Her life had been hard. She had lost so much: her mother to cholera, a brother stolen by the Russian army when soldiers invaded in what was then Austro-Hungary during World War I. When she was 18, her father sent her alone to a brother in America and she never saw any of her relatives again—most were murdered in the Holocaust, except her youngest brother who escaped to Palestine as a teenager. She met and married my grandfather, a Russian refugee, and they owned a laundry. He washed the clothes and she did the mending and ironing. By the time she and I ended up as roommates, Grandma, now in her seventies, had lived a life she’d never expected as a child.
To cheer herself up, she liked to talk about her youth—climbing a cherry tree in her white graduation dress because she just had to have this one gorgeous cherry, ripping the dress her mother had hand-sewn for her on the way down. She sounded so high-spirited to me; her life seemed so magical before the wars swept her whole world away. She was educated, too, which was unusual for a girl in those times, and a Jewish one at that. She could read and write in seven languages. She was an expert seamstress and embroiderer, and she took dance lessons, which she loved. I was a dancer, too! Not social dancing, like her, but ballet and modern. As I read my book, I fantasized about the parties she must have attended at school.
Now, she was heavy-set, you could even say lumbering. But when I asked my question, she got up and began to slowly demonstrate by circling around my bedroom. One-two-three, one-two-three…her arms orbiting a phantom partner. I laughed when I saw her—she wasn’t exactly an active senior, and she had neither a bra nor girdle on under her house dress. But then I recognized she could really move. The muscle memory was still encoded in her body. She had rhythm and grace. Her grief and loss had not stolen this from her.
“Pussycat,” she said, “Come try.” I walked over and she put her arms around my waist and shoulder and began to hum, some waltz-y type music from her memory that I didn’t know, as she spun me around our bedroom. We were both so happy.
I have continued to dance ever since, taking ballet and jazz classes well into my forties and since then barre class every day and a lot of yoga. Dance has sustained me my entire life. But before we’d met Erik, that brief lesson from my grandmother was the only moment that I’d ever truly experienced ballroom dancing.
Now, I am going to be twirled again. Eric first puts on “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss and then “The Second Waltz by Dmitri Shostakovich”. He tells us to hold each other and move naturally, so Bruce and I sway side-to-side. He teaches us a two-step first and then the box step. Fun, but not what we’d come for. “I want to swirl her around the room,” Bruce had said, when Erik had originally asked us for our goals. We keep knocking into one another. We laugh at our own clumsiness, and Erik laughs too. He is so glad that we are enjoying ourselves. Erik teaches us “the lady turn,” where Bruce spins me under his arm, and then we two-step away from each other and he spins me back to him. Maybe it is the altitude, maybe it is the romance of it all, but by the time Eric puts on Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You”—also in ¾ time!—we are both breathless. And we are waltzing.
