Pas de Deux for One?
by Scarlett Davis
I didn’t really see much of a reason to continue living, but I had adult beginner ballet class on Thursdays at 7pm.
Walking in, the studio always smells like optimism and feet, but I leave my thoughts at the door. Inside, we are just finishing our dégagés to an instrumental of “Singing in the Rain,” working hard this time to avoid sitting in our supporting leg as the combination moves from outside leg to inside leg and then en croix. Our teacher Emily thumbs through her phone’s Spotify playlist, looking for new music and there’s some clinking of heavy water bottles and popping of joints as we wait. Then the Cranberries start to play. Uh oh, we think. Emily marks the music first, and we brace ourselves for the fondues with the long holds and of course the développés, repeated twice but on relevé. Once we finish the exercise, there is a collective exhale from the group, despite Emily’s gentle nudge as crisp as a four-count: “Don’t. Forget. To. Breathe.”
So much of life is music. Once you see it, you start to appreciate the pockets of music all around you. I have finally started to release the beats I’d rather forget, the mechanical off clicking of an oxygen machine as well as the flippant phrase take care, which are forever synapsed in my brain for their simple but shattering one-two syncopation. If sounds could carry weight, I now picture those as stones I chuck across still water that skid and ripple.
These days, remembering choreography is a constant struggle now that I have ‘Dory brain’— the fish from Finding Nemo who playfully has short term memory loss. In reality, it’s just a way I mask how two years of depression and trauma have fundamentally altered me. Stretching at the barre with our regular combo before center, it’s a nice moment of class where each of us gets to be alone but together in a liminal space. As I cambré back to a coffee house version of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” my fingers long and shooting energy from the tips, my upper back lengthening up and out, it becomes clear that I’ve come full circle. Ballet once again has become the light to tunnel towards out of a dark chapter.
I took my first ballet class when I was seventeen after my mother had died the summer before. I had shocked everyone by excelling in school and getting straight A’s, but I self-isolated, cancer had that effect. Mostly, I was numb to joy or pain, didn’t matter which. I was just going through the motions and then my aunt signed me up for dance.
My aunt was in chronic pain her whole life with a bad back, but she found a bench in the corner of the room. She observed from a braced position for my first lessons where I learned the basics of how to plié and tendu. Even with her feet swollen she could still demonstrate how the toes should be pointing, “like this,” she would say shaking off a slip-on clog. She used to like to tell a story that while in college she had a job at a sock factory (yes, they had those). Her fingerprints would be burned from the dryer heat and she would sweat so much her jeans would bunch up. But then, some nights she’d go to a ballet class and maybe dancing at a club with friends. “My waist was so small then,” she would beam. Of course, she didn’t tell me that story because she wanted to pass on ‘body goals;’ rather she wanted to impart to me that life could be senseless again, maybe even fun.
Lung cancer is a brutal battle. At her deathbed, I couldn’t help but think how her story—how our story—didn’t fit society’s mold. Her husband had passed many years before, she had no children, most of our family (not all) were gone but we had each other. No one really prepares you for what the end-of-life stage looks like when you don’t have a partner or a family. There’s no romanticizing it and yet her life was so full, and her funeral packed with people.
A couple months before she passed, my boyfriend of nearly five years on a random Wednesday told me that he was no longer in love with me and left. As he packed his side of the closet and threw things into garbage bags, I called my aunt, the woman with all the answers: “What do I do?”
“Cherish,” she said, “cherish these last couple of moments with him.” It took me a long time to fully understand what she meant. She wasn’t advocating for fighting for someone who had already let go. She was encouraging me to find beauty and meaning in that moment of transition, the end of the relationship. Not unlike sitting with a loved one, once they’ve passed on; there is something transcendental and elusive about that experience and you only get the opportunity to really take it in once. By definition, ‘cherishing’ is a “kind of love that has come to maturity, to fruition.” In essence, cherishing someone is the highest form of love. It’s what we all aspire for our lives, to be seen and witnessed.
Today, I’m a nearly thirty-five-year-old single woman with no husband, children, or real career. I have now become the archetype that they make sad movies about and I have one of those pet strollers that are side-eyed with judgment and in my darkest moments, I vehemently wonder what will my life look like at the end if there is no one to cherish me, see me, witness me.
The timing was bad; the loss of the relationship, followed by the loss of the woman who raised me. I fell into a state of depression and then sank even lower. When someone no longer wants to be here, it’s a well-kept secret, but it’s not the long-term goals like family or career that sway them, it’s the pebbles: the stack of books on the nightstand waiting to be read or a latte from the new coffee shop in town. The Senseless. My favorite thing next to ballet are my daily walks with my two-year-old dog, the excitement she finds from a dancing leaf or the curiosity tinged with fear from a pinecone, I realize now that we’re both experiencing life again for the first time.
Watching the news, the world is literally on fire, and all I seem to want to do is go to ballet class. So, I double-up on the number of classes I can drop in during the week, I add a second leotard and skirt to my Amazon cart, I begin a stretching routine with a foam roller and a Theraband, at night, in between late-night snacking, I practice balancing. I use the kitchen counter as a ledge and the magnets on the fridge as a focal point to practice spotting for turns. I gradually retrained my algorithm to replace the breakup content with ballet. I unearth Twyla Tharpe’s 1982 Nine Sinatra Songs, the grainy footage lulls me like a bedtime story, and I go to sleep under Baryshnikov’s spell. I fall in love again with the primers, movies like Center Stage, White Nights, and even Dirty Dancing and somewhere in the middle of all that, I have re-found the senseless again.
I develop new reasons to attend class: to hone the tension in my fingers, the rounding of my shoulders, the activation of my back and core muscles, the articulation of my feet and their connection to the floor, the gradual planting of my foot, and the synergy of sending energy up as well as down. I surprise myself with how much stronger my balances have gotten as well as my flexibility to the extent that I am incredulous when someone from class says to me, “You have such beautiful lines.” It sounds almost distant like underwater, but I resurface despite my lack of confidence to thank her and tell her how lovely her jumps were during our petite allegro and she smiles as if maybe that was something she also needed to hear today. I look around the room at the other adults the way you sometimes stand on a street corner in a busy city and wonder about the individual lives in each of the apartments and think: I wonder what’s their story?
My favorite part of class is usually during the romb de jom when Emily paints long gooey circles into the floor with dramatic, sweeping arm positions and says, “Now, this part’s just for you,” and for a phrase we can retreat back into that liminal space. When Emily awards us now after a hard piece, she says, “Yessssss dancers,” and suddenly it feels earned in a way that it didn’t quite before.
If I were married and growing a family, my Thursday evenings probably wouldn’t look this way. Instead, I get to use this time to be the best possible version of myself to travel and go back to school. I get to be selfish with my time and resources in ways that our mothers and grandmothers couldn’t. I think of ballet as the process of becoming as well as this chapter of my life that can’t be rushed, otherwise I might lose something critical to its foundation.
Not all love stories are equally yoked. Mine at the moment is icing my knees in a quiet, man-free apartment next to my pets watching my favorite TV show and remembering to cherish it all. I know nothing about philosophy but struck by Nietzsche’s life question: But does it dance? I now have my answer.
BIO: I am a Louisiana-based writer and the podcaster. I am currently working on my debut crime novel. I was the winner of the 2022 Southern Screen Writing Competition for my short story "Swampkitty." My work has appeared in Kelp Magazine, Musée Magazine, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.