We were a matched pair; the blood said so when we sliced our thumbs in the dressing
room. At fourteen I couldn’t compete with your ripening body. Mine was a plank. Yet
we twinned in ballerina talent, you with your perfect ballet-body alignment and strong
feet arched like hooks, and me with my thirty-two fouettés or whip turns where each
landing before the next was an exclamation point. It was as if some force were driving
me out of myself to leave all boundaries behind. What we hid from our parents was the
plan to quit school at sixteen to join the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. When we doubted
ourselves, we were sure we’d be asked to join this progressive company when in 1951
Janet Collins became the first African-American to be a full-time soloist in ballet’s white
world: dear Janet Collins, a slip of a woman we’d sometimes watch rehearse before
afternoon class absorbing how she moved. The ease with which she executed the most
complicated choreography was a language our bodies longed to speak. M and I were
going to live together in the great city of New York and that plot kept us going through a
gloomy and spotted adolescence. Oh, Marcia, everywhere we turned, we stretched
towards the invisible light. This was the love we shared.

A dancer’s life—
millions of spinning miles
clocked on her odometer.


© by Jean Colonomos.
Used with the author’s permission.