Equanimity

Equanimity

Her feet were sore. She had been standing on the tips of wood inside her shoes, and now she sat massaging them.

“You’re on in five minutes.”

“Now?”

“No, five minutes. Get your head on your shoulders. It’s packed tonight.”

God, I cannot wait to get out of this costume, she thought, still wearing it.

The other dancers came backstage, giggling and cheering among themselves. “You were amazing.” “No, that turn—I saw it. You are the best.” Then they stopped, looking at the final dancer, the prima donna.

“Good luck,” one of them said.

She smiled back. They looked at her, then laughed. One made a comment she could have sworn was about her, though she knew it wasn’t.

Do not lose your nerve now.

She remembered her father, an abusive man who drank too much. Those early memories, her introduction to violence at home, had become the kindling of her ballet. Her grace. Her secret weapon, she had always told herself.

These other dancers danced, but they did not know the story as well as the prima donna.

Stravinsky. The Rite of Spring. In this telling, the virgins ran into the woods, and the men chased after them, catching them to claim their brides. But the one who was fastest, the cleverest, the one who thought she could outwit and outrun them, was caught last. They raped her to death.

The stagehand approached as she stood at the side.

“Now.”

It was time to take the spotlight, to stand in full view. This dance hurt her. This story. Yet something within her found solace in dancing it, in standing at the center of the men as the last one caught, the one who knew how to run away the fastest. What happened to her would be shown through the dance: a woman turning upon herself, surrounded, pirouetting to death.

She strode onto the stage. The music began. The shadows of men, their characters clothed in darkness, began to surround her. She moved one way, and a man stopped her. Another way, another man. Her hands rose into the air. Another came forward. The music began to churn, and the director looked up and signaled for her to begin what she had disciplined herself her whole life to do.

She found her place and turned, then turned again, the pitch rising, the tempo quickening, her feet returning her to the same place, her head finding the same point again and again, faster now, the men around her, the music pushing toward an impossible tempo, and still she found the point, still she turned, the tears replacing the pain beneath her, her head coming around, finding it, losing it, finding it again as the tears circled about her and flew away, waves of her own dwindling compassion for herself, away and away, and she turned, the fastest, the smartest, the most cunning, and she had not escaped, she had not escaped the rape of man.

The curtain fell. Boom.

“Brava! Bravissimo! Magnifico! Prima donna!”

She heard the calls from the other side of the curtain. No longer faces. Only voices remained, slowly ending, endlessly.