Various Positions (6 page)

“Oh god,” he chuckled. “Who died now?”

His plastic ID card swung on his neck. He had just come back from the hospital.

My mom lifted her head with a jolt. She looked at him flatly, didn’t move.

“Hello?” my dad said.

“Hi, Dad.” It came out as a whisper.

I wasn’t sure if he had heard me, because he was looking at my mom. There was a shakiness to his expression, an anger or a fear. My mom hoisted her body off the bed, stomped toward the doorway. As she passed him, he reached for her hand and missed it. He put more of his body into the next attempt and caught her wrist. She yanked it away immediately. They stayed there, their faces just centimeters apart. I thought he was going to try to kiss her on the mouth, it looked like he was about to, but after a moment she took a step back and walked out of the room.

I expected my dad to follow, but he stayed where he was, staring at the corner of the door frame as though a part of her had stuck there. Finally he looked down at me and sighed.

“She had a bad day, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“How bad?”

“She couldn’t take me to the audition.”

His head started to move, shook slowly back and forth like the air around him resisted. “I don’t know what to say, Georgia. God knows what is going on with your mom these days.”

I reached down to take the bag of peas off my ankle. It made a raw sound, the shards of ice displacing.

“What did you do to yourself?”

I brought my hand to my ankle. It had a reptilian dampness, felt like something other than skin. “Fell.”

“Does it hurt?” He sat on the edge of my bed and lifted my foot by the heel. Slowly he turned my ankle one way, then the other. I focused all my attention forward, sent him secret messages in my head.
Ask me about my audition. Ask whether I got in
. The hospital badge dangled from his neck like a jewel.
Dr. Lawrence Slade
. The laminate peeled from the top corner and in the photo his forehead was a splotch of flash, but his eyes were absolute power. I reminded myself that he’d had a busy day full of dozens of patients. Expecting his attention would be acting like my mom.

“It’s no big deal,” I told him.

He touched the bone lightly and felt the skin with the back of his hand. “You should probably stay off it for a day.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He walked toward the door, shut it behind him.

I counted to five slowly in my head. Their voices started. My dad’s came first, a low rumble of sound. With the door closed there were no words, just the essence of his frustration. I waited for the treble to kick in, the soprano ring of my mom’s fury, the screaming match to follow. But when her voice came it was tiny, a thousand miles away.

I took a pillow and wrapped my arms around it. My mom’s mind had taken a turn for the worse; it was best that I didn’t deny it. She had homed in on something specific now and was feeding it all kinds of distorted junk. The
shit stuff
. What did she mean by that? I couldn’t guess the details of this new delusion, but the core of it was mangled, I had heard it in her laugh. I squeezed the pillow into me. I didn’t want to acknowledge what I was looking at, but it was there, a solid demarcation, the yellow line on a busy road. She was crossing the divide between what was normal and what, no matter how you tried to soften it, was strange, dark, wrong.

I looked down at the photo of Gelsey on the April page. She was so beautiful. I traced my finger up the shimmery grayness of her pointe shoe, let it rest in the accordion pinch of her leotard. This would be me now, a real dancer. It meant something significant. I was conscious of their voices again. My mom was screaming and the sound carried down the hallway, filled all the dead space in my room. I moved my finger along Gelsey’s sinewy leg. Ballet school meant I would never be touched by someone like Kareem again. It also meant I would never need to scream like my mom.

FOUR

I counted the days until I’d start at the academy, but counting them made them slow down, so I hid my calendar at the back of my desk drawer and tried to lose track. But my mind counted anyway, even more carefully than before. I became conscious not just of days, but of half-days, quarter-days, the inescapable tick of my watch. One morning, I woke up with the feeling that I’d spent the whole night staring at the red robot lines of my radio alarm. I got out of bed and took the calendar from my desk drawer, pinned it back to the corkboard. I drew red Xs through all the days I’d missed.

The house was quiet that morning and I figured no one was home, my dad working at the hospital and my mom teaching at the university. I liked summer weekdays when I could stay in my pajamas until lunchtime, eat cornflakes from the box while practicing
pirouettes
on the kitchen floor. I put on my ballet slippers and stopped to answer the phone. A woman asked for my mom and I offered to take a message.

“Do you have any idea where she is?” the woman asked. “I’m calling from the college and she hasn’t shown up for her lecture.”

I walked down the hallway, covering the receiver with my hand. My mom’s door was just a little ajar and I kicked it open with my foot. The lights were off and the air inside was warm and maybe a little musky. I stepped onto the grassy rug at the foot of my parents’ bed and made out her form beneath the giant duvet.

“Mom,” I whispered.

Her breathing grew more and more audible until it became a groan. She turned onto her side.

“The college is on the phone for you. Mom?”

She stayed quiet for a moment and then she mumbled something.

“I can’t hear you,” I said.

“My assistant is teaching today. Tell them to read the goddamn schedule.”

I looked down at the receiver in my hand. The last thing I wanted to do was speak to this woman again. What if she told me that my mom was mistaken? I had a feeling that she might be or that, even worse, she was lying.

“Do you want me to say that, Mom?”

This time her sigh was full of frustration. She pushed herself off the pillow and reached out her hand. Her face looked bloated with sleep. I passed her the phone and listened to her tell the woman that her T.A. was supposed to be there and that she was fed up with the department’s incompetence. She jabbed the hang-up button with her thumb and hoisted her body out of bed, moved languidly to the stool of her vanity table. She rested her chin in her palm and stared at her reflection. The mirror was the shape of a big egg and the table covered with glass jars and perfume atomizers that she’d collected while traveling before I was born. She opened the top drawer and pulled out a small package. I couldn’t see what it was until she lifted her fingers to her lips and put a cigarette in her mouth. She pulled a lighter out of the same drawer and lit it.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She blew a ribbon of smoke at the mirror and smiled at me. “Don’t tell your dad.”

I had never seen her smoke in my life. It was difficult to make sense of, like seeing a puppy with a vest or an old person without teeth. I felt like I should tell her to stop but I worried she’d get angry, so I just walked over to the bed and watched her. She watched herself too, eyes fixed on her mirror-eyes as she sucked the smoke in, parted her lips to blow it away.

“Am I losing it, George?”

“Losing what, Mom?”

“You know.” She ran her hand through her hair. “My looks.”

I was relieved that she hadn’t meant her mind. But the reference to her looks was almost worse. I hated when she talked about them that way, like looks were a collection of bobby pins that you misplaced one by one until you didn’t have any left.

“Looks aren’t important, Mom.”

“Is that right?” She seemed to find this funny. “Who told you that? Your dad?”

The mention of my dad made her laugh more, but the laughter sounded sour now and a sadness flashed in her eyes. She ground her cigarette into the green-glass ashtray that she’d always told me was just for show, then got off the stool and ruffled my hair. “I better get to the university.”

When she’d left the house, I went back into her room to see what she’d done with the cigarette butt. She’d left the door closed and a pale cloud corkscrewed in the light, the smell of smoke still heavy. The butt was just where she’d extinguished it, in the middle of the ashtray. Seeing it made me stomp my foot. What if my dad came home early and found it? I looked over her array of perfumes and chose a clear bottle with a golden seashell head. I sprayed it all over the room until I thought I would gag on the wet jasmine air. Then I took the cigarette butt and flushed it down the toilet.

*   *   *

I finally drew the last red X on my calendar. The air shifted that evening too. From my bedroom window, I could smell the change, delicate and a little charred, like what had built up on the barbecue grill all summer had finally burned into the atmosphere. I packed my knapsack with everything I’d been told to bring for my first day at the academy: two pairs of pink tights, one black leotard, leather ballet slippers. We’d be fitted for pointe shoes by a specialist at the school. I lay on my bed and focused on the swirls of the drywall ceiling until they took on the significance of the night, one plaster rift becoming my old life, another the new. I must have dozed off, because I had dreams that wrenched me from sleep and found me staring at the radio alarm again.

Still, I felt rested in the morning. There was a crispness in my head and a place for everything, thoughts and feelings tucked where they belonged. My parents had left early, so I had the kitchen to myself, didn’t have to worry about whether or not they were talking to each other. A bowl of cereal had been laid out for me, even a small plate of sliced cantaloupe and wedges of pear. Beside it was a note torn from my mom’s day planner. She’d sketched a map for me in pencil, an elegant scribble of street names and arrows that traced a route from our front door all the way to my new school. Even though I’d rehearsed this journey a hundred times on Google maps, I held the paper in my hand on the subway, let it soften beneath my thumb. I felt an amazing forward momentum all the way to my stop. I had passed by Wellesley Station before but had never gotten off there. The turquoise tiles lining the station would have looked normal in a bathroom. I followed the crowd up the escalator and stepped out into the street.

I walked quickly down Church Street, passing storefronts I’d never seen before—a Yogen Früz with a peeling sign like a homemade banner, a video rental shop that claimed to be open all the time—and knew that soon enough they’d be ordinary, things I’d look at and not register. When I turned the corner, I could see the edge of the academy right away. It was bigger than I remembered it and whiter too, the sun hitting the steps at a blunt morning angle, lighting the pillars as if they were on a stage.

We were taken to a classroom on the second floor. Sixty found me almost immediately, pulled me around to the desk where she’d already left her things. She was wearing a short dress that cinched at the waist and looked grown-up enough for Isabel. The skirt billowed away from her body, so that when she walked I could see far up the backs of her thighs. She was tanned, even up there. Her hair was loose, almost black and with an aura of frizz, like it was full of chlorine or saltwater. I asked her if she’d been away for the summer.

“Away from where?”

“Toronto.”

She stuck her lower lip out and blew a stream of air onto her forehead. “Of course.”

I sat at the desk next to her and watched the rest of the class come in. My class. It was hard to focus on one person for very long. Just as I was taken by a blond girl with a ribbon of moles below her collarbone, a black girl was on her heels, her hair a cloud of tiny coils. I tried to absorb the feel instead of the details, the general wash of motion the way you’d examine the sky. I saw long hair and bare legs, knapsacks and shoulder bags trailing. A rebel giggle erupted from the center, like the trill of a piccolo in a symphony. The feeling I had was private but radiant. I looked around the room at all the faces. Girls. And not just that, but
dancers
, each of us here for the same thing.

A teacher led us through the school toward the theater. The halls seemed older than I had imagined, and shabbier—no hardwood or marble or bay windows. The floors looked like they must be linoleum and were that funny color between yellow and beige. I peered into classrooms with the same perforated ceilings as in my old school, the same Formica desks with attachable chairs. But it felt different here, better, as though the inanities of math and science were okay because they were part of a bigger purpose.

We stepped into the theater. It was exactly what I hadn’t been expecting too, no curves or bobbles or ceilings made of glass, just pure geometry, the stage a giant rectangle, the boxes freckled with rows of squares. I followed Sixty down an aisle near the front, sat beside her. The cushions were thick and covered in material that reminded me of carpet. I focused on the stage. Maybe its simplicity made it better. It was empty except for a few bits of white rehearsal tape; the longest was the length of my arm and ran in a sharp diagonal. Whatever ballet it had been used for had probably only just opened. I saw flashes of different heroines, suicidal Giselle in her death-white tutu, Spanish Dulcinea with her fan of damask lace.

A woman stepped onto the stage. She kept her face toward us as she walked, legs gliding under a pin-straight back. She was a dancer, or at least she used to be. Her hair was short, and beneath it was a long and fatless face, cheeks that didn’t sag but didn’t seem there at all. I looked at Sixty to gauge her reaction.

The woman introduced herself. Beatrice Turnbull. Sixty nodded. It was the name she’d been expecting. Beatrice Turnbull said she was the executive director of the academy and used meaningful words to stress the enormity of the day. Our achievement was momentous. We were joining a historic student body, a tradition of excellence and prestige. Her voice was soft and it drew my attention to her neck, long and marked by tendons that settled into her collar like the roots of a tree.