Odd Fellows Hall, the onetime fraternal club meetinghouse (“Friendship, Love, and Truth”) where there is — with perfect symbolism — now a Rolex store, is where the bourgeois girls of my generation studied ballet under the exacting tutelage of Gordon Peavy. The building had an aura of fanciness about it. In front, all along the low, white fence, there were deep-red roses that matched the deep-red roses that used to bloom in incredible profusion, too, at the Long Island Rail Road Station, on the other end of Newtown Lane. Crimson and white.
Mr. Peavy’s airy dance studio was up the stairs. To the left of the landing was his office and to the right, a small dressing room where we changed out of our street clothes and, if our mothers hadn’t done it for us already, pulled our hair up into a ballerina’s bun.
The floors of the studio were a blond 1970s wood, thickly varnished, always glossy; the walls were white, and the atmosphere scented with Jean Naté After Bath Splash. Mr. Peavy kept a bottle of Jean Naté After Bath Splash in the bathroom, and sometimes I would pretend I had to go, so I could surreptitiously splash some on myself while Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” played in the other room and the other girls practiced their port de bras, furrowing their brows with concentration.
I started at Mr. Peavy’s dance studio in fourth grade, the same year I moved from the hippie heaven of the Hampton Day School to the much more conventional John M. Marshall Elementary, where the walls in the halls were cinderblock and we had to call the teachers not “Barbara” or “Bill” but “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
The dressing room of Mr. Peavy’s dance studio was my introduction to the norms of late-20th-century womanhood. I took classes there up until I left East Hampton High School, between fall and spring semester of my sophomore year, to attend Concord Academy in Massachusetts. It was in this dressing room that I discovered that there were many things I wasn’t doing quite right. For one thing, my mother was busy working at this newspaper and never did my hair for me. (She wouldn’t have known how to do it, had she tried. Ballet class was a foreign land to her.) I bought my own hairnets at White’s Drug Store on Main Street, whispering to the formidable lady manager, “Charge it to our account.” The hairnets were a mystery of femininity, stocked in a special drawer that the clerk at White’s opened for you; you chose by color, from platinum to jet. I twisted my own hair up into a bun just before class, pinned it, and secured it with my mouse-brown net from White’s, and I was never good at this ritual. Inevitably, my bun looked like Olive Oyl’s from the Popeye comics.
My tights, bought at Fifth Avenue Fashions a few doors down from Odd Fellows Hall, were not quite the right ballet-pink, smooth and doll-like, but the somewhat more orange-pink color of a baby aspirin, with a rougher texture. I’ve mentioned this before, but this dressing room is where, wide-eyed, I first heard about girls starving themselves: One of my (already quite bony) classmates, in sixth or seventh grade, informed us that she was on “the apple diet”: an apple for breakfast, an apple for lunch, and an apple for dinner.
Meanwhile, my cousin Cleo and I were making up humorous new words to the introduction that played at the beginning of each episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man”: “Steve Austin, astro-snot,” we would say, laughing and laughing and falling out of our chairs laughing, “a man barely alive. We can rebuild him! We have the technology. We can make him better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”
But I was a good dancer — if I can say so without sounding egotistical, all these many decades later. Mr. Peavy’s advanced ballet class never performed a recital or show for a real audience, so I have no external verification of this assertion, but I do have the memory of one special afternoon when Mr. Peavy invited the mothers to watch us dance, and my own mother insisting afterward that it was urgent that I become a dancer and not waste my talent. She wasn’t prone to excessive compliments. She did also tell me once that she thought my handwriting — a scrawl that was, in the opinion of the ballet-class girls, too irregular and boyish, as well, not the requisite bubble-shaped script — was appealingly sophisticated or artistic looking.
Ballet was an education in the variations and gradations of pink. There were tights in a pink so pale it looked almost like my own white-white flesh, the almost-white pink of the legs of the Paris Opera corps de ballet girls in a Degas painting. There were ribbons of soft shell-pink, like the inside of a Caribbean conch, and shoes that ranged from the odd tangerine-y hue of a Circus Peanut marshmallow candy to — I won’t say a bubble-gum, but almost a peppermint-pink.
Mr. Peavy had opinions about how young women should comport and adorn themselves, too. He preferred it if instead of bare nails we wore fingernail polish. He taught us how to sew the pink-satin ribbons to either side of our satin Capezio Assoluta shoes, when we were old enough, and the bones of our feet had become strong enough, to go on pointe. We stuffed the toes of our pointe shoes with lambswool.
After my crush on Lee Majors, and before my crush on Joe Strummer of the Clash, I had a crush on Mikhail Baryshnikov. I hung two posters of him in my bedroom: the famous one where he is bare-chested, throwing one arm above his head in “Le Jeune Homme et La Mort” and one from the movie “Turning Point.”
For some reason, on Sunday, I was standing in the mud room behind the kitchen staring out the window beside the washer-dryer, looking at nothing much in particular — the shrubs beyond the window glass, bridal veil barren of flowers and an apple tree with no apples, the clouds of white snakeroot that have taken hold in the lily patch — when it occurred to me that while I still conceive of myself as a talented dancer, it’s 40 years since I took a ballet class and I bear absolutely no resemblance to a ballerina. I was a dancer in my youth; I am not a dancer now?