ANN

The changing room was not a room. It was the end of a storage closet the art department had cleared out and put a screen across, with a chair, a hook on the wall, and a mirror the size of a dinner plate that somebody had hung too high. Ann could hear the class through the wall — not words, mostly. The scrape of the drawing benches being dragged into their circle. Paper. Somebody laughing once, too loud, the way people laugh when they’re nervous and don’t want anyone to know. On the other side of the wall, twenty strangers were waiting for her to walk out in her robe and take it off. She had practiced that walk in her mirror every night for a week, and the mirror, she understood now, had been leaving out the twenty strangers.

She had been a modest girl on purpose, good at it, proud of it in the quiet way you are proud of a talent. Twelve years in a plaid skirt at Saint Hedwig’s had suited her — green-and-gold plaid, the same skirt Becky wore now, the blouse buttoned where it was meant to be buttoned, the hem at its regulation length, the clean carried knowledge underneath it all that she was a girl nobody had to worry about.

Now she stood in her slip in a storage closet with her heart going so hard she could hear it over the benches scraping through the wall, and a grief moved through her that she had not expected, because she had loved that modest girl the way you love a house you have kept clean for twelve years. You did everything right, she thought at her, sudden as tears. Every button. Every hem. Her hands kept smoothing at nothing. Hold still. You have held still through worse. You have held still through every Mass since you were six years old. Her breath kept shortening on her, and the Hail Mary, full of grace, arrived the way it had arrived before every test she had ever taken, uninvited and exactly on time.

She had been standing in her slip for four minutes. She knew it was four minutes because she had laid her pale blue Swatch face-up on the folded dress when she undressed, and the second hand had been making its rounds under her eyes since the first bench scraped. Professor Porter had walked her through the room an hour before the students were due, brisk and kind and entirely business, and left her in here to change. Her shoes sat under the chair, toes together. Her purse rested on the dress, and in her purse, folded into the side pocket where nobody would ever have reason to look, a page torn out of the free arts paper from the stand by the Butler library.

MODEL WANTED, it said. Life drawing classes, fall term. Paid. Inquire at the art department office.

She had inquired. That was the thing nobody would believe later — there had been no accident to it, no friend daring her, no wrong turn. She had read the ad standing in the library doorway with her work bag on her shoulder, and set it back in its stand, and gone back on Friday and torn it out along the perforation as neat as you please and put it in her purse. She drove up the hill to Basse College on her afternoon off. Seven dollars an hour, the woman in the office had said. More than the realty paid. She had wanted it from the library doorway. Three weeks of driving past the turnoff hadn’t changed it, and neither had the drive back down the hill. But she had done the tearing herself. She wanted that on whatever record there was.

At noon her mother had been live on the little office television, reporting in the wind in front of half of Pittsburgh; on Sunday the same woman would be at the Mars table in an apron, serving noodles. Now it was a quarter past six on a Tuesday in the middle of October, and Ann was standing in a storage closet in her slip, with no name anywhere on the door.

“Two minutes,” the instructor said, through the wall, not unkindly. A working voice, a woman who had said it ten thousand times. “Get your boards ready. We’ll start with gestures.”

Ann took the robe off the hook.

It was her own robe — short, pale blue, bought at the J.C. Penney in Butler expressly for this. She had stood in the lingerie department for a long time choosing it, because it was the only part of the costume anyone would ever see her choose, and because a girl ought to own the thing she was going to be taken out of. She put it on over her slip, then stopped, and took the slip off underneath it, the way she had practiced in the apartment with Jan at the movies — the robe settling onto bare skin all at once, neck to knees, a held breath of a garment. Under it, her skin felt newly invented. No man had ever seen her. A boy from Mars had gotten his hand under her sweater in a parked car the spring she was seventeen, and gotten it politely and completely removed, and that was the entire history of her body in company. Every inch of her under this robe was unvisited country. She had wrapped the belt twice around her and tied it in a bow, and she checked the bow the way she’d been checking it in her mirror at home, every night for a week. It would hold. It would also open with one pull. She understood, standing there, that both of those things were the entire point.

Her hands were not shaking. She had expected them to shake, and somehow that was worse — it meant this was really her, doing this, and not some braver girl she’d be able to blame. She breathed the way she had counted rosaries at nine years old, in tens, her thumb walking her bare fingers, until her heart came down somewhere near the speed of ordinary clocks.

She went out.

The floor was cold through the studio carpet. She could hear her own feet on it, which no girl should be able to hear over twenty people breathing, and she heard them anyway, all the way to the platform. Nobody in the ring looked up. She would learn later that this was the room’s manners — the class kept its eyes on its boards until the robe came off, the walk out belonged to the model alone — but standing in it, it felt like crossing a church with everyone praying: twenty people being good, loudly.

The studio was all windows and light — tall windows on the north wall, the light gray and even, and the ring of them already in place: twenty students, give or take — cuffs rolled, sweaters big enough to hide in, a Walkman clipped at one boy’s belt with the cord run up inside his shirt — on their benches and easels turned in toward the platform like a congregation that hadn’t decided yet whether to believe. The platform was a foot high, carpeted, with a stool on it and a chair and a folded length of cloth, and at its edge a little space heater already glowing orange, because Professor Porter — whose name was on the door and whom Ann would call ma’am for exactly one more minute — had told her: you’ll be cold before you think you will. The stillness does it. I keep the heater on for all my models.

“Class,” the instructor said, “this is our model for the term.” She did not give Ann’s name. Ann understood that this was a courtesy so old it had stopped looking like one: in this room she would not be a person with a name and a job and a mother fifteen minutes away. She would be the model. The word was a wall and the wall was a mercy, and she climbed up onto the platform inside it and stood next to the stool with her heart going like a fist on a door.

“You can hang your robe on the hook there. We’ll do ten gestures to warm up. One minute each. Ready when you are.”

Ann put her hands on the belt.

She had rehearsed the order of it at home — belt, shoulders, step down out of it, hang it up — but rehearsing in an empty apartment and doing it in a ring of twenty held pencils were different countries. The belt was under her fingers, wrapped twice, tied in a bow, hers, and it would open with one pull, and everything she had not rehearsed was the size of the second in which she hadn’t pulled it yet: she could still tie it tighter instead. Say I feel ill — nearly true — take Porter’s kindness and the door somebody would hold for her, put her dress back on in the little closet, and be home by seven with a story she would never have to tell a living soul. The pencils waited. Not impatient — that was worse. Patient. And you’d know, she thought. Every Tuesday for the rest of your life, you’d know.

She looked down at her hands — traitors in good standing — and addressed them the way Sister addressed a classroom, without raising anything: you know how. They did it. The belt came loose in her hands with a sound like a sigh giving up, and the robe opened, and she got her shoulders out of it and stepped down out of it and hung it on the hook with enormous care, as if neatness were a sound she didn’t want to make, and turned around.

Nobody gasped. Nobody even looked up all at once — that was the mercy and the strangeness of it. Twenty heads bent over twenty boards in a ragged wave, charcoal starting to move in little scratchy gusts, and here and there a pair of eyes coming up to her and going down again, up and down, the rhythm of people reading a page. She was being read. She had known the word for the fear of it since she was fourteen and it was happening in a bright room on a carpeted platform and the world had not ended. The heater’s breath reached her knees. A radio was on very low out in the hall — the college station, mostly voices and weather, and just then a song under it, Cyndi Lauper singing about true colors, turned down to almost nothing.

“Gesture one,” the instructor said. “One minute. Go.”

So she moved.

She had worried about the poses — what do I do with my arms, what does a model do — but it turned out the body already knew this language. Reach. Turn. Bend like you’re picking something up off a beach. Hands on hips like you’re waiting for a bus that’s late. Between poses, while the pages turned, her eyes kept finding the pale blue robe on its hook by the door — the whole road home hanging two yards from the platform. One minute each was nothing, it was less than nothing, the minute hand flew, and the poses poured out of her and the charcoal kept time and by the sixth one she understood that she had been wrong about the room: it wasn’t a ring of judges. It was weather. She was standing in weather, and weather doesn’t judge, it just moves around you.

“Longer now,” the instructor said. “Fives. Take your time in them.”

The five-minute poses were where the cold found her — the heater helped, but stillness is a temperature — and where the ache started, low in the standing leg, a bright thread of it up into her hip. What she hadn’t expected was that she could feel where she was being looked at. Not everywhere, but now and then a gaze would settle and stay a moment, on the line of her hip, the backs of her knees, and her skin knew it before her eyes did, the way skin knows a hand is coming a half-second before it lands. She learned to breathe into the ache and let the breath out slow and to think about anything else: the grocery list. The oil light in the Jeep. Her mother’s handwriting on the recipe card for the thing with the noodles. Her body held still and her mind wandered off like a dog let out, and each time the instructor called time she came back into herself all at once, surprised to find she’d been a statue.

“Last one,” the instructor said. “The long pose. Twenty minutes. Use the stool — you’ll want it.”

Ann sat down on the stool.

The stool was backless, wooden, worn to a shine in the middle of the seat by every model who had ever sat out a term on it, and she arranged herself the way the instructor had shown her before the class came in — one foot up on the stool’s rung, knee fallen open, the other foot on the platform, her weight settled into the hip, her back straight without being stiff, one hand resting loose on the raised knee and the other down along her thigh. It felt, arranged, like the most natural thing in the world, like sitting on a porch step in July. That was the lie of the first two minutes. By minute five the pose had become a country she had to hold with her whole body: the straight back a wall her shoulders had to keep rebuilding, the raised knee a stone, the still hand on it the heaviest thing she owned.

“Mark your pose,” the instructor said quietly, to her, a voice pitched just for the platform, and Ann watched her come up with a roll of tape and kneel — actually kneel, a grown woman in good slacks — and put two small crosses of tape on the carpet: one by her heel, one where the stool’s leg met the platform edge. “When you take your break, that’s how you’ll find it again.”

“Thank you,” Ann said — the first words she had spoken since she climbed up, and they came out smaller than she expected.

“You’re doing fine,” the instructor said, in the tone of a woman reading a gauge. “Ten more. Then break.”

Ten minutes is not a long time anywhere else on Earth. Ann lay down in it. By the long pose there was a buzz in her with no single address — her skin, her ears, the backs of her knees, lower, everywhere at once. She could feel the blush come up her chest — she had always blushed with her whole front, neck to breasts, fair skin keeping no secrets — and there was nothing to pull up over it. The heater had her left side. The cool air had her right, and the cool air had the rest of her too, moving over skin that had spent eighteen years under cloth — the insides of her thighs, the open country of her belly. Between her legs, where the pose had set her knee fallen wide, the air arrived like something with fingers, cool and unhurried — and Daisy, her mother’s polite word for it, the word from a kitchen-table talk about keeping covered, was uncovered to a roomful of strangers and answering them all by herself. She was wet. It had come without consulting her, and it sat in her awareness hotter than the blush, because the blush she could blame on the room. This she could only blame on herself: some warm machinery low in her had heard twenty pencils going and answered like this was what the sound was for. Her mother had been saying it all her life: good girls don’t expose their breasts. Hers were exposed, nipples hard in the cool air, moving with every breath she took — and there was nothing she could do about any of it from inside the pose. She had been undressed before — baths, the doctor, her own mirror — but she had never been naked, air on all of her at once, and naked was not a condition. It was a sensation, and it didn’t stop. Sweat gathered between her breasts and ran one slow line down her stomach, and she let it travel. Wiping it was not in the pose.

She kept her eyes soft the way she’d been told — don’t stare at one student, pick a place on the far wall — and let her mind run: the desk at the realty, the showing book. Jan’s laugh through the apartment wall. Her mother’s kitchen. And underneath all of it, steady as a pulse, the knowledge of the room: twenty people, and her, lit and naked and entirely unhidden — down to her tan lines, the swimsuit she’d worn all summer printed pale on her skin — she had thought being seen would feel like being opened. It felt like being a window. Light just went through. It had nothing to do with her at all.

Which is why she noticed the one pair of eyes that didn’t do it that way.

She couldn’t have said which bench. Third or fourth around, on the window side — a boy, a young man, really. His charcoal had stopped. Everybody else’s hands were moving in the scratchy gusts, up and down, page and model, page and model. His hand was still on his knee and he was just — looking. Not at the pose. The pose was the knee and the hip and the line of her back. He was looking further in than the pose. He was looking the way you look at a person in a photograph you are trying to remember for later, when the photograph is gone.

Her breath went shallow without asking her. Heat climbed her face, went down through her chest, low into her belly, and lower. The warmth that had been idling in her all pose stood up and paid attention, all of it aimed at one bench on the window side. Twenty people had been looking at her body for an hour. This was a hand. She could feel Daisy answer him — a slow deepening, a pulse with his name almost on it — and her raised knee wanted, traitorously, to close, and the pose said no, and the wanting to close and the being held open sat in her together like two hands pressed palm to palm. She held still through it by main force, astonished. Nothing in the parked car had done this. Nothing she had ever done alone in her room, thinking her wicked thoughts with her heart slamming, had done this. She had been naked in front of twenty people for an hour and weathered it like weather — and one boy had stopped drawing, and it had undone her entire arrangement.

Somewhere around the fourteenth minute, the wanting to stop arrived, whole and sudden — and it did not arrive as a thought. It arrived as choreography. The hand on her raised knee wanted off its post, wanted across her body, wanted her breasts covered and then lower, Daisy first of all, wanted to be a door — and under the hand, deeper, the rest of her had already stood up in her mind and was going: down off the stool, across the carpet, the robe off its hook and around her in one motion, out the door and down the hall with the robe belt streaming, the little closet, the dress over her head, shoes, purse, the stairs, the cold October air on her face like forgiveness, the Cherokee starting on the second try the way it always started, down the hill and home to Butler by seven-thirty with the whole evening converted into a story she would never tell. She could see every step of it lit like a hallway. Her weight was already shifting on the stool toward the doing of it; her heel had found, all by itself, the exact place on the platform edge it would push off from.

She breathed in tens. She looked at the tape crosses on the carpet, at their plain neatness. Seven dollars wouldn’t have held a cat in this room. Porter’s kindness wouldn’t either. But underneath the urge to run was the wanting that had torn the page out of the paper and driven her up the hill and untied the bow — and it was still there. She still wanted to know what happened next.

She kept the hand where the pose had put it. She put her heel back where the pose had put it. She stayed. It was the first time all evening she understood staying as something she was doing — not a condition, not a trap. A hold, taken on purpose, in her own hands.

She should look away — the far wall, the soft eyes, that was the rule she’d been given and she’d been keeping it all evening. She looked at the far wall. She counted the instructor’s soft footsteps around the outside of the ring. She thought about the oil light in the Jeep. And then, because she was Ann and she had torn the page out of the paper herself and driven up the hill herself, she did the thing she had not planned, the only unrehearsed thing in the whole evening: she looked back.

He didn’t drop his eyes. That was the whole of it, and it rearranged the room. Twenty students had been looking at her all evening and she had been weather to all of them and they to her; this one looked at her and didn’t drop his eyes, and she didn’t drop hers, and the pose held — the tape on the carpet, the ache in her back like a plumb line, the heater ticking — and someplace in the middle of her, in the place where the fear had lived since she was fourteen years old, something that had always been clenched simply and quietly changed its mind about what it was for.

“Time,” the instructor said. “Good. Robe on, take five, drink some water. We’ll reset the same pose after the break — I want the light while it’s still with us.”

Ann stood up out of the pose slowly, every joint reporting in, and took the robe off its hook, and put it on, and wrapped the belt twice and tied it, the way she had at the beginning. The cloth felt different on her skin than it had an hour ago. Louder, the way everything feels louder on skin that has been out in the sun. The break was five minutes, and the five minutes were hers to rest in, and she stood in the robe with the pose still burning in her shoulder and was sorry — actually sorry — that they would take as long as they took.

She wasn’t cold anymore. She hadn’t been cold for a while. She stood there in the pale blue robe in the middle of the ring of benches, with her hair coming loose and her shoulder still burning from the pose, and she thought — with the whole evening’s surprise still rising in her like heat — I could do this every week.

I want to do this every week.