Various Positions (22 page)

“No,” I said. “No.”

“Because people seem to like it, ballet. Women seem to like it. The company has giant gross profits every year and 70 percent of their patrons are female. It’s not like we’re talking about titillating lonely men at gas stations. And it’s not like you girls have been kidnapped and coerced into this. Is there anyone pressuring you to be here? Are your parents forcing you?”

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“No.” I spoke firmly. “Not at all.”

“No one’s bribing you with a bigger allowance or the promise of, what are you kids driving these days, a Mini Cooper when you turn sixteen?”

I laughed.

“Is there something you’d rather be doing than ballet?”

“No.”

“Anything you want more in the world than to become a ballerina?”

“Of course not,” I said, grinning. “Nothing.”

“So who are we to tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about? That you’ve been manipulated, like children, against your will?”

He was very close to my face now. I stayed absolutely still.

“Sorry, Georgia.” He backed away and ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry to get carried away with all that, but this stuff just”—he tightened his hand into a fist and bounced it in the air—“it just really ticks me off, you know?”

“It’s fine.” My hair was down and I moved my hand through it softly, let it rest on my shoulder. What was he seeing in me just then? How much did he like it? “People don’t realize how complicated everything is.”

“You’re absolutely right. The process of training dancers is incredibly complicated.” He paused, considered me more carefully. “You’ve grown up a little over the break. There’s a new maturity about you.”

“Oh.” This was it, the kind of comment I’d been waiting for. The thrill of it tickled.

“We’ll start
Manon
next week. Maybe Monday afternoon. I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Me too.”

“Good.”

He walked toward the hall. I turned and watched his back. My eyes dipped below his belt.

*   *   *

When we walked into Studio A for ballet class on Monday morning, there was a woman sitting in a chair against the mirror. Roderick was standing over her, gesturing. Sixty’s fingers found my arm and squeezed and we exchanged a look. Roderick had a no-visitor policy in class. He didn’t mind an audience in rehearsals but maintained that class was sacred, that it needed to be a kind of sanctuary where we could push ourselves and make mistakes without fear of being judged.

I sat on the floor beneath the barre and pressed my legs into a diamond so I could get a good look at the woman, figure out why Roderick had made an exception. I had a weird feeling about her right away. Maybe it was her size. She wasn’t big in a fat way. Her dimensions seemed perfectly proportioned but slightly exaggerated so that she left the impression of a statue, everywhere larger than life. She looked professional. Her hair was dark and framed her face in manicured layers. She wore a tidy gray suit that tapered at the waist and had flat, oversized buttons on the jacket. An open leather folder rested in her lap, and her large hand was cupped over the paper, holding a silver pen.

Roderick had finished speaking to her. He stood at her side and watched us set up along the barres. For a moment, I wondered whether she could be his girlfriend. But this seemed impossible. There was a formality between them. Roderick almost looked uncomfortable. His hands rested on the sides of his thighs with an unnatural heaviness, as if he had placed them there deliberately and was willing them to stay. And the woman was about his age, possibly older. If Roderick had a girlfriend she’d be as young and beautiful as Gelsey Kirkland.

I pulled myself into middle splits but twisted my body sideways enough to keep looking at her. There was something comfortable about her face, something verging on the familiar. Her nose had a funny thinness to it, the bone visible from bridge to tip like the piping of a tent. She tapped her pen against the notepad in a way I liked. There was a composure in the gesture, a natural authority. I looked down at her calves, planted on the floor. She had short muscles that bulged like pears. She didn’t look like a dancer.

Finally Roderick cleared his throat. “Good morning, Year Nines. We have a visitor in class today.” His tone sounded apologetic. “Dr. Navarro is a professor at the University of Toronto. She studies, sorry”—he turned toward the woman—“I hope I’ve got this right, the genetic etiology of food-related—”

“Oh no.” The woman laughed and color rose on her cheeks. “That was just a title,” she said to Roderick, “the title of a study I’ve been…” She faced us. “I study cultural theory, which is … the media and society and ideas about that.” She brushed a hand in the air in front of her as though she thought this was the most worthless thing a person could study. “Please don’t mind me. I’m just here to watch quietly.” She squeezed her shoulders inward, made her body smaller. “Very happy to be here,” she added with a sheepish shrug.

Navarro. My heart raced as I repeated the name in my head. The coincidence caught in my throat like a large pill you can’t quite swallow. Could it be? I looked at Roderick for more information, but he had walked to the piano and was now demonstrating the first exercise.

This woman was Pilar. The coincidence felt like the luckiest fluke imaginable and my heart pounded with delight. But was she here because of me? I knew Isabel talked about me sometimes. Maybe she had mentioned something about ballet that triggered Pilar’s interest, seemed related to all the feminist stuff she wrote about in books. I did my
pliés
and watched her. She seemed only half real, like if I blinked for long enough her features might change and she would become someone else. She was different than I’d imagined, not the idea of her but the particulars, as though an infinitesimal difference in every feature culminated to change the result.

I bent forward from my hips in a deep
port de bras devant
. When I came up, she was smiling in an absentminded way, as though her smile was a light she’d left on in an upstairs bathroom. I wanted her to look at me. But did she know who I was? Had she seen a recent photograph? Suddenly, I felt a desperate desire for her to have seen a picture of me, for photographs of my face to have popped up at various moments in her life.

Roderick was distant throughout class. He kept his voice low and gave us few corrections. When we finished the last exercise he thanked us for our hard work, something he never usually did, and walked over to Pilar. They exchanged a few words. Pilar stood up and looked around the studio. I tried to do the things I was supposed to, stretch out my calves and hamstrings, go over the steps that I’d screwed up, but I only wanted to watch her. I saw wonder in her eyes, as though we were a flock of strange birds she’d never encountered before. Roderick gestured toward the door. She hesitated but allowed herself to be ushered out.

I had to talk to her. I picked up my water bottle and started to walk out of the studio. Sixty clambered after me.

“Where are you going?”

I shook my head. There was no time to explain. Pilar was standing right there in the lobby. She leaned against the metal rail above the covered benches. Roderick appeared to have just said goodbye, was walking away from her as she fiddled with her notes. I mustered all the courage I had and moved toward her. There was a funny imbalance in the moment, like I was approaching a celebrity who had lived on a poster on my wall.

“Hi,” I said.

Pilar looked up from her notes and right away I could see my sister. There was Isabel in the feline distance between her mother’s eyes. Pilar seemed embarrassed for a moment and then, with some difficulty, she found a smile. “You must be Georgia. I thought I recognized you in there.”

Her voice was full and throaty. I thought I remembered it. We shook hands like two strangers until she pulled hers away. She glanced down at her notes as though they might prompt her, then back up at me.

“It’s nice to see you again. Last time I saw you, you were—” She leveled a flat hand at hip level.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I grew.”

Pilar nodded as if to say
that’s that.
“Your dancing was nice,” she added after a moment, her eyes shifting over my head. “You girls are so talented.”

“Thanks.” It was Sixty. I realized she was standing behind me.

“You’re very musical,” Pilar said to me. “It’s lovely to see.”

“Oh.” I beamed. “I come from a family of musicians. On my mom’s side, I mean.”

“Is that right?”

I noticed a stiffness in her voice. We fell silent again. Why did this feel so weird? I wanted Pilar to like me right away. I wanted to remind her of a smaller version of Isabel. I couldn’t think of anything more to say, and after another awkward moment there was nothing else to do but turn around and leave. But then Pilar asked if we had a few minutes to spare and could answer some questions for her research. Sixty and I followed her to the covered benches and sat down. She opened her leather folder and uncapped the silver pen.

“Right. So”—she looked down at her lap—“I don’t mean to seem formal with the notepad or anything, I just might want to scribble a few things down. For my own reference. Is that okay?”

We nodded.

Pilar asked us whether we remembered the first time we’d seen ballet. I told her about the beautiful Sugar Plum Fairy in
The Nutcracker
and Sixty relayed a similar story about seeing
The Sleeping Beauty
with her mom in Rome. Pilar asked how long after that we had started dancing ourselves and whether we could remember why. We both responded that it was pretty much right after but stumbled over the reason.

“It just … I don’t know,” Sixty said. “You did things when you were little.”

Pilar wrote something on her notepad. I wondered what she was writing. She proceeded to ask us about a typical week of school. My voice sounded strange as I answered. I was conscious of it as I spoke and then I lost my way in my own words. Sixty interrupted me to disagree over the order of certain classes and how much time we spent sewing pointe shoe ribbons in the evenings. Pilar listened carefully, her chin cocked slightly to the side.

“And food,” she said, as if this followed naturally. “Tell me about what you eat. Do you watch your weight at all?”

It was a weird question and it made me feel uncomfortable right away. More than uncomfortable. Suspicious. I wondered if this was exactly why she was here. Had word of Chantal leaked out already?

Pilar rolled her hand forward, encouraged us to speak. “I mean, do you girls discuss dieting with each other?”

“No.” Sixty answered for both of us. “We’re like this naturally. We don’t think about it at all.”

Pilar asked us a few more things, like whether our families were supportive and whether we had any time for extracurricular activities. Finally she closed her folder and thanked us for our help.

“I’ll be around on and off this week, so hopefully we’ll chat again.” She stood up as though to go, but then she hesitated. “I hope this isn’t awkward, Georgia. I guess it’s … it’s an unusual situation. But I want you to know that I don’t hold anything—” She rubbed her forehead. “What am I trying to say?” She looked straight into my eyes. “Just that … it’s nice to meet you again after so long.”

I watched her walk away. Sixty came up close to me.

“Your stepmom?” Her voice was a whisper but full of excitement.

“She’s not my stepmom.”

“That was strange. What she just said.” She linked her arm through mine. “What do you think she meant?”

I shrugged. We started to walk across the lobby.

“It sounds like she really doesn’t like you.”

I let her arm drop. “Why would you say that?”

“I don’t mean it’s your fault. I mean—”

“What?”

“It just sounds like something bad happened, that’s all.”

“No.” I frowned. “I don’t think so.”

But Sixty just looked at me and said nothing.

That afternoon, Nathaniel and I waited in Studio C for Roderick. We were supposed to have our first rehearsal for
Manon
. I lay on my stomach with my legs in a froglike shape behind me. Boys never stretched as much as girls did, and Nathaniel just paced, digging his feet into the floor like he thought he could move the wood veins. He looked down at me a couple of times like he wanted to talk, and slippery wedges of untrimmed hair fell into his eyes. I looked away. I needed to prepare myself for what was ahead and couldn’t be distracted by an immature conversation. Roderick would walk in at any second and I would pay attention to all the details, the things he would say, the way he’d say them. If he was going to try to touch me again, it was unlikely to happen now, with Nathaniel in the room. And it was too soon in the rehearsal process for Roderick to risk too much anyway.

After twenty-five minutes, his head finally appeared around the door.

“Georgia, Nathaniel. Sorry.”

I flipped over and sat up. Roderick stepped into the studio and my heart, as though pressed by a button, started to beat faster.

“But I’m going to have to postpone again. I’ve just … I’ve got to run.”

“Oh.” The disappointment weighed on my chest. “Okay.”

“Really sorry. Something popped up.”

“It’s okay.”

“Yeah,” agreed Nathaniel.

“Good. You guys are great.” He placed a hand on the edge of the doorway, swung his body around. He looked back over his shoulder. “I’ll find you two tomorrow to reschedule.” He winked at me and left.

I felt miserable as I pulled off my leotard and tights in the change room. I tried to console myself by rationalizing the situation. Roderick was under a new kind of stress. Chantal might be a legal problem and it sounded like her parents blamed him. Who knew what they might do? Roderick had a lot on his mind right now and it had absolutely nothing to do with his feelings for me. But the sad ache in my stomach surged despite this. Roderick’s behavior felt different. I was supposed to be carefully charting his advances and now they had all but disappeared. He had been very honest with me in the lobby the other day, but it wasn’t the same. He hadn’t tried to touch me. He hadn’t even looked at me in that hungry way that I’d finally got used to. How could someone’s behavior change so quickly? I dragged my feet as I left the change room. It was more than disappointment; I felt like I’d been tricked.