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Sunday, September 26, 1999

Mom flew home this morning. I rode out to LaGuardia with her on the airport bus because she refuses to let me pay for a cab, and then I rode back alone and cried a little against the window somewhere in Queens, which I'm told is the traditional place.

Last night we walked over to the river after dinner. The moon came up huge and orange behind us, the harvest moon, and Mom said it looked just like the one over Grandpa's bean field, and I said everything looks like Grandpa's bean field to you, and she laughed. Then we sat on a bench by the water and she said, "Can I ask how you are? Not how you look. How you are."

So I told her. The real version. That most days are good now. That some days the Committee still gets the floor, but I have people I call, and I don't do what it says anymore. That I'm not going back.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "I'm always going to watch, you know. I watched you cross the street until you were fourteen." And I said I know. And then I said something I didn't plan to say, which was, "I think I can let you."

Two years ago I would have picked a fight about the watching. Ellen is going to be very smug on Tuesday. I'm a little proud of me right now, and I'm going to let myself be.

She left the rest of the buckeyes in the tin with a twenty folded underneath, the way she used to pack my lunch money. Hi, Mom, if you ever find this page. I love you. Stop reading.

Brunch shift in an hour. The Table 12 Lady will be there.

Listening to: Patsy Cline, "Crazy." Mom hummed it all weekend and now it's mine.
Mood: full up.
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Mom got in last night. She walked into our apartment, looked at the bathtub in the kitchen (yes, the bathtub is in the kitchen; it has a board on top and we call it the counter), and said, "Well. It's very efficient." Then she hugged Rachel and Marco like they were hers, which I guess they are now.

She brought buckeyes. For those of you not from Ohio: peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate so they look like the nuts off a buckeye tree. She made four dozen. Marco has already eaten a number I'm not going to write down, on principle.

Then we all watched Friends on Rachel's little TV, because it was the first one of the new season and Rachel has opinions. Mom laughed at all the same places I did. I forget how much I laugh like her until she's sitting right next to me doing it.

Today we stood in line at the half-price booth in Duffy Square for an hour and got seats for Cats, because Mom has wanted to see it since 1983 and I have made fun of it since 1983, and it turns out we were both right. She cried when the old cat sang "Memory." I did too, a little. Don't tell Devon.

Here's what I'm noticing: Mom hasn't said one single word about food since she got here. Not at the diner, not at the pizza place, not about the buckeyes. It is costing her. I can see it in her neck. I love her for it and I also wish we could just talk about it like two grown women. Maybe tomorrow.

Mood: nine years old and twenty-six at the same time.
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A good therapy week. I want to write it down before it goes soft around the edges.

I got to Ellen's and she asked how the week was, and I told her about the tour. All of it: the callback, the waiting, the not getting it, the rain. And somewhere in the middle she said, "Can I point something out?" and I said sure, and she said, "You haven't once made this about your body."

I hadn't. I'd made it about luck and timing and a picture in somebody's head and whether I should take more voice lessons. Normal dancer complaints. Healthy, neurotic, garden-variety dancer complaints. I sat on her ugly green couch and cried, but the good kind, the kind where something lets go of you.

In the program, two years ago, there was a poster on the wall of the group room that said PROGRESS, NOT PERFECTION, and I hated it. I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever read. I was a perfectionist. Perfect was the whole point. I would like to formally apologize to that poster.

After, I walked home down Columbus instead of taking the train, just because it was a nice night and I could. Bought a bunch of yellow mums from the Korean grocer for the kitchen, since Mom comes Thursday. Rachel says they make the bathtub look festive.

At work the TV over the bar had the earthquake in Taiwan on all night. All those buildings. I kept looking up at it between tables and feeling small, the right kind of small.

Mood: something I think is called hopeful. Will confirm with Ellen next week.
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I didn't get it.

Nobody calls to tell you no. That's not how it works. They call the people they want, and everybody else just keeps checking the answering machine until the answer is obvious. Devon heard through a friend of a friend that the offers went out Wednesday. So I spent Thursday knowing and not knowing, which matched the weather: it rained all day, the leftovers of that hurricane, so hard that the gutters on Tenth Avenue turned into rivers and a man outside the deli had his umbrella blow inside out and just stood there holding the skeleton.

I was close. That's the part that stings. Close is its own special kind of mean.

So here is what I'm not going to do. I am not going to decide it was my body. It wasn't my body. It was a room full of people with a picture in their heads that I didn't match, and next season the picture will be different, and the season after that. Ellen taught me to say that. I'm going to keep saying it until I believe it all the way instead of most of the way.

Here is what I am going to do. Take class tomorrow morning. Work brunch Sunday. Let the Table 12 Lady tell me something else about 1950. Call Mom, who comes next week, and tell her I didn't get it before she has to ask.

Mood: bruised, upright.
Listening to: Sarah McLachlan, Surfacing. A little on the nose, I know.
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Callback today. Let me get it all down while I can still feel my calves.

Same studios as last week, but this time there were about forty of us instead of a sidewalk full, and they knew my name. They KNEW MY NAME. Well, they had it on a list. Same thing.

First we danced. The combination was harder than the open call, with a tap section in the middle that was all fast wings and pullbacks, which I love, because tap is the one place the Committee can't keep up with me. Then they split us into fours. Then they had me do it again. Alone. With the director and the choreographer and a woman in very serious glasses all watching and writing. Devon says being asked to do it alone is good. Devon says a lot of things. Devon is usually right.

Then I sang my sixteen bars, the same sixteen bars I have been singing since 1995, and my voice only cracked a tiny bit on the high part, and the music director smiled, which could mean anything.

"Thank you, Lindsay. We'll be in touch."

I missed my Tuesday with Ellen for this. I called her from the pay phone on Eighth Avenue to cancel, and she said, "Break a leg," and I said therapists aren't supposed to say that, and she said, "I'm off the clock for thirty seconds."

Dad called Sunday night to report that the Browns lost 43 to nothing in their first game back and he has never been happier in his life. I do not understand Ohio men.

The TV at the restaurant had the hurricane on all night: cars bumper to bumper on the highways down south, whole towns packing up and leaving. It made my big day feel small. It was still a big day.
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THEY CALLED. Callback Tuesday.

I screamed, Rachel screamed, and Marco, who was asleep, screamed from his room without knowing why and then came out in his robe and screamed properly.

It's 9/9/99. Marco's brother took a personal day to go buy some new video game machine that came out today. Marco says that's now the second most important thing that happened on 9/9/99.

Jo today, too. I told her and she said, "Okay. What are you going to do to take care of yourself between now and Tuesday?" Which is a very Jo thing to say. I made a list. It's on the fridge. Sleep is on it twice.
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Open call for the national tour today. The big one. You know the kind: every dancer in the tri-state area comes back from Labor Day weekend and lines up on the same staircase at seven in the morning with a bagel and a dream. The line went down the stairs, out the door and around the corner. The union people get seen first. Non-union girls, which is me, get seen after, if there's time.

There was time. Barely. They took us in the middle of the afternoon, a big group at a time, and did the type cut first, and I braced for it like last month, and then they read my number. I stayed. I actually stayed.

Then we learned the combination in about ten minutes: a kick line, a fan kick into a double turn, a jazz run across the floor, a big hitch kick, and a finish where you smile until your face falls off. We did it in groups of eight, and about three counts in I knew my body had it, the way it sometimes just does. It's the best feeling I know. It's the feeling I lost when I was sick, and it's the feeling that, honestly, is a big part of why I wanted to get well.

"Thank you, ladies. We'll call."

Moved Ellen to tomorrow. Worked dinner. Didn't drop a single plate, although I did tell table four the specials twice because I was thinking about hitch kicks.

Mood: don't jinx it.
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Double shift. A birthday party walked in at a quarter to ten, fourteen people for a table set for six, and every one of them wanted a separate check. My feet have filed a formal complaint with the union.

More tomorrow. (Probably not tomorrow.)
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Jo day.

Jo is my nutritionist, and I know what you're picturing, and you're wrong. She wears Birkenstocks with socks, she has a cartoon of a cow in a tutu taped to her office door, and she laughs at my jokes even when they're weak. When I first went to her in the spring of '97 I sat with my arms crossed and answered everything in one word for about a month. She waited me out. She's very good at waiting.

Today she asked what I'd do with all the room in my head if the Committee ever moved out for good. What would I think about instead. I said, "Learn to sing better." She said, "What else." I said, "Read a whole book without reading the same page six times." She said, "What else." I said, "I don't know." And she said, "That's okay. You get to find out."

I thought about that the whole way home on the C train. You get to find out. Like it's a present.

So I got off a stop early and went into the used bookstore and bought The Red Tent, because the girl behind the counter said she cried three times reading it, and I figure I'm due for some crying that has nothing to do with me.

Recovery, according to Jo, is not a straight line. It's a cha-cha. Forward, back, cha-cha-cha, and sometimes you go backwards on purpose so you can go forward again. I told her that's the most dancer thing a non-dancer has ever said to me. She was very pleased with herself.

Full moon tonight over Ninth Avenue. Very yellow.

Reading: The Red Tent, page one. Only once.
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Typed out today.

For those of you who don't dance, an open call for a big job goes like this. You get there early, you sign a list, you wait on a staircase for hours, and then they bring you into the room in a big group and line you up in rows. Somebody behind a table looks at you for about as long as it takes to read a cereal box, and then reads out some numbers. If your number is called, you stay and dance. If it isn't: "Thank you all so much for coming."

Mine wasn't called. I never danced a step.

That's called getting typed out, and it's nobody's fault. Maybe they wanted taller. Maybe they wanted shorter, or redheads, or girls who could pass for sisters with the girl they already cast. They don't tell you. It is the most personal impersonal thing in the world.

While we were waiting on the stairs, the girl next to me was doing the diet talk. If you've spent any time around dancers, you know the diet talk. I put on my Walkman and moved to the other end of the hallway. Two years ago I would have joined right in. Two years ago I would have won.

That's the thing about getting well that nobody warned me about: you don't forget the way back to the bad place. You just stop taking it. Every day you stop taking it. Some days that's the only thing you do, and it counts.

So I didn't go home and sit in it. I called Devon from the pay phone and we went to the diner, and I ordered what I wanted and let him complain for an hour about his shins. Then I went to the six o'clock jazz class, because the best answer to a bad audition is a good class. My turns were clean. Take that.

I'm sad and I'm okay. Both at once. Ellen says that's allowed. I'm taking her word for it until I can take my own.

Mood: bent, not broken.
Listening to: Cher, "Believe." The teacher played it for the cool-down and I'm deciding to take it personally.
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Sunday brunch at the restaurant, which is a meal invented so people can be rude before noon.

But I have to tell you about the Table 12 Lady. She comes in every Sunday at 10:15 on the dot, sits at twelve by the window, orders one poached egg and dry rye toast and a hot water with lemon, reads the entire Sunday paper including the wedding announcements (which she snorts at), and tips in quarters stacked in a neat little tower. I've waited on her most Sundays for two years. She has said maybe forty words to me in all that time.

Today, while I was refilling her hot water, she looked up over her glasses and said, "You're the dancer."

I said yes. I don't know how she knew. Probably the way I walk. You can always tell.

She said, "I was in the chorus of Guys and Dolls. The original. 1950." And then she went back to the crossword like she'd told me the weather.

I carried that around all afternoon like a warm stone in my apron pocket. She still walks like a dancer, a little turned out, very straight in the back. She has to be past seventy. She's still here. She still comes into the city every Sunday and does the crossword in pen.

I want to be her when I grow up. Minus the dry toast. (Jo would want me to note that.)

Listening to: Lauryn Hill, through the wall, on Rachel's side, for the fourth time today. No complaints.
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Ellen (my therapist, see The Cast) says I should keep a journal. I told her I've kept a journal since I was nine, and it's mostly lists of things I was going to fix about myself, so maybe not. She said, then keep a different kind.

So here we are. A different kind. On the Internet, where strangers can read it, because apparently I can't do anything without an audience. I'm a dancer. We need a downbeat.

Here's the deal I've made with myself. This is not going to be a sad page. Some days will be sad. But I spent a long time being sick very quietly, in a very tidy way, and I'm done being tidy about it. So I'm going to write about auditions and the restaurant and my roommates and my feet, and sometimes I'm going to write about getting well, because that's the thing I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays and, if I'm honest, all the days in between.

Today: 10:30 jazz class. Worked lunch and dinner. A man at table nine sent back his iced tea for being "too wet." I don't know either. Marco came home at midnight after his show and ate cereal standing over the bathtub (long story) and told me the whole plot of a dream he had about the Golden Girls. I love this apartment.

Five, six, seven, eight. Here we go.
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