Various Positions (34 page)

“What do you think you’re doing here?” It takes effort for him to ask this. I can hear it in his throat. “How the hell did you even get in?”

His expression is terrible, eyes small with hate. I begin to say that I’m sorry, but he isn’t listening. He starts to close the door.

“Please—don’t. I … I really need to talk to you.”

“You need to go. Now.”

“Please!” I cry. “I am so sorry. I’m going to tell the truth.”

“Keep your goddamn voice down.”

“Please don’t shut the door.”

He moves to shut it fully.

“Please!”

His eyes jog down the hallway and they’re sharp with rage. I have seconds to get it all out so I start talking as fast as I can.

“I’m going to fix everything. I’ll tell everyone the truth and you don’t have to worry. There’s something wrong with me and they’re going to know that, so they’ll believe it had nothing to do with you.”

His hand is on the edge of the door, but he pauses now. I’ve had a tiny impact, I see it in his face.

“How?” When I haven’t understood, he goes on. “Tell me how they’ll believe you, Georgia?”

“I’ll go to Mrs. Turnbull’s office first thing Monday. I’ll swear that I made it up.”

He shakes his head tightly.

“I won’t leave her office till they believe me,” I add.

He frowns. “That won’t do it.” His hand adjusts on the door.

“I’ll swear up and down. I’ll give them a thousand reasons to believe me.”

He pauses, thinking. Then his eyes climb the door frame. When they drop back to me, they stab with a new grit. “You tell them that I walked out of my office immediately that day.”

I nod.

“You tell them that you came up with all those ideas yourself, that they were your own … deranged imaginings.”

“I’ll do that. I promise.”

He looks at me differently, silent for a moment. “You little twit. What in god’s name were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you know what this has done? Do you have any understanding of what you’ve done?”

“I … I’m really sorry.”

“I’ll never understand girls like you. Students that think…” His face winds into a smirk. “It’s a shame because you’re actually pretty damn good.” He shakes his head again. “Now get the hell out of here before anybody sees you.”

I leave his glass lobby and step out into the night. The air swings through me and I imagine my lungs like the doors to a saloon. I start to walk but the feeling stays with me. I wonder if it could drag me through the cement. What is a girl like me anyway? The question is stupid but awful. I look around like the answer could be here, hanging next to me or in the slush of sidewalk under my boots. I’ve never seen hate like that before, the venom that swirled in Roderick’s eyes. He’ll despise me forever now and the truth is that I deserve it. I am a girl like that, a sex girl, a girl who has cheapened everything. I feel it on my shoulders as I walk, a shame that tires my whole body. Two high-rises make skinny checkerboards to my right and a parking lot floats low in between. This neighborhood is safer than the last one. Noises are closer to me, traffic just around the corner, and I hear people too, the faraway hum of chatter. I cross my arms over my chest so that I can feel the bulk of my parka as though it’s actually mine, new mass protecting my body. Even if I’m a girl like that, at least I probably won’t get attacked here.

I reach into my purse, feel lint and wrappers and coins, and I pull out the big ones, jangle three two-dollar coins in my palm. It’s not enough to get home. It’ll probably cover a taxi to the academy, but there’s no entry to the residences after midnight. I’m not sure whether pay phones exist anymore but I decide I’ll walk until I find one. At the intersection, I see a hot dog stand and beside it a short gray shelter with a blue overhang. I pick up my pace, squint to be sure.

I put two quarters into the slot and dial my mom’s cell. It goes straight to her voice mail. Sausage smoke surfs the cold air, and when I cough, I’m sure the hot dog man glares at me. I wonder where I can catch a bus. I’d ask the man, but his fingers are black from the barbecue and his mood looks burned too, his face dewlapped with grumpiness. I remember the paper in my purse. It’s crumpled into a cauliflower, but I manage to smooth it out enough to read and dial the hotel’s number. They ask me for the room number and I read it off the page. In a second, my mom exhales a slipshod hello.

“I need you to get me.”

I try to explain to her where I am. Richmond Street and something. She tells me to ask the nearest woman, but the hot dog man is the only person around. I describe the gray building towering behind me, the empty patio across the street. The panic in her voice gets worse.

“I’m fine. I’ll just—” I look around in every direction. “Someone will walk along soon.”

“Hey,” the hot dog man calls out to me. “You looking for something, kid?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I need to know where we are.”

“Richmond Street and Peter.”

I repeat the intersection to my mom and hang up the phone. The hot dog man keeps looking at me.

“You got someone coming to get you?”

“Yeah. I do.”

He sticks out his lower lip and nods like this is a decent answer.

I lean against the phone booth and wait. I wonder if I look like a hooker but then I think that hookers probably don’t wear coats or snow boots. I know that I’ll never wear this dress again.

My mom’s white car pulls up. I look at her profile through the bluish gleam of the window tint and try to prepare myself. I get inside and we just hug.

“Roderick didn’t do anything, Mom. I think it was my fault.”

She’s craning her neck over her shoulder, trying to merge into traffic, but she drops the steering wheel. I see the purest shock sweep through her features, leave a dark crescent between her lips. “Thank god,” she whispers finally.

“Aren’t you mad?”

All she does is shake her head.

Outside the window, a group of guys are staggering out of a bar. They look about Isabel’s age, and I bet she’d call them jocks. We drive past them and I see a tree growing out of the sidewalk. Even in the darkness the leaves seem unbelievably green, webbed with a floss of snow.

“I don’t even understand what I was doing,” I say.

She leans over and squeezes my leg. “I understand,” she whispers. “It’s okay.”

“It is?”

She turns to me, smiles sadly. “Well, I’m sure you had your reasons. I mean, I bet it’s more complicated than just that.”

“Yeah.” The tree with green leaves shrinks behind us. I turn and watch my mom drive. I always thought her emotions ruined her, but now I’m not so sure. “It is complicated.”

NINETEEN

The sun wakes me up because my mom hasn’t put up blinds yet. She lives in a restored heritage building south of King Street where they used to make farm equipment. Her apartment has two loft-style bedrooms that remind me of hammocks, cocoa floors that look tied to the ceiling beams. I moved in a month ago and I sleep on a futon beside a wall of exposed brick left over from the factory. If you stand in the kitchen, the bricks look red, but from my futon they are the colors of mud and archaeology, terra-cotta, orange, and brown. Four bricks are completely black, scattered illogically as moles, and an ocher stripe cuts through the wall’s belly. I like to trace my finger along the zigzags of ancient putty and push, search for a brick that’s loosened.

My mom brings me a mug of coffee while I make my bun. I started drinking coffee when I moved in with her and I’m not sure if I actually like the taste. Caffeine is an addictive drug, though, and I like thinking about that as the hot liquid curls down into my esophagus. She watches me in the mirror.

“You might see some people you know today.”

I reach for another hairpin and bore it through the mesh net on the back of my head. The trick is to glide the metal right against the scalp, as close as possible without piercing the vellum of skin.

“So?”

“Well, I just— Don’t let it upset you.” She crosses her arms over her chest, leans her hip into the wall beside the towel rack. She bought clothes to celebrate the divorce, shirts that are dry-clean only, and the one she wears now gapes low on her chest. “People are little shits. They gossip.”

“I know.”

“And nobody blames you for Roderick’s resignation. He made that mess himself.”

I smile at my mom for her own sake. She’s referring to the uproar around Chantal’s eating disorder, but her reassurance isn’t necessary. I know Roderick’s resignation had nothing to do with me because I fixed things, told everyone the truth. And the truth I told was even better than the real one, edited of all its gray zones and uncertainties, so that not even the scent of responsibility could be found on him. I understand something at last, maybe what Roderick had always been trying to teach me, that the rules of the real world just aren’t suited to ballet. I’ve tasted something of this real world now and it is the saddest flavor imaginable, dreary as a piece of gum that’s been in your mouth too long, waiting to be spat against the sidewalk.

“We should go. I want to be early.”

The audition is in the company buildings on the waterfront. The Montreal School of Ballet is doing one day of tryouts in Toronto. The school doesn’t have the same reputation as the academy, but my mom and I agree it’s best that I have a change. The leadership of the academy is in transition anyway and it’s hard to be sure of its future. From the car window the lake is a sheet of tinfoil, stretched taut to the horizon, and there’s a gummy smell of seagulls and algae. The sky has the pallor of morning, like a face that’s not quite awake. We park underground and the wind cuts under my nose as we cross the street. I cover my bun as though it might blow away.

As we step into the building, my mom’s phone rings and she fumbles through her purse to pull it out. She answers, says, “Oh hi, Isabel,” and looks at me with a question in her eye. I can’t imagine why Isabel is calling. She came to my mom’s apartment two weeks ago, faced us on the sofa with her hands curved around a mug of tea, and asked whether ballet was making me happy anymore.

“Is it really the healthiest environment for you?” she said, her gaze level and lacking shame, as if her question were somehow acceptable. When I didn’t answer she turned to my mom. “I just … I wonder if there’s something not right about it.”

“What exactly?” my mom asked.

Isabel sat unmoving, her eyes on the terra-cotta bricks.

“The stuff with Roderick is over,” I told her.

“It’s not that,” Isabel said.

“Then what?”

After a moment, she just sighed and offered up an empty palm, claimed it was nothing she could put her finger on.

Now my mom pushes the phone at me. “I think Isabel just wants to wish you luck.”

But there’s no way I want to hear the falseness of this, the empty sound of Isabel saying things she doesn’t mean. I take a step away and shake my head, hear my mom be sweetly obliging, invent something about my having already gone up to the studios.

I sign in at a desk in the lobby and climb the wide staircase to the change room. The junior school auditions aren’t until the afternoon and the senior girls are scheduled to be seen one at a time. It’s much harder to get into a ballet school when you’re older. I’m trying out for grade ten and they’re unlikely to accept more than a couple of girls. But I’m not worried. Even as I climb the stairs, the old feeling enlivens my muscles, like I’ve smoked drugs that make them supernatural. It’s like sleeping in your own bed when you’ve been away for a week, a private warmth that you can’t explain to anyone. I know now for sure that this is what my body was meant for, that I have no interest in what normal bodies do. I’ll be accepted. I close my eyes and feel the certainty swell in my heart.

A swinging door opens into the changing area. I get a smell memory like an ice-cream headache, hairspray and baby powder rushing up my nose. I pull on my bodysuit and tights and move to the mirror. A girl hunches over the far sink. Her spine pops out of her leotard, each vertebra big as a marble. She has her foot angled under the tap so that the water hits the heel of her pointe shoe. I wonder why she’s prepping her pointe shoes now, whether she’s been in for her audition yet. I’m about to ask her when she lifts her head. It’s Chantal. I feel my eyes get as big as hers do. She unhitches her leg from the sink and in a second we’re hugging. She squeezes tight and I match her grip, like we’re both worried the other might slip away.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she says.

“Me neither.”

She moves away from me and we look at each other. Her face is the same illuminated storm it used to be, and there’s flesh on her cheeks again. Her curvy lips force them upward into bumps round as Christmas balls. We both realize we’re listening to the tap run and we start to laugh at the same time. She goes to turn it off and I scan up and down her body. She’s still brittle in her thinness, but her thighs widen at the tops. She might not look completely starved.

“I’ve been training privately.” She starts telling me what she knows about the audition, who will be on the panel and how many girls they’re likely to see. Her voice is the same breathy rush of passion, overwhelming her tongue and lips so that she almost can’t keep up.

“It’s Vaganova method. So keep your arms back. And aim for height above all else. They love dancers like us, Gumby ones who can do anything. And look”—she holds out her arm—“I stayed really thin, huh?”

I feel a bit weird about this question, and at first I’m just going to shrug. But the shrug isn’t truthful. She’ll have to stay skinny if she wants to make it, and if they let her out of the hospital, she must be healthy enough.

“You did,” I say. “That’s good.”

Her face goes bright. “We should be roommates,” she says. “If we both get in.”

“Yeah. That’d be nice.”

Her big lips part and she takes my hand. “
Merde
, Georgia.”

I grab my pointe shoes and we hug once more.

The building is nothing like the academy. It’s only a year or two old and has the uncluttered feel of a well-designed kitchen, spacious rooms unhampered by doorways, steely surfaces that reflect bodies and light. I walk slowly up the staircase to the third-floor studios. It feels funny that I have run into Chantal here, a coincidence that seems like a symbol. We’ve both traveled back from nether regions of the universe to find ourselves in exactly the same place.