To my parents
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part II
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Acknowledgments
Copyright
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, decl
are, 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.”
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.
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