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will be determined later.
    “Are you scared?” I ask her.
    She tilts her head and looks up at the clouds. “Not yet,” she says.

    I WASN'T SURE WHAT to wear to my first dance lesson. It’s the continual conundrum of fashion—you want to look like you tried, but not too much. I remember the old woman I saw in the studio and how, even with her slow and unsteady movement, her dress swayed around her legs. All that furling and unfurling—it was almost as if the dress were a living thing and she was merely riding along within it.
    So after digging around in my closet, I find a Lycra dress with a full skirt that I bought to wear on my last and only trip to Europe with Mark, because the salesgirl promised it would pack well. It’s teal blue, an awkward color—awkward because it is a color at all and I normally wear beige or black or gray. It always makes me feel like a stewardess on some airline that went bankrupt in the seventies, but when I turn side to side the dress swishes. It makes what I imagine to be the sound of dance. I pull my hair back too, but loosely, not in an ostentatious ballerina bun, which might indicate that I think I’m better than I am, but in a hairstyle I stole from Elyse, a sort of sloppy French twist.
    Even with all the fussing, I still arrive at three thirty for my four o’clock lesson, carrying my new dancing shoes in their little blue sack. Quinn’s not at her desk, but is instead with a student. Surprising. I wouldn’t have guessed she was a teacher as well as a receptionist. I walk to the back of the room, uncomfortably aware of how loud my sandals sound on the polished wooden floor, and sit down on the couch. The studio is a different place without music.
    Quinn and the man are not dancing but are rather standing in front of the mirrored wall, frowning at their reflections, holding hands. At first they seem utterly immobile, but then I see that they’re each slowly extending the right foot, tilted with the toe in the air and the heel grazing the floor, and then slowly pulling it back. Quinn does this easily; when her foot slides forward, her body stays relaxed and erect and the knee of her standing leg flexes. She has good range in her step. She must be naturally limber, or maybe the ability to slide your heel like that is more a matter of balance.
    The man is a whole other story. He’s tall, with a ruddy face, and something about him is familiar—where could I have seen him? The country club? Some fund-raiser? He’s handsome, I realize, with a belated jolt. What’s wrong with me that I see a man and it takes me a full five minutes before I figure out whether or not he’s good-looking? If this were a movie, he’d be cast as a duke or an earl, perhaps even a king. There’s something haughty in his expression, something aristocratic. Something that implies he rides horses and jumps over fences, followed by packs of yelping dogs. But his face is frozen in concentration and when he pushes out his heel, it doesn’t slide smoothly, like Quinn’s, but rather sticks and then jerks forward as if there are bumps in the dance floor that only he can feel. Worse, when his leg is fully extended, he leans his torso backward to compensate, which makes him look like a vaudeville comedian, someone who is about to stride onstage with a cane and straw hat. It doesn’t make sense. He looks like the lord of the manor but he dances like a clown, and he must know this, so why is he dancing at all?
    I bend down to put on my shoes. The woman at the store had talked me through the process, the crisscrossing of the straps, the buckle that rests in the indentation of my heel. I get them on without much trouble, but when I stand, the straps shift a little. Perhaps they should be tighter. The woman said that if they hurt when you’re sitting, that means they’ll fit perfectly when you’re standing, so if you’re in pain, that’s a good sign. Because hey, we can’t have our foot sliding around, can we?