“How can somebody actually dance themselves to death?”
Professor Sobel, taking a drag on his cigarette, thought to himself: I left that gig at Columbia for this? The setting was Bennington, Vermont. The subject: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. An afternoon in early March, the doldrums of mud season: the bitterness of the cold mattered little to Professor Sobel, who insisted on teaching all of his classical music courses outside in a meadow, no matter what the season, so he could smoke unlimited cigarettes in a pleasing, rhythmic continuity. Questions and comments were not encouraged in Professor Sobel’s courses, though in the free-wheeling spirit of progressive education were nevertheless volunteered. The students, among them Cassandra, sat crouched in the mud awaiting his response to Chelsea Hayden-Smith, the Bambi-eyed sophomore who had interrupted him in the midst of a majestic monologue about the finer thematic points of Stravinsky’s masterpiece.
“Are you from Kansas?” he asked, his large shaggy frame towering over her. “Have you absolutely no imagination to speak of?”
He put out his cigarette, disgruntled. God, was he looking forward to class being over so he could go meet that leggy cello student he was banging for a quickie in the Secret Garden. And so:
“Class dismissed,” Professor Sobel announced without further ado.
But one year later Cassandra wondered whether or not Chelsea, during her final moments on earth, may have thought back to The Rite of Spring, as she and her best friend Beverly Tinker-Jones plummeted to their deaths through the wide glass windows of the fifth-floor dance studio of the college’s performing arts building. Cassandra wondered, too, if when Professor Sobel first heard the news he guffawed, cried, or simply, as was most likely the case, lit another cigarette and never thought of Chelsea Hayden-Smith ever again.
Chelsea and the poor, fawnlike Beverly, both of them ethereally beautiful young girls, ages twenty and nineteen respectively, were said to have died immediately on impact. The coroner in Bennington, Vermont, was long used to handling the college’s many overdoses and suicides, but this latest tragedy was something new. He had never known, previously, of anybody dancing themselves to death. But he, unlike Chelsea, was not so young or so impertinent as to question the unexpected twists of this cruel universe.
The cause of Chelsea’s and Beverly’s deaths was said to be an accident, and yet the rumor mill began swiftly, and with inexorable force, from the minute the news hit the dining hall, where the students who were not still in bed sat spreading Tofutti cream cheese on their bagels and nursing their hangovers with grape Pedialyte. People said that the girls had been pushed through the window. People said that the Wiccans on campus might have had something to do with it, though this theory did not hold up when you stopped to consider that none of the Wiccans, almost all of whom were overweight, had anything to do with the modern dancers; what the Wiccans mostly did was hang out in the house living rooms and braid one another’s hair and eat chocolate cake. (Cassandra knew this for a fact, having once crashed a meet-up of theirs just because she was hungry.) Other people said that ghosts were involved, and if you had ever been on the Bennington campus late at night, why not? It was a ghostly, godless place. There was actually a name for it and its peculiar geography: the Bennington Triangle. This had been given to it on account of a number of individuals who had gone missing from this supposedly serene corner of southwestern Vermont in the last century, including but by no means limited to a Bennington sophomore who had disappeared from one of the hiking trails near campus. And now, just look at what had become of the dancers—not a disappearance per se but an otherworldly turn of events that was queer and creepy nonetheless.
Cassandra learned one thing from all of this, anyway: that modern dance at Bennington was a dangerous discipline and that she had been right to steer clear of the performing arts building all these years. Not to mention the hiking trails.
She was an English major.
And, as such, throughout the years she often thought back to Chelsea and Beverly. The spring she graduated was the spring the dancers died. There seemed, in retrospect, to have been some kind of warning, for her and all of the other young women of Bennington who graduated with the class of 2003, in the unforgettable image of those tender white feminine bodies slain on the black pavement.