Don’t count on anything, Chiyo warned herself. Maintain zero expectations.

Already a challenge and the class had not begun. And now, having considered Hopps, she thought of how everyone these days seemed to need slowing down. In her various classes, she found herself using adverbs like mindfully, carefully, deliberately, gently—all the while speaking in her low and steady reassuring voice. Each instruction was geared toward staying safe, respecting the body’s limits while exploring its possibilities. She wondered if she should be exploring a new vocabulary, too.

There was also Maria, who frequently signed up for classes. Participants often returned, keeping fit by repeating or mixing classes of their choice. Maria, strong and lean, danced to every move no matter what the class, no matter what the exercise, music or no music. She was incapable of being still. If she was lifting weights, she danced. While stretching, she danced. Her feet tapped a double beat to everyone else’s single. If other participants were stationary, Maria was wiggling around. But Maria also had grace. She listened to people; she cared. And why would Chiyo attempt to suppress anyone’s natural dancing talents? No reason at all. So Maria danced through every session.

Chiyo stacked her papers and set them aside; Spence was on his way to pick her up. They planned to go to the repertory theatre to see Wim Wenders’s documentary Pina. Thankfully, Spence loved film as much as Chiyo did, and both were glad that after half a dozen years, Pina was finally coming to Wilna Creek. Chiyo had long ago purchased the DVD, but she wanted to see it on the big screen. She had huge admiration for the late choreographer’s company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, the innovative use of space, the grit and beauty of movement. Pina Bausch understood emotions, but it was her use of the playful and absurd that most attracted Chiyo. Male dancers often wore dark striped suits too large for them and baggy pants, a sort of zoot-suit look of the forties that included snap-brim fedoras. The women wore bunched-up dresses, ill-fitting loose lingerie, heels or pumps with straps. Sometimes, men and women exhibited bizarre tics or swept their arms over their heads repeatedly. The work was visceral, spectacular; the absurd insistently reared its head. For Chiyo, the end result was a glorious display of creativity.

Another element of the dance was the way men and women sometimes relinquished their sense of balance. They tipped over, fell sideways or forwards or back, deliberately, occasionally violently. Usually, but not always, someone was there to catch them: someone who ran ahead, or behind, or alongside. But the fallers continued to fall. Repetition was paramount, and for Chiyo, this was a message about life itself: persistent patterns. Occasionally, the fallen stayed down. There was something semi-comic and vulnerable about the dancers after they fell, about their inability to get back up. At the same time, expressions of the tumbled body postures evoked deep sadness.

Later, after the film, Spence would come back to the house with Chiyo and stay the weekend. Chiyo smiled to herself. She would be glad of his company. She looked around the kitchen as if her mother might be standing in a doorway, peering inside her thoughts.