Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [15]
I watched their bare feet pick up fine dust and kick it into the cool, moist grass along the path. Without thought, Flo and I fell in behind them. It was a long, winding run down into a hollow and then up around a wide grassy hill. My thighs and calves started to ache in the first thirty feet. Only stubbornness kept me moving, following those boys, who would occasionally look back and snicker. Later I would be grateful for their laughter. Without it, I would never have managed the full quarter mile, especially not the last curving uphill grade to where a soft-featured, blond young man was doing some kind of stylized kicking exercise.
The sensei stopped to watch us stagger up the hill. The boys were ahead of us, and I couldn’t hear what they told him, but his first words were as precise as his motions.
“You want to join the class, you’ll have to do better than that.”
“We will,” I announced emphatically, trying not to gasp for air. The sensei just nodded and started the class, putting Flo and me at the back as if suddenly adding two women to his all-male domain were something he had hoped to do all along—which it was, though we knew nothing of that.
The first weeks we kept coming just to hear the sensei tell us we could not come back. But every day he welcomed us as he welcomed the boys, requiring that we first complete that run, then stand silent, breathing as he breathed, deep and slow, trying to feel each muscle in hips and shoulders and neck. I barely heard him. For me those weeks were grim agony. I was making demands on muscles I had ignored most of my life, and only because I expected the ordeal to be over soon.
The boys helped. Every time they laughed, I would make myself stand taller or move faster. Every time they looked back over their shoulders at my stumbling attempts at running, I would grit my teeth and force my legs to pump higher. So long as they laughed, I would not quit. So long as they watched for tears, I would not let myself cry, though some days to cry was what I wanted most to do—to lie down in the damp grass and weep at the inept female body in which I was imprisoned.
Two, three, four weeks, we kept going. The laughter eased off, but not my desire to cry. Was it in the fourth week or the fifth that the teacher brought his wife to class? A ballet dancer with long, long legs, she easily outdistanced all of us on tight-muscled calves. Nothing daunted that woman, not the run or the kicking or even lifting one of those big pink-faced boys to her shoulders and showing us how to step in a gracefully wide stance while holding him easily. I watched her in confusion, understanding completely what was intended, the example of that astonishingly perfected female body taking over the class and showing us all what a woman could do. I watched the sensei watching her and understood that not only would he not ask us to leave his class but that the passion in his glance was something rare and unknown to me: love that yearned as much for the spirit as for the body.
I looked at her then as he looked at her, and somehow she became a story in my head, a memory of a woman I had seen once dancing on the balls of her feet, arms moving like scythes, face stern, eyes alive. Naked and powerful, deadly and utterly at peace with herself. She had a body that had never forgotten itself, and I knew at once that what I was seeing was magic. Watching, I fell in love—not with her but with the body itself, the hope of movement, the power of jumping and thrusting and being the creature that is not afraid to fall down but somehow doesn’t anyway.
Running the quarter mile back from that class, I started to cry. I made no sound, no gesture, just kept moving and letting the teardrops sheet down my face. Everyone was way ahead of me. My hands were curled into fists, pumping at my sides. The tears became sobs, heartbroken and angry, and I stumbled, almost falling down before I caught my footing in