Jennifer Shaw

A contemporary short story

Ten-year-old Dalia tipped her dark bunhead back. She gazed up at the thirty-foot glass ceiling of the city ballet’s enormous atrium. Light filtered down, bright but cool in the vigorous air conditioning, and weirdly heavy.

If this were a swimming pool, it would be deep.  

Cold, too. It was, in fact, way colder in here than she’d imagined. All this chilly air pressing down on her might give her calf cramps. How could she dance well, if her muscles locked up?

Ahead of her, Dalia’s mother waved her on, her voice quieter than usual. “Let’s go, Dal. You’ll do great. Don’t dawdle.”

They followed other parents and children making their way to a marbled countertop in the reception area, its sheen bright enough to reflect in the glasses of the elderly receptionist.

At the desk, Dalia exchanged her name for a cardboard number and safety pin. The official, crabby-looking lady glared at them over her wire rims as Dalia’s mother paid the audition fee in cash. The ugly look rolled over Dalia like a powerful wave, and she resisted the urge to rock back on her heels.

But she was really only imagining it, she told herself.

This lady doesn’t know me. She has nothing against me. It’s okay.

In a sleek, vanilla-colored waiting area, where someone’s rose-scented body mist wafted under her nose, Dalia sat flat on the spotless carpet. She bent her legs into a butterfly position and tried to give herself a good pre-class stretch. She was distracted, though, by all the other chattering children. Strange seams ran up the backs of their matte tights, which were clearly another brand than Dalia’s thin, shiny ones. Their fancy-strapped leotards were different too, fresh pastels unlike her simple, washed-out black one. These girls were rainbow clusters, all blonde and brunette giggles, and they chirped together in nervous cheer.   

How did they all know each other? Where had they come from? Not her part of town.

Dalia wanted to pull out Evie, the little stuffed elephant her friend Prisha’s mother had made for her, and give the good luck plushie a squeeze. But it was buried deep in her hot pink bag, cartoonish pointe shoes emblazoned across its plastic front. One corner of the laminate was beginning to peel, the overlay curling back, dirty with lint. She’d had the bag since she was six. She caught one younger girl staring at it, and at her. These other kids had large, sturdy, new-looking bags, with nothing but Bloch or Freed or Danskin logos on them.

Dalia turned her bag around.   

Like the atrium, the inner ballet studio was large and airy. Under a white-tiled ceiling, , wooden double barres ran mounted along mirrored walls. So many mirrors, reflecting every angle. A scruffy man with a gray ponytail and old sneakers sat at an upright piano.

Live music for class! This place really was the real deal.

Upfront, three stony adults perched on chairs behind a folding table. They pressed their lips together as they shuffled papers, clutched pens, and sipped from water bottles before leaning in to smirk and whisper together.

Thankfully, the lady giving the class was younger and softer.

“I’m Miss Henley.” She made a graceful, welcoming motion.

She had a smooth face and fabulous dangle earrings that swung as she floated about. A fringed, flowery skirt wrapped around her narrow hips, and the high arches of her soft-shoed feet impressed Dalia. Miss Henley probably smelled rosy too.  

This lady would be on her side. 

“Does everybody have a place at the barre?”

 Dalia remained where she was, in a back corner.

“I will teach a full class, and the combinations will be simple.” Miss Henley’s sweet voice lilted over the room. “Please concentrate on doing your best. We want to see how you move.”

Back home, at Dalia’s neighborhood studio, Karen Kang’s Toes ’N Tunes, Miss Karen often gave Dalia’s dance class tricky combinations, tests of physical skill and memory.

“I don’t want you to get bored,” her teacher often said. “It’s good for your brain, too.”

But if these combinations were easy, Dalia should have no problem dancing well, even if her muscles were cold and tight. She was “a little etoile,” as Miss Karen liked to say. Her movements were “sublime.”  

Dalia had needed to look that word up a few times, in a couple different dictionaries, then listen to the definition out loud before she fully understood it.  

Super, amazing, wonderful.

That was her, according to Miss Karen. She’d said it more times than Dalia could count.

Placing her left hand on the barre, Dalia bounced on the balls of her slippered feet. She, too, could be pure air, like everything else here. She was made of the same stuff they were, even if she didn’t look like them or have the right clothes or bag.

Maybe, what she was made from was even better. People always told her how blessed and special she was. She had a learning disability, so school was usually awful—she was no good there—but she was the best dancer at her studio. That she knew, with rare, fierce certainty. It was the one sure thing. And this audition today was Dalia’s chance to “take it to the next level,” as Miss Karen had said, so Dalia could start going to the fancy classes at the ballet academy and, someday, dance professionally with the city’s company.

Dalia would never be a teacher or a doctor or a businessperson. She didn’t have the brains for any of that. But, she could be a real ballerina!

That was even better.

She’d had a hard time wrapping her head around the idea, at first. But, she trusted Miss Karen as much as she trusted her own mother.

After all, Miss Karen was never wrong, and she’d said, “You remind me of a young Marianela Nunez. You have the same lines and delicate fluidity, that special vulnerability that shines onstage. You’re a natural.”

Dalia hadn’t understood those words, not really, but they’d sounded so pretty.

This audition would change her future, Miss Karen had assured her more than once.

“Don’t be scared,” she’d said yesterday, when Dalia admitted she felt off-balance. “Lift that chin. Go show the world how special you are, ma petite etoile.”

That’d made Dalia smile. Everyone loved Miss Karen’s pretend French accent.     

Now, at a signal from Miss Henley, the pianist touched hovering hands to the keys, and sharp notes, rising and falling, filled Dalia’s heart. She raised her chin.

I’m an etoile.

The plies were in fact simple: two demis and a grande, in first, second, fourth and fifth positions, the sweep of arms the usual. Dalia’s body finally generated some warmth as she executed the basic knee bends.

“Deepen the bend in your knees, Number Thirty-One,” Miss Henley said, stopping in front of Dalia to study her. “Don’t lift your heels, though. Heels stay planted in the ground.”

Had the judges noticed?

Keep going.

The next part was easy, too. From first position, the students extended their legs forward along the floor, toes pointed, in three tendus, then plied. Then three to the side, plie. Then three back, plie, and once more three to the side, plieing as they closed in fifth position, repeating the combo on the same leg once more before soutenu turning to face the other side.

Miss Henley appeared in front of Dalia again, her smile tighter.

“Brush the floor with the ball of your foot.” She demonstrated, her toes visibly caressing the vinyl floor. “Leg stick straight. But—” As she positioned her hands on Dalia’s hips, Dalia’s body blazed and her arms prickled. “Stay square to the front.”

Miss Karen never gave her corrections like these. Rarely did she put her hands on her. This wasn’t good.

Meanwhile, all around her, Miss Henley was blessing everyone else with compliments.

“Gorgeous port de bras, Number Seven.”

“Lovely full ronde de jamb, rotating that hip at the last possible moment. That’s right, Number Twenty-Two.”

During fondues: “Yes! Up and out, one continuous movement. Carve the air.” Miss Henley emphasized the description with her arm, an elegant motion of its own, her earrings swinging. “Perfect, Number Sixteen.”

But Dalia kept getting picked on. Her neck and shoulders were stiff, she was turning out from her ankles, not her thighs. Her frappes and grande battements were dull, heavy.

Perspiration slicked her body, thickest under her arms. She was getting dizzy. She should have eaten more than a banana. She should have put on more deodorant.

As one disoriented moment after another accumulated, like a string of cursed beads, Dalia grew awkward and stiff, the combinations suddenly confusing. Now, she couldn’t remember simple steps. Her bad brain was betraying her. She forgot things, screwed up the rhythm. She missed more than one turn to face the other side, finding herself sliced by the gaze of the owlish girl in front of her and knocked out of time with the music.     

The heat of the eyes from the folding table scalded her. She knew those eyes were on her, sensitive as they must be to imperfections, especially stupid mistakes like these.

Even the way she positioned her fingers was wrong.

“Leave a little dainty space between your middle finger and thumb. Yes, like that. Soft hand. Much better.” Miss Henley finally gave her a real smile.

But that little bit of praise came far too late. By then, Dalia had been pulled so far outside of herself she was only hovering nearby in searing, spinning misery. In a terrible, boiling limbo in which someone else was in control of her body and it was all happening too slowly.

Stars burn out, don’t they?

Soon, she’d be a pile of ash.   

Like the firebird in the production Miss Karen had taken a group of them to a few months ago.

You can come back, be reborn.

Wait, no. That was the phoenix, not the firebird. She was mixing up her stories. God, she was stupid!

A fat bead of sweat rolled down her temple.

“You have to be strong in life,” her mother’s mantra echoed in her mind. “You have to fight for the things you want.”

After barre, Dalia hid in the back line where she wobbled through the adagio sequence. Next came turns, and they were given a traveling combination: four piques, four chaines, plie into pas de bouree, and a pirouette.

“A clean single is fine,” said Miss Henley.

Dalia positioned herself second to last, watching as all the other children spun in a diagonal line across the never-ending room, which seemed to stretch ever longer. Several children pulled off tidy double turns, performing for the judges who examined each auditioner more closely.

One girl executed the most graceful triple pirouette Dalia had ever seen. Her turns looked almost lazy, her balance and control were so superhuman. When she rejoined the line—they would all have to do it again!—she caught Dalia’s eye and grinned. Her straight, white teeth were huge and perfect.

As the child in front of her took off, a powerful burn ignited in Dalia’s belly. She stood in tendu, arms in position though her biceps felt like weights strapped to her limbs.

Everyone was looking at her.

“Chin up!” Miss Henley called out. It landed on Dalia like a final, fiery hex.

She couldn’t shift her weight. She couldn’t step into that first turn. She couldn’t breathe.  

 “Go!” Someone hissed behind her.   

The studio tilted.

In her damp chest, her heart slammed hard against her rib. It cracked the awful spell, she could move again.

She bolted for the door, heaving air in and out of her lungs. Wishing she could turn to smoke and make everyone forget she was ever there. That she’d ever stepped foot over this threshold.

(Threshold. A vocabulary word from last year at school. Today, she finally understood its meaning.)

She flew to her mother, who was sitting in one of the colorless corner chairs in the waiting area, clutching her purse.

“Get this off me!” Dalia fumbled with the safety pin, frantic to rip the number off and ready to fight. But her mother did not catch her hands to soothe her. She did not tell Dalia to go back into the studio, as Dalia expected. 

What’s happening? I really don’t understand what’s happening!

On the car ride home, calmer, the girl leaned her forehead on the cool glass of the window. She could have taken a timeout in the lobby restroom, she knew. Given herself a chance to catch her breath, then gone back inside. Tried to finish stronger, or at least finish with some kind of dignity. (That had been another vocabulary word. She’d liked that one.) Even if they kicked her back out, it would have been better than abandoning the class. Better than giving up.

But, she could not collect herself.

How does one gather all their bits and pieces once they’re only flakes of ash?

She didn’t have that kind of magic.

She wasn’t that special.

Clutching Evie, Dalia ran her thumb over the soft cloth of the good luck stuffie. It caught on something, and she glanced down at a loose seam on the elephant’s chest. A bit of stuffing bled out, and she slipped her thumb inside its fabric body.

She stared at it.

She ripped her thumb downward, tearing the seam, pulling the fabric apart. A mass of fluff bloomed, and Dalia yanked more and more of it out until the pathetic thing was limp and empty and her lap was snowy with shredded white.

“What are you doing?!” her mother cried.

Dalia didn’t answer. She threw the useless, empty toy down on the dirty floorboard and buried her face in her arms.    

“Miss Karen lied to me!” she wailed, elbows heavy on her bent knees.

“What?”

“She said I had a good chance. But she lied!”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I couldn’t even plie right!”

Usually, Dalia’s mother was quick with pep talks. Now, after a flat silence, Dalia only heard, weakly, “All we can do is our best.”

It was not what Dalia wanted to hear, and her belly button collapsed into her tailbone.  

The most honest thing her mother said came after they finally rolled into the carport at  home. Dalia refused to touch the ruined stuffie, so her mother turned back to the passenger seat. She snatched the animal up and examined its construction before throwing it away in a trash bin faint with the sweet stink of rot.

“Should have made the stitches smaller,” her mother said. “Too big, and things come apart.”

***

But on that ride home, the sky a low, vast ceiling of bruised clouds, making even the highway claustrophobic, Celia’s tongue was heavy, immobile. She wanted to comfort her daughter, but she was too flustered by that place, the academy.

That ginormous, posh space was nothing like the warm cocoon of Karen’s messy little studio, where the students, the families, and the handful of teachers all knew each other intimately and loved one another well. That made Karen’s place nicer, really, despite the smelly carpet puked on a half-dozen times, the sirens wailing down the highway, the addicts camped out in the vacant, graffiti-spattered suite on the strip center’s west end.

It’s not perfect.

It certainly wasn’t.

But it doesn’t have to be.

At Karen’s, things were safe. Nurturing. She took roll and made sure the kids came to class. She got them to commit and act respectful, unlike the teachers at Dalia’s school. She turned out drill team officers at the nearby high schools, year after year. All the older kids who stuck with her ended up with their diplomas. Celia could afford her tuition, and when she couldn’t, Karen has all those little scholarships. She also went above and beyond for Celia when she kept Dalia at the studio late, when Celia had to take evening shifts at the Chili’s across the road to help pay for a sudden repair or crazy-ass medical bill.

Karen Kang was a jewel in the community.

Wasn’t she?

Of course she was.

And recently, Karen had offered something more, and only to Dalia— a special future, a surer one. She wanted to put the girl on track to become a professional dancer.

The evening she’d first mentioned it, back in May, Dalia was in tap class.

“Come here.” Karen had waved Celia into her office and shut the door.

A minute before, Celia’d been worrying whether they could afford another drive-through dinner, but that ground beef in their fridge had probably gone bad. And oh god, Taco Bell sounded so much easier than the Old El Paso kit, and Dalia probably had homework they’d need to get through before bed, and it’d be eight o’clock before they even got home, and Celia’d been up since 4:30 am, and it was only Tuesday…  

“Your daughter can go pro,” Karen said. “I know it. She just needs to audition for the ballet company’s school.”

“Wow.” Celia lowered herself into a metal chair. That chronic ache that felt like an illness—or maybe a curse—throbbed in her head and neck. Her throat was parched—she’d done more talking than usual that day because there had been a substitute, and since she was the aide, everything had fallen on Celia. She’d kill for a Dasani and a chance to just stretch out, rest her eyes. For the world to be quiet.

“What about the cost?” she’d asked instead.

“The academy will offer her a scholarship. I’m sure they’ll be eager to, given your situation. What a success she’ll be! What a story!”

Karen was a storyteller. She invented all kinds of stories for her students—it was one of the things that made her hugely popular. “If you don’t bend your knees when you land your jumps,” she’d told Dalia’s tot class way back when her daughter first started lessons, “you’ll get big green monster legs!”  

Karen saved other appeals for the older kids, more romantic and inspirational ones. Platitudes, usually, all very general. Variations on “Dream big!,” punctuated by personal anecdotes. Like the time Karen won the Bojangles Award when she was a student herself and, later, when she performed with the backup dancers for Hillary Duff at a fundraiser somewhere downtown.  

“It’s just…” Celia scanned Karen’s tiny, cluttered space. A faded, wrinkled poster of Baryshnikov leaping across a stage, an ancient Capezio ad, hung on the wall. The man had been retired for decades. “…That’s so major. So big. Dalia’s in a good situation now.”

What she couldn’t say to Karen—her child’s happiness had been hard won. The joy and pride Dalia had found in the studio had been the one thing giving her a solid sense of purpose and self-worth, and Celia did not want that rattled. She worried about Dalia otherwise. Sometimes, the teachers and interventionists at school were good; often, they were not.

Last year, they were terrible.   

Another poster, one of those typical motivational ones, hung opposite the old advertisement. Against a navy background and yellow celestial bodies, the pale shape of a crescent moon contained the curlicue text Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

“I know it’s intimidating, Celia,” Karen said, her petite frame filling the small space as it always did. “But don’t you want big things for her?”

Of course she did.

“Don’t you believe in her?” Karen was smiling, but her hands crept up to the waist of her black Soffe shorts. Her lipstick was as crimson and loud as her zippered leotard. Her throaty voice thrummed with energy and enthusiasm. Optimism. Ferocity. All the things Celia lacked. It carried something else, too.    

Beneath the tiny woman’s gaze, Celia rubbed her bare lips together, then said, “I only want the best for Dalia.”

Karen cocked her head. “Why wouldn’t this be the best?”

Now, in the car, Celia’s stomach was sour. She’d eaten something rotten.

What the hell did Karen Kang know about professional ballet, anyway? Everyone idolized her, but what was she, really? A musical theater major from a small, no-name college who’d done a few stints on cruise ships before opening her business. It was a business first, and Karen understood marketing.

Thoughts of Karen’s socials slithered through Celia’s mind.

Join our magical community! #balletdreams #karenkang

We’re in the business of making dreams come true. #danceschool #dreambig

What might Karen have posted, if today had gone better?

How I turned one child’s hopes into reality. #balletinspo #balletislife

Karen might even have arranged for a local publication to do a piece about Dalia, and about herself, too, her business. It was the kind of thing Karen did.

“Publicity is bread and butter,” Celia once overheard her say.

Stories everywhere.  

Yet… Look at all the good Karen does.

Could she really have…?

Maybe. But—

Celia’s nausea intensified.

You know whose fault this really is.  

She tried again with her daughter, though she kept her eyes straight ahead. “I saw a pamphlet in the lobby, Dalia. The academy does free community workshops and open classes.”

Grinding her teeth, Celia omitted the word “outreach.”

 “You can take some of those to improve your steps. Then you can try out again, maybe next year. If you want to.”

“No!” 

Celia clenched the ten and two of the wheel, knuckles bloodless. They’d exited the freeway, and she slammed on the brakes, nearly running a red light.

Fuck you, Karen Kang. 

***

The thin form letter arrived even faster than Dalia expected, only two days after the audition.

Her mother forced her to open it.

Thank you for your interest in our program. Regretfully, we cannot offer you, Dalia Harris, a place on our fall roster. We encourage you to continue dancing, however, and to audition again at a later date …

It was perfectly polite, and cold, and it burned Dalia’s fingers. She tore it up and scattered the pieces across the brown linoleum floor of their apartment’s galley kitchen. The bits fluttered down like ash.

It was early September. Dalia went back to Karen’s only three more times before she quit.

Now, the place was too cramped, too hot and dark. She couldn’t stand how it smelled like feet, how clumsy and clueless all the loud, yapping children were. What a stupid mirage it all was.

What a dead end.

Karen’s words no longer meant anything to Dalia, except when she said, “You should have finished the audition, Dalia. You don’t know what their decision would have been.”

“I don’t understand.” Dalia cut her eyes at her once-beloved teacher.

“They know everyone’s at different levels, but they’re looking for potential. They’re examining body type, quality of movement, and attitude. Not necessarily technique. That lady gave you those corrections because she was teaching a class.”

Karen’s words slammed into her. The wreckage burned fast and hard.

“But you didn’t warn me about that!”  

“Enough, Dalia,” her mother said, her hands folded in front of her.

Karen shook her head. Nothing about her face or posture indicated guilt.

All she said was, “You should have stayed.” 

Her words scorched themselves into Dalia’s memory. Eventually, they made their way far enough down to sear her heart.

So, Dalia set about learning how to stay, in other places.

Often, places far less warm than Karen’s.    

***

Thank you for reading. Also, many thanks to Jenny Irish and Gloria Herdt for their feedback on earlier drafts of this story.

XOXO,

Jenn