Various Positions

by Martha Schabas

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Me?” We pulled out onto the street. “Not too far from school. Close enough to walk, really, but—”

  “Yeah.” I nodded as though walking was somehow ridiculous. “On what street?”

  “Just on Richmond. A building past Spadina.”

  “Oh.” I looked out the window, tried to make it seem like I was casually interested. “What number?”

  He paused and I felt his eyes on me. I was asking the stupidest questions. I should make up some kind of excuse, pretend I had a friend who lived on the street and that I wondered whether he knew her, but then he started to smile.

  “Eighty-three. Why, do you know the area?”

  “Yeah. Well, a bit.”

  He looked at me and smiled more. “I’m lucky I have one friend at the academy, Georgia.”

  I hummed as if this were only of minor interest.

  “Yes.” He sighed theatrically. “I’m lucky I have you. Things are … well, they aren’t going so well for me these days.”

  “I know.” I looked down at my lap. “I’m sorry.”

  He made a clicking sound with his mouth. “Yeah, well, so it goes, I suppose. What can we do?”

  I tried to smile reassuringly, but his eyes were focused on the road again. He was confiding in me. Would this lead to something else?

  “It seems that I’m a bully,” he said finally. “A bully.” He shook his head. “Did you know that, Georgia? That I bully young women?”

  “I don’t think you do that.” There had been a meanness in the question, but I knew it wasn’t directed at me.

  “No? Well, I wasn’t aware of it either. I thought we were in the business of graduating more professional dancers than any other school across the country. But no, news brief, that’s actually immaterial.” Roderick whacked the steering wheel with the back of his hand. “What matters is that sometimes, occasionally, I forget to mince my words. That instead of censoring my thoughts and undermining you girls as artists, I actually treat you with respect. Apparently, the School Board doesn’t like that too much, me treating you with respect.”

  I nodded solemnly.

  “Do you like it?”

  “What?”

  “My treating you with respect. Like an artist. Like an intelligent human being?”

  “Of course.” I looked at him so that he’d feel the weight of my sincerity. “Of course I do.”

  I could see the ligaments in his neck tighten. Sometimes in ballet class, if he felt a student was dancing with extraneous tension, he would flutter his fingers gently from her shoulders to the nape of her neck, encourage her to let go. I wanted to do that to him, to reach out and dip my fingers under the collar of his shirt.

  “And that’s the worst part, the most ironic part. I’m accused of bullying while they, they put words in your mouths!” He knocked the steering wheel again. “You girls feel manipulated. You have no self-esteem. You’re suffering psychologically—I’m not kidding you. The School Board claims to know it all.” We stopped at a red light. “I can’t imagine what that feels like. To be a trumpet for someone else’s cause.” His voice was quieter now, troubled but curious. “Tell me what it feels like.”

  “I, uh, I don’t know exactly.”

  “It must—I mean, it must just infuriate you.”

  “Yes. It does.”

  He seemed to like this answer. “You know, some people would even see this as inappropriate. Me driving you home like this.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? That someone could distort something so innocent?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “Amazing.”

  We pulled up in front of my house and I thanked him for the ride.

  “We’ll start regular rehearsals next week.” He rubbed the back of his neck, his fingers inside his collar at exactly the spot I’d been yearning to touch. “Providing I don’t get sued in the meantime for … god, who knows, inciting starvation.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “They can try to do anything. But they have no case. Don’t worry. Beatrice—I mean Mrs. Turnbull—is rallied behind me and we’re getting very good advice.”

  “Oh, good. That’s essential.”

  “Yes. It’s essential.” He looked at me, his face unreadable. “And you will be beautiful as Manon. I’ll invite all the right people.”

  I lifted my knapsack off my feet. It was coming, something was coming now.

  “There are some exquisite extensions in that pas de deux. We’ll showcase those gorgeous legs of yours.”

  My cheeks burned. I couldn’t stop them.

  “You’re blushing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to blush.”

  “I—I know that,” I stammered.

  “Ballet isn’t about that.”

  “Okay.” I nodded hard.

  “Don’t ever be embarrassed about your physical beauty. It will ruin your presence onstage.”

  I focused on the folded cuff of my jeans.

  “Tell me you won’t be embarrassed.”

  “I won’t be,” I said quietly.

  He laughed. “Look me in the eye and say it properly.”

  I raised my head. His eyes were dark. “I won’t be embarrassed.”

  “Good.” He wore a private smile now as though I’d done him a favor. “I care about your career. I really do. I don’t want you to fall victim to these idiots who try to regulate everything and make ballet as banal as their own lives.”

  “Oh.” What else should I say? “Thank you,” I added.

  “Good night, Georgia.”

  I thanked him once more and said goodbye. If he was going to put the moves on me, this was his last chance. I walked up the path to my front door, moving slowly. He could get out of the car and come up behind me, grab me by the waist. I took another step and imagined him ogling me from the driver’s seat, staring at my bum through my jeans, his fingers tapping the steering wheel in indecision. Should he come after me or should he resist? I moved as slowly as possible to give him time. He was probably kicking himself for not trying something earlier. It would be trickier now, the logistics of it. My parents could be in the living room and if he startled me I might scream. He’d have to tiptoe up behind me, maybe cover my mouth with his hand. I’d struggle silently, flail my arms as much as I could, but he was so much bigger. He’d pin my arms to my sides, drag me backward. Before I’d know it, we’d be back in the car.

  I took my house key out of the front pocket of my knapsack, brought it up to the keyhole. I turned around to see what he was doing. But he was pulling into the opposite driveway to turn the car around.

  * * *

  There was a note on the fridge from my mom. Headache—bed—pad thai. I opened the fridge and took out the brown paper delivery bag, still stapled closed, a bill splotched with see-through grease on its front. I heated the pad thai in the microwave and tried to eat. But my stomach felt lined with raw nerves. I put my plate in the fridge and went upstairs. My mom’s bedroom door floated over a sliver of light. I hesitated for a second and then knocked.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  I opened the door. She was sitting up in bed, reading. Only the lamp on her bedside table was on and it cast a long shadow across her face and neck so that she looked like a gloomy photograph. Her expression enhanced the effect, eyes sinking under two apples of darkness. I realized it was the expression she usually had these days, as though something inside her had shriveled up.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  She managed a nod. “Okay.”

  “Do you want me to get you an aspirin?”

  “I took some already.”

  I leaned into the doorway. She was wearing a tank top with silky straps and I saw her again in Isabel’s clothing. I needed to know what had happened, the truth of what my dad had done. But how could I ask? She rested her book on her lap and adjusted the pillow behind her shoulders. H
er sadness looked different tonight. It worried me now and I could feel it more clearly, like a pebble pressing into my toe.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  I ground the ball of my foot into the carpet. I was afraid of my own questions. I knew what men were capable of now, the way their lust set the rules for everything. Girls could feel it even when nothing was said. I had accepted this. I had seen it in Roderick and accepted it and maybe this was something my mom had never done. And then she let the unfairness make her miserable.

  “Is something up?” she asked.

  “No,” I whispered. “Good night, Mom.”

  “Good night,” she said, and looked back down at her book.

  A few hours later, I was trying to sleep and not succeeding. I closed my eyes and looked for a cool, quiet place inside my head to curl up, but my mind felt humid and overcrowded. The word gorgeous made an amorphous cloud of sound, everywhere and nowhere, whining like mosquitoes by my ears. Gorgeous was not a ballet word. Roderick had chosen it deliberately.

  I tried to picture Roderick’s naked body. I focused on one part at a time. I made out two wide shoulders and the undulation of chest beneath, pectorals like flattened mounds of dough, chocolate chips of nipple. There would be hair somewhere, but here the image got confusing. Would it be curly or straight and how much would it cover? Color compounded the problem, not so much of the hair, which I imagined must vaguely match that on his head, but of his skin. What was the color of male skin? It couldn’t have any of the pinkness of mine, none of the pale softness of girl flesh that snuggled beneath T-shirts. I aged him across his ribs, painted crystalline formations of sun damage, bluish shadows of veins. But when I spliced his head on top, the picture wouldn’t stick together. Head and neck didn’t match, like one of those kids’ games where everyone draws a different body part.

  Why had Roderick driven me home? I flipped onto my back violently, let the mattress suck me in. The ceiling was truth and I stared at it. He had pretended the ride was a spur-of-the-moment apology, but we both knew this wasn’t true. The act was big, too big, outweighed the size of the offense. Roderick had wanted me in his car. He had wanted to do something. Normal teachers didn’t drive students home anymore; there were probably even statutes against it. I flashed back to the feel of sitting there, the worn upholstery under my legs. There’d been a smell, wires and car dust—I could almost get it back. Some people would even see this as inappropriate. What had he been trying to say?

  I was back on my side, curling into the memory. At the time, I’d seen it as a statement, but now, replaying it, it didn’t sound like a statement at all. Some people would even see this as inappropriate. Roderick had been asking me a question. Possibly several questions at the same time. Did I see it as inappropriate and was inappropriate okay? The statement had been a test, a test any child could identify, but one that had stupidly, unforgivably eluded me.

  My thoughts moved slowly, carefully, letting the clues fall into place. Roderick knew it was dangerous to put the moves on me. He wasn’t inside my head like I was, had no proof of how I might react. In his mind I might be a cluster of girl nerves, innocent and wired tight, frightened of the world. I might wind down the window and scream my tonsils red, open the car door and hurl myself into traffic, tell my parents and destroy his career. He was a smart man, a rational man, and harebrained risks were unthinkable. He needed to ensure that I’d be compliant, that I was up for his moves.

  It was up to me to fix this, to give him what he was too scared to take. Roderick had probably driven home in a huff of disappointment. He was sitting in his condo now, drinking whatever he drank normally, perplexed by the inconsistencies in my behavior. I had caressed his hand in the hallway and now I was acting like a prude. His guard would be up and I’d have to proceed carefully. What I’d have to do was find that narrow space between his new doubts and his real desires and slip inside it. I’d have to pinpoint the very second I became irresistible to him, the second his eyes went funny and he started thinking with his dick.

  I went downstairs to the drawer in the telephone nook. It was a mess of papers, receipts, and elastic bands, but I found the leather case of my mom’s digital camera. It’d been a gift for her last birthday and I’d seen her use it only once. I took it back to my room. I placed the camera on my desk, on an angle so that it faced my bed, and examined the view on the screen. It captured the top of my pillows, two rectangles of ivory cotton like giant tablets of chewing gum, and the white headboard against the pale pink wall. The desk was too high. I scanned my room for something better. My bookshelf. I took four large books off the bottom shelf: An Encyclopaedia of Technology, The Pop-up Book of the Human Body, Balanchine’s Stories from the Ballet, and a French-English dictionary. I made a tower of them in front of my bed, placed the camera on top of it, and inspected the screen. The image sat perfectly, capturing the lilac comforter and the space just immediately above the mattress.

  I turned off the overhead light in my room and replaced it with my desk lamp and the lamp on my bedside table. I selected the timer setting on the camera and the automatic flash. I took off all my clothes and started taking pictures. I had no problem re-creating Mandi’s position, sticking my bum up at just the right angle so that it was curved and taut and exposing the skin in between.

  The printer was with the computer in the basement, so I waited for my parents to go to bed before I tiptoed down. I uploaded the photos and chose four. I printed them and made sure I’d deleted everything before I went back to my room. At my desk, I picked my favorite, one where my eyes had the sleepy look of Mandi’s eyes and where my bum looked bright from the flash. I placed it on top and slipped all four photographs into the front pocket of my knapsack.

  * * *

  I waited until the end of the day to minimize the risk of distractions. It was Friday, so by four o’clock traffic had thinned in the stairwells and most of the staff had pattered off to their cars. I walked down the faculty hallway and knocked on Roderick’s door. When I heard his voice, I stepped inside.

  “Oh.” He looked up at me. His eyes were soft and inky. He was sitting at his desk. The window was open a crack and his hair had a rumpled look. “Hi, Georgia.”

  I pulled on the edge of my jean skirt, forced the waist onto my hip. I told myself to speak. “Can we talk?”

  He looked perplexed. “Of course.” He put his pen down and straightened a couple of papers. “Now isn’t actually the best time, though. Is it something that can wait?”

  “Well.” I looked down at my feet. I’d painted my toenails that morning with a polish that Isabel had left in the bathroom, and I imagined the muggy purple beneath my sneakers, like a row of squarish bruises. “No, I don’t think it can.”

  He turned toward me now, more curious than annoyed. He crossed his hands in his lap and gestured in the direction of the extra chair. “You don’t want to sit down?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay. Do you want to shut the door?”

  I’d forgotten about the door. I turned around and shut it promptly.

  “So?” He opened his hands and left them that way for a second. “What’s going on?”

  I took a deep breath and lifted my chin. I would start the way I’d planned, with a smooth clear statement. But his eyes made this difficult. They were right there, dark and liquid, and my heart pumped. My mind whispered, This is real, those are his eyes. The air knotted in my throat. I cleared it with a thin fake cough.

  “I’m all ears,” Roderick said.

  Now I was self-conscious. The feeling was lawless, spreading everywhere at once. I looked back at my sneakers. I wished I could enter again, exterminate my stupidity.

  “Georgia?”

  I looked up. Roderick’s forehead crinkled with a teasing sympathy and he leaned his face into his hand. “Take your time. It’s okay.”

  “Thanks.” I nodded once. “Okay.”

  I gazed past his head and out the window. His office lo
oked out onto another building and I could just make out the silhouette of a computer and a desk. It occurred to me that I had never thought about this building before, never questioned what kind of offices it housed. I held my chin up and felt my earlier resolve blow in like a weather front, irrepressible and smooth. I closed my eyes for an invisible second so that I could have a moment alone. There was a coolness in my head, sharp as a newly sucked mint, and I reveled in the clarity.

  “So.” He lifted the hand from his face. “Tell me.”

  I took a step toward him, then another. I reached out and lifted his hand from where it rested on his knee. It was heavier than I’d expected and the logistics of lifting a hand that didn’t know where it was going were a little weird. I had to take another step toward him. When his arm was roughly at a forty-five-degree angle, I forced myself to meet his eye again. He looked surprised, maybe a little tense, the side of his face turned to me in a question. I paused. Then I felt it, the resistance in his hand. He sat up straighter, pulled it away.

  “What did you want to talk about?” he said firmly.

  I looked down at my blouse. It was going wrong already.

  “Georgia, maybe we should talk another time.”

  “Us,” I said quietly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I want to talk about us.” I couldn’t meet his eye.

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  He did know what I meant. I felt a charge of confidence, looked up and met his eye. His expression wasn’t what I’d been expecting. It was jumpy, alarmed. He scratched the top of his head.

  “Do you want to chat tomorrow?”

  I looked at him, kept my eyes level. “I know what’s been going on,” I said.

  “Regarding…?”

  “Regarding me.” I willed myself to continue. “Liking me,” I whispered. My eyes dropped to my sneakers.

  “Liking you?”

  I kept my head down. I’d said it. He knew what I meant and I had only to bide my time for a second, wait for him to absorb it and take action. After a moment I looked up.