The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [70]
“And Helen will do a series of poses of women at their toilet,” he said.
I heard a few titters as I put my rolled-up jeans beside my sweater in the hutch. Ah, he is baiting them, I thought, and this gave me another jolt to stay on my feet.
As he explained what this meant, I knew he would be pointing to the basin and washcloth on the platform and to the picture of the old-fashioned tub. I knew I should hurry to disrobe. In just a moment, Tanner would say, “Helen, we’re ready for you.” But I stood in my mother’s slip. I felt the old silky fabric against my skin. I stepped out of my underpants and then undid my bra, pulling it through the spaghetti straps of the slip. Briefly I thought of Hamish waiting for me. Pictured him stretched out on the couch in Natalie’s living room. Then the vision changed, and his head was awash in blood. I put my underwear in the hutch just above my pants and sweater.
Everything about disrobing at Westmore had a rhythm. I walked into the classroom, said hello to a few of the students, glanced at the platform, and went behind the screen. I started undressing as the professor arrived, and continued as he began the patter that preceded my posing. Each article of clothing had its place in every room. In the room where Natalie posed, there was an old metal locker salvaged from the renovated gym. In my room, there were hutches and a painted straight-back chair. As I ran my hand over the material of the rose-petal-pink slip and felt my chest, my stomach, the slight curve of my hip, I thought of my mother. I thought of what a refuge Westmore had always been. I came, stripped away everything, and stood in front of the students, who drew me. I had never been quite so foolish as to believe that this meant they actually saw me, but the methodical disrobing, the stepping up on the carpeted platform, even the shiver in my body, often felt revolutionary to me.
I heard the students opening up their large sketch pads to a clean page. Tanner was coming to the end of his useless mini-lecture. I took the slip off over my head and stepped into my bamboo flip-flops. I placed the slip on the chair for just a moment and took the hospital gown from the hanger. Quickly, I covered myself.
“Helen, we’re ready for you.”
I saw the slip. It was my mother in the chair. I wanted to cry in horror, but I didn’t. Was I thinking self-preservation at that point? What was it that made me do what I did? As if it were one of the small objects in my house that I discarded, I balled up my mother’s slip in my hand and shoved it behind the hutches against the cinder-block wall. There it would stay, I knew, for a long time. Natalie had lost a ring there once, and months later a professor, bored to the point of rearranging the furniture in the middle of his own class, had found it.
I walked out from behind the platform, holding the hospital robe closed at the waist, my flip-flops and the shifting of the students the only sounds. I climbed the two stairs up to the carpeted platform, and Tanner handed me a little book. It was one with which Natalie and I were very familiar. Not much larger than my palm, it was part of a series of small art books from the late 1950s and had been kicking around the classroom for years. This one featured fifteen color plates of Degas and was titled simply Women Dressing.
“I’m good,” I said, keeping the book held out so Haku would take it away again.
“We’ll cycle then,” he said. “Give them a three-minute