But first, she wanted to survive this ballet class.
For the last week, ANB had agreed to let her join company class every day, so every morning she’d woken up early, sometimes leaving Nick in bed asleep and sometimes finding that he’d already left to go surfing with Marcus. The classes Carly had taken with ANB’s ballet masters and mistresses had been staid and predictable, in a comforting and familiar kind of way, confirming her belief that ballet class was basically the same in every country and in every language.
“All right, get your calf raises in, and let’s party!” Alice called, rubbing her hands together with evil glee. Heather caught Carly’s eye from across the barre and raised her eyebrows.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she muttered, with a wry smile.
Ninety minutes later, Carly’s scalp was drenched with sweat, and her heart was pounding from the speed and difficulty of the petit allegro combinations Alice had set for them. Petit allegro was usually her favorite part of class, because even if you made a mistake, you moved on so quickly to the next jump, the next direction change, that no one would notice, and you could almost forget that the screw up ever happened. Until, of course, you had to do the entire thing on the left side, with all the directions flipped. Most people hated that part, but Carly had always loved the puzzle of it, the way her brain had to communicate with her body, and vice versa. Today she was struggling.
The final group of dancers sautéd in zigzags across the studio, and when they were finished, Alice called out for the pianist to stop. All around Carly, dancers were panting, hunched over with their hands on their knees or leaning on the barre trying to catch their breath.
“Pretty good, guys!” Alice said enthusiastically from the front of the room. “Should we pick the tempo up a bit?”
No one bothered to suppress their groans, but Carly looked around and saw several dancers giving Alice what looked like fond smiles. Apparently this was just the Alice Ho way, and her colleagues had learned to love it. When she retired and was asked to run some company somewhere, she’d have the fittest dancers in the world.
Was that something Carly could do, after she couldn’t dance anymore? Run a company? She tried to picture it: teaching company class every day, picking who got promoted and who got let go, meeting with a board stocked with rich donors like her parents, figuring out how to give audiences what they liked without putting the same old shit on stage year after year. It seemed like something she’d be good at. But the question was moot, because only former principals got asked to run companies. No one was handing an artistic director job to Peasant Maiden #4.
“Oi, you’re up,” someone muttered in her ear, and she started and turned to see a tall blond man looking at her expectantly. Heather had introduced Justin, one of the company’s other principals, the first time Carly had taken class here, and she’d noticed his unbelievably good feet immediately. They looked like they’d been photoshopped into the kind of cashew curve that dancers obsessed over. One girl Carly used to dance with had spent hours with her feet under the couch trying to bend them into that shape, but the toe point Justin had been blessed with could only be achieved by some combination of winning the genetic lottery and starting dance training as soon as you exited the womb. Once she was done ogling his feet, she also noticed that Justin was also very cute, with wide green eyes and dimples that flashed whenever he was smiling, which was pretty often.
Right now, though, his dimples were invisible, and his eyebrows were raised in confusion.
“Right, shit, sorry,” she muttered back, and stepped forward just in time to start the combination with him and two other dancers. And just in time to immediately bump into Justin.
“Other left, Carly!” Alice called from the front of the room, and Carly swore under her breath again as Justin and the other two dancers carried on without her, bouncing and pivoting across the studio, the women’s pointe shoes clacking on the floor in perfect unison each time they landed a jump. She scrambled to catch up, but she could barely remember the combination, let alone flip it and translate everything to the left-hand side. If this ever happened in an NYB class—and she couldn’t remember the last time it had—she’d grit her teeth and keep going, unwilling to let the director see her giving up halfway through an exercise. But Alice wasn’t a director, and Carly didn’t work here.
“Sorry,” she waved at Alice, stepping to the side of the room and shaking her head. “Total brain fart. I’ll go with the next group.” She’d been so distracted by trying, and failing, to envision her hypothetical future that she’d totally spaced out.
“No worries,” Alice shrugged, “you killed it on the right. So just … kill it backwards and in reverse this time.”
Carly gave her a half-hearted smile, then trudged to the back of the room where a handful of dancers were still waiting their turn. Heather, who had already had her turn, caught her eye, looking concerned.
“Are you okay?” she mouthed.
Carly gave her a shrug that she hoped saidI’m fineand notI have no idea what I’m doing, with this combination or with the restof my life.Heather didn’t look convinced. She waved Carly over, and when Carly arrived at her side, Heather gave her a grin.
“Come on, let’s do it together. First one to fall on their ass or pass out wins.”
Carly laughed despite herself. “You’ve never once fallen on your ass.”
“If anyone can make me do it, it’s Alice,” Heather shrugged, then reached out and tapped on the shoulder of the tall, reedy dancer in a red Sydney Swans singlet in front of her. “Hey, Matty, do you mind if we join your group?”
In the end, neither of them fell on their ass or passed out. With Heather dancing a foot in front of her, and apparently a little more accustomed to Alice’s high-speed, intricate combinations, Carly got through the exercise without messing up again. By the time they were near the front of the studio, Carly caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror and saw that she was smiling, unable to resist the pleasure of petit allegro, the combination of explosive power and control that had made it her favorite part of class since she and Heather were gangly eleven-year-olds. It felt like magic. Like freedom. Even on the left-hand side.
“Yes, Carly, yes, Carly, yeeeessss!” Alice chanted from the front of the room, clapping her hands with the kind of exuberant delight Carly had never witnessed in a ballet teacher in her entire life. She tried to imagine Mr. K or Catherine behaving like that in a company class and couldn’t even conjure it. She liked it, though.
“All right, all right, I’m taking mercy on you all,” Alice called, gesturing to the accompanist to stop playing. “You all look great. Don’t forget to stretch or you won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”
“I can barely walk now,” Matty grumbled from behind Carly.
“Seriously,” she muttered back, but she joined Heather on the floor by their bags, and they took off their pointe shoes to stretch for a few minutes, letting beads of sweat slide into their already-damp leotards and onto the already-slick floor.
“You okay?” Heather asked, before pushing herself up into a downward dog.
Carly hugged one knee to her chest and let out a heavy sigh. How much longer could she keep doing this? Killing herself in class, performing five or six nights a week, waking up stiff and sore and finishing class exhausted? And for what? So she could snatch a few moments of petit allegro joy? So she could wear a giant rat costume inThe Nutcrackeror be one of thirty-two identical wilis inGiselle?
“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said, needing it to be true. “Just tired. Tired and old.”
“Alice makes everyone feel that way, don’t worry about it,” Heather replied. She pedaled her feet out and groaned. “It’s a good thing she’s so nice or I’d have to hate her.”
