Free Strip by Andrew Binks Page A

to do—the big companies they only want paper dolls who have never had a period in their lives—am I right, Louise?”
    She rolled her eyes—another of her big assets—brown and dark, arched eyebrows. She was the kind of woman that made you say, If only I were straight … “You see? We do need another male.”
    â€œWe need a good male.” Bertrand slammed his hand on the table.
    â€œâ€™e’s jealous.”
    â€œOf whom?”
    â€œYou’re jealous of Jean-Marc, Madame’s pet,” she shouted back at him, as if jealous of his jealousy. She turned to me. “Madame would do anything for Jean-Marc.”
    Jean-Marc, the other male dancer, was their bone of contention. Bertrand obsessed about Jean-Marc. And Louise was miffed by Bertrand’s obsession.
    â€œWe need another male for our New York tour.”
    â€œNew York?” Music to my ears. Daniel would see.
    Madame brought the rest of her little company to Montreal to see Le Ballet Naçional de Cuba at Place des Arts. The hall was filled with Montreal dancers from the Conservatoire, Eddie Toussaint, Les Ballets Jazz and any students who could afford it. I shared the row with Bertrand, Louise, Madame and the Quebec dancers. We waited for Alicia Alonso, the blind legend, to perform with lean, brown-skinned men who swirled around her, doubling as seeing-eye dogs. I closed my eyes, pretending to be meditating. Instead saw my young self in the audience one snowy Edmonton night.
    Big old cars—Cadillacs, Impalas, Buicks—skid toward a downtown theatre. There I am, peering over the window’s ledge into a continuous stream of snowflakes flying by the car. Bored voices from the front seat drop in and out of my little window-world, blankly telling me I am on my way to see something great, that I would probably never see again.
    Ballet.
    It’s your father, (she calls him) who said, “I don’t know why we had to bring him along, he won’t remember.”
    Your mother, (he calls her) said, “It’s easier than getting a sitter.”
    Bringing me along turned unlucky for him. I could have clung to her but, no, I hung on his jacket sleeves, and the curses he muttered under his breath. The theatre was velvety and everything swirled upward. The seats were soft enough to fart silently, unlike the harsh wood pews at Bellamy Baptist. In that world of gilt and gold and plush fabric, the smells were thick, too. A woman’s powdery perfume drifted down her Dippity-do waves of hair, tumbling over the fur collar spread across the seatback, suffocating me, my throat collapsing involuntarily. And as the fur collar inched toward my little flannelled knees, I wondered if I would ever be a grown-up.
    â€œDon’t touch,” Father scolded.
    â€œLet him touch it, he’s not bothering anybody. Besides,” she whispered loudly, “it’s only muskrat.”
    They never found out about the sticky mint I glued under that muskrat collar, in the dark, or the giant gumdrop I stuck to the back of some woman’s ermine resting on the radiator. But that was when I didn’t appreciate the price of fur.
    People laugh and whisper, lips touch ears, heads tip toward me with that isn’t-he-cute nod and wink, until the sounds fade with the lights and the heavy blood red curtains obey the jab of the conductor’s baton and magically fold toward the corners of the proscenium.
    And who gave a damn about the dancing back then? Anyone could do it—twirls and twiddles. I was more interested in the ballerinas looking like they had been dipped in icing sugar, and the feathers on their costumes that tickled the men’s noses and clung to their sweaty foreheads when they all danced together. I wished, in that silent world, that someone would sneeze. But real swans were much more graceful, I told mother, and they had longer necks, and didn’t clomp on tippytoe.
    All those cotton candy