Mother and daughters on a ladies’ night out: Anna and Sophie’s first ballet. It was still quite chilly for a June evening. Maman was wearing her salmon coat. Over their new dresses, the girls had matching white princess coats that covered their joyous fidgeting.
Maman’s fingers had coaxed the knots out of Anna’s thick blond hair and pinned it into her first bun. It was the most magical night of her life: Swan Lake. Anna had fallen in love.
The stage, the lights, the audience blackened out of sight. The violins flooding the hall, the music filling her lungs. Pas de bourré, pirouette, glissade, grand jeté. The closest anyone could come to flight.
She left thinking ballerinas existed only in that enchanted, chandelier-lit world of red velvet seats and carved wood painted gold, undulled by grimy city light. That place, and the swans’ delicate white feathers, filled the daydreaming six-year-old’s head. So Maman took her to ballet lessons once a week, then twice a week, then every day. To rehearsals and auditions, and she and Papa applauded proudly at every curtain call.
Anna became a ballerina like the ones she had dreamed of, and she found out they were real. Up close and offstage, they were competitively, painfully thin as well. They sweated and stretched for eight hours a day, went to bed aching and starved, but when the curtain went up at 8:00 P.M. every night, they turned into swans.
She also found out that she did not have the body of a perfect ballerina. She was just a little too short and her feet were a little too flat. And she could stand to lose a little weight, she was constantly reminded. But she was good and disciplined enough that she could entertain the dream that if she pushed a little harder, stretched a little further, spun a little faster, she could change.
She did her pliés, put more fire in her jumps. Glissade, glissade, grand jeté. Back straight, shoulders back, ankles crossed. Always. The lighter she was, the easier it would be to flutter off the ground. So the less the other girls ate, the less she did too. Dancer see, dancer do.
Anna neither flew nor grew taller; she got shorter as her spine collapsed. Her knees buckled one afternoon in rehearsal. Surgery at twenty-three, then bed rest.