Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead

asking you to send a picture, and you never did.”
    “Didn’t I? I’m sorry—I meant to. I can be so spacey.” This is not strictly true, and they both know it.
    “Don’t you have a picture in your wallet or something? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
    Joan purses her lips, conceding, and takes her wallet from her tote bag. She opens to a plastic sleeve of photos. Harry’s is on top, gap toothed in his first grade portrait, his dark bangs falling straight across his forehead.
    “God,” says Elaine. She takes the wallet from Joan’s hands, examines it, and then abruptly hands it back. “He’s different than I imagined.”
    “Not a great haircut,” Joan says.
    “I thought he would look more like you.”
    “He looks like Jacob,” Joan says, fishing in her bag again. “Do you want a smoke?”
    “I’m on a health kick, but okay. For old times’ sake.” They light up and smile at each other, feeling young.
    “Are you still doing blow?”
    “No, not really. Just in emergencies.”
    When Joan first joined the company, someone had told her Elaine was looking for a roommate, and they had become compatible cohabitants, then friends. They were bonded by their constant fatigue and the endless ministrations their bodies required. They liked to sit sideby side on the edge of the bathtub, drinking tea and soaking their feet. Each was grateful to have an ally. From the beginning, there was no question that Elaine was by far the better dancer. Elaine was waiting to be promoted; Joan was praying to stay.
    “I’m bringing Harry to the matinee,” Joan says. “You’ll meet him then.”
    “Does he dance?”
    “No.”
    “You should make him try it. He might like it.”
    “He doesn’t seem interested.”
    “We need boys.”
    “You sound like an army recruiter.”
    “They are an army—the young ones. Waves of them. Mostly girls, though. I like the boys, not the girls. I’m afraid for them, too. We’re losing boys.”
    “I’ve heard.”
    “Is Harry gay?”
    “He’s seven.”
    “So?”
    Elaine has grown harder. Her voice, her eyes, her bones. Her sternum is like a turtle shell with skin stretched over it. They are all thin, dancers, but Joan can discern infinitesimal variations in thinness, and Elaine’s is the minimalist body of the survivor. She has reduced herself to the most essential pistons and gears. Nothing extra can be allowed to create strain or cause wear. She is a witty dancer with clockwork timing, best suited to comic heroines and the demanding tempos of Mr. K’s ballets. On Sunday, when Joan takes Harry to Don Quixote , Elaine will dance Kitri in red and black lace, a perfect curl of hair glued to each of her cheeks. She will prance and snap her fan, do the flamboyant sissonne leap where she nearly kicks the back of her own head. Now that Elaine is a principal and has danced the major roles, she has become an object of curiosity for Joan, like someone who has experienced space travel. If Joan had not had Harry, she would still not be dancing Kitri,but Elaine, stacking packets of sweetener with bony fingers at the end of bony arms, caught in a small eddy of leisure between class and rehearsal, seems like an apparition, a ghost of what might have been.
    But it would not have been, Joan reminds herself. She reminds herself, too, that she doesn’t miss the feeling of living at an accelerated pace, each year counting for more than an ordinary fraction of life, like dog years. Her childhood was dominated by discipline, fear, repetition—her small self in an endless, tearful hurry to get better, to get good in time to have a career. Her childhood bled seamlessly into her adulthood, each contaminated by the other. She had not felt grown up until Harry.
    “I’m dying to see you dance,” Joan says.
    “Don’t be. I’m the same, just older, with all the same bad habits.”
    “No, you were always wonderful.”
    Joan has lined up the slices of her orange end to end like a train, and