Girl Through Glass (27 page)

Back at Felicia's, everything is quiet. She's still out. I take the stack of letters out of my purse. At the bistro table, I spread them out and count them—twenty in all. I sit for a while with my hand on them and watch the lights crawl along the other side of the river. I'm not ready to read them yet. I'll always have these now, to add to my collection, my exhibit of my past. But they are words, not objects. Evidence of someone's heart, someone's mind, someone's soul. When I've read them all, I will know his secrets, too, what was inside his mind all these years. This knowledge keeps exploding in my head. That old feeling of being onstage and having the lights on me comes rushing back—the excitement and energy of that—even as I sit in Felicia's silent living room. But that feeling fades and in its space is something softer.

I call my mother again, and this time she picks up. I jump right in.

“Mom, I met him.”

“Who?”

“My son.”

“Oh my god. How?”

“He found
me
. He's been looking for me.”

She's very quiet.

“He's a man now. A lawyer. He wants a relationship with me.” My voice spirals up at the end like a girl's.

“Oh, Kate.”

“But it's okay, Mom. It's okay. I know it will be.”

“Well, that's fucking wonderful then,” Rachel says after a long pause. Her voice is thick. I wonder if she is going to cry. Maybe she's
thinking about me as a pregnant teenager beached on my bed, clinging to my secrets.

“You're a fucking grandma.” I laugh.

“A fucking grandma,” she says. And she laughs, too. “I need a cigarette.”

But I will never tell her who is Kevin's father. I will never tell her about Maurice. That is a secret I will take to my grave. Me, Maurice, and Kevin (and Rob? I wonder suddenly) are the only ones who can know that. But then I have this thought:
this is something I may no longer get to decide.
Maurice was Kevin's father. This information belongs to Kevin as much as it belongs to me. If he ever meets my mother,
he can tell her who his father is.

I start to dance. On Felicia's clean carpet, I'm doing the same moves
I was that night in the studio when Sioban found me—but now they feel brighter, easier. I start small, just my foot against the floor and my hands up, but soon let go. I'm dancing, in Felicia's living room high above the Hudson. There's something okay about this moment. Dancing in this luxury apartment. The air circulation system humming. I'm not sure if it's the sweet sadness for what is lost, or for my own self, for Maurice, for the girl that I was and had abandoned. But at this moment it doesn't matter.

I wake in the middle of the night, my heart pounding. At first, I don't
know where I am. I look around the room. I am lying in Felicia's guest room, staring at the ceiling. I am trying to grasp simple facts of memory, of the past and the present. Kevin who I just met in his tower of gold and glass. This boy—this man—needed me enough to have found me.
He
sought
me
out. I am his birth mother. I was
raped
by a man three times my age. I got pregnant. I hurt him but I did not kill him. These are the facts, how slippery they feel, and how much I have resisted them.

I bring my hand up to the weak light from the window—thin fingers grown thicker with age, no-nonsense, the pale freckled skin
that I've looked at for so long, now new to me. I feel tender toward it. I run one hand over the other, tracing veins, wrinkles, freckles. A life—one life. What will I do with the rest of it? I've squandered much of it by waiting, by giving in to my own fear of myself and what I could have done. But did
not
do. I hear my own notes from the modernism lecture in my head:
the grotesque, ugly, brutal, and the strong, Nijinsky wielded like a weapon.

Is it too late for me?

Not to destroy the past, but to open up through thickets of inertia, new landscapes of future possibility.

I insisted to Sioban that she can be a scientist
and
a dancer. What possibilities are there for myself that I have not allowed? Can I become a mother this late in the game? What ways are there of moving beyond anger and sadness that I have yet to discover? Can I stop sabotaging my own ambitions?

Mira's mother lives in a colorful, peeling Victorian house that she shares with three other roommates. The overall impression is of macramé everywhere, shoes left in a pile by the door. Her mother's roommates, Edana, Brian, and Ralph, pursue various life changes—Ralph is becoming a priest, Brian is becoming gay, and Edana is becoming single after the breakup of a long marriage. The common area is draped in hanging plants, woven rugs, and stacked with magazines. But the kitchen is the real control room. In the kitchen, there are an array of various tins, jars, containers of messy, organic substances that had to be cared for in certain ways—reconstituted or blended or hydrated or ground with an ancient stone pestle. They are kudzu, protein mix, nutritional yeast, flaxseeds. In her mother's bedroom are her paintings and drawings, tacked up over mirrors, laid over bureaus and dressers, bound in portfolios piled underneath the bed and stacked in the closets. Mira sleeps in a room at the end of the second floor that is barely big enough for a bed, but she likes its smallness and its lack of furniture.

Her mother takes Mira to the Castro Theatre, where she sits in gold-painted balconies to watch black-and-white movies. Her mother takes her out to eat, places where they sit on the floor. They walk up to Dolores Park and watch the dog owners exercise their pets in the brave, golden light. They continue walking up into the hills, where it smells of sawdust and eucalyptus. Mira marvels at the plants: the trees whose flowers look like party favors, the palms whose spider-leg fronds walk along the sky crazily whenever a breeze
comes. The jade's thick leathery leaves that burst into the air. Her mother tells her about “the California Dream,” which is all about, her mother says—her face hawk-like, insistent—
freedom
.

At the end of a week, Mira doesn't want to leave. Her mother is
very quiet and her freckles stick out as she says, “This is a big decision.” She tells Mira that she's been taking time off work and can't do that again. “You'd have to take care of yourself a lot,” she says. Mira nods. “You'll need to talk to your father about this.”

Mira calls her dad. She tells him she wants to stay with her mother. “Why?” he wants to know. “How long?”

“I just need to be with her for a bit.”

“That woman—”

“I haven't seen her in a long time. She's my mother. I want to spend some time with her.”

There's a pause and then he says, “Why?” Listening to his breathing, she imagines the brilliance of her princess life—her bed on the floor, her posters of dancer superheroes. She smiles, almost says,
yes, she'll come home.
Then she remembers her terrible body, its spreading flesh, how shocked Judy would be. Of all the people in the world, only her mother can see her like this.

“They put me on the weight list, Dad.” The silence on the other end lasts a long time. Into that crackly space, she wishes she could cry, but suddenly no tears are there. “Hang on,” says her father. Her dad has gone to get Judy, she knows. How can dads be so powerful and so clueless?

Judy comes on. “Honey, your father told me. Mira, listen. I have a friend—she's a dietician. She can make a diet for you that's just perfect.”

Judy's pragmatism makes Mira pause. Maybe this is something Judy can fix with her friends, her lists—her devices? But she knows that she's too far gone. This is what happens to girls who grow breasts and hips, who get too tall. There is no diet that can really change those things. She's seen girls try. The giant worry-stone hip
bones, the collarbones like lamb shanks. Thinness does not make you smaller, it just makes you thinner.

“We can label all of your food. Ramona's daughter was horribly overweight and that's what they did—started labeling her food—and no one else could touch it and she was just feeling jealous it turned out. And it worked, she dropped twenty pounds. You just need a few pounds, right? Then, you'll be back on top—”

Mira feels it inside her, a broken, human thing. “I don't think so, Judy.”

There's a silence. Then another silence. “And what about ballet?”

The thing that had always kept her going was projecting herself into the future. It was a bright and simple place: dancing onstage, beautiful, before adoring eyes.
His
eyes. But that future is gone. She feels a swell of vertigo. This city of windswept hilltops and eucalyptus and orange is as far as she can imagine from that future. “I'll quit,” she says.

“Oh, dear. No, you don't.” Then Judy is quiet for a long time. Then the phone rustles, and she breathes out a big sigh. “I'm putting your father back on—we love you.”

Now her father is back on the phone. He asks to talk to her mother, and her mother takes the phone into her bedroom and she talks in a low, murmuring voice that reminds Mira of the days when they all lived in a house together. Before her dad hangs up, he says to Mira, “I guess—you can stay with your mother for a while. We'll be here when you're ready to come back. When you're ready.”

Mira moves into the room at the end of the hall. Because she fits in
well, her mother is only asked to pay a bit more in rent. Her dad sends the money. Mira's old life of grosgrain ribbons, hairnets, and Fiorucci sweaters is replaced by a small room, a window without shades, oversize shirts and sweaters strewn about, black eyeliner, antacids by her bedside. She takes in a desk off the street—someone had primed but not painted it. To go with it, a wooden thrift-store
chair with a tie-on patchwork cushion that Edana, who sells things in flea markets, donates to her.

Her mother isn't home much, between her job at the lawyer's office and evenings at her studio. But Mira quickly feels comfortable in the house. She makes cookies with Brian, pasta with Ralph, and vegetable stews with Edana.

Mira spends most of July lying on the grass in a nearby park, letting
the sun bake her. She likes to watch the stray cats wander by. They stare at her without expression and then move on. Or she sits by the window in her room, staring outside at the crazy blue sky. She's able to just sit now for hours. Just sit and stare, letting her eyes take in what she sees. Like a cat, she can just let her eyes move, take things in, let them come to her. They come to her in fits and starts—Ralph's Gregorian chant tapes, Brian's 1950s ballad singing, Edana's conversations with her girlfriends from what she calls her “other life,” before she was married. People starting over. Lives after lives. Second, third lives. This city is filled with them.

Maybe this is what freedom feels like—the freedom
not
to move, to just sit, to just
be
.

One afternoon in the beginning of August, her mother comes and
stands at the door, clears her throat. “We need to talk. I need to ask you something.” She's holding keys on a chain, as if she were about to run out. She jangles the keys. “Okay. Do you have something you want to tell me?”

Mira looks at the peeling ceiling.

“Have you had your period?”

Mira shakes her head. Her mother asked her the same question a few times before during their infrequent phone calls, in the too-open air of Judy's kitchen, and she had shaken her head, the same as now, and said “no” with a secret proud smile on her face that she was glad her mother couldn't see.

“Do your friends have their periods?”

“Most of the girls I dance with don't.”
Danced
with, not
dance
with. “
Danced
.” The exercise keeps it away. That was what they all said to their parents, who believed them. But they also know that the less you eat, the more likely it is that your period will stay away. Even the girls who had had their periods pretended they didn't. They hid their tampons and wouldn't be caught dead with a bulging sanitary napkin. No ballet girl wanted her period. They wanted suffering, but not
that
kind.

“Really?” her mother says.

Mira nods.

“Never?” her mother says.

Mira doesn't answer. Her mother squints her eyes and looks at the ceiling, where Mira had just been staring. “Well,” she says, but doesn't finish her thought.

It turns out that her mother has already made an appointment in a
beige building with a big crowded waiting room lined with posters depicting medical procedures. Her mother waits, while Mira is led to an examining room. Here a doctor with glasses asks Mira to pee in a cup and listens to her belly. Then he asks her a lot of questions like “Who do you live with?” and “Has anyone touched you?” Finally, he sits on a chair across from her and holds his own hands. “Do you know you are pregnant?” he says.

People say they realize things in a flash, a bright bulb going off. Not Mira. She knows this doctor is right because she feels a dull thud in her chest. Her heart slows to a lizard's crawl.

“With a baby?”

The doctor smiles. “Yes, a baby. About four months.”

“But I've never had my period.”

He nods. “It's not impossible for a girl to ovulate before her first period. That's when the egg goes into the uterus. It's been known to happen—more frequently than you would imagine.”

Egg, uterus.
All of this she thought was simply about Pavlova's shoe, her desire, his desire, her need, his needs. That stupid brief,
terrible thing he did—they did—made a baby. What has she done? It's unfathomable.

He moves a little closer. “Whose is it? I can keep a secret.” But she won't say anything to the doctor. There are no words yet for what has happened. She is too close to the volcano, she must be still.

He continues: she can
press charges,
he says. She can
make whoever it is pay.
“Does anyone know about this?” he asks.

She shakes her head.

“This is
not your
fault,” he says. “I know you're scared.”

She's not scared, though. Not like he thinks. He can never understand her world. She's alone now: they were lying on the floor—and now she has a cat body with a baby inside.

“I can't remember,” she says.

He sighs. He tells Mira to wait while he calls her mother into his office and they talk privately.

Back home, Mira and her mother sit across from each other on her
mother's bed. “How did this happen?” her mother says.

Mira puts her head in her hands, but no tears come. “Are you going to tell Dad?”

Her mother looks at her for a long time. “Was it a boy at school?”

She thinks: it could have been Oliver, if everything were different. It could have been. “Not from my school,” she says. She thinks about the other girls and things they did. Things she could have done if Maurice hadn't always been there. “I just met him once. We rented a room at a hotel. They invited some boys over. I never saw him again.”

“What was his name?”

She shakes her head.

“Did he force you?”

If she says yes, they will look for him, for someone, to blame. She remembers some things—her own wild laughter, the Monopoly game, Maurice's pale face. If there are people to blame, she is surely one of them.

“No,” she says, sweating. “Please don't tell Dad?” She can't cry now, when it would help. “Please don't make me go back.”

Her mother sits down on the bed. “I have to think about this.”

Several days later, Mira's baking cookies with Brian when her
mother comes into the kitchen. She takes Mira into the living room, which is empty. Mira now has her mother's full attention. Her laser-like eyes are focused on Mira more than Mira can ever remember. Brian is humming in the kitchen. The streetlights are flowing in the windows. Her mother touches dried flowers in a vase on the table, then pulls her hand away quickly.

“My whole life I've been keeping secrets. You know that, right? That's why you came to me, right?” her mother says. “
I
left everything behind. It was the right thing for me. I was maybe too young when I had you or maybe—I don't know.” She flushes, but it's a soft kind, not a blaze.

Mira stares at her mother. She's wearing a bandanna, like in the old days.

“You should know this—having you was the greatest moment of my life. It may be hard to believe but—it changed everything. A new life does that.” It takes Mira a moment to realize that her mother is crying. Not the kind of crying people do on TV, loud and desperate, but a delicate kind of crying. It's like something is trying to get inside her mother and the tears are being pushed out.

“But you
left
. Then why did you leave?”

Her mother holds Mira's gaze. “I left to—I had to—find myself.”

Mira thinks about this. Can you really lose yourself? And if you do—how do you find yourself again? Has she lost herself too? Is that what has happened to her? She surprises herself by not being angry. She says, “Did you? Find yourself?”

“Well—we all have many parts to ourselves it turns out. But I—I did find something—so, yes, I think I did. I mean, I have.” Her mother does not wipe away the tears, which have spilled onto her eyelashes and beneath her eyes. “But I have caused you suffering. I
see that. You have paid for my lack of self-knowledge.” Her mother stares at her for a long time. Then she finally wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. “Oh, Mira,” she says. “I am sorry this happened to you. I am sorry I left—and—”

Mira nods. She understands that her mother does not know what she should do. She could get rid of the baby or she could have it. Either way, what she understands is that it—this—has happened and can't be undone. Her life will never go back to the way it was.

“Do you know what an abortion is?” says her mother.

Mira nods.