My grandmother longed for ballet lessons when she was a little girl. She grew up in Brooklyn in the 19-teens and twenties, the third child of parents who came to America in a wave of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, and that wish would never come true. They couldn’t afford to send her to ballet lessons. Even now, almost a century later, Belle still remembers how deeply she envied her classmates whose parents could afford it.
It’s hardly groundbreaking to say that a love of ballet is passed from mother to daughter: the overbearing ballet stage mom living her dream through her child is a tired cliche for a reason. But it is the case that my grandmother’s yearning for and appreciation of ballet was passed on to her daughter, who then passed it on to me.
In the mid-1950s, When my mother was a girl, Belle was widowed, and suddenly became a single mother with two young daughters. There’s a lot I don’t know about that time in her and my mother’s life, but one thing I do know is that Belle would often take the girls into the city and they’d go to the ballet together, sitting high in the cheap seats in the Family Circle at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center.
Those seats cost a little more now, but they’re cheap enough that I could afford them when I was in graduate school and carving out a freelance journalism career. On more than one occasion it occurred to me that I could have been sitting in the very same spot that my mother had occupied as a girl. It was a kind of stationary, intergenerational time travel that made me feel closer to my mom, who now lives very far away from New York, in Sydney, Australia.
A few years ago, Belle started doing something that a lot of elderly people do: she started giving away her stuff. When I visited, to cook her dinner and play Scrabble, she would ask me what decorative pieces I wanted from her home, or which pieces of jewelry I particularly liked. She would tell me to take whatever I wanted from her bookshelf. I never took much, but on one occasion I accepted The Ballet Goer’s Guide, by Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp.
Clarke (who died in 2015) and Crisp, who were both dance critics, wrote many books about ballet together, and this one came out in 1981.
It contains a brief history of the artform, summaries of nearly 150 different ballets, and at the back, a short briefing on ballet positions and movements. It’s a useful little volume. But as is so often the case with second-hand books, I am more interested in the marginalia than in the book itself.
Belle received this book as a birthday gift, though I don’t know which birthday it was — in part because the card from her then-companion, who gave her the book, makes a joke about celebrating “many happy 39th birthdays.” In 1981, Belle was already 67. The card is slipped into the book between pages 252 and 253, at the start of the entry for The Sleeping Beauty, and it’s a reproduction of the 1874 Degas painting “Ballet Rehearsal.” My grandpa was on brand.
It gets better. Slotted in between pages 198 and 199, after Onegin but before Orpheus, are two pages ripped out of a Playbill in 1997. Belle had gone to see an American Ballet Theater performance of Othello, choreographed by Lar Lubovitch and starring, that Saturday afternoon in May, Desmond Richardson in the title role. In the corps, playing “Venetian Courtiers, Children, Attendants, Guards, and People of Cyprus,” are some other names I recognize: Stella Abrera, now an ABT principal who would have had her retirement performance this spring; Griff Braun, now an organizer at AGMA, the union the represents dancers, and someone I interviewed for TURNING POINTE; and Rosalie O’Connor, now a well-regarded ballet photographer.
The ballet had premiered just the day before, on May 23, and it occurs to me that this performance might have been part of Belle’s birthday celebrations that year. You see, Belle celebrated a birthday this week.
This week, my grandma Belle turned 106 — yes, 106, she is older than the First World War — and it was a bittersweet birthday for her and for everyone who loves her. We weren’t able to celebrate with her in person, weren’t able to gather around a big oval table at an Italian restaurant on Long Island and toast to our remarkable matriarch. She was able to go outside, but it was for the first time in two months, and she was wearing a mask and gloves the whole time. Because she’s 106, this is the second global pandemic she’s lived through.
After 106 years on this earth, Belle’s favorite saying, the one she’s repeated to me and my cousins many many times, is: “Man plans, God laughs.” Sometimes she says it in Yiddish: “mann tracht, un Gott lacht.” God certainly appears to be laughing her ass off right now.
I miss cooking dinner for my grandma. I miss going to the ballet. I miss the solidity, the certainty of knowing when I’ll do either of those things again. And I am more grateful than ever to have little pieces of her with me, and to go hunting for more of her in the margins.
That’s it from me this week. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Chloe.