Mannequin Girl

by Ellen Litman

  Inside the classroom, someone’s father is blowing up balloons, someone’s mother is arranging flowers.

  “Your parents are here?”

  Kat shakes her head, Nope.

  “Mine neither,” says Igor.

  When it’s time, they line up in the hallway, and the Junior Pioneer Counselor leads forward her troops. The banner is carried in, to the roar of drums, the squeal of bugles. “Octobrists are diligent children—they love the school, respect their elders.” Songs are followed by poems, poems by short songs. “Octobrists—honest and deft, brave and adept.” Even Vika is permitted to participate, and she is not exactly honest. “Octobrists—a friendly gang—read and draw, play and sing, have much fun with everything.” And finally, the private moment comes, quivering with meaning, when each of them faces a Young Pioneer, a girl or a boy from the fourth grade, and the needle of the pin is threaded through the fabric on their chests. Something is altered in every one of them, something important is bestowed.

  In the canteen, they celebrate with tea and cake. Kira Mikadze’s mother brought the cake; she is the head of the parents’ committee. She sits sprawled on a chair, and other parents keep asking her what they can do to help. Nothing, she says. It’s all taken care of. Don’t fuss so much, for God’s sake. Sit down, have a piece of cake.

  Then Rosa taps her watch and says, “All good things in good measure,” which means that it’s time for the parents to depart. Rules are rules and schedule is schedule, and homework isn’t going to wait. Though in recognition of this outstanding day, the children may stay in their party clothes for the rest of the evening.

  And this is the best part: the blouse, the bow, the skirt, the devastating lightness as Kat pirouettes rather than walks through the remaining evening hours. She turns out her shoulders and keeps her back straight so that everyone can see how perfect she is, how slim is her mannequin-girl body.

  After supper the girls beg Rosa to allow them to dance. They put on a record and for the next twenty minutes they become one and the same—sweaty, happy, flailing—singing along with the stereo. “Summer, oh Summer!” And Kat is among them, perfect and weightless, dancing as if in her sleep, as if this joy would never cease, as if this moment could be endless.

  THE BRACE she’s given is unwieldy. It smells of leather, metal, glue. It seems to be intended for a much larger person. Kat puts it on in Dr. Bobrova’s office, and once she’s all trussed up, Dr. Bobrova tightens the bolts at her sides. She has a wrench in her desk for just this purpose. She tells Kat the rules: always put it on while lying down, never while standing up; never walk with the head collar unlocked.

  Kat stands frozen by the doctor’s desk—because this can’t be it, this heaviness, this ugliness, this roughness.

  “What are you waiting for?” Dr. Bobrova asks.

  It is a long, slow walk back to the classroom. To be sure, she’s not the first to be lumbered with a brace. Nina Petrenko has hers, and so does Seryozha Mironov. It’s been months since school started, and now the braces on others don’t seem all that ghastly and strange. Yet how different it is to be inside one. With every step, the bolts squeak at Kat’s waist. The metal slats support her head, so she can only move it up or down. How massive it feels, how rigid, despite the strips of leather that cover the slats and the rosy fabric of the corset part.

  By nap time the brace has rubbed her body into a red, blistery mess. Even her chin is red and scraped. “You’ve got to break it in,” says Nina, while Kat sits on the bed examining her sore spots. Nina gives her a spare handkerchief to line the inside of the head collar.

  After nap, Kat has to put the brace on by herself. It takes her half an hour. The lacing gets tangled, and the clamps on the shaft-bows get stuck. She misses evening snack and has to go hungry until suppertime.

  In the morning, the process is just as long and intricate. She has to skip morning calisthenics, which doesn’t bode well for her disciplinary mark. The only good news is, it’s Saturday. “Try practicing,” says Thumbelina. “You’ll get the hang of it.” A kind-hearted creature, she makes an exception and doesn’t mark Kat down for tardiness.

  “Oh, Button,” Misha says, when he sees her downstairs in the vestibule; then just as quickly he backpedals: “You can barely see it. It’s really not that bad. I bet you’ll forget it’s even there.”

  But how can she forget when every squeak, every pinch, every step keeps reminding her? People stare at her—on the bus, at the Culinariya, where Misha buys éclairs and almond cakes. Quick, sneaky looks or prying, lengthy ones. At a crosswalk, a small boy gapes at Kat. “What’s wrong with her?” he asks, and his mother explains in the same loud whisper: “She’s probably broken her neck. I bet she didn’t listen to her parents.”

  This weekend Kat is grateful not to go anywhere. She picks one of Misha’s thick scarves to disguise her head collar. She plans to wear it forever—let people think she has mumps. She once heard her parents talk about a book they read in college in which a man gets turned into a bug. At the time it seemed silly, improbable, but now, studying herself in the mirror, Kat is struck by how insectlike, how unnatural she looks.

  She knows she must practice and she does. By the end of Sunday, she’s mostly mastered it, easing herself onto the carpet, pulling down her panties, stretching out the edge of her camisole, lacing up the corset, fastening the stubborn locks and clamps.

  “I think I’m pretty fast,” she says, when Anechka comes home from her final appointment with Nelya.

  The new dress is ready, and Anechka hovers before the wardrobe mirror. “It’s not too boring, is it?”

  The dress came out well, neither too staid nor too frivolous. It has some solidity to it, which makes it appropriate for work, but also some girlish grace—raised shoulders, pleats, an elegant blue bow at the neck. Nelya has done her best.

  Kat tries to count how many fittings they have been to, how many brace fittings she had. Her mother got a dress, and Kat got a brace, and no matter how you look at this situation, it’s unfair.

  Anechka turns this way and that, frowns a bit at her reflection, though anyone can see she’s pleased. “You think it’s attractive? Not too frumpy or matronly?”

  And seriously, what does she expect? Here’s Kat in her brace, all sore and shivery, a monstrous, miserable thing. The dress, Kat says, looks like a sack. A boring, shapeless sack, something Rosa might wear. In fact, Rosa dresses like that every day.

  “You don’t mean it,” Anechka says, stunned, and Kat, also stunned, stricken by her own meanness, runs off to the bathroom and slides the latch closed.

  How quickly a person can change. A bright and sparkly girl, perhaps a budding genius, becomes a sickly, mediocre slug. A girl who was formerly kind becomes a dark, vindictive creature. She is a bug, inside and out, a gruesome, despicable bug. Is it any surprise that her parents have grown ashamed of her?

  KIRA MIKADZE SAYS, “You’ve really done it, Knopman.”

  It’s Monday afternoon, classes have just ended, and Kat is not aware that she’s done anything deplorable. In fact, she feels she’s held up rather well. But Kira’s looking furious, sticking her finger in Kat’s face, and beside her, the others appear just as mad. Alina Nesterenko. Lida Kravchenko. The viperish Inna Smirnova.

  “You’ve disgraced all of us,” Kira says.

  Kat asks what she is being blamed for.

  “You’re such a retard, Knopman.”

  “Can’t you see she’s pretending?” Lida Kravchenko says.

  “At physical therapy,” says Kira. “You pulled down your panties, and all the boys saw it.”

  “I didn’t . . .” Kat starts. But of course! She was putting her brace on. With all that practicing at home, she’d forgotten about the boys.

  “She’s smiling,” says Inna. “She’s enjoying it.”

  It’s true, she can’t control it. Her lips are creasing into the semblance of a smirk, which happens sometimes out of nervousness.

  “They totally s
aw it,” says Lida Kravchenko.

  “The way they were whispering and pointing.” Inna covers her face. “That horrible Mironov—”

  “Zotov, at least, wasn’t pointing.”

  Kira says, “She’s either a retard, or she did it on purpose. Either way, I’m calling for a boycott. No one talks to Knopman from now on.”

  “I didn’t,” says Kat, and what she means is, How could it have been on purpose? But the girls spin away from her in a motion so smooth you’d think they’d choreographed it. A splash of arms, twitching shoulders, a turn. Through the doorway and into the classroom, where they will speak to every girl in confidence.

  All conversations hush when she enters, and the girls make a show of scattering away. Even the weepers won’t talk to her. And Igor Zotov . . . How studiously he avoids her, how promptly he averts his eyes. When Kat asks to borrow his eraser, he acts as if he hasn’t heard her.

  She tries to be stoic about the boycott, too proud to let on how much the silence hurts her, too mortified to dare complain. It can’t get worse, she tells herself. It simply can’t. But it is getting worse, each day a little more so. Spitballs land in her hair, doors are slammed as she approaches them. Her towel gets dropped into the toilet. Someone puts salt in her tea. And everywhere she goes, there’s the cursed Mironov, circling around her, monkey-like. “Take off your panties, Knopman. Show it to us.” He is loving this boycott. He steals her notebook, draws naked pictures on the cover, and later the notebook makes rounds through the class. They know it’s his work, but they all pretend it’s Kat who did the drawings.

  A week goes by, another one starts. Mironov won’t let anyone forget about the boycott. If it weren’t for him, they would have grown bored with it by now; but no, he won’t let them move on. He shadows her everywhere and even waits for her outside the girls’ room. The moment she comes out, he resumes his hollering. “Show it, show it, show it to us.”

  She dreams of hurting Mironov. Hurting him physically, drawing blood. Never before has she had such primal urges. She’d like to push him down a staircase, or punch him really hard, so hard that he’ll fall over and lose consciousness.

  It happens at the end of medical gymnastics, just a few days before the autumn break. She’s putting on her brace, flat on her back, at her most vulnerable. But because it’s almost break and the day’s been relatively quiet, she doesn’t expect an attack. Even when the boys start gathering around her, she thinks they’re mostly playing and that their game, whatever it might be, won’t go too far.

  She is the mammoth and they are the hunters. They brandish their exercise sticks, do their stupid indigenous dance. There are only two of them this time, Mironov and his sidekick Eremeev.

  The boys are trying to provoke Kat. They prod and strike her feet and shoulders with their sticks. They’ve done it before, so she knows it’s best to ignore them. But the blows of the sticks are persistent and not so light anymore. When one catches her knee, she can’t keep from crying out: “Stop it!” It’s more of a squeak than a scream, and anyway, their therapist, the young and bored-looking Evelyna Borisovna, left the gymnastics room a while ago.

  They draw back briefly, but soon return. And now the game is different. The blunt tip of a stick touches her thigh and inches upward. It is her panties they’re after; they want to hook them and drag them off. “Show us, show us, show us.” You can tell it’s Mironov who’s thought it up. The whole class is watching: Will it work? In the back, someone whispers, “Disgusting,” and Igor Zotov leaves without a glance.

  Disgusting. The word seems to echo. What would her parents think of her? It’s two o’clock on Wednesday, which means they have . . . what? A pedagogic council? Their once-a-month union meeting? She doesn’t know, can’t remember anymore. How did she end up here—on her back, in a brace, on this floor, abandoned among these wicked creatures? Is it because she is also wicked? Or maybe simply weak? “Disgusting,” Anechka would say. She can’t abide weak people.

  Her brace undone and clunking, Kat gets up on her knees. “You freak,” she shrieks at Mironov. “You worthless freak of nature, you ugly dwarf, you miserable crippled hunchback!”

  She sees her words connect with him; he shrinks from the impact, recoils. They’re better than a punch, these words. So powerful and solid. They are bubbling inside her, she can’t contain them anymore. “You’re a hunchback, hunchback, hunchback.”

  ~

  SHE DOESN’T REMEMBER IF IT HURT. There’s the glimpse of him swinging the stick and the quick burst of panic. Some time after: the shine of a pen-light in her eyes. The stick hit her just above the temple; an inch lower and she’d be gone. Years later she can still recall his face, pasty and hideous, twisted with hatred. How odd, she remembers thinking, to be hated like this, so completely. But not the pain, never the pain. Just the swift, blissful darkness that comes a second later.

  7

  NO NEW STUDENTS TURN UP AT ASSEMBLY. KAT is certain of that. She and Jules scrutinize the whole of 7A and find not a single new face. “Figures,” says Jules, and Kat says, “What did you expect?” But she is also disappointed. Their class is rotten, everyone hates them, they haven’t had a new non-loser person since Jules joined the class in fifth grade. They are bad, truly bad. There have been rumors of splitting them up, redistributing them amongst the other classes, and Kat wouldn’t mind that—as long as she and Jules can stay together.

  It’s the first day of the new school year, and like every year the courtyard is awash in bouquets. The school population, lined up in rows for assembly, braces for forty minutes of tedium. A big-time baritone climbs onto the wooden podium. His daughter is starting first grade at their fine institution, so hurray, they’ve got themselves a celebrity. The baritone is portly, with a sweaty and bloated face. For decades now he’s been singing of plentiful Russian fields and unrestrained steppes, and no one has any respect for him anymore, save maybe for some patriotically minded pensioners.

  “Sing for us, birdie!” a boy calls from the back.

  The assembly breaks into titters, and it’s fun to watch the teachers as they try to maintain their composure. Everyone’s turning to look at whoever’s been so brave.

  Kat doesn’t need to turn. She knows. How stupid do you have to be to pull a prank like that? At assembly, no less. “Imbecile,” she mutters.

  “What do you care?” Jules says.

  Kat tells her she doesn’t care, she just hopes he finally gets expelled.

  Jules, a first-rate skeptic, jacks up one eyebrow. Kat has never told her what happened between her and Mironov, and Jules, bless her careless heart, has never asked. All she knows is, they hate each other.

  Jules is runty and skinny and looks harmless enough. That was the first thing Kat noticed when she spotted her at assembly two years ago: a sunny disposition, a warm and mirthful smile. But Jules has a hard center too. You might miss it at first; it takes a day or two to realize. But it’s there in her sure bearing, the way she throws back her shoulders, her flippant opinions, her sharp, unsentimental eyes.

  The moment of hilarity is stifled, and the rest of assembly plays out according to plan, with neither a knot nor a hitch. The speeches carry on, the pupils languish. At last the baritone’s small daughter is released into the wild: she runs through the courtyard shaking a tinny cowbell, signaling the end of assembly.

  No matter what’s listed on the schedule downstairs, the first class of the year is always the Peace Lesson. This year 7A gets Kapitolina P. (code name: Creampuff). She’s nearing retirement, which Kat feels can’t come soon enough. She looks like a giant flaky pastry, with her pompadour hair and bulging eyes. Her subject is biology. She’s been at the school since forever; she’s one of the old guard.

  The old guard toes the Party line. They are loyal to the legacy of Lenin/Stalin, enthralled with the heroic past. The old guard is leery of the liberal press, of ballyhoo artists, of anyone who doesn’t appear sufficiently Russian. You can be sure their Peace Lessons are carefull
y planned: unmask American imperialism, denounce the arms race, expose the capitalist system, then spend the rest of the period singing praise to the virtues of their Socialist society. Freedom to all people! Workers of the world, unite!

  Lately, though, the requisite points must also include perestroika and acceleration—which isn’t something the old guard particularly likes.

  Acceleration’s a new factor

  But it failed our old reactor.

  Now our fine atomic wreck

  Has all of Europe caked in dreck.

  Kat herself doesn’t mind perestroika or acceleration. It’s just that you can’t turn on the nine o’clock news anymore without getting an earful of it. Talk, talk, talk. She is applying to Komsomol this year, so she tries to keep abreast of current events. But the news is often taken up with Gorbachev’s speeches, and he’s so long-winded she gives up and goes to sleep. It’s too confusing, really. Is acceleration a good thing? There is Chernobyl, and there is a girl in 9B—not from Chernobyl, but near—and now her parents won’t let her go home to Ukraine. There you have it, some people might say. There’s your acceleration.

  In the back of the classroom Lena Romanova (code name: Bones) begins to sing: “Felicità.” As if to say, We don’t care about acceleration, we don’t care about American imperialism. We prefer Italians! Which in itself is ridiculous—Italian pop is by now obsolete. But Bones has such a lovely silvery voice, who can resist?

  Creampuff applauds in a mocking way. “May I now get on with my lesson?”

  “You may,” Bones allows, inclining her head like a queen.

  She has this ethereal face, a voice that turns you inside out, and a horrible wreck of a body. A shortened torso and grotesque long limbs. How do you reason with a girl like this? How do you reason with any of them?

  ALL OTHER classes are like families: solicitous, sisterly, a little bland. 7A alone is an aberration. They are the most-despised class in the whole school. There’s meanness in them that is almost pathological. Deep-seated, private meanness.