Various Positions (9 page)

“You didn’t cry, did you?”

“No.”

“Did you look like you were going to cry?”

A tear dripped down Molly’s cheek and she wiped it with her finger. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Did you look upset whatsoever?”

Molly shrugged and smoothed her hands over her hair.

“
Did
you?” Veronica repeated.

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t do that!” Veronica slapped the side of the bench and stood up. “Oh man!” She shook her head at the ceiling and started pacing around the room. “No matter what he says, you can’t show any emotion. Didn’t you hear what he said in class?” She turned to Sixty and me. Then she reached out for our hands and pulled us onto the bench so that the four of us formed a huddle. “You have to take whatever he says without flinching, no matter how bad it is. Promise.”

We all said that we promised, and Sixty squeezed my hand. Her eyes were bright and serious and I could see how much she loved the moment. Veronica and Molly went out to buy iced coffees at the Coffee Time around the corner, and Sixty and I rebandaged our blisters from pointe class.

“I think I can do that,” she said.

“What?”

“Let him say anything to me without reacting. Look.” She sat up a little straighter and let the smile drop from her lips. Her mouth gaped open like it had been frozen at the dentist and her eyes lost focus.

“You look like you’re high on drugs,” I said.

She seemed disappointed for a second and then she burst out laughing. I started laughing too, which made her laugh harder and a sound came out of her nose. She grabbed my arm, as if to brace from further nose sounds, and we both fell back on the bench.

“How about this.” I pushed myself up and tried to remember the face I’d made as a kid when I wanted to look like my dad’s patients. I thought of the blankness in the eyes of the women he treated, the empty way they moved down the hallway as though nothing would ever have meaning for them.

“Oh my god,” Sixty whispered. “You look like you’re dying.”

I turned to her, silent for a moment, and then we both started laughing all over again.

“Hey,” she said when we’d regained control of ourselves, “can I have dinner at your house sometime?”

I faked an itch on my ankle and noticed my palms had gone clammy. I wanted to tell her that we didn’t have real dinners. My mom barely cooked and my dad was generally home late.

“Yeah,” I said instead. “When?”

“It doesn’t matter. You decide.”

I was about to say that it’d be best to wait a month or so, but she kept talking. “I could come tomorrow?” Her eyes were very still.

I worried about this dinner as soon as I’d agreed to it. I hadn’t brought a friend home since elementary school. I imagined my parents at the dinner table together, my mom howling for attention, my dad doing his best to just eat. I hoped for his sake that he wouldn’t be home. My dad didn’t deal well with girls. When Isabel was sixteen, she called him a misogynist because she’d brought a friend home and my dad had walked right past the friend without saying hello. The next time Isabel brought a friend home, my dad did say hello, but Isabel claimed it wasn’t a nice hello, cool and aggravated, as if the girl were in his way. I tried to explain to Isabel that his aloofness was only a defense mechanism because he was surrounded by crazy patients all day, but she said that was no excuse. Later I heard laughter from Isabel’s bedroom and felt two things at once: the desire to be laughing with her and shame at desiring what my dad disliked, the silliness that insulted his home.

There was little point in warning my mom that Sixty was coming for dinner. She’d say
oh sure, no problemo
and then forget the conversation immediately. But I would need to prepare Sixty for my family, tell her as little as possible, but enough. I waited the whole next day until we were on the subway.

“My dad probably won’t be home tonight. He’s on call all the time.”

Sixty swung her leg under the seat, then kicked it back up again with a jolt to her knee. “What kind of doctor is he?”

“A psychiatrist.”

“And he needs to be on call?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s strange.”

“Why?”

“You just wouldn’t think there’d be so many emergencies.”

I had never really thought of this before. I imagined my dad in the long hallway of the psychiatry wing that I’d visited as a kid, pacing up and down like a prison guard. He needed to be there because he was in charge, the only expert with genuine authority. If there weren’t any emergencies, maybe he’d retreat to his corner office and put a dent in the paperwork on his desk. He kept detailed reports on every patient, wrote all his insights and diagnoses down too. Other doctors were lazy with their records, but my dad did things right and his tower of files grew, made a skyscraper in the corner of his office between the window and his ficus plant.

“He just has a lot of work.” I paused. “And my mom can be funny.”

“Funny how?”

I shrugged. “She’s emotional.”

“What does that mean?”

I looked at my hands, smoothed them over my lap. “She just has a lot of feelings.”

Standing on the front stoop, I fitted my key slowly into the lock. A gentle entrance would set the right tone. I took Sixty’s jean jacket and hung it in the hallway closet. Then I cocked my head toward the living room, indicated she should follow. Sixty pulled on the end of her T-shirt, looked down to make sure it was clean. I tried to see her through my mom’s eyes, her black hair, frizzy in a good way, her small running shorts that cut high on her thighs. I couldn’t remember the last time my mom had met a friend of mine. I had no idea what she’d think.

My mom was sitting on the rug in the living room, one knee up. Her hair was in a ponytail and she wore her glasses, black squares that drew a heavy line between her eyebrows. Books were stacked around her body in low piles, like squat clumps of stone. She had a hardcover against her thigh, was writing something inside it.

“Hi,” I said.

She looked up at me, shut the book with a jerk. She hoisted herself up on her hand and got rid of it quickly, adding it to the pile on her left. It was an old book, a burgundy cover that looked leathery, no image on the front. I strained to make out the title, saw a blur of engraved gold.

“What are you doing?”

“Organizing.” Her hand went to her forehead, swiped away a strand of hair.

“I brought my friend Laura home for dinner. I hope that’s okay.”

My mom looked past me as though only seeing Sixty now. Her gaze just stuck there, distractedly, her mind slipping somewhere else.

“Mom?”

“Oh, it’s fine.” She tried to smile a bit. “There’ll be five of us then. Your dad is home tonight. And Pilar is dropping Isabel off.”

There was ice in the way she’d said
Pilar
, a twitch of the usual spite. I hoped that Sixty hadn’t heard it.

“Go ask your father what he wants to do for dinner.”

Sixty followed me through the next alcove and past the dining room. I swallowed this mixture of good and bad news. Isabel would improve the evening by a thousand times, but my dad might make things difficult. He would be mad at me for bringing a friend home. He wouldn’t say anything but I would feel it, the dark pit at the center of his mood.

He was sitting at the kitchen table. His BlackBerry, keys, and some change were spread out in front of him as though he’d emptied his pockets before he sat down.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, Georgia.”

“This is my friend Laura. She’s staying for dinner.”

He registered this with something between a smile and a frown, his lips stretching horizontally, not sure which way to curve. I looked at Sixty. She was exactly the kind of girl that my dad would like least. She was too pretty and her voice was high and loud, full of cheerful flourishes and extra words. I looked at her short shorts and felt ashamed. She was smart, but he would never think so. My dad liked the kind of smart that stapled people to the floor, made them solid and unsilly, smiling only at appropriate times.

“Hello, Laura.”

“Hi.” She rolled her foot onto the edge of her sneaker. “Thanks for having me.”

He didn’t answer, picked up his BlackBerry and swept his thumb over the keys.

“Mom wants to know what we’re doing for dinner.”

“Okay.” He didn’t look up at me. “Thanks for the message.”

I led Sixty up to my room. I was expecting a lot of questions, but she just walked slowly up the staircase, looking at the art reproductions framed along the wall. Maybe things didn’t seem that weird yet. My mom hadn’t raised her voice, hadn’t been all that mean to my dad. Sixty paused on the last painting. It belonged to Isabel, a gift from her mother. A completely naked woman reclined over a background of oily shadows. Her body looked soft and pale and her globular breasts stayed very upright despite the fact that she was lying down. The woman’s arms were crossed behind her head and what Isabel loved most about the painting was her hairdo. She had a helmet of brown curls that hung over her forehead and down to her chin. Isabel said the woman looked like the guitarist from Def Leppard even though the painting was two hundred years old.

“It’s by Goya,” I said.

“Oh.” Sixty wiped her finger along the bottom edge of the frame as though the gold finish might come off on her skin.

We walked into my room. I’d kept my door closed all day and it had the stuffy smell of sleep. Luckily it was pretty tidy, with maybe only four or five pieces of clothing crumpled on the floor. Again, I expected her to start asking questions about my family but she just stepped over the jeans I’d worn yesterday and moved to my desk. She leaned in toward the calendar of Gelsey. The September page had her in a long tutu, stepping into a deep
arabesque
, her calf a dark inch from the back of her head. Sixty walked by my bookshelf, trailing a finger over a few spines. She glanced at the Pre-Raphaelite print of Ophelia drowning that Isabel had given me for my fourteenth birthday. Then something caught her eye, the picture frames on my dresser. She moved toward them and lifted one. It was of my mom holding me as a baby. It was summer and I must have been only a few months old, just a crescent of blanket in her arms. My mom inclined her head to one side so that her dark hair swung completely over one shoulder and she wore a pale dress with thin straps that tied into bows. Her skin had a luster to it, darkened by the sun. She was looking straight into the camera, smiling goofily at the photographer.

“Your mom’s hot.”

I shrugged. “Thanks.”

“She’s really young, huh?”

“There?”

“No.” Sixty replaced the photo on the dresser. “Now.”

“She’s almost forty.”

“She looks younger than that.” She went over to my bed and bounced backward onto the mattress. “How old is your dad?”

“Older.”

“Yeah. No kidding.” She placed a pillow behind her back and leaned against it. “How did that happen?”

“What?”

“Your dad scoring someone so hot and young?” She liked the question. I read the pleasure it gave her, the burst of novelty in her eyes.

I moved toward her, sat on the edge of the bed. “It was just—” I stopped, not knowing how to answer her.

“How did they even meet?”

“At the university.”

“Doing what?”

I moved my body around so I was sitting beside her. “My dad teaches at the medical school. And my mom was doing her Ph.D. I don’t know the actual story.”

“So he was a teacher and she was a student?”

“No!” I rocked my shoulder into hers, sent her body toward the bedside table.

“But your dad was a professor and your mom was going to school.
That’s
teacher-student. It’s totally illegal.”

Her grin was huge. She was trying to be funny, but even the sound of it, those two words pressed in beside each other—
teacher-student
—made me feel gross.

“It’s not like that. You get paid to do a Ph.D. And they were in different departments.”

Sixty shrugged. “Who’s Pilar?”

“Isabel’s mom.”

“When did your dad and her get divorced?”

“Before I was born.”

“How long before?”

“I don’t know.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Was it a few years?”

I was sick to death of the questions. “It must have been.”

She looked at me strangely. Her mouth opened to say something, but she stopped herself and sat back against the pillow, a slow contentment washing across her features instead. I felt a dull worry in my stomach, not in the middle part where emotions got violent, but up in the triangle between my ribs. My family had given the worst impression. I wasn’t sure what it was but it needed to be fixed.

“Pilar and my dad woke up one morning and realized there was no more passion. My mom said it was the perfect divorce.”

“Wow.”

I watched her expression carefully and I didn’t like it. “There’s no bitterness or anything,” I continued. “They’ve even had coffee together, Pilar and my mom.”

“Really?”

This part wasn’t true. I don’t know why I said it. My mom did her best to avoid Pilar. She sometimes called her things like “that self-entitled bitch” or “that bad habit your father kicked” and then apologized right away with a crooked laugh, pretended she’d only been joking. When Isabel was young and Pilar came to the house to get her, my mom was always tinkering with something in the basement or, if it was summer, out in the backyard, pretending that she liked to garden. I could picture the whole scenario like an old movie where the characters wore out-of-date clothing. My dad answered the door and I wrapped my arms through the spokes of the iron banister as though it were more a matter of being stuck there than any real desire to stay. And there was Pilar, tall and solid, her skin the color of a manila envelope.

“Pillars,” Isabel once corrected me, “hold up the ceiling. My mom’s name is Pi-
LAR
. It’s Spanish. It’s beautiful. It’s totally different.”

I stared at this woman as she waited in the vestibule for Isabel. I remember wanting desperately for her to look at me, but she never did. She had a strange face, hard and tight, with none of the feminine softness I worshipped in my mom. I squinted at her folds and edges. Was she ugly or pretty? I could never figure it out, but knew she must be very much one or very much the other. I shimmied my rib cage from side to side, tried to hoist myself up on the banister, did all the stupid things kids do to get attention. But I never managed to get hers.