Girl Through Glass (8 page)

It is barely more than two weeks since their first meeting, but she already feels she's known him forever. When their cups are filled with the hot liquid from the samovar, he raises his glass and says, “
Nazdrovia!
” She tentatively lifts hers and he clinks his glass to hers. He smiles and points at the wooden dolls lined up on a shelf across the room. “This place is a hundred percent Russian. With a little kitsch. But who says kitsch isn't Russian? They are really quite
art brut.
”

She nods. For once she knows what he is talking about. Her grandmother had given her a Russian nesting doll for her tenth birthday. The dolls painted on oblong wooden eggs. The women get smaller as the eggs get smaller. Each woman rests inside another woman until the last tiny woman stands there wobbling on the table.

Maurice waves a waiter over and orders some things Mira can't pronounce. Then he smiles at her. The noises—the laughter, the tinkling silverware, the clatter of food carts—grow louder as she looks at him, her eyes burning.

“They used to be my friends.”

“Who?”

“Val. And the other girls—”

He laughs. “They're not destined for greatness as you are.”

Her eyes are filling up again. The room is collapsing into blurry shapes and streaks of light. She hasn't been able to get the girls out of her mind. “They whisper.”

“Enough,” he says. “Mira, I want to tell you a story. Imagine, dear,
before
electrical lights. No spotlights, no disco balls. This is how the first ballerinas danced—in theaters lit by gaslights, close to the fire. Now, these early ballerinas would sometimes get a little too far downstage, too close to the lamps, and their fragile tutus, which were longer in those days than they are now, well—they would catch fire, go up,
poof
! The ballerina engulfed in flames! Many ballerinas died this way. But they didn't stop the show. Poor Clara Webster burned in front of the audience and they carried her off and the show went on.

“One night a dancer named Rostova was performing
Swan Lake
—there it was, the fire. In the mirror, she saw her own wings in flames but rushed out onstage right on cue. Siegfried, without missing a beat, grabbed a blanket from backstage, pas de bourréed over to her and wrapped her in that blanket. He had second-degree burns on his hands from trying to tamp out the worst of the flames. But they were onstage for the next act, Siegfried doing lifts with a bandaged hand. And Rostova danced the rest of the evening beautifully.”

Mira's head throbs.

“The audience, interviewed afterward, said that they thought the fire was part of the performance. The audience only knows what it is told.”

He looks at her, his black eyes boring into her. “Now these girls. They are like your fire.” She makes herself meet his eyes. “Mira, you must learn to dance with the fire.”

There is a din inside her head that matches the one in the room. She looks around the room: everything glitters strangely. It's too bright, like a dollhouse come to life. She feels like she's seeing it all for the first time.

Suddenly, her gloom lifts.

A bow-tied waiter places a bowl of soup before her. It is a deep purple red, hot and salty, with bits of something like earth floating in it. Beneath the earth and salt, the tangy silver of the spoon. Then a plate of folded pancakes arrives on their table. A number of small dishes accompany them—sour cream, apples, jam. Her mouth waters at the tastes on display. She tries each one in succession—she has always been a good eater, with a taste for sweet and salty, sour and bitter.

Then Maurice leans over to her and whispers in her ear, “My dear, do you see that man over there?” Mira looks at the corner where Maurice is pointing and she sees an older man—a man with white hair and the small wizened face of a turtle—gazing at a young girl sitting across from him.

“That, my dear, is the great Balanchine.”

There's not a girl who dances in New York City who doesn't know about Balanchine—Mr. B. He is synonymous with the great and the rare. He is father of the “pinhead ballerina”—that new variety—the waif with the strength of an ox. But to Mira, he is a confusing figure, more shadowy than the stars he has produced, more mysterious than Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, the show-stoppers of ABT.

The great Balanchine wipes his mouth heartily. His twinkling eyes scan the room. They rest on her for a second before they continue
on. Mira's eyes shift to the girl next to him. She sits with her hands in her lap, looking down. From her small ears hang strands of diamonds. When the girl looks up again, Mira sees that she's not a girl but a
woman
.

Balanchine and the young-but-old woman gather their things. They don't have much—he has no coat and she has only a tiny gold-clasped purse that hangs from one long-fingered hand. She puts her other arm through Balanchine's. Her eyes are trinkets—wide and bright. She doesn't smile. He steers her among the tables of the room as he makes his way toward their table. Then he and the glittering waif stand before them.

Balanchine nods at Maurice and turns to Mira. His eyes are small and almond shaped, and through his skin you can see the bones of his skull. His eyes crinkle as he takes her in.

“Is she one of mine?” he says.

“No,” Maurice answers. “Not yet.”

“Ah,” he says.

“Her name is Mirabelle.”

Mr. B nods. The woman blinks her startled eyes. They turn and make their way toward the door.

Sioban doesn't come to contact class on Tuesday. She doesn't show up to Dance History on Wednesday morning either. We are doing Léonide Massine and Balanchine, the early days of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the years when Bronislava choreographed her masterpiece,
Les Noces
. I imagine Sioban back in class, her tightly pulled back hair and lean body, her eyes anodyne, her speech subdued. I will say,
Sioban, we need to talk.
But where should our talk be? A booth in the coffee shop in town? In the classroom after everyone's gone? My office? Each place rife with danger.

Then comes Friday afternoon. I'm in my office. Bill pokes his head
in. I am
sure
he's going to tell me he's been given the Pell—delivering me into a year of deep income instability and insecurity, another overly educated, impoverished vagabond floating around the country. I am preparing the acrid congratulations, when he says. “Kate, are you okay?”

I'm caught off guard. Is my distress that obvious?

“You look like hell,” he says, grinning.

I haven't been able to deal with my contact lenses, so I am wearing an old pair of glasses—tortoiseshell frames that leave an orange greasy smudge near my temples where the chemical coating is wearing off. The prescription is years old. But it's a relief in a way to see less well: if
I
can't see as well, perhaps others won't look so closely at me.

Bill disabuses me of that.

“Thanks,” I say. “It's just a scratched cornea.” I have no idea where I get this lie. “And my shower's been broken.”
Lie, lie.
“But thanks for your concern.” I am not able to keep the bitterness out of my voice. My disdain for him at that moment is pure and unadulterated.

He is saying something about his aunt rupturing her cornea but I'm not really listening. My worse vision helps me see the broader outlines of his face, the shape of it—I realize that the name Krasdale must be a shortened form of something more ethnic.

Then he claps his hands on his knees a few times and says, “Kate, the other night, I was driving home after coming back from dinner and I saw”—he looks away—“I saw you and that student—I saw her in your office the other day, just walking together.” Then he looks right at me now. “You walked side by side without talking.
Exactly
in step together. Like you were going to an important meeting or something.” He laughs.

“God, Bill. Don't you have anything better to do?”

“Listen,” he says. “I've been there before—almost there.” I wish I could see his expression better. Is he smiling or grimacing? I have the strange thought that he's flirting with me.

“I'm offended,” I say, harsher than I intend.

“Be careful, Kate, be very careful. I am not the enemy.”

“Leave me alone,” I say. I am yelling. “Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Have it your way. Don't say I didn't warn you.” His tone, dire and mean, is so out of keeping with his generally jovial demeanor we stare at each other in shock. Then he shakes his head. “It's your decision to self-destruct, not mine.”

“Get out. You bigfooted me. You have no right—”

“You're a tough one, Kate.” He shakes his head again and turns to leave. “I've tried to help. Don't say I didn't try.”

Then comes the weekend. It's weekends like this that make me glad
I live alone. I don't want to have to think about anyone else right now. I shop and cook, I make a stew, I start grading the midterm.
But my worry is constant—a ghost tic in my consciousness spouting new scenarios. What is going on with Sioban? Am I going to get a call from some parent somewhere, complaining of a crying, inconsolable girl? (I think of the trembling hand on my wrist, the crumpled sock on the floor.) Is she talking to friends? Does she
have
friends? She comes to class alone and leaves alone, quivering with ideas, rattling the others. I go so far as to look up her home address in the student register. It's a town a few hours away that looks from a map like it could be considered a suburb of Cincinnati.

Or what if she is vindictive? What if she goes to the administration instead of her parents? What if she says—Dr. Randell
put her tongue inside of me
?

By Sunday evening I've finished everything I need to do and, in this fallow time, I really start drowning. I try reading, but can't concentrate. I try researching, but my mind wanders, the pen droops, and I become fixated on hunting for splinters of glass on the floor.

That night I call my mother again. The phone rings and then her
piqued voice answers.
Hello?
She always sounds like she's being interrupted.
Hello? Hello?
I imagine I'm catching her on her roof garden, at her mushroom breeding pots, her freckled knees reddening in the spring sun. Rainy season is almost over there in San Francisco. Things dry out quickly. The sun blankets and burns and chills the rooftops and soon the cool summer breeze will start up. The fog doesn't ever come this far inland.

It's enough just to think of her. I hang up, cutting off her annoyed
hellos.

My phone is languid on the table now. It shows its dull off-line screen. The sky darkens outside of the curtains. Then my eyes rest on the knives I keep in a basket on the counter, a hodgepodge of well-used curiosities. Estate sale specials. I pick an old knife from the basket and run my palm along the edge of the blade. It surprises me when my hand comes away with a long cut. I watch the blood wind its way into the little wrinkles in my palm. I rip off a sheet of
paper towel and wad it into my hand. Staunch the inevitable—but for how long? There is a universe of deception behind one secret. Not all secrets see the light of day. My life is a testament to that.

Why am I drawn to the illicit, the secretive? It's like a curse I can't shake, no matter how far I've come. What have these secrets cost me? A normal life, and intimacy of a typical kind. There is no doubt something still wrong with me, deep down, something that this letter has unearthed. Here I am, one secret at my heels, another blossoming before me. It's absurd.
I
am absurd.

Holding my hand, I head to the bathroom to look for gauze.

I have to go to New York. There may still be people there—people
from long ago, another era—who can help me put the pieces back together. There's someone in particular I have to see—if he's still there. I hesitate, then go to Facebook and, with my throbbing, bandaged hand, poke around. I am looking for Felicia, one of the few girls I used to dance with whom I've kept in touch with (at least sort of). I find her page: there are some posed photos of her in exotic locales, sunglasses and smiles, her black hair pulled back. But no new posts for six months, the last one a “like” for a salon. Still, I message her and say I am coming to town. “Any interest,” I ask, hoping I sound good-humored, wry in my own way, “in putting up an old friend?” (Was the word
friend
the right one?)

The performance will take place the weekend before Christmas: Saturday, December 17. There's only a month left of rehearsal time, and one weekend is lost because of Thanksgiving weekend. They've just finished another rehearsal, but there is still so much to do—especially on the lifts.

Christopher and Mira gather their things silently. Out of the corner of her eye, Mira watches him fold his leg warmers and pack them in his bag. His T-shirt is wet with sweat and his face pale with effort. He pulls on a blue sweatshirt and takes a comb out of his bag and runs it through his damp hair. Then he uncaps a stick of something and walks up to the mirror. He pulls his high bangs back again and gazes at his forehead, rubs his fingers lightly over the skin. Then, carefully, with quick, sure strokes, he draws a dark line beneath one eye.

“Nice job,” Christopher says, without looking at her.

He has switched to the other eye.

“Thanks,” she says, unable to look away. Again, those words:
there is something wrong with him.

“But we still need to work on the lift,” he says. “You're still holding back. You have to trust me, trust that I'll be there.”

She pulls her leg warmers off, tosses them in her bag. The cooler air slides over her shins. She knows what he means. She hasn't been able to recapture that feeling of abandon that she had the first day they rehearsed the lift—to close her eyes and
just jump
as if she were launching herself from the diving board into the deep end of the pool.
Trust
. Yes, that is the operative word. But she's not sure that it
is
her fault. When Ms. Clement is not watching, he is cavalier, he is sloppy. He doesn't plié enough, so that when she runs and leaps into him, it feels for a moment like a collision rather than a lift. She can feel his effort but it comes with a hitch, too late. Once he almost dropped her, she knows it, though he pretended it was just his jockstrap that had come loose. But can she say this to him, to a boy, a prince from ABT?

The truth is that she is disappointed in the difficult work of partnering. It is nothing like it looks: two bodies seamlessly flowing into and away from each other. It is nothing like dancing on your own, feeling the power of your own body transporting you. No, partnering is all sweating and grunting and hard-edged bones, hip bones jabbing into finger bones and taut thighs ricocheting, straining against a heaving shoulder, slick with sweat. It is unseemly and difficult, without the reward of self-mastery.

She surprises herself. “Maybe it's not
me,
maybe it's
you,
” she says.

He looks at her. He looks tired, his face too long, his eyes too blurry, his skin sickly, his hair dank, too old and too young at once.
There is something wrong wrong wrong with him.
Then he steps back and regards himself. With the smudges beneath them, his eyes appear deeper set, his skin paler, his hair blonder. “It'll be fine,” he says. “You'll figure it out. Just keep practicing.”

She looks down—her turtleneck has hearts on it. How babyish!

She remembers Maurice's story of Rostova and her partner. How he looked out for her. How he saved her when she caught fire. To
trust
and then leap. She needs to find a way to leap, she needs to close her eyes, she needs to ignore the hitch of his knees buckling, the unstableness of his stance, and the soft grunts that he might not even know slip out from somewhere in his slick-with-sweat throat. That is the job of the ballerina.

“Sorry—” she says.

He pulls his bangs back, rubs his fingers lightly over the skin of his forehead, investigating his pimples. “Are you going to audition in the fall?” he says.

She and Val had said they would audition for SAB and ABT someday, but it had been far off, an idea. Now she sees that it's not far off at all. She must have nodded because he says, “SAB or ABT? Or both?”

For her only one shining, glittering acronym matters—the one owned by the wise, shadowy face she saw at the Russian Tea Room with Maurice. “SAB,” she says. “I met Mr. Balanchine once.”

He cocks his head and smiles, though it's really more of a smirk.

I will go there. Next year.
But she has to wait for August when they famously line girls up along a barre and lift their legs and check their arches and say which ones have a chance before they even dance. They wait for the last minute, a minute before September classes start, to hold the audition.

He nods. “You should. You'll probably get in. You have the right line. No hips. They hate hips.”

“I'm only eleven,” she says.

“Yeah, well,” he says. “When I was your age, I was already the
Nutcracker
prince.”

“I know that.” She smoothes her white turtleneck with the hearts on it.

He laughs. “Of course you do. Did you read that book about me?”

She looks down and feels her face fill with blood.

He smiles slowly. “That's all right,” he says. He is enjoying himself. He rubs his eyes quickly, almost violently, and shakes his hair.

He is about to leave. Suddenly, she doesn't want him to go. She doesn't want to be alone in the studio in the fading afternoon. She doesn't want to go home on the train to her Brooklyn self, to her mother, to her absent father. She thinks about Gary, who, despite what he said, is over at the house all the time clattering away on a typewriter and lurking about, his hungry wolf's face saying hello to Mira so that before Mira has to pee, she sticks her head out into the hallway to see if he is there. She thinks of her father with his head in his hands at the steamy diner. Her father's new place: that bright
apartment with the brown couch and squat black phone. She wants to say something to Christopher that will encompass all of this.

“My father skipped out.”
Skipped out.
She's never said that before. She doesn't even know what it means, exactly. It makes her blush.

He zips up his bag. “I'm sorry.” She can see he means it.

Now Christopher looks at her. His eyes look darker, deeper set, with the slight smudges beneath them. The old swooning feeling comes back to her. Only it is changed. She feels a vertiginous swell of something for this long-faced counterfeit prince. She knows now though that it is not love. What is it?

“That guy? Watching you that first day? I know him. I remember him. He comes around David Howard's.” He begins lacing up his high-top sneakers. “Be careful of him. He's a creep.” Now he doesn't smile. He looks at her with his bruised-looking eyes. “There are creeps everywhere. The perverts are the ones who get caught.”

He pauses in the doorway and turns back around. “Ballet is not about me. It's about you. You'll see.
Ballet is woman.
That's what Balanchine said.” He reaches in his pocket and holds out the eyeliner pencil. “Here,” he says. “It's almost finished anyway. Try to get it right under your eye, otherwise it looks lame. It gives your eyes depth. If you burn it first, then let it cool for a minute, it's even darker.”

She takes the pencil from him.

He turns and walks down the hallway to the elevator. She watches him go, her fist clenched around the little hard nub of a pencil.

She stops by the dressing room on the way out to get her coat. The
room is deserted except for Robin, who has stayed after the older girls' class to practice, no doubt, and is changing into her street clothes. Robin is naked. She has never seen Robin naked before—she usually arrives from school already with leotard and tights on underneath her street clothes. Her body is long and extremely white, more substantive than it appears in leotard and tights. Her nipples, big as raspberries, sit directly on her ribs.

There are two bright red spots on her pale cheeks.

Robin nods at Mira and begins pulling on a pair of jeans without any underwear.

Mira stands awkwardly in the center of the room for a moment. Then she surprises herself by walking up to Robin. “Are you going to audition?” Mira asks. Robin hunches over a bit and peers at Mira as if she is surprised to find her there. Mira realizes she has made a big mistake: she has come too close to Robin. But she doesn't want to move back. If she moves back it will somehow be admitting she made a mistake to begin with. She and Robin are practically pressed up together. She can smell the certain combination of flowers and salt that she associates with those older than she is, with a next phase of life. She is dizzy with being so close to Robin's long flat body, milky skin, and raspberry nipples.

Robin's face looks beautiful in the weak, dusty light of the space—long and pale, big eyes, and a strange grimace. Her voice—which Mira realizes she has never heard—is a whisper. “In the fall? Sure. But just for SAB this time. I haven't heard such good things about the ABT school.”

“Me, too,” Mira says. She can't believe that she's speaking to Robin. She pictures the old man with the glittering woman on his arm.

Then another whisper from inside a see-through undershirt Mira has seen men but never women wear: “How many times have you tried before?”

“None,” Mira says.

“Really? Most girls start auditioning at five or six. When I was your age, I had already auditioned four times.”

Mira sees what her mother's lack of vigilance has cost her—all the missed opportunities. At the same time, she's amazed that Robin, perfect Robin who had played the Flower Princess for two years in a row, didn't get in. Her face fills with blood. She doesn't know where to look.

“Look,” Robin says.

In her palm, Robin holds a purple plastic square the size of a Cracker Jack box prize. Robin is looking at her searchingly, but
Mira does not know what is expected of her. Is she supposed to touch it? It looks like a toy, but she knows it's not a toy. Printed on the puffy plastic is a silhouette of a helmeted head, like a Greek warrior's, and beneath it is the big word TROJAN. Mira looks up. Robin blows at the wisps of fine hair that have fallen around her eyes, hair so fine it looks like the thread of spiders. She still hasn't put her shirt on. “Well, anyway,” Robin says. Robin closes her hand and the plastic square disappears with a crinkly sound. Robin begins to back up and Mira knows something has changed. Robin has shown her something she wanted to. Something important. But Mira doesn't know what.

That night, in her room, Mira strips naked and looks at her body
in the mirror. She imagines Maurice looking at her. What would he see? A child? A woman? A girl? A dancer? The sticking-out ears, the too-wide mouth, the knobby knees are those of a girl. Her flat, muscular stomach and long, lithe arms belong to a dancer. On her long torso she sees the hard nipples like swollen insect bites that don't go away. But they are pale, not rosy. She sees they belong to a child.

She takes out the eyeliner and uncaps it. Using one of the cigarette lighters Gary left downstairs, she burns the tip like Christopher said to do. It softens and becomes gooey. She draws a line underneath each eye, but it comes off in too thick, liquid globs. When she tries to rub it off, it smears and streaks and she can't get it off with her hands, no matter how hard she rubs. After a while, she is just transferring the black smears back and forth from her fingers to her eyes.

She goes downstairs in her pajamas for a cup of milk before bed. Her mother and Gary are sitting at the kitchen table playing cards. As she passes, Gary tosses his cards down. “You're cheating again, Rachel,” Gary says. Her mother laughs and says, “My way or the highway.”

As Mira passes, carrying her milk back upstairs, her mother grabs her. “What's that on your eyes?”

“Nothing,” says Mira.

“Little Cleopatra,” says Gary.

Her mother pulls Mira closer. Her mother's expression is too small for her big features. Her mother's eyes settle on her in that rare way, really lock in. Mira's right up against a landscape of flushed, freckled skin. Gary laughs. “Shut up,” her mother says. Her mother grabs a paper napkin lying on the table and wipes Mira's eyes hard with it. The black smudges are on the old balled-up napkin that her mother tosses on the table. Her mother looks at the napkin, then from her to Gary, tosses her cards into the center of the table next to the napkin, suddenly stands—the chair tilts back and forth before it rights itself—and says, “Game over.”

Today her dad is taking Mira to the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Her
mother gets up early and makes Mira some Cream of Wheat. She can hear Gary thumping around upstairs. She's grateful that he doesn't come down. The cereal is so thick that her spoon sticks up straight. There are lumps in it, so Mira does not eat much. She watches the sky lighten to a peevish gray and then stop.

Her father parks on Eighth. They walk over on Thirty-eighth to Broadway, where they find a crowd pressed against police barricades, spilling over, bundled in blankets and coats, with their own stepladders (her father's secret weapon!) and chairs and even giant ladders. A great crush of paper cups and thermoses. She and her father stand amid the throng. Everything in the damp, gray air.