The Shine Inside
By Janine Kovac
Twenty students in identical black leotards and the same brand of pink tights stood in fifth position, heels contorted forward, knees to the side. No nail polish. No dangling earrings. No stray hairs. We were all trying to do the same steps at the same time in the same way and still stand out. Weak afternoon light spilled into the ballet studio through floor-to-ceiling windows while floor-to-ceiling mirrors reflected our imperfections back to us. I couldn’t hope to be the best ballet dancer at San Francisco Ballet School, but I had the next best thing: a perfect leotard for pas de deux.
A good pas de deux leotard needed to have sleeves (because you didn’t want your partner looking at your armpit stubble). It had to have the proper décolletage (which varied according to who you were paired with) and it couldn’t ride up your butt during repeated lifts and jumps.
Pas de deux class started the same way every Friday afternoon. We lined up by height— girls on one side, boys on the other. If I edged toward the taller end of the short girls, I knew I’d get paired up with Joe, the second-cutest straight guy in the school.
On Mr. Berg’s signal, the pianist launched into a series of bored arpeggios and class began. The girls stood on pointe in fifth position, our body weight resting on two square inches of floor. Boys’ hands on our waists, shifting us forward and back, left to right, trying to find the point of perfect balance.
With some partners—the ones who were too young, the ones who were already getting laid, or the ones who didn’t fancy girls to begin with—the air was empty. Our bodies were slick with sweat, but there was no heat. Between combinations, the boys would withdraw their hands and I’d turn my back. But when I danced with Joe, the air was thickly charged with the thrill of physical intimacy. We didn’t talk; we barely even made eye contact. But on Fridays, our bodies
danced around each other, literally and figuratively.
Joe placed the tips of his fingers on my floating ribs, a few inches from my bra line. He gently pushed me off my balance and then back to fifth position. I could feel my center of gravity connect with the warmth of his palms as we worked together to find equilibrium in incremental movements.
He sneaked a peek down the front of my leotard when I leaned into arabesque. Later I felt his breath on my neck before our shoulder sit and it made me tingle. After the music stopped, his hands lingered just a bit longer than necessary.
At the end of class, we murmured our thanks and went our separate ways.
*
No one else knew that over the summer there had been a party, and afterwards, I’d spent the night in Joe’s dorm room. The Victorian flat in the hills overlooking the Castro had been full of San Francisco
Ballet School’s summer students and free of adults. It was a garden-variety party as sixteen-year-old ballet dancers threw them. Bartles & Jaymes. Bacardi and New Coke. Clove cigarettes and Twizzlers to a soundtrack of Simple Minds and the Police. We played all the usual drinking games: pirouette competitions and balancing contests, our judgment impaired and confidence bolstered by shots of Smirnoff.
Someone opened a window and it seemed like a good idea to climb onto the neighbor’s roof. Joe, who’d just arrived that morning from the School of American Ballet, crawled out of the kitchen behind me. Summer programs didn’t usually let dancers drop into the middle of a session, but San Francisco Ballet had made an exception for him.
I steadied myself on the apex and Joe sat next to me. He was the kind of cute you couldn’t look at without blushing. It made my chest freeze.
I couldn’t tell if I felt fuzzy from the Bacardi or if I felt brave because I was sitting on the roof—I’d always been good with heights.
In my most confident and matter-of-fact voice, I said, “I know all about you. You’re an
Aries from Southern California and you just got back from New York.”
Joe did not look surprised. Maybe he was also good with heights.
“I know about you, too,” he said. “You were in Level 5 last summer.”
I was stunned. In San Francisco I never stood out the way I had in El Paso. I assumed I was invisible.
“You never talked to me,” I challenged.
“But I still knew who you were,” he answered, tracing the back of my hand with his fingertips.
“Oh,” I said, so softly it sounded like a gasp. My chest wasn’t frozen anymore. It was quivering.
Joe slipped his arm around my waist, and I turned to face him, the same way I might let a partner guide me through an arabesque promenade. We leaned toward each other until we touched foreheads, like a reverse game of chicken. The tension of his breath on my lips was deafening. Through jumbled senses, I heard electric sparks and saw heat rising off our bodies, even though my eyes were closed. Somewhere in the middle of the throbbing, we kissed— slowly, like a question.
It wasn’t my first French kiss. But neither one of those other kisses felt anything like this. Those had been grabby and frenetic. This kiss was supple and pliant, the way we were supposed to move our bodies in Zola’s adagio combinations.
And it was a long kiss.
It started on the roof and continued into the hallway, on the sidewalk outside the party, against a grimy wall in the MUNI station waiting for the M to take us back to the dorms.
We stopped kissing long enough to realize we’d missed curfew, but I knew which stairways were left unlocked. I also knew that Joe was the only person that summer who didn’t have a roommate. We parted ways in the hall, but after a minute, I tiptoed back to the room I knew was his and knocked on the door.
Joe had already seen me laid bare in my leotard and tights, just as I’d seen him in his skin-tight white t-shirt and black tights over a dance belt. It seemed that there was little left to imagine.
I led him over to the narrow dormitory daybed and lay down as if I knew what to do next and he lay down next to me. I still couldn’t believe I was making out with the second-cutest straight guy at San Francisco Ballet School. Not Rachel, who could lift her leg to her ear, or
Shiloh who did triple pirouettes en pointe. Me. Janine from Level 5.
“You knew me?” I asked again.
Joe looked confused for a moment, then whispered, “Of course.”
Blue light leaked in through curtain-less windows and I pretended it was moonlight instead of a street lamp. It cast shadows on Joe’s face. His smile was a little lopsided as he worked his way from my chin to my belly, each kiss like a button. A countdown of tiny, exploding supernovas.
At the waistline of my shorts, he hesitated.
“I’ve never…” I began, which Joe took as a signal to stop. I saw relief in his face, and I knew I’d said the right thing.
Just before dawn, I crept back to my own room.
*
I avoided Joe for the rest of the summer, terrified of what would happen next. Besides, I was still committing that night to memory—recording our moves the way I’d mentally rehearse a new ballet. I replayed the line of kisses down my neck, the angle of our bodies, the tremors that he had coaxed to the surface with each caress. I wasn’t ready for new choreography yet.
Pas de deux was my chance to be near him. In a safe, scripted kind of chemistry, I would feel his hands along my back for a press lift. Circling my waist in a partnered pirouette. Cradling the inside of my thigh for an arabesque presságe. I could feel his gaze tracing the seams on the back of my leotard.
He wasn’t just tracking my every movement because it was his job. On the outside, I expanded through my fingers and toes, but on the inside, I played with the magnetic space between our limbs. I was both the sun that extends its rays and the flame that calls the moth. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. But I knew I was doing it on purpose.
Summers at San Francisco Ballet School were fun. Dancers from all over the country descended on the Franklin Street studios making it feel more like a beach overrun with tourists than an elite ballet school.
The year-round program was different. Unspoken lists of expectations hung in the air.
Every day we were measured against our future selves, which meant that every day we fell short.
Our teachers didn’t have to tell us that we weren’t good enough. We knew it already.
Everybody was terrible at something. Jennifer was tall and graceful, but she didn’t have a killer instinct. She never pushed to prove herself to the teachers, and that worked against her.
Maureen was thin but months of laxatives had made her so weak, she could barely lift her leg.
Lisa’s torso was too long. Patrick was stiff, and so on. In the upper levels, the standards were even higher, the margin for error even less. There, it was a different Jennifer who didn’t have a killer instinct. It was Siobhan who was too weak from laxatives, Heather who didn’t have the right proportions. And so on.
There were so many ways to be a failure.
As for me, my neck was short. My ribs were wide. I was browner than everybody else. I was also the only one in my class who had to wear a bra for support and I spent much of that year pretending I wasn’t humiliated by this.
At my high school in El Paso, I had been known as “the Dancer. The one who went to San Francisco.” When I was on stage, a light from my heart shone through my bones like sunbeams. I could feel it. But in San Francisco, I was just like everybody else—another teenager who’d moved away from home to pursue dreams of dancing. My shine didn’t matter. Not unless I was the most flexible or the best jumper or the dancer with the most pirouettes. And I was not.
*
After thirty-two Fridays, Joe asked me out on a date.
We met up at a movie theater near the ballet studio. I wore my favorite outfit: a baggy button-down shirt with big orange roses on it, black leggings, and my Converse high tops. The canvas dug into my Achilles tendons and the flat soles made my shins hurt, but I liked the way I looked. It was like something Bananarama would have worn.
Joe and I stood facing each other like amateur actors who’d forgotten their lines, deer caught in each other’s headlights. I waited to follow him to our seats and he waited for me to lead.
“It’s a David Bowie movie,” he finally said.
Four seconds passed.
“I like David Bowie,” I said.
When it came to words, being awkward came naturally to us.
He paused at the concessions counter, scanning the flat boxes of overpriced candy. It was a wall of everything I wasn’t supposed to eat. But still…how tantalizing! Junior Mints melting in the palms of our hot hands. A box of yellowy popcorn between our laps and a super-sized Coke with a single straw to share. Buttery lips and salty fingertips to kiss.
But Joe looked worried. He was clearly not indulging in the same fantasy. Maybe he was tallying up the cost of snacks in addition to the tickets he’d already bought. Or maybe he was counting the calories for me, imagining how heavy I’d be in pas de deux class next Friday after a tub of greasy movie popcorn.
Did he know that every Wednesday before our Health and Wellness class I had an appointment with a nutritionist at St. Francis Hospital?
“I’m not hungry,” I said with a shrug, as if it didn’t matter.
My diet had actually worsened since I started seeing the weight counselor. I hadn’t eaten a vegetable in months, unless you counted the fried zucchini sticks…
Smothered in ranch dressing…
Washed down with a root beer float in a back booth at Zim’s… Several times a week.
And I did count them. As “steamed vegetables and a Diet Coke.”
Like a kid from juvie who tells her probation officer what he wants to hear, my meal reports were complete fabrications. Under “Breakfast,” I’d write “bran muffin,” when really I’d eaten two servings of coffee cake. Fettuccine Alfredo was recorded as “plain noodles.” The nightly bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream? Those went unmentioned.
But I never lied about the exercise. Most days I walked to the ballet studio from the flat where I stayed with my host family—a six-mile round trip. And every day after my ballet classes were over, I dutifully rode on the stationary bike in the ballet studio’s exercise room. I was only required to ride for thirty minutes, but I always rode longer with the hope that one of the teachers would poke her head in and see how hard I was working. Sometimes I even took an extra ballet class to work on my technique. Alas, the only other person I ever saw (besides my roommate, who had the audacity to eat Snickers bars while I pedaled) was Joanna, a first-year corps de ballet member.
My nightly rides made my quads burn and my calves ache, but if it sped up my metabolism and helped me shed those extra pounds by the next weigh-in, it would all be worth it.
*
Weigh-ins at St. Francis took place every Wednesday. But weigh-ins at the ballet studio burst into the schedule like pop quizzes. The big hospital-grade scale was brought from the company lounge on the third floor down to the student dressing rooms. It sat between the lockers like an unwelcome intruder.
After scrambling to pee, my classmates and I removed everything that might lighten the load—bobby-pins, earrings, even tampons. I took off my bra and changed into a camisole leotard. Surely it weighed less than my long-sleeved one.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew that a bra, four bobby-pins and a pair of gold studs didn’t weigh the seven pounds I needed to lose between now and when I stepped on the scale. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to show how far I’d go to make my goal—and to be seen doing it. If I couldn’t step on the scale with confidence, at least I could hold up my chin knowing I’d done everything in my power that day to weigh as little as possible. Not counting the Burger King
French fries I’d wolfed down before class.
We lined up in alphabetical order. Zola calculated our weight while another teacher recorded it on the school roster. You couldn’t see exactly what anyone else weighed, but you always knew who passed into the triple digits because the clang of the counterweight echoed through the dressing room like the town crier.
When it was my turn, I sucked in my stomach and exhaled all the air from my lungs. Zola adjusted the big counterweight to “100” and nudged the small one past five pounds, then past six.
One hundred and seven pounds.
Tap.
One hundred and eight.
Tap.
I should have worn my other tights—the ones with the feet cut out. I should have skipped breakfast this morning. I shouldn’t have quenched my thirst after class. Everyone knew that water weight was heavier than regular weight. And, yeah. I probably shouldn’t have those
French fries.
Tap.
At a hundred and ten pounds, the counterweight sat suspended in perfect balance. Neither teacher said a word, but I saw one of them mark an X next to my name after my weight was recorded. When Lisa took her turn after me, the scales slammed in the opposite direction. Zola quickly tapped the counterweights to a balance, as if she could tell just by glancing that Lisa weighed ninety-two pounds.
“This is not a good trend, Janine,” Zola said at the next weigh-in. She jotted down my weight in my chart and clicked her teeth. I’d topped the scales at a hundred and eleven pounds and a half.
I clenched my jaw and stepped off the scale, determined to not look ashamed, but I knew.
My dance career was over before it had even gotten started.
The weight counselor was sure it would help to talk about my problems, but to do that I might have to confess that the nonfat plain yogurt on my meal chart that I’d claimed to have eaten for breakfast was actually more mint chocolate chip ice cream. If she told the school I’d been cheating on my diet, I might lose my scholarship. My parents would make me come home to El Paso. I wouldn’t be the Dancer Who Went to San Francisco. I’d be the One Who Failed.
I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to feel better about my body. I wanted to feel like the light that expressed itself through my muscles and made beauty out of movement was a tangible thing that could be seen and admired. When friends from home asked how things were going, I lied. When Joe called on the phone, I asked my host mother to tell him I wasn’t home. On Fridays, I avoided the tall end of the short-girl line to make sure we weren’t paired up together.
It wouldn’t have helped to know that within a year’s time I’d be on stage at the Kennedy Center. I’d be enrolled at a different ballet studio in another city. On full scholarship, I’d perform with a company that was grooming me for a professional career. I’d lose all the extra weight, too. Maybe it was because I replaced mint chocolate chip with Marlboro Lights or maybe it was because I finally started eating steamed vegetables and bran muffins.
But I wanted to succeed in San Francisco, not someplace else.
*
While I was flailing, everyone else’s star seemed to be rising. Over the weekend, acceptances for the School of American Ballet had gone out in the mail. Both Jennifers got in. Maureen was accepted for the third summer in a row and Rachel had been awarded the Capezio scholarship. I hadn’t even bothered to audition.
I had worked so hard to be seen and now all I wanted to do was disappear. I didn’t want to go to class, but I would have felt even worse hiding in the closet eating more ice cream.
The dancer who stood in front of me at the barre wore cable-knit shorts over black tights and a red plaid flannel shirt, fashion clearly outside the school uniform. She wore pointe shoes at the barre—something I’d never seen a dancer do before. Within a few years, Joanna Berman would become one of San Francisco Ballet’s adored prima ballerinas. But on that day, she was a just first-year corps member taking an extra ballet class to work on her technique. If she recognized me from the exercise room, she didn’t show it.
She had an electric intensity, as if she was both putting energy into the studio and drinking it back as fuel. It wasn’t just the position of the feet and knees and index finger. When she came down off pointe, she grew taller in her shoes before she descended. Her fondú didn’t just melt; it stretched in five opposite directions. One leg was a foundation while the other one reached and reached before curling back like an octopus tentacle. A come-hither summons that beckoned with legs instead of hands.
When she stood still, it looked like all the atoms around her were aroused, as if she were teasing the space. It wasn’t that different from the charged tension between Joe’s fingertips and my lips. Or his breath and the nape of my neck. The only difference was that there was no partner to play to.
I looked around the studio, expecting to see a roomful of students gawking at the shining diamond who’d come to our class. No one else seemed to notice. Not even Zola. Even more astonishing—it looked like this first-year corps de ballet dancer didn’t care. Other dancers I’d admired were like searchlights in the darkness, reaching out to the audience. This was something different. This dancer was just letting her shine out. Like she’d made herself the center of her own universe and she didn’t care what other centers existed; she could feed herself through her own grace. She wasn’t waiting for anyone’s approval.
Watching her, I thought, I can do that. I had a beam of light inside me, too. It hid behind my breast, afraid that if I opened the aperture of my spotlight, everyone would see me and maybe they’d remember that I didn’t belong. But if I stayed closed, I would shrivel and wither. I already knew—no one was going to pull me onstage and make me a star, like in the Bruce Springsteen video. And if I counted up pounds, pirouettes, and degrees of turnout, I wouldn’t succeed there, either.
Perfection wasn’t attainable. But this—reaching out, drinking it back like an elixir, becoming my own renewable energy source—this I could do. For the rest of the class—in fondú, developé, tombé pas de bourrée—my center of gravity plugged into a place that was both a force of resistance and a power source, intuition that lived in my body as knowledge.
It was like my legs were meant to move this way. Sensual but strong. I was an electrical force greater than the gravitational force. I was charged protons expanding in opposite directions. Rachel might still have a higher arabesque, but who could say? I was a moving illusion, like the light trails left behind by fireworks on the Fourth of July.
If Zola noticed, she paid me no more attention than she paid to San Francisco Ballet’s next rising star.
It didn’t matter. Dancing like this couldn’t be measured and this glow was all mine.
Drawing from her career as a professional ballet dancer, Janine Kovac (she/her) writes about power dynamics and women’s bodies. Her memoir Spinning: Choreography for Coming Home was a semifinalist for Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Prize and a winner of the National Indie Excellence Awards. She is the recipient of the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award for Nonfiction, the Elizabeth George Foundation Fellowship from Hedgebrook, and the Calderwood Fellowship for Journalism from MacDowell. Her fiction is supported through a “Courage to Write/Writer of Note” grant from the deGroot Foundation and is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas. She lives with her family in Oakland, California.