Man. What do I categorize this under? “Yoga”?
How This Could Have Happened
1995: I’d wanted ballet lessons for as long as I could remember. In 1995, at the age of twelve, I got them.
It was my stepmom who spearheaded the whole thing. She took me to our local Capezio. I picked out my own pair of soft pink shoes, a black leotard, pale tights and a white chiffon skirt. Every Sunday she dropped me off at lessons, and an hour later she picked me back up.
When I wasn’t in class, I gazed arduously at those soft pink shoes. I practiced the warm-up exercises in the hallways of the junior high, and in the back stage during drama club meetings, pointing my toe out to the side, raising an arm, circling back.
I felt at home in ballet. There was nothing about it that wasn’t pretty, controlled, quiet. My friend Johanna had been a ballerina for most of her life already, and when she showed me the tapes of her performing as a mouse in a production of “The Nutcracker” I nearly cried with jealousy. I wanted to be in “The Nutcracker” so badly. You could have made me a candy cane.
1996: “I don’t think you’re quite ready for level II,” the instructor told me. “I think it’d do you some good to take another level I class.”
We were standing outside the door to the classroom. I looked in at my level-II-ready classmates, running and giggling or sitting strangely in the middle of the room, sucking a thumb. When they weren’t taking ballet class, they were amusing themselves with other necessary schooling appropriate for their age group: preschool, kindergarten, first grade. Our age discrepancies had always been clearest to me in the long mirror that stretched across our classroom, where, during flights from one end to the next, I could observe my head bobbling at twice the height of my peers’, like a baby giraffe in a pen of piglets. Whenever we swung our legs back I had to make sure I wasn’t about to knock some distracted, Lifesaver-mouthed princess’ teeth out.
I thought about that. I thought about a whole new troupe of them, the same age next year, and me a year older: thirteen, fourteen years old in a sea of toddlers.
“So what do you think? Do you want to take the same lessons again next year?” my stepmom asked.
We Were Rooting For You
We sat on chairs, couches, pillows, floors, we stood in lines against the stair railing — we watched CNN, NBC, and even Fox to see what they were saying about you. And, apropos for our generation, we happened to be watching The Daily Show when your projected victory was officially announced.
It’s odd, getting news like that on Comedy Central. For what seemed like ages, we just stared at the graphic they’d thrown onto our screen. “Wait, seriously?” someone said.
Then, as if one cue, the whole room erupted in screams, applause, and hollers. We awaited your speech. (Full album.)
Chaos in the Cat House
We’d both agreed, before going to the creepy wood-paneled house with six cat cages, twenty humans, three dogs and four kittens in the living room that we would only take a cat home if it was the perfect second cat. I was pushing for an elderly, marmalade-colored female.
“So . . . what do you think?” I asked an hour and ten cats later. I was holding a five-month-old scrawny male, with grey spots and a siamese nose. He’d been one of the first cats we’d picked up, and drooped into our arms obligingly, falling asleep within minutes. We’d wondered aloud if he’d been drugged.
Jurvis gave me his overwhelmed, “I can’t make decisions right now, please, please don’t make me” face.
After Dark in the Apocalypse
I. Until fairly recently, I had a respectable monthly allowance of expendable income. The target of said expendable income had become, for better or worse, ritzy clothing retailers. Silk, modal, lace, one-hundred-dollar pairs of pants, elaborate bras, uncomfortable shoes: over the years, my wardrobe blossomed like an Anthropologie flower brooch.
These days I make just enough to get by, but I still wear my former life’s clothing. The other evening I found myself sailing on a bicycle down Spring Hill with green-black oil smudging my ankle bones, sweat dripping down my neck: wearing a dry-clean-only blouse. I had loved it five months ago for its color, just slightly off-white, like the inside of a Creamsicle.
II. When we were first outfitting our bicycles with the necessary accessories, I had gotten the mid-range kinda-okay lights, vowing that since bicycling after dark was dangerous and frightening I would only do it when circumstances absolutely required — but it was after midnight when we decided to go on our first bike adventure. We had ridden the mile or so to our friends’ apartment earlier in the evening, and as the night wore on someone suggested we hop on the Minuteman.
It was a cool summer evening, perfect for bike rides, and for back porches and home-brewed cider and surprise-we-own-a-canoe-now-honey anecdotes.
“You guys have never ridden at night?” Angie cried. “We should remedy that. Soon. Right now.”
We’d have to ride on Mass Ave to access the Minuteman’s entrance — an infinite, four to six-lane road that connects everything I know of Boston — and which I had also vowed I would never set bike upon. Mass Ave is terror and frustration, no u-turns allowed. Mass Ave is too important for your tiny legs. Mass Ave would kill you deliberately, slowly and painfully, if it meant getting there five minutes earlier. But I trusted Angie and Aaron’s biking sensibilities. Both of them are the kinds of bikers I’d like to be — which is to say, commuters, builders, repairers, and unrelenting law-abiders.
Aaron donned a blinking vest and showed me how to adjust my helmet for ultimate brains protection. We slung our frames over our shoulders and carried the bicycles down to the streets.