You have the ballet to get to. You don’t want to be late. It’s not like the movies. They don’t let you just walk in at your leisure.”
* * *
The Capitol Theatre on Second South is one of Salt Lake’s oldest buildings. It was built in 1913 as a vaudeville house called the Orpheum until fourteen years later when its name was changed.
During the holidays the Nutcracker was performed at the theatre three times a day, and we entered the lobby against a stream of people leaving the building. It had been more than twenty-three years since I had been there, and the theater, like me, had undergone an extensive renovation, inside and out.
We surrendered our tickets at the door, then went into the hall to find our seats. The theater was ornately designed in the classic style of the Italian Renaissance, like many of the opera and ballet houses of Old Europe. The seats were red velvet with polished dark wood arms, stark against the ivory-colored walls with chalk-white panels and gold-leaf accents.
The stage bulged slightly with the orchestra pit, settled at the base of a massive red curtain with a thick gold-fringed hem. I remember, as a young girl, being on the other side of that curtain, waiting with the other little girls for our chance to dance.
As the conductor walked out to applause, a long-dormant excitement rose in my stomach, which grew as the iconic chords of Tchaikovsky resonated throughout the theater. I had watched the performance more than fifty times, though always from behind, and it was peculiar seeing the production as it was designed to be seen. The way my parents saw it. The way they saw me.
I was transfixed by it all, as memories flooded into my heart. As a girl, my love of dancing had been everything and I gave it up back when I had given up everything else I once loved.
As the performance progressed, my feeling of excitement changed to a heaviness in my stomach and chest, almost in contrast to the ethereal weightlessness of the dancers floating across the stage. In a sense, ballet is a lie—an illusion. It is made to look effortless but requires incredible physical stamina, strength, and pain. I have seen blood drip from ballerinas’ feet as they removed their toe shoes.
My life was also a lie. In this sense, I had never stopped trying to make things look easy and right.
The final scene of Act 1 was the battle scene between the soldiers and the mice—the scene I had danced in. Watching the girls prance across the stage in their little mouse costumes brought a flood of emotion. I looked over at Dylan, who was smiling, intent on the performance. Alexis was curled up against him, her hand on his arm, her head against his chest. There was something inexplicably powerful about what I was experiencing, both on stage and in the seat next to me—something I had buried deep within my psyche. I suddenly had a flashback of my father carrying me out of this very theater, my head against his chest, the smell of his cologne in my nostrils.
As I looked at them, tears began falling down my cheeks. A few at first, then in greater numbers. My chest constricted. I was suddenly having trouble breathing and felt nauseous. Dylan glanced over at me, his concern evident in his eyes. “Are you okay?” he whispered.
“No.” I stood and hurried out of the performance, in too much pain to be embarrassed by the disapproving glances I got as I ran up the aisle toward the exit.
CHAPTER forty–one
If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.
—Shereen El Feki
Dylan came out after me, carrying Alexis. I was grateful that he didn’t ask what was wrong. I couldn’t have explained it if he did. All he said was, “I’ll take you home.”
The drive home was silent. It seemed that lately all our drives home were silent.
As usual, Dylan walked me to the doorstep. He never came inside when Alexis was with us, and right now I wished she wasn’t with us. I wanted him to come inside. I desperately wanted him to hold me and never let me go. But there was something else inside me that was pushing back—a force growing louder and stronger, shouting at me to run before it was too late; screaming that love was an illusion. There were no true relationships. No one stayed together anymore. Not my mother