Various Positions
Authors: Martha Schabas
T
o my parents
C
ONTENTS
I stand still and pretend to be innocent.
I allow my mouth to hang in a disbelieving O. I squeeze a hand into my pocket and find a jean stud with my thumb, push the nub of metal into my hip bone. The wind has whisked tears to the corners of my eyes and the school blurs behind them until I blink. Everything is bright and sharp before it’s ordinary again. I imagine I look ordinary too, just another body amidst the crowd that’s gathering. But there’s a thickness in my throat, it cinches as I swallow, and if someone spoke to me directly, I’m not sure I could make a sound.
Sixty looks over her shoulder at me. She’s a few steps ahead and she’s made fists inside her gloves. When she reaches for my hand, I’m grazed by empty fingers. She comes closer and drapes the bulk of herself on my back, rubs her head into my arm like a cat. Her dark hair falls in her eyes and she doesn’t fix it. She gives me too much weight, the weight of real sadness, then shakes her head and sighs.
“This is crazy.” Her lips stay near my ear.
“I know,” I say.
We stare ahead together. A group of junior girls have clustered beneath the sign and their heads dip down and up as they steer their bodies around it. Some wear winter hats but others have bare heads, and my eyes hook the pink crescent of a small girl’s ear. I feel a twist of empathy for this bit of freezing flesh. With the studio entrance locked, it’s unclear where we should go.
Something has distracted Sixty. She relieves me of her weight, her attention shifting sideways, and I trace the impulse of her movement to a couple of girls by the main steps. A winter sun bleaches their features, slings white light between the columns of the portico behind them. I can’t make out their faces, but Sixty’s perspective must have less glare. As she moves away, the panic rises.
“I have to tell you something.”
She stops. The incline of her head asks its own gentle question. I let a big breath fill my ribs. But just as I feel the first word find its shape, the impossibility of saying it hits me harder.
“What?” she whispers.
The words are gone now, as though scattered by my pulse. The moment comes back to me in pieces—the shadow of his nose next to my nose, the grainy darkness of his cheek. I can feel the memory quiver down my legs, my underwear rolling to my knees, catching my ankles in a coil of nylon. And then I flick my underwear at him. I send it straight into his lap.
“Georgia?”
I just shake my head, as though I’ve miscalculated my thoughts, and send Sixty with my hand toward the other girls. She hesitates, but a steeliness on my face must convince her there’s no point. I watch the swing of her arms as she walks away and wonder how I’ll ever explain to anyone what I’ve done.
PART I
ONE
I found the envelope in a pile of letters on the hallway radiator. It was white, flat, ordinary as any envelope except for the strange look of my name across the front. I wasn’t used to getting mail. There was a logo in the corner, the curving, antique script of the Royal Toronto Ballet Academy. I took the envelope up to my room. My fingers were stupid with adrenaline, and as I ripped off the top, I tore the letter too. I read the time and date of my audition aloud and recorded the information on the Gelsey Kirkland calendar above my desk, filling the March 27 box with tiny handwriting.
I observed what I’d written as though I didn’t trust it, staring, squinting, trying to look at the ink askance. I muttered patchy sounds under my breath, little words like
yes
and
good
. March 27 needed to be distinguished from its meaningless neighbors, so I drew a green border around the date and added jagged diagonal strokes that tied like a knot in the middle of the square. I stepped backward, examined my work. It all looked a bit like the kind of flammability warning you’d find on a hairspray bottle. I worried this was a bad omen. Symbols of explosions might not lend themselves naturally to good luck. But maybe it could be a kind of reverse jinx, like whispering
“Merde”
before going onstage, or grabbing your partner in the wings and screaming “Go to Hell!” beneath the opening chords of the overture. That’s what they did in Russia.
Above the March grid of the calendar was a black-and-white photo of Gelsey in rehearsal. She was standing with her back against a studio barre and bending at the waist to fiddle with the ribbon of her pointe shoe. Her oversized leg warmers crawled up to the middle of her thighs and she wore a leotard that reflected light like tinfoil. The material pinched at her chest in the shape of a tiny accordion. On either side of this accordion there should have been boobs, but there were no boobs, there was virtually nothing at all.
Ha!
It was a laugh in the face of everything.
I had been watching Gelsey on the Arts and Entertainment Network since my mom had ordered specialty cable three months before. I had seen her in five different ballets and I loved her. She didn’t look wet and brainless like some other ballerinas, dancing across the stage as if they were lost in heavy fog. She attacked her steps as though she had something against them, pouncing ferociously from one to the next. These pounces were punctuated every few minutes by close-ups of Gelsey yearning into the camera. Sometimes her pale face would take up the entire frame and just hang there in a look of incurable distraction. Pain hammered deep around her crystalline eyes. A tenderness pillowed her lips. It was a beauty I had never seen before, too extreme for human beings. Somewhere along her vacuumed cheeks, inside the pout of her ruby mouth, Gelsey became less girl and more creature, so feminine she canceled herself out.
I folded the letter back into the envelope and sat down in my desk chair. I would e-mail Isabel and tell her about my audition. I turned on my computer and waited for my e-mail program to load new messages. I had a separate folder for Isabel that I’d labeled “Sister.” This wasn’t really necessary, considering she was the only one who ever e-mailed me. The label also wasn’t technically accurate. But Isabel had told me it was tacky to always call her my half sister in front of other people and I wanted to make up for the mistake. I imagined scenarios where Isabel would happen to see the title of the e-mail folder. She’d be home at Christmas and we’d be hanging out in my room. She’d be telling me about the stuff she usually tells me about, her most recent semester at university, about after-dark activities and theories on gender and meaning. At some point I’d have to get up to pee. Alone in my room, she’d glance at my computer screen, see the only folder in my e-mail account and smile to herself. When I came back into the room she’d poke me in the ribs and tell me how grown-up I seemed.
My in-box loaded zero new messages. I clicked on the “Sister” folder and scrolled through old messages instead. Isabel always filled in the subject lines, titling her e-mails things like “W’sup” and “Hola Infanta,” and “Georgia on My Mind.” I clicked on one e-mail with the subject line “Gelsey.” It was from a few months ago, soon after I’d told her about my new idol. Isabel had written that she was “skeptical of a society so predicated on celebrity-worship.” I had typed “predicated” into www.dictionary.com and written back that I wasn’t trying to “derive, base, found, proclaim, assert, declare, or affirm anything.” Isabel hadn’t been convinced. She’d done a little googling and had written back that Gelsey was a cokehead who’d dated Pat Sajak in the eighties and that her lips had been injected with an amount of collagen that Health Canada considered “unadvisable.” When I hadn’t believed her, she’d sent me
Dancing on My Grave
, Gelsey’s tell-all autobiography, via priority post.
I looked at the bookshelf across my room. I could pick out the spine immediately, the font reflective like a speed sign on the highway, the rose wilting onto the word
Grave
. The spine looked worn, even from a distance, with a deep wrinkle scarred through its middle. I had read the book three times now and knew the quotations on the back cover by heart: “the dark side of fame,” “a descent into drugs and madness,” “a tortured quest for perfection.” I loved Gelsey more with every read. Not only was she the most wonderful ballerina the world had ever seen, but she had suffered something horrifying and her face was brimming with poisonous chemicals.
Isabel had been e-mailing me approximately twice a week since she’d moved downtown for university. She lived in a three-story house with six other girls, one working shower, and no TV. Every time I visited I felt cold inside my kneecaps and smelled old beer and Pantene Pro-V. Still, I loved visiting her. My dad had only been once and he called the house Moldova.
How are things in Moldova?
he’d ask when Isabel came home for dinner and he wasn’t at the hospital.
Have you girls managed to get a land line yet?
Isabel’s mouth would fatten into a smirk.
Moldova isn’t so bad anyway
, she’d say.
It has a thriving viticulture industry. It’s the crossroads of Latin and Slavic worlds
. My dad would lift his hands on either side of his body, palms facing Isabel as if she were a bandit with a gun. I would stand absolutely still, do my best to embody neutrality so that no one could accuse me of picking sides.
Right before she’d left for university, Isabel had taken me to the park for a talk. We sat on the swings and I followed her lead, digging my heels into the gravel beneath us, engraving hearts and then wiping them clean with our soles. The kid swinging next to me was pumping his legs hard, trying to propel his body toward rooftops, but Isabel was unmoving, so I would be too. I watched a tiny bulge in the middle of her neck and then another, as though she were swallowing her thoughts. Half an hour went by and she still hadn’t done any talking. Pins and needles fried the underside of my thighs. Finally she looked at me. The grayness of her eyes had deepened. They were the color of the sidewalk after a thunderstorm.
“Things might be difficult when I leave, George. You’ll have to be extra grown-up.”
“Sure.”
“Just—” She paused, stabbed the rubber toe of her sneaker into the middle of a dusty heart so that a cloud of sand wafted up her ankle. “I know it’s difficult when Dad’s always—” She cut herself off and looked at the sky. “Just don’t let it get to you. They’re adults and it’s not your problem. And call me if you need anything. Like anytime, whenever.”