I am spending an hour with one of my many dance friends in the shabby, pretty suburb known as St. Elmo. We’re talking about dance, which is, after all, the one subject.
We go to a hummus place — room for maybe four tables, slender old man running the front, slender young man cooking in the kitchen, chairs at a slim bar along one wall. We order hummus bowls and eat a ridiculously large amount of spring greens, onions, olives, falafel, eggplant dip, flatbread, samosas, kombucha (her), and cranberry lemonade (me). The bar is so very narrow we can’t scoot all the way up to it. We sit catty cornered to each other on our tall chairs. Behind me, a plate glass window radiates midday warmth. I hook one foot around the spindly leg of Dance Friend’s chair.
Dance Friend is about 10 years younger than I am, a company director, a former soloist, a choreographer, an improvisor, and a mad free spirit. I feel a bit pokey compared with her, but when I’m near her, her face, flame-like itself, reflects a light. That’s good enough for me.
Outside the window we can see tourists walking up and down to get at St. Elmo’s three attractions: the Incline Railway, Clumpies Ice Cream, and Mister T’s Pizza. All of America thinks they need to ride the Incline up Lookout Mountain, and since the tram is small and the speed slow, they mill around in the dozens of dozens, eating ice cream and looking like Sylvain Chomet’s Americans on The Triplets of Belleville.
We discuss everything, from people we know to the artist’s need for moral and creative freedom. Not freedom, you understand, from morality, but freedom to hear one’s conscience and to obey it. They’re the same, really, for us — moral agency, creative agency. Dance Friend tells me about her marriage. I tell her about my — yikes — marriages.
We’ve told each other before, but you know how it is with friendships, real years-long ones: You may have the same conversations over and over, but every time you talk, you dig deeper. You circle higher.
We ask for to-go boxes and carry the remains of our greens with their scrumptious toppings away across the street, waiting carefully at the crosswalk cos A Lot of These Tourists Don’t Know What a Crosswalk Is.
A perennial complaint.
A few minutes before, Dance Friend had asked, “Would you marry again?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m so bad at it.”
Follow description. Dance Friend has heard the list before, but this time I go deeper, though without much emotion. The litany no longer interests me. At the time, you understand, it was paralyzing. Now it’s just background for a point I’m getting at.
“ … and he threw me and raped me so, you know, I probably won’t be trying that again any time soon.”
That’s where I’m going with that one. My crashing incompetence at marriage.
We’re crossing the road, careful of these tourists who Don’t Know What a Crosswalk Is, and about midway, Dance Friend interrupts my catalogue of insult, right at the rape, “How RUDE.”
And I laugh.
She laughs, too. She turns the R almost into a W, like maybe a Teletubby would say it.
(Teletubbies: rainbow-colored, perennial 18-month-olds who live in a space ship buried and turfed over to look like a hobbit hole. They have no grownups, and they talk in sentences of two or three words, which they burble out as coos and squeaks.)
And there it is, you know, that’s how it is, not those things you think when you’re young, A Big Trauma, I’d Rather Die. Now, looking back, with Dance Friend laughing at my shoulder, it’s no more than this: An imposition by a person whose RUDE-ness makes them almost unworthy of notice.
Funny, almost.
No, not almost. Very funny.
Say that in a Teletubby voice.
How RUDE!
Vewy funny!
We walk on across the street. We climb the hill to the empty parking lot where we’ve stashed our cars.
I look at my friend, this vibrant woman with her dark-honey-colored curls, her strong nimble body, her eyes that might be green or gold or blue depending on where her thoughts have carried her. I think, She’s right.
What was hard is now easy.
There’s been no great revelation, no psychological work put in. Only time has elapsed, and I have gone to the studio hundreds of times, done hundreds of barres, folded my knees in maybe thousands of pliés. And I’ve been blessed with friends for whom, also, the one thing is the work.
As to the rude impositions of others — I’m indifferent. Dance Friend has shone me a mirror for real, and it’s empty of almost everything but light.
Next time we meet, we’ll talk about freedom as indifference to past harms, I think, without being in a hurry about it. Might be next week or next year. We see each other all the time, but we mostly talk about dancing, of course.
Now, in the empty parking lot with the funeral home up the hill and the dusty oak leaves rustling overhead like it’s August, not June, and the Food City parking lot busy behind us, Dance Friend leans in to hug me.
We’re Southerners, we’re women, of course we hug. But there are hugs and there are hugs. Today, for instance, the air’s humid, not too hot, around 90 degrees. We’re both a bit sticky. It’s a real, tactile hug. Then Dance Friend says, “No; other arm, other way.”
I back up. I take a minute to figure it out. She holds out her left arm. I swap my leftover hummus bowl to my right hand and hold out my left arm. We lean in, pulling close. At last I understand: I can feel her heart beat when I hug her this way.
“A heart hug!” Dance Friend explains as I get it. She waited for me to feel it first. Another dance friend has taught her. Now she teaches me.
“Yes!” I say.
We make plans; we part.