Sam Bell
I lean into the triple-pirouette. I am on one solid foot on a slippery stage. My arms form a perfect oval above my blonde hair tight in its bun. I spot and see the audience once, twice…and then nothing comes.
I see my grandmother in the second row. She is standing suddenly; her hand covers her mouth. I realize that I have fallen in front of hundreds of people. I realize I did not complete the triple turn. I fell on two-and-a-half, straight onto my backside. I realize this because I keep going – a rule in dance class. If you fall, you get up, and you keep going. I never fall.
On film, the fall looks staged. I mime a look of surprise that fits the theme of the dance, put a hand on either side of my face, tilt my head to one side, and rise gracefully into an arabesque. I am so bent on perfection I even want to fall correctly. This emphasis on perfection carries over into areas challenged by gender. I want at once to be good at ballet and at driving a car. I want to succeed at speed and grace. I love the performance of the dance on the road as I watch my father drift from one highway lane to the next; my mother gripping the door handle for support when he speeds up. I love the ballet for its fluidity; it promises streamlined movement.
The first boy to compliment me on my driving was a college boyfriend. He usually drove everywhere, but I knew Rochester well and wanted to navigate the roads expertly to impress him. Halfway there, after dodging traffic and slow-downs in the eastbound lane, he turned to me and said, “You are a really good driver.” I looked over and smiled at him. It was one of the sexiest compliments I had ever received.
Driving in my family was an art form and my father was its master painter. He not only took pride in his driving style, which was safe and controlled, but he also cleaned the interior and exterior of the family cars nearly every weekend. Once, coming home from a play in the city, I had fallen asleep in the back seat. When my mother tried to rouse me from sleep, I heard my father stop her, saying, “She can sleep in the car in the garage for a little bit; then we’ll come get her.” He was so proud of his car replicating the needs of a bed that he let me stay, curled in a tiny ball in the back.
In ballet, the performance must be perfect, which is not unlike the mentality of a careful driver: to avoid being hurt, one must always stay alert and be adept at the skills to get everyone home. I flourished in ballet because, like driving, there are rules to be followed, and I loved rules. When I was to take my driver’s permit test, I studied the entire booklet. I still know who has the right of way at unusual intersections, and I am still irked by other drivers who do not know these inane rules. In ballet, I studied the French words to make sense of their movements. A rond de jamb meant to circle the leg. You can see this with the movement. Grande battements are big kicks, which is obvious. The plié is a small bend, something easily taught and hardly ever mastered. Like pushing in the clutch in a car and moving forward on the accelerator, ballet teaches skills for muscles that need to work in perfect harmony, else something bucks or breaks.
When my father taught me how to drive, he had good intentions: he did not want to buy a new car and both cars in our household were stick-shifts. My father drove me out to the high school over winter break, and eased the car into the horseshoe drive that was covered in ice. In upstate New York, the climate was snowy and bleak. Shaking, and not wanting to ruin the car, I hesitated. Before going on stage, I would feel this same cracked nervousness. I would stand at the cusp of the velvet, magenta wings and watch audience members hustle to their seats. I would feel like peeing, look away, and then take my position. Only when I stepped onto the stage with my small feet working directly underneath me did I manage to breathe and accept my fate – to perform.
My father put the car into neutral and turned to me. “Well,” he said, eyes crinkling, “your turn.” He opened the driver’s side door and a burst of chill flooded in. I opened my door at a snail’s pace, worried to have to try and drive.
I climbed behind the wheel. An abyss lay between my feet and the pedals. I have always been a small person, but this was extreme. I inched my seat forward slowly, my eyes barely reaching over the dash. My dad chuckled. He told me, step by step, how to push the clutch in, press the gear shift into first gear gently, give the car gas and balance the clutch coming up at the same time. This was entirely too complicated for me. I let the clutch go immediately, and the car jarred back and forth, back and forth. “Clutch in! Clutch in!” my father shouted. His temper arrived.
Shaking, I pushed the clutch in to the floor. My legs were trembling wildly. “Okay, again,” my dad wheezed and held his breath. I tried again, and again, and again. The clutch came out too fast, a common problem. It’s all about balance. I tried and failed to reach equilibrium with the two mechanisms.
In ballet, balance is elemental. The supporting leg is the clutch coming out slowly, letting the other leg and the arms propel the dancer forward, backward, or around. The limbs are the gas pedal – they need grounding or they move too fast or too slow. I knew this as I pressed the clutch back, letting it out too fast. It was a lot like my Nutcracker audition.
I love the Nutcracker; it’s my favorite ballet. The performances involve groups of dancers, and many are meant to feel unique, even in an ensemble, and there can be multiple soloists, which can be rare. I auditioned in the early fall for a part – any part, really, in Rochester. Deep in the heart of the city, close to where my ballet studio practiced and performed, I felt sturdy and equipped for the audition. It began in the late afternoon, and my call-back was for the evening. Too nervous to eat, I paced with my mother by my side as I practiced my steps. By nightfall, I was called back into the audition room. I used my nervous energy to balance my pirouettes, spinning on my lithe legs turn by turn across the room. I was graced with long arms, which helped me balance and turn, balance and turn, all the way to the end of the rectangular room. I thought I nailed it.
I was called back for the following day, for an advanced position audition. I was thrilled. On the way home, sitting in the backseat with my two friends, who were also called back, I watched Christmas lights pop and twinkle against the snow on the sides of the road. We split a chocolate bar three ways, everything perfectly square.
The next day, the audition sat in my stomach. I prepared with calming breaths on the drive out there. In the daylight, the snow was dull, the porches unlit. There was a line of dancers, all of us waiting. When I was called, my body lurched. We were told to line up and stand straight in front of the mirror. I expected a routine, not a line. The judges stared at us, had us turn around. Finally, they released us without having us perform. I worried in the hallway. We were called back two hours later. Finally, I thought, a chance to perform.
I was pulled into the room with three other girls, all about my height and weight. I was underweight and tiny for my age, something that was always an asset for ballet. Yet I was released with the others. We were not given parts. A foreboding, beautiful woman all in black stood in front of us and explained that we were the skilled dancers for the part but we were all too small. It was explained to me that I was too short. The weight did not matter, but the height was my downfall, for even if my legs could balance me, I would not align with the others on stage – I would stick out and I was not to be a soloist then. I was too short.
And now, in the car, I was too short again. My aim for the speed of the release of the clutch was too short, my legs too short to reach the pedals. It seemed my body was almost always betraying my abilities. I adjusted the rearview mirror and saw fear centered in my eyes. I took a few deep breaths and tried again. My father lost his mind.
As my father yelled, I floated away. I did this often and on stage, too. I drifted from hearing applause following a triple-turn sequence to spotting and shifting weight to balance myself on my nervous legs. I breathed in, out, in, out, until I got hold of my nerves. I was frequently praised for my performances because audience members could never tell that I was nervous. This was a source of pride for me but it never worked with my father. Instead, sensing my muscles tense in the cramped car, he yelled louder into my right ear until I was deaf with fright.
“Get it right!” he shouted, and my right leg began to twitch. Finally, it was uncontrollable – every time I tried to step on the clutch to press it down, my leg twitched and my foot slipped off the pedal, forcing the car to kick again. Without hearing my father speaking, I slowly exited the vehicle.
I stepped out into a winter landscape. I tramped down on the icy street and made my way home on the sidewalk – we were less than a mile away. My father, sensing an eruption that would likely include tears, quickly jumped into the driver’s seat and pushed the gas. He inched toward me as I ran toward Ayrault Road.
He leaned out the open window, “Samantha! Get in here, now.”
I turned to face him, my face flush and pink. I shook my head, forcing myself not to cry.
I kept walking on toward home. There was no performance left in me today. He inched the car behind me as I made my brisk way back to our house.
I hated to cry, even as a teenager. When I auditioned at our ballet studio to take pointe classes and my toenails began to bleed, I held my tears. Pointe is the ultimate advancement in ballet; the technique involves satin-lined shoes with wooden boxes at their tips. Going on pointe means you have become a ballerina, full of vigor and strength in order to literally stand on the tips of your now-wooden toes, the satin lacing wound around your tiny calves. My knees, like everything else on my body, were underdeveloped. I trained my knees and my toes to straighten beyond their will – I used the kitchen counters as barres, then slowly weaned myself off those surfaces and into the center of the kitchen itself all to balance on the edges of my toes, the bones pushing back toward my knees and my knees crackling under the stress of my body weight. I did not cry, even when the new ballet instructor took me aside during auditions and said, “You’re too small, not this year, but keep working.” I worked. I never cried, and was taken into the pointe classes the following summer, where the same instructor had me sit, legs straight on the floor, so she could bend my toes to the floor. The pain was excruciating and exhilarating. “If you can do this, you can get up on pointe,” she said as I winced in pain. It took me all summer, but by the end, I was rising up on pointe, then lowering down, then rising up, where I put my arms in a wide oval and beamed, tears of absolute pain welling in the back of my head.
Driving was not supposed to be as hard as going on pointe, I reasoned, but there was no way to measure emotional pain. At home, my father pulled the car into the garage and met me inside, where I explained to my mother that I could not learn both standard-shift gear changes and driving rules at the same time. She nodded but I could tell my parents were both let down; I was their only child, and thus capable of everything.
My lackluster performance in the car drove me into a spiral of insecurity and rebellion. My social life climbed, which meant that I could get rides with friends, and this led to me to spend less time in the ballet studio. In the middle of high school, I developed an abject fear of driving a car and I let my ballet skills atrophy a bit. I started reading because I had the time to, and because the expressions of poetry ran parallel to my experiences dancing – both were performative, both were emotional, and both relied upon a strong foundation and required practice in order to improve.
My parents purchased an automatic SUV, a monstrosity they wanted me to drive. Now, the issue was parallel parking. I could navigate the wide suburban streets where we lived, but because we didn’t have parallel parking challenges, this, and the size of the vehicle, made me a nervous wreck. Afraid of a repeat performance with my father, I asked my uncle to accompany me to the first parallel parking event, where my father excitedly arranged two garbage cans alongside our cul-de-sac’s sidewalk, making me find a way to move the vehicle deftly between them. I failed miserably. I started to shake again. My father, who this time was relegated to the sidewalk as a guide, waved his hands in the air as I missed the curb entirely, putting about three feet between the passenger side and the walk. My father told me to “do it again.” And again. And again, until finally, my uncle hopped into the passenger seat and said to me, “It’s okay. You can do this, just do it slow and your father will back off.”
He was right. I eased slowly, painfully so, into the spot between the cans. It worked when I relaxed. My father clapped – I watched his hands meet and part in the cold afternoon. “See?” my uncle said loftily, and patted my hand.
It was right around this time in my life that I discovered shyness. Because I had been performing on stage since I was three years old, I was an undiscovered shy woman. I hated driving people around, because I was afraid my driving was poor. I was growing tired of performing on stage – my knees and hips ached. I was too short to attend college simply for ballet, and my technique needed work. It was at this juncture, at age sixteen, that I decided to table ballet. As penance and celebration, my ballet instructor assigned a solo part for me for our last recital performance in June. It was a solo that dovetailed into another soloist on stage who was also leaving the studio. This soloist was the coolest woman I knew; I was thrilled to perform on stage with her. She towered over me, and I circled her on the stage as we practiced. I was terrified of her out-performing me, which never happened, but my encroaching shyness crept into the final performance that June. At the curtain close, I remember feeling not sorrow but relief; I was finished traipsing across the wooden, slippery floorboards, knees knocking, hips popping. I was finished.
That summer, by way of performance, I caused a giant three-car pile-up in the front of our high school on the way to an outdoor concert my friends were putting on. A few hundred students were gathered in the front of the school on the green lawn, waiting for the band to start playing. It was a fluke performance, and friends had called me late to get a ride. I obliged, and, running late, couldn’t decide in my jumbled brain whether to park on the side of the road, where parking looked scary, or to park in the lot behind the school which required a longer walk. A friend wailed in the back, “Park on the street, the show’s gonna start!” and it was at that moment that I swerved away from the right-hand turn I was about to make into the high-school driveway, and pulled off to the grassy side road. As I did this, the car behind me, traveling fast and impatiently waiting for me to make a decision, crashed into the back of my car. The car following crashed into the second car. The hood of the car directly behind me crumpled and folded back onto itself. I put my hand to my mouth in horror.
One of the boys getting ready to start playing the first song of the concert ran across the wide lawn, screaming and waving his hands to us, “Everyone all right?” He was frantic. One of the backseat passengers in my car held her neck with her hands: whiplash. Everyone was fine, but the college kids whose cars were wrecked were beside themselves with rage. I phoned my father and when he arrived he was calm and intimidating. They left after signing necessary police forms and pleasant enough exchanges about insurance carriers. They were on their way to a party in two separate cars, so they all piled into the car with less damage and drove off. They did not wave goodbye.
Oddly enough, my father wasn’t too upset about the accident. It may have been because he didn’t witness my pathetic performance but mostly, I think it shook up his center – I could have been hurt. At dinner that night he kept grabbing my hand across the dining room table. Both driving and ballet held freedom – of the open road, of travel, of artistic expression. And both held the potential to maim me, harm me, and to change how I moved through the world.
I started to write poetry. The poems were long at first; I matched their sentiment and length to music. This came naturally from a ballet dancer, and did not change until after college, where I learned the nuances of line breaks, imagery, sound. There is something inherent for me in a good, solitary drive along the ocean, a sequence across the studio floor in ballet, a series of successful lines when writing a poem. All three hold the slight but wonderful possibility to lose myself; each turns unexpectedly at some juncture, and the ability to turn, too, is the utilization of that close sense of balance that I strive to achieve and keep.
Not too long ago, I was asked to read my poetry at a venue in downtown Lawrence, Kansas, where I live. The woman who organized the event was known to be flaky, unstable, but I said yes anyway, and my husband was to be the other reader. Armed with our poetry, we arrived to an empty space. The seats were arranged, the formation of the room cozy, yet we were the only ones in attendance. The organizer was missing as well. We wandered around until she arrived, and a few others straggled in from the cold.
We waited. I watched as the door remained close. We ordered coffee. We drank the coffee quick, my husband’s mouth twitching into a small smile. Finally, when the organizer came to accept that no one else was coming, using some of the chairs gathered us into a circle in the back of the room.
“Why don’t we all read something, yes?” she asked, and pulled out a tome of work. My eyes widened.
She began to read her own poems. She read one about the death of her grandmother; it was emotional yet predictable. The woman next to me began to sniffle, then, she began to sob. By the end, the woman was inconsolable and the organizer beamed. It was a production of grief. The crowd then turned to me.
“Well, thanks,” I said, my voice shaky. As I aged, my shyness crept forward. In large auditoriums, I felt fine – the larger the crowd, the less anxiety my body produced. But in small groups, where I was expected to perform, I lost my bearings. I became flesh and blood; I became a person and not a performer. I was close to the touch of others in the audience; this was new and worrisome to me. My performances were made into intimate portraits of myself, and as I spent less time in a ballet studio and more time reciting poems, I grew cautious, meek. In this instance, I was in front of abject strangers and my husband, but I was too close to them, our knees almost touching. Their eyes were my father’s eyes watching me in the cold car.
I unfolded my poems and chose a series of short narratives, hoping to get this fiasco over with soon. I speed-read, moving over line breaks, giving no pause. “Wait, stop,” one man said, leaning back in his folding chair. “You read much too fast.” I stared at him. This was not my first time reading – this was simply my worst time reading. “Look, I know you’re nervous,” the organizer said slowly, “but try again, and read slowly.” She emphasized “slowly” in excruciatingly slow vowels. I raised my eyebrows.
The poem I was reading was about glass breaking. I read it slowly. I did not train my eyes away from the type. Then, I folded the poem and stared at my husband. The group eyed me expectantly.
“Well, we should get going to pay the sitter,” my husband spoke quickly. With that, we stood to leave.
At home, over a glass of wine, we mused my bad performance. The lines were off, the group arrogant, the organizer overly-emotional. We did not have children. My husband’s performance had been believable enough though to spring us back toward home. While my husband drove fast, speeding the various winter scenes, I managed to marvel over the white Christmas lights on the small porches, small public displays of celebration. At home, we shared our poems with one another, listening to each other’s cadence, the lifts of the breaths that carried us off from line to line to line. It was like watching the highway lines pass by or the lines of a fine and trained arabesque, all the muscles in place, the arms up, the chin high, the pulse of the flesh a living organism, the art of the movement a thing itself, moving, stable, balanced.
Sam Bell is a contributing editor for Emprise Review.
