Various Positions (8 page)

I nodded quickly. I itched to know how my classmates were reacting, but I needed to appear focused. I had known that studying at the academy would present a host of tests and challenges, and this was the first. I could take it. It was crucial that my expression reveal this, in case Roderick could see it.

“And we’ll be discussing more than just your physicality at the consultation. Be prepared for that.” He paused. “Ballet is physical, yes. Ultimately it’s a physical medium. And some ballet schools are happy to leave it at that. They train physically proficient dancers. Graceful athletes, I like to say. But that isn’t what we’re doing here at the academy. We’re here to train artists, and this demands something else.” Again he scanned the barre, swallowing us with his eyes. “So if you aren’t interested in becoming an artist, please”—he lifted his hand and held it out toward the door—“get out of my studio because you’re wasting everyone’s time.”

The change in his expression was immediate. It wasn’t anger. It was more like a shock of blankness, a TV screen turned to snow. An embarrassment flooded up from my chest. I didn’t understand it, but I had to look away. There was an enormous silence in the room. After a moment Roderick cleared his throat. He told us to face the barre and began to count us through the first exercise.

I couldn’t concentrate throughout the class. I moved my arms and legs in the appropriate configurations, but my attention wasn’t inside my body like it should’ve been. It was on Roderick. Unlike all the ballet teachers I’d had before, he didn’t circle the inside of the studio while we danced, poking bent knees and keeping the rhythm with his foot. He stood in the very far corner, almost completely behind the piano. He leaned his body into the crook of the walls, holding his face so that his fingers covered most of it. I tried not to look at him but it was impossible. His reaction felt so important. We were doing what he’d told us to do but still, there he was, slinking as far away from us as possible. I couldn’t see his mouth but I was sure there was something strange along his eyes, something almost sneering. This is it, I thought, this is the Rodomization. I bent forward in a deep
port de bras devant
and felt a tingle all over my body.

FIVE

I watched the other girls in the change room the next morning. Sixty chose a locker next to mine and Veronica was beside her. They took off their tank tops and skirts and stayed naked for much longer than necessary. There were no windows in the change room, just long tubes of yellow light that dangled beneath exposed piping. Veronica had blue underwear with white elasticized trim. It cut a blunt line below her hip bones, and she had moles there too, hooking beneath her belly button in the shape of a bass clef. I tried not to look even though I wanted to, but then my eyes were on Sixty instead, tanned everywhere except for a tube around her boobs and the white ghost of her bikini bottom.

“You should really use a higher SPF.” Veronica sat on the bench now, gathered her tights into scrunches, and placed a foot inside. “Tanning will age you prematurely.”

Molly Davies laughed. She was the black girl with a cloud of curly hair. She only had her tights on, and she reached up for something on the top shelf of her locker. The seams curved over both her bum cheeks, dropped straight down the middle of her legs.

“Gorgeous.” Veronica smacked her lips at the magnetic mirror inside her locker door. In her hand was an uncapped lipstick, rolled up to reveal a ruby bullet of wax.

“Gorgeous for who?” Molly leaned over her shoulder. “Nathaniel or Jonathan?”

Everyone laughed. Nathaniel and Jonathan, the two boys in our class, looked like mannequins for kids’ clothes and weren’t the kind of boys that anyone normal would date.

“We’re going to need alternative options.” Veronica shut her locker with a clang. “I’ll make it my mission.”

Molly tossed her ballet slipper like a Frisbee, aimed straight for Veronica’s gut. “Nympho,” she said.

“Pretty much,” said Veronica.

At ten minutes to nine we left the change room as a class and made our way to Studio A. I felt slightly deadened by the conversation about boys. It hadn’t been what I’d expected. We were supposed to be focused on the task at hand, preparing quietly and seriously for our second technique class. But I forgot about it as soon as I saw Roderick. He had the same air of lazy interrogation, eyeing us up and down as we walked into the studio. It sent a throb up my body, the challenge of it. He leaned against the piano. His striped dress shirt was rolled neatly above his forearms, and he pulled on the end of his chin as we arranged ourselves at the barres. I yearned for invisibility. I would watch him stare at the girls, observe exactly where his eyes went, figure out what went on in his mind.

We completed the first exercise. “That was awful.” Roderick shook his head. “Terrible.” He turned his body toward the piano, as though too repulsed to look our way.

My head dropped to my feet. I wasn’t individually responsible for this assessment, but I felt the shame of it intensely.

But when Roderick turned around again he was smiling. “Disgusting. Do it again.”

I adjusted my leotard strap. Molly, in front of me, did too. Something about his nastiness was irresistible. It was like when someone teases you, and you’re charmed against your will. We repeated the exercise. I channeled pure power into my muscles, could picture the energy, hot and white. I had never wanted to be so perfect before. When we finished, Roderick pushed himself off the piano and walked slowly across the studio floor. I could only see the side of his face, but I was desperate to read his expression. Was he pleased with our work this time?

“Let’s do center.”

We moved away from the barres to begin the center portion of the class. Roderick didn’t demonstrate the exercises. Instead he talked us through them, occasionally lifting a hand to symbolize a jump or a turn. We were divided into three groups to perform the exercises. This meant I could watch two-thirds of the class dancing, and I did, greedily. Veronica was in the first group. She was an athletic dancer with high jumps and quick turns. Her footwork was what teachers called
clean
. She moved with an edginess that made her body seem two-dimensional, cut from paper and easy to fold. Molly danced beside her. Her legs were long and bendy, and her arms undulated as if they had no bones. When she paused in a
développé à la seconde,
I measured the distance between her head and foot. She was more flexible than I was, not by much, but by just enough for it to bother me. Sixty was in this group too. Her legs pierced the floor like spikes.

My attention went back to Roderick. Did he prefer the fluidity of Molly’s body, the strength in Sixty’s balances, or Veronica’s speedy turns? A perfect
pirouette
was wasted if he hadn’t turned his head to see it. Veronica stepped into a
first arabesque
, stole a glance at him as she rolled through her foot. Molly did this too, sneaking a peek toward the mirror as she aligned herself for a sequence of turns. The girls spun around each other, vying for his interest.

When it was my turn, I felt a thirst right in my gut. I needed to have him watch me. I pushed myself through the steps, my mind storming with instructions:
pull up, turn out, lift from beneath your arm.
I caught a glimpse of Chantal in the mirror. She was beside me and I saw immediately how good she was, even though she was chubbier than everyone. Her flexibility was second nature, but she had muscles too, the strength to hold her legs high and propel her body upward. She moved ethereally through everything, a quality that rarely coexisted with such steady athleticism. I forced myself to look away. A low panic flapped in my chest. We finished the exercise and I looked at Roderick. He was leaning against the mirror now, eyes on Chantal. His expression was unsettled, as though he hadn’t quite made sense of things. But the approval in his eyes was clear.

“Don’t forget”—he pushed his body off the glass, took a step toward us—“that I’m not interested in good
students
. I’m interested in good
dancers
. If you don’t understand the difference instinctively, then it’s something you’ll need to figure out.” He scanned our faces one last time and started to walk out of the room. “Let me just suggest that a
student
brings her emotions into the studio. Her feelings are hurt when she receives a harsh correction or embarrasses herself by falling out of a turn. A
dancer
is never hurt or embarrassed.” He paused. “I want you to think about that.”

We whispered about this as soon as we’d left the studio. Veronica said the girls in grade eleven had told her that Roderick hated wimps.

“Last year, a girl started crying in pointe class and she was expelled a few days later.”

“That’s terrible,” Sixty said.

“Sounds like bullshit,” said Molly.

Veronica shook her head solemnly. “I’m sure there were other reasons. But the crying was the last straw.”

We moved as a group into the lobby, where the air felt cool after the studio’s humidity. I had never cried in Mrs. Kafarova’s class but the idea of expulsion freaked me out. I couldn’t fathom the sadness of it, being forced to leave the academy after working for so long to get in. I followed Sixty toward the bulletin board to check the master schedule for any changes. Veronica stood in front of us and she pointed to something tacked onto the cork. It was an envelope with Molly’s name on it. People started whispering. Molly weaved her way to the board, reached up, and took it down. She ripped it open and took out the letter, read it with a look of stern composure.

“My consultation,” she said, folding the paper back along its seam.

The meeting was scheduled for the second half of lunch. The girls made sympathetic sounds that I knew were mixed with envy. Molly assured everyone that she didn’t mind being first, and Veronica wrapped an arm over her shoulder, ushered her through the crowd.

*   *   *

The cafeteria was a small room on the other side of the basement. The walls were a pale blue, the color of newborn boy stuff. It emphasized the air’s dampness; dips on the surface looked wet to the touch. There were only four round tables, room for seven or eight at each, which meant there were two separate lunch periods and we overlapped with a different grade each day. Today we ate with the grade-twelve class. They were already there when we walked in, seven of them ringed loosely around the table beneath the only window.

“There used to be fourteen,” Veronica said as we unstuck orange trays from a plastic tower, rolled them onto the metal tracks.

“What happened?” I asked.

Veronica reached into the refrigerated compartment for a carton of apple juice, placed it on her tray. “If you piss Roderick off, it’s pretty much curtains.”

I accepted a plate of spaghetti and followed Veronica and Sixty to the nearest table, inhaled a spicy steam of tomato and starch. I looked at the grade-twelve class as I walked. There were three boys and four girls. They were hardly talking to one another, and I wondered if that was normal. Two of the girls had finished eating and didn’t seem to be doing much. One seesawed her fork, pressing down on the end where it overhung her plate, let the tines crash into the ceramic. The other had her head in her hand, was staring out the window.

Sixty sat next to Veronica and I sat next to Sixty. Chantal, Anushka, and Sonya came over to our table and sat down too. Chantal sat right across from me, her tray stacked with spaghetti and all the extras: fruit, yogurt, a granola bar, and salad. She wore a different pair of bad shorts, plaid and cotton, something a kid would have worn. Her T-shirt was baggy again too, and I looked at the soft arms that extended from the sleeves, not quite fat but chubby and formless. I knew I wouldn’t like them if they were mine. Strangely, her face was full of shape. Her lips formed a perfect rosebud, dipping to make the cleft of a heart, and her nostrils were wide and shadowed, as big as kidney beans. It wasn’t unattractive. The largeness of her features pulled you in.

I heard a giggle and turned toward it. Veronica had her wrist pressed into her mouth, pretending to choke her laughter. She pointed at Chantal’s plate.

“Do you always eat like that?”

“Like what?” asked Chantal.

“There’s enough on your plate for all of us.”

Chantal looked down at her tray and I could see her whole face go funny. I thought she wasn’t going to say anything but then she whispered, “Fuck you.”

Veronica turned to Sixty and then to me. Her lips parted in shock and she exhaled loudly. “It was just an observation. Excuse
me
.”

I kept my focus on my spaghetti because I didn’t want to get involved. Veronica whispered something to Sixty and I heard Sixty mutter something in agreement. When Veronica had finished her lunch, she asked Sixty and me to come with her to meet Molly. “I told her I’d meet her in the change room after her consultation. We should make sure she’s okay.”

I locked eyes with Sixty across the table and I knew she was telling me that she wanted to go. She and Veronica got up and started walking to the exit, so I didn’t really have a choice but to get up and go too. I looked at the top of Chantal’s head as I passed. I wanted to say something nice to her, but I couldn’t think of anything in time.

Molly was already in the change room when we got there. She was standing in front of the full-length mirror by the entrance to the showers, watching herself as she pulled up onto
relevé
and rolled back to first position. She’d taken her tights off and her bare legs were dark and glossy.

“How did it go?” Veronica asked her.

Molly stopped what she was doing and looked at us in the mirror. She didn’t say anything and bit the corner of her lip as though she was trying to hold something inside. She moved to the padded bench in the middle of the room and plopped her body down.

“What happened?” Veronica asked.

Molly shook her head slowly. I’d thought she’d be too mature and sarcastic to get upset, but I saw now that I was wrong. Her eyes were going glassy. Veronica sat down beside her and threw her arms around her neck.