She always wanted to be a dancer.

When she's a little girl, six or seven, her father sets up a large slab of wood in the garage; her dance floor, he calls it.  She puts on her Sunday shoes and pretends to tap tap tap while he rearranges his tools and laughs, finally stopping to hold her hand and twirl her around. 

Her parents finally relent and sign her up for dance lessons, and she loves to flash a smile and twirl her skirt as she practices every night without fail, while her friends jump rope and play hopscotch on sidewalks down the street. 

*

She grows seven inches one summer, the summer when she's thirteen, and she likes to imagine that her new height must make her look so graceful, and enhance her lines while she dances.  Her mother starts complaining how she slouches all the time.

“I’m not slouching. Dancers don’t slouch.”  She straightens her shoulders.

Her mother smoothes the back of her blouse, tugging on the bottom.

“Well then, why is the hem of this uneven?”

She sighs.

"I don’t know, Mom.”

She finds out soon enough.  A yearly checkup reveals Scoliosis.  Scoliosis, which means her spine curves slightly, like her hand does when she pirouettes across her dance floor in the garage.

She has to wear a brace, fitted from her neck; it’s a plastic corset that keeps her rigid and straight.  Her mother doesn’t complain that she slouches, not anymore.

For twenty-three hours every night and day, she wears her brace, moving awkwardly through school, through her house, through her life. 

For one hour in the evening, she feels liberated and dances across her garage like she has forever, and the kitchen timer that buzzes through the back window of the house means dinner, not a return to captivity. 

*

She graduates high school with a straight back and a handful of boyfriends.  She takes a job at a local Burlesque theater, a place where her background in tap and ballet proves useful, but the experience with her handful of boyfriends means she keeps her job. 

Her back starts hurting one day, a tangle of nerves attacking her resolve to ignore that fact that she isn’t a dancer, not really.  She gets a job as a receptionist at a local paper company and only goes dancing on the weekends.  She feels free, liberated, and stops caring about how she looks, or the lines of her body as she moves across the floor.

Pretty soon, her lines twist into curves and no one notices when she stops dancing and sits alongside the dance floor, sipping her drink.  She gets a promotion and starts selling, flashing her smile that still works and thinking that dancing isn’t everything and dreams can change.

*

Years of no motion pass and she feels old, old and tired, and considers ending everything.  No one would blink; not her sisters, who have all found what she can’t.  Not her parents, because her father demands all the attention, and rightly so; he’s so sick and his little girl doesn’t dance for him, not anymore.  She wishes she could.

She’s half convinced that yes, it’s time, when she shares an elevator with a man, a man with a nice smile who places his hand in the small of her (straight) back when he walks her out to her car and tells her she’s gorgeous, asks her out.  His name is Bob.  She decides to give it one more chance and I can always be depressed tomorrow.

“Where are we going, Bob?”

“Just wait and see, pretty lady.” 

He takes her dancing.  Somehow he knows.

*

She has a boyfriend and he doesn’t expect anything from her but…herself.  He acts like he’s in an old movie and he shakes her father’s hand, charms her sisters, makes her love herself and him.  She feels new again.

Pam is planning her wedding and for the first time she starts planning hers in her head, like a teenager.  It helps that the initials are the same, and she can’t look at a dress or give Pam an opinion on flowers without repeating Phyllis and Robert in her head over and over again.  She feels like she and Pam are best friends, sharing girl talk and planning a double wedding where she gets to marry the love of her life. 

Pam becomes distracted in the weeks approaching her wedding, and asks her to confirm a few things.  After calling the caterer, the florist, talking to Kevin about what to play, she thinks just in case and tucks a copy of the list of numbers in her purse before leaving.

*

Bob asks her and she feels like everything leading up to that moment was practice, that this is the real show.  Pam called off her wedding and while she seems quiet, she’s doing new things and Phyllis pulls out the list one night, takes out the notes of places to go.  She remembers the invitations and the initials P & R and thinks, perfect.  It’s like she was planning her own wedding all along. 

She wonders for a moment if Pam minds, but in the receiving line she looks at her and smiles, really smiles, into her eyes and squeezes her hand.  She wants to grab Pam and hug her, tell her thank you and I’ve found mine; however long you wait, it will be worth it.  But Pam is already moving along, and Phyllis looks at Bob and she’s moving along, too.

She always wanted to be a dancer, and she is one when Bob leads her out onto the floor, holding her close so they fit together.  She knows that later, she’ll hold her father’s hand and he’ll twirl her around, and she knows they’ll both laugh.  She knows that the hem of her wedding dress is perfectly straight.

She knows that her smile isn’t the only thing that works for her. Not anymore.