My daughter fell in love with ballet when she was six years old.
My mother took her to see The Nutcracker at the big theater downtown for Christmas. I had to work that night, so I didn’t go. When they came home, Audrey was still wearing her good red dress and her tights had a hole in one knee, and she walked through the front door on her tiptoes.
“Mommy,” she whispered, like it was a secret. “Did you know people can fly?”
She didn’t stop talking about it for a year. She danced in the kitchen. She danced in the grocery store. She danced in the bathtub until she slipped and split her chin open and needed three stitches. Even in the emergency room, holding a bloody washcloth to her face, she asked the doctor if she could still be a ballerina.
“I don’t see why not,” he said.
She grinned at me with blood on her teeth.
We signed her up for lessons at a little studio in a strip mall near our house. Miss Patty’s School of Dance, between a nail salon and a pizza place. Miss Patty was seventy years old and wore leg warmers and smoked in her car between classes. She taught tap, jazz, ballet, and something she called “creative movement,” which mostly involved the little ones pretending to be leaves.
Audrey went every Tuesday and Thursday for nine years.
She was good. Everybody said so. Better than good. By the time she was twelve, Miss Patty was taking me aside after recitals.
“That girl needs a real teacher,” she told me once, smelling of menthols. “I’m not saying that to get rid of you. I love having her. But I’ve got nothing left to teach her. She’s going to outgrow this place like a goldfish outgrows a bowl.”
I nodded and thanked her and didn’t do anything about it. 