Every Step You Take (2 page)

Despite all my calm and deliberate planning, when the last week before my final performance finally arrived I was a wreck—anxious and confused, and overwhelmed by a variety of feelings. Several of my family members had traveled east early for the event, and while their presence strengthened the sense of support I felt, it also compounded my anxiety about performing well. For several of them the long trip to New York was the first travel of this kind they had ever made, and I wanted to make sure they felt it had been worthwhile. A longtime ballet patron and friend, Anne Bass, incredibly generous as always, had offered to host a party in my honor after the performance, so she and I were busy coordinating details for a Mexican feast for 450 to be held downtown in a party space called Industria. I was working night and day with the physical therapists and my trainer to hold my exhausted and vulnerable body together, and at the same time rehearsing not just for my farewell performance but also for the regular ballet program pieces I was dancing in the days leading up to my performance. Everything felt pretty crazy.

When June 19 finally arrived I was numb. Luis very kindly took me out for brunch before the performance, which was scheduled as a 3:00 p.m. matinee, but I couldn't even touch my food. As the hour approached, I sat in my dressing room and stared in the mirror, looking for evidence of something new in my face that might reflect the extreme change my life was about to take. I applied my stage makeup for the last time—a little eyeliner and a little blush—and dressed and headed down to the stage earlier than usual. Standing in the wings, looking out into the theater, I realized it seemed surreal to me that today would be the last time that I would throw my whole heart and soul out across this familiar platform, where I had danced so many amazing stories. A wave of panic swept through me as I considered the possibility that I wouldn't make it through the program—I had rehearsed the steps of all five ballets over and over, but never back-to-back while dancing full out in the real-time performance framework. (Dancers my age rarely rehearse a ballet dancing full out—if you do, you would have nothing left by performance time.) What if my legs just gave out halfway through? The possibility was horrifying.

Finally the moment came for the program to begin. As I stood in the wings, I found it strange to think that at the end of this evening the person I had been for thirty-five years—the obsessed and driven ballet dancer—would just disappear. Where would that person go? And what would be left in the space he had once occupied? I looked out to find my family in the third-row orchestra seats below, and caught my mother's eye. She was beautiful in the red shirt and black pants and jacket she had made for herself for the occasion, and she was wearing one of the wigs—the short, spiky one that was my favorite—she had started using since chemotherapy. As our eyes met she sent me the huge smile that had warmed and brightened my life for as long as I could remember, and I felt a familiar calmness spreading though me. It was time to dance.

I made the sign of the cross—something I had done before every ballet I ever performed—and took a deep breath. As the music began I stepped onto the stage and into the role of Bernardo of the Sharks in the “Dance at the Gym” scene from Jerome Robbins's
West Side Story Suite
. I turned to my fellow Sharks as we advanced upon Riff and his gang of Jets. “Mambo, mambo, mambo!” I shouted. In a matter of seconds, the combination of music and movement gathered me up and carried me to a new place. Any concerns I had had about a dancer named Jock Soto and the possible pitfalls of his retirement performance evaporated. I was a Shark, and I was at war.

T
O MY GREAT
relief my entire retirement program unfolded as it was meant to, and in the months that followed I congratulated myself for having executed the whole transition successfully, more or less as I had planned it. I was really enjoying teaching full-time at the SAB and taking courses at the Institute for Culinary Education. The last pieces of the documentary about me, titled
Water Flowing Together
, seemed to be finally falling into place, and Luis and I loved getting to spend more time with each other and with Tristan, the adorable baby basset hound my fellow dancers had given me as a retirement present. In fact, other people seemed to be more traumatized by my retirement than I was.

“Don't you miss performing?” they would ask me incredulously when I bumped into them on the street. “Yes, I do miss performing. It's all the other hours I don't miss,” I would say, trying to brush it off lightly. “I'm tired. I'm so ready to do something else.” And I believed this to be true.

But deep inside, I know part of me must have been in shock. There is no greater feeling than the one that comes after a performance when everything has gone incredibly well. In the last decade of my career, when I was dancing so much with Wendy Whelan, I often felt that our dancing must be the closest thing there was to flying. Our beings and our bodies merged, and we went soaring through the ballet on a cloud. Every time we danced together it felt like a new story was unfolding. Of course I missed it, and knowing I was letting go of this experience forever had been like watching a part of myself die. In so many ways, on so many levels it seemed unthinkable—so I did my best not to think about it.

At the same time that I was keeping myself in studied denial about the death of my professional identity, I was trying to face a much more serious and upsetting loss. My mother's health had continued to disintegrate, and she was getting weaker and weaker. Even though she was often living as much as three thousand miles away, I had always remained aware of my mother as a powerful and vital force in my life and in the world. It was not just her physical presence—her beautiful skin and hair, elegant face and carriage—or her warm and embracing manner that struck everyone who met her. Mom had certain ways about her—ways of seeing and ways of speaking and ways of teaching and loving and living—that were unique. Born and raised on her clan's ancestral lands on the Navajo tribal reservation near Chinle, Arizona, she was both humble and proud, and filled with an innate courage and dignity. She had often talked about how her elders on the reservation had taught her to “walk in beauty and in harmony,” and I knew she had a grand scheme for how life—whether on or off the reservation—should be led by all of us. And now this amazingly intense and vibrant woman was fading, beaten down by rounds and rounds of chemotherapy and all its nasty side effects.

I was grateful that my retirement allowed me to spend more time with Mom, but I found that the more I saw her the more I dreaded losing her. Over the months, another potential loss began to haunt me. My mother had always been the bookkeeper and historian in our family. I was afraid that if she died there would be much—about my parents and grandparents and their families, about my own early childhood, about my mother's Navajo heritage and my father's life in Puerto Rico—that would go to the grave with her. I had promised Mom that I would try to remember what she had told me about our heritage, and do my best to pass it along. But what if I wanted to learn more about my past at some point? Who would I turn to?

Recognizing how much I didn't know about my parents' backgrounds and my own early years brought me face-to-face with an even more alarming question: Did I even know my own life, the one I had supposedly lived for the past thirty years here in New York? Luis and I had begun to talk about getting married someday, and maybe even having a family. If I ever had children of my own, would I be able to tell them about this life I had lived, what I had done and what I had learned from it? Or had I danced right over three decades of precious time, pouring everything into the stories I was creating onstage and ignoring the overall arc of how everything, onstage and offstage, fits together? This raised another troubling question, especially for someone facing the challenge of inventing a whole new life: Can you figure out where you are going if you have never paused to consider where you came from or where you have been?

I had been so determined to channel all my energies forward into a productive future after retiring—yet now I found myself possessed by a curiosity about my past. I kept thinking about the months and months that had piled up into years and years, during which my only focus had been a near maniacal pursuit of the art of dance. Balanchine's famous quote about ballet came to mind: “The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.” Could I apply his comment on dance to life in general? Could I keep moving through the present and planning for the future, and at the same time be able to rewind the tape and sift through my past, looking for any information and insights that might be embedded in all those days and weeks and months and years during which I had just floated through life—happily adrift in a universe that was all about dancing, dancing, dancing?

For a long time I wrestled with these questions, wondering if I had the courage and stamina and honesty—not to mention intellectual depth—to actually harvest anything from a more probing look at my life. But on the sad day in March 2008 when my brave mother finally lost her battle with cancer and died, something shifted inside me. I didn't recognize the change instantly, but over the next few weeks it became obvious that I had been asking myself certain questions for long enough. The time had come to try to find some answers.

______

Every day the world turns upside down for someone who is sitting on top of it
.

—E
LLEN
G
ILCHRIST
,
I
N THE
L
AND OF
D
REAMY
D
REAMS

I
am three years old, and I am dancing with my mother. I am three, and she is immortal—as big and beautiful and bright as the sun in the sky. We are dressed in special dancing clothes that she has made for us. I have little beaded moccasins and a headband of wiry horsehair; my velvet loincloth and matching fringed vest with sparkling sequins are a pretty purple. We are carrying smooth circles that never start and never end, beautiful wooden hoops (mine are small and just my size, and my mother's are bigger, just right for her) made by my grandfather.

As we begin to move through our dance steps, holding our hoops, my mother and I become another set of hoops. We roll, separate but connected, inside the heat and the light and inside the irresistible beat of my grandfather's drum and the sound of his voice as he chants a long, special song. We gather momentum and unity as we move; the surrounding light and colors and all of the familiar smells—horsehair, leather, dust, hot clay—become one with our movement and the drumbeat and my grandfather's voice. I notice from the corner of my eye that even the sunlight is dancing with us now, its shadow feet rushing to match the movement of every step we take, meeting us toe-to-toe with perfect timing.

I am dancing with my mother and I am only three, but already I can feel the thrill and the power of surrendering to the sum of our partnership with each other and with everything in this moment in time. I am her son, she is my sun, I am a small moon in her happy orbit. Every time we dance it is like this—we spin ourselves a brand-new universe.

Whenever I dive into the murk of my childhood years, the earliest artifact I can bring back to the surface is this memory of my mother teaching me the traditional Navajo hoop dance. As memories go, my childhood pas de deux with Mom is always easy to find—in fact, over the years it has revisited me often, bringing with it sensations so vivid and visceral they register more like a current than a recollected experience. On March 28, 2008, as I sit in an uncomfortable wooden pew in a small chapel in Colorado Springs and try to listen to the rent-a-priest who is speaking at my mother's memorial service, the memory comes to me once more—this time in an act of emotional rescue.

My beautiful mother—Josephine Towne Soto—has died. But as the gray minutes roll past and the priest at the front of the chapel drones on, my beautiful mother is still dancing with me in a world of bright light and vivid colors. We are moving across the hard-packed earth in front of my grandpa Bud and grandma Rachel's hogan on the Navajo Reservation in Chinle, Arizona, on a day four decades ago, but we are also dancing through the fluid dimension of time, on a platform that is both of and above the world we usually inhabit. This is what the two of us always have done together; this is what we always will do. My mother was my very first dance partner, and as I close my eyes and ears to the grim little gathering that surrounds me, it is a great relief to know that I will be dancing with her forever.

Only two weeks have passed since the moment when my brother, Kiko, called me, as I was headed to teach my partnering class at the School of American Ballet in New York, to say I'd better come back to Colorado Springs, where Mom had been admitted to hospice care several weeks earlier. We have been through many tough times since our mother was diagnosed with cancer five years ago—but nothing could have prepared me for these final weeks, when every twenty-four hours seemed to bring brutal new diminishments of her autonomy. For me the visual and emotional horrors of watching my mother suffer a slow and painful death have been compounded by the strange and unpredictable dynamics of our large and unruly family. My mother has always been the powerful and beloved center of that family, both the immediate and the extended branches. Not one of us wanted to let her go. As we all have tried to face the pain of our profound loss, spoken and unspoken feelings have ricocheted like stray bullets among the scattered members of this communication-challenged family. My father has been retreating deeper and deeper into a childlike state of denial that I find frustrating, but even worse are the tensions that have developed between my immediate family members who left the reservation some years ago, and my mother's traditional Navajo relatives who still live there. The telephone calls between us have grown more and more strained.