Various Positions (2 page)

I nodded slowly, trying to put lots of meaning into it because I knew that’s what she wanted to see. Isabel generally talked about my mom that way, ran circles around the problem without ever stopping to look it in the face. In her last year of high school, Isabel had stayed with us less and less and this had distorted her perception of what was happening between my parents. Isabel never saw my mom’s tiny provocations, the way she would stare out the window and announce the strangest things out of nowhere—that she missed smoking cigarettes in her old Ford Cortina, that she was curious about neo-punk. One time after dinner, I passed my mom the lasagna dish and she said she’d rather ram her head into the kitchen sink than wash it. Another time, when there was a segment on the radio about the fruit bat, she stepped out into the backyard and started to cry.

I swiped my finger on the track pad to wake up the computer screen. I clicked on the
COMPOSE
button and typed Isabel’s e-mail into the address bar. I told her about my letter and asked how things were going at Moldova. I paused over the subject line. Then I brought my fingers back to the keyboard and typed
My Audition
. I sat back in my chair and looked at the title. I deleted
Audition
and wrote
Career
.

*   *   *

My parents weren’t speaking at breakfast the next morning. Nonspeaking mornings were identifiable by whether my mom got up to kiss me when I stepped into the kitchen, and she did today, bringing her hand to skate down the back of my hair, sighing as though there was something sad about the gesture. She had that cool look around her mouth too, a tightness that paralyzed the corners of her lips. She turned away and traced an unnecessarily wide semicircle to retake her place at the table, fiddling with the pearl at her collarbone. My dad sat perpendicular to her, hunched over a newspaper and a bowl of Cheerios. He shoveled the cereal into his mouth, slurping milk through all the tiny holes of oat on his tongue.

“There are English muffins.” My mom’s eyes were full of feeling. “In the fridge.”

I’d planned on telling them about my audition, but a nonspeaking morning made it impossible. I should have seen it coming. My dad had worked late every night that week and had been on call most of the previous weekend. I pulled open the fridge door, smelled chilled plastic and immobile air, took the baggie of muffins from the shelf. I tore my muffin along its precut seam, slid both halves into the toaster. My mom’s fingers fluttered from her coffee mug to her hair, played quick-fire scales on the table. She wanted my dad’s attention but there was no way she would get it. My dad’s mind was traveling inward, incubating new thoughts. When his practice was busy, he achieved heights of concentration of which few other doctors were capable. It’s what made him the best in his field. Now he thumbed the corner of his paper, flipped the page without looking up. I could see just enough of his forehead to observe the process, one heavy wrinkle like an equator around his brain. I wished my mom would understand.

I took my muffin to the table. My mom wrenched her chair forward, made the linoleum squeak. I wouldn’t meet her eye. I feared the look they would have in that moment, tragic and on the brink of something I couldn’t describe, a thousand times darker than tears. I needed to distract her.

“Could you pass the butter?”

She slid the dish toward me, got up to get a knife. Now I would stay calm because calmness was contagious. Then time would run its course. My dad’s schedule would ease up by the end of the week. He’d come home with flowers or a bottle of wine and things would go back to normal.

“Do you want jam?”

I shook my head. My mom walked over to the counter and poured what remained of the filter coffee into a travel mug. She twisted the lid on with a snap. Again her eyes jogged toward my dad. I wished she would watch me and learn. The trick was to hope for his attention silently, will it in a steady, invisible way.

When I was younger and there’d been no one to look after me, my dad sometimes took me to the hospital with him. He’d leave me in the nursing station, a see-through cubicle that bubbled onto the hallway, and tell me to wait. A nurse would usually give me some paper and whatever colored pens she could dig up, but coloring was the last thing I wanted to do. The nursing station was beside the elevators, so I could see everyone come and go. I planted my elbows in front of me, bones sharp on the desk, made a hammock for my chin. I focused on the people in regular clothing. If they turned right, they were heading toward the neurology wing. If they turned left, they were my dad’s patients. I tried to deduce who was who in the few moments before they turned. I searched their faces for signs of craziness. It wasn’t obvious the way you’d expect. The ones with the strangest ailments, tremors that hijacked their hands, bandages choking their heads, usually turned toward the neurology clinic. The crazy ones looked normal. I remembered tired women in clothes that didn’t fit quite right, not always the wrong size but somehow the wrong idea, a sweater that must have itched, a bag that dug marks in a shoulder. If these people seemed anything, I would call it pensive, or maybe just a little distracted. Most of the time they were girls.

I would watch them again on their way out of my dad’s office, study their expressions for improvement. I was sure I saw ease across eyebrows, as though a bad thought had been removed. This was my dad’s accomplishment. Darkness captured his interest, things that grew moldy in shadows. Loudness, flashiness, the prime-time girlie stuff he rolled his eyes at—all that he couldn’t stand. In the car ride home I would stare flatly through the windshield, let my eyes find the deadness of a patient’s. I tried to evoke my own hospital feeling, the sad chime of the elevator, the bigness of life and death. If I concentrated enough, the feeling would emanate from every feature on my face and my dad would notice it, see a heaviness he understood.

“I’m off.” My mom had her travel mug in one hand and her laptop case in the other. She had three kisses for me, forehead, cheek, and cheek. Her hair swung toward me and the pearl did too, an opaque teardrop knocking the cleft of my chin. “Have a good day, sweetheart.” One last glance shot toward my dad before she turned to leave the kitchen.

I left my dad at the table without a word so that I wouldn’t disturb him the way my mom had. I brushed my teeth slowly in the upstairs bathroom, trying not to look in the mirror. I knew what kind of day it was and I didn’t want my reflection to confirm this. But a mean urge wormed up the back of my neck. I lifted my head and squinted at the little person squinting back at me. It was a small day. I had them every couple of months and they crept up without warning or explanation. It was hard to pinpoint the exact place where I seemed to shrink, but it was there, somewhere, like an invisible weather front pushing in from all sides. I placed my hands on either side of the medicine cabinet and leaned in toward the pale blob of my face. Yesterday it had been normal. Now it was unreasonable in its compactness, as if every feature had slipped a millimeter inward overnight.

I walked to school and stared at the traffic. It was cold and my breath made clouds in front of my nose. The street had been plowed about two hours earlier, before the city got out of bed, but I knew snowplows often missed black ice. I looked for older cars, the ones that wouldn’t have antilock brakes. They were easy to pick out because they were painted dull colors that nobody liked anymore and had long, flat hoods that made me think of alligator snouts. I watched their rear tires and waited for the moment that they’d hit a dark patch of invisible ice. The brakes would lock, the wheels would spin, and the car would swing onto the sidewalk and give me a concussion.

I got to school and walked along the parking lot to the first classroom, trying to crush the maximum number of salt crystals beneath my boots. The school was being renovated that winter and our classes had been transferred to a row of newly delivered portables. They were white rectangles, big metal shoeboxes that extended all the way to the school’s back fence. I walked up the steps of the first one, the grade-eight math portable, kicking my boots on the final ledge to knock off snow and pebbles. The lighting was fluorescent, and I breathed in the familiar smell of something plastic and squeezable, a bit like a rubber duck. I took my usual desk in the middle and muttered hello to the kids around me.

I pulled my binder out of my knapsack and listened to their conversation. They were talking about a party they’d been to over the weekend. Julie Chang’s party. I hadn’t been invited, but that was okay because I would have had to miss a ballet class to go. They were discussing Chicken, the game where male hands wandered up female bodies until the owner of the body decided she’d had enough. I had never played Chicken before; the idea made my stomach feel like it was rotting. Everyone would be watching. I looked down at the small bumps that barely lifted my sweater. Inadequacy slithered up from my groin.

The lesson began and my eyes drifted from the blackboard to the window. It was snowing now; fat white flakes disappeared into the mud of the soccer field. What would I do if I were forced into a Chicken situation? What I needed was a plan. I sucked in my stomach so that my ribs puffed out. I sucked in even harder until it hurt. It would be a tricky position to maintain for more than five minutes, but it made my chest inflate with a buoyancy that might be mistaken for boobs. It did more than that, too, taking me away from my body, lifting me out of the disgrace.

At four o’clock, I took the bus across Bayview Avenue toward the Wilson School of Ballet. The buildings shrank and lost their color, becoming low concrete blocks on either side of the road. The final landmark was a church with gray bricks and a bulging chimney. You wouldn’t know it was a church if it wasn’t for the thousand pieces of broken gold glued to its far side in a big Jesus mosaic. The ballet school sat next to it, separated by a snowbank that, today, made the shape of a long, bumpy creature, maybe a humpback whale. I pulled open the door and walked into the foyer.

A group of older girls were stretching on my left. I loved the older girls, especially the ones with long hair. A few of them were going to make it as professionals, that’s what all the parents said. I looked at their legs, long and muscled on the floor. I wanted to wrap my hands around them. A red-haired girl called out my name and waved. Her name was Emily and she liked me. Once, when I was leaving the studio, she’d tapped me on the shoulder. I felt her slender fingers on my bare skin. “You’re soooo skinny,” she said sweetly. Her friends agreed too. They shook their heads and smiled reprovingly. “Do you eat anything?” a second girl asked me. “She’s so cute,” a third one said. Another time, I found a chocolate bar taped to my locker. A Post-it note was stuck to the wrapper.
Eat up!
it advised in permanent marker.
You need it.

I waved back at Emily. A smile was wriggling up inside me, but I stopped it with my lip muscles so that I wouldn’t look dumb. I went down the hallway to the change room. I pulled on my tights and leotard along with the other junior girls and coiled my hair into a bun. Then I walked toward the studio. As I approached the two steps of its entrance, Mrs. Kafarova glided into the doorway. She crossed her arms over her spandex bodysuit and peered at me beneath two turquoise eyelids.

“You hev your letter?” Mrs. Kafarova frowned. She normally frowned as she spoke, as if language itself was distasteful to her.

I nodded and told her the time and date of my audition. Her frown deepened. Auditioning for the Royal Toronto Ballet Academy had been her idea. She’d pulled me into her office a few weeks ago and stared at me menacingly from her swivel chair.

“Georgia, it iz time you were in proper akedemy.”

I looked up at the posters on her wall. They were from the Soviet Union and the images looked smeared, blue backgrounds that bled into the dancers as if the paper had been held under water.

“Yes of course my school, iz very good.” She closed her eyes for a second, bowed her head, as though accepting applause for her school. “But you will hev future. And to hev riel future, you must hev riel training. Many hours, every day. And then every day, many hours, all again. Yes?”

I nodded solemnly. I knew I was experiencing the kind of moment that people talked about, one I’d remember for the rest of my life.

Now I stepped into the studio toward her. Mrs. Kafarova grabbed my arm and squeezed. She wore enough rings to handicap an average hand and they pushed against the underside of my wrist.

“You must hev good picture for zhe application. You must hev your hair perfect. You must make your lips pink.” She stared hard into my eyes. “Promise me you will hev your lips pink.”

I promised her I would. I joined the other girls at the barre.

“Please!” Mrs. Kafarova commanded the pianist with one dictatorial foot stamp.

Class started slowly, the first piano chords soft, bendable, as we eased our muscles back into familiar tensions. In the wall-length mirror beside me I saw fifteen bodies moving in unison, charging the air with silent effort. The chronically uncomfortable person that possessed me in ordinary life let go of her spindly arms and Tinkertoy legs. A volt buzzed up my spine and I grew between each vertebra. My small day was officially over.

“Girls!” Mrs. Kafarova stopped the pianist with another foot stamp. “Enough.” She dismissed us with the back of her hand, walked away from the barre. “You stretch. We do center.”

As we pulled our legs around our bodies on the floor, Mrs. Kafarova tidied herself in the mirror. She smoothed two hands on either side of the yellow hair that contoured her head like a travel pillow. She reapplied lipstick on her skinny leather lips. She adjusted the sash on her black teaching frock and turned sideways to examine her profile, nodding at what looked back at her. I imagined she saw herself not in this reflection, but in the framed forty-year-old photos that hung in the school’s main hall. There, in black and white, a fire-eyed blonde in a sequined tutu soared across the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre. Two white legs scissored the air, her back arched onto a tilting crescent foot.