As Allegra left for the dance studio, her mother shouted after her, “Don't you care about anything besides yourself?”

She was shocked by her mother's question. She cared about lot besides herself! She cared about her friends. She cared about ballet. She cared about her parents.

And she cared about the baby her mother had told her she was expecting last year, and then had lost.

She would have loved to have been a big sister to some little kid. She'd have taken him for walks. She'd have offered to babysit whenever her parents wanted to go out. Maybe that would have helped them stop arguing.

But now, her mother was saying she had “fallen in love” with somebody. She was thinking of asking for a divorce.

Dance your heart out, Miss Salter, Allegra's favorite dance teacher, had told the students in the class. If you think your heart is breaking, take your heart to dance and dance it out.

Allegra wanted to dance. She wanted to leap away from the earth, a weightless light. But she was worried about her parents. Their lives were like a soap opera. One sad event followed another.

Her parents didn't look like soap opera actors, though, of course. The men on the soaps were slim and dark and handsome, their sketched-in eyebrows perfectly arched like boomerangs. By contrast, her father's stomach hung over his belt buckle. His hair had started to recede in the last few months.

Meanwhile, her mother grew thinner and darker. She'd stopped wearing makeup. She no longer bothered to pull her hair up in a neat chignon. Allegra had always thought her mother was beautiful. Now she didn't look so young and pretty anymore.

In fact, at least one person in the world apparently thought her mother was getting old. Allegra had been out in the car with her one day when her mother had slowed down too soon at an intersection. The driver behind them blasted his horn, then sped by in his red sports car, his tanned, hairy arm raised in an obscene gesture toward the open sky. “Outa my way, Granmal” the driver yelled.

“My goodness,” said Allegra's mother. “Why on earth would he say that?”

Allegra felt torn in two. One half agreed with the sports car driver. Her mother always drove too slowly. Even if the light at an intersection was green, she began to stop.

The other half felt hurt for her mother, because of the crude gesture the sports car driver had made and the remark he'd yelled.

After that, Allegra went to spy on the man her mother said she loved. She took the bus to the store where the man worked and walked up to him and asked to try on a pair of running shoes.

“I'm not sure I'll buy them, mind you,” she informed him. “But I'd like to try them, please, if you don't mind.”

As the man bent over her feet, tying the shoelaces, Allegra studied the top of his head. A spot of pink flesh was visible at the crown. Clouds of thick white hair circled the pink spot, like one of those weather photos of a coming storm. What on earth was her mother thinking?

“Well thanks anyway,” she said to the man. She left the store.

Now she had to run all the way to ballet class. It was one of the standing rules of the dance school that the students could not be more than five minutes late for the exercises at the barre.

She slipped through the door of the studio, keeping her head low, her eyes riveted on the polished planks of the wooden floor.

“Heads up!” Miss Salter was saying. “Focus!” She was teaching the class inversely from the mirror at the front. She didn't miss the hurried addition of Allegra's reflection to the slow, rhythmic reply of the other dancers at the barre.

“We're at demi plié à la seconde, Allegra,” Miss Salter said.

Allegra extended her arm and folded down.

“Follow your hand, Sydney. Watch your upper torso, Barbara... Excellent, Thomas, right, good form.... Don't forget to breathe!”

The instructors were always reminding them to breathe. Allegra took in a deep, satisfying breath of air, then let it out.

She had gone to see Miss Salter in a performance once, just so she could watch her teacher breathe. Taking her seat at the back of the small, hot theater in the oppressive dark, she hadn't recognized Miss Salter when the troupe came out — five slender women dressed in identical costumes, black tights and red satin dresses. They all wore straight black wigs with bangs that brushed their eyes.

But as each of the dancers struck a pose, Allegra found her teacher. She could not mistake that perfect turn-out, or the particular arch of her neck, or the articulate way she lifted her elbow, or shifted her arms, or tilted her pinkie finger in bras bas.

A dancer joins infinity on The Ballet Line, Miss Salter had told them. The Ballet Line enters at the point of the foot, then extends beyond the tip of the outstretched arm.

As Allegra watched her teacher dance that hot, still night, she thought Miss Salter may very well have been a point along The Ballet Line. But she was still an individual all right.

“Find your center!” Miss Salter was saying to them now. “Keep your focus!”

Allegra realized she had allowed herself to be distracted by her thoughts.

She listened for the carefully exaggerated one-two-three, one-two-three of the Chopin waltz the pianist was playing. A note somewhere on the upper register of the piano was out of tune. Ping, it went. Twong.

She glanced over to see the pianist's frizzy blond topknot. Her round, brown eyes, peeking over the top of the piano, turned up at the corners as she smiled. Had she always wanted to be a pianist, the way Allegra had always wanted to be a dancer? Had she wanted to play Rakhmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, the way Allegra wanted to dance out Tchaikovsky's magnificent white swan? Not every pianist would perform on a concert stage. Not every ballerina would dance a pas de deux with Baryshnikov.

“The rest of us are doing our ronds de jambe en dehors, Allegra!” Miss Salter said. She had come to stand beside Allegra. “You, however, are doing them en dedans.”

Once again, she had lost her focus. “All right, everyone,” Miss Salter said. “Take a five minute break before we come center.”

Allegra came back before the others from the break. Miss Salter was sitting in her folding chair in front of the mirror, writing in her purple velvet journal. Allegra wondered what sort of things Miss Salter might be writing down. Allegra was late for class again today.

She sat down on the floor, extended her legs, then stretched her fingertips to grasp her toes.

Her teacher placed her journal on the floor. “Is everything okay with you, Allegra?”

Allegra's cheek was resting on her knees. She was grateful Miss Salter couldn't see her eyes. “Do you ever have bad dreams, Miss Salter?” She had the same bad dream almost every night. Her father was walking out the front door. The man with the white hair was waiting for her mother in a beat-up old station wagon out front. And there was no nice little kid to be a big sister to in sight.

“I used to have a lot of bad dreams when I was your age,” Miss Salter said.

Allegra's chest tightened. Breathe!

“One of my bad dreams was about being a chicken.”

Allegra looked up.

“My parents said I would wake up squawking and clucking and flapping my arms up and down, like this.” Miss Salter leapt gracefully to her feet. She did a little running step across the studio before striking a pose with her hands tucked up beneath her arms, the perfect demonstration of a ballerina's chicken dream.

Allegra laughed.

She jumped up, did a glissade, a pas de bourrée and three little chaînés, to reach her teacher.

Miss Salter clapped. “You and I make very bad chickens, Allegra,” she said, putting her arm around her shoulders. “That is why you and I have chosen dance.”

Allegra closed her eyes. In a moment, the others would return. But for now, she stood alone with Miss Salter, two dancers joined to infinity on the Ballet Line.

The author of The Ballet Line says she relies daily on the truths found in the Bible and Science and Health to heal both herself and her family of physical and emotional ills. She says these books help give her the inspiration and spiritual poise she needs in her work as a short story writer.

Under the name Gail Gilliland, she has published fiction and poetry in a number of publications, including American Poetry Review, Sonora Review, Passages North, Thirteenth Moon, and Yankee Magazine. Her book on writing, Being a Minor Writer, was published by the University of lowa Press in 1994.