Girl Through Glass (26 page)

He lunges at her, grabs for her pocket. “Give that to me,” he says. He's shouting. His mouth is open.

“You'll have to get it,” she says, turning to run across the room. He grabs at her pocket, circling her body with his arm. He smells different, not like oranges and cinnamon, but like moist air, like a wild animal. He tries again, but she squirms away and runs, squealing, to the other side of the room, then onward, through the dim rooms until she gets to Pavlova's pointe shoe. He's breathing behind her. She hears herself laugh as he catches her and then, in the next instant, he's yanking at her pants. She has no leotard and tights on today; what emerges is just skin, the skin of her belly, her thighs. She's on the floor. She grabs his shirt, saying, “I am afraid.” But it's too late.

“Is this what you want?” he says. She is quiet now. He bends her knees up to her armpits and shoves himself inside her. It is a stiff tent in there. He pushes himself into her again and again, destroying everything he has built.

She sleeps, or something like it. They are on the floor of the room
with the old photos of dancers. Like two trees' branches tangled up together. A forest. Together they make a forest of limbs. She is trembling like dry leaves in a heavy wind. He is bony, ancient, gray, and powdery. She is young, white, and sinewy. Her legs like steel covered in flesh. The corners of her mouth curve upward in a smile, but it is not a smile. She is like a thing falling—in space falling—to the ground. A dried leaf, a twig, a piece of dried skin, discarded, passed over even by the street sweeper's brush.

After leaving Kevin's office, I walk, a particle in the bloodstream of the city. I let myself drift. Something comes to the surface in me. It is sadness, a deeper sadness than I can ever remember feeling.

I am carried over east, past brick buildings, a flag, stained glass. These side streets that are always full of surprises. I'd forgotten that about New York. Between the fortresses of Park Avenue and the helter-skelter of Lexington, anything is possible. Maurice lived on a side street, farther east, past Lexington.

What is Felicia doing now? Is she just coming home from some event? How many Lucky Charms would she have to eat to take in this news? I imagine telling her, her vicarious excitement. Drama!

I want to know you,
Kevin said.

Have I
known
anyone my whole life?

The past is swimming all around me. My father is not a bitter, twice-divorced teetotaler on an Exercycle in Connecticut, but a robust alcoholic in the middle of destroying one family and creating another. My mother, not a glorified secretary with a storage unit full of paintings, but instead a beautiful young woman, angry and searching.

Maurice wanted my forgiveness. Can I give it to him? No. I can't. I am angry. The stack of letters Kevin gave me are burning a hole in my bag.

A bunhead passes me. Strange she would be so far east. She wears a leopard-skin hoodie, tight bright blue skirt, tights, espadrilles. Even through the Old Navy colors, I see her studio-pale legs, the battle between teenage softness and muscular power. Which one will win? She picks her way through the stream of people without looking at anyone. I must have looked like her, wandering through the city, devotee of a far-off god.

When I see these bunheads roaming the New York streets, I want to kneel and kiss them. I want to punch them, break them.

It's the gloaming now. The West Side is still in sherbet colors, but here it's night already. I reach Maurice's old building, an inconspicuous six-story brick apartment building, similar to others around it. Still, I know it immediately. It now has an awning, but I recognize the glass doors and the tarnished gold handles. I peer into the windows closest to the ground. In one, a forest of plants, in another what looks like a piano, curtains in another. Who lives in Maurice's sprawling (or do I just remember it as large?) second floor apartment now? Was it sold to pay for his care—all those years of care that I made necessary?

As I stand there in front of this unobtrusive Manhattan apartment building, my mind lurches. It's strange. Like some liquid that loosens concrete, turns it back into sand, one image dislodges another. And the images at first seem disassociated—as if they belonged to someone else. But then they heat up and my body responds. This is my memory. It belongs to me. It
is
me.

I remember everything now.

Maurice is there again, lit strangely by the light from Pavlova's case, which is broken. Glass all around. There is still the old meanness and mischief around his mouth, but there is something new in his eyes. He says something, peevish, victorious, and I can hear it. “You shouldn't have looked at me like that. You shouldn't have al
ways been saying,
Touch me, Touch me.
You should never have asked that.”

I raise the fireplace poker, step closer, and then
let it fall,
and it lands on his back, I feel him curve beneath it. He raises his hand and sinks to the ground like something without bones. He moves in stubborn slow motion. He's on the floor now. His mouth changes to a surprised smile.

That wild, bewildered look crosses his face. “Beautiful,” he says. Then he closes his eyes.

It all surges back into the center of my mind and explodes outward. All the pieces are fitting together, but I don't really like the puzzle. I
smashed
the glass, I
broke
the humidor, I
stole
the shoe, I
attacked
him. But then there is the relief: I did not
kill
him. I am no murderer. But behind the relief there is something else, too.

My memory of that night, of what I did—and the feeling of that in my body. I remember so clearly now, the cool metal, so uncompromising in my hand, the weight as I pulled it back against the air, and the relief as I
let it drop
. No, I don't believe that, I
swung
it at him. He was a fire I wanted to put out.

I
could
have killed him. I know that is true. I
wanted
to kill him. And—I wish—I watch this wish—that I
had
killed him that night.

I shiver, though the breeze is strangely warm.

I head back west. Then I'm on Park, going uptown, nodding at the
doormen as I go. A new breeze, this one colder, comes up. I wrap my jacket tighter. I walk in and out, light and shadow under the awnings that stretch all the way curbside to waiting taxis.

I have never been rid of him, not really, all these years.

Flotillas of taxis move unceasingly toward, then past me. One stops to let an old man out. It takes an eternity for him to unfold his body.

I see myself at Dad and Judy's, a bunhead sleeping on a mattress on the floor, counting her calories to help her fall asleep. I thought I owned the world. What a fool is the girl who desires to be a princess, trapped in the tower of her own making.

And now Kevin, his son.
My
son.
Our
son.

Other parts of the city forget themselves again and again. Where Felicia is, for example. Warehouses, then bars, now condos. And the new people who come to live in them.

Except Park Avenue perhaps.

I end up in front of Dad and Judy's old building on Seventy-ninth.
Through the glass doors, I watch the doorman touch his hat as an elderly woman walks out of the elevator. He looks like a younger version of Felix, who would be retired by now. The uniform hasn't changed either, green with gold buttons, like an old-fashioned elevator operator. An anachronistic world. The doorman tips his hat to a woman walking out into the night.

Another piece of that night, a bit of memory, floats back to me. This one eases in gently, so at first I don't even know I'm remembering. It feels just like thinking. I'm at Dad and Judy's, I let myself in quietly; everyone asleep—down the hall to my room. There is blood on my shirt, and I take off my clothes, search my body for the wound that caused this blood—I can't see it, but I can feel it. It's my own wrongness, badness.

I sit on my bed and let the vertigo take me. I remember being on the floor, on his scratchy ancient carpet, his broken body on top of me. I walk—slowly—to the bathroom, wash the blood from my shirt with freezing cold water, ball up the wet fabric and put it in the hamper. I open my dance bag and find inside Pavlova's pointe shoe and Maurice's little black book.

I know there is never only one version of the past. We resurrect the
past to suit the needs of the present. As I leave the fortresses of Park Avenue behind me and head to the boutiques of Madison, I understand something. Maurice didn't belong to this world any more than I did. We were both pursuing something that we didn't have a name for. We ended up calling it beauty.

And what is beauty? A whiff of smoke. But felt with the force of a
cannonball. When you see it, it pierces your eyes, the heart overflows, contracts.

I have told myself that life inevitably ends in tragedy. Don't the old ballet stories tell us so?
Giselle, Swan Lake
—those stories of betrayal, lost love, and untimely sacrifice.

But I don't know if that is true anymore.

I gave up my innocence. But I went on living. Maybe this was the greatest crime—against him—and against myself.

It is, maybe, neither of our faults. Where does outgrown anger go? Will it fade away?

On a corner of Madison, here's a photocopied
LOST CAT
sign on the lamppost. A fluffy white cat sitting on a brown leather couch.
Have you seen her?
Someone has scrawled over the sign in marker
I FOUND HER
! I touch the metal of lamppost on the corner and it's still warm from the sun. I'm filled with strange good cheer. A lost cat. Found. Bravo!

What should I have said to Kevin? I should have said, “I remember when I was pregnant with you. I remember feeling full for the first time in my life, I think. Then you were gone, and I missed you. The dream was over and another started.”

I feel like I would die if I said that.

I head south down Fifth and then west on Fifty-ninth, skirting the edge of the park. Little pools of streetlights follow the dark paths into the park. A horse and carriage clomps by, jangling its belled harness. I smell manure, leather, and perfume. Does the horse care about this performance? It has a job to do. It gets treats. Or is it whipped? Balanchine escaped the Russian Revolution, way before Stalinism set in. If he had stayed, he might have been killed. Instead, he came to America. He started a school. I was born in America. I went to his school. The accidents of history are everywhere. The carnage all around us.

I pause in front of the Plaza, its big, subdued bluster lighting up the night, a quaint idea of itself for tourists, and also, still itself. I remember Dad and Judy going off to the Plaza one anniversary
weekend. Sam and I avoided each other as much as possible, but one night we met in the dark kitchen and neither of us turned on the light, but instead we just stood in front of the refrigerator and ate straight from it without forks.

I have never truly, entirely, felt what was done to me was “rape.”
“Rape” suggests a finite act. What was done to me kept happening, went on and on. It is still happening to me. That one
time
produced a child that I was too young to carry. That time has never been over for me. The therapist I saw in my twenties wanted me to say “rape” because she was sure that my problem was I couldn't admit what had happened to me. But I didn't want to admit it. Because the word took away something too precious.

After I stopped seeing the therapist, I studied harder and danced more. The incessant movement, and the academic work, did its job. They kept the pain muted but still present. That was optimal. A reminder of a part of me.

A version of the past I could live with.

I arrive at the Columbus Circle mall, which gleams upward in mirrored
glass. When I lived in New York, all this would have been unthinkably tacky, but now it feels right. At the head of the circle, in front of one of Trump's hotels, is a giant metal statue of the earth spinning on its axis.

I am crying, the kind of tears no one can see, that can be dismissed as watery eyes or an allergy.

How does a city go on and on, remaking itself, losing itself?

This city is a mirage, a dream. A world spilling out, too small for itself. My past is always alive, is always being made. I bend again and again to that humidor, that glass tube of light, and I smash it to the ground. In the moment when the glass shatters but before it hits the ground, I have broken what I am. I am in the state of becoming something else.

I know where I will go tomorrow. The house that started it all.

Mira's body finally begins to change. Her breasts begin to show and her hips round slightly. It has taken her body a long time, but now it rushes to catch up.

She's hungry all the time. Her stomach lurches under her ribs. She eats some apple, some chips, some pie. She eats and eats. Something secret is growing inside of her. It is like a wild, unruly garden. It is something hungry and thirsty.

She sits bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night, covered with sweat. Her body is limp, foggy, wet, wrung-out; in contrast, her mind is buzzing and razor sharp. She feels bad, really bad, a different kind of badness she does not even have the words for. It's the opposite of how she feels when she is dancing.

A month and a half after Mira's birthday, one of the women of the
pulled-back hair and buttoned blouses and gold pins—the one who met with her after the SAB audition—appears in front of Mira in the hallway. Her eyebrows are drawn together. Her face is strange and unseeing. “Mira,” she says. “Please come here.” Mira steps into the woman's office. On her desk are the ledgers, the big books she sees her walking around with and consulting. A heavy green sky out her window makes Mira blink.

Mira grips her bag tightly against her hip. She has never been called into an office before—is this being
talked to
? Usually, in a room full of girls all moving, she rises, bigger and stronger, out from under the blanket of
tondues
and pliés. She knows how to rise to be
noticed within a line of girls, to stand straighter and command her legs to beat faster, to obey more quickly than the others. But, standing alone, in this blank office and faced with the woman's face, some other face she does not know—not kind, not mean, and not anchored by any movement—she feels herself disappearing.

“Mira,” the woman says, taking a sip of her coffee. Mira keeps her eyes on a far roof through the window. “Your body—”

The woman says something in Russian as she puts down her coffee, then picks it up again. “No one say you are fat. No girl here is fat. For ballet dancer, is not question of
fat.
” Her face smoothes out. “I remember one season at the Kiev, I eat only chicken and turnip. We are not allowed bread.” She smiles.

“Some is made to be ballerina. You can do, do, do! Like ballerina. But some girls is not. We must find out this. Is better to know than not know. If not ballerina, something else.”

Mira is so invisible now that she cannot move. She has turned into vapor at the same moment she is being told she has too much substance. “No!” she says suddenly. Then corrects herself. “I mean, okay. Okay.”

The woman laughs. Mira has never heard this woman, whom she has seen in the hallways and classrooms so often, laugh before. It is a low, then high, unpredictable sound, like an animal skittering from corner to corner. “Mr. Balanchine likes you—you are a former Marie. But many girls change and we cannot do anything. Material is good but it—collapses.” She is talking about Mira's body as if it were separate from Mira, a disappointment that has befallen them both. Her brows draw together—yes, sympathetic. “Dear, sometimes there is change. What can we do? No where to put girls then.”

Mira's head pounds. Tears spring to her eyes. Sympathy, immeasurably worse that cruelty. Mira feels the ground unsteady beneath her.

In the moment before she turns, Mira notices, hanging on the wall a studio shot of a woman. It is a black-and-white publicity photo with that timeless look that means it could be from twenty or
a hundred years ago. She is a smooth-cheeked young woman, in a black leotard on her pointes. Her expression is soft, her features delicate, well-spaced, exquisite. She has a serenity and generosity to her expression that Mira has never seen on her teacher Tumkovsky. But, yes, here at the bottom of the photo in embossed letters is her teacher's name: Antonia Tumkovsky.

In the distance, Mira hears clapping somewhere and the splat of water from the fountain outside.

Mira walks blindly down the hallway. Her shoes squeak. She locks
the door on a bathroom stall. She sits on the toilet with her bag on her lap. Her breath comes jaggedly. There are shuffles and clangs from outside the stall. A strong odor of rubbing alcohol. More girls are starting to arrive. Of course everyone will know. There is a line between the girls who have been
talked to
and the girls who have not, as visible as a road divider. On one side the traffic flows freely; on the other side, it crawls along, snarled.

Breathing more regularly, she exits the bathroom and nods to the other girls, a few of whom are in her class. She opens her locker and begins to search for her morning classes' leotard. She doesn't dare investigate her body for its betrayal. For now, she treats it gingerly, like something broken that might have sharp edges she could cut herself on. Terrifying: she does not know how to fix it.

Airy and indefatigable, a Tchaikovsky serenade floats out from the studios.

Mira lies awake all that night. The next morning, she is strangely
calm. It's a Saturday, perfect. She pulls on underwear, her tightest jeans, a polo shirt and a long green sweater with a belt around the waist. She dumps out her giant dance bag onto her bed—the tangle of leotards and tights fall out into a twisted mass—then she pulls the items from under her bed—Maurice's book and Pavlova's shoe—and shoves them into the bottom of the bag. She packs an extra pair of jeans, her favorite boatneck shirt, two pairs of underwear.

She climbs on the crosstown bus. At this time of the morning, the bus is mostly empty. There are no other bunheads. The streets are still quiet of the clatter of cars and horns and trucks. There are two old ladies who could be traveling together but don't speak. One is frail, with a bent spine and a tacky raincoat and a plastic kerchief over her head. The other one is round, has a direct stare and pink saggy cheeks, and carries a cane. She fixes on Mira with a conspiratorial smile. The ladies get off at Fifth. A middle-aged man with a briefcase and untied shoes gets on. He opens the briefcase and begins shuffling his papers.

Then it's her stop. She stands, in her light windbreaker, belted green sweater, and penny loafers, in front of a diner on Sixty-sixth and Broadway. It is eight fifteen. She enters and orders a blueberry muffin, toasted, no butter. The boy behind the counter stares at her for a moment too long before he turns to make her food. Already, the clean early-morning air grows muddy with the regular people who are rising, demanding their coffee, their donuts.

“Hey, Dimitri, doncha just stand there, get the girl her muffin. What's wrong with you?” A burly man with the same hair as the boy claps him on the back.

The counter boy hands over a warm ball of tinfoil. For a moment, both of their hands touch the pulsing mass of heat.

Standing there in that diner, with this boy, she feels like she is turning back into a girl—not Bella, not Mirabelle, but
Mira
—a normal girl. Everything in her carefully constructed life is splintering. She can feel it happening: and in the spaces, those moments of weakness, like when she went into Sam's room and he told her about Oliver.

“Are you okay?” the counter boy says. She quickly looks away and flees back outside to class.

The next week, she does something very difficult—she calls her
mother and says she wants to come visit.

“When?” her mother says. She had imagined her mother would be more excited.

Mira begins to cry, heavy sobs that hurt her head. “Soon. Now.”

“Whoa. Of course you can come soon. I'll talk to your dad.”

“They think I'm fat,” Mira says, breaking down.

“Those Russian pricks?” says her mother. “Screw them.”

As soon as school ends for the year, Mira is on the plane to San
Francisco. Her mother hugs her and says how good she looks, how healthy. Rachel's hair is long and she's wearing the same shell earrings that Mira saw back in New York.