“You OK?” The porch light from my place shone on his face. He looked genuinely concerned.
“Yeah, sorry. I’m really beat. I don’t think I’m up for anything tonight.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “Yeah, fine, but are you OK?”
Was I OK? I didn’t know. I probably would be tomorrow. “Your song was phenomenal,” I said, which I realized didn’t answer his question, but it was the truth.
The next morning, I overslept so severely that I had to vault out of bed and run to the dining hall so as to not miss breakfast. I’d been so weirdly overwrought when I got back to my cabin last night that I’d forgotten to set my old-school alarm clock, so I’d missed my morning swim.
I’d freaked out last night, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. The homesick-in-advance feeling had stuck around, kept me tossing and turning until the wee hours. I felt better this morning, but jumpy. I told myself I would chill as I worked on the new Lori dance, which was my plan for the day. I would, of course, beworkshopping it with the counselors and the kids, but we were tight enough on time that I was going to get moving on some ideas.
I ate a big bowl of oatmeal with fruit and headed out. I took the extreme step of locking myself in the dance studio. Generally we kept the doors open. Because of the heat, but also because of the overall vibe of Wild Arts. There was something about being surrounded by people making art that upped your own game. I thought of the times I’d listened in on Teddy and Anna.
But not today. I could only hope that as was generally the case on weekends, the kids and counselors would be off doing regular camp things—there was a two-hour canoe trip this morning that at least some of the dance girls had opted into.
The Lori dance wasn’t that hard. I knew Hong and Harper. Not just as dancers, but as people. I knew how the dance was meant to slot into the overall performance, in terms of both pacing and style. It was like adding a missing paragraph to an essay or finding a missing puzzle piece under your sofa.
As I ran through it one final time, doing Harper’s new part, I found myself adding a calypso leap on the end. It didn’t belong there. It made no sense within the grammar of the dance. But my body wanted to do it. To add it on like an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence. Except that wasn’t right, because this leap wasn’t a punctuation mark that signified an ending. It was more of a transition. A beginning, even.
I’d been doing this particular leap off Teddy’s porch a lot. I didn’t even know why, except that it just… came out. Maybe his porch was a good height.
Which made no sense, because the whole point of a leap was that you started on the ground and ended on the ground.Starting from a higher vantage point, like a porch, gave you a head start. It was cheating, basically.
So why couldn’t I stop doing it?
Why did I run over to the potting studio and liberate an unused bench they sometimes used to display pieces and drag it back to the dance studio and leap off it approximately a million times?
What did it all mean?
I wasn’t sure, but suddenly there was a flash of lightning in my brain and I started thinking about the opposite concept: how would I execute a calypso leap—or any leap—if I wanted to start on the ground and land on the bench?
I asked myself again why I would want to. What it would mean.
What did it mean when I leapedoffporches oroffthat bench? Why was I doing that?
I thought the answer was that it was an expression of joy. The head start made the leap extra big, made my body feel extra buoyant. I tried to put some specificity to that feeling. Like, what would be an example?
The first thing that came to mind was Teddy. Well, not Teddy per se, but that feeling I’d had when we were negotiating the last hurrah.I don’t feel like I have to watch what I say, or care what I look like, because I don’t care whatyouthink I look like, I’d said, and I’d literally laughed out loud from the thrill of it.
So… I was leaping because I was liberated. That wasn’t very deep.
I closed my eyes and summoned one of the vignettes that had been accumulating in my mind. It was a woman dancing up a hill. Not dancing in a happy way, but working hard against gravity, exhausting herself.
So if leaping with a head start—off a porch, or a bench—was liberation, was the opposite also true? If I tried to leap but started from “below” somehow, from downhill, my body having to fight against gravity to make it happen, would the resulting leap signify heaviness, strife?
My legs got jumpy.
I had no way to try out this scenario. I did consider actually trying to leap onto the bench, but it was narrow and rickety and I didn’t want to hurt myself and leave the dance group leaderless. Instead, I… pretended. Imagined a giant slope that I never managed to crest. Did it over and over again, thinking about the woman in the vignette in my head until I became her.
The piece was about the shitty men of Tinder, it turned out. About what it felt like to be the recipient of their unsolicited opinions, even as one was doing one’s best to live up to their expectations.
I suspected it was also about men generally. Aboutlifegenerally. What an uphill climb it was sometimes to exist as a woman in the world, in both the personal and professional realms. But when I thought about it like that, I got spooked. That was too big a theme. So I just danced.
At seven, when I emerged, I felt… new. Scraped clean, somehow. I decided to knock on Caleb’s door, to tell him about my day. I’d followed my body through the negative-start leaping it had seemed to want to do, and, after doing it enough times, I’d started to get what it meant. The meaning was coming through the steps. I’d never done things in that direction. For recital pieces at my studio, I had selected music, often according to a theme, and then put steps to the music.
I stopped on my way to Caleb’s. Would he get it, though?Maybe I should find Maiv. She would give me some box wine and be thrilled to hear about my day.
I knocked on Teddy’s door.
