I’m the sort of egotist who, in her own opinion, possesses an array of magnificent talents — from inventing the best salad dressing in creation (I swear to God it was me who thought of “cooking” raw garlic with cold lemon juice) to target-shooting with a rifle (basing this on something that happened at a county fair when I was 7). But the fact that I still manage to think of myself as a talented dancer is pretty funny. It is, as they used to say back in Nova Scotia, comical.
It’s been decades since I performed a jeté or assemble. My last ballet class was at Barnard College in 1990, and by then the studio mirror already reflected back to me a physical person I hardly recognized: I was already no longer the extremely limber high leaper of my childhood. Indeed, it’s unlikely I ever was the highly talented ballerina I thought I was; my optimistic nature, most likely, supplied a grace and agility that may, I admit, have existed primarily in my own self-perception and not in others’.
My ballet teacher was Gordon Peavy, of sainted memory, who had his studio in the Odd Fellows Hall on Newtown Lane, above what is now the Chanel store. There were deep-red roses along the snow-white fence outside Odd Fellows Hall and Mr. Peavy’s studio upstairs was very clean and very light, white walls and varnished wood floors and a mirror at one end that reflected back the light from the windows. The students, all girls, got changed in a dressing room at the top of the stairs with cubbies for our books, lunchboxes, and bags. Rose red, rose red! When I remember this setting of my childhood I think of the velvet texture of the petal of a Dame de Coeur rose.
Mr. Peavy kept a large bottle of Jean Naté After Bath Splash, a yellow bottle with a black cap, in the bathroom at his studio, and I would sometimes slip away from the barre so I could go to the bathroom to help myself to some. In memory, it had a lemony scent, with a bit of spice.
He had been an ice skater and had toured with Sonja Henie in “Holiday on Ice.” Do you remember Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure skater? She died in 1969! Mr. Peevy never went into detail about the circumstances in which he partnered Sonja Henie on ice, but she must have been well past her prime and he must have been young. Was Mr. Peavy in his 30s when I studied ballet with him upstairs, above the red roses, at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s? In his 40s?
These were the years when young girls kept posters of Mikhail Baryshnikov on their bedroom walls. I was the ballerina in class who didn’t have the good bun. My mother did not do my hair. I had to walk to Mr. Peavy’s from school and twist it up into a bun myself. We carried a supply of hair nets, bought at White’s Drug Store, and bobby pins for the required updo, but I never learned to get the bun into the sophisticated position that the other girls’ mothers got theirs into. Laura Krupinski’s bun was always perfection; her bun sat higher up on the crown, while mine was a bobble, like Olive Oyl’s, bouncing at the midline at the back of my head.
I was being raised in the spirit of “Free to Be You and Me,” and I wholeheartedly embraced the “Free to Be You and Me” message, which explains why I arrived at Mr. Peavy’s dance studio as an 8-year-old tomboy carrying both pink kidskin ballet slippers and a “Six Million Dollar Man” action figure. Lee Majors, who played the Six Million Dollar Man, was my first crush. I recall some of the other ballet girls, girls who attended Most Holy Trinity Elementary School and who were being raised in a more traditional manner — the 1950s parenting style, in which boys didn’t play with dolls and girls didn’t watch “The Six Million Dollar Man” — making narrow-eyed and critical remarks about my Six Million Dollar Man: “Why do you have that?!”
At first, I was something of a misfit in ballet class, having only just transferred in fourth grade to John M. Marshall Elementary School from the utopian hippie paradise of the Hampton Day School, where we did yoga instead of gym and ran barefoot through the high corn screaming “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor,” a sea chantey we had, in the high-strange 1970s, learned in chorus.
One of the other ballet students was already dieting. I greeted this news with surprise. I remember standing in my ballet leotard and bad bun as she sat on the bench in the changing room putting on her slippers and describing “the apple diet”: She ate an apple for breakfast, an apple for lunch, and an apple for dinner. I was amazed. So this was American girlhood. Mr. Peavy’s ballet class was where I discovered I wasn’t quite doing American femininity according to most people’s rules. Or, to put it another way, it was where I discovered that many girls were still doing it the old-fashioned way.
I always had the scratchier, more coral-pink ballet tights, too, rather than the smoother, paler-pink ballet tights that Laura and Christa Bistrian wore. To get our ballet clothes, our mothers had to drive us to Riverhead to a store that sold slippers and pointe shoes, and we had to sew our own satin ribbons onto them after we’d turned 12 and were allowed to go on pointe. We wrapped lambswool around our toes.
I will mention here that I had a good pointe. I may not have been Gelsey Kirkland, but I had a good arch. You can’t take that away from me.
Mr. Peavy had strict standards for dress and grooming. I was his student all the way through ninth grade, by which time I had become a punk rocker. I remember the afternoon when I’d used a black Magic Marker to paint my fingernails — no one sold black nail polish in those days, at least on Long Island — and as I held out my arms in a port de bras, Mr. Peavy gently took ahold of my left hand, inspected the manicure, and nodded his approval: at least I’d done my nails.
There are certain secrets of Mr. Peavy’s ballet studio that I honor and keep to this day. I will not reveal which fellow student it was who was already restricting herself to the apple diet at the age of 11, although I remember perfectly well. I will not say which girl told us how cruelly her father criticized her appearance. I will not mention, either, who it was among the studio cast of characters who had an alcoholic breakdown in the middle of class, and began pirouetting and staggering and laughing and crying theatrically around the light-filled studio as we were in the middle of our floor work, revealing — to a class now of only two of us remaining, two who had persisted all the way to the age of 13 — that the beverage in his mug hadn’t been coffee all this time, but was vodka. We never spoke of it.
My best memory of Mr. Peavy’s dance school, actually, was walking there from John Marshall after school in fourth grade. There was an overgrown field, a meadow, where the long-term parking lot is now, behind the Reutershan lot, and I’d leave school on foot and walk through this meadow where the milkweed grew. I remember the milkweed pods bursting open, which means this was probably in October, which means I was 8. The hard pods broke open and the white milkweed were softer than lambswool, lighter than a blown dandelion, filaments in array like a starburst or sun flare. As I walked through the meadow with my ballet bag and my Steve Austin doll, I’d reach out and grab a handful and toss it up; the floss floated in the air, diffusing the sun.