All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [19]
As I stare in the mirror, I remember another party and another black dress, slinky with spaghetti straps. It was sophomore year and I was unhappy with how I looked. “You’re beautiful,” a woman next to me said to my reflection. “Just forget about it.” That moment, with my protruding collarbones, tiny waist, smooth skin, and long blond hair, was probably when I looked my most conventionally attractive. But I got there by extreme dieting and purging (I thought I’d invented bulimia) and felt anything but beautiful inside. There were so many pressures on me—thrown into a situation where I thought I had to be thin, witty, East Coast–smart, sexually experienced, invulnerable—that something had to give, and it ended up being my self-esteem, along with my lunch. The campus therapist asked why I couldn’t just control myself—this being the Dark Ages in the history of eating disorders—and I told him that that was exactly the fucking problem. So many of us young women could have earned PhDs in eating issues, or in anything else, for all the time we wasted on our unhappy relationships with food and our bodies. Not to mention how much joyful eating and delicious sex we missed out on.
Thank God those days and issues are out of the way. I look in the mirror, apply some bright lipstick, pat my belly, and decide there’s no way I’m going to waste any more of my evening with my sophomore self, who barely had a sense of humor (one of the things that definitely improves with age). I’m taking my forty-one-year-old ass back out to a party.
The alumni fete is at one of the old fraternity houses, which smells faintly like twenty-year-old beer. A band is playing New Wave cover songs from the late seventies and early eighties, the Talking Heads and the Clash, which we all simultaneously enjoy and dimly, uncomfortably realize that the band is playing as oldies.
No matter. In the living room, on worn wooden floors, a group of us dance, warming up slowly, then moving and shaking through the strata of our bodies to an energetic, euphoric 1982. I am back in the body of the young woman who, no matter how confused she was about what it meant to be a feminist woman making her way in the world, could dance her way down to a truth, holding and expressing rhythm in every part of her being in a way that was completely, unabashedly female. Dancing kept me grounded in college and transformed me from a brain with a ponytail, supported by undifferentiated mass, into someone who inhabited her body with flexible, energetic assurance.
Just a few hours a week of dance class with a warm, exuberant, and challenging professor changed my body image: when we watched a videotape of ourselves leaping across the room, I wondered who that graceful woman was wearing the same color leotard I always wore. The subtler lessons of dance class were harder to learn, such as the idea that in order to improvise with someone else you have to really listen to them, to respond rather than react, a notion that has tickled my brain ever since but which I’ve rarely managed to embody.
I dance with these people I danced with so long ago, with no judgments, just joy. It reminds me of sunny days in spring when we’d dance in a circle to African drums, feeling ecstatic and tribal there in Connecticut, unleashing our bodies, passion, and energy. “That was better than sex,” I recall one guy remarking when the dancing stopped, and we all lay back on the grass, sweaty and spent.
AFTER THE REUNION, my head buzzing, I head to New York City for a few days, a city I love and lived in briefly during college, doing a magazine internship (I was Xeroxing for cokeheads at Rolling Stone; the only time an editor spoke to me except to give me shitwork was to ask, “Why is it all the women who work here are pears?” I was still too young and cowed by New York magazine editors to come back with a proper reply, which