Group of Artists, 1908 by Jennifer Dines

      Rick Cameron CC




Group of Artists, 1908


I am seven years old, and I unwrap the last Christmas gift from Santa. A porcelain-white bag covered in carnation-pink cross-hatched lines overlaid with silhouettes of seafoam green, carnation-blue, and plum-purple ballerinas.

“It’s a ballet bag!” my mother exclaims. “I bet Santa gave that to you because he wants you to keep taking ballet!”

But I know it’s from my mother. I don’t remember saying anything about quitting ballet, but I suppose I had because she really made a fuss about it.

The prior spring, on the day of my very first dance recital, my mother bobby-pinned my hair into a perfect bun, spraying it in place with a cloud of AquaNet. She brushed my eyelids with sky-blue shadow and had me pucker my lips into a kiss while she applied magenta lipstick from a gold tube.

On stage, I plied and rond-de-jambe-d in my pink and black striped satin leotard to a full house of parents and grandparents and VHS camcorders. Afterwards, my family went out to a Chinese restaurant. At the end of the meal, the waiter placed a silver dish of mint chocolate chip ice cream adorned with a glistening maraschino cherry right in front of me. I savored each bite I took from a gleaming silver spoon. It was the most glamorous day of my life so far.

What my mother doesn’t know is that she is the reason I don’t want to dance anymore. Well, my mother and Katharine Dougherty and that dreadful carpool. The drop off part of the carpool wasn’t so bad. Sitting in the back-back of Katharine’s father’s station wagon. Watching the road disappear behind us on our way to Centennial Lane Elementary School.

The classes took place in the gymnasium. Our teacher, whose dazzling smile and soft voice was not unlike that of Glinda the Good Witch from Wizard of Oz, had a record player plugged into the outlets underneath one of the basketball hoops. We started at the barre, then moved across the floor, and ended with a bow and a curtsy. But it was after the end that the trouble began.

Katharine always huffed“Late! As usual!” after the other dancers had cleared out with their rides. What could I say? She was right. My mother was never just a few minutes late. She was late by a lot.

Katharine and I usually just plopped down in the hallway, Miss-Mary-Mack-ing until finally my mother arrived, sometimes so late that even the class after ours had already been dismissed.

But one day, Katharine proclaimed “Late! As usual!” once again, and that was it. That was the moment I stopped talking to Katharine all together. I hated Katharine for saying that my mother was always late. I knew it already, and it was humiliating, so why did she have to say it? Let her sit by herself if she had so much to say about my mother.

So I just pretended I was alone, sliding my legs back and forth across the linoleum floor, smearing dust and pencil shavings all over my pink tights, willing everything to disappear except for this poster hanging on a bulletin board: a painting of a family of four people and their small white dog.

I called the father of the family Mister Moneybags because he wore a suit jacket and had a golden box in his hand. He seemed to be pulling some money out of it. The mother held a pink rose over her chest, her heart full of love for her husband. The daughter wore a solid gold headband and sat smiling in a very cute way, looking straight at the viewer with her lips in a tiny pink crescent moon, her chin resting on her hand. Just by looking, you knew that everyone adored her, that they just loved to take her picture. To the left of this family was a very strange man. His head was turned completely sideways, so you only saw one of his eyes, a big round eye, like a fish’s eye, staring straight at you. He was the mysterious uncle who had come for a visit from a far away land, bringing some more of the family’s gold.

I dreamt of being that daughter. She was so beautiful and so loved that no one would ever forget her.

​

Jennifer Dines, a Baltimore native, is a Boston-based writer, mother, and teacher. Her previously published work has appeared in Current Affairs, Retrofied, HerStry, and Memoir Monday's First Person Singular. Her essay “The Language of Learning” was included in the anthology Gifted-ish: Women and Non-Binary Writers on Intelligence, Identity, and Education (MacFarland, 2024).substack: teacherwellnessdiary
​instagram: jenniferdineswrites

---