Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet

by Ringer, Jenifer

  Maybe it sounds silly, but that was a huge moment of triumph for me. Perhaps I wasn’t going to be a dancer anymore, but I could learn to function in this other, nondancing world. I wasn’t completely without skills or hope. I had the ability to learn, and things to offer.

  Throughout that fall I did what I could. I attended college courses, taught the ballet workout, and worked at All Angels’. I tried my hand at writing children’s stories, a secret dream of mine, and sent some of them out to publishers. I prayed regularly with Kathy and Fay, and slowly, slowly, my food cravings and disorders began to ebb away. My depression began to lift. I was weaning myself off my therapist, feeling stronger without her. I returned full force to House Church. I began to have a normal relationship with food for the first time in a long while, and was starting to feel like I had a regular life: I had nondancing jobs, was going to school, and had nondancing Christian friends. No one cared what I looked like or ate or how much I weighed. I was valued for the kind of person I was, not how I appeared on a stage. In my head I had quit dancing completely and was looking forward to starting a new life. I was thinking about joining a master’s program in psychology.

  One day I happened to bump into my ballet teacher from Steps, a public dance studio on Broadway and Seventy-fourth Street where anyone can take classes. Many professionals take classes there when they find a teacher who particularly helps them to grow as dancers. My favorite teacher there was Nancy Bielski; I’d taken classes from her since my first summer course in the city when I was fourteen.

  Nancy had never judged me based on my weight and had always focused on teaching me to dance, caring about me as a dancer and a person but never basing her approval on my professional success. When we saw each other on the sidewalk, I was happy to talk to her and tell her what I was up to.

  She looked at me there on the street and said, “You should come back to class.”

  “I don’t know, Nancy. I think I’m done with that. I don’t think I would feel comfortable anyway,” I replied.

  “You should come back just for you. Not to dance professionally or anything. I think it would be good for you to just dance and move to music. I don’t care how you dance or what you look like, and you can take classes for free as my guest. Just come back.”

  I gave Nancy a noncommittal answer, but over the next couple of days I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Maybe it would feel good to dance again with no one pressuring me to do it. I would just be going to dance for myself, to make my body feel good, and to do exercises that I’d been doing since I was a child. Since I was no longer a part of a company, I didn’t have to worry about my appearance. My body was now my own, and I could enjoy dancing without being anxious about what I looked like as I danced. Lots of people took dance class for fun. Why couldn’t I?

  A few days later, I walked into Nancy’s classroom at Steps. I was suddenly terrified to enter the studio and had to talk myself into actually going through with the class. I had to remind myself that I was free from anyone else’s judgment, that I was a Daughter of the Lord, and that I was just going in to take a ballet class for the fun of it, for me. Nancy greeted me with an encouraging smile, but I still had the remnants of the shame I’d been dancing with prior to having been fired; I wore a giant T-shirt and large “garbage bag” shorts that obscured my shape. And I was relieved that no one from City Ballet was in the class that day.

  The class was like a renewing rain. From the first chords the pianist played for the plié combination, I felt a sense of happiness and familiarity. Nancy’s class had a rhythm I was comfortable with, and it felt good to be doing the barre exercises that I’d done in one way or another since I was ten years old. My body moved into the ballet combinations as a train travels down the tracks: the path my limbs traced in the air seemed inevitable.

  Even the center work felt good, even though I was out of shape and couldn’t dance anything very well. It was simply wonderful to dance to music again, and I found a freedom in the familiar structure of a ballet class. Nancy gave me corrections as if I’d never stopped and treated me as simply another student.

  The one thing I did find was that I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. As comfortable as I was growing in my new regular life, I couldn’t see my reflection in a ballet setting without hearing the old voices of disgust and condemnation ringing through my head. My solution was to simply not look so that I could enjoy dancing again.

  After a few days of this, I had a moment in the middle of Nancy’s class that was a culmination of all the healing that had slowly been taking place in my life for the past few months. Everything seemed to come together: the prayers, the conversations, the new friendships and new jobs, the new, daily reliance on a personal God. As Nancy was giving the adagio combination in the center, I was in the middle of a group of dancers trying to learn the sequence. The dancers in front of me shifted just enough so that I could see myself in the mirror; I locked eyes with my reflection.

  I stared at myself for an uncomfortable moment or two, immediately going into self-hating dancer mode. From the beginning, we ballerinas are taught to look at ourselves in the mirror to find out what is wrong or bad or ugly. We try to perfect the shapes and lines our body is making and feel unsatisfied if our feet aren’t arched enough or our legs aren’t high enough or our arms aren’t well shaped. I know some dancers who were told, ridiculously, that their necks were too short. They would wear their hair high to try to disguise the “problem,” but I’m sure that most of the time when they look in the mirror, they think, “short neck.” Me, I stared at my hips and thighs and arms and waist, disgusted by them and ashamed that I’d even walked into a ballet class.

  But then, like a golden light, a thought fell over me: You are beautiful just the way you are, like this, right now. It was not my thought. It must have come from God. But I saw the truth in it, because I realized that my beauty came not from my body but from the fact that I was a Child of God, redeemed and forgiven. My appearance wasn’t important. I could allow myself to be in this body, exactly the way it was, and feel beautiful and loved by my Savior who pursued me—He had sought after me, lost though I was, even with all the things about myself that I hated. I could accept God’s forgiveness and also forgive myself for falling and failing and self-destroying.

  I realized that I looked fine, just the way I was, and if I stayed at the weight I was right then for the rest of my life, it was all right. I did not need to be a professional dancer. I didn’t need to constantly wish I was thinner. I accepted myself for who I was, inside and out, and allowed myself to picture my life moving forward with me at this weight; I saw myself happy and free and able to function in and contribute to the world. I was not perfect and was still very broken in many ways, but it was that very brokenness that was enabling me to lean on God and invite Him ever deeper into my life. My very failures had become the things that God was using to heal me so that He could use me to His purposes, whatever those might be. I went through the rest of class with no one being the wiser that my world had changed. Outwardly, no apparent change had occurred or would occur for months, but I knew that something was different, and I clung to it.

  Chapter Five

  Dawning

  I never had a boyfriend. Actually, scratch that. I had lots of boyfriends, up until the age of ten. In preschool, I loved this sweet little dark-headed boy. He and I would run the length of the front yard when preschool was done for the day, get behind the large sign that proclaimed our school to the road passing in front of the building, and kiss until our mothers decided it was time to go home.

  During kindergarten, my neighbor John soulfully sang seventies love songs to me while we played hide-and-seek in the empty grass lot by my house.

  In the first grade, there was a quiet redheaded boy named Lenny. When I went through a string of viruses and missed a lot of consecutive days of school, Lenny and his father came to my house with a gift for me. In
side the little box that I shyly unwrapped was a chain bearing a golden key.

  “It’s the key to my heart,” Lenny solemnly declared. After that I skipped second grade and went to third, and Lenny and I lost touch.

  In the fifth grade there was a tall boy named Tim. We used to hold hands while we walked around the track during recess. He instructed me on how to properly hold hands.

  “Why is your hand so relaxed?” he would ask, pressing my fingers around his. “You have to actually hold my hand.”

  I was not very nice to Tim and suddenly decided I liked another boy named Chris instead. Tim and I had a bad breakup, and I made Tim feel sad, which I later felt very bad about. But it was too late to go back, and now Chris and I were an item, slow-dancing at the fifth-grade gym dance with our ten-year-old tummies pressed against each other.

  And then, after Chris, there was nothing. I had lots of crushes on boys but never had the gumption to assert myself, and my reticence made them leery of approaching me. Ballet began to take up all of my after-school time and left little room for other social activities. I was a hopeless romantic, however, and loved reading books with a love story in them. In fact, if there was no love story, or if, when I read the end of the book in advance (yes, I’m one of those people), I discovered the love story didn’t work out, I would put the book down and search for another. Around the age of ten I even prayed for my future husband. I asked God to watch over my future spouse and to develop him and make him and me both ready for each other at the right time. I made a list of things I was hoping for in a husband, which I prayed for and then put away in a drawer; the only things I remember now from that list are that I wanted a gentleman, a hero, and a good dancer.

  God would one day answer that prayer in every way, but in the meantime I had several misfires. There was a horrible incident in the ninth grade when I was sweet on a handsome boy named Gary from my Spanish class. I was hopelessly in love with him, but he was in the popular crowd and had no idea I even existed. My two friends and I formed a very small, quiet group that went largely unnoticed by the other kids. Every time Gary walked by my desk or glanced at me, I would feel my face flush and grow hot. I must have talked about him a lot at home because my mother hatched a scheme to try to get his attention, much to my dismay.

  “Why don’t you call him and ask him what the Spanish homework is?” she asked. I thought about the idea, tempted but also appalled.

  “I could never do that. He would know. It would be so embarrassing!”

  Besides, everyone knew I was a straight-A student and a “good girl,” and it would be ridiculous to pretend I didn’t know what we had been assigned for homework.

  My mother and I went back and forth for a while until I found myself with my finger on his number in the phone book, sitting by our telephone. I have no idea how she managed to convince me. I ordered my mom out of the room so that I could have some privacy and rehearsed what I was going to say. I picked up the phone and then hung it up. I dialed his number and then quickly hung up again before the phone rang. I took a moment to giggle uncontrollably. Finally I plunged in and did it.

  The phone rang. “Hello?” It was his mother.

  “May I speak to Gary, please?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “It’s Jenny from Spanish class.”

  There was an agonizing pause while Gary was fetched. I wanted to hang up, but it was too late!

  “Hello?” His voice sounded weird on the phone.

  “Hi, it’s Jenny from Spanish class.”

  “Hi.”

  Silence.

  “Um, I forgot what the homework was. Can you tell me?”

  Now, as I said this, I remembered that not only was I known as a good student but my only two friends, Susan and Erica, were also in my Spanish class. He must have been wondering why I didn’t call them, if I’d indeed forgotten about the homework. Soon he would figure out that I’d called him because I liked him.

  “Uh, let me go check.”

  Gary put the phone down while I writhed in embarrassed agony on the other end. He came back to the phone and told me the page numbers and assignments.

  “Oh, thanks,” I said into the awkward silence.

  Then, “Okay,” I said rapidly. “See you tomorrow!” I hung up the phone, moaning. I was going to kill my mother. How could she have done this to me? How did I ever let her talk me into it?

  Gary continued to ignore me at school, as did the rest of his friends, so I didn’t, at least to my knowledge, become the class joke. But I also never went out with him.

  For the rest of my high school life in Virginia, I nearly always left school early for dance and got to know very few of my classmates. There were hardly any boys at Washington Ballet for me to spend time with either. During my last two years of high school in New York City, I attended the Professional Children’s School and was rarely in class; the same was true of the rest of the students there. My friends from the School of American Ballet also attended PCS, so we stuck together.

  There was a large male class at SAB, but I didn’t really get to know any of them very well. Their classes were separate from ours except for the pas de deux class, and I wasn’t outgoing enough to make friends with them. I had my three main girlfriends, and we did everything together; I suppose we were the nerdy ones and were not really invited to parties. There was certainly a popular crowd, and anywhere there are teenagers, there are always wild and crazy parties, but we never saw them. We would make homemade pizza together or, if we were feeling really crazy, go and get ice-cream cones in the middle of February.

  I loved pas de deux class despite my awkwardness around the boys. There were always the sweet quiet ones who would come and ask me to be their partners. Once I began taking the class regularly, I gained confidence in my abilities as a partner and in my ability to ask someone to dance with me. It was still very challenging, but a lot of the challenge was just being a teenage girl in a room full of teenage boys and wanting to impress them and not embarrass myself. I developed regular partnerships with the boys who didn’t scare me too much.

  After I got into the company I went on a couple of dates, usually blind dates set up by friends, but I was never interested enough to try to sustain a relationship beyond three dates. Ballet just took too much of my mental, emotional, and physical energy. On my free days I was attending Fordham University and doing homework or getting massages or doing Pilates. I had plenty of friends and a fat, loving cat. What more could a girl need?

  I used to force myself to go on dates because my friends and family told me it was good for me. If the first date with a guy wasn’t a winner, I would still go on at least one more to give him a good try. But one day I realized that if I had to force myself to go out with someone, I obviously must not be interested in him. Why was I wasting my time? I held on to my hopes for romantic love and nurtured dreams of a hero who would appear from on high to sweep me off my feet. In the meantime, I just had a lot of guy friends, nothing more.

  One guy had been on my radar since I was fifteen: James Fayette. At SAB he was in the cooler, more rebellious crowd. He wore clumpy Timberland boots and a puffy jeans jacket with the collar turned up. He would stub out his cigarette and slouch into the ballet school with a wink at the girls, telling some guy-joke to make his friends laugh. One of the most muscular boys at SAB, he was the strongest partner and the one every girl wished she could dance with because he could do all the hard lifts. James and I knew each other, but we rarely interacted because we didn’t partner together and kept to our separate crowds.

  I got into the company one year before James did, and even after he joined the corps, we maintained a strictly professional relationship. Some of my best friends were close to him, but I always found him a little intimidating, so I kept my distance. Professionally, however, we were soon thrown together and found ourselves frequent partners. James had a steady
girlfriend to whom he was faithful, even though he could be flirtatious and flippant; knowing that his playful comments and winking were harmless, I found that I enjoyed dancing with him and trusted him completely as a partner. It was fun for me to flirt when I knew nothing serious would come of it. And when it came to doing his job, James was very serious; I knew that if he was the one responsible for holding me up, I would be in good hands.

  Now James claims that sometime after he and his longtime girlfriend broke up he asked me out several times. I have no recollection of this. James swears that he asked me out with groups, in a casual way, so that we could get to know each other better. He asserts that he had been interested in me since our SAB days. I was completely oblivious to this and, inexperienced as I was, don’t remember James asking me out even as part of a group. James says that I would always say yes and then fink out at the last minute, leaving him disappointed.

  That, unfortunately, does sound like me. I tended to enjoy my alone time and often found too much socializing to be draining. Most of the time I was happy to be home reading a good sci-fi or fantasy or romance novel, curled up in my pajamas. The thought of having to go out and see people was exhausting. The only person whose company never tired me out was my sister, Becky, because she always let me just be myself, with no judgments or expectations. Our relationship was balanced and reciprocal. But I do remember agreeing to social engagements in the moment, because I had a hard time saying no, and then coming up with an excuse later so that I didn’t have to go out.

  When I began to struggle with weight in the company, I became even more of a loner. I would take long walks at night through the city, often ending up at a bookstore where I could sit on the floor and read for hours. I would stay at home and rent old musicals. One day, however, I discovered Denim and Diamonds, the line-dancing country music bar on Lexington Avenue and Forty-eighth Street.