Girl Through Glass (4 page)

It's over a month since her father left. In her red kimono, her mother plays game after game of solitaire at the table in the parlor. “He isn't coming back,” she says. She doesn't take her eyes off the cards. “It doesn't mean he doesn't love you.” Then she says some other words meant for Mira not to understand:
irreconcilable differences, separation by consent
. In response, Mira has her own words. “You said you loved him! You lied!” Rachel's face is set in stone. “This really has nothing to do with love.”

Her mother reaches out and grabs Mira's arm. “The
only
reason we
got
married,” she says, “is that we were in love.” She turns back to her game of solitaire. Slap, slap
.
The cards continue.

Mira feels a jab of hate for her mother. She thinks about that loose snapshot in her parents' wedding album. How many times has she stopped when leafing through this album to stare at this snapshot, which is a different size and shape than the official wedding photos? Her mother, in her long white dress, is standing on top of a table full of young men. She's striking a pose, her head thrown back wildly, and she's laughing. The men have their bow ties loosened and the table is littered with corsages. It's late in the evening. Mira's
father also sits at the table. Unlike the other men, her father is not laughing. His arms hang at his sides. He stares up at his wife, gaping, as if he is caught in a fire, burning alive.

“My mom is totally destroyed,” she says to her friends who stand
around her in the dressing room. “She wails all day and night. You can't even go near her. She wears this kimono and doesn't take it off. And she doesn't shower.” Only the part about the kimono is true.

There is a part of Mira that has floated free with her father. The part that is left cares less about what others think and whether what she says is true or not. She often feels like laughing suddenly, for no reason.

“Maybe you should call Social Services,” says Meaghan.

“Oh, come on,” says Val, gnawing on her fingers. “You're exaggerating.” Val's parents split when she was five and her sister was seven. When they'd met, Val was the one with tough luck, without a father, and with a shitty childhood. Mira, with her two parents, with her big house, couldn't
understand,
didn't
know
. Now Val is afraid of losing her trump card.

“Are you saying I'm lying?” says Mira, staring hard at Val. She never used to be able to stare at anyone without looking away before.

“Yes,” says Val. She turns to Delia and whispers something in her ear. Meaghan titters, then whispers something to Delia.

“What?” says Mira.
“What?”

When she gets off the train in Manhattan, she walks slowly down
the streets, looking at each window of each apartment. A million people hiding behind curtains, her father in one of them. That you could lose your father in a city. That he can disappear into the streets, leaving only cuff links behind. It makes her stomach feel funny.

“Hurry up,” says Val. “I'm sick of always waiting for you.” Val rushes on ahead.

Mira goes up to a doorman standing in front of the giant apartment building on Fifty-sixth. It could be this very building. “Is Carl Able staying here?” she says to the doorman in his livery. “He's my dad.”

The doorman steps inside and pulls out a clipboard from behind his desk. His chin doubles over as he pursues his list. “Sometimes they forget to update me. Did he just move in?” If a doorman, whose job it is to keep track of residents, can lose count, how would she ever find her father?

October turns cold. The old shutters knock against windowsills as
a strong breeze buffets the house. Her mother sits cross-legged on a throw pillow on the floor, a blanket on her lap, papers spread out before her. “Look at me!” her mother says loudly. “I'm doing bills!”

Across the room, Mira sits in a chair and does her homework in the glow of a glass table lamp with a bordello shade. Mira's posture is unusually straight, as if she sits with her back to a wall. Only her head is tilted downward toward the ruled page of her notebook.

Her mother puts the bill in front of her to the side and looks at the one beneath it. It is from The Little Kirov, typed in heavy ink on onionskin paper. She holds it up.

“Agh,” says her mother, shaking the paper. “What do you like so much about ballet?”

Mira does not look up. “It's beautiful?”

Her mother writes some numbers in her bank book. “It's 1977. Beauty? Where has it gotten us?”

Mira looks up. Her mother's red kimono, now wrinkled and dull; it hangs on her like a too-big sheet. Her mother looks small and pale. Dwarfed by the things in the room. The
junk,
her father would say. Her mother laughs her skittish laugh and covers her face with her hands. “Where has it gotten
me
?” She drops her hands and in a louder voice says, “Let it go down in flames!”

“Why don't you sit on the floor? You don't look comfortable,” says her mother.

“I like this chair,” says Mira.

“I am thinking of taking all the chairs out.”

“No!” Mira says. When she sees her mother's expression, she wants to look back down. But she doesn't. Mother and daughter stare at each other for several moments; there is something between them, then nothing.

It's time. The letter. I hadn't forgotten, not exactly. The rage toward Bill had to be dealt with first, but now I go get the letter from my bag. In my ochre reading chair, under a gray-white Ohio sky, I spread the letter out on my lap.

I have gone away to a place where the dead go—no, not Hades, a city that befits me. No ballet here, only early bird specials and other sad people who have been banished to a city with no reason for existing.

My mind treads water, eddies pull. That voice. It's his. How can it be? Can he still be alive? How old would he be now? I quickly do the math—eighty. Possible. But why
now
? Why contact me after so long?

I close my eyes. To leave the body. To abandon the body. I know this trick. It doesn't work. The body goes on. So I call myself back. To the Dutch Colonial that I fell in love with on my tour of the town late last spring. Its blue slate roof on the cupola (with pewter detailing)
like ancient armor, and inside the hardwood floors and clean white walls, all of which felt vast after my last two small, linoleum-tiled (and ammonia-stink) faculty accommodations.

I open my eyes. Everything looks altered. The red ceramic vase my mother gave me for my doctoral ceremony, for which I have both an abiding revulsion and love. I've carried it with me from college town to college town over the past four years. I look over at my black office chair, my spindle-necked desk lamp, my modular desk to which I had attached an ergonomic keyboard. It's like peering through glass—everything looks altered, too big or too small in this space. Objects tossed together with no coherency. I remember only the compulsion, the desire and guilt in each item's acquisition. Only the rug under my feet feels familiar and recognizable, with its bold geometry of circles and triangles, a faux Mondrian pattern. These things—my chair, my rug, my desk—I'd chosen to create a workspace, now pulling apart.

I force myself to keep reading:

You killed me and I must thank you. I am one of the dead. I do not deserve to have commerce with the living. I wanted to tell you, my dear, because you too are one of the dead. Do you know that yet? You will always be—no way to avoid it. When you kill, you become one of the dead yourself.

I'm sure of it, suddenly! He is still alive. How raw, how familiar is his penchant for melodrama, for vitriol even. No one can hate like him—except me, perhaps. I have hated him with a passion that burns my scalp and palms, and stifles my voice. I have struggled with this hate, suffered it, abided it. At times it's been overpowering, at times it's ebbed; it's always been there, my whole adult life.

My legs are ready now; I stand; a burst of energy carries me into the
bedroom and toward the closet. But I'm not heading to the closet anymore. Instead I'm reaching under the bed. Here, now, on the bed
in front of me is an inlaid wood and enamel box. It was a long time ago, the last time I opened it. I open the box and take out one tiny pointe shoe that looks like it would only fit a child. It is the brownish color of a bruised nectarine. Barely larger than one of my hands—and worth at least twenty thousand dollars. Worn by Anna Pavlova in the second half of a performance of
Giselle,
in which the great ballerina had a rare tumble as she threw herself at the dying Albrecht. (Only one camp of balletomanes agrees that this was actually a fall. Another thinks it was a kind of seizure, a harbinger of the pneumonia that would eventually kill her.) At least, this was one of the several stories Maurice told me about the shoe over the years. You can no longer discern the bloodstain that Maurice pointed out to me. The fabric is worn away at the tip of the toe box, exposing the layers of binding underneath. The ribbons are brownish and shredded at the end but have held up better than the rest of the shoe.

I take out a tangled mess of grimy pink pointe shoe ribbons. Something a cat might have played with and discarded. Sometime after college, I found a giant tub of my old pointe shoes in the basement of my father's Connecticut house, where he and Judy were living before they finally divorced. I cut off all the satin ribbons, leaving the shoes, denuded, cracked, and bent but still startlingly pink in their satin skins. A childish gesture. Like cutting the hair off an old favorite doll. I threw the heap of limp ribbons in the garbage. Then on second thought, I went back and picked them out of the garbage can, balled them up, and put them at the bottom of my suitcase. Back in San Francisco, where I was getting my MFA, I stuffed them in this box. It was a maudlin gesture. Hyperridiculous. Bathetic, even.

Next, I finger a bent graying business card with
NEW YORK LIBRARY OF THE PERFORMING ARTS
on it. Not sure this one gets “exhibit” status. I put that aside and remove a perfume decanter top. Exhibit C. I never had the bottle. It has the telltale Victorian flourishes. The body of a swan is etched in the glass. The wings are open behind the swan so that it looks like it is exploding out of the glass in a Victorian fantasy of flight. I hold the top in my hand, roll it back and
forth. When I was younger, when he gave me this, I thought it was huge. It still seems uncommonly heavy, from another era when beautification rituals required a different kind of attention and commitment. One's perfume. Like another limb. It's a perfume bottle stopper. I sniff it. It smells of some kind of adhesive and musk.

Then I pull out a little book with a curled black leather cover. The pages inside undulate. They are yellowed and brittle. Still, you can make out the writing. Even black cursive with uneven line breaks, punctuated by dates.

One entry:

10/15 Bella chosen for Angel—next year will it be Polichinelle? I want to see her as a Polichinelle.

She must work on adagio. Développé and ronde de jambe en l'air. The shaking in her thigh. I have seen it. The problem is core strength. Will it come with time?

The Polichinelle variation will require work on her jumps. I must watch carefully how she lands. She must stop that birdlike flutter of her hands. Annoying. I don't care what B. says to her.

There are a couple of other things in the box—odds and ends whose
significance I don't try to recall because his face—the very last time I saw it—comes back to me. Maurice's face. He woke up before I left the room. I see him now as he lay on the floor looking up at me and laughed.
Bravo, bravo, my dear, your finest performance.
His face is gray, his hair yellowish white against the stain of dark red that grows from the side of his head, his grin monstrous. He wears his old smile that shows his teeth lined up. It is full of brilliance.

“Stop making fun of me,” I say.

His smile fades. He looks stricken. “I have never made fun of you.” Then the wild, bewildered look. Then he closes his eyes. I leave. I run out of the room.

In the middle of October, Mira comes home from school to find her mother and a strange man sitting on the living room cushions. Her mother has finally changed her clothes. She wears a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck, and her hair is tied back in a frizzy bunch with a bandanna. The man sits across from her, cross-legged. The bottoms of his jeans are frayed. He has taken his shoes off; his socks are all wrong—shiny and too new for the rest of him. Though he is a big man, his hands are bony. Mira dislikes them immediately. They are attached to bony wrists that stick out of the sleeves of a blue worker's jacket like the kind that men working at the gas pumps wear. Although he is inside, he wears the jacket zipped all the way up. When he takes a sip of tea, Mira wants to shout a “No!” that will make this man disappear from her living room. His eyes, under his taxi driver's cap, are bright and watchful. He reminds her of the men her mother draws and paints from her Court Street studio window—those lurking outside Club Wild Fyre, the strip club, who push things along the curb with the top of their broken-soled shoes. She has invited them into their house now.

Mira looks straight at him. He takes a sip and places the cup on the carpeted ottoman that serves as their makeshift table.

“This is Gary Rosen. He is going to rent a room upstairs for a studio. He's a writer.”

He takes off his hat and looks down at his cup. Mira regards him with suspicion. Someone who sits in a room and puts words on a
page. But for what? And whom for? And why would one need a special room to do it in?

“What room?” Mira says. She does not drop her backpack. She does not say “hi.”

“The extra room,” says her mother.

“The junk room?”

Her mother smiles sheepishly at the man. “We used to call it that because that's where we kept all the extra furniture and stuff.”

“Extra furniture?” he says. “Wow, man. What a concept.”

Her mother's cheeks grow red. “It's not like we bought it. It was here, it came with the house.” Mira looks at her mother, for she has used her Manhattan voice in their house, in Brooklyn, with this raggedy stranger.

“Sure thing,” he says, looking around. “This is a far-out place.”

“You're going to live here?” Mira says.

“Mira!” says her mother. “Don't be rude!”

He shakes his head. “Don't worry. I'll be out of your hair. I'll mostly be here during the day when you're in school.”

Mira turns and walks out of the room, up the creaky steps.

“Mira! Come back here!” But her mother's voice breaks into the beginning of laughter.

She hears the man say, “Well, I should be going.”

She hears her mother laughing again—high-pitched, energetic—as if her daughter's rudeness has fueled something in her. “Red hair,” she hears him say. She hears him say:
takes after her mother.

Soon after, a boy from their neighborhood is kidnapped. He is, it is
said, kidnapped in broad daylight, while waiting for the school bus. It happens down below Squibb Hill, where Mira and her friends never go. There is nothing there—only old deserted factories. But this boy
lived
down there. The thought of a boy living down there makes her squirm inside. It is like imagining living on the moon. His sticking-out ears and cloud of curly hair appear on posters everywhere, under the headline
MISSING.
The graininess of the photo
copied paper makes it look like he is staring out from behind layers of static, of white noise. So the world has grown less safe, not just for her, but also for everyone.
Missing.
One might go missing, one's face staring out from telephone booths and street signs, covered by a static blanket. Sometimes she has to pinch herself just to be sure she is here—that she can be seen.

After school, on the way home, Mira stops at one of the
MISSING
posters. She rips down the faded and watermarked paper and takes it home. She carries it to her room and hangs it on the back of her closet door. Sometimes she will talk to this boy, sometimes she won't. She will tell him about her father. She will tell him she hopes he is okay. Just to hang in there. She will feel better looking at him, knowing that someone always leaves something behind, even if it is just a static-y smile.

The temperature drops again and the rats hide in garbage cans
and make nests under the grease-stained hamburger. The leaves fall from the trees. The hanging sneakers blacken with soot. Sirens comb the streets, the lights raking across her ceiling. Her mother thinks they are still looking for the
looters,
the people who
broke in
stores and
stole
. Bulky men in blue loiter on street corners giving the stink eye to passersby. She knows they are looking for the boy. But they won't find the boy. He has disappeared, just like her father.

The cops wrap yellow tape around trees on Squibb Hill. It says
DO NOT CROSS
. No one ever removes it, though bottles and Band-Aids and Newport cigarette packs gather around so that by next spring, when Mira has moved to Manhattan, it looks like there's been a party.

Ms. Clement waves her hand in the air to start the class, slips a
Chopin record out of its sleeve, and puts it on the turntable. The scratching needle starts up the tinkling piano tune and the girls begin the movements that by now are rote.

Mira holds the barre, the smooth, round wooden pole that draws a line around the room. She points her foot in a
tendu.
The air is bright with afternoon light, an elbow of shadow rests on the floor. Ms. Clement walks slowly along the barre, surveying her girls. Mira feels Ms. Clement's half-lidded eyes on her and then her dry, pointy fingertips rest gently on the small of Mira's back. “String through the top of the head,” she says. Her other hand massages the air in time to the Chopin waltz.

Ms. Clement runs The Little Kirov. She's a dancer in her fifties with a vague past—a “European touring career” is how she puts it. Ms. Clement wears too much of the wrong kind of jewelry and chiffon to have really been a Russian dancer, even in her assumed prime. Mira thinks about something her mother said to her once—that Ms. Clement looks like something out of an Ingmar Bergman movie. She doesn't know who Ingmar Bergman is, but she pictures him like someone small and stooped with bright eyes. “A woman,” Rachel said, “standing by the window, with the light a certain way. Not miserable, not happy, just
there
.” What Mira knows is that Ms. Clement belongs with them more than in the world of adults. Mira has seen her talking to the parents after the recitals—her big eyes wandering around the room and her fingertips drumming restlessly on top of the piano. Unlike her classroom teachers, who stand in front of the blackboard in their starchy pantsuits and winged hair and gaze at them with malevolence, Ms. Clement looks at them with a gentle fatigue, like someone who has just drunk a glass of milk before bed.

Today Ms. Clement wears a knee-length black chiffon skirt and a long-sleeve black leotard gathered with an iridescent pin at the nadir
of her sloping breasts. She moves on to Val, whose elbow has dropped again. “Arms round as a beach ball, Valerie,” she says. She puts a hand on the back of Haijuan's head. “Don't forget,” she says, and they know how she will finish: “A little magnet on the chin. Chin to collarbone.”

In Ms. Clement's class, something secret blooms in her. Mira doesn't get this feeling anywhere else. She is learning that ballet makes a science out of the movements of living. She is learning how to walk in that special dancer way—like a bright, fearful bird. She is learning how to hold her fingers as if she has just let go of a dainty teacup, still feeling the pressure between her thumb and middle finger. She is learning how to smile and lift her chin as she pliés
.
She is learning that to be a girl is to be strong and tireless. She smiles and lifts her sternum, moves her arm from a first, to a second, to a fourth position, gathering up the air and redelivering it. She will be reborn, transformed. She can feel it.

Yes, she is a girl in pink tights and ballet slippers, a girl with a heart beating. Her body will move; it will take care of itself. Plié, plié, grande plié
.
Open her arms, close her arms. As if relearning the very rhythms of breathing. Outside, above the rusted fire escapes, the birds circle high above Seventh Avenue's canyon of buildings.
Relevé,
turn to the other side.

“Movement,” her mother once said as she watched Mira practice, “is the thing that interests me now. How one thing changes into another.”

Tendu,
dégagé,
tendu,
dégagé.
Passé.
She rises on her standing leg, bends her other knee, and points her toes into the crook of her standing leg.

Ms. Clement, in her breathy monotone, says, “Lovely, Mira. Nice long legs. Yes, little ones.”

As the girls are leaving the room, Ms. Clement calls out to Mira to stay behind. She drapes her long arm over the girl's shoulders, then dips her head and looks at Mira over her bifocals. The glasses are red and overly large. In them she looks like a regal fly, the dotage
queen of some insect tribe. Mira stares at the nicely scuffed toes of her Capezio slippers. She has done her elastics in an X, the way she has seen the SAB dancers do in photographs in the books her father has given her.

“Please accompany me to my office,” Ms. Clement says.

The small, cluttered office has a faded carpet and a gingery smell. A
steady peck peck of a typewriter comes from one side of the room, where the office manager, Mr. Feltzer, a hunchbacked man in black-framed glasses, works on bills.

Ms. Clement positions herself on a battered office chair and covers her shoulders with a shawl. Mira sits on the hardwood school chair facing her teacher. Mira had never thought of Ms. Clement as old, but next to the piles of papers on her desk, flanked by two towering filing cabinets, Ms. Clement looks tiny and ancient.

“Dear,” starts Ms. Clement. “We think you are doing very well here. You have good line and, even more, you have the je ne sais quoi
.
”

The sound of the typewriter stops briefly. “For this year's
Little Prince,
we would like you to be the Flower Princess.”

“But Robin is the Flower Princess,” says Mira.

Ms. Clement laughs—a strange sound—like music from a rusty toy.

“The Flower Princess is a part, dear, a role, for each girl to step into as she will. Robin, yes, she is a lovely Flower Princess, but so will you be, and so will the girl after you. It is a part. . . .” Here she trails off, adjusting some papers.

Mira sits on the scratchy wood of the chair. She feels suddenly very hungry, a deep ache that comes not pleading and insistent as hunger from her stomach, but general and complete, from the farthest reaches of her body: her ears ache with this hunger, and her buttocks, and ankles, and toes. She sees herself as the Flower Princess, onstage, healing the Prince. But the image fades, leaving a darkness as if the sun blinked and never opened its eyes again.