On Point

Exhausted after a full day of rehearsals, Myra was in her tiny studio apartment applying salve to her painful, blistered toes and feet. 

And she was worried. She had been in rehearsals for months now. This was going to be her debut performance as a lead dancer. 

Sure, she had performed in many smaller productions, but not on the big stage in an important ballet in front of such a huge audience as one of the lead dancers.

She was terrified and her hands shook as she wrapped cool cloths around her aching feet. Maybe the shaking was just from not eating anything today, she thought to herself. This is really happening. Am I good enough?

      Myra Collins was a very petite, rail-thin ballet dancer. She fell in love with this beautiful form of dance when she was very little and had started it herself when she was three. And now that she was 20, the rigors of dancing had already taken their toll on her small lithe body. Dancing required you to be very thin and extremely strong and fit. 

      This night Myra was feeling every bit of the demands of the days and weeks of rehearsals and she was not only exhausted, but consumed by worry.

      When she finished nursing her painful feet, she slipped into her fuzzy cat-face slippers and slowly scuffed into her small studio kitchen. To say it was small was an understatement. 

This was all she could afford in the theater district on New York’s West 45^th Street. It had a tiny galley style kitchen, a small bathroom with a tub and shower combination and a miniscule closet. She slept on a futon couch in the living room. A very small round table served as her “office” and where she took her meals, when she took the time to actually eat. 

      The two really good points about the apartment were its proximity to the studio where she rehearsed and its two large windows with a sometimes too intimate view of the apartment building next door and the street with its hustle and bustle below.

      Since she hadn’t gone grocery shopping for two weeks, there really wasn’t anything in the refrigerator. As she peered into the small stainless steel box the landlord generously called a refrigerator, there was nothing but a tub of used butter, half a quart of milk, a sticky jar of grape jelly, and two wrinkled tangerines.

      Myra sighed and decided a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a glass of milk and one of the tangerines would have to do for dinner. 

She found the peanut butter jar and scraped the last of its contents onto two slices of whole wheat bread, smoothed on a generous serving of the grape jelly and squashed them together. She put it on a small plate, poured herself a glass of milk, retrieved a sad looking tangerine and carried them all to the tiny table in the corner. 

She had to brush aside four days of unread mail, her handbag, her dance bag, her laptop and various pens, pencils and sheets of edited dance scripts to make a small space for her plate and glass.

Myra settled into one of the chairs at the table. As she munched on the sandwich, which tasted like a steak dinner to her, since she was so hungry, Myra idly thumbed through the stack of unread mail. She came across a letter from a dance agency whose name she was familiar with, but had not been affiliated with in the past.

 She opened the envelope with the return address listed as Newfound Dance Group of Greater New York. She read with interest that the owner and head dance instructor of the studio, Miss Cornflower, (yes, that was her real name) had heard of Myra’s reputation and great dance abilities and wondered if she might be interested in auditioning for her studio and dance group. 

The studio needed a lead ballerina, as theirs had defected to another dance group and they desperately needed a Snow Queen, the lead ballerina in their upcoming production of “The Nutcracker” ballet. Myra was very unsure whether she wanted to move to a new dance troupe or not. 

The thought of taking a lead role with a new dance company terrified her. She was already having nervous fits over the upcoming performance that loomed in the near future.

      As she continued to rifle through the pile of unread mail, something caught Myra’s attention out of the corner of her eye. She could see directly into one of the apartments in the building next door, since the residents’ curtains were not drawn. She often saw way more than she really needed to see sometimes.

In this particular apartment, there were two people who appeared to be fighting. They seemed to be a young man and a young woman. Myra got a good look at the man as he slapped the woman hard and shoved her. She landed hard on the couch.  But the man went over to the woman and was blocking Myra’s view and she assumed the woman was alright. “It’s none of my business, anyway. What’s the point?” thought Myra to herself.

When her cell phone rang, Myra was jolted back to the here and now and her attention was drawn away from the fighting couple in the apartment across the way.

It was her best friend and fellow dancer, Tanya, who called. They hadn’t spoken for a couple of days and the two had lots to catch up on. Their conversation lasted at least an hour. Myra relayed to Tanya about her shattered nerves about her upcoming performance.

As soon as the conversation was over, Myra heard a huge commotion outside her door.

She walked over to the door and looked through the peep hole. She couldn’t see anything but she could hear a loud ruckus out in the dimly lit hallway. There were audible voices and suddenly she heard a thump.

Even though the noises scared her, Myra quietly unlocked her door and peered out. There was nothing outside her door, but then she heard the voices again, this time much louder. A young man and a young woman were arguing in the hallway about three doors down from where she was, which was the end of the hall.

The young man shoved the much smaller young woman to the floor of the hallway. He was on top of her now slapping and hitting her violently. The poor frightened woman was screaming up at the man. She also had a pink ballet slipper, one toe shoe, in her hand and was defending herself by hitting the young man in the head and face with the steel toe of the ballet shoe. She was flailing away as hard as she could at his face and head in between being hit and slapped.

Myra stared frozen for a few moments at the scene unfolding in front of her. She was frightened and not knowing exactly what to do, she suddenly heard herself yelling out, “Stop, stop! I’m calling the police right now!”

The young man turned briefly and looked directly at Myra. He jumped up from the young woman and ran away down the hallway and Myra could hear the creaky elevator doors open and then close behind the person who she presumed was the perpetrator.

Myra ran down the hall to the young injured woman who was moaning softly and bleeding from her mouth. A large ugly purple bruise was already forming around one of her big brown eyes.

Myra didn’t recognize her and asked, “Oh my god, are you alright?”

The young woman continued to moan, but was able to whisper, “Yes, I think I’m alright.”

“No you’re not,” said Myra in a worried tone. “You’re bleeding from the mouth. And I think you have a tooth missing.” 

“Oh no,” said the young woman. And she started to cry.

Myra still had her cell phone in her hand and she dialed 9-1-1.

“9-1-1, what is your emergency?” the operator asked.

Myra breathlessly answered the operator. “A woman has been beaten up and she’s bleeding. Please send an ambulance and hurry!” She gave the operator their address and she hung up.

“Lie still,” said Myra, “there’s an ambulance on the way.” And soon they could hear the wail of the sirens of the police and an ambulance in the distance.

Later, after the ambulance had taken the young injured woman away, Myra was being questioned by police. 

“Ma’am did you get a look at the person who did this to her?” asked the policeman.

“Well, I got a pretty good look at him when I yelled for him to stop and that I was going to call the police,” said Myra.

“Would you recognize him again, if you saw his picture?” asked the kind policeman.

“Well, it was kind of dark, but I’m a pretty good observer of details. I think I would recognize him again,” Myra replied tentatively.

“That’s great,” replied the policeman. “Can you come to the police station with me now, while it’s still fresh in your mind? I would like you to take a look at a book we have of suspects,” said the policeman.

“Oh, okay, Myra replied. “Let me get my purse and lock my apartment.”

The policeman followed Myra to her apartment and stepped in with her and took a quick look around. The policeman’s eyes went directly to the two windows overlooking the building next door.

“Oh, wow, you can see right into the building next door from this apartment,” he said. “Did you know there was another attack tonight right in that building across the way? Another young woman was attacked and unfortunately she died a short time ago,” said the policeman strongly.

Myra gasped and hesitated and suddenly remembered she had seen a violent act earlier in the evening, which she shrugged off as a lover’s quarrel. 

“Oh my god,” cried Myra. “I think I witnessed that attack!” “I was sitting here at my table and I saw a young man hit a woman and then throw her down on the couch. I thought it was a lover’s quarrel.”

“Well, ma’am it may have been a lover’s quarrel, but the woman is dead and we don’t know who did it.”

Suddenly Myra realized the young man that was hitting the young woman in the hallway was the same man she had seen earlier beating the young woman in the apartment across the way!

The policeman took Myra to the police station and as they were walking in, they passed several rowdy people under arrest that were being held by police officers and who were waiting to be checked in with the desk sergeant on duty.

And right in front of her was the man she had seen in the hallway hitting the young woman and throwing her to the floor!

“That’s him,” Myra said in a scared voice to the policeman. “That’s the man I saw beating up the woman in my apartment hallway and he’s the same man I saw hitting the woman in the building next to mine!”

“Are you sure?” said the policeman. “Yes, yes, that’s him.”

The policeman, who accompanied Myra, walked over to the other policeman holding the alleged perpetrator and said something to him.

“Please have a seat in this chair and wait for me,” said Myra’s policeman.

Both policemen and the young man then walked into a small private room marked “Interrogation.”

The policeman read the young man his rights and asked him if he wanted to speak to them willingly. The young man looked dejected and said yes, after the policeman said they had a witness to both crimes.

After a couple of hours of some very heated back and forth between the cops and the young man, he finally broke down and confessed – confessed to hurting the woman in the apartment and confessed to hurting the woman in the next apartment building over, which was where Myra lived.

He was a very troubled young man who was angry at the world. He confessed he had followed the first young woman to her apartment. He said he knew there were young dancers in the area that lived alone and he knew they were easy targets.

He said he pushed his way into the first woman’s apartment when he knocked on the door and asked to use her phone. He started to attack her and she tried to fight him off, and he said this made him even angrier. He beat her up and left her unconscious on the couch.

Then he went back down to the street and followed another young woman into the next apartment building. He said he followed her and when he knocked on her door and tried to push his way inside, she pushed past him and they fought in the hallway. He said she had a large bag and when it dropped to the floor, clothes and shoes fell out. He said she picked up one of the pink shoes and started hitting him with it.

There were visible bruises on his face.

The policeman then informed the young man that the first woman had died a few hours earlier, but the second young woman would recover from her wounds.

The troubled brutal young man was hauled off to jail.

Both policemen thanked Myra profusely for her bravery and were glad that she reported what she saw and helped her fellow neighbors.

“You were right on point on all your observations, Myra,” and we probably wouldn’t have gotten his confession without you,” said the first policeman.

The nice policeman drove her home and as they walked down the hallway towards her apartment, Myra saw the pink toe shoe the young woman used to defend herself. She picked it up and held it close.

“Thank you again very much, ma’am,” the policeman commented as they got to her door. “We’ll be in touch with you again as this man’s trial is set. We’ll need more testimony from you.” 

“You did all the right things tonight. You were on your toes with your observations and on point with all of the details.”

He tipped his hat to Myra and she closed the door and locked it tight before placing the pink toe shoe with a very steady hand on the shelf as a reminder of how lucky she was to be a ballet dancer.

She said to herself, “The point is to be a good citizen and help those in need whenever you can.”

And she promised herself she would call Miss Cornflower first thing in the morning.

Myra was no longer worried about her upcoming dance recital. She had already performed to heroic measures.