by Helen Garner
In two strides I was behind the schoolgirl. I reached up, seized her ponytail at the roots and gave it a sharp downward yank. Her head snapped back. In a voice I didn’t recognise I snarled, ‘Give it a rest, darling.’ She twisted to look behind her. Her eyes were bulging, her mouth agape. I let go and she bolted away to her friends. The three of them set off at a run. Their white ribbons went bobbing through the crowd all the way along the City Square and up the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, where a famous private school was holding its speech night. The thing happened so fast that when I fell into step beside my friend she hadn’t even noticed I was gone.
Everyone to whom I described the incident became convulsed with laughter, even lawyers, once they’d pointed out that technically I had assaulted the girl. Only my fourteen-year-old granddaughter was disapproving. ‘Don’t you think you should have spoken to her? Explained why what she was doing was wrong?’ As if. My only regret is that I couldn’t see the Asian woman’s face at the moment the schoolgirl’s head jerked back and her insolent grin turned into a rictus. Now that I would really, really like to have seen.
By now my blood was up. At Qantas I approached a check-in kiosk and examined the screen. A busybody in uniform barged up to me, one bossy forefinger extended. ‘Are you sure you’re flying Qantas and not Jetstar?’ Once I would have bitten my lip and said politely, ‘Thanks. I’m okay, I think.’ Now I turned and raked him with a glare. ‘Do I look like somebody who doesn’t know which airline they’re flying?’
A young publicist from a literary award phoned me to deliver tidings that her tragic tone indicated I would find devastating: alas, my book had not been short-listed. ‘Thanks for letting me know,’ I said in the stoical voice writers have ready for these occasions. But to my astonishment she poured out a stream of the soft, tongue-clicking, cooing noises one makes to a howling toddler whose balloon has popped. I was obliged to cut across her: ‘And you can stop making those sounds.’
After these trivial but bracing exchanges, my pulse rate was normal, my cheeks were not red. I hadn’t thought direct action would be so much fun. Habits of a lifetime peeled away. The world bristled with opportunities for a woman in her seventies to take a stand. I shouted on planes. I fought for my place in queues. I talked to myself out loud in public. I walked along the street singing a little song under my breath: ‘Back off. How dare you? Make my day.’ I wouldn’t say I was on a hair-trigger. I was just primed for action.
I invited an old friend to meet me after work at a certain city bar, a place no longer super fashionable but always reliable. We came down the stairs at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon. Her silver hair shone in the dim room, advertising our low status. The large space was empty except for a small bunch of quiet drinkers near the door. Many couches and armchairs stood in appealing configurations. We walked confidently towards one of them. But a smiling young waiter stepped out from behind the bar and put out one arm. ‘Over here.’ He urged us away from the comfortable centre of the room, with its gentle lamps and cushions, towards the darkest part at the back, where several tiny café tables and hard, upright chairs were jammed side-on against a dusty curtain.
‘Why,’ I asked, ‘are you putting us way back here?’
‘It’s our policy,’ he said, ‘when pairs come in. We put them at tables for two.’
Pairs? Bullshit. ‘But we don’t want to sit at the back,’ I said. ‘There’s hardly anybody here. We’d like to sit on one of those nice couches.’
‘I’m sorry, madam,’ said the waiter. ‘It’s policy.’
‘Come on,’ said my pacific friend. ‘Let’s just sit here.’
I subsided. We chose a slightly less punitive table and laid our satchels on the floor beside us. With tilted head and toothy smile the waiter said, ‘How’s your day been, ladies?’
‘Not bad, thanks,’ I said. ‘We’re looking forward to a drink.’
He leaned his head and shoulders right into our personal space. ‘And how was your shopping?’
That was when I lost it.
‘Listen,’ I said with a slow, savage calm. ‘We don’t want you to ask us these questions. We want you to be cool, and silent, like a real cocktail waiter.’
The insult rolled off my tongue as smooth as poison. The waiter’s smile withered. Then he made a surprising move. He put out his hand to me and said, ‘My name’s Hugh.’
I shook his hand. ‘I’m Helen. This is Anne. Now, in the shortest possible time, will you please get two very dry martinis on to this table?’ He shot away to the bar. My friend with the shining silver hair pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at me. We waited in silence. Soon young Master Hugh skidded back with the drinks and placed them before us deftly, without further attempts at small talk. We thanked him. The gin worked its magic. For an hour my friend and I talked merrily in our ugly, isolated corner. We declined Hugh’s subdued offer of another round, and he brought me the bill. He met my eye. Neither of us smiled, let alone apologised, but between us flickered something benign. His apparent lack of resentment moved me to leave him a rather large tip.
On the tram home I thought of the young waiter with a chastened respect. It came to me that to turn the other cheek, as he had done, was not simply to apply an ancient Christian precept but also to engage in a highly sophisticated psychological manoeuvre. When I got home, I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead where I’d left off and came upon a remark made by Reverend Ames, the stoical Midwestern Calvinist preacher whose character sweetens and strengthens as he approaches death: ‘It is worth living long enough,’ he writes, in a letter to the son born to him in his old age, ‘to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.’
I take his point. But my warning stands. Let blood technicians look me in the eye and wish me good morning before they sink a needle into my arm. Let no schoolchild in a gallery stroll between me and the painting I’m gazing at as if I were only air. And let no one, ever again, under any circumstances, put to me or any other woman the moronic question, ‘And how was your shopping?’
2015
In the Wings
LEGS. My God, how many pairs of astonishing legs, women’s and men’s, are gathering here along the barre, in this vast, pale studio walled with mirrors? White tights reveal muscle and sinew in a pinkish glow. Black tights give a dense, matt profile. Some legs are hidden in loose trackpants. Others are bare: hairy or svelte, slender up to here, or chunkily supporting globular glutes and sculpted haunches. And the bellies above them are flat, flat, flat.
This is morning class, compulsory at least four times a week for every member of the company, from the corps de ballet and coryphées all the way up through the soloists and senior soloists to the principal artists.
The ballet master enters, a neat, powerful little blond with a jaw, in dark jeans. Quietly he approaches the central barre. The dancers turn to face him. I wait for him to call them to attention; but without preamble he begins to speak, no louder than if he were in conversation with someone standing right next to him. Out of his mouth pours a soft stream of French words in an Australian accent, illustrated once or twice by a couple of clear but casual movements. The dancers are standing still, watching him intently. I’m filled with alarm. The room is the same size as the main stage of the State Theatre! How can the distant ones hear him? How will they know what he wants them to do? Are they too scared to ask him to speak up?
‘Thank you!’ he says. A man at a Yamaha upright in the corner launches into some Schumann with a slow beat. The dancers draw themselves up, and begin to work.
And they’re all doing the same thing! They know the moves by heart. I relax into the peculiar bliss provoked by the sight of bodies moving in unison.
The higher the rank, it seems, the more individual a dancer’s demeanour in class. The lowlier dancers work conscientiously as instructed, while soloists and principals (older, more famous looking) will break off from the routine, adapt it as they please, or sit on the floor in a corner and quietly g
o through a private series of movements.
Two young men appear to be the pranksters of the class. They horse about near the window. Around them there’s a fizz of suppressed hilarity. Tsk. If I were the teacher I’d have pulled them into line by now. One of them is even eating chewy. Then I notice that the master himself, completely relaxed as he paces among the dancers and watches them with sharp eyes, is also discreetly chewing.
The music stops, and the master sets out a new list of steps. They must have a name for every movement the human body can make. He murmurs the sequence in a little rhythmic tune. To me it sounds like ‘Two jetés, two piqués, brush and brush and brush, plié!’
Everywhere I look I see a wonder. That girl there can’t possibly weigh anything—a breath of wind would bear her away. What flexibility. What control, what self-command! I have a guilty urge to stare, as one does at a deformity. Aren’t that boy’s thighs too heavy for his height?—but no, up sails his leg, weightless. A minuscule Chinese girl bends her torso back into such a perfect arc that an arrow might fly from her belly.
Through the huge western window of the studio I can see, only metres away, the balcony of an apartment. A man in shirtsleeves comes out and lights a cigarette. He leans his arms on the balustrade and smokes, with the morning sun in his face, calmly watching the dancers.
All this while, the exercises they’re doing have been increasing in speed and intensity. They are virtually fanning with their feet: they’re whirring. Their skin gleams with sweat.
I can see the effort. How do their knees take it? My own body tenses in sympathy, in incredulous envy of what they can do. I feel the weight, the strain in my hip joints, just sitting here in the chair.
They break for a brief rest. The stars withdraw. Now the humbler ones from the side barres can get out in front of the mirror for a moment and feast their eyes upon themselves.
I know nothing about ballet. The words Swan Lake, to me, are ignorant shorthand for fluttering tutus and rippling arms and melodramatic death throes in some damn castle in Europe. I don’t even know the plot. So when I wander in to watch Stephen Heathcote and Madeleine Eastoe rehearse a pas de deux, I’m probably expecting a dusty old thing, all sucked-in cheeks and phoney emoting.
Instead of which I find myself in the presence of a couple of cheerful pragmatists. I enter the room just as Heathcote is shoving his forearms like a forklift under Eastoe’s armpits and towing her backwards across the floor on the tips of her shoes, at speed. They are both laughing.
Heathcote is forty, old for a dancer. He is world famous and garlanded with honours, but there is nothing outlandish about his body, only a fine uprightness and strength. His demeanour is that of a bloke you might be standing next to in a supermarket queue: he has a friendly, ordinary manner, very short hair and a grin full of big white teeth.
Eastoe, at twenty-six, is approaching what I’m told are a dancer’s peak years. She’s a small woman, barely 5'2" at a guess, but, like Heathcote, not at all extreme in shape. Her build, light but strong, reminds me subliminally of someone from my distant past. She calls up in me a strange affection, a desire to choose her as my favourite to watch. Over the five days I spend in the studios, I rack my brains for the source of this recognition, and one morning, when I see her yank her leotard down over her bottom like a kid at the pool, I grasp it: she reminds me of myself and my sisters, when we were thin, muscly legged schoolgirls in the 1950s. This isn’t vanity. It’s just a measure of how unexaggerated her build is, how close to the everyday; yet she has brought this standard-issue healthy Australian body to a pitch of shapeliness and power by years of concentrated labour that the ordinary teenage girl could barely conceive of, let alone aspire to.
The ballet mistress, in tight black with a ponytail and the soft voice that seems to go with the job, is guiding the dancers through the steps, sharpening and correcting and focusing. Heathcote and Eastoe grin as they work. Their manner suggests that on some level they find their efforts comic, even ludicrous. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Is this the right grip? Would it be better if I did it that way? They seem to have even the backs of their necks under conscious control. Then Heathcote steps up behind Eastoe, seizes her waist, and before I can see what he’s doing, she’s soaring high above his head, giggling as she flies. He places her lightly back on her feet.
Rain patters on the roof. Again and again they tackle the difficult passage. Heathcote watches himself and Eastoe in the mirror with a fierce concentration. There is a great politeness in the room and he seems to be the source of it. Every time they stop dancing to discuss the steps, the pianist seizes his cryptic crossword and bows his head over it.
Eastoe, her wavy hair escaping in tendrils around her forehead, constantly effaces herself before the more experienced Heathcote. In spite of his genial patience, she is always apologising, as if all the mistakes they make were hers: ‘Sorry! Sorry! It’s my leg, not the step! It should feel beautiful, but there’s something wrong with my arms—I feel retarded!’
He lifts her once more and up she flies—but high in the air on his two hands she loses it and starts to laugh helplessly. He lets her drop, vertical, to his chest and squeezes her tight, like a father playing with a child. Everyone in the room is laughing.
‘I have to not get excited,’ says Eastoe, taking the blame. ‘I love that jump. I’ll let you jump me!’
And this time they get it right. He doesn’t ‘jump’ her, he tosses her, as it were round the corner of himself, and catches her deftly in both arms, cradling her in an intricate folded posture, right across the front of his body. The trust! This whole thing is trust in action.
‘Right?’ says the ballet mistress. ‘Thank you!’ The piano strikes up.
And suddenly, with the music, the room changes key. What’s happening? ‘This,’ whispers the young publicist beside me, ‘is where she suspects he’s having an affair.’
Something has happened to Eastoe’s brow: it’s low and dark, charged with pain. Heathcote, too, loses his genial smile. His face chills and hardens into defensive anger. They are dancing together, but he is withdrawing from her. His hand, which by all instinctive rules of dance and of love should now be curved round her face, is loitering stiffly by her waist. She seizes it, drags it upwards against his resistance, presses his reluctant palm against her cheek.
The emotional freight of that movement is unbearable. A wave of memory hits me. I want to hide my face; but when I glance at the publicist I see that she too, who has seen this ballet several times, has tears in her eyes.
Through the open door comes a faint rhythmic squeaking. I glance up from this scene of primal suffering and see a male dancer out in the hall, prancing up and down on a tiny, round trampoline and vaguely looking on.
Meanwhile a third dancer, a pretty woman with a broad, gentle brow, quietly enters the studio and goes to the barre along the mirrored back wall. She pulls on a long tulle skirt over her pink tights and glossy new pointe shoes, and begins unobtrusively, while Eastoe and Heathcote are still deep in their anguished pas de deux, to do preparatory stretches.
The publicist whispers to me, ‘That’s Lisa Bolte. She left to have a baby. She’s come back to do a guest role in La Sylphide.’
Bolte’s arms, as she practises on her own, have a dainty lightness. They flow through the air, like thin water-jets snaking outwards from her shoulder joints. Every move she makes radiates sweetness, lifts the heart. Her facial expressions are introverted and eloquent, like those of someone engaged in a pleasant conversation on a hands-free mobile.
Heathcote and Eastoe turn back into ordinary people, pick up their gear and stroll flat-footed out into the hallway. Bolte’s partner, Robert Curran, enters: a pale, long-cheeked, hairy-chested sex bomb who in this role will wear a kilt. The two dancers start work. Within minutes they are both panting and sweating. Bolte goes fleeting across the floor on pointe, her ankles whirring like mad under her delicate skirt. As she dashes past me I can hear her harsh, rhythmic breathing.
They pause to rest. I look at her with curiosity: yes, though she is still, by the standards of the world, a beautifully slender and strong young creature, her torso no longer shows the flat belly of girlhood. She has transcended the flowery innocence of the ballerina, and entered a deeper womanhood. This moves me, somehow. I respect her in a more complex way.
I glance down and notice that a very young dancer has spread out a dark red crocheted shawl on the floor beside me, and is lying on it, doing a series of slow but demanding abdominal exercises. There is no fat on her belly at all. None. I gaze at this in slightly disapproving awe.
In the wardrobe department, women—and the odd man—work in silence at big tables, subduing stiff swathes of translucent fabric. Deep in the room stand posts to which are hooked frothy clumps of those crazy-looking notions, tutus. Each one bursts upward in widening layers from its lacy little knickers. Their frills remind me of the tender feathers that Snugglepot and Cuddlepie glued to their bottoms when they disguised themselves as birds to escape the horrid Banksia Men.
A member of the corps de ballet is about to be fitted for her costume. Here she comes, a tall, fine-boned, brown-skinned lass with her hair screwed into a knob on top of her head. These necks they have! The essence of ballet resides in the neck. You can’t mistake it. The length, the grace, the exaggerated distance between earlobe and shoulder tip—oh, it’s gorgeous.
With the unconcern of one who knows her body is perfect, the girl strips off her baggy cotton garments and stands there in what looks like a black bathing suit. The seamstress pins round her waist a calf-length skirt in many layers, tinted the palest, most watery green. It gushes out from under the hard, narrow little bodice which is being fixed so firmly to her torso that I get anxious: ‘Can you breathe in that?’ The girl grins and shrugs: ‘A little.’ ‘Enough,’ says the seamstress. The milliner reaches for a tiny coronet of georgette petals and plops it on top of the dancer’s head. She examines herself in the long mirror: ‘I feel like a fairy already!’
