Various Positions (17 page)

“Why would you want to do that?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. All I knew was that we were a little bit alike, and that little bit of likeness set us apart from those other girls. We loved ballet in a way that canceled out all the stupid things they worried about, especially sex.

“I think you’re a really good dancer.”

Her expression started to change. She looked surprised for a moment and then, slowly, ecstatic. “I think you’re really good too,” she said.

*   *   *

Isabel’s conference was that Saturday. I sat on the landing of the stairwell, legs folded like a kid in kindergarten, and listened to my parents argue. My mom was in the kind of mood that my dad called operatic. It meant that she said the same thing over and over again and, as if this repetition wouldn’t do the trick, made tormented gestures with her hands too.

“I wonder how you could think that that’s normal,” my mom hissed. “Because it’s
not
, Larry. It’s not normal. It’s not. It just isn’t.”

“Okay,” my dad said. “Don’t come.”

“I won’t. I wasn’t planning on it. I will not be joining you. You and Georgia can go alone.”

My dad and I drove downtown together. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been alone with him in his car and I wanted to make the most of the event. He was in a pissed-off mood, though, muttering little things to himself and then shaking his head like the argument with my mom continued in his imagination. It was best that I didn’t bug him. Outside the window, the street was lined with cars and skeletal trees clinging to sporadic yellow leaves. I didn’t mind the silence. I was secretly in a good mood and I wanted to enjoy it. I was looking forward to hearing Isabel speak and, maybe even more than that, I couldn’t wait to see Pilar. Isabel would introduce us and Pilar would shake my hand, say what a pleasure it was to see me again after so many years, and that I looked elegant and serene, the quintessence of a ballerina. I loved it when people told me that. If there was time, maybe the four of us would go out after the conference for a snack and I’d watch Isabel and her mom discuss how it had gone, hear all the things they said to each other.

The conference was taking place on the main campus of the university. My dad paid twelve dollars to park on university property and complained about it as soon as the money left his hands. It wasn’t right that adjunct faculty were required to pour their earnings back into the administration’s purse. I told him he was 100 percent right and he nodded appreciatively. We walked into a building where bald branches scaled the bricks, and then we went up a staircase that ascended so gradually it was awkward to climb, every step a little anticlimax. The conference room was full of people. We sat in the only available seats, near the entrance, and I scoured the backs of heads for a woman who might be Pilar.

Isabel spoke well and didn’t seem nervous, except for one time when she stumbled over a word and lost her place, had to start back at the beginning of her sentence. I tried to listen carefully, to make sense of the long phrases and all the difficult terminology. She sounded wonderful in my opinion, but I tried to gauge her performance by the reactions of other audience members who might know more. When she finished, everyone clapped. I thought the applause was louder than it had been for the previous two speakers, but I wasn’t sure. My dad turned to me and made a face I recognized, the whites of his eyes expanding in mockery, like clapping was a ritual he’d never understood. Still he clapped, and maybe more to make up for it, hands raised above everyone else’s and muscled into clamshells to make extra noise.

Isabel met us in the foyer when the conference was over. I threw my arms around her and my dad patted her on the shoulder.

“Where’s your mom?” I asked.

“Oh.” Isabel frowned. “She couldn’t make it at the last minute. She’s interviewing a doctor, a psychiatrist, actually”—she looked at our dad—“at the University of Manitoba.”

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Isabel wrinkled her nose, thinking. “I can’t remember the name. But they’re starting a study together, something about genetic mapping in body-image disorders. It sounded pretty cool.”

My dad nodded like he thought this was a little interesting, but not very interesting. Isabel told us she had to go out with her colleagues but that she’d make it up to me another time. My dad and I walked out to the parking lot together. I felt extremely disappointed by the whole afternoon. It was only four o’clock but the dark sky was already dropping toward us. The dreariness of the coming evening made me lonely. I didn’t want to deal with my mom, so I decided I would go to the public library. I could browse through coffee-table books on ballet and look for information on nutrition and dieting to help Chantal. When my dad and I got home, I grabbed my knapsack and went right back out the front door.

I hadn’t been outside for more than a minute when my mom came running after me. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she’d stuffed her pajama pants into a pair of Eskimo boots. She asked me where I was going.

“Out,” I said.

“How was the conference?”

I kept walking. If she cared about the conference, she should have come herself.

“Did you meet Pilar?”

“Of course,” I lied.

She grabbed my hand and forced me to turn around and face her. “What was she like?”

I yanked my hand away. Why in the world was she asking me this? My mom had met Pilar a bunch of times, and it was stupid that she cared about her anyway.

“She was so nice,” I said. “She sounded really smart and I thought she was as beautiful as Isabel.”

My mom looked stung. Good, I thought, maybe she’d learn how to mind her own business. But then she went on. “Did she and Dad talk?”

I was so sick of all her questions, her excuses, her suggestive tone of voice. “What is your problem, Mom? Why can’t you just be normal about things!”

She blinked hard and her eyes froze into two black jewels. She said nothing. Then she turned around and walked back into the house.

*   *   *

The following Monday, Molly wasn’t there at the start of our technique class. My eyes kept going from the clock above the doorway to the empty meter of barre between Sixty and Sonya Grenwaldt. It was possible that she was only late. Molly lived in Mississauga and she took the GO train in to school each day. But I had a strange feeling, a numbing draft between my bones. I told myself that it was reasonable to consider her late, until it was forty-five minutes past the start of class. When forty-five minutes had gone by, I told myself it was reasonable to imagine other possibilities. Any number were conceivable. There could have been an accident on the tracks and all the trains could have been canceled. She could’ve caught some kind of virus over the weekend and be lying on her couch in front of the TV. There might have been a family emergency, which probably meant one of her grandparents had died. I pictured Molly in a long black dress, standing beside her very tall father and her mother, who wasn’t really that tall at all.

People whispered about Molly after class, but I stayed on the periphery of the commotion, head down as I zipped up my jeans and wormed my feet into my sneakers. Sixty was beside me, getting dressed too, and was similarly quiet. When I was ready to go for lunch, we locked eyes.

“Come,”
she said.

I followed her up the back staircase to the residence hallways. We moved solemnly as though our muscles dragged from exertion, didn’t speak; in fact, we barely met each other’s eyes.

“There are a thousand possible explanations,” she said. “Kids miss normal high school all the time.”

We huddled on her top bunk and called Molly on her family’s land line. It was a 905 area code, so I pictured a wide street without a sidewalk, a basketball hoop with a beard of snow. We pressed our heads together, divided the receiver between our ears. There was the dull purr of the ring tone.

“Yeah?” The voice was male and sounded teenage.

I nudged Sixty to get her to talk.

“Is Molly there?”

“Uh.” There was something like a grunt on the other end. “No.”

“Is she … Do you know if she’s coming to school today?”

“Uh, no.”

Sixty shrugged helplessly. I tried to think tactically, find the best question to exact clues.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

Sixty and I hovered over the silence, my temple pressed against her forehead. I felt the clammy adhesion of skin. We heard the voice breathe.

“I guess. Yeah.”

We thanked him, hung up the phone. I leaned back on Sixty’s pillow. My silence felt superstitious, as though saying the wrong thing would make the wrong thing a possibility. But I had a strange feeling. Molly was a sex girl and I knew this had something to do with it.

Metal scraped in the keyhole. The door opened and Chantal stepped into the room. She saw Sixty first, then me, and her expression changed between the two moments. I remembered I had three books in my knapsack on weight-loss methods that I’d found at the library, but I couldn’t give them to her in front of Sixty. Chantal moved farther into the room and opened the mini-fridge. She took out a snack pack of chocolate pudding and then reached into the mug on top of the fridge for a spoon.

“Chantal,”
I said.

Sixty looked at me strangely and Chantal froze. I was as surprised by my outburst as anyone. Chantal hesitated for a moment, an embarrassed muddle in her eyes, but then she dropped the spoon back into the mug and looked down awkwardly at the pudding. She made a crude show of noticing something she hadn’t before, something that displeased her. I could tell that Sixty was about to ask me what was going on, but Chantal interjected.

“There’s something on the bulletin board for you, Georgia. Some kind of note.”

*   *   *

On the bulletin board in the main lobby was an envelope with my name on it. Veronica and Anushka were sitting on the bench and they watched me as I took it down, untucked the flap. Sixty stood closer to me than necessary.

“It might be nothing,” she whispered.

“I know.”

I read it to myself first.
Dear Georgia, I’d like to meet for a consultation. Studio A at 1 p.m. Ballet attire
. The writer had signed off with a dash at the bottom of the page followed by two lazy initials, R.A.

I looked up at Sixty, who was reading over my shoulder. Her eyes stayed on the page for longer than they needed to. Was it pity or envy? Veronica and Anushka had come toward us and Veronica pushed in next to Sixty.

“I have no idea what it’s about,” I said.

Sixty nodded slowly, thoughtfully. I worried that she didn’t believe me, but then I wondered whether I believed myself. Technically I didn’t know what this consultation was about; I certainly couldn’t articulate it in a sentence or break it into points. But I did have some idea, a notion slippery and unsure. My strategy was working. Roderick saw that I was different from the sex girls and he had singled me out for more attention.

Veronica lifted her head. It was lunchtime so she’d taken her hair down, and she made a big show of it now, pulling all of it over her shoulder so that the ends dipped into the neck of her shirt.

“Maybe he has the hots for you.”

Anushka looked me up and down and laughed. Sixty squeezed my arm and shook her head.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered.

I walked to the change room. Staring at myself in the mirror over the sink, I faced a new challenge. How should I try to look? Roderick respected me, on this point I was certain. But I was struck by a conflicting image: the beautiful ballerina in the photo I’d found online. Roderick had held her tightly, clasping her around the waist. Was her beauty something he forgave her for, or was it one of the reasons he liked her?

I pulled a clean pair of tights up my legs, straightened the seams on both sides of my bum. I tried to move quickly but I couldn’t. All I could hear was Veronica, the way she’d said
hots
. She’d only been trying to be funny, but still. Was there the slightest possibility that Roderick could have the hots for a student? It seemed like one of those crazy legends that kids loved to believe, like crocodiles in the sewers or gangs that steal your kidneys. What did it mean to have the
hots
anyway? I repeated the word aloud. It sounded like a pant. Dogs panted because they couldn’t sweat, and maybe men had hots when they couldn’t sweat enough, looked for cool things to cure their bodies. Girls. The idea gave me the creeps.

When I got up to Studio A the door was ajar and the room empty. The top of the grand piano was open and it made a slope beneath the window, smooth like black ice.

I called out softly, “Hello?” Nothing. “Hello?” I walked in. I placed my pointe shoes on the floor against the mirror. What was I supposed to do now? I could just sit in the corner, stretch my legs as I waited. But that didn’t seem good enough. Roderick had to see me working, sweating, training my muscles whenever I could. A real dancer would never entirely stop practicing. She’d roam the world with her chest lifted and her stomach sucked into nothing. Her inner thighs would burn with every step, sending the tips of her toes out on permanent diagonals.

I moved to the center of the studio. In the mirror I saw a tiny navy leotard, and because my tights were a creamy pink, as washed out as the sunlight in the window, I looked a bit like a floating body. The room expanded around me. When Roderick came in, we’d be so alone, just the two of us with all this unused space. I hated myself for feeling funny. Cooler girls handled this kind of situation like it was absolutely ordinary, shrugged off the men who leered at them the way you’d shrug off a bug on your shoulder. I forced myself into a
first arabesque
, my favorite static pose. I looked at it in the mirror. The line of my leg was long and slender and my foot flicked up from my ankle like an inverted comma. I looked perfect.

“Bigger.”

Roderick leaned against the frame of the doorway. He held one leather shoe crossed over the other.

I looked back at my own reflection, let the effort sprout up my calf so my supporting leg was fully rotated. I straightened my hips so that they rested evenly above my foot. I pulled up from my stomach, made myself taller. I felt the new space inside my elbows, between every rib.