A Feather on the Breath of God Read online

  Advice from another sylph: “When you see food and you feel tempted, focus on what the food will turn into once you do eat it. Really think about it. It will help kill your appetite.”

  Strange, that none of this seemed strange to me at the time. What could have been more in keeping with that stern, pure life than fasting? And I was not much of an eater even before I discovered dance. I didn’t have any sense of the pleasure food can give until I was in my twenties. In our house, eating past necessity was discouraged. My mother always complained that we ate too much. I was dazzled when I visited the houses of friends and saw how much food was kept on hand, and how casual everyone seemed to be about it. In our house you were not allowed to take food, not even a glass of milk, without asking first. My mother knew every bite I ate. And so a certain amount of guilt about eating had already been instilled in me. Now I had found my own reason to starve myself, and I had plenty of lovely company. “Americans eat like pigs,” my mother said. Not me, not me.

  Give a dancer a choice between a small plate of chicken and broccoli and rice for dinner, or one large brownie, and she’ll probably take the brownie. Most dancers are addicted to sweets, and there were periods when I practically lived on them. Sugar was great: It could give you the zip you needed to get through a hard class, but you had to be careful. Too much could make you dizzy, and you might finish your pirouettes on the floor.

  It is only to be expected that the ballerina, that female extreme, should suffer from female anxieties, pushed to extremes. The anxiety of never being thin enough, of never being beautiful enough, of being rejected after one has reached a certain age—and that age so young! It was something you saw all the time: hardworking dancers fired because someone—because some man—had decided they were too old or too fat.

  And something else you saw all the time: a gifted child betrayed by puberty. When a girl comes to audition for a school, she is carefully checked out. Is her back flexible? Does she have long legs? A long neck? What they should really check out is the mother who brought her to the audition. I remember Pamela, a very good dancer and my friend, whose doting dumpling of a mom always accompanied her to class. Years later, long after I had given up ballet, I saw Pam’s mother having dinner with a man in a crowded restaurant that was known for its barbecue. I was tempted to go over to her and ask whether Pam was still dancing. But of course it was Pam herself I was looking at, and I didn’t have to ask.

  All the beauty magazines, which I was now reading from cover to cover, warned that the way I ate would ruin my looks. But I had inherited my father’s indestructible teeth, and there was nothing wrong with my skin or my hair. This was youth, of course. But I wonder. It is said that vigorous exercise can counter all kinds of physical abuse, and that may be why so many dancers I knew appeared to be glowing with health, though they lived on cigarettes, black coffee, and Tab.

  Those days when you had managed to eat nothing but one apple and maybe a candy bar, you went to bed nauseated and with a splitting headache, but also with a sense of triumph. (In dance, pain was often inseparable from desirable feelings. For years after I quit I remembered certain pains—hot, cramped, throbbing toes, for example—and I missed them. I would have forgone many pleasures to feel the pain of being a dancer again.)

  Even now, outweighing my young self by almost forty pounds, when I look at photographs from that time, I don’t see myself as thin. I was never thin. Not even at ninety pounds. To see how long I could go without solid food (up to five days) was a favorite game. How beautiful the hollowed gut, the jutting bones. To be light as a feather, light as a soul—“a feather on the breath of God” (Saint Hildegard).

  Not all the sensations caused by hunger are unpleasant. Some days I bore a universe of stars inside my head. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was bad for me, nor do I recall anyone ever suggesting that it was bad. Masochism, anorexia—these were words I heard only much later. It could have been worse. I never ate myself sick, never forced myself to throw up, never took Ex-Lax or the popular “natural” equivalent: a box of dried apricots and tea. I knew dancers who did all these things. But during those years the seed of illness was planted. The sense that eating was a disgusting habit and that food was impure would come back to haunt me. Ahead lay periods when I would have trouble keeping food down, when I would not be able even to brush my teeth without gagging, and when, hard though I tried, I could not stop myself from imagining what the food I loathed to eat “turned into.”

  My best friend in class was a very thin and very rich girl named Portia. Rich in itself, that name—not any ordinary girl’s name, it seemed to me, but a name for the stage. To go on stage was not just a dream with her but a kind of birthright. Her family had been in the theater for generations. She had famous grandparents. Her father had been an actor and was now a producer. Her mother had been a dancer and was now an actress. They knew a lot of dancers and actors. They knew Mr. and Mrs. Stravinsky.

  We often went to Portia’s on Saturdays after class. The apartment, on Park, in the Seventies, had as many rooms as a large house—an architectural possibility that had not yet occurred to me. The kitchen above all impressed me, with its pantry the size of my future freshman dorm room. As always, I was struck by the amount of food. Pyramids of cans, a whole shelf of cereal boxes; many kinds of coffee, many kinds of tea. “What would you like to drink?” The first time Portia asked me this I said, “What do you have?” She gave me a puzzled look, then laughed and said, “Anything you want, silly.” And it was so.

  Once again, going back in time, I am led by the nose. The whole apartment smelled delicious: bosky, summery, alpine. Never the smell of cooking that I can recall, though much good cooking was done there. It was a Chinese woman—silent as a tree, with a face in which, like a doll’s, only the eyes seemed capable of motion—who cooked for the family. A woman I will never forget Portia describing as having been lent by her mother (along with the duck press) to a friend one evening for a special dinner party. It was that word lent, possibly, that fixed my decision not to tell Portia about my father. But then one day Portia’s mother asked me whether I was part Oriental.

  “Mommy, how did you know?” Portia was delighted.

  “Oh, an old trick. If you want to know if a man is Jewish, they say, try to picture him in a yarmulke. Well, I just popped your little friend into a kimono!”

  Later, as we sat in the kitchen having tea, Portia announced to the cook, “My friend is part Chinese too.” At which that woman, chopping vegetables at incredible speed with what looked like a small axe, did not even glance up.

  I liked being at Portia’s. It was surprisingly easy to feel at home there, grand though it was. It was very different from television. On television, when the idea was to give an impression of wealth, what you got was mostly pallor and shine. A woman with pale blond hair wearing a white gown and a white fur stole. Rooms with white carpets and white furniture, everything looking brand-new, airy, and weightless—sugar-spun, like the cotton candy my father bought me at Coney Island. But Portia’s house was all darkness and pattern and heft: woodwork, tapestry, lots of heavy dark furniture. And: “It’s very old,” she would say, of practically everything I asked her about there.

  “My parents are party animals.” It was the first time I had ever heard that expression and I laughed, envisioning a scene from a children’s book. I knew Portia’s parents went out almost every night, and often when we arrived at the apartment half a dozen guests would already be there. “Aren’t they darling?” Portia’s mother would say as we entered the living room. “Aren’t they two little jewels?” I had never heard anyone talk like that. But the ways of these people were all new to me. I had never seen people touch so much, I had never heard people so loud. They all talked as if to be heard in the next room, they boomed and they pealed when they laughed, and they laughed a lot, and Portia’s mother often cried. Her tears were completely different from my mother’s tears. “My mother is very emotional,” Portia expla
ined, in the same tone she might use to say, “My mother is out shopping.” A striking woman, thin and supple as a willow wand, with ivory skin and large dark shining eyes, like black olives. Portia’s father, years older than his wife (and only now as I picture him do I see that his stiff wavy hair is not real) liked to play the piano for his guests, songs I would not identify until later as those of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. Sometimes people would sing along, and sometimes Portia’s mother would say, “No, not that one, please, or I’ll cry.” But her husband played the song anyway, and she did cry, but instead of being angry when he finished, she kissed him.

  So much kissing. Women kissing women: That too was new to me. I tried to imagine the women of the projects embracing each other, calling each other darling, sitting on the benches as these women sat on the several couches that the living room was big enough to hold, with their arms about each other’s necks. Fixed in my mind is a pair of dancers, sipping from the same glass, puffing on the same cigarette, and pecking at each other. The women all had names like Lili and Margot and Colette—and that is where I would meet them again: in Colette.

  My mother listened with full attention when I described Portia’s world to her. But she laughed her most scornful laugh when I said I too wanted to live like that when I grew up. Portia never met my parents, never visited my house. Once, when it got to be late, her father sent me home by limousine, all the way to the projects. The driver had to use a map because I had no idea how to direct him. Later, I looked for signs of a change in feeling toward me on the part of Portia or her parents and was relieved to find none. Not having any way to get Portia back to Manhattan was my excuse for never inviting her to my house.

  Portia went to Professional Children’s School, and as if there were not enough already to envy about her, she hardly had to do any schoolwork at all. A pretty girl, with an open, cheerful temperament. A good kid, as we used to say. She had her mother’s large dark shining eyes. Confidence was the big feature of her personality. She was not that good in class. She was not as good as Pamela, she could not touch our tall blond star, and though she worked hard in class, no one mistook her for one of the destined ones. But about her future there was no doubt. It was just a matter of time. A niche was being carved for her, and one day, when the right time had come, her strong-armed father would sweep her up and set her there.

  She died at the age of sixteen of leukemia. By the time I learned of this she would have been twenty-five, and I had not thought about her in years. Now I never remember her without also remembering the old Irish doorman who used to be on duty in her building on Saturdays. Pink, sunburned-looking skin and a pouf of crisp white hair, like snow on eaves. He was another one who called everyone darling. He holds the big door wide for us as we enter the lobby. Beaming at Portia, he wants to know how the dancin’ is comin’ ’long, and he listens as she replies, with a look all tenderness and pride, as if she were his own granddaughter. He smiles after us as we cross the lobby and get into the elevator; he waits until the elevator door has closed, never taking his eyes off Portia. At the last second, just before the door closes on us, the light in his face goes out and his expression turns wistful, as if he were afraid she might never descend again.

  The old building where the dance studio used to be was pulled down in the early seventies. Not long ago, a violent crime occurred in front of the building that replaced it. The blood of the victim has not yet faded completely from the sidewalk. The blood of a young woman.

  Back then, there was no security guard in the lobby, and people came and went freely. The elevator, a large rickety cage, was at the back of the lobby, up a flight of three steps. One day, as I entered the building, a man came in behind me. We waited for the elevator together, and when it arrived we both got in. He was a young man, but his slouch and pinched features made him look older. He kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. The elevator door was just closing when a voice cried out to us to wait, and I pressed the button to open the door again. Three young women, all going the same place as I, crowded in. And now the man got out, as if he’d changed his mind, and we went up without him.

  I did not give this man another thought until the following day when I heard that he had waited there in the lobby for another few minutes, until another young dancer arrived, a girl who got in the elevator as innocently as had I and whom he forced up to the roof and raped.

  That girl was not in my class and I barely knew her. No one made much of the incident, it shocks me now to recall, though she never returned to the school. But to be honest, I felt less for that girl than I did for myself By this time in my life, I had already developed my sense of being in constant peril. I was always afraid that something was going to happen to me. (I was one child of the Cold War years who didn’t need shelter drills to be convinced that the world might blow up at any minute.) I know people who would have seen such a narrow escape, had it happened to them, as proof that someone was watching over them. But I was used to feeling, whenever I heard about trouble striking someone else, how easily it could have been me. I lived under threat of harm at every moment of my life, violence and trouble were always looking for me, and if they missed me it was only by a hair, and next time they would not miss me.

  Was it this incident that prompted my rash decision to change schools? At the time I thought there were sound reasons for change. I was often in pain. This almost surely had to do with my late start and the fact that I had to rush to get on point after only one year of classes rather than two or three. I would say now that I was probably suffering from tendinitis (though some of the pain I felt was bonedeep). But at that time I was not looking for a diagnosis. Pain was good; pain was promising. Pain meant that you were working hard, doing things right; it was when you didn’t feel pain that you had to start worrying. Any dancer could tell you that. But I was dancing badly—nervously, gingerly, with that fear of falling that is fatal to the dancer—and I thought changing schools might help. Auditioning for the new school, I was crafty enough to lie about my age. I was hoping for a scholarship. My mother, who had expected that I would outgrow ballet and start thinking about college, was beginning to chafe about all these dance classes. A scholarship could change everything; it would take my future out of her hands.

  But before he handed over that scholarship, the director of the school told me, I had to hand over proof of my age. I don’t know whether this was school policy or whether he was suspicious of me, but that was the end of that.

  I know now that I had no future as a professional dancer. I never made up for that late start, never came close to really mastering even the most basic steps. Once I stopped dancing every day, I immediately lost what proficiency I had, which would not have happened to a better dancer. Nevertheless, it amazes me how easily I gave up my dream. (But then, hadn’t my entire upbringing conditioned me to expect disappointment, to see futility in every effort? I have sometimes thought that I am less afraid of failure than other people because I know it is inevitable.)

  I have spoken of the pain of dancing. Now let me say something about the pain of not dancing. You stop dancing and your body tightens. You feel like a piece of clothing that has shrunk in the wash. A sensation worse than any muscle ache. You are trapped in a body that is too small for you; you want to claw your way out. Was it really possible that ordinary people went about feeling this way all the time? I knew I couldn’t do it. And so I danced when I was in college. I took classes in modern dance and in jazz, but these styles never much appealed to me and I was not good at them. It was only much later, in yoga, that I came close to the bodily feelings I had never stopped missing. Sustaining a balance and being stretched to the limit satisfy very deep cravings in me.

  It was a long time before I tried to take ballet again, and when I did I realized my mistake and stopped immediately. It was a long time too before I could watch ballet again, and when I did I was astonished to think I could ever have been so blind. Nothing to do with sex, did I say?
Hoisted into the air by her partner, the ballerina is borne downstage, her legs split as wide as they can go, the rushing air driving her chiffon skirt up to her waist. If she is wearing a tutu, the effect is even more startling: a frilly target board with her crotch for bull’s-eye.

  There were times, sitting in the dark of the New York State Theater, when it seemed to me that ballet was about nothing but sex.

  I cannot be the first to make the connection between the toe shoe and a penis—or, to be more accurate, between the toe shoe and an erection. I can remember riding back and forth to class on the subway, reaching often into my dance bag to fondle my shoes, and what pleasure it was to feel them, the smooth satin, the hard points. I can remember also the special feeling, the excitement and the sense of triumph that came from développé, the slow extension of the leg out from the hip, strong and straight, foot aimed at the ceiling—the higher the leg the better the feeling.

  Sitting in the audience, watching those stiletto girls with their phallic feet, I felt as if scales were falling from my eyes.

  I cannot be the first to make the connection between toe shoes and foot-binding. I think a lot of people would be surprised if they knew what a dancer goes through with her toe shoes. I think some people might even find their pleasure in watching ballet a little diminished. It takes a long time, a lot of scraped-off skin and blood, before the necessary calluses form, and by then the dancer’s foot has become something hideous. Balletomanes who gush over a dancer’s feet are talking about slippered feet, of course. (The Chinese woman’s bound foot—that stump incredibly called the lily—was always covered with a white sock.)

  Toe shoes. Pink satin torture chambers. No left, no right—no contouring to accommodate the foot’s natural shape. Pink satin slipper: favorite of the fetishists. (It fits, the rumor that Balanchine loved the huge bunions that deform every ballerina’s feet.) Ballet a woman’s world? But it was men who invented ballet—and the ballerina. It is men who put her feet in those shoes, and who take the food out of her mouth. All this to get the desired creature, more boy than woman, a kind of third sex—could it really be?—a woman with a penis, a woman capable of an erection.