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MASTER CLASS: THE BODY IN MOTION

As a child, Andrew loved to dig.

He destroyed his family’s backyard. Ripped open the roots of the rosebush. Dug holes to the bottom of the sandbox. He asked for a shovel for Christmas. He loved machines that dug, with their brontosaurus necks and their scoops like claws. He loved the feeling of earth in his hands. When Ros came into the picture and the three of them built that world just off school property, before the people who lived in the house boarded up their fence, he was in charge of irrigation and moats. When the visiting director tells them that she wants them all to dig deep in today’s movement exercise, Andrew thinks of a big yellow excavator, scraping through the earth.

Just begin , the director says, by being aware of your body .

Honestly: Andrew’d rather not. He feels, to the extent that he can, his slim calves and his stringy arms. His face, so freckled, even more so in the summer. He leaves his body, remembers seventh-grade chorus, where he was the only boy still singing in the soprano section, how the music teacher wouldn’t stop complimenting him on his lovely voice. Remembers Ros and Celia, in the middle alto section, mouthing the words to the song for the winter concert: S’vivon, sov sov sov.”

Move as you normally do , the director says.

He walks. Heel toe. Heel toe. Celia told him once he had a distinctive gait, and he wonders if it’s possible to have a clownish walk. He doesn’t really want to be a leading man, in spite of what he said to Celia. He likes being the clown, is the thing. Likes making people laugh. He cracks wise. People haven’t always thought of him as funny, but it’s something he sees in himself now and likes.

Be aware of others , the director says. Acknowledge them with your body, with the space your body takes up.

Just below the surface, an undercurrent, always there, like a smell coming up from the floorboards, like crocuses peeking through the snow, is Celia Gilbert. Celia Gilbert, his kindergarten wife, Celia Gilbert, who’s almost forgotten him. Celia Gilbert, who thinks he’s moved on.

Now change the way you’re moving , the director says.

He stands up taller, tries to walk like his brothers. They’re older than him by ten and eight years, Andrew clearly an accident, so much so that no one even bothered to pretend. Both were over six feet tall by the time they reached sixteen. One played basketball and the other rowed. Andrew spent his childhood being shuttled around to sporting events, waiting for the day he’d grow. He practiced handstands behind the bleachers, taught himself to do a backbend.

Change it again.

His whole life, Andrew’s been weak. As a kid, he was constantly sick. Always running fevers and suffering stomachaches. He and another kid could take the exact same fall off the monkey bars: The other kid would brush the wood chips off their pants, and Andrew would wind up in the hospital with seven staples in his head. He broke his arm trying to teach himself to do a front handspring. Missing school because of doctor’s appointments and trips to the allergist. Gluten’s the latest on the laundry list.

Move like you’ve had some good news.

Welp, there’s Celia Gilbert again, Celia Gilbert that he can’t seem to get over, even though it lasted two weeks—eleven days, really. Eleven days, two and a half years ago. It started the last week of school before winter break, when everyone is supposed to be doing the most and no one is doing anything, when flurries outside can make the whole class erupt into shrieks of “It’s snowing!” They were partners in computer literacy, designing a website for an imaginary company. They touched a lot. He made her laugh. She smelled like clementines. He went up to Ros and said, “I think I’m in love with Celia.” “No shit,” Ros said. They gave him the combination to Celia’s locker, and he planted a trail of peppermints all over the school, taped to flash cards with clues as to where she might find the next one. Ros helped him think of the riddles. It was the closest he’d ever felt to Ros: trying to win over Celia.

Now this news is even better , says the director.

Eleven days, but it was the start of winter break, so they saw each other all of four times. The first time, he misread the movie times, and so instead of seeing a movie as planned they wandered around a Target, reading each other sympathy cards from the greeting aisle. The second time they rode bikes around the college campus by Celia’s house. It was a production: putting air in the tires, blowing cobwebs from helmets. It was twenty degrees, the coldest day California had seen in decades. After fifteen minutes of riding, they were sweating beneath their jackets but their hands had frozen into claws. He blew on hers to warm them up, rubbed them between his own hands.

The third time, his parents accidentally locked him out. By the light of his phone he hunted for the key in the bottom of the right terra-cotta pot that stood amid a thousand identical terra-cotta pots in their backyard greenhouse, the one he’d been scared of as a child, the one he was still sort of scared of, honestly, drafty and full of spiders and hiding spots, where anything, or anyone, could be waiting. She’d wrapped her arms around him and kissed the back of his neck, an inch or two west of his right ear, a place on his body he wasn’t sure he’d been aware of until that very moment, a place that he still reaches to touch every now and then, just to make sure it’s still there. He touches it now; it’s part of his walk, and every time he touches it, he imagines his limbs getting lighter, more spring in his step.

Change again , the director says. Move like someone who’s been hurt.

Around him, people drop to the floor. Nina Booker-Pope clutches her leg and starts literally screaming until the director reminds them all that this is a silent exercise, please. Sil is doing kind of a drunken stumble; Audrey crawls, drags one leg behind her. Andrew settles on a plodding stagger, hands in pockets, shoulders around his neck, lifted in a perpetual shrug. He’d had to drag the breakup out of her.

Now the hurt is worse , she says.

Eleven days, two and a half years ago. He’s glad they’re friends. But he wishes he could drink from the Lovesick Falls spring and fall out of love in an instant. Because it hurts to know that he was the only one who fell in love. It hurts to untwist a peppermint from its cellophane shell, to smooth the wrinkles from the wrapper while the candy disappears on his tongue, leaving him sugar-toothed, muck-mouthed.

Andrew runs his tongue over his teeth.

The director speaks again. Move like the person you are when no one else is around.

Andrew can’t help it: He pays attention to what other people are doing. Audrey is running laps around the room. Nina Booker-Pope is doing literal handstands. Jesus Christ.

His reaction is to make himself small.

He is a tiny rolling pebble, somersaulting around.

A rock in dirt.

There are his brothers, so much older, saying, Don’t be such a… He shudders at the hateful word.

There is the fear that maybe, maybe, at the rock and the core, there is something he might not know about himself. Not that he could be gay, but that he doesn’t know . That other people know him better than he knows himself. That there is something about him that people recognize , and it’s not fucking fair. How can parts of yourself be a secret to you but clear to strangers?

Now put on armor , the director says.

Later, the director will have them discuss their discoveries—what they noticed, how it changed their movement. Nina Booker-Pope says something about how walking on her hands helped her see the world as it really is. Barf. Audrey will say something really, really smart: about how the armor—that her armor, actually, wasn’t all that different from her neutral walk, and that she wondered if what she thought of as neutral was actually a way of protecting herself.

When Andrew leaves the class, he finds he’s still wearing his armor. It’s frightening and metal, with a big claw like an excavator, and is so loud it scares even him. But he knows it’s there. He can put that armor on now. He doesn’t have to be weak anymore. He can be the thing that rips open the earth, that leaves behind gaping wounds.