muscle memory
On Sunday I started ballet classes downtown. It was the first time I’ve been in a dance studio in nearly 12 years and the first time I’ve put on ballet shoes in even more. A few weeks ago, my friend Peter asked if I thought any of it would come back to me—if I might have retained some muscle memory. “No way,” I told him. (In my mind I’m swilling a drink.) “It’s been way too long for any of that to stick around.”
*
Let’s get right into it. It’s citrus season and I’m thinking about my grandfather. The grapefruits get sweeter every year. Or that could be a trick of the mind.
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A facet of grad school is that there is no sustainable routine because my schedule changes every four months. I am thinking about this. When I lived in San Marcos, my routine involved sleeping until 10 (this was shocking to me—someone who, for years, willingly woke up before 7), brewing six cups of coffee, working on a story in my little office enclave, then making and eating two breakfast tacos smothered in doña salsa, so much that it made me sweat and cry. For all of 2022 there was no routine. Now, for the first time in a year, I have space to create a new one. Sunday was an experiment: Drive to ballet class, change in the studio bathroom, get a cortado from the horrible part of downtown, then read in the central library branch. A routine, I think, has to be just a little bit grating in order for it to work.
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Most people think of grapefruits as tart or sour. They are usually served sprinkled with brown sugar, or even brûléed. Grapefruit juices and cocktails are often artificially sweetened. So then what if I told you that the grapefruit tree my grandfather grew harvested grapefruits so sweet they tasted like candy? They were relatively small—the size of a baseball—bright yellow on the outside and pale pink on the inside. Neither of my grandparents could eat them because of various medications they took, and few others in the family liked the taste. My cousin Nicole and I got all the grapefruits every year, save a few that went to my mom for making Palomas. There is a story about this grapefruit tree but it’s not right to put it here, so it will come later, as everything eventually does.
*
There are about 15 dancers in my ballet class. We are in an upstairs studio. I walked in on Sunday afternoon and slid on my ballet shoes and was pleasantly surprised to find I was among the most casually dressed in my leotard and running shorts. Most of the others had on pink tights and sheer skirts, and how lovely to dress as you wish in service of a hobby? The things we think of as frivolities are often joyful at least and necessary at most. We started at the bar with pliés and tendus that escalated into frappés and an adagio, just like before, just like always, except now the classmates aren’t teenage girls who pinch their belly fat but adults who wiggle and laugh. I found that the bend of the wrist in port de bras came right back.
*
It is citrus season. At Central Market, they have big drawings of citrus fruits dressed in capes and boots, because when you are in that store it is Super Citrus. The produce aisles are loaded with warm colors. There are at least four variants of grapefruit and we have bought them all. There are 11 in our refrigerator drawer now. They are best when eaten cold, like any other fruit, even in the winter. I find myself telling everyone I know that it’s citrus season, because some part of me wants everyone to experience the grapefruit, even if I know it isn’t universal like that, not at all, and we’ll get to that, I promise.
*
As I was describing to someone today, ballet is good because it’s fully embodied. It is impossible to think about anything but movement when your legs and arms and neck and back and toes and fingers and face are all performing different tasks. A frappé is a full articulation of the foot, an extension of the leg, an extension of the hip, an extension of the torso. I found the strike of the foot against the linoleum familiar. I found my toes stretching out away from me.
*
The grapefruit tree produced its largest harvest of my life in the 2020 season, early in the year, months before the pandemic. I was home for Christmas and my granny sent me back to New York with a plastic Wal-Mart bag of grapefruits. I ate a few of them but most of them went bad on the counter. There were just too many. Which is a myth. Because the second that something runs out, it is impossible to imagine abundance. It’s like that Steinbeck line from East of Eden: “During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years.”
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There’s a particular pinch in the back when you’re in an arabesque. We were only extending to about 45 degrees, so the pinch was subtle, but its presence told me I was doing it right. Sometimes the edge of pain is a reminder.
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My grandfather bought that grapefruit tree from a man in town decades ago. There was just the one tree. He died in 2020, on November 7, the morning that the presidential election results were confirmed and people were cheering in the streets. In February 2021, the freeze came and the tree, though covered in sheets and blankets, died with it.
*
On Monday I felt myself getting sore in familiar places. The sides and bottom of my butt where my turnout muscles are, my calves, my inner thighs, my upper back—all these little tissues that hadn’t been used, it felt like, in over a decade. “That’s so great!” Marshall said when I told him. And it is; it’s good to be sore in these places. Something about it makes me feel like a kid again.
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Now that we have our own house with our own yard, somewhere we will theoretically stay for a while, I’ve considered getting a grapefruit tree. We could grow it and have our own annual harvests, count the green balls on the tree as they ripen like my granny used to do, anticipating future sweetness. But I know they would never taste like the ones my grandfather grew. They wouldn’t pucker the cheeks like his did. So I wonder what would make more sense: To grow a tree that may produce sour fruit, or to try for sweetness. I would know the taste anywhere.