Prima.
Mother managed to convince herself she always knew best — whether out of necessity to protect her ego or simply out of her own brand of contrarian ignorance. I don’t think I’ll ever know which it was, honestly. The mental gymnastics she went through to deny me my need to play in the dirt with the boys and, instead, package me up like a product and place me in ballet classes with a sadist masquerading as an artist are worthy of an Olympic gold medal in their own right. She said it was because she loved me. But she never did that to my sister. Eleanor had come before, by three years and had been the trial run for an unprepared, overeducated academic achiever struggling to decide if she wanted kids… or even a marriage. I came along and completed the duopoly, packaged as two young daughters, just as mom finished med school.
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Divorce followed suit while I was just leaving diapers — so mom would make jokes about all of the shit in her life was finally gone all at once. It took a while for me to work out that she held dad in the same esteem as a dirty diaper. He and I were never close at all, but I doubt he held that same value to his friends and remaining family as a soiled nappy. I hope they thought more of him. He died from a liver thing when I was 8. Something about aspirin and toxicity from too much of it. Mom wouldn’t take us to the funeral. I remember Eleanor getting all dressed up in black and crying uncontrollably in the living room as she waited for the ride that would never come. It was shortly afterwards that I was forced to don the leotard, bind my feet, and learn to point, pirouette, and plié. It felt ridiculous and unnecessary — and I fought my own guerrilla war against these odd demands and the agony of the torturous exercise that I could feel shaping my body as I grew. Society has put a girdle on our feminine nature, tightened it, making it harder to breathe, and told us that we are prettier like this and should embrace it. This absurdity in physical constraint is what I have always hated about ballet, yet somewhere along the line, I found something I love. I love conquering it, being unbroken in spite of the cruelty of it. To find a moment of seeming weightlessness in flight made real by my own energies and efforts is a kind of self-made magic. I know what it is to love what I hate and hate what I love because of my experience suffering for mastery in ballet. I guess maybe that is why mother put me through that — so I would understand her own love-hate relationship with being a mother. She was like that. Everything she did with us had an allegorical rationale related to her own solipsistic self-referential observations about the world and what went on around her. Everything had to be a lesson, and it all had to do with letting us know what a struggle it was for her. Sitting here, staring at my feet and knees, turned and tortured as they are, I feel a bit disconnected as the other relatives are doing the necessary platitudes in describing her accomplishments and declaring her a trailblazer in medicine and how wonderful she was taking on the challenge of raising two daughters while doing her residency in psychiatry. They gush aggressively about how the world will never appreciate the quiet, good work she did healing the minds of the sick. I just look at my feet. I feel my knees. I am 22 years old, and I have severe pain in my knees and feet all of the time. Even the pain of my first period — at 12, which was pretty crippling — paled in comparison to the constant throbbing of my joints from my waist down. And this thing that she did to me — willingly — is maybe the best memory I have of her. She showed me that there is arbitrary cruelty in this world — and it might even seek you out — so figure out how to shape it, mould yourself to deal with it, and make it suffer you. For that, I am almost thankful for her and proud to call myself her daughter. But then Eleanor speaks and undoes it all, bringing me back to the realities of life “I have the pleasure of being one of two daughters to Dr Huston. One of whom she invested so much time and effort in, taking her to ballet, supporting her, and opening a world of art and possibility — urging her on until she took on the mantle of Prima Ballerina for the New York City Ballet. But that was my sister, Catherine. The other — well, she left that one alone to her own devices — sent off to study, absorb, and synthesise everything she was exposed to. I so wish I had been the daughter who got to be a ballerina — but instead I was sent to be the academic. The pain of that perceived cruelty still haunts me today as we say goodbye to her.” Eleanor steps away, and the room is quiet. I sit there, wondering if I should say something, but I know I will absolutely contradict everything Eleanor just said, and then my compulsions will have me just screaming. I let Eleanor have her delusional moment and tighten my grip on myself for just a few seconds. I give nothing away, despite the many curious sideways glances hunting me down and interrogating me. I am stoic. I am glacial. Nothing can move me, nothing can melt this ice — because I know that this is not a permanent state. I just have to hold it together for a few more minutes, then, once we are at the wake, I can kick the shit out of Eleanor in the backyard like I have always wanted to.
So, just a few more minutes…
