Astonish Me: A novel by Shipstead Maggie

Author:Shipstead, Maggie [Shipstead, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307962911
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

III

APRIL 1986—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

SOME DAYS WHILE JOAN TEACHES, HARRY GOES TO HIS FRIEND Dale’s house after school, and other days he comes to the studio and does his homework behind the reception desk or on the lobby floor by the big window into the studio. Joan has asked him if he wouldn’t like to try dancing, but he politely declined, just as he turned down soccer, baseball, tennis, and karate. At a loss, she and Dale’s mother signed them both up for swim team. Harry goes and swims with little complaint, but he is fundamentally an indoor child, dreamy and thoughtful and given to abrupt, consuming interests (astronauts, trains, submarines) that require semiweekly trips to the library for books he races through, shoveling information into himself like coal into a furnace.

The little girls in Joan’s classes wear black leotards and pink tights and have their hair done up in buns decorated with bright scrunchies or little pink crocheted cozies. Their limbs are too thin or too plump; their bodies are incapable of grace but full of will and infantile pomposity. “Stand like a turkey,” she tells them, gesturing to her own lifted chest, the way her weight is slightly forward. “Be over the balls of your feet, but not too far.” With the addition of a gauzy black skirt, she wears what they do.

She likes to teach the girls who are just starting to go en pointe. As a warning, she shows them her own feet, pointing out the knobby protrusions, the toenail that has simply given up and stopped growing, the thick yellow calluses. “Still want to do it?” she asks them. They do. She tells them how she went through a pair of shoes every day when she was performing with the company. All the dancers got custom-made shoes. Hers came from London. Once she went to the factory and met the man who made them, and he had asked to see her feet because he wanted to find out if they were as he imagined. Joan shows the girls how to sew on the satin ribbons and rough up the pointe. She demonstrates how to tape their toes and pad them with lamb’s wool. She leads them over to the rosin box, and one by one they step experimentally into the sticky dust. One day, she tells them, each of you will have your own method for getting your shoes just right. Then she leads them to the barre, and up they all go like seven baby giraffes: spindly, ankles trembling. First position, face the barre, plié, here we go, ladies, and relevé, and roll through your foot, whole foot, all the way up. Back down, and cambré back. Remember to push down to go up, and pull up to go down. Now again in second position. Only a few minutes for the first time, but they almost look like dancers.

Chloe Wheelock is taking a beginning jazz class. Joan hadn’t recognized her when she first caught sight of her through the big window, only noticed her pleasing lines and proportions.

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