Various Positions (4 page)

“Where’s Dad?” I said instead.

“At the hospital. He had to leave early.” She looked back at the spot out the window.

“Are you okay, Mom?”

She made a snickering sound, a rush of air exhaled through her nose. “Of course I’m okay.” She looked me straight in the eye to convince me. “I just have a headache, that’s all, sweetie. A really tight, front-of-the-head thing.” She rested two fingers on each temple and applied pressure, pulling the skin upward so that her eyes narrowed and lengthened. “I didn’t sleep well,” she confessed quietly.

“Why don’t you just go back to bed?”

“Mm.” She shook her head lightly. “I’ve made coffee.”

I glanced over at the full pot of drip coffee on the counter and registered what I’d been smelling, a coarse tang spread thick on the air. Even though I wasn’t a coffee drinker, I understood the sacredness of the freshly brewed.

“Go back to bed, Mom.”

“We have to leave in a few hours.”

“I’ll wake you up.” I shrugged like it was no big deal. My dad had encouraged me to do this sort of thing, to reassure my mom when she got like this.

She looked out again into the backyard. Our little lawn was muddy and unkempt, my old wooden swing set rotted from years of rain. The single orange seat had that eerie, deserted look of child abduction. “No.” Her voice was airy, distant. “No, I won’t be able to sleep.”

But she was able to sleep, and at noon, when I popped my head into her room, her breathing was deep and regular, almost a snore but teetering on the edge of something more ladylike, an impassioned exhale. I took a step toward her, stopped. I wished she’d wake up without me. There was a logic to people’s actions, a very simple kind of truth. I closed her door quietly and went to my bedroom. I lifted my phone from its cradle and dialed Isabel’s number.

It rang three times. Someone answered but a beat went by before there was a person. Instead I heard crinkling, a body moving through sheets.

“Hello?”

It was a guy, which didn’t make sense because all of Isabel’s roommates were girls, and the suddenness of this, a voice with the rumble of an engine, made my heart beat hard. I asked for Isabel anyway, and strangely the voice muttered a yes, told me to hold on. Now there was the squeak of a mattress, footsteps, breath. A door opened, a rush of water, voices beneath.

“Hello?”

“Isabel?”

“George, is that you? I’m halfway out of the shower. Give me a sec.”

The water stopped. I tried to make sense of the picture I couldn’t see: Isabel naked, the voice of a man.

“Hey.” She was back. “What’s up?”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“That?” There was a pause, the sound of shuffling. “That was Pete. My boyfriend.”

There was an apology in her inflection. This was the first I’d heard of a boyfriend.

“Isabel?”

“Yeah, G.?”

“I need your help.”

*   *   *

Isabel and Pete were on my doorstep by twelve thirty. Isabel had borrowed her mom’s car, a wide sedan the color of roasted chicken, and we drove south through the city. The family homes and boutique restaurants of Mount Pleasant Road became the motels and subsidized housing of Jarvis Street. Isabel put on some thin-voiced indie band and rolled her window down. Pete shook his head to the music as he drove. He was very tall and very narrow, his body tapering from the waist up to culminate in a pointy head. I imagined them naked together in the shower, two pale forms against all the textured plastic. I always thought people looked funny with wet hair, shorter and sort of like seals. And if Pete and Isabel kissed with their mouths open they’d get hot water down their throats. I hated that feeling, the nostril spasm, the burn at the bridge of your nose. I looked at Pete’s face in the rearview mirror. He had thin eyes and little lips, lips that had been on my sister. He didn’t hold the steering wheel like a responsible driver, he sort of tapped it like it was always in his way. There were freckles around his knuckles, clusters of orange accidents. They gave the illusion of softness but Pete’s hands weren’t soft, not entirely. These were the hands that had groped Isabel, maybe pinned her against the bathroom wall so he could touch her the way Kareem had touched me. Except Pete’s touch was private, real. It stemmed from something buried inside him that had nothing to do with showing off to his friends. The idea made me shudder. I pulled on my seat belt, let it snap against the bones of my chest.

I listened to Pete’s voice for signs of his private self. He was talking about a guy they both knew from Montreal who was starting up a magazine that, Pete explained, intended on having zero mandate.

“It’s just not that subversive anymore, you know?” His voice was deep and he karate-chopped the steering wheel for emphasis. “It’s just derivative
Seinfeld
. The magazine about nothing? I mean, who’s going to buy into that now?”

“Okay,” Isabel conceded, “but I mean it still actually has a mandate. Even if the marketing ploy is to make it seem mandateless. That’s just another lever, right? It’s still very much after a certain readership. A certain reading”—she paused, rubbed a finger on her lower lip—“you know, demographic.”

Isabel sounded happy. Her voice curved gracefully through her ideas and she kept looking at her boyfriend. She must have looked at him a hundred times.

There were papers on the seat beside me, a stack of them. A skin-colored folder sat on top of the pile and on it was a Post-it note, “Pilar Navarro” written in blue ink. Isabel’s mom.

“Your mom didn’t mind that you took her car?” I asked.

Isabel turned around. “I told her what it was for.”

I looked down at my lap, felt my cheeks redden. I thought about Pilar sometimes. I felt like I knew her even though I hadn’t seen her since I was a kid. She was so real to me, though, the giant woman who’d come to our house to pick up Isabel. In my clearest memory, she was standing beside my dad in the vestibule. She wasn’t quite as tall as him but their bodies left the same impression of geometry. Her shoulders didn’t decline with the gentleness of my mother’s; they jutted out in flat horizontals. What was most amazing was her strength, oversized hands that I was sure could fix major appliances, lift all the recycling even when the bin was full. I imagined her kitchen, the dark blue tiles that Isabel walked on in bare feet so that she could admire the butterfly tattoo below her baby toe. Unlike my mom, who made sandwiches for dinner or ordered in Thai food, Pilar could cook. She prepared heavy foods from where she was born near the Mediterranean, pies made of egg and potatoes, seafood fried into rice. I pictured myself sitting with them at the table, not as a guest but as someone ordinary, permanent. Pilar would ask me questions about life and school and I would confide in her without worrying that it would make her more depressed. Sometimes I pretended that there was a room upstairs in Pilar’s house for me too. I knew her house was older than ours, built in the nineteenth century, and I imagined following her up the steps, other people’s memories creaking through the hardwood. The feeling I’d have would be like falling asleep while it stormed outside, sheets of rain pelting the window as I curled into warmth.

“Guess you must be pretty nervous, huh?” Pete’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

Isabel placed a hand over the gearshift and onto his beat-up jeans. “Don’t stress her out.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “I think this is great, George. It’s great that you’re doing this. Don’t let Dad discourage you. Dad is a jerk.”

“I’m not nervous,” I said.

It was true. There was something about the day that already felt beyond the sway of my influence. The need to be accepted into the academy had crept up on me so slowly, so steadily, that it had accumulated determination and desperation in equal measures. The day would be a brilliant success. It had to be.

*   *   *

The academy looked like a temple from ancient Greece. It seemed completely out of place in Toronto. The exterior made me think of planets too stark to support life-forms, moonstone smooth enough to rub my cheek on. Five pillars grew out of the porch, propping up the ceiling like big toothpicks. We followed black arrows down a staircase and through a labyrinth of hallways, until the corridor opened into a high central space. I looked up at a row of skylights, down at dozens of girls. A woman gave me a number—59—to pin to the front and back of my bodysuit. Isabel sent Pete off to have a cigarette and she took me to the change room. I took off my clothes and she pinned the numbers to me, front and back, sliding her hand inside the leotard so as not to poke my skin.

We followed another set of printed arrows up a staircase to a studio. On the door was a sign that read “Junior Division Warm-up—Auditionees Only.”

“Well.” Isabel grabbed my arm and squeezed it. “I’ll be cheering silently. Meet you in that big room after, okay?”

The studio was full of girls, all of them wearing pretty much the same thing, pastel tights with a hint of pinkness and black bodysuits without sleeves. Their legs were over the barres or in splits on the floor, chests rolled out between them flat as rugs. Some girls lay on their backs and yanked their heels toward their shoulders. No one spoke; instead, everyone pursued an imaginary solitude, as though invisible walls curved throughout the room.

Only one girl broke this rule. She had her elbows propped up on the barre, her back leaning against it. She looked around the room, her eyes stopping full on one girl, then jumping to the next. Her gaze was full of muscle, without a hint of shame. She was tall, or at least tall by my standards, and thin, but not in my shapeless way. There was breadth to her thinness, a strength. She had black, Cleopatra hair slicked into an unusually high bun and a nose that was so long it almost grazed the bud of her lip.

“What?” She was staring at me.

Everyone looked over. Blood poured in from the tops of my ears. This was probably the first thing that’d been said in the room, and the sound of a voice was jarring. I cocked my head toward the bit of empty barre beside her, tried to make it seem like I’d been searching for some space to park myself. She shrugged as I walked over. The other girls went back to their stretches.

But now, closer, I wanted to look at the girl more. It’s not that she was so beautiful or anything. I instinctively compared her sharp, oval face to Isabel’s delicate beauty, a trial I subjected every pretty girl to, knowing that she would come up short. But this girl had an authority about her, a careless way of occupying space that was either impressively grown-up or thoughtlessly childish. Her eyes slanted up away from her nose. They were that unusual kind of hazel that seems more orange than brown, like two polished pennies.

“Fifty-nine, huh?” she asked. The number sixty was pinned beneath her rib cage. She had breasts. They were small and pressed tidily into her bodysuit.

“That means you better be either really good”—she pressed her lips together, popped them at herself in the mirror—“or really shitty.”

“Why?” I tried to sound uninterested.

She sighed and unfurled a leg up onto the barre. The leg was long and perfectly sinewed, strong along the inner thigh where ballerinas should have muscle and streamlined along the exterior where they shouldn’t. She stretched her chest onto her leg and reached for her foot. It was a perfect ballet foot with a high, convex arch, an instep that could almost fold in two.

“If you’re really shitty then I’ll just look extra good beside you. And if you’re really good…” She paused and met my eye in the mirror. “Well, that’s even better.” She smiled slowly, her mouth wide. “They’ll spend the whole time looking over at the two of us.”

A woman stepped into the studio and told us to line up in numerical order. I looked around me, meeting the eyes of other girls looking around too. I felt a tug on my hand.

“We’re at the back,” number 60 said, pulling me toward the barre. Her hand felt bigger than mine. “Which is perfect for standing out.”

I stood in front of her as the other girls lined up. When the line started to move into the hallway, she yanked me toward her.

“Don’t fuck up,” she whispered.

Studio A was large and yellow with sunlight. The room was split in half, one side reserved for the audience on fold-out chairs, the other set up for dancing. We walked up the side of the studio, past the audience. Six movable barres were lined horizontally across the dancing area. Behind that was a long table at which sat five adults. They leaned into the table and held their faces toward us at curious angles. This was the faculty. I registered them with a jet of nerves in the pit of my stomach.

The woman explained that we’d be taken in front of the panel in groups of five. They’d look at us from every perspective, front, back, and both sides, and then we’d be asked to bend over and touch our toes.

“If you can place your palm flat on the floor that’s even better.” She raised her eyebrows, made peaks sharp as tents. “Then I’ll direct you to a barre. Once everyone’s at a barre, the class will begin.”

The first five girls were led forward. I watched their bums as they walked away, the syncopated strides of their legs. I wondered who would be able to lay their hands flat on the floor and who wouldn’t. They were positioned at even intervals in front of the table, one girl to one faculty member. I watched the teachers’ faces. They were wired with curiosity. I looked at the girls’ heads, the row of tiny shoulders, and wondered how it felt standing there, being stared at. The teachers made notes on their notepads.

When it was my turn, I walked forward keeping my neck long and my gaze just above eye level. I could feel Sixty behind me and I knew she was doing something similar, trying to walk the way a dancer should. I was placed in front of the second-last teacher, the only man. My pulse quickened. I’d never had a male ballet teacher before. I knew they weren’t unheard of, but still. It seemed suspicious. Maybe he was gay. I pressed my thighs into first position and tried to see out of the corner of my eye. Isabel could always tell if a guy was gay. She said her methods weren’t foolproof but maybe right 85 percent of the time.