Girl Through Glass Read online

  “Do they have homes?”

  “No,” he says. “Or no longer.”

  “Why?”

  He laughs.

  “Attention, caution,” says Maurice.

  “Find me,” she says and runs off. Despite the fact that it is so cold in the house, she wakes in a sweat, with her heart pounding, shaking. She cries, not out of sadness but because, for a time, a few moments in this dream, she felt happy and complete.

  In the middle of the fifty-sixth hour of their lights-out period, Mira reads in the cracked bathtub by the window in the junk room by the pale winter light. She’s covered herself with three blankets. There is no wind and the tree outside the window shimmers in the startled air. Now she is turning the final pages of The Black Stallion—the midnight thoroughbred is heading into the last furlong with victory in his stride—when she hears a deep voice echoing in the hallway downstairs, a male voice. “Helloowwww,” it says. “Anybody home?”

  She stands. “Dad!”

  Her father stands in the dim hallway. He looks huge-shouldered, giant.

  “Carl!” her mother says, appearing.

  “You could have called,” her mother says.

  “I wanted to see how you were faring—” He looks at Mira. “What’s on your eyes? Why’s it so dark and cold in here?” Then he sees Gary, who appears in the doorway behind her mother. He stares at him for a long second. “Who is that rodent and why isn’t he wearing any shoes?”

  All the attention focuses on Gary’s feet. Despite the cold, he doesn’t have any shoes on. A map of blue veins runs under the skin.

  “I’m Gary.” He uses a strange, polite voice. He extends a hand. Her dad does not shake it.

  “He rents a room for writing. A writing studio,” her mother says.

  “Which room?”

  Her mother looks down at her legs and smoothes the robe over them.

  “Which room?”

  “Your study.”

  “Oh my God, Rachel.”

  “Carl,” her mother says. “Carl. What was I supposed to do? You left me alone here. You hadn’t even paid the electric bill. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Don’t play the victim, Rachel. I gave you the money to pay the bill.”

  He gestures to the living room. “I want to talk to you.” Her mother begins to follow him out into the living room. When they leave, she and Gary will be alone in the shadowed hallway, with the beaten and broken furniture, her parents’ voices colliding in the parlor. She remembers Gary’s mouth on hers, scratchy, searching. The dark, she remembers, with a strange excitement, is coming again soon. What will happen?

  “He kissed me,” she says loudly.

  Gary looks at her like he has forgotten something important.

  Her parents stop at the threshold, in the doorway. Her father turns back to her.

  Gary smiles a strange smile and holds up his hands. “Arrest me.”

  “What do you mean? When? Where?” her mother says.

  “I—shoot—” Gary drops his hands. The strange smile is stuck on his face.

  “Gary, I think you should leave,” says her mother.

  Then her father rushes at Gary and hits him straight in the face so that Gary bangs against the wall and clasps his hands to his nose, which explodes into something bright red. Mira has never seen her father hit someone, her father of two modes: homecoming joy and worried absence. She does not associate her father with violence at all. Thus, she does not recognize what she sees as violence, but as a strange dance of color and motion, somewhat beautiful, in slow motion, out of time.

  “Carl!” her mother says now with more solid confidence.

  “My stuff,” Gary mumbles as he sinks to the floor.

  Her dad says, “Mira, pack a bag.”

  “You can’t,” says her mother. “He’ll leave. I’ll make him leave.”

  “I can and I will.”

  “You don’t get to take the moral high ground.”

  “Yes I do,” says her father, grabbing Mira a little too hard by the elbow. “Forget that bag. We’re leaving.”

  Less than five minutes later, she has her jacket on, her school bag is packed with a nightgown and change of clothes, and her father ushers her out the door, his hands like a guided missile on her back.

  “Mira!” her mother calls as they pass. “Mira!”

  Gary is outside too in front of the house, gathering his things off the ground that her mother has been throwing out the door in batches. He wears his boots now, unlaced, and his nose is swollen and is growing purplish.

  As Mira passes Gary, he gives her a sad grin. She likes him at that moment, she really does. He didn’t try to lie. Her father’s voice is low, a growl. “Come on,” he says. The slate of the sidewalk rises and falls in great slabs like shifting tectonic plates. Mira walks down the uneven block, her heels and toes rocking up and down, stepping carefully to avoid the cracks, which are everywhere. From behind them, she hears her mother’s rangy Brooklyn voice shouting, “I am not an unfit mother.”

  Mira looks back at the stoop, at the peeling wrought iron and the weather-stained clapboard, and then she turns back to face the street ahead. Her father is taking her to Manhattan, where the lights, she imagines, will never again go out.

  For the “time being,” Mira lives with her father while her mother “gets a grip.” She loves her father’s new apartment. It is small but it is very high. It has only three colors—black, beige, and white. It’s in a new building on Second Avenue in Kips Bay, a neighborhood she’s never known before. It’s very tall and made of glass and steel. From the windows you can see in all directions. To the south, red brick columns swell from the earth like primitive golems of clay. To the west, rise the Park Avenue fortresses of yellow sandstone. To the north, the midtown skyscrapers shine like monoliths glinting golden in the sun. Up here, she is elemental, protected.

  But there is a third father, it turns out. He is not the whiskey-peppermint preoccupied father of the mornings, nor the cheery, doting shiny-faced father of after-dinner wine. This father brings back piles of dry cleaning and hangs them over the back of the kitchen chairs so that whenever you walk by you can hear the whisper of the plastic. He washes his underwear in the sink and hangs it over the towel rack. This father is always going off, in his ironed suits, to see lawyers to “argue for his rights.” He wants to keep her; he doesn’t want to send her back to her mother. When her mother calls she says, “The only reason I let him take you was that I didn’t want to fight over you.”

  Her father’s new apartment is filled with sounds. The operatic blast of his new, digital clock radio. A tiny Pavarotti pours forth from the box you can hear from the kitchen. These are all sounds she has not known since the old sad gray house, when she was upstairs and he was down. The razor buzzes, the kettle he uses to make Sanka bleats, the spoon clinks as he carries his cup to the bathroom. Hollow drone of the coffee grinder, the lawn mower growl of the juicer; she has never known there are so many gadgets. They gather in the kitchen like costumed partygoers eager to show off—their sleek white and black plastic and invisible machine parts. Voice of the radio: traffic report heard through the hustle of static. There is the familiar bright, sharp, shattering whiskey-peppermint smell, which now she understands comes from a can of shaving cream with bold green swirls on it and a corroded metal bottom that she avoids looking at whenever she is in the bathroom brushing her teeth. But there is also a new bottle on his dresser. It’s a blue bottle in the shape of a ship. From it comes a deep, woodsy smell, dank and primitive, that she doesn’t like. It’s this smell that shatters her sleep if none of the sounds do first.

  She and her father go back to the sad, gray house with the broken stoop to “get more of her things” for her. Gary is gone, his studio cleared out. Gone is the picture of the skinny man and the poster of Al Pacino. The walls have been spackled with a white as white as her hospital sheets had been. In the living room, the beaded lamps, the giant cushions, and the low table ar
e all gone. There is a multicolored woven rug in the center with a brand-new sofa.

  Her mother acts differently. She wears a pair of corduroys and a turtleneck with a scarf tied in her hair. She grips onto a coffee cup the whole time they are there. She holds it up to her chest as she follows her daughter around, watching her pack.

  Nightgown, pants, shirts, socks, toothbrush, ballet tights, leotards. “Enough for two weeks,” her father says, but it will, she knows, be more than that. She takes the faded poster of the missing rat-faced boy from behind her door. She takes Maurice’s card—she’ll put it by her new bed.

  “Where’s Gary?”

  “He won’t be back,” her mother says. “I’m sorry about him, Mira. Did he hurt you? Tell me, did he?”

  Mira shakes her head. “No. He didn’t hurt me.”

  Her mother takes a sip of coffee and looks quickly at her father. Their eyes meet and there is something that passes between them. Her eyes are red and full of water.

  “He won’t ever do that again. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, sorry.” She begins crying.

  If Gary had been here, he would roll his eyes and she would laugh at her mother’s tears. He might say “Oh, Rachel—watering the lilies again?” Then her mother would laugh. In honor of Gary, Mira laughs. Both her parents look at her.

  Her mother offers them pumpkin bread that she’s just baked. Mira is surprised that her father accepts. They all stand in the old kitchen on some new linoleum her mother has just put down. It is white with brown designs and it makes her feel strange. In the kitchen, everything is clean and orderly and shiny. Outside, it is getting dark and the squirrels chirp.

  Her mother looks down at her clogs while her father eats. Her father hums a tune. He looks happy, like he has just won a prize. He looks like he is enjoying the bread very much. He glows with a proprietary shine.

  Mira, looking at her mother looking at her clogs, feels bad for her. She sees that telling on Gary has cost her mother something. It has given her father something.

  Her father puts the bread down and says, “We got rid of him, didn’t we?” And he chuckles.

  “Carl!” her mother says, without looking up from her feet. She says nothing more. Her parents are now in the grip of something new between them. She does not understand why they are being nice to each other now, her shiny-faced father and her red-faced, shy mother.

  No one mentions Mira’s own performance, in which she fell, and Christopher did not catch her. Is there nobody but Maurice whom she can trust? Christopher had said “trust me,” but he couldn’t be trusted. Maurice who never asked for anything. She had followed him, had brought him forth from the city, and he had magically shown up.

  Maybe the people who tell you to trust them can’t be trusted, and the people who ask nothing are the ones who are there when you need them.

  That night she goes to her father while he is washing dishes in the kitchen.

  “Did they ever find that boy?”

  “Huh?” he says turning to her.

  She says his name, pronouncing it the way that she’s pronounced it in her head—two long words with too many consonants—but it sounds strange in the air.

  “Who?” he says.

  She goes into her room, gets the poster, and presents the worn, crinkled sign to him as if it is an X-ray of her insides. “The boy,” she says, “the one they lost.”

  He grabs the paper and before she can stop him, crinkles it up, and throws it into the garbage under the sink. “Mira, why do you keep stuff like this?”

  Now she is yelling. “Did they find him? Did they? Tell me. Did they?”

  He wipes his hands on the dishrag and reaches for her. “No, Mira. I don’t believe they ever found him.”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you!” she yells. She’s said it once to her mother. Now she says it again to her father.

  He slaps her then—a quick, hard slap to her face. He has never hit her before. His face is beet red and his jaw shakes. He holds his hand as if he has hurt it. Her cheeks burn as she stares at him. This third father is one who hits her, is the one who punched Gary. But then his violence was directed at a man she despised and there had been the giddiness to cover the fear—fear of her own father.

  The slap stings more than hurts. But like the hand-washed underwear, Pavarotti radio, the cologne in the shape of a ship, it’s the strangeness of the slap that she hates.

  Some shirts in their dry cleaner bags are piled on the back of a chair. She backs up into them, slips to the floor. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” Her father grabs his coat and says, “I am going to be late.” He pauses at the doorway to tell her that a babysitter will be there shortly. He locks the door behind him. Take care of yourself, he says.

  An hour later, the babysitter still has not come and the snow has started. Mira goes to the heavy black phone, hard and thick as a giant beetle, and picks up the receiver. The dial tone, a low even moan, rushes out at her like the language of another species—and she giggles. She giggles again and again. She can’t stop. Then she dials the number on the card. The phone rings and rings, and on the fifth ring, a faint, sleepy man’s voice says, “Hello?”

  She giggles.

  “May I help you?”

  “Can I please speak to Maurice . . .”

  “Mirabelle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At my dad’s.” She stops giggling.

  “Who is there with you?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You’re all alone, then?”

  “Yes,” she says. And now, instead of giggling, she begins crying.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “I’m scared,” she says.

  “Turn out the lights. Look out the window,” he says. Her sobs slow down.

  She is quiet.

  “Do you see?”

  She flicks the living room switch and stretches the phone cord as far as it will reach. “Yes.” Against the brick of the old building across the yard, the snowflakes are visible individually—puffy, like cotton balls, drifting slowly, joyfully. She tips her head back and stares up at the snow spinning downward in a crazy swirling vortex.

  When she returns to The Little Kirov, Mira dances like a demon. She dances with a wildness that makes the other girls gape, and then snicker when she is out of sight. It isn’t that her breasts have grown or her toe shoe ribbons are grimy, but something in her far-off expression, the seriousness of her too-pale face, the flush of her cheeks as she works over and over again on her pirouettes and battements. She dances as if she is the only one in the room. She dances as if it’s Mr. B himself standing in the doorway watching her, and not a little studio on the seventh floor of a crumbling office building.

  Even the little girls push themselves up against the walls as she passes.

  Now Mira understands Hannah’s impulse to fling her head back and kick up her leg, and laugh like a tornado. She understands Robin’s blank face and scarlet cheeks. It is terrible to be singled out, to feel eyes on you all the time. It is wonderful, and terrible too. But more than that it does something to your insides: they don’t feel like they belong to you anymore. Your seams come loose and parts of you start coming out. It makes normal things—like walking or talking—feel hard, and things that are hard—like holding an extension until your leg shakes—feel easy.

  She wears the wrist guard for a week more until the fracture heals. When she was young and fell down and scraped her knee, grown-ups were kind to her; they bent down and investigated her cuts and bruises, applying a Band-Aid and Mercurochrome. But no one is kind to her about this injury. It seems a dancer’s injury is different—it is to be treated with suspicion and avoided at all costs.

  At the end of that week, she finds Maurice waiting for her outside The Little Kirov. She smiles and her smile is too big. She can’t help it. His newly white hair floats up from his head in a shimmering lawn. It makes his pointed chin and arched, still-black eyebrows look even more elfin. His brown eyes, with t
heir large pupils, confront her with their amused gaze. It makes her laugh. Only he can make the coil of tension inside her subside.

  “I like your hair,” she says.

  “I’ve heard of that happening. Going white overnight.”

  “Thank you for the flowers,” she says. She looks down. “I’m sorry.” She is surprised to find that she is about to cry.

  His hand is on a new walking stick made of marbled wood, with a silver tip. “You were wonderful.” He says this word wonderful as if it’s never been said before. “You fell wonderfully.”

  “I trusted him. It was his fault.”

  “No, dear, this is not true. You closed your eyes.” He leans toward her. “No matter, you fell beautifully.”

  MANUFACTURING

  BEAUTY

  CHAPTER 20

  PRESENT

  That first building where I lived on my own in San Francisco was a real tenement. Bathrooms in the halls. It was young women who lived there—wannabe dancers, actors, models. I was there a year before I got my own rattletrap studio in the Tenderloin, the kind with the toilet two feet from the stove. I would be there for seven more years. Sometime in those years Felicia and I got together a few times. She was still in L.A. working at acting and getting some gigs. We tried to be friends for a while. Her apartment in Los Feliz was cheerful: Chinatown gauzy curtains, plush sample sale linens, Oscar de la Renta shirts and slacks hanging in her closet, sorted by Easter eggs colors. Her fingers twirled and her hands fluttered as she spoke. She was singing, cocktail waitressing, and working the perfume counter at Nordstrom. I admit it: I tried to drum up some marvelous pity for her—she’d not even gotten a BA—as someone who represented what I was leaving behind, but I couldn’t. She seemed too cheerful, and too charming. At her apartment, we drank coffee from Viennese cups and ate linzer tortes off Bloomingdale’s china. On the surface we had a lot in common—single ex-dancers living in apartments with antiquated plumbing. Were we really that different? Yes, we were. After a few moments together, any fool could see we were different animals.