Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (15 page)

I joined a House Church, one of several small fellowship groups that studied the Bible and prayed together in one of the member’s apartments. At first I was wary of attending: what if these Christians were . . . weird? What if they were too touchy-feely, or invasive, or socially awkward, or more-pious-than-thou? After all, they didn’t go to church only on Sundays. They also went to this middle-of-the-week Bible study and who knows what else. What if they asked me to open up and show my true self by sharing my problems? What if they wanted me to do scary things like help other people? The dangers were endless.

You may not be surprised to hear that I learned this group was friendly, down-to-earth, and hilariously funny. In addition to earnestly studying the Bible together, we laughed a lot and shared our lives in an empathetic and supportive environment. After several weeks, I gathered up my courage and revealed my eating disorder to my small prayer group. I thought it might be my last day with them: surely they would be horrified and disgusted when they discovered my lack of self-control. But no one judged me; they heard my prayer request, went on to hear everyone else’s prayer requests, and then we prayed. They asked God for help and healing on my behalf. We parted with hugs and the promise to see each other the next week.

I soon felt more comfortable with my friends at House Church than I did with my friends at the theater. At House Church I was completely myself, knowing that everyone there loved me for the person I was and not for what I looked like or what I could do for them. In contrast, my theater friends backed away from my difficulties and couldn’t relate to me if I wasn’t thin enough to successfully perform. They didn’t do it maliciously or even on purpose; my situation confused them and made them uncomfortable. Plus, they were all overwhelmed with their own busy dancing schedules. They still loved me, just from a distance. At the theater, ballet was everything—ballet was god—and few there could understand someone who had been a part of the ballet world but was
now operating on the outskirts of it. And from artistic management, all I received were grim looks and stony silence.

At church, I became more and more involved in activities beyond regular services and House Church, participating in and eventually assistant-leading a weekly program for people questioning the Christian faith. God was slowly peeling back my layers, enabling me to discover and adjust to who I was as a Daughter of Christ as He worked on my heart to heal me.

At the company, however, things were quickly deteriorating. Although I’d recovered from my back injury and could dance, I wasn’t being cast for performances because of my weight. I felt like an utter failure and an outcast; just walking into the theater felt like entering a dark prison. I dreaded going into that windowless concrete building and felt like I could breathe only when I was outside again.

I was still called to rehearsals, but always as an understudy, and I only stood in the back and watched other people dance parts I’d once performed. I remember a brief conversation with Rosemary during which I begged to be allowed to perform something. I needed something to shoot for, something to look forward to. We met in the girl’s locker room.

“Why can’t I dance in
Suite No. 3
?” I asked. “It has a long dress and is behind a scrim.”

“You are too heavy even for that,” she replied. “It would not be fair to the other in-shape and ready-to-go dancers if we cast you right now.”

“What about
Firebird
princesses? That is just a corps part, and they have long sleeves and long skirts.”

“You would stand out too much. It wouldn’t be a good example. You just need to lose the weight. You can do it quickly if you want to.”

I sat there and cried but accepted it. And went home and ate until my stomach hurt.

It seems strange when you think about it, given how prevalent eating disorders are in the ballet world, but at the time it was one big scary undiscussed secret. There was only silence. The other dancers and ballet
masters didn’t know how to interact with me. Some just ignored my weight and the obvious problems it was causing and talked to me about other things. Many ignored me altogether, avoiding eye contact. These same ballet masters had been extremely friendly when I was thin. Sometimes I found people staring at my body, and when they realized I was looking at them, they would quickly look away.

Some did try to intervene: a few of the ballet masters took me aside to talk to me, trying to gently help me or inspire me to lose the weight and get back on the right track. Others seemed angry and disappointed when they talked to me about how heavy I had become. I was never commended, however, when I lost weight. Despite the revelations in my inner spiritual life, I was still in the binge-and-purge cycle, eating practically nothing for a while, losing weight significantly, until something broke and I started binging again. I was so self-absorbed that even an imagined critical look would send me to the deli for ice cream. But management only spoke to me when the news they wanted to give me was bad. The assumption at the company was that no news was always good news.

I had conversations with Peter during which he was very frustrated and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get my act together. He was seeing my weight fluctuate wildly from week to week.

“I gained weight once. I just had to stop eating cheesecake,” he told me.

If only I could just
stop
, I thought. If only it were that easy.

Other meetings with him revealed his anger at me. He felt I had severely let him down. I don’t remember what exactly was said, frankly. I do remember him throwing a magazine at the wall. And I remember sitting on his office’s red leather couch and just crying.

I saw Jerome Robbins backstage during this time, and he said, “Come on. You just need to get the weight off. Just do it. We need you.”

The conversations varied, but their effect didn’t: after each one, I went home and bought a pint of ice cream and consumed it in front of the television.

It wasn’t that I’d given up trying to lose weight. I tried weird diets where I was supposed to only eat green vegetables or have just fruit before noon or have minuscule little meals mailed to me. The diets would last for a day or two until I felt weak and headachy and sick and would finally buy a whole bunch of food and eat to the point of discomfort. I did give up on OA—I couldn’t make a connection in the big loud meetings in New York. And though I went to a wonderful nutritionist, I lied to her about what I ate, telling her I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t losing weight because I was following her program almost perfectly.

I worked out frantically at the gym for hours. But when I came home, there was only me and my obsession with food and failure. To prevent myself from thinking about the disaster of my life, I turned repeatedly to books and television—and always food. Though I had God back in my life and in my head, my heart was still broken. Something in me still needed to be fixed, and God was the only one to do it. But though I was praying, God was not answering my prayer in the way that I wanted. To me, it seemed He was not working at all. Unfortunately, I was still trying to be my own fixer, which meant ultimately that nothing was getting better. And the company wasn’t seeing any improvement.

In December of 1996 another ballet master, Russell Kaiser, asked me to come in for a talk. Russell and I had danced together before he retired, and he now worked very closely with Peter. He gently told me that he was worried that if I didn’t lose the weight, I was going to be let go. Here it was: my worst fear and the ultimate failure. If I were fired, then the whole world would know that I was worthless. I was so wrapped up in my inner world that I thought I was still fooling everyone. I told outsiders that I was fixing things and that eventually I would be back onstage. I put on a smile at work and pretended I was on the road to recovery, even at church. But if they actually fired me, I would be caught in my lie. Everyone would know that I had no self-control and couldn’t overcome my addiction to food. Russell was kind and understanding during our meeting, but it was too late and not enough.

In February 1997 I had a meeting with Peter before the regular
contractual deadline, when the company must inform dancers whether or not they were going to be reengaged. There wasn’t much to say.

“Well, we have said it all before,” he told me, no longer angry, just resigned. “It has been too long now. We’re going to have to let you go. But we need you here, onstage. Your contract lasts until the end of our Saratoga season. You have your job through July, and if you can lose the weight by then, I can rehire you and no one has to ever know that you were fired. I really hope you can do it.”

And that was it. As in all of our meetings, I didn’t say much. I accepted. I cannot remember if I cried during the meeting or not. I cried so often in that office that it is hard to keep track.

After leaving Peter’s office, I headed to a restaurant where I was meeting my parents, who were in town visiting—the last thing I wanted to do at that point. I broke down sobbing right there, unable to wait to cry until I wasn’t in a public place. I couldn’t keep the news from them. But I told no one else. Still a coward and still trying to keep up some kind of strong public image, I hoped to fix things by the end of Saratoga so that no one else would know that I’d been fired.

My mother came to stay with me and lived in my apartment for almost a month. She was so worried about me and didn’t know what to do to help. Unfortunately, as I went through the daily paces of ballet class and gym workouts, I felt like I was encased in rock around my mother. For some reason I couldn’t open up to her, nor could I accept or welcome her advice. Perhaps I felt that her presence was too threatening in the sense that she would cause me to show my vulnerability; if I opened up a crack, I knew I would crumble. I shut her firmly out of my inner world and almost ignored her the entire time she was with me. I regret terribly how much I must have hurt her, and I’m sure she was distraught over my behavior. But I couldn’t let her in; she knew me too well, and it felt too dangerous to allow her access to my thoughts and feelings. I wanted to shield myself and be alone.

Finally she went home, and I felt relieved. But things didn’t get better. I tried to go to some OA meetings again but still couldn’t make a
connection. I became inconsistent at House Church. The theater felt like a trap—I was unwanted and unuseful and seemed to make everyone uncomfortable. I went there as little as possible. When I did have to go, it felt as if I were going into a dark place that required all of my energy just to protect myself and survive.

I tried frantically to lose weight, to fix myself quickly so I could keep my job. I tried not eating at all but couldn’t maintain it. I worked out at the gym and ran in Central Park until I couldn’t walk the next day. I thought about taking up smoking so that I would have something else to do with my mouth besides eat, but I hated cigarette smoke. I considered drugs: didn’t people on cocaine get really skinny? Maybe I should try that, I thought. But I didn’t know how to buy drugs or know anyone I felt comfortable asking about it.

I began seeing a Christian counselor. I was very resistant to going at first. It was my parents’ suggestion, first of all, which made me particularly unreceptive. Additionally, I mistakenly thought only weak, crazy people went to counseling—not strong, perfect Christian southern girls. I had the wherewithal, though, to take a look at myself and realize that I really needed help and I would take it from just about anyone—even someone my parents had suggested. So I went to counseling.

It was helpful. The therapist was a stranger who had no previous knowledge of who I was or even what the ballet world was like. When I first sat across from her in her office, I had no idea how to even begin to talk to her. But she asked a couple of questions and then just sat back and listened, looking small and kindly in a Mrs. Claus kind of way. I started to dispassionately tell her my history and why I was there. I heard myself being completely honest with her, as I’d never been with anyone before. I had nothing to lose at this point. After each horrible revelation, she just nodded and waited. I laid myself bare, and it was a relief. There was no need to pretend with her. Finally I was really talking to someone.

Two other women I was completely honest with were Fay Fondiller and Kathy Mihok, friends of my mother’s from All Angels’ Church. They knew I was having trouble because my mom had asked them to
pray for me. So they came and offered to meet with me for prayer. They were lovely Christian women, gentle in spirit and loving in demeanor, who felt called to pray for people who were in need. I know now that God obviously put them in my life as instruments for His healing. They would meet me once a week in a small room at the church. The two of them would ask me how my week was and what I needed prayer for, and then they would spend forty-five minutes praying for me, holding my hands. They would assure me of God’s love for me and encourage me to accept His love, despite the repeated failures and ugliness that I felt I carried around on my back everywhere I went.

Their prayers slid like water over the shell I’d created around myself, wearing away at the hardness. No great, sudden changes were occurring in me to the outward eye, and I often felt that nothing good at all was coming as a result of the counseling and the prayers, but I know now that God was working and a light was being nurtured back to life within me. At the time, however, I could not see it. I was still so lost in the darkness.

—

T
he spring season went by with no real change in my weight. I was allowed to dance in some corps roles with big dresses, but really, I was unusable. The company went to its summer home in Saratoga Springs, and I went too, knowing secretly that this was going to be my last season with City Ballet. I started hinting to my friends that I might want to stop and go to college full time, still maintaining the image that I was in control. None of them talked too much to me about it. I’d effectively shut them out long before.