Free The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke Page A

were wearing black leotards, flesh-colored tights, hot-pink tutus that circled their hips and waists with stiffness. The auditorium was in one of the oldest buildings in Briar Hill. Heavy velvet curtains. Radiators knocking, leaking boiling water onto the dressing room's cracked ceramic tiles.
    It was spring. The heat was unnecessary, especially with all those girls perspiring in their leotards, and it steamed up the dressing room mirrors.
    They'd gathered in a circle and passed the joint around, the smell of cotton balls and the sickly sweetness of those burning leaves.
    It hadn't been Diana's joint, and it hadn't been her idea, but there she was in the circle when Miss Zena, who must have been standing in the doorway for a while by the time she was noticed, said, crying a little, "It ees time for you to dance, you leetle beetches, you beetches who half broken my heart."
    There was no time to talk then. Whoever had the joint tossed it away somewhere, and Miss Zena hurried them out to the back of the stage, which was dark and hung with ropes and discarded ballet shoes, sequins and tinsel scattered on folding chairs, and the heavy dust-smell of velvet.
    The accompanist started to bang out their cue, then stopped, and the girls drifted into the stage lights. There were
chalk circles drawn on the floor, and each girl moved into her own circle, the
swish-swish
of tutus in the silence.
    All Diana remembered was the sensation of floating, a starburst in her eyes, and then it seemed as though there were little bits of glitter attaching themselves to her eyelids and arms. She had never smiled before with such unselfconscious joy. When she looked out at the audience of parents and siblings, she saw electric beach grass blowing in a breeze.
    Wild applause when they were done.
    Her heart was beating hard.
    "That was beautiful," her mother said when she came to the dressing room to get her. "You girls are so talented," she said, speaking to them all.
    They didn't look at one another.
    Miss Zena never told any parents what had happened, as far as Diana knew, but none of the girls who'd gotten caught in the dressing room signed up for ballet lessons the next year. When her mother asked her why she was giving up ballet, Diana had simply said, "It's for little girls."
    And even all these years later it still filled her with remorse and a terrible stab of loss to think about it. All those years of ballet lessons—Miss Zena scolding her about her derriere, her pliés and relevés, maneuvering her thin feet into satin shoes with cardboard toes, the tautness of ribbons around her ankles.
    All that sweetness and grace had turned into one false and brilliant performance in her mind, a few fleeting and hallucinatory minutes of fraudulent bliss.
    She narrowed her eyes, looking through that screen, then rubbed her eyes and Miss Zena was gone.
    The backyard was scattered with Emma's toys—a Frisbee, a red wagon, a plastic pony on wheels, which had been bought at a
garage sale when Emma was three and which she'd ridden wildly around the house for years, scuffing up the hardwood floors.
    Then it was abandoned in the front hallway, near the coat closet, where it grazed absently for a long time ... a stiff, blank-eyed thing they had to step around on their way to other places, a toy in a kind of limbo between rummage sales.
    When Diana and Paul had suggested that they give the pony to the Salvation Army with some old bicycles, Emma had squinted at her parents as if they were people she barely recognized, people she wasn't sure she wanted to know better.
    The pony was kept, although it was eventually sent out to the backyard, where it spent its days staring expressionlessly into the side of the garage. If it ever thought of them, of the lives they led inside the house without it, it could not have been with fondness. It had a few wet leaves stuck to its saddle and in its mane that morning.
    Already the lilacs that grew in wondrous profusion near the