Inside These Walls

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My mother used to drive me to ballet lessons in her white Ford Torino, her delicate fingers light on the wheel, rolling slowly down the clean streets of San Jose as I sat beside her in my leotard and pink tights. Often the driver in front of us would glance in his mirror and slow down, mistaking us for a police car. “Come on, sport,” she would mutter under her breath, imitating my father, even long after he died. I found it comforting, the way she kept his presence alive in ephemeral but steady ways, and I felt as though he could still protect me. It was startling to discover that wasn’t true, but for a while it gave me comfort.

The lessons began when I was four, ended abruptly at age thirteen, and began again much later, when I was forty-three years old. At that age I practiced alone, without a mirror, without a real barre, because I had no choice—but the music was the same as ever, Beethoven and Brahms selections from Afternoon Classics on NPR. I am very, very good at going deep inside my mind and, even with my eyes open, imagining my surroundings as they should be rather than as they are. Sometimes, when I practice, I imagine myself as a six-year-old in the high-ceilinged studio with the long mirrored wall and the record player in one corner. Back then I was just Clara and my name meant nothing. I could even say the entire thing, Clara Mattingly, and no flicker of recognition or shock would pass through the gaze that rested on me. I remember how small and light my body felt then, a wonderful sealed machine, an egg. I remember the way the rain lashed the tall old windows, whipped the trees outside, but couldn’t touch the airy sanctuary filled with piano music and the warmth of a dozen energetic small bodies.

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