Various Positions (21 page)

TWELVE

I leaned against the radiator in the academy’s lobby and waited for Sixty. She had called me the night before, spoken in a voice of dreamy exhaustion—jet lag, she’d said—and asked me to meet her before our first ballet class that morning. She said she had something to tell me. I pressed my legs into the radiator so that I could feel the columns of heat through my jeans. In my new thong, I pictured it burning long red stripes from my knees all the way up to my hips.

“Hi.” Sixty stepped into the lobby from the residence stairwell. We hugged. Her cheeks were darker and I thought I could smell coconut sunscreen through her shirt. “You look good,” she said. “Older.”

I clenched the muscles of my bum so that I could feel the string of material between my cheeks. I felt like I looked good. I felt older too. We walked down the main hallway of the academy, hand in hand. She told me about her dad’s new house in a city called Mar del Plata, about a terrace framed with jacaranda trees, which had creepy purple petals. There was a steep rocky path to the beach down which she’d tumbled twice.

“I really had one of those moments where I was like, okay, that’s it, my leg is broken, my career is over.”

“Is that what you had to tell me?”

Sixty stopped. “No.”

We were standing in a quiet nook between the main lobby and the stairwell and no one was around. She pulled me in close to her so that I was looking up into her face.

“I almost did it,” she said.

“What?”

“It.”

“Oh.”

“On the beach.”

She waited for me to say something. I didn’t know what to say. I was so close to her face but I couldn’t understand her expression, the funny knot of her mouth.

“He was a lot older than me.”

“How much older?” I asked.

“Eighteen.”

“Oh.”

She told me the story. He was the son of her parents’ friends. There’d been a dinner party on a boat.

“He came up behind me. He put his hand right there.” She reached around to the back of my neck and traced a finger along its invisible hairs. I shivered. “He said he’d been watching me all night. He said he thought I was a model.”

We started moving down the hallway. I listened and looked for Roderick. It made a liquid feeling inside my chest, the constant tipping of anticipation. Sixty was still talking. The boy had taken her to the beach the next night. They’d drunk sweet vermouth from the bottle. He’d rolled on top of her out of nowhere and started to unbutton her jeans.

“It was weird.”

“Good weird?”

“Yeah.” I heard a tremble in her voice. “I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “It was good.”

“How far did you go?”

She looked down at her shoes and shrugged.

“What?” I asked.

She stayed quiet. When she lifted her head, she looked as though something made her nervous, frightened her, even. “His eyes went funny.”

“Like funny how?”

“Like brain-dead funny.”

We stood there looking at each other. I saw diamonds in her irises. For a second I thought she might cry. But instead she moved her eyeballs upward and rounded her mouth in a small O.

“Like that?” I asked.

She kept going, bringing her eyebrows together while she moved her head back and forth like a dunking bird. It made a violent picture, one body beating into another body, but then, out of nowhere, she started to laugh. So I laughed too, even harder than she did.

“Like he could only think with his dick!” she said.

“Oh my god!” I laughed so hard my stomach burned. “Gross!”

We turned the corner into the main lobby and I thought about Roderick. I imagined him rolling his body on top of mine, the feel of his fingers as they reached down and fiddled with my fly.

Sixty squeezed my hand. “Look,” she whispered.

I followed the tilt of her chin toward a girl in the middle of the lobby, sitting on the covered bench. The girl looked down at her lap, so that I couldn’t see her face, only the silhouette of her mousy bun. It was Chantal. She turned her head abruptly, not toward us but in the other direction, as though she’d heard a sound coming down the opposite hall. A man and a woman approached her. Sixty pulled me back into the hallway so that we were more or less hidden behind the dividing wall. Chantal was getting up to greet the couple, but she moved with a troubled slowness, shifting her weight onto her arm and using it to help her up. When she was finally on her feet I saw what was wrong.

“Oh my god,” Sixty whispered. She pressed her fingers into the soft part of my arm.

Chantal’s body had deflated. Two sticks jutted from her jean skirt, thighs barely wider than calves. It gave a sense of backwardness, her legs getting thinner where they should have swelled. Her knees exploded in the middle of it all, two doorknobs of bone. What had she done? Chantal took a step toward the couple and the man put his arm around her, squeezed her from the opposite shoulder like he was helping her to walk. The woman moved behind them, her skirt a frenzy of floral drapes, keeping a pace away. She was about the same height as Chantal, although the wideness of her hips in comparison made her look like a different species. These must be Chantal’s parents. Sixty and I watched silently as they moved in a sluggish threesome down the hall toward the stairway that led to the faculty offices.

I didn’t see Roderick until ballet class. When he walked into the studio, my heart pumped furiously. His collared shirt was rolled up at the arms and his hair looked a little unruly, like he’d been rubbing it with his hands. He greeted us with a clipped hello and proceeded almost immediately into the first exercise. It wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Where was the welcome-back speech full of insidious smirks and warnings for the new year? I did my
pliés
and
tendus
and waited for him to look at me with sex in his eyes. But his expression had a blankness I’d never seen before. He wasn’t even sneering. I scanned the barre for explanation and noticed that Chantal wasn’t in class.

All the dancers cast in solos and duets were supposed to have a preliminary meeting with Roderick after class, but when we’d finished our
révérence
, sinking to the ground in voluptuous curtsies, he announced that he’d have to reschedule.

“I’ll post something on the board tomorrow.” He was already halfway out of the studio.

I’d been looking forward to this extra time with him in a smaller group and felt another pang of disappointment. It would have been an opportunity to observe his behavior. How else was I going to prepare myself for the advances he might make when we were alone? I rolled off my leotard and tights in the change room, pulled on my zebra thong. I took out my bun and brushed my hair in many hard strokes. I borrowed Sixty’s new Argentinean lip balm, Rosa Mosqueta, made from wild roses in the Patagonian mountains. On the top of the tin was a flower the color of dried blood, its printed petals unfurled beyond the rim to drape over the side. I unscrewed it and spread my finger along the surface of pale moth-colored wax, rubbed it into my mouth. I looked at my reflection and pictured Mandi. I allowed my lips to part in two lazy pillows. I licked them so that saliva would congeal over the gloss, make shiny beads of wet. Rosa Mosqueta tasted like soapy Plasticine.

I walked back through the lobby and up the stairs that led to the faculty offices. I tried to focus on thoughts of Roderick, but I couldn’t stop wondering about Chantal. I pictured her legs again, the tiny wobbliness of them. It gave me a horrible feeling. I looked down at my own legs. Hers had been just a little bigger than mine before the break. She was supposed to diet until she reached my size; that’s what my schedule had planned for. What had gone wrong? A dim worry started to clamber up my middle, made a nasty kind of ring in my ears. She must have stopped eating completely to lose that much weight in so little time, and the savageness of this scared me. But something else nagged too—had Chantal told people about the schedule? What if she made it seem as if she was doing as I had instructed?

There was no one in the hallway. I walked down it, squeezing my bum muscles together so that I could feel the black string between them. Roderick’s office door was closed. I went closer to it and something moved behind me. I turned around. Chantal was standing by the doors to the stairwell. I hadn’t seen her from the front yet. Her cheeks were depressed, making concave saucers on both sides of her face. She took another step toward me, moved her lips like she was rolling something around in her mouth, maybe trying to moisten it.

“Hi.” She looked at me expectantly. When I didn’t respond, she gestured down at her body like it was a prize on a game show.
“Look.”

“What?”

She stared at me like I was crazy, smiling all the while. The smile pulled on her skin, stretched it like chewing gum. “What do you think?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“I owe you the biggest thank-you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For everything! For helping me.”

I felt like I couldn’t move. She didn’t look real to me, more like a stick figure come to life with the face of an old lady. “I didn’t really help you,” I muttered.

“Georgia!” She took another step toward me and tripped a little. If she fell, she’d break every bone. I could imagine the sound it would make, a hundred eggs cracking on the marble. “You did!”

I heard something from Roderick’s office, shuffling on the inside, a conversation nearing the door. I bolted for the stairwell, pressed my body against the perpendicular wall so that I wasn’t visible. The door opened and voices stormed into the hall.

“You’ll hear from us soon,” a woman said.

“Let’s just go,” a man said.

“Fine.” It was Roderick, exasperated. “If you really think that will help your daughter.”

Footsteps traveled toward me. I pushed my body off the wall and ran down the stairs.

THIRTEEN

Chantal wasn’t at school the next day, and Roderick was strange in technique class again. I tried to use my eyes as an invisible leash, pull his focus to my body. But everything about his behavior had a vagueness to it. He talked us through the exercises, moved his hand as though to demonstrate, but it swung with all the enthusiasm of a dead fish. I thought about what I’d overheard at his office, the meeting with Chantal’s parents, and worried again that my name had come up. Maybe Roderick was ignoring me intentionally. I pushed my lips together hard, tried to smother my frustration. It wasn’t fair. Chantal had practically lost her mind, and there was no way I could have prepared for that. I’d thought I was helping someone normal and it made me furious that she had gone so far.

On Wednesday, I was crossing the main hallway on my way up to the residences to meet Sixty. Roderick was crossing from Studio A toward the stairwell that led to the faculty offices when he saw me and stopped.

“Georgia.” I’d caught him off guard and he seemed surprised, almost embarrassed. “How are you?”

“Good.” I was instantly hot and I stammered. But his expression appeared to be warming, and this gave me confidence. “I’m good. How are you?”

He breathed in so that his torso lifted, his crisp dress shirt filling with more chest. Then he exhaled audibly and shook his head. “I’m okay. I’m okay. Thank you.”

I realized, in that instant, that he wasn’t okay. He was distracted, upset. It was an opportunity to mention Chantal, make it seem like I was as shocked by her condition as he was.

“I saw Chantal,” I blurted.

“Oh?”

I kept going. I’d happened upon her in the lobby. She’d been with her parents and I didn’t know what to think. He considered all this without reacting, his face a deadpan moon. When I ran out of things to say, I could feel my nerves catch up with me. Roderick looked pissed. Had I said the wrong thing?

“Don’t worry about Chantal. She’s going to be fine.” His tone was firm. “This happens more frequently than anyone is willing to admit, and invariably—things are fine.”

“Oh. Good.”

“She’ll be back in class within a month.” His voice softened. “So don’t worry, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Are the other girls—they aren’t worried, are they?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good. That’s good.” He took a step away from me, stopped. “Because there’s really nothing to be anxious about. I see this happen virtually every year and it always resolves itself quickly. Why not tell the other girls—” He cut himself off and shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” He was still shaking his head. “Nothing, Georgia.”

“Did you want me to say something?”

“It’s a shame, that’s all.” His jaw was tight. “Another talented young woman getting herself in a mess when this whole thing was completely avoidable.”

“Is that what you want me to tell the other girls?”

“No.” He laughed once, falsely. “God forbid we could actually talk about these things.”

“About what?” I asked gently.

He gazed up dramatically, as though the topic were too big to broach. I thought he was about to walk away again, but just thinking about it seemed to trigger his anger and he took a step toward me, lowered his voice. “You remember that presentation you watched? The one with the food groups?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s where this kind of nonsense starts.” He punctured the thought with his finger in the air. “All Chantal needed was a little
real
guidance. But instead, we send thousands of mixed messages and wait for things to get really bad. What it is, is unbearably childish!”

I looked deep into his eyes. It felt like he had taken my own thoughts and transformed them into words. This is exactly what I had tried to do, help Chantal in a reasonable way.

“You know,” Roderick continued, practically muttering to himself, “anorexia hardly existed when I was at ballet school. Do you know why?”

I thought hard. The right answer would impress him. “Was it because the idea of a perfect dancer’s body was different then?”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, the standards were identical. It’s because the girls had daily weigh-ins. Because they were told to keep thin, because it was something that was talked about openly. There was no shame in it.” He looked back at the ceiling, as though remembering a better time. Then his chin dropped like a drawbridge and he fixed me with a hard stare. “Ballet is about beauty. Is there something wrong with that? Is there something demeaning about that?”