You've got to understand what it was like, growing up in the Hollow. You were either a coal miner or a coal miner's wife and that was that. You didn't dare dream of anything bigger. You weren't allowed to get any big ideas about being a prima ballerina and moving to Paris, or New York, or even Cincinnati.

But me, I wanted out of there since the day I was born. Everybody laughed at me and spit on my dreams, but I didn't care. I learned to talk like the actors on TV, to say "Hollow" and not "Holler," to sew my own dresses just like the ones in the fashion magazines, and do my hair and makeup like the film stars. When the other kids took common, low-class languages in school, I tried to learn Latin instead, like high-class kids did in fancy private schools. When my sisters wanted to listen to the Top 40 countdown, I turned it to classical, like high-class people listened to. So of course, folks called me too big for my britches. Pa would take a belt to me for being prideful. Kids from school would set upon me on the way home from school and tear my pretty clothes and throw mud and worse at me.

See, a town like that, it's like a bucket of crabs. You can try so hard to climb out, but all the others will just grab you and drag you right back down.

But I held my head high, because I knew one day I was getting out and nobody would stop me. I taught myself to dance, best I could figure out how from looking at pictures in a ballet book I took from the school library. I made myself my very own pair of ballet flats by gluing a cardboard sole on some old red slippers, and those were my special "red shoes," like in that old ballet movie. I practiced most of the night, every night, until my sisters begged me to stop so they could sleep, and my parents pounded the walls and threatened me with a beating. Then I'd practice some more, only quiet. I'd stand in fifth position for an hour. I'd stand on my toes and count to one hundred. I got circles of blood all over my bedroom floor from standing on my toes until my toenails fell off.

When I was in fourth grade I heard about this open audition for The Nutcracker, all the way over to Lexington. Of course, Pa wouldn't take me, he was out doing whatever he and his buddies did all day since getting laid off from the mine. And Ma wouldn't take me, seeing how she was too busy being fat and laying in bed with "poor health," which seemed to come from drinking Rebel Yell for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Useless, both of them, useless! What was I supposed to do? Give up my dream just like that? Not on my life! I hitchhiked all the way there, oh yes I did. Took me over three hours, too. But wasn't I afraid, you ask? Well, the way I figured it, better I should get myself murdered and tossed in a ditch, than not get to dance.

See, that's what it means to have a dream. A dream is like a Siamese twin that shares your heart—you let it die at your own peril.

When I got to the audition, everyone laughed and laughed when they saw my shoes. They all had their perfect pink leotards and their perfect pink shoes and their hair in perfect buns, not a bobby pin out of place. And here I was, some hillbilly in homemade clothes and homemade shoes and no tights. That's what I was to them, some filthy holler monkey who had no business being there. They said, Go on home now—shooed me off like a begging stray. Wouldn't even let me audition. So what did I do? Turn tail? Hell no. No, I started dancing right then and there like my whole life depended on it. Because it did. I showed all those perfect, pretty-pink horse-country girls how high I could jump, how fast I could spin, how far I could stretch. And did they all stop laughing then, and go real, real quiet? Oh yes they did.

. . .

The Company ended up buying me my very first pair of real satin toe shoes, and they set it up for one of the older dancers who lived closest to me (almost an hour away, yet) to pick me up for all the rehearsals and performances. Ooh, how that girl hated me for it. Crystalanne Lorelai McGillicuddy, her name was, and her family bred horses, and she thought her shit smelled like honeysuckle. Oh, brother, how she hated me. But she wouldn't cross Madame. No one ever crossed Madame.

. . .

When I was fifteen I met a boy at a church social. Two years older than me. He was new in town, came from Tennessee. An outsider. Everybody gossiped about him, said his mama had died and his pa had took off. So he came to the Hollow to live with cousins, who all worked in the coal mine and everybody figured he would too. But Bobby was different from the other boys in the Hollow. He said he wanted to be an artist. Not the way I wanted to be a dancer, no—not "more than anything." But still, he wanted to "do art," in some restless kind of way. In the Hollow, even a nights-and-weekends artist was something that raised eyebrows. Bobby didn't want to be a coal miner, or, not just a coal miner, at least. And more important, it seemed he didn't want to make me a coal miner's wife. It seemed he liked the idea of being the guy with the glamorous dancer on his arm.

. . .

Bobby had this old red pickup, more rust than truck, and he started driving me to all my ballet classes. And he would do sketches of me dancing, like that French artist who did all those drawings of ballerinas. Bobby would pick his favorite sketches and turn them into paintings, and then he'd try to sell them to bars and truck stop diners, but I don't know what he was thinking. I mean, who in the Hollow would buy that sort of thing? Dogs playing poker, that was the fanciest you were going to get. Maybe a velvet Elvis if someone was putting on airs.

. . .

And then when I was seventeen, Bobby took me for the weekend all the way to Chicago, where I had my big audition for the conservatory. Going in I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. I didn't just need to get in, I had to be the best, because I needed a full scholarship.

. . .

Well, after the audition I was high as a kite with joy. I knew I had nailed it. Oh yes I had. I was as good as out of the Hollow and headed for the big time and all my dreams come true. Me and Bobby drove partway home that night and then pulled off into the countryside to sleep under the stars. Bobby produced a bottle of Old Crow, which was strange because I wasn't the drinking sort, and he wasn't either, I thought. "C'mon, it's to celebrate," he said, in that wheedling way men have. To celebrate. And I don't know why, but I just got caught up, like nothing could ever, ever go wrong. We drank in the back of the pickup until all the stars were spinning. Looking back, maybe Bobby was as happy for me as I was—maybe he really was proud and happy. I want to think that's all it was—just two kids with their first glimpse of what freedom could be. But sometimes I wonder, maybe Bobby had got himself scared a little. Scared because I was getting out. Because I was going to be a ballerina, for real, just like I'd dreamed my whole life—and not a nights-and-weekends ballerina, either. It's like, there I was, right up there, clinging to the edge of that crab bucket. And there Bobby was, down below me, reaching up. Was he trying to give me a boost? Maybe. Was he grabbing for me so I could pull him out with me? Could of been, I guess.

Or maybe, just maybe, he'd thought of the one way to drag me back down that I never saw coming.

. . .

People might wonder, why didn't I just get rid of it? Oh I tried, believe me, I tried. Of course, there wasn't anywhere local to "take care of it," and besides, I was underage. Even if I knew of somewhere sympathetic to my predicament, Bobby would've had to drive me, and I didn't even want to tell him about it. Didn't think he'd agree to it anyway. Truth is, he had a bit of a churchy streak in him even then.

So I tried starving it out—didn't eat a bite for over two weeks. I tried pickling myself with moonshine, the foulest stuff I could find. Only managed to puke my guts out and get myself grounded. Tried making this herbal tea I heard some girls talking about, wild carrot seeds and cohosh and whatnot, and that just made me retch too. Finally I flung myself off the roof of a barn, figuring that would either get rid of it or kill me—either of which was fine by me at that point, compared to not dancing. But all I did was break my left leg in three places and knock myself out. By the time I woke up I was in traction, trapped like a fox in a leg trap, and my whole family knew my secret, and my daddy was just about loading the shotgun.

. . .

So, you see, that's the way a big dream dies, sometimes. With just one mistake. Just one little mistake. One mistake, and there I was, back down in the bucket all over again with all the stinkin' crabs, and this time there was no getting out.