Her life was hard. She lost so much. Her mother died from cholera. A brother was taken by the Russians during World War I when soldiers invaded Austro-Hungary. 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 married my grandfather who was a Russian refugee and together they owned a laundromat. He did the washing and she did the ironing and mending. Grandma had lived an extraordinary life by the time we became roommates. She was in her 70s and had never imagined it as a young girl.
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. Her life sounded magical to me before the wars. She was also educated which was uncommon for a Jewish woman in those days. She was able to read and write seven languages. She was an embroiderer who specialized in sewing and embroidery. She also took dance classes, which she enjoyed. I was also a dancer! I was a dancer too, though not social dancing like her. Ballet and modern. While reading my book, I imagined the parties that she attended in school.
You could say she was lumbering. When I asked her a question, she stood up and slowly circled 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. She was really moving. Her body still had the muscle memory. She had grace and rhythm. This was not taken from her by grief or loss.
“Pussycat,” said she, “Come Try.” She put her arms around me and my shoulder, and started to hum some music that she remembered, but I had never heard before, while she spun around our bedroom. We were both so happy.
Since then, I’ve continued to dance. I took ballet and jazz lessons well into my 40s. And since then, barre class and yoga have been a part of every day. I have been dancing my whole life. My grandmother’s brief ballroom lesson was the first time I ever experienced ballroom dancing.
Then I will be spun again. Eric starts with “The Blue Danube”, Johann Strauss’s piece, followed by “The Second Waltz”, Dmitri Shstakovich. He tells Bruce and I to sway in a natural way. First he teaches us the two-step, then the box step. It was fun, but not the reason we were there. Bruce told us, “I’d like to spin her around in the room,” when Erik first asked for our goals. We keep bumping into each other. Erik is also laughing at us. Erik is happy that we’re having fun. Erik teaches “the woman turn,” which is Bruce spinning me under his arms, then two-stepping away from him and he spinning me back to me. 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. We are now waltzing.
