How Not To Fall by Emily Foster (5)

For the uninitiated, here’s how a ninety-minute community center jazz class goes during the spring: thirty minutes of warm-ups, twenty minutes of floor work, and then forty minutes on the routine for the recital. I’m choreographing it to “Happy.” They love the song and their dance, but I’m pushing them hard. By seven thirty, my eighteen tweens are sweating heavily, their heads down, their hands on their hips as they gasp for air.

“If it feels hard, you’re doing it right,” I tell them. “Get the heck outta here, and I’ll see you all next week—Paul and Amy, see me please!” The students applaud dutifully, if desultorily, and limp, groaning, out of the classroom. Paul and Amy approach me.

Paul and Amy are twins. They’re in both my jazz class and my ballet class, and they’re helping me out with my solo in the recital. They’re going to sing live, their mom accompanying on the piano. Their mom (a professor in the IU School of Music, so, ya know, no slouch) is arranging “No One Is Alone” from Into the Woods as a duet for her two children, special for this performance. It’s a cheat on my part—I don’t love putting on a show, and I’d rather share the stage with my students, plus who doesn’t love a brother and sister singing together, right? And yesterday—two weeks after I chose the song—it was on that TV show Glee.

We’ll be a hit.

I’ve been choreographing to a click track and the sheet music since I chose the song, and Professor Paul and Amy’s Mom promised me a MIDI this week so I’d have something like music to rehearse with.

“Amy and Paul,” I say to them very seriously. “Do you have the MIDI file from your mother?”

“Oh! I forgot!” says Amy. “It’s in my bag.”

“Run and get it, and you can watch my dance. Want to do that?”

They both nod ecstatically and run off together.

And then I notice Charles hovering at the studio door, looking uncomfortable. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say, “be just a minute. The kids are bringing me a thing, and I told them I would—”

Amy and Paul race back in, barging past Charles. “Here you go, Miss Annie,” Amy pants. She holds her Android up to mine and transfers the file onto my phone. Kids these days.

“Cool! Let’s see what we’ve got here.” I plug my phone into the speaker jack and hit play.

The MIDI is not the most musical thing you’ve ever heard; it’s basically the worst karaoke track in the history of the universe, but it’s way better than a click track and my imagination. I start marking steps, and then I notice my students starting to gather at the door—Amy and Paul clearly told them I was going to run through my solo, and they all want to see.

I pause the music. “Ladies, if you want to watch, come in and sit cross-legged in front of the mirror and be very quiet. Understood?”

They nod silently and shuffle in.

There are parents in the doorway now too. And Charles. Well, no pressure. “The whole thing isn’t even choreographed yet,” I announce to the room generally, “but let’s see what we’ve got so far. Call out when you see a step you recognize.”

I run through what I’ve got, walking through the parts I haven’t figured out yet, while students call “Ballonné!” and “Pas de chat!” There are gasps and whispers of “Four!” when I get to the pirouette at the end, which I finish in arabesque—barely. I stick out my tongue and wrinkle my nose as I wobble on my left foot, trying to salvage the finish. I could also just make it a triple, or finish on both feet like any normal person would. But it’s a song about balance, so.

When the song ends, I curtsey ironically, all the way to the floor, as the students give a polite smattering of applause, and then I shoo them out. “Amy and Paul, thank your mother for me!” I call after the twins. Finally I turn to Charles and say, “Welcome! This’ll just take a sec.” And I start putting my stuff away. It’s hot in here, with a little bit of sweaty tween stank.

“How long have you been dancing?” Charles asks.

I pull on sweat pants and a T-shirt—this one has a cherry drawn into a grid of the value of pi to the twenty-five-hundredth decimal (another one from my mom)—over my leotard and tights and say, “Since I was three.” I shove my feet into my Chacos. “I kinda went the professional training route for a couple of years, but it wasn’t for me.” I pull the bandana off my hair and allow the sweaty, curling mop to make its own decisions about how to behave. I look at him and smile. “Okay, ready.”

He’s looking at me with his mouth open. “I had no idea.”

“It’s not that related to school, I guess. That’s sort of why I changed direction.” With my backpack on one shoulder, I lead him out of the studio. I wave and call bye to students, parents, and other teachers as I go. Once we’re out, I turn to him and say, “Where to?”

“Do they know?” he says.

“Does who know what?”

“The students. The other teachers. Know that you . . . ‘kind of went the professional training route’?”

“Sure. Where’re we going? I have a fuck ton of work and I’m starving.”

“What made you quit?”

“I didn’t quit,” I say, my index finger in his face. “I changed direction.”

And he laughs. He laughs and starts walking down Grant Street. “Of course, what was I thinking? How about Laughing Planet?”

“Great.”

It’s only a couple of blocks, but I walk as slowly as I can. Spring has finally come—late this year—and the air has that fresh, muddy smell from rain earlier today. I think the sun should never set before eight p.m. There should be a rule.

“Petrichor,” Charles says, walking beside me, his hands in his pockets and his satchel over his shoulder.

“Huh?”

“The word for that smell you’ve been inhaling as if it’ll get you high. It’s called petrichor. The stones release oils when they get wet, and that’s what the smell is.”

I look at him, astonished. “That,” I say, “is my favorite fact ever.”

And then we eat burritos and work on our respective papers.

I don’t want to bore you with the details of my research, but the ultra-short version is that I study arousal coherence in anger. There’re three levels at which we experience emotions: physiology (like heart rate), involuntary behavior (like facial expressions), and experience (what you pay attention to when someone asks you how you’re feeling). And sometimes they all line up (coherence), and sometimes they don’t (noncoherence), and my project looks at how they do or don’t line up when people experience anger.

To do this, we induce anger in research participants and then measure their heart rate, reflexes, pupil dilation, facial expressions, and we ask them how they feel. Got it so far?

And the thing Charles found in my data, which I failed to notice, is that there were some outliers that seemed to form a pattern of their own. And I’ve been spending all this time trying to figure out what the deal is with the outliers. My working hypothesis is that it has to do with our mood induction method. I think it might be producing inconsistent results.

And if you don’t care about any of that, I won’t be offended. There are days when I don’t care either.

So while we’re eating burritos and working, I’m running my hypothesis past Charles, and he nods eagerly. “I think you’re on to something. May I suggest another approach that could dovetail well with that one?”

“Does it involve a lot more work? Because the clock is seriously ticking, dude.”

“A bit more—for the purposes of your thesis, it’s probably only necessary to be able to say you’ve considered it and it might prove a valuable avenue to explore in the future.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Trauma,” he answers.

“Trauma?”

“Your outliers are all women. Women are disproportionately the targets of interpersonal violence, and this is not an otherwise at-risk group. I think a reasonable potential cause for the differences are different reptilian vagal responses that are characteristic of trauma survivors. You look troubled by this.”

“Um, yes, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Reptilian vagus. Trauma. Look it up.”

 

I do. I go to class on Friday, and then I go to the library. I spend Saturday at the library too. Then I spend Sunday at the lab. So the next time Charles sees me, it’s Monday morning. He finds me in the ducklings’ office, fast asleep on the couch, with my face pasted to the pages of The Polyvagal Theory. He wakes me with a hand on my shoulder and a soft, “Annie.”

As I rise to consciousness and he hands me a mug of shitty lab coffee, I tell him, “Dude, I fucking hate you.”

“Finding it hard going?” he says, sitting at the far end of the couch. He takes a sip of his coffee.

“It’s not just that it’s hard to understand—which it is! It’s hard, man. I’m not dumb, and this is hard. But the part that really sucks is—” I’m suddenly choked by the tears that have been chasing me through the weekend, that forced me out of the library, out of the apartment, into the lab, where I could be alone.

Charles sits calmly and blows on his coffee, waiting.

I start again. “The part that really sucks is reading the stories from the women, you know?” I sniff and gasp through my tears. “And I don’t have a clue what my research subjects brought into the room with them in their central nervous systems; we didn’t even ask. For all I know they could have been hit by cars or sexually assaulted or experienced birth trauma or been targets of violence—I mean, is this what the world is like? Are people walking around with these scars on their nervous systems, and we can’t even see them?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I mean, have you read this?!” I brandish my book at him.

“Yes,” he says.

“I mean, listen to this.” I flip the book to the page that knocked me out of the library on Saturday, and hold up one finger while I read. “ ‘For example, following the rape, sexual encounters, even with a desired partner, may elicit a vagal syncope. Or the raped women may become anxious about sexual encounters and physiologically mobilized via sympathetic excitation to escape.’ I mean . . . both of those are terrible.” I look up and stare at him, my jaw dangling in horror.

He nods, and a corner of his bottom lip tugs downward, like an apology. “I know.”

“You know what I loved?” I yell, like it’s his fault, though I know it isn’t. “I loved my cadaver dissection lab! I loved seeing how all the parts of the machine work, what they look like on the inside! It never bothered me—it’s how I knew for sure I should be a doctor! But you know what grosses me out? Nauseates me? The way living humans treat each other!”

I’m choked again, and I just sit there and let myself cry.

We sit together, silent apart from my tears, which fade at last into a couple of noisy sighs.

Then Charles gets up and walks to the door. He stands there, his hand on the doorknob.

“Going to med school then, young Coffey?” he asks gently.

I nod and sniff.

“Good,” he says. “Want the door open or closed?”

“Closed,” I say.

And he closes it behind him as he goes.

As I sit, staring at the closed door, I remember that for the whole first year, I could hardly make eye contact with him, much less cry in front of him. I couldn’t even say his name. I called him Dr. Douglas. In return, he called me Miss Coffey. Until one day, I was in a shitty mood because it was raining—I love the rain, honestly I do, but there’s just some days, you know? Anyway, I was all grumpy, and I complained, “Can’t you just call me Annie like everyone else does?”

And he said, very calmly, “Can’t you just call me Charles?”

Which is when it all changed between us—I thought, anyway. That was when I was like, Charles and I have A Thing.

I practiced saying his name on my walk to campus each morning. “Charles,” I’d mutter. “Charles. Charles.” It sounds nice in his accent—“Chahls”—but it’s awkward in mine. And then I’d get to the lab and say, “Good morning, Charles,” and he’d look up from whatever he was doing and say, “Good morning, Annie,” and I’d feel totally sure we had A Thing. And then he’d ignore me for the rest of the day. But it was like . . . “ignoring me” ignoring me. Ignoring me because he knew I was there.

I don’t even know anymore if we have A Thing—if we ever had A Thing, or if it was always in my head. But the last few weeks, ever since Veggie Burger Friends Night . . . I don’t know. I feel like he really is my friend. It’s like the wall he built dammed off a lot of awkward stuff that made me feel anxious, leaving only the friends we could have been all along if I hadn’t been distracted by my crush. I can’t even tell now if I still have that crush. I only know that the closer I get to the end of thesis writing, the more I feel like he’s the person I want to celebrate that with, more even than with Margaret.

It doesn’t feel the same. I don’t feel giddy or nervous; I just feel happier when he’s in the room. He understands something about what I’m going through that Margaret can’t. He’s the person I feel comfortable around. First I made a fool of myself in front of him, then he corrected a mistake I made, then I was terrified on the rock wall, then he saw me dance, then I bawled all over the place in front of him. And now I feel like I could do anything, and he’d just sit calmly beside me, drinking his coffee.

Margaret was right. I can’t take his sexy throat with me. But I have a feeling medical school will be a lot better if I can take his understanding and patience with me.

 

I spend the next week incorporating the literature on trauma and stress response into my thesis. Never have I been so grateful for my dance classes. It has always been true for me that in the studio, everything else disappears. As a teacher, I find it easy to let go of my academic work and focus on my students. I know I’m doing a good job when the tension in their shoulders and faces eases, when their bodies are resonating, freed, at least for now, from whatever troubles them outside their time in the studio with me, and they’re completely focused.

And I’ve learned that the best way to make that happen in a ballet class is to kick. Their. Asses.

On Tuesday we do grands battements at the barre to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” (“Hips square, my friends!”) and then do échappés in the center to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” with me clapping on the downbeat and shouting at the top of my lungs, “SPRINGS! IN-YOURHEELS! SPINE! STRAIGHT! THEFLOOR! ISON-FIRE!” I correct a couple of students, sticking one of my fingers in their belly buttons and another at the base of their spines while they bounce in front of me and I mouth the lyrics.

It’s one of the most beautiful sounds on Earth, the rasping, desperate gasps of a dozen tweens, their sweaty palms on their knees as they pant for air in the silence after I turn the music off after échappés.

“Feels good, huh?” I say with a grin.

They groan.

I laugh evilly and then begin, “Adagio, fifth position . . . and prepare.”

There is no ass-kicking like an adagio ass-kicking. I walk out that Tuesday night feeling like I’ve burned away a demon.

I haven’t hung out with Charles since Burritos and Trauma Night, as Margaret is calling it. Mostly I’ve been in the lab or at the library. When he sees me in the lab, he says hi, but it feels a little like he’s keeping his distance.

But by Friday my thesis is done.

It’s done! . . . At least, this draft is done.

I e-mail it to Dr. Smith, and then I text Charles:

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Douglas: not a loquacious texter.

 

“I wanted to say,” I begin on the car ride to the rock gym, “that I don’t fucking hate you.”

“Hm? Oh, that. No, I didn’t think you did,” he says, eyes on the road.

“And I wanted to say,” I continue, “that I’m really grateful for all your help.”

“All part of the service,” he says.

“Rock climbing isn’t part of the service,” I say. “Sitting with me until I’m done crying definitely isn’t part of the service.”

He’s silent until we park in the gravel lot at the gym. He looks at his hands on the steering wheel and says, “My last year as an undergraduate was hard. It’s rewarding for me to offer you the kind of support I would have liked for myself.”

“What made your senior year hard?” It’s impossible not to ask.

“Oh, the usual storm and strife,” he sighs, dismissing the question. “Come on, we’ll climb some rocks.”

We go in and gear up and start to climb. We don’t talk much, except about climbing. He teaches me some techniques, shows me how routes are mapped with colored tape on the wall, explains how they’re rated for difficulty. I don’t feel ready to start measuring my ability on rated routes, and he doesn’t push me today. He teaches me to “hang from my bones.” He says, “Let your skeleton do the work, Coffey. Your muscles will last longer.” My muscles, in fact, crap out much sooner this time than they did last time, and I barely get through four climbs before I collapse onto the mats in gasping agony.

“You’re trying to climb with your arms and hands. Climb with your feet and legs, and you’ll last all day,” he tells me.

“Dude, I don’t know what that means,” I say through heaving breaths.

“Never mind,” he says. “We’ll work on it next time.”

Next time.

When he drives me home, he parks in a spot near my door, turns off the engine, and sits back in his seat.

And we just sit there.

And it’s awesome.

It’s awesome to be physically exhausted while you sit in silence with someone who gets it, and you don’t have to explain that all you want and need is to be quiet and still together. To smell the faint warmth and spice of his skin, to hear him breathing, to watch his chest move lightly with each breath. To imagine—it can only be imagination—that the tension in his forearm has nothing to do with climbing, and everything to do with him wanting to reach out and hold your hand. To be enclosed in a warm dry car as the rain begins to fall, first in scattered specks on the windshield, and then more steadily.

“Starting to rain,” he says. “Better get inside.”

I nod and put my hand on the door.

He stops me. “Tuesday? We’ll practice your defense?”

“Yup,” I say, my hand still on the door.

“Are you ready for it?”

“Not yet. I’ve got time this weekend.”

He nods. “Better get inside,” he says again, but again as I turn to open the door, he stops me. “Annie.”

I turn my face toward him but don’t look up.

He says, “Er.”

And then I raise my eyes to his. And it’s right there between us, as tangible as the gearshift. The Thing. The rain is growing louder around us, outside the car, and it feels like I’m nearer to him than I have ever been in my life, cloistered together in here. Charles swallows, and I want to put my lips on his throat. I want it so badly, I can barely remember to breathe.

He breaks the moment, tearing his gaze from me and staring instead at the steering wheel. “See you Tuesday,” he says.

I get out of the car and run inside before I get soaked.