“Do we ever get to the world that’s realer than this?” Annamae wanted to know.
“What do you mean?” replied her mother.
She had just gotten picked up from ballet. Now the two of them were hurrying the seven blocks uptown to collect Danny from T-shirt Basketball at the Y. Her mother was threading so swiftly along the crowded sidewalk that Annamae had to do an extra skip every few steps in order not to fall behind. Her tights were sagging a little in the crotch, but there wasn’t time to stop and pull them up. “Like, I know this world is real,” she tried to explain, panting a bit, “but I mean a realer world.”
“Yes, Annamae, I hear you; I’m just not understanding what you mean.” Her mother was sounding a touch exasperated.
Annamae knew the feeling.
“Why do we always have to walk so fast?”
“Because we’re always late.”
“Why do we always have to be late?”
“Don’t get me started.”
At the corner, the light was, thankfully, against them. Annamae had time to pull up her tights and try again. “Like, the world that’s just beyond—Mom, you’re not even looking. Look!” She was holding up her hand, palm out, as a kind of visual aid. “Like that thing of how you can feel there’s something just on the other side”—she pointed to the space on the far side of her palm—“that close, but you can’t see it—Mom, look, look!”
“I am looking. What? I see.”
Hopefully: “You do?”
“I see your hand.”
The light changed.
“Let’s go,” said her mother, forging ahead.
In ballet today, they had been doing jetés, which were a way of jumping prettily with their legs and arms stretched out. But Ms. Jules had gotten mad—or not mad, serious—and made them stop. She had clapped her hands together and said, “No no no! You are making shapes. Do not just make shapes with your bodies—really reach!” They’d all tried again, stretching their legs and arms out even longer, but Ms. Jules had said, “No no no no! Not like you are grabbing for the jar of peanut butter!” This had made them laugh, but Ms. Jules did not laugh. She pressed pause on the music and gathered them around. “When you dance,” she told them, pronouncing the words as if they were stamped in gold, “it is not about executing the steps, making the shapes. It is about reaching for something. Yes? It is a form of listening. Yes?”
Baffled, embarrassed, the students remained still.
“You must be,” Ms. Jules told them, “like insects.”
“Ew,” somebody said.
“Like butterflies,” she amended, “with antennae”—she placed her index fingers up by her temples—“always reaching, listening, feeling for something. A message, perhaps, on the wind.”
Some of the children crooked their own index fingers up by their foreheads.
“A butterfly,” Ms. Jules had continued, “is beautiful, yes. But a butterfly is not concerned with beauty. It is concerned only with the search.”
The other children, wiggling their antennae, giggled, but Annamae had felt something tighten in her spine. She did not know what Ms. Jules meant by search. But the thought—the wish—came into her mind that she might be on a search, too.
Now on the sidewalk, heading toward the Y, hop-skipping to keep up, frustrated and lonely because she had not been able to translate her question into language her mother, the linguist, could understand, she caught sight of her scurrying self reflected in a shop window. There was something about shop-window reflections that was always unsettling. The partialness of it, the way you could at once see yourself and see through yourself.
Annamae practiced a jeté, looking sideways at her reflection. There in the plate glass, leaping in parallel, part light, part shadow: an answering streak.
“Please don’t dally,” called her mother.
But she had to do one more, this time facing the shop window. So that she and her mirror self, as they leapt, each reached toward the other.