Girl Through Glass (16 page)

So Mira becomes one of the three hundred girls who attend SAB. She is put into B1, Intermediate Level, where the color of leotards is midnight blue. She is one of the four routinely selected by call-outs to demonstrate the steps.
Mira, Felicia, Natasha, Bryce.

She feels that thing that was set loose by her fall—the part of her that wants to laugh and fling back her head and twist Ms. Clement's kind hands until they break—brought her here. Under the stares of the Russians, this thing rears up, animated. The Russians hate her and she respects them for it. It makes her dance better. It is now these women, with their faulty English, their imperious attitudes, their quick jabs to her flesh, their movement tics and flourishes—it is this that she craves. It is this that makes her feel she has arrived.

Maurice shows her a documentary called
The Children of Theater Street
. It is about the making of ballet dancers in the Soviet Union, the same great ballet factories that produced Baryshnikov and Makarova. She learns that in this other land the boys and girls come from all over—hundreds, even thousands, of miles—to audition. They are measured, and their natural gifts are tested, the way they tested Mira. The documentary follows the lives of the chosen few girls and boys who have been taken from their homes in the provinces and brought to Leningrad to train. One girl sleeps on a cot in the kitchen of her host family's apartment. It is rolled out every evening and rolled away at five in the morning when the girl rises, and after a breakfast of beets and bread by flashlight (her host family still sleeping), she begins her hours-long journey to the Kirov stu
dios, where she will have a long day of grueling classes. She is eleven years old.

And now Mira is studying with these Russians, who had trained in those
very same
ballet factories; Mr. B—Balanchine—had gathered them together: Alexandra Danilova, one of his earliest partners. Kiev's State Theater's Tumkovsky and Hélène Dudin who emigrated after World War II. Felia Doubrovska, who danced at the legendary Mariinski Theater before the Russian Revolution. Former Bolshoi principals Nikolai Tarasov and Andrei Kramarevsky.

Mr. B is both familiar father figure, warm and human, and as remote as a god. Each girl lives for the day he will visit her class, run his eyes over the lot of them, stop at
her,
and magically elevate her to the likes of one of his muses. Suzanne Farrell is his most revered. The newest of his muses, Darci Kistler, is scarcely two years older than Mira.

Like a family, bound by its own mythology. One can hardly switch parents; one makes do, adapts. In family life, in a family of good children, each one strains to be the best.

Mr. B's girls.
They are being molded into the stick-thin hipless Balanchine ballerinas, known far and wide as Balanchine's “pinheads.”
Pinheads.
If there is a fairy tale at work here, it is not really
Cinderella,
but something more like
Hansel and Gretel
. A brittle finger bone, a threat of fire and oblivion, a trail of receding crumbs disappearing in the woods of a vanishing child-self.

The SAB changing rooms are like a gym, with metal lockers, long
wooden benches, and a back room with showers. The only thing that sets it apart from a gym changing room is the big cat litter–size
box of rosin in the corner by the door, where the hard yellow rock sits chipped and battered amid a powder of its own skin.

One afternoon after Mira has been at SAB a few weeks, she is in the changing room before class. She takes out her pointe shoes and bends to unroll the ribbons. The shoes are new. Capezios. Just this morning she closed her bedroom door on the toe box several times to break them in. (Judy shouting from the kitchen, “Mira, what are you doing? Stop making that racket!”) She shakes them out and runs her hand along the lining just to make sure. She heard about a girl who had to go to the hospital because someone put glass in her pointe shoes and it chewed up her feet so badly that she was out for several months. Or that was the story. You hear things, lots of things. You never know what is true.

As she is slipping on her shoes, two girls come in from some class in sweat-drenched leotards. They both have brown hair, but one looks wispy and the other more solid. Yet another brown-haired girl comes in behind them, thinner than the other two.

“How much do you have to lose?”

“They want five pounds by the summer.”

Mira thinks of Adele, a girl she's heard stories of, who was supposed to have been great. Mr. B has picked her out during a class, once. But after Adele was
talked to
about her weight, she began peeling the skin from the bottom of her feet and the wounds caused an infection that finally put her out of class for a month. By the time she came back to class, she had gained more weight. She was not invited back after the summer. Though Mira has never met Adele, she is a present figure, ghostly, in her life.

Mira watches the third girl. She reminds Mira of Robin from The Little Kirov
.
This thin girl is not B Level—she's C Level, marked by black leotards. She has Robin's dark hair, heart-shaped elfin face, and bow-shaped lips. She has Robin's untroubled translucent skin. But Robin's thinness is an ethereal slightness, whereas this girl's thinness is one of will: her collarbones and ribs stick out like bony fingers. Only her calves and ankles are substantial. There is some
thing about this not-Robin that, despite—or maybe because of—her anorexia
,
makes her look older, almost like a lady, a grown-up.

Mr. B does not like anorectics. Thin is good, yes, but the anorectics end up getting sidelined and leave. Still, the line is fuzzy. A girl can be delicately thin and then, only a few pounds less, she can have the tell-tale gaunt rigidity of the anorectic. Anorectics are not reliable. They stick around for a while, all bone, no muscle, downy hair growing on their backs, until they can't dance anymore. Then they disappear. Mira does not know where they go.

Not-Robin sits on the bench and pulls her leotard down so that you can see her pinprick nipples that barely rise from her ribs. She looks at Mira with some kind of raw emotion, and for a second Mira has to look away.

Mira looks down at her new Capezios, with their barely cracked toe box. She feels some wall coming down, that she is growing less complicated, some jewellike part of her beginning to shine again. Her mouth opens to say something.

Not-Robin turns to her locker, and when she turns back her face has changed. It is shut tight and strangely blurry. A closed window streaked with rain.

Then Mira comes crashing into her ridiculous childhood self—and she is humiliated at the sight of her. Here again is the girl who dreams about being a princess, who loves the prince above all else, who thought saying “Fuck you” would solve all her problems, who accosts a jester because he kisses the prince (as if most ballet boys didn't prefer boys). She has to look down.

All at once, the other girls laugh.

The taller girl snorts and says, “I hate when they get boners! I hate when they get them and stick them in your back.”

“Oh yeah,” says the wispy girl. “Like when you're partnering, like for pirouettes? They have to hold you around the waist and they get a boner and it's sticking you in the back.”

How many times has Mira come to this moment? She sees herself in the wings watching the jester kiss Christopher, his head back and
broken-looking, the fierceness rising in her. How many times has she been asked to hate that ridiculous girl? Still, she can't. She can ridicule her, but she cannot hate her. She is like a younger sister, stupid, fresh, naïve, ridiculous, but hers—
her
sister. But she thinks now of that night in the terms Maurice has laid out for her: she
fell
.
You fell wonderfully
.

Everything will change—is changing. She will no longer be Mira, but “Bella”: someone new and better and braver.

In October, Mira and her dad move into Judy's big apartment off
Park Avenue. Park Avenue from Sixtieth Street to Eightieth Street is its own world, a twenty-block island of determined wealth and privilege that abruptly ends with a stretch on Madison of public institutions—a big red brick school tagged long ago as a bomb shelter and a bedraggled public park. On this island, things are as they've been for a long time, or at least everyone has agreed to pretend so. Mothers in heels, wall portraits of family members, maids in uniforms in the kitchens, dining rooms with sideboards of weekly polished silver. Kids leave this world only to walk a few blocks to their private schools or climb into their family's Mercedes to drive to the Hamptons.

Brooklyn is an excuse for sitcoms, the Bronx shorthand for urban desolation and fear, but Park Avenue floats untouched, insulated. This is Judy's world—and now her dad's and hers.

Judy enrolls her in an all-girls private school. Mira walks a few
blocks to her new school, tucked in a town house off Fifth Avenue, built of marble and wood, nodding at the doormen on her way, who
stand in the dimly lit antechambers in stiff hats and brocaded lapels, protecting what is left of her innocence.

The difference between Brooklyn public school and Manhattan private school:
everything
. No cafeteria workers. No hot lunch. No Tater Tots. No bouncing baloney. In private school, kids
buy
—not bring—their lunch. Overpriced salads from the Madison Avenue deli. A steak sandwich from the deli two blocks away. Mineral water. At public school, no one got more than a dollar a week in allowance. Here, they get twenty-five dollars a week! “Recess” in a pebbled concrete yard is replaced by “gym” in a shiny wood-floored room of skylights and the squeak of sneakers and balls hitting the floor. In this shiny gym, she plays volleyball. The girls' voices lower an octave and become hard and urge her on and if she hits the ball they thump her on the back and if she misses they turn away from her and clap their hands quickly to dismiss her failure. “Keep the energy up,” they say, clapping again.

In public school, the teachers are decades older and have pockmarked skin, circles under their eyes. Their eyes skate over her in relief whenever she is silent. In private school, shiny-haired young teachers call on her when she doesn't speak enough. The other girls look at her expectantly as she tries in her new voice to get her ideas across. The ideas flow up as if from nowhere: she sees wind as a symbol in
Wuthering Heights.
She sees the Chinese Confucian system as an enviable moral code and in one paper compares foot binding to wearing pointe shoes. Her mother lets her go to this school because her father is paying for the tuition. But having gone to a private school herself, her mother warns her daughter of “the snobs, fruitcakes, and counterfeits” who are at these kinds of schools.

But the girls are nice to her for some reason, maybe because she is a bunhead, or maybe because she is Sam's sister. Sam is popular for being a good lacrosse player. He goes to an all-boys private school—her school's “brother school”—about ten blocks away.

Or maybe it's because she tells these girls that she has a rich, old boyfriend who is going to marry her when she graduates high school.
Maurice gives her money on Friday nights—“the babysitting money” she would be making if she were really babysitting. With this money, she buys jewelry from Bloomingdale's that she tells them is from her boyfriend. They gather around and their makeup-less faces—no makeup is allowed—press in to see her latest acquisition. They believe her, or appear to.

After school, she climbs on the crosstown bus to SAB. It cuts through the park at Sixty-sixth Street and then travels west on Sixty-fifth. She gets out on the corner of Sixty-fifth and Amsterdam on the north side of Lincoln Center. The bus is often strangely empty. For some reason, not many people make the journey at this time of day from the East Side to the West Side.