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when class wasn’t in session. They waved them back and forth like flags of unconditional surrender. Every minute I was there I heard my name spoken with burning urgency, “Mrs. McSwan! Mrs. McSwan!”
    Or, I should say, I heard some version of my name. I had given up trying to explain that my name was actually McSwain a long time ago. They were too young for puns anyway, and the idea that they could be attending a school based on a spelling error would have been deeply upsetting to them.
    I clapped my hands and they came running, the whole room filled with the slap of tiny feet wrapped in soft pink leather.
    Tom was going to be sixty-five in March and he planned to eat a piece of birthday cake and hand in his resignation. He was going to walk away from the public defender’s office the day his first pension check was ready, and while we traveled through Italy he would read all those big Russian novels that he had been lugging around since college. But me, I wanted to be buried at McSwan’s. I wanted to be one of those ancient ballet instructors who shouted for relevés from her wheelchair, who tapped time out on the floor with her cane. I knew why the Rolling Stones kept going on tour long past the age when it was appropriate to be a rock star. It wasn’t about the money. It was the love. Once you get used to the adoration and love of a room full of people, even if it’s a small room with very small people, well, there is no giving it up.
    This morning it was the bumblebee class, four- and five-year-olds, girls who had yet to be touched by the rigors of first grade. We made like daisies, stretched up slowly toward the sun and waggled our fingers at the overhead lights. I found something graceful and flowerlike in every child there, and if my daughter was marrying rich and my sister was coming to stay with me, for a while I forgot about it completely.
    I was on to the second level of the exercise, where the daisies encounter a breeze, when I noticed that one of the flowers was larger than I was. It was George, his black warm-ups rolled at his waist, an old A.B.T. T-shirt with a faded-out picture of Suzanne Farrell on the front. He had managed to sneak in quietly, when all of our faces were thrown back to greet the sun, and when the girls saw him, they let out a high-pitched yell and stamped their feet. Only the very bravest of my students were able to go and throw their arms around George’s legs the way they wanted to. They were all too in love with him.
    “Reach, reach!” he said, his voice set to just the right pitch for the four- and five-year-old crowd, enough enthusiasm to make them work, not so much that they simply spin out of control. “Keep reaching!” He went up on his toes and came close to brushing his fingers against the fluorescent lights. My students squealed in appreciation of his height.
    I GAVE BIRTH to four children and ultimately Tom got every single one. “It wasn’t a contest,” he liked to say with the cool noblesse oblige of someone who’s already won. Henry, our oldest and most practical, was a tax attorney. Charlie, the entrepreneur, was in real-estate law (which almost counted as a failure in Tom’s eyes, though he managed to keep it to himself). Kay, the greatest source of pride, was making slave wages in the P.D.’s office just like her father. And it wasn’t just that they were all lawyers. None of the first three of the children could dance. Despite the nine months of dancing they did in utero, despite the constant sound track of danceable beats that had permeated our home since their first hours of life, despite the fact that they came to every class I taught and were piled in the corner on a high bed of discarded coats and backpacks until they were old enough to take to the floor themselves, they could not dance. I mean, they really could not dance. The second I brought them home from class, they would shimmy up into their father’s big chair, put their arms around his neck,