Various Positions (7 page)

“She was famous.” Sixty’s face was at my ear. I could smell artificial strawberries. “In the seventies, I think.”

Beatrice Turnbull looked famous, with her all-bone face that made me think of ice, giant swaths of it like glaciers. She said we were to collect our schedules in the lobby and would reconvene for our inaugural technique class after lunch.

“Roderick Allen will be teaching you. I’m sure you all remember him from the audition, and if not, not to worry, you will know him very well soon enough.”

Sixty grinned at me, baring front teeth with little ridges. The other girls reacted similarly, turning to their neighbors, everyone whispering. It drew my attention away from the noise and to the only girl who wasn’t talking. She was a seat away from everyone else, her chin pointed up toward the stage, eyes frozen on Beatrice Turnbull. She was a nerd; I knew right away from her T-shirt, peach-colored and shapeless, not tight enough to show her boobs. She seemed wrapped up in her own thoughts, the way you’d expect from a nerd. She watched the stage, thoughtfully, as though something were happening up there, an invisible ballet that only she could see.

I followed Sixty and the other girls up the stairs of the auditorium, back through the hallway, and into the school. We heard piano music from two directions, notes that collided together into a dreamy clutter of melody. I noticed two boys now, standing side by side in the middle of the clump of us. I tried to get a good look at them but couldn’t without being obvious. Our schedules were pinned to the bulletin board in the main lobby, our names printed in the top left corners. I pulled mine down, rubbed my finger over the piercing left by the thumbtack, joined Sixty and some other kids on the bench. We had school from Monday through Saturday. Weekday mornings started with two hours of technique class, followed by an hour of pointe, modern, character dance, or pilates. Academics were in the afternoon, only two classes each day, and the early evening was reserved for repertoire and rehearsals. Saturdays began with something called body conditioning. Sixty said she’d had it at her last school and that it involved a lot of bending and rolling with giant rubber bands. This was followed by two hours of
pas de deux
, and the afternoons were set aside for rehearsal.

“Come.” Sixty weaved her fingers through mine. “I’ll show you my room.”

We turned left from the lobby, went down a hall I hadn’t seen yet. The ceiling was lower here and it led to a stairway at the far end. We took the steps two at a time. Her flip-flops snapped with each hoist, marked our pace like a metronome. Again I saw up her skirt, saw more than she probably realized, looked down at the steps and back up at her thighs. I let my index finger drag on the wall behind me while I listened to her, traced the painted grooves between the fat porous bricks. She had moved in two nights before and she already knew most things about everyone.

“That’s Veronica Orr’s room.” She held the door open to the landing and I squeezed in as it tottered on its hinge. She pointed to the first door in the hall. An erasable board was stuck to its front, two names committed glassily to its surface, bright blue on skating-rink white. The handwriting was different—
Veronica
lowercase and organized,
Anushka
a bloated cursive, the final
a
looping off to make a heart.

“Veronica’s the blond girl. The one with—” She brought her finger to her chest, traced a row of invisible moles. “She’s really pretty but she might be a snob. I haven’t met Anushka yet. She’s from Los Angeles and she missed her flight or something.”

We continued down the hallway. Each door had the same erasable board, two personalities married on it with a plus sign. I read all the different names while Sixty explained. There were seventeen in our class altogether, fifteen girls and two boys. Thirteen lived in residence and were mostly from different parts of Canada, small towns that Sixty couldn’t remember to repeat.

“But Sonya Grenwaldt’s from New York.”

We looked up at
Sonya
+
Limor.
Sonya rolled downward, five squished letters aiming for level ground. Limor ate space voluptuously, gaps between each letter big enough for two.

“And Limor’s from the south.”

“Like Mississippi?”

“No.” Sixty looked solemnly at her feet. “Somewhere underneath Hamilton.”

We continued down the hallway until she stopped in front of the final erasable marriage.
Laura
+
Chantal
. Sixty’s handwriting was bubbly and complicated, Chantal’s vertical and neat.

“What’s your roommate like?” I asked.

Sixty made a face. “Nerdy.”

Sixty turned her key in the lock and we stepped inside. There was a bunk bed on the left, a desk on the right, and a large window on the wall between. Both bunks were made. The top could have belonged to a princess, a purple comforter with the sheen of an amethyst, a mosaic of round pillows at one end. The bottom was the complete opposite, an old hospital-green blanket pulled to the corners, one starched pillow at the top. I turned to the desk. A corkboard was mounted above it with a black line marked down the middle. One side was bare except for a small black-and-white image of a dancer’s feet thumbtacked to the center. The other side was covered with overlapping photos: Sixty in a bikini on a white rocky beach, Sixty in toque and mitts in front of the Eiffel Tower, Sixty sitting atop a camel, a scarf wrapped Grace Kelly–style over her head, her arms arced high in a perfect fifth
port de bras
. She looked happy in each of them, but always in a quirky, theatrical way, her eyes opened to cartoon proportions or her lips pursed in a supermodel pout.

“My dad’s a banker,” she explained, passing me an opened bag of Cheetos that she’d pulled from under the bed. She sat on the lower bunk and I did too. “We moved constantly.”

I accepted a Cheeto and tried not to seem too impressed.

“It’s made me chronically restless.” She tossed a cheese curl into the air, caught it like a dolphin in her mouth. Then she laughed. “What an annoying thing to say, huh? ‘Chronically restless.’ I hate people who talk like that. But it’s true. I’ve lived in sixteen different cities. But at least maybe I’ll have a boyfriend now.” She shaped her hair into a ponytail, draped it over her shoulder. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

I shook my head, ran my finger along the ridge of the Cheetos bag. “Not right now.”

“Have you done stuff, though?”

“Stuff?”

“With a guy?”

“Yeah.”

I heard the squeak at the top of my voice. Her eyes were steady, impossible to read. She lifted her leg, stabbed the end of her flip-flop into the floor, and said, “All the girls in Monte Carlo had done it.”

“Really?”

“It’s different in Europe. Nothing’s a big deal.” She sighed and threw her body backward onto the mattress. “Which is like, bad and good, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it’s better than complete repression. Like my roommate.”

“What’s wrong with your roommate?”

Sixty motioned toward the desk and again I looked at the dancer’s severed feet floating in a sea of cork.

“She’s
really
serious about ballet.”

I nodded as though I understood what she was implying, but I couldn’t help but think the image was beautiful. It was just newspaper or something, but the feet looked suspended out of nowhere, and even though the picture wasn’t sharp, you could feel the muscles of it. The dancer appeared to hover over a step, one foot extended in front of the other one, and staring at this idea of motion made me think she’d moved a hundred times.

There was a sound from the hallway, a key tinkering in a lock, and a girl stepped into the room. She had a round face and brown hair that folded into her head at chin level. I looked at her T-shirt, oversized and peach, and recognized her as the girl who’d sat alone in the theater. She watched us for a moment. Finally she said hello.

“Hi,” I said.

“We were just going for lunch,” Sixty said. “Do you want to come?”

Chantal moved past us without answering, placed her keys down carefully on her side of the desk. She was wearing jeans that weren’t cool; they rested too high on her waist and were a funny pale blue. The pockets looked disproportionately miniature on her bum, and it was kind of a big bum, I noticed, for a dancer.

“Thank you, but I need to prepare for class.”

Sixty shot a look at me. “Prepare what?”

“I just need to get organized. Roderick Allen is teaching.” Chantal had a strange way of talking, not what she said but the way she said it, her voice a rush of childish breath.

“He’s teaching
all
of our technique classes, you know?” Sixty said. “Plus he’s supposed to be totally nuts.”

I looked at Chantal. But she was massaging the arch of her foot, apparently not listening.

“Veronica told me what the grade-eleven girls told her,” Sixty continued. “They call him the Rodomizer.”

It was a weird word, I thought, with an ominous grumble, like a motor ready to hurtle.

“The Rodomizer,” she repeated with the same clever severity, grinning at Chantal. “It’s a mix of
Roderick
and
sodomize
.” Air hissed through the grate of her teeth. “Roderick’s approach to training dancers is like bending them over and doing them up the ass.”

I barked an uncomfortable laugh.

“No, it’s true. They say his approach to teaching is like systematized humiliation. And do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“Do
you
know why?” Sixty asked Chantal.

Chantal shook her head.

“Because he hates women,” Sixty pronounced. “Ballet is his revenge.”

“Revenge?”

She nodded.

“For what?” Chantal asked.

Sixty shrugged. “I don’t know the details.” She turned to me, twisted a lock of hair on her finger. “But I’m sure it’s something horrible.”

I followed her toward the door, paused. My attention went back to the corkboard, the feet that moved without moving. I wanted to ask Chantal who they belonged to, but I didn’t want Sixty to hear me.

“Bye,” I said.

Chantal looked up. Her eyes were soupy, the kind that never focus on anything, that thrive off their own secret. It made her look a little cross-eyed but there was something pretty about it too.

“Bye,” she whispered.

*   *   *

Roderick Allen stood in the center of Studio A, tall and fixed, like the spiked leg of a drawing compass, his eyes tracing the circle of dancers in the room. His hair dashed away from his forehead, leaving two gothic points of skin. My lungs felt slippery with nerves but I tried to breathe normally. I wanted to look just right. I had my back to the barre but was careful not to lean against it. I felt it was important to stand up straight. Sixty was next to me and Veronica, blond and square-shouldered, was on my left. My other new classmates curved around the room.

Roderick considered us slowly, his feet still. There seemed to be amusement hidden somewhere in his expression, but it wasn’t on his lips and I couldn’t pin it down. He nodded at the pianist, a nod that seemed to mean more stop than go. I looked at the funny recession of his hairline. I thought of what Sixty had just told me, that he hated women, that ballet was revenge. I searched his face for evidence. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for but I thought I might know when I found it.

Suddenly, Roderick jerked his arm out and lifted his sleeve to look at his watch. He smiled now, widely. It crinkled the corners of his eyes.

“Sorry to keep you all in suspense. I just like to take a little time on the first day of school to find my bearings.” He had a resonant voice, warm and deep, but shaped into careful consonants. “And I’d say that’s a good starting point for all of you, taking some time to find your bearings, because you’re going to find that the demands placed on you here are, well, different. And different in the most exceptional way.” He looked around, made sure he had everyone’s attention. “I’m going to throw something at you. Just a thought. A phrase.” He paused again, frowning. “
Reading between the lines
. What does that mean to everyone?”

I looked to my right, toward Sixty. She was looking at the rest of the class. No one said anything.

“Reading between the lines,” Roderick repeated. “Tell me what that implies.” He crossed an arm over his chest and propped the other elbow on top of it. He held his face in his hand, his middle finger curving beneath his nose like a mustache. He started to walk along the perimeter of the room, taking one slow step at a time.

“You probably all have similar stories. Similar stories with minor variations. You love ballet more than anything. You’ve been dancing since you were five years old. You were the star of your regional school.” He turned his head and flashed a few teeth at the girls he was passing. “Not to insult anyone with a glib generalization.” The girls blushed and one of them giggled.

“Now you’ve been accepted into the program of your dreams and you’ve arrived with a variety of preconceived ideas. And here’s where your stories diverge.” He stopped abruptly and uncrossed his arms. “Because no two of you will have come with the same assumptions. But you will all have your assumptions, and they’re the first thing we have to address.”

He started to walk again, looking down at his feet. There was a rhythm to his behavior, as though this speech was a phrase of music and he was waiting for the instrumental part to end.

“Some of you are going to be tempted, tempted right from the very beginning, to behave in a
certain
way.” He lifted an eyebrow, held it there. “If I can leave you with one thing this afternoon, one suggestion, it’s this: if you feel yourself tempted to behave in a
certain
way, you should take a moment, and stop yourself.”

I looked around the room. Fifteen girls and two boys. I got a good glimpse of the boys now, both smaller than any at my old school. They had tidy haircuts and gentle faces.

“One of the first things that will happen is your consultation. Each of you will be having a one-on-one meeting with me. We’ll start scheduling them as early as tomorrow.” He hooked an arm behind his neck and rubbed it. “Don’t be intimidated by how that sounds. You’re going to hear some difficult things from both myself and the rest of the faculty over the course of your four years here—it’s a policy we’re really committed to. And that will start with this first consultation. I’ll be talking you through your weak points as a dancer and I won’t be mincing my words. We can save that luxury for amateur hour. Understood?”