The Art of Falling by Kathryn Craft Read Free Book Online

chest, and long, strong legs. None of the womanly lumps and bumps that would detract from a clean line. That day I needed to go home and see my father’s face light up when he saw the girl I still thought of as me. To hear him call me his “mysterious little artist,” his smile promising that my identity would not be tainted by the inappropriate blossoming of my body. I wanted to bury myself in his arms until I felt reassured, from a source I trusted more than my overly invested mother, that I was still beautiful and worthy.
    But my father never came home that night.
    And by the next morning, he was dead.
    • • •
    For a month we moped around the house, my father’s customary absence now concrete, my future in dance an unspoken question between us. My mother and I poured our displaced creativity into the embellishment of Jell-O. It seemed the perfect choice: it is one of the few foods that can sustain movement. One day, while eating lime with cottage cheese and pineapple, we read in the paper that Muhlenberg College was bringing Bebe Browning in from Philadelphia to teach evening modern dance classes. The possibility of a fresh start inspired me to phone for more information.
    Because I was too young for continuing ed classes, I had to meet with Miss Browning for a private audition. My mother was asked to wait outside. Miss Browning demonstrated steps, which I repeated. Her movement called, I responded. She pulled things from me and I pushed my limits—and soon we’d lapsed into one of the most exciting conversations of my life, held entirely without words.
    I fell hopelessly in love, both with my new teacher and with modern dance. Fall and recovery, contraction and release—this language spoke of the effort it takes to create meaning in life. My body had loved the exacting standards of ballet, but modern dance claimed my imagination as well. Engaged in co-creating every movement—adapting it to my body, interpreting Miss Browning’s ideas, seeking a story within each dance that made sense to me—my mind was too busy to cave in to new anxieties about my shape.
    During my junior year, I drew the first boundary between my mother and me, and moved into the small apartment above Miss Browning’s studio to finish high school at CAPA. Leaving my mother was hard, but necessary if I were to dance my dream instead of hers. Once I pressed my bare feet to Bebe’s floor, I never wore a pair of pointe shoes again.
    Or ate Jell-O. Having a wiggle in your middle may have been perfectly acceptable to my mother, who ran the candy factory she’d inherited, but I was determined to succeed at weight maintenance where she could not. For this I would credit Miss Judith.
    Now that I’d returned to dance, I vowed to do everything in my power to never again inspire such humiliation.
    • • •
    “It was breast cancer,” my mother was saying. “Miss Judith was only forty-eight. I guess the school is closing.” She paid the toll and pulled through the booth. “Hey, you could reopen it. Wouldn’t that be a headline full of poetic justice? ‘Rejected Ballerina Returns after Successful Professional Career.’”
    “I can hardly walk.”
    “Martha Graham choreographed from a chair for years—”
    “She was almost a hundred years old.” I didn’t bother asking her to stop making such comparisons, though. My mother had always seen me on par with the world’s legendary dancers, living or dead. When I was young, it thrilled me to hear I was as quick as Kirkland or as quirky as Tharp. But I was starting to wonder if, when she looked at me, she really saw me .
    “We’ll have plenty of time to check out the want ads. I have the new issue of Dance Magazine at home and I already circled a bunch. I know the director of the arts council, too. He might have some leads.”
    “You don’t even know what I’ve been through—”
    “And whose fault is that?” she snapped.
    She let the question dig at me while we passed the Cape Cods