THE ARMADILLO’S FOXTROT | Lorraine Comanor

“A change of scene will do you good. The dance studio’s air conditioned,” Mother coaxes, as I lie on the floor in my total body cast, an armadillo in plaster from armpits to hips. She’s got the ballroom bug big time but has put her Florida lessons on hold, coming out to California after my spinal fusion. God knows, I could use help, but not a mother with a yen for action. Since her arrival, she’s talked incessantly of Michael, the young dance teacher she discovered nearby, urging me to come with her to his studio.

I don’t want a dance teacher. I don’t want a dance studio. I just want to lie next to the TV and watch something other than the Olympics. The garden thermometer reads ninety-two and, reduced to taking showers in a raincoat, I don’t want to ride in an unairconditioned car, my cast padding sticking to my skin. Every pothole on the way will be an IED going off in my back. Besides, I have no interest in ballroom dancing. 

“Michael’s marvelous. He’s English.” Perfectly coiffed Mother hovers over me, examining her new three-inch heels, probably dreaming of Blackpool. I have yet to try a shampoo in my raincoat or consider footwear beyond slippers. 

Reluctantly, I abandon my floor TV-viewing spot from where last night Nadia Comaneci’s backflips on the Olympic beam triggered a phantom-limb-like experience of my own national championship performance on the ice — split flips and double-lay back spins — the mind remembering Gumby-like movement, the body remaining locked in plaster. I inch on my back over to the sofa, the crutch needed for the getting-up routine: rolling to one side, maneuvering onto all fours, pushing up with my triceps. Once vertical, wondering if I can make the twenty steps to the car.

Scrunched in the backseat, I rehash the events that brought me to this condition: repositioning a three-hundred-pound patient on the OR table, the bottom-to-toe electric shock, the numb right leg and dropped foot. Then the failed laminectomy, the year’s series of body casts and silastic jackets, finally the fusion. 

On arrival at the studio, Mother starts right in with Michael while I retreat to a corner of the floor, where I can lie down and stare at the pine knots in the ceiling. The one catching my eye is surrounded by wavy lines resembling a faulty back that no longer holds its owner upright.

“Your spine’s unstable. A fusion is your only option,” Dr. Hanbery, Stanford’s chief of neurosurgery told me. “You’ll never be an athlete again, but if we’re successful, you’ll stand up.”

Hardly a goal for a former national champion, however, at the time, I aspired to nothing more than getting through my anesthetic list and my three-year-old out of the bathtub.  

My ruminations are interrupted by strains of “Fly Me to the Moon” drifting across the ballroom. Turning my head slowly to the left — any rapid movement sends a bolt of lightning down my spine — brings Michael into view, demonstrating the closed change, linking the waltz’s forward and back box step, followed by Mother executing the sequence with relative ease. In no time, he’s waltzing her around the room, a feat that twenty years ago would have been out of the question.

Sitting down to nurse infant me — Dad never failed a reminder—Mother had missed the rocking chair and broken her back. The result: a failed laminectomy, eighteen years of fifteen minutes getting in and out of a car, a spinal fusion, a three-month hospitalization, weeks of confinement and a very slow recovery. Determined not to repeat her past, I’d asked Dr. Hanbery what I could do after surgery, “Nothing,” he replied. “People like you undo all my good work.” The story of his lumberjack patient who had ruined his fusion taking an eight-mile hike the day of his hospital discharge, resurfaces, as Michael walks over to where I’m lying on the floor. 

“Foxtrot time. Your turn.”

My turn? Has Mother put him up to this? Does she have a hidden agenda to revamp my negative attitude towards dancing? I have a right to my prejudices: ice dancers and free skaters are cows and sheep in the same pasture, the former refusing to budge from their pattern, as the latter approach at twenty miles per hour. The childhood humiliation of Miss Eleanor’s recital where her four nine-year-olds attempted Swan Lake’s pas de quatre and somewhere during our sixteen pas de chats, my head went right as my neighbor’s went left. The Russian tongue-lashing that followed. 

“Not in a total body cast,” I tell Michael, patting my carapace. “Armadillos don’t foxtrot.”

“We’ll just do walks.”  

He offers a hand, which, I don’t want to accept, as becoming vertical requires the rolling-to-one-side, landing-on-all-fours, then pulling-myself-up-on-a-nearby-chair routine. Unfazed by my gymnastics, he ushers me to the center of the ballroom and demonstrates controlled steps, standing hip leading, free leg dragging behind. Not what I call dancing but not an eight-mile hike either. Dr. Hanbery probably wouldn’t object to an armadillo foxtrotting. Fixing my gaze on a spot on the mirrored wall, I have a go at copying Michael’s movements. No easy task when you’re tilted forward, your center of gravity – you’d always known where you were in space –now lost in never-never land, flirting with falling and breaking apart like Humpty Dumpty. I wobble but stay on my feet, exhausted after a few minutes.

“Tomorrow, we’ll do it backwards.” He shoots me a mischievous glimmer and walks over to where Mother is waiting. 

“Tomorrow will be easier,” she encourages.

Tomorrow? Has she already booked another lesson? All I can think about is getting horizontal.

“Your turn now,” Michael calls after Mother’s next session. He looks down at me stretched out on the floor, where I’ve resumed studying ceiling knots. This afternoon’s focus: a tight ball with a long tail. Not an unstable spine but a would-be armadillo. Not of the Bishop’s ‘head down, tail down’ variety but more of an ‘adaptable and clever’ Kipling specimen, probably capable of sprinting thirty miles per hour and walking under water holding its breath for six minutes. Armadillation, suddenly no longer a viable excuse for immobility.

Time to repeat the get-yourself-up routine and waddle to the middle of the ballroom. Michael changes the music from waltz to foxtrot and then demonstrates the reverse of yesterday’s exercise. I place one foot tentatively behind the other. Slow, quick, quick, slow, quick, quick, toe heel, toe heel, free heel not touching the floor until parallel with the other foot, the backward shuffle of a ramp-walker, but a ramp-walker who is a little steadier, a little quicker than yesterday, perhaps even better tomorrow, its endorphin levels increasing with each step. 

When I arrive at the other end, Michael slides his left arm around my plaster cage and placing my left elbow on his raised right instructs, “Look over your left shoulder and open your body like a flower.” Panic hits. Counterrotation in a rigid cylinder is a surefire way to suffocation. Turning inadvertently in a previous cast I’d got stuck, unable to breathe. Oblivious, Michael continues, “I’m going to move you backwards and you’re going to dance with me.” Imagining imminent catastrophe, I hang on tight to his biceps without rotating. He steps forward, applying the slightest pressure of his chest against my armor and sends me gliding across the floor, almost as gracefully as an armadillo scurrying across the bottom of a pond. I look over at Mother who is hiding a grin, alrady seeing, long before I do, the dance to come.

Lorraine Hanlon Comanor is a former U.S. figure skating champion, U.S. team member and board-certified anesthesiologist. A graduate of Harvard University, Stanford Medical School, and Bennington Writing Seminars, she is a co-holder of a U.S. medical patent and author/ co-author of 35 medical publications. With notables in 2020 and 2023 Best American Essays, she has three nominations for the Pushcart Prize, one for Bet of the Net and her personal essays have appeared in the New England Review, Boulevard, New Letters, Joyland, The Rumpus, and Newsweek, among 23 others. Her memoir is forthcoming in 2027 with Legacy Books

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