Dances by Nicole Cuffy

Author:Nicole Cuffy [Cuffy, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

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I wake to Jasper settling his body over mine, early-morning sun reaching for the bed. I sigh into his mouth, forgiveness coming quickly. He cups my face with a hand, uses the other to pull my knee up. My hip cracks loudly and we laugh, our foreheads pressed together. I hook my arm around his neck, use it as leverage until I fall back, turning my face and burying it in the pillow to muffle myself. I enjoy the aftershocks with Jasper’s body still pressed on top of mine, his weight a ballast, our sweat mingling, and—and this mass, a clotted snarl of cells between us, beating against my abdomen, his abdomen. I shudder and Jasper kisses me nearly hard enough to bruise.

I shower first, and when I emerge Jasper, still naked, is sprawled across the bed on his stomach, looking at his phone. He waves it at me as I approach. I sit down next to him and he plays me a YouTube video—a line of black-clad dancers on a stage undulate in a wave to a haunting score of polyphonic overtone singing. It’s strange and beautiful, the dancers sinewy and fluid. I note that one of the Black women has a large ’fro.

“I googled your friend’s company,” Jasper says.

One of the male dancers breaks the line, stepping forward and doing a kind of grand fouetté sauté. The line of dancers behind him spin around in quick succession, turning their backs to the audience. The polyphonic singing is unsettling, it’s nauseating me. I lean down to rub my face in Jasper’s hair.

“We’ll be late,” I say.

Jasper takes his shower and we dress and carpool to the studios with Rohan and Fran. I keep unconsciously putting my hand to my stomach, like worrying at a wound; my knuckles press into my belly during the drive. I can feel my own fraught heartbeat.

Kaz is giving class today, which is good because he gives complicated combinations. Maybe it’ll help me not think. My teeth hurt as we begin and I worry that they’re going to fall out. I read somewhere that women in the old days used to lose their teeth when they got pregnant. Something about insufficient nutrition. Don’t I need folic acid? Where does one get folic acid outside of prenatal vitamins? I don’t even take a regular multivitamin.

Front front side side back back. And…

I imagine the fetus as a bloody clump of flesh at my core, both revolting and somehow not, like a vital organ. I heat up quickly at the barre. I take off my cardigan, exposing my glistening, bony décolletage to the air. The gradual removal of junk clothes in class is a performance in and of itself. Every discarded garment means something—signal of another movement, cuing of the next act. Tendrils of hair stick like wet tentacles to my temples. I will have to use the flat iron later.

And fondu and relevé and second plié passé passé retiré and stay stay stay…

I check my silhouette in the mirror, half expecting to see some kind of bulge, some kind of tell.

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