LESLIE KENDALL DYE

writer and editor

Perfectionism

I started taking real ballet classes when I was six years old. Before that, I had been enrolled in a “pre-ballet” class — where they distributed fairy wands and praised us for prancing about. It was humiliating. I may not have known much about dance but I knew when I was being patronized. My classes looked nothing like my older sister’s, who, at twelve, was old enough to study at Roland Dupree’s Dance Academy, where my mother and I watched her class through a one-way observation mirror. Soon enough, I begged my mother for real classes, too. She hunted for a ballet school that took six-year-olds and found The Lichine Ballet School, located on a quiet street in Beverly Hills. On my first day, we parked and walked into an alley, where we knocked on a heavy metal door. Once inside, we ascended a flight of creaky stairs to a studio with a slippery wooden floor. (The studio burned to the ground not long after, was rebuilt a few blocks away in a much nicer space, and rechristened “The Lichine Ballet Academy,” which befit the spacious new real estate.)

On that first day, the teacher, Miss Hilger, placed me at the end of a row of girls at the barre, where I did my best to follow the combinations while being constantly reminded to point my toes, turn out my hips, and keep my heels on the ground while in demi-plie. It was like trying to solve a Rubik's cube in a strobe-lit room with ten Rubik's cube champions clicking all around me. My ability to survive this class without disgracing myself seemed to me the measure of my worth as a human being. It was a preview of how I would feel when facing all sorts of tasks in life, as though I were restarting an engine that frequently stalls from over-excitement. I think it was my first experience with perfectionism.

Perfectionism is not a reflection of the quality of your talent or ability, despite the implication of the word. Instead, it’s a function of neural processing: some of us have trouble organizing the elements of a task into a hierarchy, and even once we decide upon an order of operations we have trouble committing to it. In other words, we can’t stick to a plan. Too many ideas are buzzing for our attention, as though we must find the location of one particular bird by its warble when that bird is surrounded by dozens of other birds simultaneously singing. It’s beautiful and energizing, but deeply confounding.

I have to take a breath when too many thoughts compete for attention, and it happens a lot when I write. In Neil Simon’s play I Ought To Be In Pictures, Herbert Tucker is a writer struggling with his latest screenplay. His daughter Libby insists things must be going well — after all, she heard him banging away at his typewriter all night. She tells him it sounded like he wrote 46 pages! “It was no good, Libby,” he replies. “I didn’t write 46 pages. I wrote one page 46 times.”

I should have that bit of dialogue framed on my wall. Writing a good sentence can feel like catching lightning in a bottle. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said that by the time we get the words on the page, they are but the embers of the fire that inspired us. Not all “writer’s block” is about perfectionism, but perfectionism is often the culprit that slows the gears, gums up the works, and induces paralysis just moments after we’ve flown to the page to transform ideas into words.

Recently, I sat down to write something — this essay, actually, which was originally entitled “On Inspiration,” before several drafts convinced me that wasn’t what the essay was about. I wrote and deleted the first sentence at least a dozen times. Then, remembering the desperation of my first day at the ballet barre, I realized how much composition has in common with ballet: there are so many things to keep track of. Ballet demands correct placement, turnout, musicality, internal resistance in the muscles to create fluidity and the illusion of weightlessness, constantly shifting epaulement. The elements of composition are just as numerous and intertwined: grammar, usage, rhythm, tone, cadence, clarity.

Here’s the thing about learning how to be a ballet dancer: we do it wrong for years. Years! It takes years of repetition and corrections and reminders before the knowledge a ballet dancer needs — both bodily and intellectually — sinks in. Every day, dancers line up and painstakingly repeat the steps, hearing their teachers offer imagery to guide their bodies to move (smoothly) from one muscular feat to the next. If every ballet class is like a draft, think how many hundreds of drafts a dancer completes before going on a stage!

In ballet, we are taught that we never stop moving; even as our arms and feet return to fifth position, signaling a combination’s end, the body continues to stretch upward and outward as it simultaneously pushes down into the floor, as though inside us were the ropes and pulleys that transport an elevator car up and down, forever working against each other to balance the body and mind. The body is never at rest — even in a resting position. It is always in motion, ever in transition from one moment to the next; a static position — even a balance — is an illusion. One mark of a great ballerina is the seamlessness of her transitions, those transitions a visual metaphor for the law of conservation of energy: shifting as it does from one limb to the next without losing or gaining any mass.

Once a dancer internalizes the sensation of eternal movement, she can creep ever closer to ballet’s platonic ideal. As for composition, they say a work of art is never finished, but abandoned. It too represents an endless shifting of weight — of parts of speech and tenses and syllable counts until the writer is as close as she can be to — well, perfection. This sensation of asymptotic pursuit, the sense that our journey is shaped by an imaginary or invisible destination — this is what is common to all perfectionists.

As aggressively difficult and exhausting as ballet is, a writer has to be even more determined and disciplined than a ballet dancer, because the latter is able to feed off the collective energy of the other dancers in class, all stretching toward the same precise but invisible destination. Dancers also have music and syncopation and rhythm to lift their spirits, the dual forces of companionship and competition, and — most importantly — they have a teacher barking orders, which disrupts the paralysis of perfectionism. Dancers have no choice but to jump in, even if we’re doing it “wrong.” Sitting alone at a keyboard is a very different proposition. I have typed and deleted words until my fingers grew numb and my confidence evaporated.

“The only joy in the world is to begin.” Is this Cesar Pavese’s poetic way of describing perfectionism? Zeno’s paradox suggests that because you must cross half a distance before you can cross the whole of it, and half the distance of the half, and so on to infinity, that not only can you never cross the room, you can never even move at all. Perhaps Pavese found joy in not yet having begun because it was only then that he could be sure his writing was entirely free of fault.

Inertia is defined as “a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion.” It is easy to visual the dancer’s inertia — she must keep moving to sustain her positions. Writers’ block is inertia as well. But if we remember that our minds are churning despite producing nothing, perhaps that can give us the optimism we need to get the ink flowing across the page.

Cesare Pavese did get past his beginnings and wrote a great deal. The pragmatic perfectionist sees the absurdity in not attempting to achieve his goal. The writer overcomes the paradox, writes her essay, and with as much grace as the dancer, one hopes, manages to get across the room.

Beginnings

I keep my books on writing on a single shelf above my desk. When I’m feeling distracted or uninspired, I pull one down, open it, and find some passage I underlined long ago. Today, I came across this one, from Good Prose, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd.

You can’t make the reader love you in the first sentence or paragraph, but you can lose the reader right away. A good beginning achieves clarity.

The book goes on to quote E.B. White comparing the reader to a drowning man and good writing to a rope with which he can hoist himself ashore. The rope, clearly, is clarity.

For me, the finest beginnings do more than titrate information at a manageable rate: they also present a mystery, some question to be answered, a promise of revelation in the wind.

Below I’ve compiled some of my favorite beginnings. All achieve clarity, which, incidentally, doesn’t require brevity — the first sentence of Anne of Green Gables is almost comically long, but it is also crisp and clean.

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
The Princess Bride, William Goldman

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse had signed a lease on a five-room apartment in a geometric white house on First Avenue when they received word, from a woman named Mrs. Cortez, that a four-room apartment in the Bramford had become available.
Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin

What does it take? It takes talent.
A Challenge for the Actor, Uta Hagen

Some years ago, when I was walking with my dog in Fulham Palace Gardens, we overtook an old woman who was wheeling a baby carriage. She was chatting cheerfully to its occupant, and it was therefore, perhaps, not unreasonable of me to be surprised to find, when I caught up with her, that this too, was a dog.
J.R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip

There was one condolence letter that made me laugh.
About Alice, Calvin Trillin

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery

You are not going to believe me, no one in their right mind could possibly believe me, but it’s true, really it is.
Freaky Friday, Mary Rodgers

The Neighbors Stole Our Jagermeister (A Cautionary Tale)

We had a hell of a rainstorm three years back. It was called Hurricane Sandy, and it caused a lot of people a lot of genuine heartache. Despite our being in the safest part of Manhattan, where the lights didn’t even flicker, we lost something profound that night. Not our home, but something once lost, can never be replaced: our youth.

It was a few nights before Halloween, and my family, consisting of my bespectacled horror movie screenwriter husband, my Gerber baby who could pull off a bonnet like nobody’s business, and me, a very charming chatty type whom everyone loves and wants to be best friends with, were dutifully locked indoors per the advice of the mayor.

As the trees lashed against the window and the gusts of speeding wind carried leaves down the block in milliseconds, we tried to keep a baby — a baby who had just learned to crawl — calm in a 600 square foot space. Upon hour twelve, I was pretty sure I saw her crawl backward up the bedroom doorway. Every roll of Saran Wrap and Aluminum foil had been tugged out for miles, with our blessing. By the time the baby had fashioned a hat out of my nursing bra and was banging on our front door with a macaroni-encrusted wooden spoon, I knew we needed a magic portal out of this place.

Then I heard the lobby door slam shut against a gust of wind. Boots stomped and trudging commenced. I swept up the kid and opened our front door to see a woman in fishnet stockings and grunge leather knee-high boots making her way up the stairs.

I blocked her path with my speed demon baby and my immeasurable charm. I kind of wished I were wearing jeans, but I knew that my fast talk and dry wit would make fast friends of grunge-boot girl and me. I wanted to know where she was headed. Whose apartment? Why was she risking life and limb to visit anyone in our building? Did she want our baby? Maybe just for a few hours? If not, did she want to come to our apartment instead? We could offer her endless entertainment in the form of fort-building with Carters swaddling blankets.

She caved to my warm interrogatory style — who wouldn’t? — and I got some information. She was visiting Mary and Tom upstairs. They were going to hunker down with pizza and wine and watch CNN and light candles if we lost electricity. A party in the building!

Perfect!

Mary had told me I was welcome any time to venture into the R line of apartments to see how the layout differed from ours. (This is a time-honored Manhattan tradition. You don’t have to be friends with people to ask to see their apartment, ask their square footage and the amount they pay in rent.)

Well, any time was clearly now! What could be more perfect? We were all in this mess together, this bloody rainstorm that had caused hordes of panicked city dwellers to raid the shelves of Zabar’s, so that not a lick of whitefish salad or a morsel of challah remained on its steel shelves by the time the first drop of rain had plopped from the sky. (This is another Manhattan tradition: we buy food stuffs whenever anything is going to happen. President Obama is coming to town and the transverse will be closed? I don’t have to go to the East Side for any reason, but I had still better grab every can of canned salmon and bottle of Oregano I can get my hands on in case the traffic is really bad!)

Mary and Tom were perfect for us. She had shiny hair and he did some Brooklyn-non-profit type work and collected vinyl records. I saw the brown paper packages delivered to our lobby every week and because it’s obvious from my quick wit and dangling earrings that I love Charlie Parker and wore red lipstick while I delivered my baby that my husband and I were basically Mary and Tom in five years, Tom was eager to tell me about what lay in his brown paper packages. We were definitely showing them how to raise a baby without giving up your style, your deadpan morbid humor, your effortless New York warmth sprinkled with cynicism.

I just needed a little something to launch this rocket. I mean, technically, we weren’t invited to the party. But it was a hurricane, and all of New York was in this together!

I knew what Mary’s and Tom’s apartment would look like. It would be decorated with lush photos of safaris in Africa and honeymoon strolls by the Seine. A guitar and possibly a yukele hung from the exposed brick wall. (A Facebook profile photo — even if it’s just of a face — can tell you a lot about a person’s apartment.)(If you’re under-slept from round-the-clock nursing and therefore prone to flights of fancy.)

Fishnet stocking girl was slipping past and I had to act fast.

“Our television isn’t hooked up yet — wish we could see the damage in real time too!” I exclaimed.

Lie. We’d hooked up our cable before we’d even moved in. Possibly before we’d signed the lease.

“Oh, well, why don’t you guys drop by, I’m sure that’d be fine.”

We were in!

I couldn’t wait to show Mary and Tom just how little changes after you have a baby. We could make the best Wolf Blitzer jokes, my husband murdered people in his screenplays, and I used to be on some TV shows — if anything, they might envy how effortlessly we had slipped into parenthood with nary a sign of bedragglement. We would serve as inspiration, even if jealousy was a necessary byproduct. I mean, how many people get a baby as cute as ours? The odds aren’t good.

I went back to our apartment, dragging the baby from her Sisyphean quest up the carpeted staircase.

My husband was thrilled at my victory. Although usually anti-social to the point of avoiding grocery shopping lest someone ask him if he knows where the lactose-free milk is, twelve hours of trying to keep a speed-demon baby locked in barely 600 square feet had made him willing to host a cocktail party if we hadn’t just been (pretty much) invited to one.

We brainstormed. You can’t show up empty-handed to a Hurricane party. You also can’t bring the three jars of Oregano and a tin of artichoke paste that you squirreled into your Zabar’s cart in the midst of pre-storm shelf-looting.

“We have Halloween candy,” I said.

“That’s pretty good,” he said.

“Maybe I should bring some alcohol.” I said. “It goes with pizza. And if we bring candy, they’ll think we’re senior citizens who have baskets of it lined up for the youngsters a week before Halloween.”

”All we have is half a bottle of Jagermeister in the freezer.”

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“You go,” he said. “Do reconnaissance. I’ll join if I get a text from you.”

So he intended to lurk in the shadows, letting me do the neighbor-trapped-in-the-storm dance, and once I had achieved success — admission to some strangers’ apartment and new things for our baby to crawl on/chew on/gurgle at, he would coast in on my hard work. I sighed. Contracts arise in every marriage.

He handed me the Jagermeister and wished me good luck. His tone was urgent. Please succeed at this. I have to get out of this apartment. Other people have to talk to the baby — and soon. Or you’ll have to cart me off to the loony bin the moment we are allowed to leave the building.

If he’d been watching me take off in the space shuttle, he could not have been more nervous about the outcome of my expedition.

With a baby on my hip and a freezing bottle of Jagermeister in my hand, I mounted the stairs. I rang the bell.

Mary and her shiny tresses opened the door. Down the long exposed-brick-hallway, I could hear the party in full swing. I smelled pizza. I heard Wolf Blitzer.

“You had mentioned we should stop by some time so we could see the layout of the other line of apartments? And the baby is stir-crazy and we brought some Jagermeister… Your friend mentioned you were all gathering around the storm reports, so…uh, here you are!” I thrust the bottle into her hand.

“Wow,” Mary said. “That’s so nice! Thank you.”

She called out to Tom and he came to the door to thank me too. My daughter jumped out of my arms and scurried down their (exposed brick!) hallway. I followed her. Soon I would be texting my husband! It was falling into place! We had a night out — in! — out!

We exchanged fabulous New York City apartment neighbor first-date talk. I knew Mary would be suggesting that they babysit for us. They needed practice after all; they were next, having been just married, right? She’d say something like that in a minute. I was always telling my husband, this is all it takes! A little effort, a little extroversion, and New York can be a village!

“Thank you so much for stopping by! And thanks for the Jagermeister!” Tom, non-profit, working-in-Brooklyn, record-collecting boot-legged jean husband put in. Someone was putting pizza on paper plates behind him and someone else was pouring wine.

I got dizzy.

I wrenched the baby off a potted plant and waved goodbye.

My husband’s face was puppy-dog expectant upon my return.

“Well?”

“They liked the Jagermeister.”

”Great, let’s head up!”

“I don’t think we’re invited.”

”What do you mean, they took the Jagermeister, of course we’re invited!”

”But we’re not.”

“What did you say? Here’s some Jagermeister, have a party?”

”No. I was clear that I was bringing a beverage to a party we were invited to.”

“Nobody takes a bottle of Jagermeister. It isn’t done.”

“But it was.”

“You must have said something that implied it was a gift.”

”Why would I bring a gift in the middle of a hurricane to people we barely know?”

”You must have said something that led them to believe we didn’t want it anymore.”

“I didn’t!”

My husband got very quiet. He is always quiet. This was very quiet.

“They stole our Jagermeister.”

“If you think you could have done it better, then you should have brought the Jagermeister.”

”You must have implied –“

”I didn’t!”

We went around like that for a while, as the baby dumped laundry on her head.

Mary and Tom don’t live here anymore. Their sublease ran out. They wanted to move anyway. Family planning, they needed more space, yada yada.

I think we are still friends on Facebook, but I haven’t checked in a while.

Maybe I should stalk their page and try to spot our bottle of Jagermeister in the background of one of their parties, all of which are no doubt documented in selfie glory.

I haven’t the heart. That bottle, like my illusions, might as well be smashed into a thousand shards. I don’t wear red lipstick anymore and screenwriter or not, my husband spends more time these days washing pee pee stained sheets than revising drafts. To people who visit tapas bars every weekend and wear high heels, we are peripheral figures, shadows, ghosts, non-union extras! — a couple with a baby.

We may have had electricity but we had no alcohol with which to ride out that long, wet night. Worse than that, our youth had swirled out the window and scurried up the street, along with the brittle October leaves.

BUS STOP COMMUNION

BUS STOP COMMUNION

An (Early) (Secular) Tale of Spring

The air outside a hospital feels especially cool and fresh. The natural light, even if it’s gray January light is a blessed relief after the fluorescent tunnels I've been guiding my mother through today. We had a funny bit of intimacy in the bathroom, trying to get her urine sample in a cup. It isn't easy: crouching, aiming, approximating where in the space below you the stream will collect. Add a daughter trying to micromanage her mother’s urine flow and a line of weak-bladdered patients queuing outside, rolling their eyes and tugging at their waistbands and you have all the ingredients of a Nichols and May sketch.

Sometimes my mother and I are indeed a traveling comedy duo: arguing in circles in front of strangers in dizzying fluorescent hallways. We are the Mike and Elaine of post-hemorrhagic-stroke-induced-dementia. At last I've found a niche in the entertainment industry. I've only been a performer for thirty years.

Did Nichols and May ever confront the specter of eternal loss in their routines? It’s doubtful; it’s a real comedy killer. Yet somehow, between the bickering fostered by dementia’s time warps and lost threads and a child-turned-caregiver’s impatience, hilarity ensues.

There’s a quiet moment after the overture of a ballet, just before the curtain rises. The audience’s breathing grows shallow as it waits in suspense: what will the opening tableau be? As my mother and I sit in the brittle air of a winter’s day and wait just outside the hospital for the bus — only one stop away — I feel a moment of suspension. Brain injury and years of hospital visits seem, for one moment, not to have left creases on our history. We’d gotten on unusually well today. I sense a curtain is about to rise.

We’d left the doctor’s office ten minutes earlier and I am wondering if ten minutes is enough time to erase the memory of the doctor laying out my mother’s choices and our decision — my decision, really — to operate immediately on some new horror they’d found. I stare at a brick wall opposite the bus stop. It is a dingy housing project. A bleak house, I think, and laugh bitterly.

“What? What is it?” my mother asks. Because she doesn't remember our conversations, I've grown weary of telling her what I’m thinking. The effort is mercilessly futile.

I look at her. She’s seventy-five. I love telling doctors that fact. I never tire of their expressions of disbelief, so clearly genuine. My mother was a dancer and a figure skater. In the last two months she’s had abdominal surgery, a blood transfusion, and a cranky thyroid that sends her body on roller coasters of chills, sweats and panic attacks. She has soldiered through the results of a November afternoon five years ago when blood soaked two thirds of her brain in a devastating hemorrhagic stroke.

The attending physician told me at her I.C.U. bedside that she’d never wake up. She mumbled a bit and had no idea who I was. Two days later she opened her eyes and demonstrated some ballet steps for the wide-eyed residents. When I told her that her boyfriend was headed in by train, she asked me for mascara and a hairbrush. She knew exactly who I was, too. She discarded the play book and made her own rules. Still, the bleed soaked the short-term memory pathways and for the most part they did not regenerate.

Aside from her gaunt frame, trauma hasn't seemed to touch her physically. All you see are her big brown eyes and red lips and bobbed hair and her legs, still so beautiful in her old bell-bottomed jazz pants. All you see is a dancer bouncing down the hallway. You’d never know she couldn't remember her own birthday, her own address or her grandchildren’s names. You might not even guess she had grandchildren.

I look at the brick wall in the wash of gray light.

“I have a confession, Mom.”

My mother loves winter, partly, I suspect, because she enjoys being an iconoclast. She was a figure skater, so she’s used to braving the brutal cold. It can be tiresome, her frequent pretense of shock when people find the winter difficult and depressing. She loves to be baffled by the norm, to be at odds with routine human feelings that are discordant with her unusual take on life.

Winter has always excited my mother. Marriage transplanted her to Los Angeles for many years, and my sister and I were raised under palm trees, our “winters” dipping to maybe 50 degrees at night. A New York City winter was the stuff of movies, of my mother’s childhood performing at Rockefeller Center, of “normal” life with four seasons. “Normal” and Los Angeles couldn't be farther apart; even growing up there I knew that. We didn't rake autumn leaves, we didn't build snowmen and we didn't take refuge by fireplaces and radiators. Due to a romantic nature and an unreasonable loyalty to my mother, I've taken on the mantle. Having lived in New York City half my life now, I profess an honest thrill as autumn descends into the darkest days of winter.

“I confess I’m really looking forward to spring, Mom,” I say. “Something’s happened to me this year and I don’t want any more winter. I want the sun and the light and the flowers.” I wait, ashamed, for her reply.

“Me too,” she says. “That’s happened to me, too.”

My heart freezes and splinters. If her obstinate love of the wind and ice has vanished and she now longs for the sissy holiday of spring, what remains of my mother? Is she the same person? How do you define a person, anyway?

We sit next to each other, staring ahead at the brick wall.

And suddenly I change my mind. We are on the same path, looking out in the same direction. Greeting cards tell us that this is the definition of a healthy relationship. In the last five years, our relationship has been many things: fierce, devoted, fractious and corroded by sorrow and loss. It is nice to be in a healthy relationship, suddenly, with my mother. We agree. Together, we look forward to spring.

If obstacle and discord is the lifeblood of comedy, I will trade every moment of hilarity with my mother from now on for companionable agreement. You’ll never hear a Nichols and May sketch about two people agreeing at a bus stop. It’s boring.

Because of spring, my mother and I experience a rebirth of our relationship at this sooty, ice-encrusted bus stop at January’s end. She won’t remember our communion, but on the upside, I don’t need to swear her to secrecy. And I’ll never forget the moment when the understanding we once shared— before her stroke— was resurrected. We share a secret, even if only I know it. I can keep it for both of us.

Did my mother die that November day in 2009? Am I communing with a ghost? Or has our constant treading of the same conversational ground brought her back? Today, she changed her mind about something. She felt something new— something at odds with decades of intractable tradition. Is there any better definition of “alive?”