Free Step-Ball-Change by Jeanne Ray

had bitten Tom and was trying to pin it on the dog.
    “The hospital?”
    “He’s fine. He just needed a tetanus shot.”
    “Never a dull moment.” George looked at the clock.
    “Go to class,” I said.
    “Change clothes,” Taffy said.
    “There isn’t time. If I run now I’ll just make it.” George gave us both a quick kiss and went flying for the door.
    “You can’t go to law school dressed like that!” Taffy said.
    “They’ve already seen it all! We’ll talk tonight,” he called back to Taffy. “I want to hear everything.”
    But Taffy only waved. I don’t think she particularly felt like telling everything to any of us.



chapter six

    I AM SIXTY-TWO YEARS OLD AND ONE OF THESE DAYS I’m going to have to buy myself a new left hip. Maybe, a couple of years after that, I’ll need a right one, too. I will buy myself a set of dazzling plastic joints to replace the ones I’ve ground down over the years. I will reward my body with state-of-the-art technology, the very best that money can buy. It still surprises me that some mornings this body, which has been so strong and flexible that I could make a living off of it, lies in bed and doesn’t want to go anywhere. But then it does. I stretch over one leg and then the other while I brush my teeth in the morning. I roll up onto the balls of my feet and stay there while I floss. It still works, it just takes a little longer to get it going. Tom will watch me down a couple of ibuprofen and suggest that maybe it’s time to sell the school to Peggy, one of the teachers who works for me, who is saving up her money to buy it, but I’m not quite ready to let it go. And when the cars start driving up and the wave of little girls pours through the front door all decked out in their pink leotards and white tights, I know that I’ll do this for as long as I possibly can. I never get tired of seeing them. Sometimes a few of the older ones will wear me out, but the little ones are my joy. Not every girl is going to grow up to be a dancer, and God, let us be thankful for that, but even theones who will grow up to be physicists and heart-transplant surgeons are better off for having danced. Dancing puts you squarely inside your own skin. It teaches you that your body is yours, yours to move and bend and stretch. Dancing makes you listen to music with more than your ears and know that the music can be felt and applied. All of the little confidences of balance and grace, the pleasure of watching your own hand arc above your head in the mirror, the camaraderie of moving in a perfect line with others—I teach those things, and I like to think that somewhere the lesson lodges in the subconscious. I believe these girls are made better for having danced, even if it’s only for a year. I believe that boys are made better for it, too, but in the forty years I’ve taught, I’ve probably had only two dozen boys come through my school. Maybe somewhere there’s a football coach lamenting the lack of girls who signed up for practice in the fall.
    Mother-daughter tap was started several years ago by a woman who would wait in the car and read while her daughter took class. When the weather turned cold, she brought her book inside, and when she found she couldn’t concentrate on her reading with all of those clattering shoes, she bought herself a pair of taps and took up a spot in the back of the room.
    “They’re six,” I said at the time. “I think it’s going to be a little slow for you.”
    She shrugged, a pretty young mother with brown hair and blue eyes. “I don’t know a thing about dancing,” she said. “I would never try to take a class with adults.”
    And so she danced. She danced pretty well but no better than her daughter. Soon the other girls told their mothers and the other mothers started coming with tap shoes of their own. It was all such a big success that I had to move the girls whose mothers didn’tcome into another class because they felt so horrible