“Hi, Mom,” I replied, fighting to keep from sounding like a petulant child. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
Dinner wasn’t strained, because my mother was always the consummate hostess. My father, who had been exactly this stout and stern and mustached as long as I could remember, told carefully curated stories that gave the appearance of joviality. My mother steered the conversation from his stories to topics of general interest, then back again. She always asked questions, then pretended to be interested in the answers. He always pretended to be as entertained as he was entertaining.
I sat there dutifully and pretended to be perfect.
It was like every dinner I could remember in this house. We sat stiffly in the sophisticated dining room with its gleaming mahogany table, the hand-polished chandelier, and my grandmother’s silver.
“You must be excited about the new ballet season,” my mother said. Her formidable gaze met mine. “Is there any hope that this is your year at last?”
She meant, When can I tell our friends that you’re dancing a solo instead of merely leaping around in the back?
“It’s been almost a decade,” my father chimed in, as if I’d missed that. “You deserve a promotion.”
“It doesn’t really work like that.”
“Have you tried, dear?” my mother asked.
She didn’t ask it snidely. There was no edge to her voice at all. She sounded as cool, composed, and carefully neutral as she always did.
There was no reason whatsoever that I should feel this…thing erupt inside of me.
I wanted it to be a cleansing sort of rage, but it was far more frightening than that. It was emotion. Thick and ugly and everywhere.
And I knew why. I could see Sebastian’s bright blue gaze as if he sat there across from me at this excruciatingly polite dinner. I had kept myself in little boxes my whole life. Perfect daughter. Straight-A student. And the best ballet dancer that I could be, which was never good enough.
“It’s actually extremely hard to make it into the corps at all,” I heard myself say, all that emotion making my voice too thick. “Much less stay there, dancing perfectly day in and day out, for years.”
My mother did not express disappointment in my words. Instead, it was in the angle of her head. The faint lift of one brow. “No one is prouder of you than we are, Darcy. Was that in doubt?”
And just like that, I felt like a bull in a china shop. I set down my heavy silver fork and fought to compose myself. For some reason I thought of Sebastian again, somehow handling a drunken, broken mother. Maybe we were all reduced to this, no matter our accomplishments. Maybe we all acted like children when faced with the only people on earth who still saw us that way.
But telling myself it was normal didn’t make it feel any better. It didn’t make me feel any better. And all I ended up wanting to do was…rebel. Somehow. When the most rebellious thing I’d ever done was talk back a few times as a child, right here at this same table. Or fail to disclose every detail of my whereabouts when asked. Small-fry stuff, if that. Mostly I’d spent my childhood in ballet studios and boarding schools.
Maybe that was why what I said then felt like such a bombshell.
“Ballet is only one kind of dancing,” I heard myself say. “It’s just a style. There are other styles.”
Sacrilege.
My parents looked appalled, as if I’d started shooting up heroin at the dinner table.
“Such as?” my mother asked, frostily.
“Please don’t tell me you’re planning to run off and join one of those Cirque du Soleil troops,” my father muttered, no longer the least bit jovial. “Dress it up anyway you like, it’s still the circus.”
“Cirque du Soleil performers are acrobats of the highest level,” I replied. Possibly through my teeth. “And no, I would not be running off to join them, because I’m not an acrobat. It’s a completely different form of bodywork.”
“I don’t recall anyone using the term bodywork in your ballet classes, Darcy,” my mother said in repressive tones.
“That’s because they use French names so they can sound fancier,” I replied in much the same tone, as if we were fighting. When I knew very well we were not. Because my parents didn’t fight. They exhibited their reactions through the use of temperature. Cold or frigid, generally. Right now there was a wintry wind blowing in this dining room, but for some reason, it wasn’t having the effect on me it normally did.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to be perfect,” I heard myself say, though no one had asked. My parents looked glacial. “That’s what ballet is. It’s rigid. Exact. And I love it, I do. I always will. But every now and again I wonder if it might not be a whole lot more fun to just…dance.”
My heart was pounding. My ears were ringing. My head felt thick and fuzzy.
I had never said something like that out loud before. I wasn’t sure I’d ever dared think it.
“Just dance,” my mother echoed. She and my father exchanged a chilly look. “I’m not sure I understand what that means, Darcy. As far as I was aware, that is what you do. As a profession—one you worked very hard to achieve.”
“There’s more to dancing than just classic ballet, that’s all I’m saying. Modern dance. Contemporary dance. Folk dancing. Postmodern dance. Personal dancing in clubs. Burlesque dancing.”
“Burlesque dancing.” This time, the way my mother repeated the words dripped icicles. “Do you really think a…cabaret show is an appropriate use of all the years you’ve spent studying proper dance?”
She said cabaret show as if it was a filthy curse word more commonly employed in truck stops.
“Is ‘cabaret’ how you say ‘stripper’ in Connecticut, Mom?”
I shouldn’t have asked that.
My father’s face turned red. My mother’s hand rose to her neck, and if she’d been wearing a strand of pearls I was sure she’d have clung to them. Not because I’d said something so distasteful, I knew. They read grittier things on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. But because it wasn’t appropriate dinner conversation.
“I’m not saying I want to be a stripper—not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I hurried to say. “I’m just pointing out that there are other forms of dance.”
My mother seemed to take an ice age or two to lower her hand back to her lap.
“Your father and I have season tickets to the New York Philharmonic,” she said evenly. “The Metropolitan Opera. And the Knickerbocker Ballet. We do not have season tickets, or any tickets at all, to a burlesque revue. Why do you think that is?”
I wanted to say, because you’re snobs. But that would be drastically upping the intensity of the bomb I’d already thrown into the middle of the dinner table. I wasn’t sure I really needed to up the ante with the nuclear option.
Or you’re too afraid, said a voice inside me that sounded entirely too much like a very dangerous Englishman I needed to forget. Too much of a coward.
So instead, I fumed about it all the way back to the city on the train. And when the fuming wore itself out, I wondered why I’d lost my temper in the first place. I didn’t fight with my parents, as a governing policy. There was no point to it. I didn’t fight with anyone, for that matter, because there were so few areas of my life that allowed for any conflict. Not when what was required to survive my schedule was discipline, endless discipline.
And yet since