The Art of Falling (4 page)

I would never again have to return to the apartment and face the concrete evidence of Dmitri’s absence. The corner that had smelled of salt and musk, where he’d pile the contents of his dance bag each night—now odorless. The frame of the bedroom mirror, where he had tucked the picture of his parents—emptied. The couch that had chafed me for weeks because I could no longer get any rest in the bed we had shared—abandoned.

I would never again have to face the door to the balcony.

As my mother turned onto the Northeast Extension of the turnpike, she spoke loud enough to be heard over the talk radio station. “Did you know Miss Judith died?”

“No.” The news shocked me—Miss Judith, my first and last ballet teacher, had the kind of life force you couldn’t squelch if you wanted to. And I’d wanted to. In my adolescence, I’d fantasized her death in a multitude of settings. My favorite: Miss Judith flailing around in the ocean, finally drowning because she had no body fat to help her float or fight the chill. Even now, fourteen years since I’d seen her and with her body gone to dust, her words remained sharp enough to cut me down.

I was fourteen when my body first betrayed me.

I’ll never forget when Miss Judith asked my mother and me to step into her office. I was mortified—this was where Miss Judith took people to chew them out. The thought of having to go in immediately put me on the defensive. I was a model student who picked up sequences of steps quickly. I could reverse them to the left without extra practice, a feat Miss Judith often asked me to demonstrate for the rest of the class. I ran through the studio rules—arrive on time, black leotard/pink tights/pink shoes, hair in bun, no gum—but could think of none I had violated.

Miss Judith stood behind her desk and asked us to have a seat. Her office was no more than a nook off one side of the waiting room, so I took the chair in the tight corner near the wall. My mother angled herself near the door, her dimpled thighs spilling over the sides of the folding chair.

“Listen, this is difficult to talk about, so I’ll get right to the point,” Miss Judith said. “Your daughter’s body is changing. We often see it at this age. Breasts develop, hips spread, you know what I mean.”

I wondered who she meant by “we”—Miss Judith was the only teacher I’d had for the past eight years. I wondered why she kept talking to my mother and not me. I wondered why she mentioned breasts—my training bra still had wrinkled cups. But I had to admit I wasn’t blind to my increased inventory in the hips department. I had shared my concern with my mother while we were doing the dishes together that very week. She explained that muscles develop different ways in different people. My hips were perfect for the mambo, for instance, and my thighs were sturdy. Then she would put on Tito Puente, and we’d snapped our damp tea towels and boogied away my worries.

Miss Judith continued. “Penny is a very hard worker, and will no doubt be a success in life. She aims high. She says she’d like to attend the scholarship audition for the School of American Ballet’s summer program.” My mother looked at me and we both smiled. She was the one who had taught me to work hard and aim high, with constant references to dancers who achieved fame in like fashion. I worked harder than anyone else in the class, and everybody knew it. Miss Judith looked at my mother. “In order to avoid undue heartbreak, we need to steer her in a different direction, don’t you think?”

Heartbreak? Different direction—what?

“I thought you were going to get to the point,” my mother said.

“Pursuing a career in ballet will be a mistake. Penny has the wrong body type. Ballet choreographers want a long, lean leg to achieve certain aesthetic results—”

“She’s five foot eight, how much longer do you want her legs to get?”

“—and to develop a corps de ballet with a cohesive look. Due to recent changes…” Miss Judith lowered her eyes and looked at some papers on her desk, as if to check facts. “Specifically, her hips, your daughter will not fit in. She’s too big.”

“My daughter is not fat.” My mother nudged me. I stood but stared at the floor, a slab of meat without a voice. “Her belly is as flat as your chest.”

Tiny Miss Judith flashed a smug smile, secure in the fact that for a dancer, neither large breasts nor curvy hips were a relevant standard of beauty. “Ballet is a cruel, unforgiving profession. I’d change it if I could, but…” Her gaze drifted to me.

“Perhaps she might try African,” Miss Judith offered. “Or study choreography.”

“My daughter is a beautiful dancer. The best you have here. I don’t get this. I’ve paid you plenty, and always on time—”

Stop, Mom. Everyone can hear
. I wanted to melt from my chair, slip under the door, and reform—with smaller hips—somewhere on the other side of town.

“Hope is not available for purchase at this studio,” Miss Judith said. “Penny aspires to be a professional ballerina, and I cannot endorse her choice. Unless she would like to pick up baton, I suggest we remove her from the roster.”

Until then I’d hoped my situation was still salvageable. But my mother wasn’t quite through. “I shouldn’t be surprised, a little thing like you can’t have much heft to her brain,” she said. “
You
were lucky to have
her
. You should have counted your blessings while you had the chance. Come on, Penny.”

I’m sure my mother wanted to make a dramatic exit, but tension fizzled when the chair released her with a humiliating groan, and the vinyl door came off its track as she tried to sweep it open.

How had this happened? Any choreographer would have been pleased with the prepubescent version of Penelope Sparrow—narrow hips, flat chest, and long, strong legs. None of the womanly lumps and bumps that would detract from a clean line. That day I needed to go home and see my father’s face light up when he saw the girl I still thought of as me. To hear him call me his “mysterious little artist,” his smile promising that my identity would not be tainted by the inappropriate blossoming of my body. I wanted to bury myself in his arms until I felt reassured, from a source I trusted more than my overly invested mother, that I was still beautiful and worthy.

But my father never came home that night.

And by the next morning, he was dead.

• • •

For a month we moped around the house, my father’s customary absence now concrete, my future in dance an unspoken question between us. My mother and I poured our displaced creativity into the embellishment of Jell-O. It seemed the perfect choice: it is one of the few foods that can sustain movement. One day, while eating lime with cottage cheese and pineapple, we read in the paper that Muhlenberg College was bringing Bebe Browning in from Philadelphia to teach evening modern dance classes. The possibility of a fresh start inspired me to phone for more information.

Because I was too young for continuing ed classes, I had to meet with Miss Browning for a private audition. My mother was asked to wait outside. Miss Browning demonstrated steps, which I repeated. Her movement called, I responded. She pulled things from me and I pushed my limits—and soon we’d lapsed into one of the most exciting conversations of my life, held entirely without words.

I fell hopelessly in love, both with my new teacher and with modern dance. Fall and recovery, contraction and release—this language spoke of the effort it takes to create meaning in life. My body had loved the exacting standards of ballet, but modern dance claimed my imagination as well. Engaged in co-creating every movement—adapting it to my body, interpreting Miss Browning’s ideas, seeking a story within each dance that made sense to me—my mind was too busy to cave in to new anxieties about my shape.

During my junior year, I drew the first boundary between my mother and me, and moved into the small apartment above Miss Browning’s studio to finish high school at CAPA. Leaving my mother was hard, but necessary if I were to dance my dream instead of hers. Once I pressed my bare feet to Bebe’s floor, I never wore a pair of pointe shoes again.

Or ate Jell-O. Having a wiggle in your middle may have been perfectly acceptable to my mother, who ran the candy factory she’d inherited, but I was determined to succeed at weight maintenance where she could not. For this I would credit Miss Judith.

Now that I’d returned to dance, I vowed to do everything in my power to never again inspire such humiliation.

• • •

“It was breast cancer,” my mother was saying. “Miss Judith was only forty-eight. I guess the school is closing.” She paid the toll and pulled through the booth. “Hey, you could reopen it. Wouldn’t that be a headline full of poetic justice? ‘Rejected Ballerina Returns after Successful Professional Career.’”

“I can hardly walk.”

“Martha Graham choreographed from a chair for years—”

“She was almost a hundred years old.” I didn’t bother asking her to stop making such comparisons, though. My mother had always seen me on par with the world’s legendary dancers, living or dead. When I was young, it thrilled me to hear I was as quick as Kirkland or as quirky as Tharp. But I was starting to wonder if, when she looked at me, she really saw
me
.

“We’ll have plenty of time to check out the want ads. I have the new issue of
Dance
Magazine
at home and I already circled a bunch. I know the director of the arts council, too. He might have some leads.”

“You don’t even know what I’ve been through—”

“And whose fault is that?” she snapped.

She let the question dig at me while we passed the Cape Cods and ranch homes of the neighborhood. Our corner lot created the illusion of property expanse in an area where most of the houses butted up one against the other. But still, the brick ranch looked smaller than I remembered. The ivy my mother had planted at the end of the house after my father died now swallowed the whole wall and crept along the rain gutters above the garage door.

“Listen,” I said. “You’ll have to be patient. I can only take this one step at a time. Literally.”

My mother parked the car in the driveway. If the garage weren’t full of junk, she could have put me three short steps from the family room. “I’m willing to help you, Penny, but you have to promise me you aren’t going to try this again. If I’m going to wake up one morning and trip over your body on the way to the coffeemaker—”

I gazed out the passenger window at the impossibly long trip to the front door. “Come on Mom, think about it. If I jumped off a building without dying, what could I possibly try next?”

When the car rocked gently, I turned. My mother was sobbing. How could I comfort her, when her imagination was more real than any memory I had of the event? But her grief did pain me: my own mother thought me capable of self-destruction. I’d left the notion behind—I had to. What energy I could muster had to go toward healing.

My more immediate struggle with the car door brought her around. Once she’d helped me into the recliner in the family room, she scurried around the house ablaze with energy. She fetched me some water, then bustled back to the kitchen to make dinner, all the while muttering that everything would be fine now that I was home.

I quickly fell asleep. Sometime later, the smell of fennel and the sizzling of sausage woke me. I had a pain in my side—the bag with the pill bottle Dr. Tom had given me was wedged between my hip and the arm of the chair. I pulled it out and studied the leaflet. The antidepressants had a longer list of side effects than benefits. Among them: memory loss, inability to concentrate, and—the pièce de résistance—weight gain. I ripped up the leaflet.

My mother kindly set aside her disappointment when I said I wouldn’t join her for dinner. It took a few minutes and most of my remaining energy to free myself from the recliner’s embrace before heading to my room.

As I labored down the hall, I was surprised to find the collection of framed dance posters lining the wall had grown. Especially since I hadn’t considered my mother’s house my home for twelve years, and hadn’t been back to visit since leaving for New York City six years ago. During my youth, she had bought one each year to commemorate my birthday.

Within one of those frames, hanging at the end of the hall, the contours of a body I knew only too well confronted me. He crouched low, arms spread, voracious eyes stalking me in a pose from a solo work I had helped him develop. It was a poster for Dance DeLaval’s debut at the Kennedy Center, and my mother had hung it right next to the door to my room.

I braced myself against the doorframe and looked back at my mother padding down the carpeted hallway behind me, folded sheets in hand.

“Why is this here?” I said.

“You deserve a place on this wall.” The conviction in her voice made every single cell in my body ache. My circumstances were hard enough to face without adding what I may or may not “deserve” into the equation. “Those performances were the highlight of your career.” Fingerprints already smudged the glass where she now placed her hand. “This one’s
Puma
, right?”

Maybe I should have taken comfort in this display of maternal pride. But seeing Dmitri on the prowl right next to the room where I had dreamed as a little girl rattled me. “I told you I didn’t need help.”

“And I heard you, Penny. But how are you going to get these sheets on the bed with only one arm?”

How was I going to live without the career Dmitri yanked from under me? I grabbed the linens from her and whipped around fast enough that my good elbow hit Dmitri with a satisfactory snap. I was so bruised already it was like using mincemeat as a weapon, but the poster crashed to the floor.

My mother stared down at the web of broken glass over Dmitri’s face, her mouth agape. I shook with a torrent of emotion: pain and rage mixed with an equally disturbing desire to laugh.

“Oops,” I finally said, and let myself into my room.

Dmitri DeLaval. Dmitri DeLaval.

I used to love hearing him say his name. A quick two-syllable climb up a mountain and a three-syllable slide back down. I never would have met him if Bebe Browning had accepted me into her company, as was my hope. But years of studying with her and teaching for her never resulted in an invitation. Finally, after graduating from the University of the Arts, I worked up the nerve to broach the subject.

“Is that what you’re hanging out here for?” Bebe, as Miss Browning now insisted I call her, had finished fitting her company members for new costumes and was rolling her measuring tape. “You wouldn’t fit in. Performers like you command the stage. You’re solo material.”

“Then why can’t you give me solos?”

“You wouldn’t be happy here. Not for long. You’re a creative, darling. Your name will be in lights. My girls are just dancers.”

I couldn’t believe it. Another teacher was cutting me loose. And this time—because I was too good?

“Come on, Bebe.”

She reached up to grab me by the shoulders—I was taller by a head—and nailed me with her pale blue eyes. When she spoke, I caught glimpses of the discolored front tooth she tried so hard to conceal. “You need to move to New York.”

“But I work here—”

“You’re fired.” She picked up her clipboard, ripped off a piece of paper, and scrawled a phone number onto it. “I have a friend who juggles sublets. She should be able to hook you up with another dancer for housing.”

“You can’t do this to me.”

The green caftan she wore over her dance clothes swept the floor behind her as she moved to the door. “Consider this sparrow pushed from the nest. You have a brilliant career ahead of you. Go. Dance.”

I showed up for work the next day—at least I peeked through the window, still unsure of whether or not she was joking—but someone else was preparing to teach my advanced modern class.

Once I got settled in New York, I learned just how inconsequential my college degree in dance would be. I combed websites and trade publications for opportunities and tackled auditions. I managed to score a few special projects as a pickup dancer, but nothing with a contract. I watched my first roommate come and go as she won a position with a modern dance company in the Midwest.

Frequent callbacks provided enough hope to try again. I was so close. But hope couldn’t pay the rent: I needed a dependable job to support my career. Even after replacing my departed roommate as sales associate at the Capezio dancewear store, I couldn’t afford to live alone.

I again contacted Bebe’s friend. This time she sent me Suzanna Franke, who dreamed of Broadway by day and waited tables by night. She never worked as an actress the entire time we lived together, but she lived the life of an actor wannabe and that was enough for her.

I wanted more.

During one of our Sunday evening phone calls, I admitted to my mother that I could no longer afford to take classes. I’d been signing up for any free audition I could, just to stay in shape.

“Are you eating?”

“Enough.” I’d had two plums for dinner.

The phone was quiet for a few moments. “Mom? Are you still there?”

“I was figuring. I can do it. I’ll pay for your classes.”

“I’m twenty-two years old. I don’t want a handout.”

“Call it philanthropy, then. Listen, Nureyev wasn’t much older than you when he defected to Paris with all of ten bucks in his pocket. Others helped, and he turned out to be a worthy investment. And it won’t be for long. At this point, it’s a numbers game. Your turn’s coming soon.”

But audition after audition, month after month, year after year, I’d make it through callbacks, then stand before my jury. Sweat would ooze from my pores as if my entire body were crying while one artistic director after another looked me over, head to toe, then shook his head.

Time and again I drew inspiration from Bebe’s enduring belief in me and my mother’s cheerleading: Tomorrow was another day. If they don’t want you, then you don’t want them. Something better was waiting around the corner.

By the time I was twenty-six, my mother’s interest in philanthropy had worn as thin as her platitudes. She said, “If the candy factory ate money like this, we would have shut it down years ago. You’re going to have to move back home.”

I hung up the phone determined not to speak to her again until I could make a go of my life in dance.

Later, while I was icing my knee, my roommate Suzanna begged a favor that would change my life. She pinched her dark eyebrows, flicked at her pale hair, and said, “Tina is coming into the city next weekend. She heard about some Russian guy coming to audition dancers for an out-of-town company. It’s her first audition. Could you go along and show her the ropes?”

“Sure,” I said. “Who’s Tina?”

As if I needed one more reminder that my career possibilities were pinched by a looming expiration date, she answered, “My daughter.”

Give
me
a
break
. Yet by the time I next received an incoming call with my mother’s name attached to it—one I did not pick up—I’d already left New York City for a new life.

• • •

In the bedroom of my childhood, I woke to the sound of my mother pounding on my door. “Penny! It’s almost time to leave for your physical therapy appointment. Are you okay?”

My eyes snapped open, frantically seeking my ballerina alarm clock. Her painted arms sloped gracefully down the clock face, as always, but she held her legs above her head in an impossible V. Eleven o’clock? I’d missed class. I leapt from the bed—or tried to, anyway—before slamming back into my current reality.

I struggled out of bed, shuffled to the door, and opened it. “Why didn’t you come in and wake me?”

“I was afraid.”

“To come in? It’s your house.”

“I didn’t know what I’d find. You’ve been quiet so long—I thought maybe you’d taken pills or something…”

Which did she fear more: that she’d find me dead, or alive? Defeated and defenseless, I had to turn away.

“You don’t believe it happens? Patrick Bissell was one of American Ballet Theatre’s shining stars when he overdosed.”

“He was also an addict.”

Shouldering my own fears was hard enough; adding hers squashed my spirit flat. Should I have flushed those pills? I felt so low I doubted whether an overdose of antidepressants could have released me from it. Most of the night I’d relived a past as frustrating as my present, save one thing: back then, even when hope was in short supply, I had danced.

I aimed my body toward the closet. Put it in motion, as dancers do. Each step forward an agonizing effort. I had assumed correctly that my mother had put some of my clothes away while I napped the day before.

She picked up the sheets from the floor to make my bed. She was right—I’d been unable to do it myself, so I’d slept on the mattress pad. She opened the fitted sheet with a snap and let it float down to the surface, muttering. “I shouldn’t have stayed out of your life. I knew you were dancing so I thought everything was fine. But I should have kept calling. Or insisted on seeing you. Or had Bebe check up on you. Or—”

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you!”

She stood with a pillow in her hand, stunned into silence. As if she had forgotten I was even in the room.

I looked at the clothes I held, wondering how to get them from my hand onto my body.

The phone rang.

“We have to leave in ten minutes,” she said quietly, then went to the kitchen to answer the phone.

Through trial and error, I found my way into a short-sleeved button-down blouse. Its frilly collar would look ridiculous with the black sweat pants I planned to wear, but it was the easiest top to get into.

My mother returned. “It’s for you.”

“Who is it?” I couldn’t imagine anyone knowing—or caring—that I was at my mother’s house.

“I didn’t ask.” She handed me a portable handset, which I set on the bed. “Mom, first…” I pointed to the sweatpants lying at my feet, an impossible distance away. “Could you?”

She labored onto her knees and slid the pants up my legs, politely refraining from exclaiming about their color. I’d checked them in the full-length mirror—now nine days since my fall, my bruises had turned a deep blue-black. After she helped reattach the immobilizer, I thanked her and picked up the handset.

“Penelope, please don’t hang up. This is Margaret MacArthur from the
Philadelphia
Sentinel
.”

I steadied myself with as deep a breath as my back muscles would allow.

“Penelope?”

“How did you get this number?”

“I called all the Sparrows in the Lehigh Valley phone book. There are only eight.”

“Why are you calling?”

“Our readers want a follow-up. Are you doing better?”

“Let’s see. I can shuffle a few steps farther. Good luck turning that into a Pulitzer. I’m not half as interesting as you think.”

“I disagree. I followed Dance DeLaval to New York, once, for your debut at the Joyce. I wrote about it. I believe it was right after Dmitri appointed you rehearsal assistant—”

“I have to go.” It was then I noticed the frame on my desk. Why was it out? Years ago I’d tucked it away. In its picture, I was seven, waiting in the wings for my first recital. My entrance was imminent, but my mother had called my name from the wings and taken the photo when I turned to her. My face was flushed from warming up and a bit too much rouge. My mother had slicked my hair into a bun and added a glittering tiara; the whole ensemble was lacquered into place with hairspray. Huge front teeth crowded baby teeth on either side, but I couldn’t deny the way she had captured the beauty of anticipation: I would soon dance.

I folded the frame and put it back in the drawer.

“Do you still have my number?” MacArthur was saying.

“I won’t need it.”

“I’m not the enemy, you know. My recommendation helped Dmitri get the residency at the University of the Arts. I’ve known him his whole life.”

I madly re-sorted the facts of Dmitri’s life as I knew them.

“Are you still there, Penelope?”

“He never mentioned you that way.”

“Of course not. He feared if people found out, it would undermine the authority of my reviews of his work. But I studied ballet with Ekaterina Ivanovna in Paris. She emigrated from Russia the summer after he was born.”

“His mother.”

“I’ve kept my eye on his career.”

My mother—the self-appointed guardian of my career—waved to me from the hall.

“I have to go.”

My finger was poised to disconnect the call when MacArthur added, “I found out where he is.”

He. Even the personal pronoun had the power to choke me up. Then choke me. Gag me. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t hang up.

“His tour has dipped into northern Africa.”

“I don’t care.” I shouldn’t care. So why did my pulse race at this morsel of news? We were still connected, Dmitri and I, whether pushing together or pulling apart, because what art had joined no man could put asunder. He was still accelerating toward his goal; I, reaching back for what I’d lost, had created my own terminal velocity. Now Dmitri had custody of work that shared our creative DNA. MacArthur’s unwitting implication dawned on me: I had not been left behind after all. Not completely. Dance DeLaval was performing choreography built on my body, shaped with my movement, for an international audience. With a gnawing hunger, I craved what MacArthur knew of Dmitri, of the others, of how African audiences received it.

My mother reappeared at my door, this time with her purse over her arm and the car keys in hand. I dropped the handset as if it were hot. As if my mother had caught me, once again, hurting myself while reaching for dreams she’d stored too high.

“So who was it?” she said.

“Margaret MacArthur.”

She picked up the handset, almost as if she might flick it back on to see if MacArthur were still holding. “The
Sentinel
critic? You didn’t even say good-bye.”

“New priorities, Mom. If she can’t help my body heal, then she isn’t all that important.”

“But the influence she could have on your career—”

“Please.” I waddled through the doorway and into the hall. My mother had cleaned up the broken glass and removed the poster. “I’m not going to worry about what critics think as I relearn to walk.”

“I’m just saying it wouldn’t hurt to be polite. Someone like Margaret MacArthur could be a powerful ally.”

“She bugs the shit out of me.”

“Penny.”

“Just keeping it real.” As we passed the kitchen, I grabbed an orange from a bowl on the counter, then continued chugging toward the front door. “If you’re all hell-bent on being my agent, you talk to her next time.”

“Exactly my point. You hung up on her. There might not be a next time.”