First Dance Lesson

One of the volumes in the forthcoming Flyover Country project is Words Like Stars: Essays on Family. That volume chronicles my life, and my connections to the past, the present, and the future. This excerpt, from an essay titled “Rose Dances,” connects all three in the story of Ashley Rose’s first dance lesson, at Lila Jean’s Studio of Dance in Owensboro, Kentucky.

Having stretched, they move to the center of the small studio. Lanita goes to the stereo and puts on music; I blink to hear the long-forgotten pop and shush of a needle making contact with a vinyl record album. Surely, I have stepped into the past, or out of time, somehow, in this place where children and the adults accompanying them are presumed to have the same surname, and music is overlaid with that slight hiss that betrays the mechanical interface between recording and playback device. Together, they dance, Lanita leading by example, the two girls getting arms right, or feet right, but seldom both at once, and never in rhythm. Lanita seems not to mind, as long as they are engaged.

I did not expect this. I did not think that they would simply, with very little explanation, begin to dance. Instruction, I assumed, would be more formal, more ritualized; they would stand at the barre and learn first position, second position, pliè, watch yourselves in the mirror, girls, see that you do it right, now third position, let me help you, this is how you put your feet, this is how you hold your arms. In truth, I could not imagine how that would work, in a class of two-to-five-year-olds; I saw ritual and chaos intersecting somehow in my mind’s eye, but this . . . this is nothing like I thought. This actually looks like fun.

I should not have been surprised. My passion was horses, and I remember now my first lesson. Then, too, I expected to be given details, lists, memory work — in short, formal instruction. This is a bridle, this is a bit; saddle, girth, stirrup; you must do it right before you can do it at all. Instead, the instructor put me up on a calm palomino named Danny, and out into the woods we rode. But we’ll just walk today, I told myself wisely, only twelve years old. It won’t be fun yet. I have more to learn before it will be fun.

I was wrong. We rode out to a clearing in the woods, and cantered. I was riding, really riding, fast and high and joyous, just the way I so had wanted, and it was glorious.

We are going to dance like ducks now, says the ballet teacher—you know what ducks are, they live in the water and say, quack, quack?

“Yes!” Ashley Rose gushes, her enthusiasm spilling from her in words. “And whales live in the water, too, and fishes!”

Lanita smiles at her; looks at me. “How old is she?”

“She’s three,” I say. So impossibly young.

They dance. Like ducks. And when they are done, Ashley Rose bows with her hands thrust out behind her and her chin raised. She has danced ballet, with the full approval of her teacher, and she is glorious.
 

From “Rose Dances,” Words Like Stars: Essays on Family, forthcoming