Previously – Chapter 2: The Room
The Saturday class started at ten and Mia arrived at twenty past nine. She told herself it was to avoid arriving in front of everybody. It was in fact so that she could be sitting down before anybody saw her walk.
Mrs. Fletcher was at the desk with a cardigan on the back of the chair and a cushion that did not match it.
“You’ll be Mia Chambers.”
“I will.”
“I knew Adam’s mother. Very well, in fact, we were on the same committee for eleven years, and she’d have had something to say about that sign hanging crooked.” Mrs. Fletcher put a form on the desk and then took it back. “That’s not for you. That’s for the mother of the child who’s been coming for three weeks without filling anything in.”
“I could fill something in.”
“You’re not paying,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “and if you’re not paying you’re not enrolled, and if you’re not enrolled you’re not a liability, and that’s the insurance, that’s not me,” which was, Mia thought, the most Pine Falls sentence she had heard in sixteen years.
Adam had put a chair out for her. Not in the corner: about a third of the way along the mirror wall, angled slightly, in the place you would put a chair if you had thought for some time about where a person could sit and see everything and not be looked at.
There was a small table next to it with a bottle of water on it.
“That’s too much,” Mia said.
“It’s a chair and a water.”
“It’s a considered chair.”
“Yes, all right,” Adam said, and went to open the fire door because the room was already too warm.
* * *
They came in at ten to.
Eleven of them, aged from about thirteen to seventeen, in whatever they had: two proper leotards, one full black outfit that had cost somebody money, four T-shirts, a hoodie that stayed on for the entire two hours. One girl had her hair in a bun that was too low and pinned it four times in the space of a minute. A tall boy in shoes that were plainly not his came in last, saw a stranger in a chair, and went and stood at the far end of the barre.
Adam did not introduce her. Mia had asked him not to.
He got them going with a warm-up that was twenty minutes long and about eight minutes too polite, and then took them to the barre, and Mia sat in a considered chair with a bottle of water and watched, and inside four minutes she was working.
Pliés. Tendus, four to the front, four to the side. Rond de jambe, with three of them rolling in on the supporting foot and nobody saying so. Frappés, the worst thing in the room. Then the long adagio at the end of the barre where you find out who is strong and who has been getting away with it, and Mia found out.
She could not help it. It was like being handed a page of somebody’s arithmetic.
Second from the left, forcing the turnout from the knee instead of the hip. She’ll have a problem in two years.
The tall boy is a foot taller than he was in April and nobody has told him what to do about it.
Everybody in this room is holding their breath on the balance. Every single one of them. That’s not eleven problems, that’s one problem and it’s the teacher’s.
She wrote nothing down, because writing would have been unbearable.
Instead she cataloged them. That was worse, because she could not stop.
The tall boy was Connor, she learned when Adam said his name; seventeen, six foot two, and every single thing wrong with him was a growth problem and would fix itself in eighteen months if anybody told him what was happening. Nobody had. He was apologizing with his shoulders for being that size in that room.
The two thirteen-year-olds were called Amy and Ash and were plainly the same person in two bodies.
There was a girl at the far end who did everything eight percent behind the beat and was not late, exactly, but consistently unhurried, and who had the most beautiful upper back in the room and who did not appear to know she was in it.
And second from the barre, in a hoodie she did not take off for the entire first hour, there was the one with the low bun.
Mia clocked her at four minutes and spent the next thirty trying to un-clock her, because it is a bad habit and an unkind one and she had watched it done to her when she was fifteen.
The extension was fine. The feet were adequate. It was that when Adam gave a correction to somebody else, four people carried on doing what they had been doing, six adjusted the thing he had named, and one adjusted the thing he had meant.
Oh, Mia thought, and then made herself look at the window for a bit.
At forty minutes Adam put them in the center and gave them a phrase, and the phrase was fine, and Mia’s opinion of him went up considerably, because it was a phrase built by somebody who knew exactly what his students could and could not do and had constructed something that let them look good.
At fifty-two minutes he gave them a turn sequence, and it fell apart.
Not badly. It fell apart the way it falls apart in ten thousand rooms: nine people did a double, and six of them landed off the leg, and the two best of them landed on it and then had to hop, and Adam said, “Spot it. You’re not spotting. Find the wall and take it,” and they did it again, and the same thing happened.
Mia sat in the chair with her hands in her lap.
“Again,” Adam said. “Watch me.”
He did it. He was a good demonstrator, clean, not showy, and he had the mechanics right. And they all watched him and then they all did it again and eight of them landed off the leg, and Mia understood, with a small cold clarity, that he was going to keep doing this, twice a week, until June.
The girl with the low bun did it a fourth time and landed badly enough to put a hand down.
“Sorry,” she said, to nobody.
“Don’t apologize,” Adam said. “Again.”
Mia heard herself say, “Wait.”
The room stopped.
It stopped completely, in the way a room does when the person who has been sitting silently in a chair for an hour makes a noise, and Mia had a very brief and vivid understanding of exactly how much she had just taken on.
Adam turned around. He did not look annoyed. He looked, if anything, relieved, which was its own kind of terrifying.
“Go on,” he said.
Mia looked at the girl.
“What’s your name?”
“Tori.”
“Tori. Do the two turns and stop. Don’t do the third one, just stop where the third one would start, and then don’t move.”
Tori did it and stopped and stood there on one leg with her arms out, wobbling.
“Now don’t move. Don’t fix it.” Mia leaned forward. “Where’s your weight?”
“Um.”
“It’s not a trick. Just tell me where it is.”
Tori stood on one leg in the middle of a studio in September with twelve people watching her, genuinely thinking about it, for a moment.
“Back,” she said. “It’s in my heel.”
“It’s in your heel,” Mia said. “So to start the third one you have to throw yourself forwards to get out of your own heel. That takes a count you haven’t got. That’s why your third turn is ugly and your first two are lovely.”
Tori’s whole face changed.
“That’s not spotting,” she said.
“No. Spotting’s fine. Your spotting’s the best in this room.” Mia sat back. “You’ve been told to spot harder for about four years because spotting is the thing everybody knows the word for.”
Somebody at the back of the room laughed, and then stopped.
“Do it again,” Mia said. “And before the second turn, not after, put your weight over the front of the foot. It’ll feel like you’re falling forwards. You are falling forwards. That’s the turn.”
Tori did it.
She did it four times, and on the fourth she got it, and she knew she’d got it before anybody said anything, and she made a noise like something being let out of a cage.
“Oh my God.”
“Yes.”
“That’s so much easier.”
“That’s what technique is,” Mia said. “It’s not extra effort. It’s finding out that you’ve been doing something unnecessary since you were twelve.”
And then the room came at her.
That was the only way to describe it afterwards. Eleven teenagers who had been standing politely at a barre for an hour turned into a single organism with questions, and it came across the floor at her, and somebody said “can you look at mine” and somebody else said “what about the jump, the jump goes wrong” and the tall boy in his brother’s shoes said nothing at all but moved about eight feet closer.
Adam, over by the stereo, put his hands on top of his head and left them there.
* * *
She worked for fifty minutes and did not stand up once.
It turned out you could do a great deal from a chair. You could see more from a chair, in fact, because you were at the height of everybody’s hips, and hips are where almost everything actually happens. She fixed the tall boy’s landing by telling him to stop trying to be quiet. She told a thirteen-year-old to breathe out on the way up out of the plié and watched a full inch appear on her développé. She spent a quarter of an hour on Connor, who had a beautiful natural jump and no idea when to leave the floor.
“You’re going late every time.”
“I’m going on the count.”
“You’re going on the count you can hear. The count that’s happening is a bit before it.” Mia held her hand up. “Go on the and. Not the number. The and before the number.”
He tried it three times and got it, and looked at his own feet in outright suspicion, and said, “Is that allowed?”
Halfway through, a girl of about fourteen asked her what it was like.
“What was what like?”
“Being in a company.” The girl went red to the ears and carried on anyway. “Like. What’s a normal day.”
Eleven teenagers stopped moving.
Mia looked at them. She had two available answers and she knew both of them: the one you give at a school visit, all hard work and following your dreams, and the other one.
“You get in at nine-fifteen,” she said, “and class is nine-thirty to eleven, and you do the same sixteen things you did yesterday and did four thousand times before that, and about once a month one of them is slightly better than it has ever been and nobody in the room notices except you. Then you rehearse from twelve-thirty until two thirty. Then you have an hour. Then you rehearse from three thirty until seven, and you do a show, and you get home at eleven and eat something standing up.”
Nobody said anything.
“You’re tired all the time,” Mia said. “You are hungry a lot of the time and about a third of the people in the room have a complicated relationship with that and it is not talked about properly. You will be replaced by somebody younger, and you’ll know the exact day it starts. You’ll be in a lot of pain from about twenty-six onwards, and everyone will be, and you’ll all pretend not to be, and that is the actual profession.”
“That sounds horrible,” said Amy or Ash.
“It’s the best thing there is,” Mia said.
The room laughed, and then realized she had not been joking, and stopped.
“I would do all of it again tomorrow,” Mia said. “Every hour of it. That’s the bit nobody tells you either.”
Connor, from the back, said: “Then why did you stop?”
“I didn’t,” said Mia.
At the end of it she was so tired she could not have gotten out of the chair if the building had been on fire, and her right hip had gone from an ache to a bright wire and back to an ache, and she had the specific hollowed-out feeling she had not had since March: the feeling of having done a day’s work.
The room emptied in the way rooms with teenagers in them empty, which is loudly and over about nine minutes.
Tori was last. She hovered.
“Miss.”
“Mia.”
“Miss.” Tori shifted her bag on her shoulder. “Are you coming back?”
Mia opened her mouth to say I don’t know.
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
Connor was the last one on the floor, doing the jump again, over and over, on his own, with no music.
He had been at it for twelve minutes and had not noticed that the class had ended.
Mia watched him from the chair and did not say anything, because there is a particular thing that happens to a person at seventeen when they are given one piece of correct information and it works, and interrupting it is close to a crime.
He landed one. Then two. Then he tried a fourth and got it wrong and swore at himself, quite loudly, and then remembered there was somebody in the room and went scarlet.
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Language.”
“Connor, I spent fifteen years in company class,” Mia said. “There is nothing you can say in this room that I have not heard shouted in Russian.”
He laughed. It was the first time she had seen it.
“It’s the and,” he said. “It’s mad. It’s like there’s a bit of extra time hiding in the music.”
“There is.”
“Why doesn’t anybody say that?”
“Everybody says it. Nobody says it in a way you can use.” Mia shifted in the chair. “How long have you been at this?”
“Four years. Since I was thirteen.”
“Why?”
He stopped, one hand on the barre, and looked at her as though she had asked him something in a foreign language.
“Because I’m good at it,” he said.
It came out completely flat and without any vanity in it at all, and Mia thought: there it is. That’s the other one.
“Are you doing anything with it?”
“Like what?”
“Like anything.”
“There isn’t anything,” said Connor Reyes. “There’s this. This is what there is,” and he picked his bag up off the floor and went out to the lobby to wait for his lift, and Mia sat in the chair and felt about nine years old.
* * *
Adam sat down on the floor with his back against the mirror, more or less at her feet, and did not say anything for a while.
“So,” he said eventually.
“Your warm-up is too long and too kind. Cut it to twelve minutes and put the eight you save into the middle. The middle is the only part of the class where anybody gets better.”
“Right.”
“You give corrections in the language of the correction instead of the language of the problem. You say spot it because that’s what you were told. Nobody in that room knows what’s wrong with them because nobody’s ever told them what’s actually wrong with them, they’ve been told what’s supposed to happen.” Mia rubbed her hip. “That’s not a criticism of you. That’s every teacher in every town in this country.”
“It is a criticism of me.”
“It’s a criticism of you that you can do something about in two weeks. That’s the good kind.”
Adam laughed. He put his head back against the mirror.
“Anything else?”
“Yes.” Mia looked at the room. “The girl. Tori.”
“Tori Dorsey.”
“How long has she been here?”
“Four years. She came at twelve. She’d been doing it off the internet in her bedroom and she turned up one Saturday and asked if she could watch and Heather let her in for nothing for the first year.” He said it easily, and Mia noticed the ease. “Why?”
“Because you’ve got a professional in that room,” Mia said, “and I don’t think you know.”
Adam’s head came off the mirror.
“She’s not.”
“She’s not yet. She’s sixteen, she’s four years behind where she should be, her turnout is average, and she has a thing you can’t teach and can’t buy, and I’ve seen about six people have it, and two of them are dancing principal now.” Mia said it flatly, because saying it any other way would have made it sound like a compliment. “She stood on one leg in front of twelve people and thought about where her weight was for nine seconds without getting embarrassed. That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire job.”
Adam sat on the floor of his wife’s studio and looked at the place where a girl had been standing.
“What do I do?” he said.
“You get her in here more than twice a week and you get her hands on somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
“I can’t afford either of those things.”
“I know,” Mia said.
* * *
She went back the following Saturday, and the one after that, and by the third one it had stopped being a thing she was deciding to do.
The third Saturday was the one where she learned what she had walked into.
It started with Connor Reyes not being there, and Adam saying “he does this” in a particular voice, and Mia asking a question she should have asked two weeks earlier: what everybody’s situation actually was.
Eleven students. Four of them from families that paid on time and did not think about it. Three who paid late every single month and always eventually paid. Two on some arrangement Adam described so vaguely that Mia understood it to mean nothing. One, Connor, on a work-study that Adam explained in a single sentence and then changed the subject about.
And Tori Dorsey, whose fees had been paid every month for four years by a man who drove a truck for a company in Everett and who had, according to Adam, once turned up in person to pay in cash because a card had failed and he had not wanted anybody to see a decline.
“He drove twenty minutes to pay in cash.”
“He drove twenty minutes into town to pay in cash,” Adam agreed, “and then he stood in that lobby and apologized to me for about five minutes.”
Mia sat in the considered chair and looked at the roster in her lap and did a piece of arithmetic she had never in her life had to do before, and worked out what a room full of children actually cost the people who put them in it.
Mia had known, in an abstract and entirely respectable way, that dance was expensive.
She had never once sat in a lobby and known that a specific man had driven twenty minutes with cash in an envelope.
* * *
The parents were still in the lobby, some of them. Mia had not anticipated that. Two mothers had waited the entire two hours in the four chairs by the corkboard and appeared to regard this as normal.
One of them stopped her on the way out.
“You’re the ballerina.”
“I’m Mia.”
“Diane. My Bethany’s the little one at the end, the quiet one, she’s fifteen but she looks twelve, don’t say I said that.” Diane had her keys already in her hand. “She came out here just now and told me about her breathing. She’s never told me anything.”
“She’s got a good back. Tell her I said so.”
“She’ll die.” Diane beamed, and then her face did something complicated, and she said, in a different register: “Can I ask you a thing. Since you’re. Since you’d know.”
“Go on.”
“There’s a flyer come around in the school bags. There’s a place opening out at Crestwood, a big one, and they’ve sent a thing around to all the schools in the county with a picture of the building on it.” Diane got her phone out and thumbed at it. “It’s got a proper floor and everything. There’s a man on the flyer who’s been on television.”
Mia looked at the photograph on the phone.
A two-story glazed frontage, still under construction, with an artist’s impression laid over the top. A logo, silver on white. CRESTWOOD DANCE STUDIOS. OPENING NOVEMBER. And in the corner, a headshot of a man of about forty with excellent shoulders, captioned with a name Mia did not know and a line that said Guest Artist in Residence.
“That’s twenty minutes away,” Diane said. “On the new road.”
“It is.”
“They do six days. They’ve got a summer thing.” Diane put the phone away and looked, suddenly, wretched. “I’m not going anywhere. Bethany’s been here since she was nine. I’m asking because half the mothers in this lobby have got that flyer in their bag and nobody’s said anything to Adam, and somebody’s going to have to.”
Behind them, through the doorway, Adam was on the floor of the studio with a mop, doing the far corner, on his own, at half past twelve on a Saturday.
“Leave it with me,” Mia said.
* * *
Lucy came around that evening with wine and takeout and the news that she had already heard about the class from three separate sources.
“Mrs. Fletcher told Beverly Ann that you transformed the teenagers.”
“I told one girl where her weight was.”
“Beverly Ann has it as a masterclass. By Tuesday it’ll be that you flew in from Paris.” Lucy put her feet on the coffee table. Patricia allowed that from Lucy and from nobody else alive. “How was it, actually?”
Mia thought about how to say it.
“I was good,” she said.
“Well, yes.”
“No, Lucy. Listen to the sentence.” She turned the glass around. “I’ve been in twenty rooms since March where I was the problem. The PT room, the surgeon’s office, the company office in Chicago where two very kind people explained my contract to me. Four months of being the thing that has gone wrong. And I sat in a chair this morning for two hours and I was the most useful person in the building.”
Lucy did not say anything for a moment.
“That’s not nothing,” she said.
“It’s not nothing.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Yes,” Mia said, and drank some of the wine, and they left it there.
* * *
She walked home the long way the next day. It took forty minutes and she was going to pay for it, and she thought about a photograph of a building that did not exist yet.
At the bridge she stopped and got her phone out and typed Crestwood Dance Studios into it.
She read for twenty-five minutes, standing on a bridge with the river going under her. A truck came past and she moved over for it without looking up.
Then she put the phone in her pocket and walked the rest of the way home.
She told nobody for six days.
2 thoughts on “The Last Dance – Chapter 3: Where the Weight Goes”