“Watch us, Mommy,” my younger daughter commands; and I oblige, lifting my eyes to see my two girls fluttering into the room on their tiptoes. They raise their arms and begin to twirl, compelled by a heartfelt spontaneity of movement that my own spirit has long ago subdued. As their spins and dips grow faster and more earnest, they tumble into each other and collapse into a heaving pile of laughter.
My oldest runs over to give me a hug, then leans into my ear. “When I grow up, Mama,” she confides, “maybe I will be a ballerina.”
I cannot suppress a wistful smile: at her age, I was going to be a ballerina, too.
When I was four, I used to pore over my ballet picture books, marveling at the lithe dancers en pointe and imagining myself floating on a stage in dreamy costumes. At last I mustered the courage to show the books to my mother. “Can I have shoes like that?” I asked her one evening, and she explained that those shoes were for dancing and could only be worn by ballerinas. “I want to be a ballerina,” I pleaded; and when she told me that there was a ballet school a few minutes away from our compound and I would have to work very hard for years before I would be able to wear pointe shoes and we would have to ask my grandmother if she would be willing to sponsor the classes because they were quite expensive and are you really sure you want to be a ballerina, I bobbed my head so eagerly in response that she signed me up the next day.
Our dance school was founded and directed by Teacher Shirley, who had been one of the principal dancers of the Philippine national ballet company, and who expected to produce the next generation of prima ballerinas in Quezon City. Her smile was warm and full of joy when we saw her in the hallways, but I rarely saw her smile in class. Teacher Shirley required perfection from every student from the two year olds to the teenagers, and she often walked around the studio to make minute adjustments to the rise of our chins, the curve of our arms, the stretch of our legs. Once satisfied, she would turn to the piano player and nod, and we would resume our dance, timed carefully to her call of the beats above the melody.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Only after class, when we had been dismissed to the courtyard behind the main studio, were we allowed to resume our childhoods. We would run to our yayas, who tucked washcloths into the back of our leotards to soak up our sweat, and we would devour the snacks they had brought from home.
The other girls in my class were all Filipino -- my sister and I were the only Americans at the time -- and many were incredibly talented. I used to watch in envy as my classmates easily opened into splits or swayed into a pirouette: I could barely touch my toes with my fingertips, let alone bend them to my forehead when we turned onto our tummies during floorwork. Even at four, my body was already curvier than those of my counterparts, whose slender limbs made mine look even plumper in comparison. My feet lacked quickness; my turns lacked precision. In my evaluations, Teacher Shirley diplomatically told my mother I needed to work on my flexibility. “But she has a natural grace,” my teacher added, “and that is something I cannot teach.” I have carried this nugget of promise with me ever since.
Years passed, and still I danced. My mother sent pictures of my sister and me in our tutus to our grandmother in California, who faithfully sent checks painstakingly taped into the folds of her letters to hide them from enterprising postal workers. I became friends with the classmates who had once smirked at my clumsiness, and we giggled together in line as we waited for our turn to perform in class. At the conclusion of each new level, I pulled out my old ballet books to gaze once again at my beloved pointe shoes. I was almost there.
One day, my mother picked me up from my best friend’s house for ballet class, and we drove toward the school as usual. The closer we drove to the neighborhood, the more sluggish traffic became, until we were at a near standstill. A few blocks down the road, giant plumes of black smoke were billowing into the air. “You might be late for class today,” my mother warned me; but as we crept forward it became evident that there would be no class that day. The school was engulfed in flames.
My mother pulled into the parking lot and I clambered out of the car in a daze. Picture book illustrations of buildings on fire came to life as flames snapped in and out of windows and debris pitched to the ground. I saw Teacher Shirley and wanted to run to her, but she was talking frantically to other adults, perhaps crying -- I wasn’t sure. I looked around the parking lot and saw my other classmates, some with their parents and others with their yayas. None of us knew the proper etiquette for exiting the scene of an emergency, so we stayed. My eyes locked with another girl from my class. We were eight by then, but we clung to our parents’ arms the way we had when we first started at the school.
The fire trucks finally arrived -- Teacher Shirley raced to the truck, her long legs perfectly turned out -- but the school continued to burn. My mother told me years later that the firemen demanded a bribe before they would turn on the hoses; and that despite Teacher Shirley’s begging and promises of money from her husband, who rushed to the bank to collect the funds, the firemen refused to fight the fire until they had received payment. It was too late by then. We stood and watched the school burn to ashes.
As I watched the building crumble, the studios where I had spent so many years dancing and leaping and loving, I was troubled to realize that along with my distress, I felt a spark of relief. And then it sank in for the first time: I was never going to be a ballerina. I went home that afternoon and put away my ballet books.
Teacher Shirley rebuilt the school and I did dance again, returning to a life of recitals and tutus and joy. I knew by then, though, that my ballet days were short lived; and so when my grandmother died the next year, I chose not to continue lessons. I was a month away from getting my pointe shoes.
But perhaps the ballerina spirit was never quite extinguished: a full decade later, when I was taking a Pilates class at Stanford, the instructor stopped by my mat. “You must be a ballerina,” she told me. “I can tell.”
So I look at my daughters, who are now twirling again while arguing over which of the two will get to marry Daddy when they grow up, and ponder whether dreams can be inherited. “Come,” I say, getting to my feet and taking their hands. “Let’s dance.”
