The Cranes Dance (7 page)

“They say that they want to turn this into a world-class company,” my dad said, as we took our seats. “There’s a lot of local support. Maybe you’ll want to come dance here when you’re done with school.”

“In New York there’s a live orchestra,” I said, as the taped music began.

Dew Drop Fairy isn’t until nearly the end, during the Waltz of the Flowers. I had applauded patronizingly through the familiar ballet, noting the lack of progress of my former classmates and wincing at the technical mistakes and lack of polish.
There was one new guy who was very good, some Polish kid who had inexplicably wound up in Michigan. The super-skinny woman dancing Arabian had great extensions, but her arms were sort of a mess. I saw nothing to threaten my complacency. If I were still here, I thought, I would be the best. Or destined to become the best, which was really the same thing. Then Gwen came on.

I didn’t so much hold my breath as my breath was somehow taken from me, like there existed some sort of high-powered vacuum from my lungs directly to Gwen’s body, and she drew whatever oxygen I was capable of employing for my own puny needs in a giant powerful
whoosh
. It was over quickly, too quickly, and as Tchaikovsky fuzzed on through the auditorium’s speaker system and Sugarplum and her Cavalier gamely tipped their way through the ballet’s concluding pas de deux, I tried to compose myself. My hands hurt from applauding. My feet were cold. I had a headache in my neck.

Somehow, some way, while I had gossiped and scarfed Entenmann’s and flirted with my invisible movie audience and practiced hairstyles and pretended to Mara that I too was familiar with Kandinsky, Gwen had gotten incredibly good. Impossibly good. She was better than Mara, and Tarine, and Rachel even before she blew her hip. She was better than me. She was the best. I didn’t understand this. Had she always been better? Maybe her performance was a fluke. One of those wacky eclipse timing things that sometimes happen where you nail every balance, land like a feather from every jump, where all your single pirouettes become doubles, all your doubles become triples, everything comes easy, easy.

“I was a little better last week,” was what Gwen said to me,
later that night. “I felt a little rickety tonight ’cause I knew you were out there and I was nervous.”

Makeup removed, the hair down her back still a little clumpy from hairspray and pins, pink-and-white poodle flannel pajamas swamping her skinny frame, Gwen sat on the end of my bed and chattered on. What did I think about so and so, and can you believe such and such and really did I mean it? She was okay?

“You were amazing,” I kept saying, hating myself and her. She had tricked me. She had pretended to be so fawning and interested and admiring of my New York City life and all the while she was keeping the enormous secret of her coruscating, effortless, obnoxious talent hidden away like a bomb.
Tick, tick … boom
.

Under the Christmas tree were my presents for her: a Chanel lipstick, the Capezio sweater everyone in my class had, dangly earrings like I had started wearing. I had bought them in good faith, wishing to bestow a little glamour on my kid sister, be encouraging:
this is what you can have too
. Now I wanted to sneak out to the family room and take them all back. If Gwen had stuff that was as good as my stuff, then what did I have? I had nothing.

“You were amazing,” I said, and Gwen curled around my knees and said that her one dream was of us both getting into the company and sharing an apartment in New York City. “I know you’ll get in,” she said.

I said I wasn’t so sure but that I wouldn’t be happy unless we
both
got in.

“I know,” she said. “I feel exactly the same way.”

Gwen’s Christmas present to me was a huge box of stationery
she had made herself, cutting things from magazines and gluing them on the paper. “She’s been working on that since the time you left,” Mom said. All the envelopes and postcards were pre-addressed to Gwen, and stamped too. “You can just throw them in the mailbox,” Gwen explained. “I made enough so that you can write me every week.” I cried a little bit and everybody said, “Awwww,” even though my getting all misty was mostly guilt and shame.

And love. I can hardly bear now to remember her face, watching eagerly for my reaction as I opened the gift. Of her little shoulders under my hands as I hugged her. We always say it’s the other one’s shoulders that seem tiny. We always press our cheeks hard against each other before we let go.

Oh Gwen.

I couldn’t believe that for three months I had basically forgotten about my sister. It was not a mistake I would ever repeat.

I went back to New York and took everything up a notch.

The newly appointed artistic director of the company, Marius Lytton, made occasional godlike descents to the school, sometimes accompanied by his balefully countenanced English Bulldog, Ludmilla. It was the wrong dog for him. With his shaggy black hair and neatly trimmed reddish beard, his height, his giant gold watch and ability to wear a neck scarf without looking ridiculous, he should have had a Wolfhound or a Saluki. Marius lounged in the doorway of our class and watched us for a few minutes at a time. We watched him out of the corners of our eyes. Ludmilla investigated her own lady parts.

We knew Marius’s history: he was a principal dancer with the company in the early ’80s, left to choreograph in Europe, became the artistic director of a company in the Netherlands.
Returned to become associate artistic director here and had recently assumed the helm of one of the world’s most significant ballet companies. In those early days his position was precarious, his board was watchful and begrudging of monies, his dancers insecure and therefore vaguely mutinous, but we knew nothing of this. To us he was Christ and we prayed that he would ask us to leave our father’s fishing nets and follow him unto the desert.

Word circulated that Marius was looking to hire four dancers, two girls and two boys, from our class. Further word was that it might not be from our class, Marius was holding open auditions for the company. Our audition would be the final end-of-year performance, which Marius and a good many other artistic directors from around the country would attend. The open audition came and went. Justin knew a girl who had been there and told him that after twenty minutes Marius had cut everybody except for eight dancers. Eight dancers! He kept that many? Were they good? How many were girls? Did anybody get offers? Justin’s friend didn’t know, she wasn’t one of the final eight but she knew a girl who was. That girl was
old
—twenty-five!—and already a soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet. There was widespread panic as everyone recalculated the odds. I dug in and dug in deeper. Whenever I felt tired or listless, I thought of Gwen and pushed through. Mara and I both got cast in lead roles for the year-end performance. We knew that we had separated ourselves from the pack a little, but we didn’t know if there was room for both of us to succeed. All during rehearsals we said nothing to each other that wasn’t sarcastic or funny or self-deprecating. It wasn’t really Mara I was judging myself against, though.

At the end of the year it was Mara, David, and I who were asked to join the company, along with some guy Marius found in Brazil whom none of us had ever seen. When I was brought into Marius’s office and he offered me a contract he told me that he was excited about working with me, that he saw real potential, that I needed to get more confident, work hard, but that he knew that would happen. He told me that at the end-of-year performance he saw something “deep” in me, and I made a “deep” face for him, for my applauding invisible movie audience, for the me I wished I was. The me who was confident and had already fulfilled her potential.

I had dreamed that if this moment happened I would be elated and triumphant and flooded with relief, but when you have been keeping company with anxiety and fear for a long time it’s hard to shake them off immediately. Also I hadn’t really thought about anything beyond the immediate goal: getting in. Now I was in and now I was going to have to
do
this thing, ballet, and not just think about the day I would do it. I realized I still wanted to
dream about the person I would become, not actually
be
her. I was worried that I would work hard and nothing would happen, that I was as good as I would ever be. I wasn’t sure I wanted to work hard anymore. I already felt kind of exhausted.

I blurted out to Marius that my sister would be auditioning the school and that he would want her too, she was amazing, she was
better
. I was then immediately embarrassed at my effusiveness and made a misguided attempt to pet Ludmilla, who nearly took my hand off.

“It’s my wife’s dog, actually,” Marius said. “She hates everybody.”

“Your wife hates everybody?” I said.

“No,” Marius started to explain, and then realized I was making a deliberate joke.

“Oh,” he said, surprised, and then he sealed what would become our eventual relationship. “That’s very funny. You’re a sharp girl.”

I walked out of Marius’s office and I didn’t cry or jump up and down or scream or anything. I walked across the park to Wendy Griston Hedges’s apartment and said to myself, “This is really happening,” and “This is the happiest moment of my life.” My movie audience applauded, but I didn’t curtsy. I was terrified. I wanted to run away, disappear, evaporate.

I called home and Gwen picked up.

“I got in,” I said. “I got a contract.”

And Gwen screamed and I could hear her jumping up and down.

“You’re the luckiest person alive,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Totally lucky. I don’t actually deserve it.”

“No, you do!” Gwen squealed. “You totally do! I meant you’re lucky to be you! I want to be you!”

“Well, you’re going to come here, right,” I said. “So you will be me. You’ll be better than me.”

“Not better. Oh my god. It’s really happening. Okay, so, what do we do if I get in? Do you think your woman will let me stay at that place too? Or what? How do we do it?”

I thought of Gwen rambling around Wendy’s apartment, not interested in the books, thinking Wendy was “weird.” Grappling with the shower hose in the bathroom, skittering across Central Park by herself. All these things would be harder for her. She wouldn’t like it. Mara and I had talked about getting a place together. That would probably happen now that we both had gotten in. We were in. It was real.

“Do you think Mom and Dad would let you move in with Mara and me?” I asked. “We could get something for all three of us if you don’t mind not having your own bedroom.”

“Oh my god, Kate, that would be awesome. But anyway I want to hear everything Marius said. Start from the beginning. So you like, walked into the office …”

And she soaked up every word and told me how I was her hero and the most amazing dancer in the world and that she knew I was scared but I shouldn’t be because I had nothing to be scared of, I could do it. “Don’t be scared,” she said. And that she knew this about me—knew that I was scared even though I had never told her anything like that—made me genuinely want her with me in New York. Made me stop wanting to disappear. Made me see my own place more clearly, defined in relation to her place. Made me coach her like a nervous stage
mother when she came that summer to audition for the company school. Made me lie to Mara and tell her that my parents insisted on my living with my sister so that Mara would agree to all three of us getting a place. Made me make a highly articulate and sensible case for this to our parents.

I remember watching her audition through the mirrors of the studio and feeling incredibly proud. She was still sweating when they pulled her into the office and offered her a full scholarship. When she came out we hugged each other’s thin shoulders hard, and pressed our cheeks together before letting go.

Things have been the way they are for so long that I’ve forgotten about a lot of this. I’ve forgotten that Gwen was ever different from how she is now. I’ve forgotten that I got here first. I’ve forgotten that there was a time, if only for a little bit, when I carried a secret around. I understand that secret now. I break the cookie open and read my fortune.
Just me
, it says. Could I ever really have wished for that?

I wanted her to become a star. It was easier to want Gwen’s stardom than my own. Did I push her? Did she push me back?

You can’t answer these questions, of course, invisible audience member.
You don’t know a goddamn thing, you’re just following the story like anyone else, right?

A star is mostly hydrogen, collapsing in a luminous cloud. There is something, some kind of internal pressure within the star that keeps it from collapsing totally into its own gravitational pull. Maybe Gwen and I have always stayed together by
some force of gravity. Only now she’s drifted away. Leaving me with all this internal pressure, lost in space, pulsing senselessly in the dark. Punishing me for the selfishness of once wanting to be without her. And then the selfishness of not letting her go.

And now it’s time for me to go to work. There is a Polish Princess costume with my name on it, waiting limply on a hanger, needing to be filled. Because I am not sure that I am enough to animate it, I take another Vicodin, which seems to help.

I haven’t talked much to my parents since Gwen has been with them. I actually don’t talk to them all that often anyway. It’s not like we have a bad relationship. I love them. They’re very supportive, but not overbearing, unique among both ballet and tennis parents.

Really, you can almost feel bad for them. I mean they should have had much more normal children. They should have had kids who studied hard and got good grades and maybe did one or two extracurricular activities well and then went to college and grad school and then became … whatever it is people become. They were prepared to be parents of such children. Maybe some parents think they want (or imagine they have) exceptionally gifted children, but I don’t think that’s what either of my parents wanted.