Strip by Andrew Binks

thighs, and make me strong, like Madame, but too tight. What had worked for her at the academy in Budapest wouldn’t work for me. My legs were becoming bulky and overly muscular. She was one of those teachers who could only work from the perspective of their own body type, and although her strength had made her an anomaly and a legend, it hadn’t made her a very good teacher. Her reputation was of no use to me. My pants were becoming tight on my thighs. I remember Kent, someone I was yet to meet, using the term thunder thighs . This turbulent honeymoon with Madame was over. It was worse than what I had left on the prairies.
    Even though I was losing my line and my flexibility, I’d survive the misery she was dishing out. And I still wanted to prove myself before taking my final bow. This “fire walk” had happened with Kharkov and each one of the teachers in the Company’s school. You either got no correction, or you got picked on by all the teachers, all at once. In both instances your head would be spinning after a few weeks of the treatment. And now it was happening with her.
    I couldn’t leave empty-handed, and without money. I also needed something—a role, a performance—for the resumé. I ruled out the idea that she might provide me with something good, a gem, a bit of conceited wisdom if possible, like most well-intentioned, yet fucked up, dance teachers I’d had. Perhaps the example of her strength and single-mindedness would be that gift. The way she taught made certain things more obvious: ballet was obviously unnatural and bad for the human form (unless, like Nijinsky or Daniel, you were born a freak of nature with legs and feet like a bird), not to mention it being invented by a mad French king who must have had some kind of strange foot-bondage fetish.
    One night at her dinner table (an easy place to eat small portions after watching her snot-encrusted infants mash food through their angry little fists), over the last of some Hungarian wine, I mentioned that I would have to start looking for a job. She banged the dirty dishes into the sink and said, “You can stay here and pay me rent when you have it.” With the offer she wobbled, then pressed her body close and smiled.
    It was time to go.
    None of the other dancers spoke about money. They boarded with siblings who had also left the folks out in the wilds of northern Quebec, but to brave the city as government clerks and bank tellers and house painters. If any of the dancers did have a job, it was part-time for pin money to buy tights and shoes, not rent and food. Madame spoke English very well when she was angry: “These other dancers are spoiled brats. They don’t understand you need to work. How do you think I paid for my training in Budapest?” This she shouted in the studio for all to hear, exploiting my situation to put them all down, and for a moment Madame and I spoke the same angry language. She seemed excited at the idea of my life beyond the dance studio—as if her secure routine in the narrow world of ballet had become a bore. But it was all an act.
    Right away I started looking for a place to live. I lost my patience; just being under the same roof ruined my sleep. The brat-and-baby noises started early and went late. Every noise started a disturbance in another part of the house, and all of it overlapped, stopped for a moment, and then started up again.
    I lost my precious sleep. As well as needing sleep to recover physically, it was the only escape from my problems. In the meantime, Madame took another boarder, her cousin Milosz, a Hungarian cellist looking to move to Canada. Every day by the time we got home, the old guy had left the kitchen a mess: daily disasters included burned spaghetti, plate upon plate of crusted dried food and one of the kid’s plastic toys used as a coaster for the hot espresso pot, which adhered to the toy and in turn to the counter. She’d swear