I Crossed the Street

Just east of the heart of campus where I went to college ran Ridge Street. On its north side stretched a cemetery and next to that, ironically, the university’s student health center.

Being both an unhealthy young undergraduate prone toward respiratory conditions and a literature major prone toward melancholic iambic tetrameter, I would often walk down Ridge on the cemetery side of the street to make two purposeful stops. I would visit the health center’s cheerless nurses, chatting them up for antibiotics and hoping for recovery in the land of the present moment. And I would visit the quiet dead, walking or sitting on the grass near them, writing lines of verse, in the land of stone and grave, of the organized past.

In those days I had a preference for neither place, for I preferred neither death nor life. Whether reading Time in a waiting room or epitaphs on headstones, I infused all my reading power then with a perfect, poetess-maudlin ennui. Some friends blamed this on my colds, others on my obsession for Sylvia Plath. I blamed it on nothing: I was a suffering poet in training.

One day near the end of my sophomore year, I was out and about sporting lit books in my backpack and a sonorous cold in my lungs. I had been to the health center, and as there was nothing more the doctors could do for me, I decided to visit my friends the Dead. I left the health center for the cemetery.

As I walked, my mind raced through the opening lines to the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, which I had to memorize and recite in a few days with some semblance of Middle English accent for my professor. This assignment excited me, for I adored the challenge of speaking in any accent other than my boring midwestern one. As my California-born college friend Annie always claimed, there is nothing more hilarious to the ear than to hear your visiting aunt from Minnesota call up the stairs, letting loose a barrage of lightly melodious but undeniably overly short ‘a’ vowels: “Oh, Aaaaannie. Do you want to go out for a Taaaaaco Saaalaad?! I can drive us to Aaanaaaaheim!” We loved Chaucer for the same reason we loved Annie’s aunt: The language made us laugh. As English majors, we needed all the laughs we could get.

I looked up at the sky and trees now as I walked, thinking of Chaucer, spring, and accents. I was thinking how Annie’s aunt was a midwesterner but sounded so very little like me. I wondered if I studied linguistics I would learn why.

A moment’s daydream, and I missed my turn into the cemetery. Instead, I found myself at its far eastern gated edge where stood its mausoleum. The mausoleum's walls were old, stone-cold-looking and moss-greened. Butting up just feet from the sidewalk, it was so close to me I could almost touch it.

Suddenly, I halted, dropped my pack to my side, doubled over, and spat the lozenge I’d had since the health center into my hand so I wouldn’t choke. A coughing fit had started. It was a bad one, keeping me doubled over and holding to the cemetery wall. When, moments later, I stood, body sore and eyes watering, my ears detected, of all things, music.

It was coming from the other side of the street, from a building I’d passed many times before but into which I’d never stepped. It was a gym. Given its proximity to the cemetery, it served as another example of campus planning irony.

I turned my sore back to the mausoleum and looked at the music-producing building. There were four tall basement windows facing Ridge Street, and never in my perambulations down it toward death or respiratory recovery had I seen the gym windows’ blinds open. But this afternoon they were, and so were the bottom halves of the windows. The music coming from them was stop-and-go: a recorded piano, melodic, repetitive. I saw movement in the window. They were dancers.

What I could see were ballerinas standing in three rows, their backs to me, looking into a mirror that ran the length and height of the wall in front of them. I think I was spying a dance studio.

From what I could see, they were moving their legs and arms around, slowly, turning to face forward, then to one side, then to the other, then forward again. There was an identical mirroring of movement going on among the dancers. It was people in formation, similar to what athletic teams do, so it made sense a gym would house a studio, but the dancers’ lines reminded me of nature and not of sports. They reminded me of tree rows. Of birds in flight.

I crossed the street.

I sat down in the grass at the far corner of last window on the right and peered in. The ballerinas were dressed in solid-color leotards and tights: pink and pink, pink and black, and black and black. Some looked into the mirror at themselves, and some looked at the floor beyond them. I saw them seeing. And if I leaned far enough into the scene, I saw me looking into the window, seeing me seeing them see themselves. I took a few deep breaths and swallowed a couple of times and settled back.

Momentarily, the one who was the teacher demonstrated some flowing arm movement and pointed to the corner in front of the furthest window on the left. The dancers broke their triple-line formation, walked to the windows, and made a long line the length of the studio, from said corner to my window. They took turns in groups of three doing sweeping moves to waltz music diagonally across the room. They whisked by effortlessly, and when they’d finish, they’d get back in line, prepared to waltz through the studio again, over and over.

Now the teacher changed the song on the record, and faster music played. After she clapped a tempo, the ballerinas started kicking one leg out to the side and leaping a little in the direction of their kicks, and landing, and then doing the same on the other side. From this they started turning, quickly drawing their arms out and in, out and in, while taking lots of little steps. And from this they made a dancing circle chain.

I took my hand to my nose to repress a sneeze. My throat lozenge was still in my hand, now candy-stick stuck, so I sucked on my palm until the lozenge loosened, and I sucked it back into my mouth. I rolled my eyes at myself.

Now the dancers started leaping across the room. Run run leap: the rhythm of the anapest. One at a time, the dancers made lines of poetry with their bodies. Lines of physical music. Oh this, oh this, oh this, oh this was what Yeats understood: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?” I sat statuesque, the ghost of pain from my racking cough barely near me.

A dancer came to my window. She was so close I could touch her. She was heaving, holding onto a ballet barre beneath the windows that ran the length of the room. She was huffing and bent over to catch her breath, assuming the very pose I had just moments ago on the sidewalk. She was healthy and sucking in as much oxygen as she could for the sake of her dancing, whereas I had been wrecked and gasping to get anything at all into my body to calm the jangling of my illness so that, eventually, on a good day, I might have something to write about, and energy with which to do it.

She spotted me. Rather than startled, she looked curious. She gave me a little, polite wave of her hand and smiled. I mirrored her wave with my sticky hand and smiled awkwardly back. Then she moved up into the dancer’s line only to leap again. In a moment, I rose and walked home.

That afternoon, I checked the course catalog and learned that my university offered dance classes for physical education credit. If I believed in the Muses, and if my destiny was poetry, that day taught me I’d have to answer to the bell of inspiration and study ballet. Linguistics and Annie’s A-flat aunt would wait.

In truth, I didn’t know if I did believe in the Muses, and I didn’t know if in essence I was a poet, but I did know one thing for certain: Observing that dance class had made me so very, very happy.

Twelve weeks later, I stepped into that very studio a nervous beginning ballet student who over time would become accustomed to the cemetery view from the dance-y side of the street. On this new side, I would be on the side of vigor, of beauty, and eventual health. I would be on the side that was companion to myself, not solely on the ghostly side of endlessly turning pages of the entombed, indifferent, unmoving past and the infirmed, unchanging, chaotic present. I’d crossed the street, and I was feeling a future, dancing out my newfound preference for life.