Various Positions (12 page)

“What are you staring at?”

It was Veronica’s voice and my heart stopped. I looked up and saw that she wasn’t talking to me but to Chantal, who was standing alone in front of her locker. Chantal looked completely pissed off by the question. She shrugged a shoulder and turned toward her locker.

“That is
really
inconsiderate.” Veronica glared at Chantal’s back.

The other girls turned around.

“What did she do?” Molly asked.

“She was just standing there looking”—Veronica shook her head as though the whole thing was too infuriating—“weird.” She turned to her own locker and started pulling out the hairpins from her bun until a loosened ponytail swung across her back. She yanked out her elastic and her blond hair went everywhere. “Let’s do something fun! Let’s go to Coffee Time.”

“Yes!” said Molly.

“Coffee Time?” Anushka asked.

“All the guys from Eastern Collegiate hang out there. Come!”

Veronica explained that she and Molly had seen a group of guys smoking and drinking coffee in the parking lot adjacent to the shop. They’d been too far away to judge how hot the boys were, but Veronica was sure they looked promising, had shaggy hair and tapered pants, boys who could have sung indie music. The three of them started to get ready, pulling lots of extra clothes out of their lockers so that they could try on one another’s things. A pile of pointe shoes and dirty tights accumulated on the floor, and the girls laughed as they threw their heads upside down to fluff up their hair. Veronica found a spandex leotard in the clump of discards, the back a giant V that would dip down to your last vertebra. She stepped into it, smothered her boobs with her hands.

“You look amazing,” Anushka said.

Sixty and I got dressed too. She didn’t say anything but I could feel the hope lining all her movements. The last thing I wanted to do was meet boys, but I wanted Sixty to be invited for her sake. Chantal left the change room without saying bye to anyone, and Veronica, Molly, and Anushka burst out laughing before she’d even closed the door. I thought about Roderick as he smirked at Molly’s tallness, ridiculed Veronica’s hand. The spandex bodysuit cut into her skin now, gave her bum a double bulge. I looked at it and remembered the exact tone of Roderick’s disgust. Was it a coincidence that he picked on the girls who talked about boys all the time? Maybe he could sense it in ballet class, a girl who wasn’t just dancing but was conscious of her boobs in her bodysuit, who imagined male eyes sizing up her legs. What if Roderick could smell it on them, like a kind of
sex
smell? Maybe it leaked from their limbs, left a stickiness in the studio air. And there was a danger in this, the sex inside our bodies. It could so easily ruin ballet.

I thought about this steadily throughout math and science. When we were back in the change room before repertoire class, I didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to hear any more gossip about Coffee Time or boys. I moved faster than everyone, pulled my tights on in such a rush that I tugged a run right beneath the waistband. It helped that my bun was already made, only needed an extra puff of hairspray. I took the blue bottle of Finesse from Sixty’s locker, shielded my eyes with my hand. I slipped out the door and went straight to Studio B. The pianist wasn’t even there yet. I took the best spot at the barre, the corner where the mirrors collided, so that I could see my front and side at the same time. I scrutinized my torso. I had little boobs now. I looked at the door, made sure no one was approaching, and ran my hand over them. I lifted the straps of my leotard so that the cotton pulled over my chest, tucked everything into place. I wouldn’t think about them. Instead I sucked my stomach in and dropped from my rib cage, lifted my arms into a perfect fifth
port de bras
.

There was a cough from the doorway.

“Hello.” Roderick stepped into the studio. “Please, keep practicing. I just need to grab a DVD.”

He walked over to the TV stand behind the piano. I turned back to the mirror, tentatively lifted my arm. My pulse was fast and everywhere. I heard him shuffling through things and then stop.

“This is great, this extra initiative.” He was watching me in the mirror, arms crossed over his chest.

“Oh, I just…” I paused. I was so nervous. I could feel the muscles in my cheeks. “I wanted to practice my placement.”

“I can see that.” He walked back across the wood toward the door. “Practice is essential.” He looked me up and down, paused. “Why don’t we schedule your consultation for tomorrow, Georgia. Let’s do it after lunch.”

He walked out. I turned back to the mirror and stared into my own eyes. They burned with the thrill of what had just happened. This was good, all of it, Roderick wandering in and seeing me alone at work. I was swallowing this little taste of success when there was another sound in the doorway. Sixty rushed over. She’d been looking for me, asked why I had come in so early. Silently, I dug my toes into the floor, kneaded knuckle into wood.

“Well, I wanted to tell you.” She moved closer so that we were wedged inside the corner. “Veronica said Coffee Time was awesome and that they’re gonna go again later in the week. She wants us to come.”

“Oh.” I moved away from her, lifted my leg onto the barre to stretch. “Great.”

SEVEN

I ate my lunch quickly the next day and went back to the change room to prepare for my consultation. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, not even Sixty, kept it to myself like a precious stone at the pit of my pocket. A few grade-ten girls stepped out as I held the swinging door open by its metal handle. One said hi to me, lifted a hand with fingers stuck tightly together, more a salute than a wave. She asked me what was being served in the cafeteria, and it took me a second to remember the flavor that was still in my mouth, the tofu stir-fry I had just eaten. I walked around to the mirror by the toilets and waited for sounds. I heard nothing, which was just what I wanted, time to prepare for my consultation alone. I had chosen my outfit carefully that morning, dark blue jeans that were loose at the knees, a white T-shirt that hung from my shoulders like a garbage bag. I leaned into the mirror, squinted at my little face, eyes and nose trying to balance over the pale thread of my mouth. I smoothed the crown of my head with my hand and adjusted a hairpin that had crept out of place.

In my head was an image of Roderick in class the day before and the sound of him too, the nasty things he had said to Veronica. Then there was his laughter, that meanness that had flashed from his eyes when we obeyed his demands and performed the exercises as instructed. I had to show him that whatever he objected to in Veronica and Molly did not exist in me. I fiddled with the edge of my T-shirt, fanned it in the air to propel it away from my body. Roderick wouldn’t find it in me, the hidden thing that he disliked. There would be no sex in me anywhere. It couldn’t nestle in the pretty curve of the small of my back or sneak up my thighs to the place where my bum started. I had to be a dancer and not a girl. I swallowed hard and muscled my lips into a frown. Could I speak while maintaining this level of severity? I pressed molar into molar, made an intimidating sound from the back of my throat.

A toilet flushed. Veronica banged open a stall door.

“Are you okay?” She stood there, glaring at me.

I repeated the sound with a little more phlegm, turned it into a kind of stunted cough.

“Yeah.” I pointed to my throat. “Just had this itch.”

She nodded slowly and raised her eyebrows, moved to the mirror. Her expression was steely everywhere, an alloy of suspicion. She pulled her glitter gloss from her back pocket and squeezed it all over her mouth.

“Sixty said you’re coming on Friday.” She held my eye in the mirror. It sounded like a question or maybe a challenge. “Meet us on the steps at five.”

“Okay.”

I waited for her to move but she didn’t. Finally she sighed loudly and held out the lip gloss toward me. Something in my manner had made her think I wanted some, or maybe she always thought people wanted what she had.

“I don’t have a cold or anything,” she said.

I accepted the lip gloss. It was tinted a plum color, smelled like grape juice and plastic. I brought it nearer to my mouth, tried to think of an excuse not to use it. Shiny lips were the last thing I needed now. I could picture the face Roderick would make, his eyes dipping beneath my nose to clock my eager, painted mouth, then that all-knowing sneer. I coughed again, slid the tube over the counter to Veronica.

“I shouldn’t.” I pointed at my throat. “My cough.”

She shrugged, stuffed it back in her pocket.

“See you Friday.” Her eyes hit me once more in the mirror before she kicked the door open with her foot, caught it with her hand as it swung back on its hinge, and walked out.

*   *   *

I knocked on the door to Roderick’s office and he told me to come in. I pressed down on the handle. The clamminess of my hand gave me a good grip on the metal. He was sitting at his desk, writing something, and as I stepped inside I realized he wasn’t alone. Two shoulders hunched in the chair facing him. They were wrapped in the kind of ballet sweater that you usually see only in ballet movies; it was a grandmotherly lilac and tied into a bow. Chantal. I waited to be told what to do. Roderick paused on a word, weighed the fountain pen in his hand, and continued writing. I expected Chantal to turn around to see who I was, but she didn’t move.

I looked around the office. There was a framed photo of a ballerina above the desk but otherwise the walls were bare.

“Give me a second, Georgia. Chantal’s just on her way out.”

Chantal, accordingly, pushed herself out of her chair and made her way toward the door. She walked with her chin lifted, focused on something far away. Her expression reminded me of the martyrs on the Christian playing cards that Isabel’s grandmother had sent her from Spain, her face pale but illuminated, the rosebud of her lip almost quivering. She met my eye as she passed, not a warning but a look of trust, as though we were running a relay and she was passing the baton.

Roderick was still writing. He wore a barely pink collared shirt, undone a button lower than necessary, revealing honeyed man-skin, maybe the remnants of a suntan. I imagined him getting dressed in the morning, which was a strange concept in itself. Clothing didn’t magically bind to his body; he went shopping, removed labels, folded things away. I imagined him standing halfway inside an open closet, selecting this particular shirt from several very similar ones, doing up the buttons in front of a wide bathroom mirror, and deciding to leave the last one undone. Did he admire his reflection? Did he narrow his eyes and smile slyly?

He rested the pen on his desk and looked up at me. “How are you?” His eyes took me in steadily.

“Fine, thank you.”

“It’s all a little overwhelming at first.” He paused. “Are you finding it overwhelming?”

I shook my head. My cheeks were hot under his stare. It was important that I not blush, because blushing was girlie. My eyes searched for something to latch on to and found the photograph of the dancer above his desk. A ballerina in a white tutu was featured from the thigh up so that you could just see the disc of tulle at her hips. The photo was obviously from
Swan Lake
. The dancer wore what looked like a headpiece of cotton balls and her hands drooped in front of her body like a dying bird.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Roderick said.

The woman’s pose was pristine Marius Petipa, the original choreographer of all the major Tchaikovsky ballets. Her arms were delicate lines of curving muscle, neither frozen nor moving but suspended somehow perfectly between. But her face was something else. It would be unfair to call her ugly; still, it was impossible not to notice the roughness of her features. Her nose was large and its slope interrupted by a bulge of bone midway, knobbly as an elbow. The rest of her face was narrow, tapering to a pointy chin.

Roderick laughed. “Eva Hermann was exquisite onstage. You should have seen her. The kind of presence that actually felt electric. Really, you’d swear she plugged herself into an outlet. She just”—he shook his head as he looked up at the photo—“she commanded your attention. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. I love that about ballet, how it transcends all of our conventional expectations.” He looked back down at me. “Especially when it comes to beauty.”

“Mm,” I said. “Yeah.”

“But in this day and age, ballet is a pretty strange discipline to pursue. That’s what’s so remarkable about it. We’re constantly coming up against our own obsolescence. Makes it essential that we know exactly what we’re doing, right?” He leaned in toward me. His eyes were dark and bright at the same time. “So what is it you’re doing, Georgia? Why must you become a dancer?”

It was like I’d swallowed something whole and could feel it lodged in the wrong part of my throat. “I … why must I?”

“Yes. You agree that we have to be able to define the value of what we do. So tell me—” He extended a hand in a diplomatic gesture. “Why is ballet something you have to do?”

“I…” I looked down at my lap, smoothed my hands over the dark denim. I needed something insightful. I opened my mouth to say something about art and meaning, but my tongue felt leaden.

Roderick sat back in his chair. “Yes?”

“I … I guess … It’s kind of hard to put into words.”

Roderick lifted a hand, palm forward, like I was traffic that had to be stopped. “And that’s just it, isn’t it?” He chuckled. “That’s the very strange paradox of it all. We have to be able to articulate what we’re doing in order to fend off the detractors, the people who say ballet is archaic, conservative.” He rolled his eyes, shook his head. “And yet ballet is dependent on its ineffability. If we could explain it, if we could summarize it in a paragraph … well, it wouldn’t be art then, would it?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“
I explained it when I danced it
.” He shrugged his shoulders and wistfully shook his head.

I had heard this quotation before, I was sure of it. I just couldn’t remember the source. I combed my brain for names, for dates, for anything that would sound smart.