I took off my towel and went to the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. I got down on my hands and knees and faced away from my reflection. Arching my back, I brought my chest lower to the floor, trying to bring my bum up higher. It wasn’t a difficult pose for a dancer. I turned around. The position was just about right, my body catlike and defenseless. But my expression was important too. I tried to remember what was so alluring about Mandi’s face, the way she looked quiet and available and completely ready for sex.
* * *
Later in the week, when my mom was done with her seminar, I came down to the kitchen in my pajamas and she made us pancakes for breakfast.
“These are gooey.” She looked down at the fried dough she’d piled on my plate. She took my fork from my hand, pressed the tines into the surface of the top one. It made a squishy sound and she laughed. “How did I manage to make them so gooey?”
“They’re fine, Mom.” I took the maple syrup from the fridge door and handed it to her. Then I sat down at the kitchen island, watched her lay the frying pan in the sink.
“Are you still mad at me?” she asked with her back turned. Then she sat across from me and drizzled maple syrup onto her pancakes. “Are you going to let me get you something for Christmas?”
“I don’t really need anything.”
“No?” Her voice lilted musically. “You don’t want some new ballet clothes or some books or … some jewelry?”
“Not really.”
“Georgia. Since when don’t you like presents?”
I shrugged.
“I could get you some nice pajamas or, I don’t know, a housecoat or … do you need new underwear?”
I looked up from my plate. My fork clanked on its surface.
“What?” she asked hopefully.
All I could picture were the bright strips of fabric that stretched over unexpected parts of Mandi and Puma. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to own clothing like that.
“Underwear?” she asked.
It didn’t seem right to let her buy me things when I was so angry with her, but the idea of sexy underwear made my palms itch. “If you really want to get me something.”
She started to smile. “Of course…” She pressed her lips together. “That seems like a pretty nice idea. Some new underwear. A camisole or something. Some simple lingerie.”
“Yeah. Lingerie.”
“We could go out one afternoon this week. Get you properly fitted.” She was bouncing her legs under the island and she tapped me with her big toe. “Is there … is there any particular reason you want underwear, sweetie?”
“No.”
“There isn’t, oh, I don’t know, there isn’t someone special in the picture? Someone you care about? A new boy?”
I looked out at the backyard, felt my cheeks burn.
“Oh.” Her voice slid melodically through the syllable. “So I’m right.” She paused. “Do you want to tell me about him?”
I shook my head. There was a lump in my throat.
“You can talk to me about these things, you know. Anything.”
I nodded hard. I could feel the serrated ridge of my top teeth as I bit into my lip.
“What’s the problem, sweetie? Does he … is it … does he know how you feel? Does he not like you back?”
I shook my head.
“Okay.” She popped off her stool, took her NUMBER ONE MOM mug over to the coffee machine. I heard the quiet glug of the pour, the simmer of the burner as it yearned for the pot’s replacement. “So there’s a different problem. Does he have a girlfriend?”
My attention was still outside, caught on the orange seat of my old swing, the patch of silver ice beneath it. I didn’t shake my head this time.
“Oh.” There was a glint of satisfaction in her tone. She moved around behind me, placed her mug down in front of me, hugged me from behind. “He already has a girlfriend.”
I considered correcting her, but the words didn’t come.
“Well.” She swung a little sideways so that our hug dipped to the left. Then she released my shoulders and kissed me lightly on the crown of my head. She reached for her coffee and walked to the sliding door. She gazed out at the snow. “You’re very young. Girlfriends are usually pretty temporary.” She stayed still for a few moments, like she’d reminded herself of something that pushed her thoughts far away. Then she turned around and faced me. “We’ll go underwear shopping tomorrow, okay? I actually need a bunch of new things too.”
* * *
She took me to a department store at Yonge and Bloor. She said they’d have all the quality labels there and that if I didn’t find anything we could walk to the boutiques on Bloor Street. We took the escalator up to the third floor, the lingerie department, and she led me along an aisle, the floor milky and impenetrable, smooth enough to skate on. We passed display after display of hanging silky things, transparent panties that dangled from plastic hangers, bras trimmed with forests of lace. The light made jewels in their creases. The air smelled like cellophane, cardboard, and Christmas trees.
At the desk a girl with peroxide hair and long nails was talking on the phone. She reminded me of Puma, and as she raised a finger to indicate she’d be a minute, I let my eyes dip down to where her tank top met her breasts. The skin on her chest had a painted quality, tanned and tinged with orange. I could just see the top of her black bra, crunchy, reinforced lace peeking over the seam of her shirt.
She took me to a fitting room. I took off my shirt and she wrapped a tape measure over my bra. She smelled like sweet artificial strawberries, and as she leaned over me I saw half-moons of white under her arms, small clumps of congealed goo. Her breasts swung right beneath my face as she measured me and for a second they grazed my collarbones. I didn’t move.
“You’re tiny.” She looked at the dimensions on the tape, then up at me. “In a good way.” I smelled nicotine on her breath. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Yeah.” I flicked my hair over my shoulder. “But he’s a lot older than me.”
“Oh.” She leaned away from me, surprised. “That’s cool. My boyfriend’s a lot older than me too.”
My mom had assembled two piles, black satiny stuff for herself and things she thought I’d like. I thumbed through them. They were mostly cotton and lightweight, panties with full bums and pretty eyelets, soft-cup bras you could fold delicately away. They were all wrong, and the wrongness of them, their inadequacy, throbbed from a spot just below my navel.
“What?” My mom picked up a particularly pretty pink camisole, ran it between her fingers. “You don’t like these?”
I didn’t answer. The salesgirl took a step forward. She was frowning in my mom’s direction. She turned to me.
“Give me a sec.”
She came back a few minutes later with a handful of underwear, laid them out on the fitting room table. They were thongs and G-strings in slippery nylons. Some had trinkets fastened to their sides, others had sequins sewn into different shapes on their fronts: hearts, diamonds, and hot lips. I pulled out a pair with a zebra pattern and white fur trim along the top.
“It’s what they’re all wearing,” the girl told my mom, taking a silver one from the pile and handing it to me. It felt like a bathing suit. I looked at the crotch; it was a long narrow triangle, like a skinny bandage. “That stuff”—she pointed at what my mom had selected—“it’s really more early twenties.”
“Oh,” my mom said. She dipped her hand into the pile and pulled out a satiny red thong. She draped it on the back of her hand like it was worth a lot of money, considered it for a moment with a curious affection.
“I know.” The girl reached out and snatched it from her. “It’s so not your thing.”
My mom opened her mouth as though she were going to contradict this, but stopped herself mid-thought. Her hand fluttered to her neck, fiddled with her pearl.
“Here.” The girl handed me something else, a bra on a hanger. It was black and made of
rough, substantial lace with a plastic finish. Even empty, the cups retained the shape of small breasts. “This’ll give anyone cleavage.”
* * *
I chose four thongs and three bras. That night, I laid them all out on my bed and tried to figure out which combination Roderick would like best. I’d done more Internet research and knew that part of the appeal of younger women, aside from their hard bodies and prettier faces, was that they’d wear skanky clothing that men pretended was beneath them but secretly yearned for. If Roderick had a girlfriend his age, she’d wear the kind of underwear my mom had chosen, silky, discreet things that needed to be washed by hand. I took off all my clothes and slipped on the shiny silver thong and the hard, molded bra. I opened my closet door and examined my reflection in the full-length mirror. The nylon string disappeared inside my bum cheeks and then reappeared to make a T along my lower back. I pulled at it, let it snap my skin.
I opened my bedroom door and listened. I could hear the murmur of my mom talking in the kitchen. My dad was at a hospital fund-raising dinner, so she must have been on the phone. I walked down the hallway. The lights were off, but I could make out the bright skin of the naked Goya on the wall. I went down the stairs, planting a foot meticulously on each step, letting the sprigs of carpet absorb my soles. Behind me, I could feel the glowing half-moons of my bum, tingling with nakedness. I tiptoed across the main floor hall toward the basement stairs. I couldn’t see my mom but I could hear her. She was saying I know over and over again into the receiver. I’m going to. I can’t take it. I know. I will. I shut the basement door behind me.
I took the Manon disc out of its laminate envelope and slipped it inside the DVD player. I selected my pas de deux. Manon lifts herself from bed and steps slowly across the stage. The first strains of violin warm bit by bit until they swell into overlapping outbursts. I pushed my arms away from me, my fingers sifting through the air in a sinewy slo-mo. I stepped into the first attitude position. I looked at the TV, where the ballerina held the same pose, her slip floating around her legs. The basement’s dim overhead light blurred the screen right below her and I could just make out my reflection in the TV, the parallel line of my leg and then, instead of a costume, the gleam of my white bum.
TWELVE
I leaned against the radiator in the academy’s lobby and waited for Sixty. She had called me the night before, spoken in a voice of dreamy exhaustion—jet lag, she’d said—and asked me to meet her before our first ballet class that morning. She said she had something to tell me. I pressed my legs into the radiator so that I could feel the columns of heat through my jeans. In my new thong, I pictured it burning long red stripes from my knees all the way up to my hips.
“Hi.” Sixty stepped into the lobby from the residence stairwell. We hugged. Her cheeks were darker and I thought I could smell coconut sunscreen through her shirt. “You look good,” she said. “Older.”
I clenched the muscles of my bum so that I could feel the string of material between my cheeks. I felt like I looked good. I felt older too. We walked down the main hallway of the academy, hand in hand. She told me about her dad’s new house in a city called Mar del Plata, about a terrace framed with jacaranda trees, which had creepy purple petals. There was a steep rocky path to the beach down which she’d tumbled twice.
“I really had one of those moments where I was like, okay, that’s it, my leg is broken, my career is over.”
“Is that what you had to tell me?”
Sixty stopped. “No.”
We were standing in a quiet nook between the main lobby and the stairwell and no one was around. She pulled me in close to her so that I was looking up into her face.
“I almost did it,” she said.
“What?”
“It.”
“Oh.”
“On the beach.”
She waited for me to say something. I didn’t know what to say. I was so close to her face but I couldn’t understand her expression, the funny knot of her mouth.
“He was a lot older than me.”
“How much older?” I asked.
“Eighteen.”
“Oh.”
She told me the story. He was the son of her parents’ friends. There’d been a dinner party on a boat.
“He came up behind me. He put his hand right there.” She reached around to the back of my neck and traced a finger along its invisible hairs. I shivered. “He said he’d been watching me all night. He said he thought I was a model.”
We started moving down the hallway. I listened and looked for Roderick. It made a liquid feeling inside my chest, the constant tipping of anticipation. Sixty was still talking. The boy had taken her to the beach the next night. They’d drunk sweet vermouth from the bottle. He’d rolled on top of her out of nowhere and started to unbutton her jeans.
“It was weird.”
“Good weird?”
“Yeah.” I heard a tremble in her voice. “I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “It was good.”
“How far did you go?”
She looked down at her shoes and shrugged.
“What?” I asked.
She stayed quiet. When she lifted her head, she looked as though something made her nervous, frightened her, even. “His eyes went funny.”
“Like funny how?”
“Like brain-dead funny.”
We stood there looking at each other. I saw diamonds in her irises. For a second I thought she might cry. But instead she moved her eyeballs upward and rounded her mouth in a small O.
“Like that?” I asked.
She kept going, bringing her eyebrows together while she moved her head back and forth like a dunking bird. It made a violent picture, one body beating into another body, but then, out of nowhere, she started to laugh. So I laughed too, even harder than she did.
“Like he could only think with his dick!” she said.
“Oh my god!” I laughed so hard my stomach burned. “Gross!”
We turned the corner into the main lobby and I thought about Roderick. I imagined him rolling his body on top of mine, the feel of his fingers as they reached down and fiddled with my fly.
Sixty squeezed my hand. “Look,” she whispered.
I followed the tilt of her chin toward a girl in the middle of the lobby, sitting on the covered bench. The girl looked down at her lap, so that I couldn’t see her face, only the silhouette of her mousy bun. It was Chantal. She turned her head abruptly, not toward us but in the other direction, as though she’d heard a sound coming down the opposite hall. A man and a woman approached her. Sixty pulled me back into the hallway so that we were more or less hidden behind the dividing wall. Chantal was getting up to greet the couple, but she moved with a troubled slowness, shifting her weight onto her arm and using it to help her up. When she was finally on her feet I saw what was wrong.
“Oh my god,” Sixty whispered. She pressed her fingers into the soft part of my arm.
Chantal’s body had deflated. Two sticks jutted from her jean skirt, thighs barely wider than calves. It gave a sense of backwardness, her legs getting thinner where they should have swelled. Her knees exploded in the middle of it all, two doorknobs of bone. What had she done? Chantal took a step toward the couple and the man put his arm around her, squeezed her from the opposite shoulder like he was helping her to walk. The woman moved behind them, her skirt a frenzy of floral drapes, keeping a pace away. She was about the same height as Chantal, although the wideness of her hips in comparison made her look like a different species. These must be Chantal’s parents. Sixty and I watched silently as they moved in a sluggish threesome down the hall toward the stairway that led to the faculty offices.
I didn’t see Roderick until ballet class. When he walked into the studio, my heart pumped furiously. His collared shirt was rolled up at the arms and his hair looked a little unruly, like he’d been rubbing it with his hands. He greeted us with a clipped hello an
d proceeded almost immediately into the first exercise. It wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Where was the welcome-back speech full of insidious smirks and warnings for the new year? I did my pliés and tendus and waited for him to look at me with sex in his eyes. But his expression had a blankness I’d never seen before. He wasn’t even sneering. I scanned the barre for explanation and noticed that Chantal wasn’t in class.
All the dancers cast in solos and duets were supposed to have a preliminary meeting with Roderick after class, but when we’d finished our révérence, sinking to the ground in voluptuous curtsies, he announced that he’d have to reschedule.
“I’ll post something on the board tomorrow.” He was already halfway out of the studio.
I’d been looking forward to this extra time with him in a smaller group and felt another pang of disappointment. It would have been an opportunity to observe his behavior. How else was I going to prepare myself for the advances he might make when we were alone? I rolled off my leotard and tights in the change room, pulled on my zebra thong. I took out my bun and brushed my hair in many hard strokes. I borrowed Sixty’s new Argentinean lip balm, Rosa Mosqueta, made from wild roses in the Patagonian mountains. On the top of the tin was a flower the color of dried blood, its printed petals unfurled beyond the rim to drape over the side. I unscrewed it and spread my finger along the surface of pale moth-colored wax, rubbed it into my mouth. I looked at my reflection and pictured Mandi. I allowed my lips to part in two lazy pillows. I licked them so that saliva would congeal over the gloss, make shiny beads of wet. Rosa Mosqueta tasted like soapy Plasticine.
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