Dance in the Dust
Ask anyone in Broken Hill about Claire Smith and the answer is the same. The patient dance teacher. The devoted mother of two. The kind of woman whose composure makes a difficult room go quieter the moment she walks into it. Ask her sister and you get the same answer in a slightly sharper voice. Ask the woman herself, inside her own head, on a bad day, and the answer is a voice you already know.
Her father fixed cars and her mother taught preschool, and by the time Claire was eight she was turning the family lounge into a rehearsal room and telling her little sister exactly what was wrong with her posture. By her late twenties she was running the best dance school in the region, raising two children, and married to a piano player she had loved since she was fourteen. She was, everyone agreed, holding it all together.
What nobody in Broken Hill was close enough to see was how the holding got done. The interior voice that ran counts on everyone in the room. The quiet at the studio that was not patience. The composure at the dinner table that was not love. The sister on the phone who called her a saint for enduring a difficult marriage — the sister being, as it happened, the only person Claire had ever trained to know exactly what to say.
Then came a week in July when the shape she had been holding finally gave way, and Claire had to decide in a few unwatched hours what kind of woman she was prepared to become. She decided quickly. She has had time since, in a place where the dust gets into everything and her body no longer does what she tells it to, to sit with the woman her decision has made her. She does not dance now. But she is performing anyway.
