. While the others waited their turn, I snuck off to the kitchen for a private audience with the article. I scanned down to where Dmitri had underlined “a disparate group of bodies.” The critic wrote:

Mr. DeLaval uses his long torso to great advantage; opposing forces of expansion and contraction that might seem minimal within another body become a bold statement on his. Others in the company are similarly lithe and strong, but two are so different that the viewer searches for meaning. Without an emotional context, one can’t tell if Mr. DeLaval is making a statement with his casting. My eye was drawn to the larger girl in the second piece, for instance—her Amazonian strength, her mercurial fluidity. Was the petite blond meant to be her daughter? Her incomplete self? Only time will tell whether Mr. DeLaval can continue to generate the kind of material that will make this ensemble shine.

I let out my breath. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. When I looked up, Dmitri was leaning against the doorway of the kitchen. Even at home, in this casual pose, he looked like a god. By extension—because he had chosen me—I could imagine a bit of goddess in me. He nodded toward the paper and said, “Amazon mother is good image. We will show her.”

Those last three words juiced me up enough to make a call of my own. When the phone was free, my Amazon fingers flew across the keypad.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded muffled, like she was speaking into a pillow. I glanced at the clock. It was only six a.m. On a Sunday.

“Mom, it’s me.” Pride—mine and my mom’s, all tangled together—swelled within my breast until it pushed the words from my mouth in a tumble. “I can’t wait to tell you any longer—I made it into a company! Dance DeLaval. We’re based down in Philadelphia, at the University of the Arts.”

“Well, I know that much.”

“You do?”

“Bebe told me.”

Of course she had. I had moved back into the little room above her studio on South Tenth. Bebe had let me have it back on one condition: I swear an oath not to give up on my performing career. “I’ve made it this time, Bebe,” I’d said, the words so significant their conveyance required no more than a whisper. I told her all about meeting Dmitri, the audition, and his three-year residency right here in Philadelphia.

It was a moment I should have shared with both my mothers.

“I thought you’d be more excited.”

“Bebe called weeks ago. The blush has worn off.” I heard her thump some pillows as she repositioned herself. “We’ve wanted this for so long. I just wish you had told me.”