by Cara Malone
“Sounds like you may be feeling a little coerced,” Dr. Riley suggested.
“You could say that,” Melody agreed. “Or trapped, tricked, forced. Any of those words would probably do just as well as any other.”
“Is the problem that you don’t want to work, or that you don’t want to work at a dance studio?” Dr. Riley asked. She jotted a few things down on her notepad, but she was pretty good about doing this sparingly. Melody had a lifetime’s worth of people scratching things on notepads while watching her when she was at Pavlova, so Dr. Riley tried to be mindful of how nervous it made her feel.
“I don’t mind working,” Melody said after considering this question for a moment. “Lord knows my parents paid for enough while I was in New York, and all the lessons before that.”
Those words were almost identical to the ones her father had used when he indelicately brought up the subject of work, and close enough to the ones she’d heard a half-million times growing up when they were paying for private lessons and physical therapists and an endless supply of pointe shoes and costumes. In fact, they never let Melody forget how much it all cost.
“So why the dance school?” Dr. Riley asked, putting one finger to the corner of her mouth and propping her chin in her hand the way she did when she thought they were really drilling down to the core of Melody’s issues.
She shrugged. “Because they were hiring?”
“There are lots of places around Lisbon that are hiring,” Dr. Riley pointed out. “There’s nothing preventing you from working somewhere else in town. If you feel trapped when you think about working in a dance school, there are plenty of alternatives out there.”
“For a college drop-out who ate, slept, and breathed ballet for the last thirteen years of her life?” Melody asked incredulously. “I can’t even make a pot of coffee.”
“Okay, so perhaps Starbucks isn’t your ideal workplace,” Dr. Riley said. “What else would you like to do with your life?”
“I wanted to be a ballerina,” Melody said. “That’s what I was supposed to do with my life.”
“Plans change,” Dr. Riley said. “Sometimes you just have to roll with the punches and see where your new path is taking you. So, no barista work. What about a doctor’s office, or retail, or some kind of trade you could learn with a little bit of training?”
“Gross, boring, and I don’t think going into even more debt would make my dad very happy,” Melody said. She knew she was being difficult, but the more she thought about her first shift at the dance school, the more irritable she felt. Rather than letting Dr. Riley rattle off a half-dozen more low-paying, entry level jobs, Melody blurted, “I just don’t know how I’m going to deal with being surrounded by five-year-old ballerinas all the time. I met one when I applied for the job and it was like looking into a time machine and seeing baby Melody before all the bad stuff happened to her.”
Dr. Riley scribbled a quick note. Half the time, Melody was convinced that she was just doodling nonsense on the page in the hopes that Melody would fill the silence and give her more to work with. This time she kept quiet and eventually Dr. Riley said, “Maybe working at the dance school will be therapeutic for you.”
“I knew you were going to say that,” Melody said. “Andy owes me five bucks now.”
“You’ve been back in Lisbon longer than you were away,” Dr. Riley said. “We’ve been talking for six months about the problems that caused you to leave school and so far we haven’t made much headway in helping you move past it. Maybe what you need at this point isn’t talk – maybe it’s a challenge. Sitting around Andy’s basement all day is an avoidance tactic – you know that. Maybe working at the studio will help you confront your demons.”
“Sounds like a hoot,” Melody said sarcastically.
“I’ll be here to help you ever step of the way,” Dr. Riley said, and Melody wished she was the type of person to find that sort of statement comforting.
She sat back in the stiff chair and tried to picture herself working at a doctor’s office, signing patients in and resisting the urge to don a surgical mask every time she heard a wet cough. Even if that did sound tolerable, which it didn’t, her first shift at Mary Beth’s was tomorrow – considering the utter chaos she’d found the first time she went there, it didn’t seem fair to chicken out on such short notice.
***
After her therapy session ended, Melody ended up in Andy’s basement once again, avoidance tactic notwithstanding. She found him in much the same place as he’d been the last time she visited, only today it was a different video game and a half-eaten sandwich on the coffee table.
“What are you up to?” Andy asked as she plopped down in her recliner.
“Same old,” she said. “Just got back from Dr. Riley’s office – she said pay up.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I bet you five dollars she would say working at Mary Beth’s was a good thing, or call it a therapy opportunity, and that’s exactly what she did,” Melody said with a smirk. She held out her hand and said, “Five big ones, buddy.”
“I didn’t agree to that bet,” Andy said.
“We shook on it,” Melody answered. “You were just too stoned to remember.”
“Huh,” Andy said, looking at the ceiling and contemplating this possibility. Then he shrugged and said, “Well, I don’t have five big ones. Guess you’re out of luck.”
“Jerk,” Melody said, crossing her arms over her chest melodramatically.
“I know,” Andy said, then a sparkle came to his eyes and he hauled himself off the sunken cushions of the couch. “But I’ve got something better.”
“Better than cold, hard cash?”
“Yep,” he said, going over to an old dresser beside his mattress. Melody watched Andy dig a small wooden box out of his sock drawer, from which he retrieved a thin, meticulously rolled joint in a test tube. “Better for you, anyway. Five dollars and a dozen more sessions with Dr. Riley won’t fix what ails you as fast as a hit to take the edge off.”
He was right about that. Melody wouldn’t really call herself a stoner, but she took a hit here and there. The experience of being high was kind of fun – everything in her vision seemed to be clearer and more real, and at the same time more comical – but the day after feeling was the real pay-off. When she smoked, calmness descended on her for about a day after, taking away the anxiety and humiliation of returning home with her head hanging low. It made her life feel temporarily more manageable. Dr. Riley was right - there was only so much that talk therapy could do.
Andy tossed the tube into Melody’s lap and she didn’t object. The thought of being surrounded by miniature ballerinas all day made her pulse race, and as she picked up the joint she felt a little better just having it in her hand.
“Thanks,” she said, tucking it into the pocket of her shirt.
“You should get your shrink to prescribe it to you,” Andy said. “It’s legal now.”
“She’s a psychologist, not a psychiatrist,” Melody said. “She can’t prescribe anything.”
“Bummer,” Andy answered, and he looked genuinely disappointed on her behalf.
“I should get going,” Melody said, getting up from the recliner. “It’s almost dinner time.”
“Later,” Andy said.
Melody went straight up to her room when she got home and stashed the joint in an old school bag at the back of her closet. Maybe she’d smoke it, and maybe she’d forget about it – she hadn’t decided yet.
***
Melody’s first few weeks at Mary Beth’s went by at a dizzying pace. With less than a month before the recital, there were costumes to pick up and tickets to distribute and directions to give. Mary Beth moved through the building like a Tasmanian devil, never staying in one place too long before spinning off to another urgent task. As a result, Melody had to train herself on the finer points of working the front desk.
Most of it was obvious – sign dancers in and point them to t
he right studio when they arrived for classes, answer the phone when it rang, be pleasant when people walked into the lobby. Some of it was a little more nuanced, like taking payments, but after a short battle with the credit card machine Melody figured that out too, making a list of payments on Post-it notes until Mary Beth had the chance to teach her about the ledgers.
All in all, Melody caught on pretty quickly, and it was fortunate that she was so busy in her first few weeks because it left very little time to even remember the fact that she was working in a dance school. If not for the costumes and the sound of tap shoes clacking on hardwood in the background, she could have been the receptionist at any number of businesses.
Melody didn’t feel the urge to smoke the thin joint Andy gave her. She suspected life at Mary Beth’s would be tolerable after all, as long as she didn’t have to set foot in either of the two studios. That would be too much, too soon.
She liked taking charge of the chaotic reception desk and bringing order to it. She liked watching the kids pour in before big classes, all smiles and energy. But Saturday afternoons quickly became her favorite.
On her first Saturday shift, Melody found herself watching the front door as one o’clock rolled around. Jessie and Ellie had popped into Melody’s head a time or two during the week, and she was looking forward to seeing them again. Unfortunately, Jessie was always coming in at the last possible second and Melody soon learned that their interactions were to be brief. Apart from a few quick words (“Thanks for the tip about those elastics – the slippers work much better now.”) Melody didn’t see her much before she and Ellie rushed into the studio.
Melody still liked seeing her though. Something about Jessie never failed to make her heart race, even if only for a moment, and she found little ways to prolong them. She would shoot Jessie sultry looks in the second or two of eye contact they enjoyed each Saturday, and usually Jessie looked away but sometimes Melody caught a slight blush coming into her cheeks and a smile on her lips.
Those were the moments that Melody liked best at Mary Beth’s.
The ones that proved more challenging were the ones that involved ballet, like the impending recital. Mary Beth expected Melody to come along and be her assistant, making sure all the dancers made their way from the dressing rooms to the stage and back, and that everyone had all the pieces of their costumes.
Melody reluctantly agreed because she couldn’t refuse her new employer after less than a month of work, but if Dr. Riley had been able to prescribe her some kind of sedative, she would have taken it for that night. Instead, she dug the joint out of the back of her closet and stuck it in her pocket – not because she was planning to smoke it, but because she felt calmer when she knew it was an option. It was like a safety net.
Mary Beth rented out Lisbon High School’s auditorium for the recital, and that was a stage that Melody had danced on many times in her four years there. She remembered the creaky wood floor, and the orchestra pit with its steep drop from the front of the stage - that had been terrifying the first time she saw it during the ninth-grade talent show. There were the heavy velvet curtains and the blinding spotlights, and of course the rows of old theater chairs staring back at her. Melody used to thrive on that sight, and now she just hoped that she could stay far enough in the wings that she wouldn’t have to look out and see the audience.
Recital night was just as crazy as everything else Mary Beth did. There were kids running around backstage like banshees and Melody had to chase them all down, group them according to the recital program, and get them into their costumes. This turned out to be harder than it sounded – kids that age grew like weeds and quite a few of them seemed to have grown out of their costumes between the time that they were ordered in the winter and the recital at the end of spring.
“I always tell the parents to order a size larger if their kid is due for a growth spurt, but do they listen?” Mary Beth lamented as she blew through the elementary school-aged dressing room with her clipboard. “Do I have all the intermediate tap dancers? Ladies!”
“They’re over there,” Melody said with a slight grunt as she yanked a too-tight purple tutu over the hips of a five-year-old and gestured to a group of girls practicing their choreography in one corner of the room. The girl she was helping whined and tugged at the elastic around her waist, saying it was too tight. Melody turned back to her. “You’re dancing right after the tap group – you can take the tutu off in ten minutes.”
“Come with me, ladies,” Mary Beth said, her voice rising into a shrill sing-song tone. “Melody, can you bring the beginner ballerinas to the stage next?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Melody said.
She glanced around the room – there were no less than two dozen dancers under the age of twelve, along with a couple of parents engaged in their own costume struggles. Most of the dance moms had dropped their dancers off at the beginning of the night along with all their costume changes and entrusted Melody and Mary Beth with the task of getting the kids ready to go on stage. This was the least of Melody’s reasons for not wanting to escort a dozen ballerinas to the stage, but it was the easiest one to latch onto.
“Someone’s got to watch the rest of them,” she said, but Mary Beth was already corralling the tap group toward the door. Panic started to rise in Melody’s throat.
Mary Beth called to one of the parents across the room, immersed in pinning up her daughter’s hair. “Janet, can you take over chaperone duties for a few minutes?”
“Sure,” the woman said around a mouth full of bobby pins.
“There you go,” Mary Beth said to Melody, and she was already heading out the door as she called over her shoulder, “Just bring the ones in the purple tutus to the left wing in five minutes.”
“Okay,” Melody said, but mostly to herself because Mary Beth was long gone by then.
She managed to get all twelve pint-sized ballerinas backstage, although getting there had been a bit like trying to heard cats. Melody wasn’t sure how anyone managed to control a single five-year-old, let alone a dozen of them full of energy and adrenaline and ready to dance.
“Shhhh,” she said, putting her finger to her lips as she led them up to the door that led backstage. “Once I open this door, you can’t talk until you get back into the hallway after your routine. Understand?”
They all nodded, and Melody was surprised at the change that came over them the moment they walked across the threshold. Then again, she could remember her first time backstage – it was cool and dark, and everyone in the wings seemed so important and so focused. There were four thick velvet curtains hanging down from the ceiling, dividing the floor into downstage, center, and upstage, and the way it was lit always looked magical from the darkness of the wings.
Her ballerinas filed calmly into the space behind the middle curtains, where one of Mary Beth’s instructors was getting them into position. An old pop song from the eighties was floating through the air and five girls were tapping their hearts out onstage, and with every shuffle ball change, Melody felt her heart thudding faster.
She didn’t like the way the metal on their shoes reverberated against the wood floor and echoed into her chest. She didn’t like the surreal way the stage lighting looked – in New York, with each failed audition it had begun to take on a fun house quality, the curtains waving more than they should and the spotlights beating down on her, and the feeling was coming back fast.
Melody looked at the beginner ballet class and they were all lining up in order of height thanks to the instructor Mary Beth had enlisted to help out backstage. Thank god she hadn’t asked Melody to do that job.
“Hey,” Melody whispered to the instructor, inching closer and trying not to look into the audience. “Your name’s Emily, right?”
“Yeah,” the girl whispered back, both of them trying to keep their voices from echoing into the tall ceiling over the stage.
“I need to get back to the dressing room,” Melody whispered. “Can you take
it from here?”
“Yeah,” Emily said. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” Melody whispered, then headed quickly for the stage door.
The hallway felt bright and large the moment she stepped into it, and it felt good to get away from those tap shoes reverberating in her chest. But every time she tried to take a breath, she found it difficult to fill her lungs. She was taking quick, shallow breaths and everything still looked slightly warped, like the stage lighting. The lockers that lined the hall weren’t completely straight, bowing in toward her, and the floor looked warped.
Melody could walk on it okay – there wasn’t really anything wrong with it – but she stumbled down the hall nonetheless. When she got to the end, instead of turning right to go into the dressing room, she went straight. There were double doors ahead of her, sunlight streaming through a pair of grimy windows, and her feet propelled her forward. Before she knew it she was outside, sucking in air with her hands on her knees.
After a moment or two she became aware of the fact that anyone standing in the hall and looking out those doors would see her doubled over and gasping like a lunatic, and she was not quite so absorbed in her panic attack that she didn’t want to avoid that. Melody took a few steps to the side of the building and leaned against the brick, putting her head back and staring up at the clear blue sky. It was a beautiful day, and here she was losing it over a kids’ recital.
Melody thought about the joint that she’d carefully tucked into the back pocket of her jeans in case of exactly this situation. Smoke in case of emergency.
Dr. Riley would not be pleased at this choice of coping mechanisms, but Dr. Riley wasn’t here right now and she didn’t have at least two more hours’ worth of little ballerinas to deal with. Melody did, and she reached into her pocket.
