“Are you kidding? I adored it. For one thing, it got me out of the house to a place where I met other kids. For another, I was good at it. I loved the sensation of moving freely across a big, open floor. Our poky house in Cherry Hill was so cluttered you couldn’t take three steps in one direction. The sense of release was indescribable.”
“Like hang-gliding.”
She looked at him in surprise. She had never connected the two experiences before. “That’s true. Well, dancing became the main thing in my life. It fed my fantasies. I must have looked ridiculous, with the baby fat of a five-year-old, trying to execute an arabesque, but in my imagination I was Ulanova or Fonteyn and prettier than either one. Once a year the ballet teacher treated us to a trip to New York to see one of the great companies perform The Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake. For months after that I would lie awake at night re-creating the scenes in my mind, with myself as prima ballerina assoluta, naturally. Okay, millions of small girls have dreamed the same dreams and outgrown them as other things came into their lives. In my case it wasn’t horses or boys or the pop scene that crowded out ballet. It was a decision of my parents. I should have mentioned that when I was three my brother, Marty, was born.”
“Your parents’ last child?”
“Yes. They stopped at two. It didn’t change things at first. He was just a baby. I don’t recall any strong feelings of jealousy or rejection. It was only as Marty grew older that I noticed my father taking some interest in him — you know, playing ball and other boys’ games. That didn’t bother me, really. Ballet was all I wanted to play, and I couldn’t expect Daddy to share in that.”
“Did your mother?”
Sarah smiled and shook her head. “She was remote. Her thoughts were all on the good life she was missing. She spent a lot of time looking through magazines. She would read one through from cover to cover, then start again at page one. But I was telling you about Marty. Pretty soon it was obvious he was a smart kid, I mean really intelligent for his age. He was reading before he was four, actually making sense of the books I had scarcely got through at school, and I was well up in my class. They let him start school six months early. Even so, he was way ahead of the other kids. He began to get frustrated with the elementary stuff being taught.”
Ed nodded. “There’s masses of research now into the problems of the gifted child, but that’s the outcome of the campaign that parents and teachers had barely started in the sixties. What happened? Was he moved to a special class, or put in with older kids?”
“What happened was that in third grade the principal called my father in and told him they couldn’t offer Marty the education his intelligence warranted. Because he was bored, he was becoming disruptive and a problem for the teachers. He wasn’t truly delinquent. If he could be educated with a select group of kids of his intelligence, he would almost certainly have no problems at all. But that wasn’t possible within the public school system in our area. The nearest school for kids with exceptional IQs was New York City.”
“That’s right. Two or three opened in the sixties.”
“Great, but you can’t have an eight-year-old traveling a hundred miles to school each day. So what else could the principal suggest?”
“Private school?”
“You got it. With the superior facilities of a small private school, Marty was judged to be capable of getting into a first-rate college. So it was all fixed, and he was sent off to a fancy private school in Philadelphia.”
“How did you take this?”
“At eleven, I found it difficult to comprehend. I couldn’t see why Marty had to go to a private school when there was a perfectly good public one half a mile up the road, where I went. We weren’t close, but at least we shared the same house and parents. No, I don’t think I was jealous. I had managed without a brother before, so I would again. But there was one thing I hadn’t figured on. Marty’s tuition was over three thousand dollars a year, and that meant drastic budgeting in the family. Sacrifices.”
“The dancing?”
Sarah’s throat ached at the recollection, but she kept her voice steady. “I had done as well as you could at eleven years old: four grades in classical ballet, two in tap and modern. I was confident that in another two years I would be good enough to join a really serious ballet school. After that, fantasy took over. Who do you think was set to be the first American prima ballerina to dance with the Bolshoi in Moscow? I guess I would stretch the point and make a guest appearance with the Kirov — by popular demand. And if the Queen asked, I would do a season with the British Royal Ballet.” She smiled, looking down at the table. “They stopped my classes. At eleven, I was an ex-ballet dancer.”
“Your dream world collapsed?”
“That was the worst day of my life. My father put it to me that Marty’s education was more important than my dancing because it would affect his whole life. When I asked about my life, he wasn’t interested. He couldn’t afford the expense of my going on with ballet classes, or the price of new shoes every five weeks. As for a big-time ballet school, it had never been a possibility. He told me to grow up and find more constructive ways of passing my time. I hated him. I hated my mother for sitting in the same room leafing through Vogue while this was being said. I pleaded, I screamed, and ultimately I collapsed. I was physically ill for weeks.”
“I’m not surprised. The way you tell it, it still hurts. Tell me, did this make you hate your brother as well?”
That was difficult. She wanted earnestly to give an accurate answer, but she could not disentangle her memory of Marty from a mass of twisted metal that had scored a crazy line across the surface of State Highway 70. “I can’t say now. I guess I was deeply resentful at the injustice. But that’s not the same as hatred, is it? I was mad at Marty because, to my childish way of thinking, he had pulled a trick on my parents. Instead of being punished for making trouble in school, he was being treated like he was some kind of hero. And what did I get for being a diligent pupil no teacher ever needed to reprimand? The loss of the one beautiful thing in my life.” Sarah paused and sipped some wine. “Ed, I’m sorry. I don’t know how I got started on this. You must hear stories like this every day. You invited me to dinner, not psychotherapy.”
He pointed his fork at her in a way that compelled attention. “Little lady, I told you I’d like to know you better, and I meant it. What really gets under my skin is when my friends won’t tell me one thing about their lives because I might analyze them. I’m interested in you as a person.”
Sarah smiled. “It’s mutual. Now tell me about yourself.”
He drew back in his chair, put down the fork, and for a moment looked distinctly uneasy. “Have some more salad. You haven’t eaten much.”
“Come on,” she urged. “I guess you’re so used to listening to other people that you get out of the habit of talking about yourself. How do you relax, for instance?”
He floundered a little. “Relax? I like to think I’m relaxed most of the time. It’s pretty important in my job.”
Sarah insisted. “You must have some interest outside of your work.”
His smile returned. “Like taking pretty girls to dinner? No, this is an extremely rare pleasure. I guess if I have a pastime, it’s the theater. Do you like modern drama?”
She was answering his question before she realized how neatly he had sidestepped. When the coffee was put on the table, they were still deep in discussion about productions they had seen.
Suddenly she was aware of him studying her face. He was gearing up to suggest something. “Sarah, would you make my evening complete?”