But no matter how I tried to imagine it, I couldn’t quite see myself in that role.
The next time I took the train north from the city, using my day off for one of my command performance dinners with my parents, I tried to imagine that this was my commute home. That I’d come down into the city to see Annabelle, perhaps, and was now returning to my small little suburban life. Back to the Darcy James Ballet School, where ambitious mamas would bully their little girls into tutus, bully me into pretending they could dance, and calling all that failure and imperfection ballet.
It made me feel hollow.
I took a taxi from the train station when I arrived, the better not to inconvenience my parents, and stared out at the Connecticut countryside that I knew so well. I had grown up here. I didn’t dislike it, or go to great lengths to separate myself from its suburban grasp the way I knew Annabelle did. But by the same token, when all was said and done, I had never imagined myself here.
I had always imagined myself onstage.
I tried to snap myself out of it when the car turned into the long drive that led to my childhood home. I made myself breathe properly as the stone house, fashioned like an opulent farmhouse, came into view. It was lit up bright and cheery against the autumn night, and I told myself that I was, too.
But no visit to my parents was ever without tension.
I was a grown, independent woman, but I still dressed for them instead of myself. A smart pair of flats instead of the comfortable boots I preferred. Black leggings, but not worn as pants, as I knew that was one of my mother’s pet peeves. I wore a little A-line shift dress over the leggings, and it wasn’t until I glanced at myself in the hall mirror in the foyer that I realized I already looked like the suburban ballet mistress who haunted my future.
I’d draped myself in several scarves to break up the relentless black and pulled my hair back into the ubiquitous ballet bun, but that didn’t change the facts. I had never seen a woman either in the ballet or adjacent to the ballet—of any age—who didn’t dress...exactly like this. As if we spent our lives in corps whether we were dancing or not.
Welcome to your life, I told myself sharply. Better get used to it now.
I wandered farther into the house, following the sound of my parents’ favorite classical music station into the back of the house. Evenings were always conducted in the chic, sophisticated kitchen complete with sofas arranged around a cozy fireplace and the sort of dramatic flower arrangements that could only be maintained by twice-weekly visits from the florist. Sure enough, my mother stood at the counter, putting the finishing touches on a meal I knew she hadn’t cooked. That was the province of the housekeeper. While she added her own little flourishes to the dinner she needed only to warm, my father sat near the fire, lost behind The New York Times.
I hovered in the wide archway a moment, not sure why it had never occurred to me before that I had first learned the rules of performance here. In this house, where the appearance of perfection had always been valued far above any kind of honesty or emotion. This was where I’d learned to dance long before I’d learned the basics of the five positions that were the foundation of ballet.
But maybe that was straying too far into the cynicism I had so boldly told Sebastian I didn’t possess.
My mother was slim, her hair more silver than black these days. Even though this was a dinner at home, she was dressed elegantly. She was always dressed elegantly. Dark, exquisitely tailored pants over flats that gleamed. And above, the sort of fitted, understated jacket that was undoubtedly sourced from some designer recognizable by a single name. She wore pearls at her ears, a simple gold chain at her neck. On her left hand, she wore one exquisite diamond that my father had placed there some thirty years ago. She was the kind of woman other people, who didn’t dance professionally, always claimed looked like a dancer. They meant she stood tall, was thin, and carried herself with a certain air of purpose.
I really was a professional dancer, but I’d never come close to my mother’s elegance. And looking at her now, I felt a familiar ache inside me that reminded me I never would. I could dance myself silly, and I had. And would, as long as I could. But it was my mother who commanded rooms with an arch of one brow.
If she’d taken to the stage, I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that my mother would have easily become a prima ballerina. Sometimes I suspected she knew it, too.
Maybe that was the sharp little thing beneath my heart that always pulsed so painfully when I was near her.
“Do come inside, Darcy,” she said then, her voice a cool reproach. “I’m not sure why you’re lurking in the doorway like that.”
“Hi, Mom,” I replied, fighting to keep from sounding like a petulant child. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
Dinner wasn’t strained, because my mother was always the consummate hostess. My father, who had been exactly this stout and stern and mustached as long as I could remember, told carefully curated stories that gave the appearance of joviality. My mother steered the
conversation from his stories to topics of general interest, then back again. She always asked questions, then pretended to be interested in the answers. He always pretended to be as entertained as he was entertaining.
I sat there dutifully and pretended to be perfect.
It was like every dinner I could remember in this house. We sat stiffly in the sophisticated dining room with its gleaming mahogany table, the hand-polished chandelier, and my grandmother’s silver.
“You must be excited about the new ballet season,” my mother said. Her formidable gaze met mine. “Is there any hope that this is your year at last?”
She meant, When can I tell our friends that you’re dancing a solo instead of merely leaping around in the back?
“It’s been almost a decade,” my father chimed in, as if I’d missed that. “You deserve a promotion.”
“It doesn’t really work like that.”
“Have you tried, dear?” my mother asked.
She didn’t ask it snidely. There was no edge to her voice at all. She sounded as cool, composed, and carefully neutral as she always did.
There was no reason whatsoever that I should feel this...thing erupt inside of me.