Strip by Andrew Binks Read Free Book Online Page A

checkups—when she could afford it.”
    He turned to my mother. “How long have you known this?” But she just took a sip of her drink and went back to the kitchen.
    â€œShe didn’t know,” I said. He’d made his point and from that moment we rarely talked. I had wronged him and his dreams and his agenda. My mother stopped talking to either of us. She’d sit in the sewing room under her poster of Nureyev and Fonteyn. I imagined her weeping though I could never be sure. I had done enough to shame them for life. There was no turning back. The distance helped me find a kind of bravado, and as a result I made another magical leap toward becoming a competent dancer. I had little—even less—to lose anymore. During his pre-dinner, post-looking-in-people’s-rotting-mouths drink, I’m sure I asked him why he was so against something so cultured, so refined, so creative. Maybe I just said, “Why do you hate that I dance?”
    â€œI’ll tell you something about Madame Défilé. She stopped coming to see me because she owed me so much. I gave up trying to get even a nickel out of her. Do you want to end up like that? Teaching little girls to point their toes. Worrying about when the power will be cut?”
    â€œShe danced with Les Ballets Russes.”
    â€œAnd she’s going to die a poor, old lady.”
    â€œBut I’m good. I really am.”
    â€œYou don’t have the talent. After one year, at your age?”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œFine. Do what you like, take up knitting for God’s sake, as long as it doesn’t interfere with school.”
    It was long overdue, this parting of ways, and after that I wondered if part of Madame Défilé’s fiery temper tantrums toward me were for my father.
    Â 
    Daniel’s words broke my reverie. “You will make your parents proud someday, and put that Company to shame. Believe me.”
    And the streets in Montreal were different now that I was free.
    We went north along rue Berri, past rows of old walk-ups, and stopped in front of an iron staircase leading up to a massive flat. The stranger who answered the door raised his eyebrows to Daniel. Daniel touched the middle of my back and gently pressed me through the doorway. Six men sat on low plush couches and rat-a-tatted Québécois. One of them, who had the look of Hitler youth—good-looking but evil at the same time with a protruding brow and chin, and wavy, very bottle-blond hair—massaged my scalp and told me I was too tense. This was typical; I seemed to attract these kinds of comments. And the massage didn’t surprise me as I am sure he had hoped it would, because Kharkov had reminded me more than once that as long as I remained an uptight Anglo-Saxon, I would be stuck in the corps, then after I became second soloist, it was forever second soloist, never principal as long as, and on and on…
    The others ignored me.
    We sat around a low table and alternated drinking mimosas with dark coffee and nibbling daintily on lox, cream cheese and bagels, which was heaven and hell for me: it was my day off and I needed to eat, but with reckless guilt-free abandon, not restrained bites. Sunday was time-out from diet, discipline and dance. For two hours, I nodded politely at their babble, but knew my cursed blank stare was most likely working against me. I understood them perfectly when they said I didn’t understand French, which happened before and after pauses, but then their chattering would start up again. I so wanted to tell them I understood French quite well, but not Québécois.
    None of them cared about the Company, or me, or dance at all for that matter. Not one of them had seen the show. In retrospect, Daniel must have had some disdain in socializing with dancers. Justifiably so—dancers could be crushingly boring to outsiders, never to themselves: when you are taught that what you do is the most important,