The American Lady(26)

Wanda laughed. “You’re breathing wrong, that’s the problem.”

“How can I be breathing wrong?” Marie panted. “I’m just glad I’m still breathing at all!” What am I doing here? she wondered as she sipped at the stale, flat water. She felt horribly out of place. The “girls,” as Pandora called her dance students, were all at least ten years younger than Marie. And none of them were wheezing like an old woman. She felt that she was on her last legs. And speaking of legs—everyone in the room was bare-legged. Wanda’s teacher had insisted that everyone take off their stockings and their corsets as well. She clearly had her own ideas of what to wear for dancing. Marie glanced over at her. She was nothing much to look at—short and almost plump—but beneath that unprepossessing exterior lay a real artistic temperament. With her doll-like face and curling blonde locks, Pandora Wilkens looked as though she would never dance anything more strenuous than a sedate minuet. So much for first impressions. Right at the beginning of class she had shown them all what she was made of—she told the girls to stand around in a circle and then kneel down. Then she smiled graciously, walked to the center of the circle, and gave a sign to the piano player in the corner of the room, a Russian man named Ivo.

“I call this dance Escapade,” Pandora had announced, and then she and Ivo had hurled themselves into a frenzy of wild sound and astonishing movement. Marie had never even known that the human body could make such shapes. The poses she struck were so shockingly strange they were almost indecent. Marie had sat there without daring to move a muscle, watching as Pandora danced and danced and finally flung herself full-length to the floor as though struck down by an arrow.

Wanda raised her glass of water to her lips and drank it down.

“You really should pay more attention to how you breathe,” she told Marie, and then held her empty glass up as though it were a trophy. “What we did just now was only a warm-up. After the break Pandora will tell us the theme for today’s class.”

Marie heaved a sigh. “I’m beginning to think your father was not far wrong when he said your dance teacher was mad.”



“Imagine it’s the depths of winter,” Pandora told the class once they were back in a circle. “You’re freezing cold, perhaps you’re hungry too and you have nowhere to go to get warm. How does that make you feel? I want to see these feelings as you dance. Now, shut your eyes and freeze!”

The girls groaned.

“Why does it have to be winter?” one of them asked.

Pandora looked over at her scornfully. “I would hardly need you to use your imaginations if I asked you to sweat, now, would I?” she said, wiping the sweat from her own brow with a dramatic gesture.

Marie laughed like all the others, but it didn’t feel right. The whole thing was just so embarrassing.

But when Ivo struck up a sad, slow tune, the winter did not seem so far away after all. As Ivo played a melody that conjured up Russia and the cold wind blowing across the endless steppe, a shiver ran down Marie’s spine. But she couldn’t move for the life of her.

“Shut your eyes,” Pandora whispered as she went past.

When she closed her eyes, suddenly Marie could see. Frost flowers, showing their fine fronds as if through a microscope. A windowpane with a weathered wooden frame, fingers tracing lines on the cold glass. Marie lifted her right hand almost without knowing she did so, and then her left. Then she leaned forward a little.

Snowflakes!

Each one more beautiful than the last. Each a tiny world that fell apart when she touched it.

As if in a trance, Marie began to bend this way and that.

If only she could catch hold of one, just one!

Her fingers grasped the air, seeking, questing.

Faster, she had to move faster than the snow could fall, she had to turn, turn . . .

Suddenly the music stopped and Pandora was clapping her hands.

“Very good, girls! Now breathe deeply and swing your arms,” she ordered.

Startled, Marie opened her eyes.

Pandora asked one of the girls what she had seen.

“I imagined I was walking through town with my mother on a January day and I’d forgotten my coat. Brrr, that was cold!”

The others laughed.

Pandora nodded to the next in line.

“I thought of the polar bears in the city zoo. And how they always have to have cold water around them.”

“And what did our visitor see?” the teacher asked, turning abruptly to Marie.

“I . . .” She was confused, and took a step backward.

“Don’t worry, this is what we always do,” Wanda whispered.

Marie hesitated for a moment longer. Well, why not?