"Voice, voice, voice. It's what I crave, and "The Ballet" comes in hot with the punchy yet vulnerable voice I love from the first line. I was hypnotized by the specificity of the language, the inherent drive of a simmering danger, and the unexpected glimpse under the hood of the polished veneer of the dance world. The narrator's pain and their particular longing for something that is just out of reach and likely always will be, was palpable. The bitter desire for perfection, for fame, for beauty, and the desire to be seen all play out here in a memorable and stunning piece that moves through time with a skilled depth and reveals the magic, the power, and the inevitable betrayals of the human body. Stirring and provocative. I loved it."

-Chelsea Bieker, contest judge and author of God Shot and Heartbroke.

The Ballet

by Maeve Barry

Winner of the 2023 Fiction Contest

I got into ballet for the trash bags. I like the look of nylon pink legs shoved into them. Frying, sweating. It is noon and it is summer and my legs are in bags. I’m warming up for tonight. I ran out of fresh bags so I took these from my can: I stretch out my legs and bend over the right one. It smells like tuna salad.

I fell in love with the look when I was three as I stood, potbellied in my peach leotard, watching the glossy-haired big girls. They twisted their hair into clips with their legs spread. Gripped each others’ wrists. Pulled one girl’s pointy chest to the floor, then that girl straightened to pull down the other. Backward and forward, like girls on a seesaw, except these girls were teens who swapped amphetamines and tips on how to best angle their fingers. Their feet were like seashells and their legs were in trash bags, their arms stuffed into stockings. 

I’m less interested in dancing and more so in the paraphernalia. Four hours till seven. In my apartment there is almost no natural light: just a layer of thick dust, covering the mirror, trapping my blurred face inside it. I reach for the hands reaching toward mine. I’ve lost the fat in my cheeks; downy hair covers them in gold feathers. I shove forward my crotch and I flex up my toes. My navel domes the loose nail in the floorboard. I’ll hold this position till my navel eats it. 

Ballet works well if you’re Catholic. For forty days, I stretch till my legs quake. For forty days, this behavior is Godly. I starve until ribs strain my skin. My bony arms splay and my body hangs limp, jointless and Holy. Lent can last the year if you let it. I stitch through satin ribbon. I needle into my palms and these become my stigmata. My small toe is blue and my big nail is split. I wind them in tape. Stick cotton into their spaces. I shove the whole thing into my sneakers and I walk to the subway. I need to be at Lincoln Center by six: the performance, opening night, begins promptly at seven. My studio is in Chinatown above a five dollar deli. It’s called that, but hardly anything ever costs five dollars. I ride the 1 train and sip from my thermos, all the way up. 

Through ballet, I learned I’m a person who should never leave the house without her eyelashes curly. Backstage, a big girl named Bridgette breathed her puke breath in my face. She clamped my straight lashes and yanked them up toward my eyebrows. My eyes filled and they twitched. The curler shone like the speculum I’d once seen inserted into my mother. The nurse told me to look at a magazine and I didn’t. I liked how close and warm Bridgette’s breath was. That’s another thing about ballet. Girls lean close to your face so your collarbones kiss. They stick their thumb in their cheeks. Use their saliva to smear on your rouge. Really, rouge is just lipstick, applied in both places. My mother’s organic so ballet is where I learned this. My mother is a hippie so she never once wiped my face in her spit. 

A man in a Vietnam Veteran hat spits on the floor of the 1 train. He’s too young to be one. He spits on the floor by my sneakers but never right at me. Not on my dress, that is hugging and satin. It is good to be a dancer who is riding the subway. You stand even if there’s a seat. This way you can turn out your feet with your neck long so that people will notice. Look at her neck! subway riders congratulate you in their heads. She’s not even yet in her makeup! But still they will notice. You don’t need to be particularly pretty if you are a dancer. It is enough to have nipples pinched through your dress. You don’t apply makeup till you’re at Lincoln Center. You’re not wearing makeup but the fake Vietnam Veteran won’t spit on you, due to your posture: tall, a dancer’s. 

There was always spit on me at ballet. Even the Russian Instructor’s. She believed herself too good for America and yet she was stuck here. She’d lick her acrylics, her tongue quick like a lizard’s. Her nails scraped as they blended bright blue on my eyelids. The ballet was Coppélia and it was not my job to look pretty. It was my job to look like a doll. A long, skinny doll. With my mother, weight wasn’t a thing to discuss. But the thing is that my mother is skinny. She never wears makeup yet is doll-like and pretty. The Russian Instructor’s hair was fried purple. She drew her eyebrows in ink and her skin sagged where it puckered. She used her tar nails to trace the seams on my tights from my asscheek to ankle. 

I get off the 1 train. My thermos is empty. There isn’t time to stop at Central Liquor. But I do; I can be late. Lateness is excusable if you are good enough. Anything is excusable if you are good enough. I walk with turned-out feet and remind myself of this. 

All the benches are wet with finished rain. An Italian kid runs and slides on the plaza by the big leaping fountain. The fountain lights are turned on even though it isn’t dark. Only dulled light, softening. The Italian kid spraying water. Dragging his yellow rain poncho with the tips of his fingers. His fat tourist father is still wearing his poncho with the hood up. Yellow clings to his fat stomach. 

Big lunch today, the Russian Instructor used to tell me as we stood in a line at the mirror. She’d rap my full stomach with her knuckles. I look in the bulbed mirror inside Lincoln Center. Do I look like the Russian? She’d rap my stomach so I’d kneel over the toilet. By the time the Guest Artist arrived I was empty. 

They brought in adult men from the nearest city to play the boy parts. These were real men who belonged to real companies. Us girls would loosen our buns so our front hair looked wispy. We’d stand with our legs on the high bar and look at the men over our shoulders. The men didn’t look at us. They gave one another handjobs over their tights in the Boy’s Dressing Room. My favorite Guest Artist was stubbled and thirty and probably gay and I was thirteen and in love with him. He’d pick me up and swing me and my legs slapped his back like a rag doll’s, not like a dancer’s. I’d breathe in his neck and feel special. There was vodka in the holes of his hair and to me it was dew drops. He kissed me like this sometimes, while he was swinging me. Or pressed against the wall in the wings. Once, I picked up his crossbody bag and needles fell out of it. He puked in the Nutcracker head that he wore to lift older dancers. Once while he swung and kissed me he dropped me on my right knee and it ached and the Russian Instructor came in and said I should learn to control my behavior. 

My right knee now aches when seasons change and when I walk the five flights to my studio apartment. The Russian Instructor is likely long dead. Or dead in the sense that she can no longer dictate. Or maybe she can, does, from her chair in a Home. Mules hung off her arthritic feet, crossed over gout-swollen ankles. She smokes despite the Home’s policy against it. She berates all the aides—the fat ones especially—and the demented old ladies. Stand straight, she’d yell, her voice robotic through the hole where her throat is. Put down the pudding! Your stomach should suck to your spine till it eats it! I suck in my stomach. I curl up my lashes. My hands grip the seat of the Lincoln Center toilet. I smile into its bowl, in the yellow light, and I see that I’ve made it. The house lights flick. I red my lips till they’re crumbled and glossless. The spit is my own when I wet them. 

The thing about ballet is you can’t train away breathing. Dancers’ heaves accompany their clomping boxed toes. Collarbones lift and then sink. If you sit close enough to the stage you will hear this. If you sit close enough, you will see dancers’ sweat where it drips when they leap. Dripped to a pool, on the black vinyl sheeting. You will see them sweat through their leotards. If you get close enough, you’ll feel sweat spray off dancers’ faces. As they chaîné turn, first in straight lines, then all around you. Your skin will collide and your arm sweat will stick. Glue you to the dancers. Waltz of the Hours will rise to the ceiling and then in your throat. 

Because ballet is also about music, and not just the paraphernalia. 

I look at my empty seat in the audience from the stage. Near the pit, three rows from the orchestra. I bought my ticket with the credit card I took out for this purpose. Still, the seat is hard to see because it is true what they say: Stage lights will blind you. My shoulder throbs where I banged it on one of the booms. After sliding over the clothed linen laps of the audience, after moving down the aisle toward the front of the stage. As I hoisted myself onto it, as I positioned myself in the boom’s gaze. Dust particles flicker in front. Pirouetting in air, moving. The dancers stop moving. They stare at me. Look around at one another. With hands on their hips, their stance is civilian. But they are never civilians. Their feet turn out and even though they are panting, even though they are angry, their necks are long and their backs are like rods. They are still dancers. I’m still a dancer. 

And I press from the balls to the tips of my split ugly toes. I haven’t been on them since I was a teenager. Since the Russian told me I lacked the discipline to make it in a company. My buns were too floppy. I fouetté now and the world blurs. Near the center of the stage; I’m no longer reaching for my own hands in the mirror, flopping around in dead toe shoes on my loose floorboards. I need to be spotting. The lights hit my eyes—one time, another. I’m still a dancer.

Then I’m caught in strong arms but these arms are bulky, not sinewed. Their sweat smells like Old Spice. A bouncer, not a dancer. He lifts me. My feet pass through relevé then I’m up off the floor, in his arms, not the Guest Artist’s, but still there is vodka. In the bouncer’s glands, in my own. In the sweat on his neck and I breathe it. I ring my arms over my head. Keep space between all my fingers. Draw my foot up my leg—I développé so my leg lifts in front, my final pose, as the cavalier carries me off stage to the wings. 

I sit. Fountain light on the water looks like gold, pulsing veins. It is fully dark now and I’m barred from entry. Discarded rain ponchos are everywhere. They blow and they tumble like daffodils. My dress soaks as I sit. My dress costs more than my savings. I sit there and look at the posing Italian tourists. I sit there and wonder if the Italians think that I’m famous.

Published July 16th, 2023