Various Positions (31 page)

“Kareem?” I say it as a question even though it’s not a question. A heat rises over my cheeks.

Kareem jerks his chin over his shoulder a little, something between a nod and a tic. “What are you doing here? Did you transfer?”

“No—”

“Didn’t you go off to ballet school?”

“Yeah. I’m still there. I mean not this very second, obviously—”

“We need a gym credit,” Sixty interrupts, and I realize that she’s followed me. “We’re just here for gym.”

“Oh. Cool.” He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. His arms are too long to stretch in this position, but he tries to straighten them anyway and this makes his shoulders pop forward, his chest retreat in a curve.

“Well, look, we’re having a party. Oh man, is it gonna be good.” He reaches for something in his back pocket and pulls out a stack of flyers. He gives one to me and one to Sixty. “It’s a house thing. My buddy’s trying to get into promotion.”

I look down at the flyer. There’s a black-and-white photo of two skinny guys in bomber jackets leaning against a wire fence. On the other side there’s all the information: an address, directions, and the date, which is tomorrow night. It also says “BYOB.”

“I’ll give you my number.” Kareem pulls a pen out of something behind him; it’s hard to tell whether it’s his jean pocket or his bag. “You know—in case.”

He looks around for something to write on. I push my sleeve up and thrust out my arm. He inscribes his number in big blue digits across the inside of my wrist. I watch his forehead as he writes. It seems crazy that I was ever scared of him.

“All right. Hope to see ya.” He wanders back into the cluster of guys behind Veronica and Anushka.

I trace my finger over the ink to see if it will smudge.

“You don’t want to go, do you?” Sixty says.

I just ignore her, turn and walk up Jarvis Street toward the subway. I suddenly couldn’t care less about this gym class. I’m going to go home and run myself a scalding bath and soak in its ceramic drum until my muscles are warm as pizza dough, can be kneaded into anything. I have to make up for three days of not stretching, and the house will be empty, so I can do it wherever I like.

I sit on the train and stare at my interlaced fingers while I concoct a ballet schedule in my head. I’ll do
adage
and
grands battements
and
fouetté
turns. I picture myself not in my leotard but in something gossamer and filthy, dragged through swamps, like Manon’s rags as she nears her death. When the subway reaches my stop, I don’t bother waiting for the bus, climb the dirty staircase out of the station and move through the glass atrium to the street. The sky is still white, but there’s sun burning beneath it now. It bleaches out detail so that sidewalks and buildings and faces are coated in a colorless glare and I wish I had a pair of sunglasses. Even though it’s cold out, I think of a desert instead of a city. This is the kind of starkness that Manon died in. I can picture her elegant body go slack in a beam of sunlight. Her throat is parched like overcooked bacon and her head lolls from side to side. Still, she points her toes. When her lover finally shows up to save her, it’s too late. Her head falls backward and her body tenses in one last spasm, arching in an endless curve, arms unfurled by her ears. Then she goes limp. What does her lover do with her dead body in his arms? He probably cries. I see him grope for some life in the body he’d loved so dearly, his hands grabbing indiscriminately at waist, thighs, chest. The sun is still everywhere, like invisible peroxide gas. He rips open her dress. Her breasts glow in the light, in fact they’re practically translucent, and he brings his lips to one of her pointy nipples for the last time.

I open the front door and my mom is in the living room. I stop dead in my tracks. Does she know about the photos? They’d make her imagine the most horrible things. I step through the alcove. She’s surrounded by boxes, and I hear the screech of packing tape as she pulls it over a flap of cardboard. There are giant gaps in the bookshelf.

We watch each other, unmoving, her body behind the mess of packing and my arms hanging at my sides. We’re so quiet that I think inanimate objects are making noise instead. Electricity tickles the glass jars on the mantel. My mom’s expression doesn’t change as she moves toward me, and in a moment she has her arms around my neck. My face goes into her hair as she hugs me. She smells like cigarettes but I don’t care.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

Her voice is thin as a reed and I wonder if she’s crying. It makes me feel terrible. I’ve caused this sadness when she was already so sad to start with.

“Yeah. I’m—I’m all right.”

“Poor sweetheart.” She sniffs. “Poor baby. We’ll get through this. I promise we will. You’ll be fine.”

She takes me by the shoulders and moves my body back so that she can look into my eyes.

“Do you want to talk?”

I shake my head.

“That’s fine.” She wraps her hand around my ponytail, leaves it there like another elastic. “We’ll talk whenever you want to.”

“Where are you going?”

She doesn’t answer me. I feel her take a massive breath that lifts her shoulders and widens her ribs beneath her sweater. “We’re moving,” she finally says.

“We are?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” I say, and I nod the way I imagine a lawyer would nod, a doctor would nod, like it’s clinical information that can’t show on my face. “Where?”

“Long term—I don’t know. I’ve booked a hotel for a few nights. I know the timing couldn’t be worse, but you’ll like it. There’s a spa and an indoor pool.” She tries to smile. “It’s walking distance from the academy.”

She waits for me to say something, probably show some sign of consent. But I feel like this isn’t even my life, that nothing about it can bug me. And I like this indifference, love it maybe, because nothing matters if I just don’t care. She goes back to the box she’s been packing, places another pile of books inside. I watch her for a moment. There’s something different about how she moves. Still smooth and dull, like an endless note on the piano, but in spite of everything, maybe today her body looks less sad. I move to the bookshelf.

“Are we taking them all?” I ask.

“Except those.” She points to a clump at the end of the shelf.

There are unformed boxes on the carpet. I lift one and fold it into shape. I take books from the lower shelves and put them inside.

“Are you going to get divorced?”

“Yes,” she says immediately, and then she looks at the ceiling, thinking, as though she’s taken aback by her own speed.

We keep packing the books and we don’t talk for a bit. I lift her old textbooks from the bottom shelf and lay them flat in a new box. When I’m holding her thesis, she reaches over and touches my hand.

“Do you want to ask me anything, George? You don’t seem very surprised.”

I rub my finger over the gold writing on the front, carved into the leather like a stream through rock. I think I might be the opposite of surprised. I look down at her thesis and think that this news, this divorce, explains things I’ve known for a while.

“I know the timing is awful, sweetie,” she continues. “And when I find a place in a month or so, you can decide what you want to do. I’m sure your dad will tell you what his plans are.”

“Won’t he just stay here?”

“I don’t know.”

Her answer strikes me as strange, or maybe it’s the way she’s said it, each word spoken so slowly that it splits from the one beside it.

“Why wouldn’t he stay here?”

She turns to me. Her eyes are still but there’s so much happening inside them that they look extra dark now, black. “I don’t know anything about this woman. I don’t know what she wants.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“I think you know, Georgia.”

She goes back to packing books again and I just stand there and watch the way her sleeves fall over her hands as she bends down.

“No, I don’t,” I say. “I have no idea.”

I think it’s my quietness that catches her. If I’d raised my voice, I don’t think she’d be turning to me the way she is now. She stares into my eyes, first like she’s trying to gauge my sincerity and then with something else. It’s a merciful look, softening down her neck.

“Your dad has met someone. A woman. He’s having a relationship with this woman.”

“Oh.”

“I kind of thought you had figured that out.”

I nod as though I might have figured it out, then turn to the bookshelf so that she can’t see my face. I wonder if this is what it feels like to get beat up, when all your bruises bleed into one bruise, and that combo of pain takes over your whole body. I bring my fingers to the corners of my eyes to push back tears.

“Is it Pilar?” I ask.

“What?” My mom sniggers. “Of course not. Where on earth did you get that idea?”

I can’t answer. I’m not sure where I got any of my ideas anymore. Wherever it is, it’s the wrong place, like someone gave me bad directions ages ago, maybe when I was just a baby, and never bothered to correct the mistake.

“So you’re getting a divorce because Dad’s screwing around with some slut?”

She comes over to me and wraps her arms around me from behind. The tears flow freely now, like the hug has squeezed them out of me.

“Well, it definitely hasn’t helped things,” she says.

“So it has nothing to do with what happened
before
?”

“Before what?”

But I have no idea how to put my question into words, how to ask about bad things that happened years ago when she was only Isabel’s age.

“It has to do with a hundred things, George,” she says while she hugs me tighter. “I think that’s generally the way these things work.”

We go back to packing the books, and when we’ve finished, she goes to the kitchen and pours us both glasses of juice. We sit at the dining room table, drink.

“We’ll leave in an hour, okay? You should get a bag together.”

I feel like I can’t move. I drill my elbow into an eye in the wood, fight the urge to climb onto the table and lie down, become a body on a stretcher. But I find my feet and drag them through the alcove. The living room looks undressed without books. Light slings over the mantel and my eyes are pulled to a border of reflective chrome, a knickknack picture frame that must have been a gift. The photo wasn’t taken all that long ago and I wonder who stuck it up there—my dad, who looks like he barely tolerated the moment, or my mom, who stares at the lens like she’s begging it for help.

I go up to my room, where I take an overnight bag from my closet and start to fill it with the obvious things: socks, pajamas, T-shirts. Inside the top drawer of my dresser is a neon garden of dots and stripes, all the things my mom bought me. I bundle the underwear into my arms and go to drop it in the bag, but my eyes latch on to another photo, my mom with a bundle of her own, a baby’s head resting in her elbow. It was always her expression that struck me as embarrassing in this shot, her laugh-aloud smile and lolling summertime head, like a kid stuck in a grown-up’s body. But now I think about the photographer, the much older man with the camera pointed at his new life. What had my dad been thinking? What was it like to step out of one life and move straight into another, as though the steps didn’t go up or down but wound so snug to his body that they barely displaced him at all? I open the next drawer and pack a bunch of tights and the only two black leotards that aren’t in the laundry. Maybe this is the true difference between my dad and me, the fact that a dancer’s steps are constant, heartfelt, while he sits stiff in the front row, shadows of wives and daughters doing the moving instead. I place my ballet slippers on the pile, zip up my bag and pull my door shut tight, hear the latch click in its hollow.

“You ready?” My mom faces me from the bottom of the stairs, her expression squeezed into a happiness that neither of us believes.

I take my parka from where I left it on the banister and she points at my wrist.

“What’s that?”

Scribbled, vein side up, is Kareem’s smudged printing.

“Nothing.” I ram my arm through my sleeve. “Is it okay if I go to a party tomorrow?”

“Oh, Georgia.” She shakes her head and pouts. “Of course it is. Things will go on as they normally do. I promise you they will.”

“Okay.” I stuff my other arm into its sleeve. “Just checking.”

We drive through the city without saying much, the grays and whites of winter dragging what’s left of themselves beneath the car.

EIGHTEEN

The next night, my mom drops me off at the academy residence and as I get out of the car she hands me a sealed envelope. I turn it around in my hand, press the pad of one finger into the needle prick of its corner.

“What’s this?”

“I’ve written down all the information you might need, the hotel address and phone number and my cell … I know, I know, you have it memorized. I’ve put a little money in there too. Just in case. Call me when you get up in the morning. I’ll come pick you up.”

I’ve told my mom that I’m sleeping here tonight, in Chantal’s empty bed, even though I haven’t asked Sixty. I say thanks and try not to slam the car door.

The supervisor buzzes me into the building and I tear a zigzag into the envelope as I climb the stairs. A note ripped from my mom’s day planner folds over five stiff twenties fresh from the bank machine. I tuck it all back in and knock on Sixty’s door. She doesn’t seem surprised to see me and still has that guilty look smudged into her features, every gesture a tiny apology. It only makes me madder. A door closes down the hallway and Veronica moves toward us in her bathrobe, two shampoo-type bottles balanced in the crook of one arm while she juggles a towel and toiletry bag with the other one.

“You guys going to this thing?”

“What thing?” Sixty asks her.

“That party.”

“I don’t think so,” Sixty says.

“Definitely!” I say, and when Veronica looks at me strangely, I add, “For sure!”

Veronica goes into the bathroom and Sixty tells me she’s off to the cafeteria for dinner, says I can eat there as her guest. I tell her I’m not hungry and drop my overnight bag on Chantal’s bed, lay the envelope on top of it. Then I go after Veronica to make sure it’s okay if I go to the party with her. The water is already rushing full blast in the first shower stall, so I move to the mirror and pretend to fix my hair. Veronica screams that she’s nicked her ankle and in a second she’s pushed back the plastic curtain and hobbles to the counter. A crimson rivulet trails behind her on the tiles, thin as unraveled yarn. We fix our hair side by side in the mirror, her towel at her armpits and me still in my parka, the furry lining going steamy on the back of my neck. She pulls a mesh of blond from the purple plastic teeth of her comb, leaves it balled beside the sink. I ask her if I can use her gel. She raises her eyebrows instead of saying yes and the goop is chilly on my fingers.