I was told told the body remembers
The instructors called it “muscle memory” and they told me I was getting it. In 1981 and 1982, in ballet class in NW Portland, I was working on the double and triple pirouette. I was getting it.
“You've been in ballet years now, you should have the double down.” They shook their heads. I should be better, after all this time.
Because I wasn’t taught the Cecchetti Technique I had not progressed as I should. They would save me. If I applied myself, I could “go professional” and become a soloist.
I wore a green leotard. I pulled it up at the hips, like the French underwear the models pulled up, nearly vertical in the Cosmopolitan magazines. It made my short legs look longer, but the other girls didn’t like it. It was provocative, sexual.
I did it anyway. I didn’t like how their legs were cut off at the hip, an even line of halt and conformity.
***
Richard told my mother, on the outside stoop one night, as if he was bragging, “There were girls I studied with in NY and I always felt like… if I wanted them? I'd Have ‘em!” Mama felt he was telling her if he wanted me, he’d have me. She was offended, but didn’t let him know that.
“You watch yourself around him, Theresa. He as much as told me he wants to take your virginity.”
But I really wasn’t a virgin. That had been destroyed in 1979, the year I was 13, in a flurry of hands and arms. Yet that’s how she said it, as if I was still untouched, still a virgin. I nodded my head. When Mama got intense, the only response was compliance.
I was the only daughter who did what I was told. She scared me and she knew it.
When they gave corrections, they put their hands down low on my pelvic bones. They could. They were the teachers and I was their vessel, waiting to be formed, waiting to be filled.
I heard the stories of other students, Danny in Margaret Craske classes in NY, being thrown out, Beth in her classes in Maryland. Each instructor had a story of the infamous throwing out of the promising student.
One day…
Danny was exasperated. “Do it like THIS!” he barked. “Why aren’t you trying?!” It was a question and I didn’t see it as a trap.
“I am trying!”
Then the wild eyed look, his hand pointing imperiously to the door. “Get out!” I turned and headed to the bathroom where I drank water gratefully from the old rusty sink and tried not to weep.
Later that night, I walked into the office to answer phones and do office work. Danny, Richard, Kevin, Beth and Barbie all smiled. I was welcomed in. I’d been tossed out for having an attitude. But they were happy, proud, smiling.
“You’ll remember this,” Danny said kindly.
I was told the body remembers.
~Theresa Griffin Kennedy
I was told the body remembers