Sarah Rooney Designs

Kneel for the first pose. The platform in the center of the room is broad, wooden, and unexpectedly wobbly. When you shift your weight it’s quiet wooden creaks bounce spectacularly around the cavernous concrete studio. Rest your rear on your heels, spread your knees wide, place your hands palm up on your thighs and set your gaze three quarters of the way to the ceiling. Remind yourself that it was no one’s idea that you get naked in studio 260C of the Salem Art Collective this morning except your own. In your periphery watch the faces behind the easels dart back and forth rapidly from you to their sketches, searching to see the lines of your body and translate them to paper with graphite. Let a smile tug at your cheeks for the earnestness of their movements, bouncing in and out of view like cartoon characters. 

The instructor calls time. Oksana, a Ukrainian immigrant. You’d looked her up when you registered with the model coordinator. She does a lot of water color portraiture and political pieces. Rotate. Sit this time, bend one leg, leave the other straight. Reach your arm to the platform behind you, twisting to look towards the diagram of human musculature hanging on the wall, pretend it’s the horizon. Notice that your torso is pinching and wonder if it was misleading to list yoga as one of your hobbies on the Figure Form – you haven’t done a sun salutation in months. Your eyes flick from the red spaghetti of the disembodied shoulder on the wall to the eyes of a man behind an easel. Fuck. Dart back to the spaghetti. Think hard about the spaghetti in your own shoulder. 

 Time – another sixty seconds has passed. Crawl to a stand on your platform and decide that whoever built this thing must have been some kind of sadist, the way it wobbles just enough for you to feel the sway. Arch your shoulders and lift your arms from your sides, endeavoring for a composition of interest. You’re facing the easel of a full cheeked blue haired girl, she’s tall, left handed. Her lips sit parted. You like the way she tilts her head slowly to the left, to the right, back again – like a metronome, keeping some time only she’s privy too. As a grimace shoots up from the fire in your shoulder blades and wraps itself into your features, think how your elementary school piano teacher, Ms. Donna the Baptist, always said the worst thing you could do after screwing up during a recital was clue the audience into the fact that you screwed up. She probably didn’t say screwed-up. Feign placidity in your face. Your features are the great plains, your eyelashes are amber waves of grain. Time your breaths to the sweet tick of the sapphics cheeks. There’s a buffalo grazing on your eyebrow. 

Time again. God. Kneel. Fold into yourself, lay your face to the side. Feel how warm and soft and squishy you are against your own skin, feel the great ridge of your spine curving with the push and pull of your breath. You can see out the window from down here, just a sliver of the sky. It’s a clear day. Watch a cloud float peaceably by. Think about how it’ll only be another week or two before it’s Spring enough for vegetable gardens to be sewn. Imagine carrot seeds planted between the vertebrates of your backbone, swaddled by your heart’s beat. Think about how it’s nice enough out now to bike to work, remember that you need to replace the rusted out chain on your bike. Green shoots push up from your back.

Time. Stand and turn. Place your hands behind your back. Watch a middle aged man sneeze into a blue handkerchief. You didn’t know people still used handkerchiefs. Take a moment here to appreciate how well you’re doing. You almost wish you were more self conscious, just to have this be more emotionally productive. How fruitful to stand here and cry “That’s right world! I have pepperoni nipples! They sit here in all their naked glory demanding to be experienced as the art that they are!”  Sometimes you wonder if there’s some hunk of your brain missing, the hunk that has the human decency to be ashamed. Maybe they crossed a wire when they took out your wisdom teeth or something. 

Oksana starts her clock – it’s time for the series of five minute poses.

Return to a stand, set your feet wide, bring your hands to your heart, squishing your breasts between your forearms, and elongate your neck to gaze wistfully to your side. Wonder if you look like a woman of depth, one who has love and pain to express. Hope so, for the art’s sake. Ask yourself what you should think about for five minutes of motionlessness. Decide maybe it’s best not to think at all. Let your eyelids close demurely. Imagine the heat from the space heaters bookending you in the uninsulated studio is the sun, that the scratch of the charcoal on sketchpad is the soft lapping of the ocean’s waves. Press your toes into the platform beneath you and feel the sharp caress of volcanic rock, picture the easels circling you are settled in black sand, that the sun is setting at your back. Imagine the artists naked here on this beach with you. They’ve all got long hair and beaded necklaces, and when you’re all through with the drawing someone will break out their drums and you’ll dance with them. Breathe there for a while, let the sound of the waves in your mind’s ear carry you off. Realize the tides carried your mind to Sean, the boy who taught you to surf. 

Remember the first time he brought you out on the water, how you laughed when there were no waves to be found. Remember how you paddled circles around one another on your boards and talked about your writing, you were still too young and self conscious then to call yourself a poet, and how he turned and looked at you like he wanted to swallow you whole. How you joined him on his surfboard, where your lips met in salty kisses and his body rocked into yours with each gentle tap from the ocean beneath you. It was dusk when you wandered back to your hostel hand in hand. Remember how he’d wanted to follow you when you left three weeks later, further up the coast, where there was more for you to see that summer. Wonder now if it was cruel to leave the way you did, driving away into the night. 

Oksana calls for a change of position. Stoop decidedly to a seat, set your elbows crossed on a propped up knee and bury your head in your arms. 

Think about how you wonder that a lot. If you’re cruel, selfish. That’s what your mother had called you the night you called to tell her you weren’t going back to school. Standing on the only hill in the vineyard where cell reception was strong enough to get a call through to Indiana, you listened to the crackling over the line that covered your mothers pinched silence. The warm breeze and the high point made you think of the summers you spent at camp with your father, when you and your brother would take turns climbing onto a boulder outside the mess hall with dad’s cell phone, stretching for a single bar to say goodnight to her. Looking down on the rows of grapes sleeping in the shadows, you could see her clearly, sitting at her home office desk with a cup of coffee, fingers splayed over the bridge of her nose. “Your father will be crushed you know”. 

Think about your father, and about how you crushed him. Tell yourself you’re going to call as soon as this session is over. While you’re thinking about the future, deliberate about what you’re going to have for lunch. Start to regret not having a more nutritious breakfast as a cramp settles into your right calf. Remind yourself that parents don’t get it and they’re not really supposed to anyway, tell yourself that’s what makes them parents. Try and imagine your dad when he was young, he must have been once. It was the seventies, you’ve been told he had a motorcycle. Press your forehead against your forearm and try to picture some sideburns. 

Give up as Oksana calls time again.

Go for a more ambitious pose this time – something with character. Stand and reach for the ceiling above you, lock your hands across your elbows behind your head. Realize as soon as you settle into place that this is too ambitious. Your breasts are sitting pert on your chest and with every tremor of your unsteady core they jiggle obviously, snitching to your viewers that you are wavering. Realize this is going to be the longest five minutes of your life. Start reciting your Hail Marys. Think about Catholic school, and how you were always in trouble for uniform violations, think about the irony of your current nude piety. Try and count how many and at the hour of our deaths you’ve recited but lose track every three. Think about how very Catholic it is that you say Hail Marys to get through suffering – when you do planks or board a plane or when you’re holding your nose to your face in the back of an ambulance. To ground yourself, focus on the most stable part of you. Choose your right ring finger, cupped around your elbow. Your whole body is your ring finger. Think of the crushing squeezes your brother would give your hand in mass, when you’d hold hands in the maple pews and say the Our Father with the congregation. Start saying your Our Fathers. 

Oksana’s “Time” delivers you from collapse – you make a note to pray more often.

Retreat to a seated position again, give yourself a rest. Recline onto your elbow and splay your legs in front of you, toss your free arm over your hip. Hope that these artists don’t think you’re a lazy model. Remind yourself that you’re an artist too. Remind yourself that you’re the art. Watch the floor deliberately, tell yourself your eyes won’t move from the point where four tiles meet. This makes you think of the game you used to play with yourself in the car as a child, the one where you’d count the intersections of the sidewalks and streets you passed by fours. Make a note to ask more people you meet what their car game was as a child – everyone’s got something. Ruminate on whether or not you could get a poem out of that – something about the purity of a child’s gaze, one that knows no worries but the moment. Try and think like a child. Sit in the moment and the moment alone. When a student drops a page to the floor, tossed away in the fervor of capturing the next pose, find your eyes distracted by the sketched contours of your own ass. Feel complimented that someone drew you with an ass so fine, wonder if it’d be unprofessional to flirt at the end of the session. Try and think of anything you could say, think to yourself that there’s very little that can be done in the way of introducing yourself once someone’s seen you naked. 

Reflect on how you have a lot of room to grow as a model. You should probably start practicing more – maybe with weights in your hand or something. The only model you’ve ever drawn was a man, and he was talented. You realized that with the first pose he ever struck. It was your first semester of college, you were eighteen and studying political science. He was older, late middle aged. He struck athletic, warrior-like poses that showed off his toned arms and sturdy torso. You regret that you don’t have an athlete’s body to show off. You regret that you’ve never watched a female figure model practice her craft. You hope you look feminine, womanly, splayed out like this. You ask yourself if you feel like a woman. A pang rings through your sternum when you remember you’ll never be a girl again. You wonder if it can be heard as it pings around your rib cage, wonder if it can be captured on paper. Not a girl in the feminine, girly sense. Girl like a child, like in the way men mean when they talk about being a boy. Shift your weight on your elbow to relieve your shoulder and resent that men got to say boy and mean childhood, but girliness seemed to seep deep into your adulthood. Woman didn’t feel quite right, most of the time, not yet. Young woman maybe. Do twenty-two year old boys feel like men? Certainly some of them must. Not any you’ve met in a long time.

Realize your thoughts savor strongly of bitterness. Remind yourself that you’re too young to be bitter. Think about the cynicism you’ve harbored in your heart since youth, how your mom always told you had a dry sense of humor – like Roald Dahl. You never really understood what that meant, but then again you never did get around to reading Matilda. Reach into your bag of explanations that you cycle through. Your parents divorced before you could remember their marriage. You have an old soul. You’re a pisces. Tally on your toes, without movement, the number of men who’ve told you you were mature for your age, wise beyond your years. Try and discern which ones you think believed it, and which ones were just creeps trying to sleep with you. Once you get past Steve the dishwasher and the guy with the wedding ring tan line at the airport bar, decide the lines are too blurred.

 Realize your thoughts savor strongly of bitterness. 

Realize that this is exactly the bitterness your parents meant to shelter you from, the bitterness that comes from a young woman who leaves home too eagerly, drops out of school to chase experiences and write poems. Focus on your breath, watch your stomach rise and fall.

“Change Position”

You don’t know where you’re going but you’re moving. The nakedness you can stand, but you wince at the thought of looking lost up here. Hope you look assured as you rise to a stand again, immediately regret that you chose to stand again. Your arms are burning the way they burn when you stack bags of soil in the greenhouse. There’s a quiet pulse in your legs like the one that comes after you’ve pushed to reach the next crest on a hike. Fall into your body completely, sink into your legs, center your being in your calves. The space heaters emit with their warmth a quiet buzz. Sandwiched between their orange glow you feel a bit like a rotisserie chicken, maybe a hotdog. Close your eyes and imagine you’re skewered on the counter of a seven-eleven, twisting twisting into infinity. Imagine glistening condensation. Be very grateful that you’re not sweating up here. Outside snow is falling, inside, the cashier is playing his own rap music. Now you’re thinking about how dearly you wished you could sing, about how really all you want is to be able to get what’s inside of you out. Watch from your spinning incubator as a large man in a black coat comes up to the register and asks for $30 on pump 2 and a pack of newports. Consider asking if you can bum one, imagine asking for a light, shivering against the ice machine, watching a pick up re-fuel. Maybe you’d exchange words, gripe about the weather, about the roads, ask “so where’s home for you?”. Look at the woman behind the easel in front of you, all you can see is the dark roots of her ash blonde hair. Ask them where home is for them, let your chest glow with the question.