Here was a space I could inhabit for as long as I needed it.
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And oh, did I need it. My mother had died; another relationship ended in painful ambiguity. The skin around my eyes was thin from weeping.
We met in a long room lit by tall windows. In the mirror were a half dozen women — teachers, librarians, scientists, designers. The instructor wore her long hair high. Her feet made a percussive racket that had the fluency of righteous speech.
I slid the metal tip of one shoe along the floor. It was slippery, treacherous. Whenever I managed to remain upright through a shuffle-ball-change, my teacher said, “Yes. Good. Again.”
Class was $10. I paid the exact amount in cash each time, taking care to refuse a membership. I could only imagine myself into the future one hour at a time. The past, though, was always with me.
When I was 10 years old, stillness was my superpower. Where my peers were quick and willowy, I was solid and sedate, definitely not someone to put her fist through a window.
Until the day I did so.
No one was home. My sister and I had our instructions: Retrieve the key from its hiding place in the garage, open the door, and put the key back. The last part was the most important. Money was tight and locksmiths expensive. A lost key equaled catastrophe.
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This was 1981, the year of the bullies. They made fun of my lunches, so I stopped bringing them; the unsupervised bathroom was a no-go zone. I heard whispers and snickers. There were spitballs in my hair. By the time I got home, I was in urgent physical and emotional distress.
How bad was it? My first research report, written that year, was on hara-kiri.
I let my sister in and put the key away. I returned to find the door locked, my sister grinning behind the glass.
That’s when I put my fist through it.
My mother arrived, and without removing her coat — a belted trench with the day’s cold still on it, spangled with drops of rain — bundled me off to the emergency room.
What happened? she asked.
Anxious about snitching on my sister, I said I’d tripped on the step and smacked the window as I fell.
In the curtained cubicle, as the doctor placed the last stitch, he murmured, “You didn’t fall.”
For years I felt ashamed of my lie. Now I see it differently. I hadn’t lied so much as misdescribed things. I hadn’t fallen. I’d danced.
When I was growing up, punishment was swift and corporal. How do you think I could put my fist through a window? I knew how strong emotion could move through a body, like lightning going to ground.
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My father ran a tight ship. Things stayed where they belonged. Like the key in its niche, I too had a place. If I had to be seen, I was certainly not to be heard.
My sister was the performer. Now I think there could only ever be one. That’s just how family roles work. While she honed her skills as a ham, I polished my mask until it became my face. Trying out for the school chorus, I adopted a falsetto. “You have a very musical voice,” gasped the teacher. Behind her, a dozen small faces, saucer-eyed with surprise.
Athletics came later, nonperformative activities at which I excelled joylessly. One day on the basketball court I hit a three-point shot; for a time, I could not miss. My father told me to stop showboating. I became prone to bouncing the ball off my toe. To do anything inside another’s gaze was impossible.
To stay safe in the kind of family I grew up in, I became completely nonreactive, a tactic called “gray rock.” By age 10, I was an expert. But it’s hard to move gracefully when you are impersonating a boulder.
I wore my rock suit into adulthood. I vomited before important performances, the talks and presentations that make an early career. In my wedding photographs, I’m holding myself so stiffly that my husband seems to be dancing with a cardboard cutout.
Tap class was, at first, no different. Another student joked, “I’m glad you’re here. I’m not the village idiot anymore.”
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It helped to learn tap’s vocabulary. Tap words sounded like the moves themselves, onomatopoetic. Shuf-fle, step. Paradiddle, STOMP.
Uncomfortable as it was, dancing gave me access to something I couldn’t otherwise reach. Every week after class, I relaxed into a hazy joy. In this mood I once snapped a selfie. Backlit, bare-shouldered, I seem hardly to touch the ground.
Dancing consolidates the body’s core, knitting the body into a stronger version of itself. Reclaiming this physical coherence unlocked other memories. My childhood had its happy moments, many of them spent dancing.
My grandfather was always playing records. In his parlor’s honeyed light, he taught me the Charleston, the jitterbug, swing.
And there was a period of formal dance instruction, at a ballet studio in a strip mall by the beach. I liked my charismatic teacher, a powerful man with a mane of dark hair who played Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky loud. On humid days he delighted me by throwing open the door with a shout: “Let the muggy in!”
If you’ve ever danced while doing chores, you know how irresistible it is to move in ways completely unrelated to your task. Mindy Aloff, a dance critic, defines dance in terms of this ability “to respond instantly to different conditions while continuing in one’s core mission.”
This responsiveness can even go beyond the dance floor. What matters is kinetic responsiveness, movements you make when you are moved.
You might dance your way to a protest.
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You might dance through some barrier — a window, say.
My tap teacher recently caught our class on tape. Half a beat behind everyone else, I’m certainly no Cyd Charisse. But as the number ends, I wave my jazz hands with a wild sincerity.
Psychological existence is a matter of fierce and unrelenting struggle. What I’m saying: Look at me.
Diane Josefowicz is the author, most recently, of “L’Air du Temps (1985),” a novella.
