Girl Through Glass Read online

  The last time we saw each other was at an L.A. costume party. I was dating a sound technician whom I’d first met years earlier during one of my modern dance performances, and then later at a café I was working at while getting my BA. The sound technician still thought of me as a dancer, though it had been several years since I’d actually danced professionally. I was keeping him company on one of his business trips. Felicia was on the arm of a slim man with an earring in each ear who introduced himself as “Madame Tussauds’ boy-toy.” She was singing then. I’d seen her name up on some Fillmore clubs. I asked her about it. She laughed wildly. She wasn’t cute anymore, but she was still beautiful. Her lips were red and perfectly outlined. When we were young, I could see the effort it involved, but now it was invisible; it had seeped into her pores. Maurice had hated the young Felicia’s beauty, her mother’s hand still obvious, but would he have hated this one? Her beauty was now so vibrant, so integrated. It wasn’t a face on top of a face.

  Felicia wore a black-and-white-striped jumpsuit with a cape thrown around her shoulders, high-heeled boots, a giant silver bangle, her dark hair in a blunt pixie cut. She was carelessly, languidly, unavoidably gorgeous. I felt like an ink-stained wretch.

  I thought about that time her mother did our hair, having to sit still while her mother held a steaming hot curling iron to my scalp, how if I moved too much I would get burned. “Scalded,” her mother had said. “Don’t wiggle or you’ll get scalded.”

  “What are you?” I said.

  “A crook.” Felicia laughed.

  The man with her laughed, too. “She’s a jailbird, can’t you see?” He held up two feathers attached to her sleeve.

  My date—Ryan was his name, I think—was a Plague of Locusts. He wore a lamp shade with paper cutouts of locusts we’d made together. I was Alice in Wonderland with a forty-ounce bottle of Colt .45 malt liquor (really apple juice). We were stoned; they were drunk. When I realized Felicia was drunk, some of her beauty wore off. But a lot was still left.

  “Still dancing?” She poked my chest.

  “No,” I said. It was the first time my heart didn’t sink when I said it. I just said it and then felt relief. After all, it was true. I was twenty-eight years old, a nothing career as a modern dancer in San Francisco behind me, but a BA finally under my belt, and just starting a master’s in performance studies at Berkeley. I was newly focused on the life of the mind, this bright space before me; I wanted to move into that.

  “No shit? I thought you’d ride that train till the very end.”

  “Well—” I said. I would have said I did, but Ryan didn’t like negativity. “I’m at school. Berkeley.”

  “School?” She said this with genuine surprise.

  “Going for a PhD in dance studies.”

  “Wow,” she said, straightening up a bit and trying to hold herself in check. “Good luck,” she said, and fell languidly against the man.

  Now it’s with a kind of anthropological interest that I cross Seventh heading west on Fifty-eighth. Past Eighth Avenue, I don’t recognize this as New York. I feel like I’m in Cincinnati. A parking garage. Blocks of condos unmarked by graffiti. A chain drugstore, a garage, a sparsely populated outdoor plaza jutting out from one of the recessed condo buildings. As I walk, I clench and unclench my hand. It’s finally healing. In the airport bathroom, I took off the big gauze bandage and substituted for it a flexible oversize Band-Aid. The gash has faded to a reddened line with a not-terrible-looking cut at its center. The innocuous-looking Band-Aid takes a lot of drama away. It’s drama that I don’t need on this trip. It’s important that I can at least sustain the appearance of normality.

  At Tenth Avenue, the street begins to slope down toward the Hudson. In my high (too high? I’ve forgotten this is a walking city) boots, I pass the bones of scrawny trees, some of them not more than saplings. It’s unseasonably warm. This weather is predicted to last the whole five days I’m here. I’ve left frostbitten Ohio and come to a place that is trying to be spring. My body, inside my coat, expands a little. My heels click on the hard, new concrete.

  Felicia’s apartment is in one of the new condo buildings. Sparkling, cavernous lobby. The doorman calls upstairs and announces me. “Miss Kate,” he says into the speaker. The bronze-plated elevator doors slide open, and the elevator silently speeds me up to the fourteenth floor, where hotel carpeting pads my footsteps. I squint to read the tiny gold numbers on the identical beige doors lining the hallway.

  Felicia holds the door open for me. We stand there, me gripping my little black conference suitcase, in my black travel outfit, my coat over my arm. My closed hand hiding the Band-Aid. She looks at me—takes it all in—with a smile on her face. What is she thinking? She wears a sparkling turquoise blue dress, high strappy heels of the same color, and bright red lipstick. Her hair is cut pageboy style and her body is toned in an I-have-a-rooftop-gym kind of way. I make a series of unkind judgments: she’s trying too hard, she’s lonely, she’s putting a good face on it. Too old to be “done up” like this. The fact is, though—and this comes to me incrementally—she is still beautiful. Her skin is clear, her cheeks taut and pleasing, her eyes inviting. In her large, bright eyes, swathed in blue eye shadow, there is something vulnerable, even innocent. There is still the little girl with big eyes who always looked on the verge of speaking but didn’t.

  “Isn’t Facebook amazing?” she says. She’d contacted me when I first signed up. We’d had a few brief exchanges but, really, my request to stay with her had come out of the blue.

  I wheel my suitcase into her large living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows look westward toward the Hudson. The carpet has the marks of having been recently vacuumed.

  My eye catches on a few sparsely placed, expensive-looking knickknacks—one of an elephant in sleek black granite and the other a silver orb sitting on a polished wooden chest.

  “It’s been forever and a year,” she says. This brings me back. Felicia always loved phrases, quotes, sayings, clichés. I turn.

  “Do you still like horses?” I say suddenly. “And pearls?”

  She stares at me. “Horses?” Then she smiles. “Yeah, I saw some amazing racing in Europe last year. . . .” Her voice changes, grows softer, fumbles. “And pearls? Pearls? God, no.”

  Her hands flutter toward the kitchen. The kitchen: Williams Sonoma apron and chef’s hat, unused, and some kitchen appliances—weighty and purposeful. “Coffee’s in the freezer. Espresso machine on the counter—you know how, right? Eat anything you can find,” she says. “Except my secret stash of Lucky Charms—just kidding—those too. . . . Please.” She gestures to her waistline.

  “You look fabulous,” I say.

  She smiles and looks at ease for the first time.

  “Tell me,” she says. “Why are you in town—I didn’t get it, exactly?”

  I’d been vague—a professional trip, I’d said. “A paper,” I say. “Have you ever heard of Bronislava Nijinska? Nijinsky’s sister, a choreographer, editor of her brother’s papers, collaborator, mother. A woman in a man’s world. Her professional journey coincided with the birth of modernism and feminism. She’s been largely sidelined because she didn’t fit into any movement.”

  She’s leading me down a hallway. We pass a bedroom—spartan, elegant—a black duvet that glints like onyx in the track lighting of the hallways, shiny green decorative pillows, and a hanging tapestry, a bold design of black and white shapes intermingled.

  “I’d like to resurrect her,” I say.

  Felicia stops at the open doorway to a dim, cool room. “Bronislava,” she says. “No wonder, with that name. Well, professor, here’re your digs. Hope you like ’em.”

  The blinds are pulled down. The air smells of perfumed air freshener.

  “Okay,” she says, giving me an air kiss. “I’m off. I’m working a show at the Javits. I’ll be back later,” she says. “But don’t wait up for me. You know how it is—single gals.”

  “Thanks, Felicia,” I say. �
�I really appreciate—everything.”

  She gives me a quick hug and holds me at arm’s length. “Look at you—a professor. You’ve done everything right.”

  “Well, not exactly.” I think of Sioban’s tearful embrace—you left me naked. And the folded letter, creased from all my handling, in an envelope in my bag. I enter the room. “Not everything.”

  After Felicia leaves, I lie down on the bed. It is impersonal, surprisingly firm, like a hotel bed. When I open my eyes again it’s nearly dark outside. I shiver, get up, stretch, and pad into the living room and go over to the windows. How must it be to live like Felicia? It’s unclear to me what she does—and there have been a few things that make me know not to ask. The photos on her Facebook page, always taken by an invisible other person—her posing alone, stylish with her head cocked in an inviting way, in various foreign locations. Is she happy?

  The sky to the west above New Jersey is pink and fierce. I pull a crocheted cashmere blanket from the couch, so soft it barely can be felt, over my shoulders. I watch the boats ply the water on the Hudson. The sunset is truly spectacular.

  Maybe Maurice was wrong. Beauty is not about suffering. It is about being fulfilled, drinking in as much as one can; it is about life, not death. I think of Bernadith’s face, her kind bulldog face, and her words: What I see is a woman who is becoming. What you are becoming I really don’t know.

  I watch a giant white cruise ship slip soundlessly out toward the Atlantic. I’m waiting for something. And then it comes: a calm falls over me. I go back to Felicia’s guest bedroom, the undertow pulling me under. I can sleep now. If I’m lucky, I will dream. And my dreams will prepare me for whatever is to come.

  CHAPTER 21

  JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1978

  Manhattan is in love with ballet. Every ten blocks there is a store selling tutus and ballet memorabilia. People leave clutching signed programs and worn pointe shoes wrapped in tissue paper. Not just girls and their mothers shopping for leotards and tights and pointe shoes, but also middle-aged people, respectable people, carrying briefcases stuffed with office papers.

  Ballet dancers are celebrities. Their faces gaze out from bus stops and from billboards next to gold watches or diamonds. Their limpid eyes melt the barren concrete. Their names spring from grown-ups’ lips in excited whispers. Baryshnikov. Kirkland. Makarova. Nureyev. On buses, sidewalks, subways, on TV you can hear impassioned discussions about which female dancer’s Swan Lake Act Three is most powerful, and which male dancer’s Act Two Giselle jumps achieve the greatest ballon.

  The Russians, especially, are everywhere. Documentaries about them play over and over again, telling the same dramatic story of escape. Pictures of them bundled on tarmacs surrounded by men in trench coats and sunglasses, moments after they utter surely the most powerful words in the world: I defect.

  These cold war princes and princesses had come over the past two decades, some before Mira was born. First Nureyev, his Tartar cheekbones turning from the cameras and mics, too-stiff, like the cold war had chilled him. Then Makarova came, bringing her tiny birdlike body, head wrapped in a gypsy scarf, her Swan Lake still intact, her back muscles famously rippling like feathers, they said. Baryshnikov came, while Mira’s dad lived with her mom, in a hail of photos, running to a getaway car. Godunov came last of all, his long hair and Thor face, and he became an actor in bad movies, and for this bunheads never forgave him.

  Manhattan loves Balanchine, who is Russian, too. And Manhattan loves his academy, the School of American Ballet. To have a daughter accepted to SAB is to be chosen by the finest, harshest arbiters of beauty in the old doomed Soviet state. And to be accepted into SAB is the final stamp of approval in a world that is based on an ancient hierarchy. These Russians had abandoned their dying world to remake ours. So these girls offered themselves to the old Russians—and perhaps to save themselves from their own land of broken marriages and smog.

  Their faces stare out from bus posters, taunting Mira, calling to her. Wait, she has to say. She has to wait a few more months, though she is ready now.

  She can’t wait to leave this small studio with the thimbleful of light spilling across it. She has to get into SAB. She can’t stand another year here. Ms. Clement’s face seems to have shrunk and folded up into even more creases since the night Mira fell, and though her teacher’s hands still correct kindly, she senses something new in Ms. Clement’s attitude toward her—something that if she didn’t know better she would think was anger.

  As for Val and the other girls, they now treat her differently. They are no longer mean to her. They speak to her with polite words and stony faces. She thinks about the girls she has known who got this treatment: they are the ones who have such badly broken homes or terrible skin conditions or such recklessness in their play that you cannot afford to be mean. You hate those girls with a hate that is based on fear. Your weapon against them—instead of meanness—is niceness. It is an effective weapon.

  So she is one of those girls now.

  She realizes that the more potent the gazes around her grow, the stronger her need to dance with a wildness no one can match. She feels a new violence at her core—a desire to do physical harm to someone, something. She imagines crushing her teacher’s gentle hands, punching Val. Her pirouettes have a new briskness to them; suddenly, she can do more than five fouettés in a row.

  She just has to make it through the spring. In the summer, The Little Kirov suspends classes and she can go to David Howard’s studio or Steps, and her dad will pay for it, especially if she tells him it’s so she can get into SAB, the best ballet school in the city. He loves anything that is best.

  Maurice takes her to the Metropolitan Museum. They enter the great facade, with its drooping eyes and stern mouth, and then the vast, dim, and cacophonous main hall. Even in the din of the crowd in the atrium, she hears the low timeless, hollow echo of the sea, like from a conch shell pressed to the ear. Warrens of rooms swim off into the catacomb-like recesses of the building. The sandy-hued marble stones and tomb-like echoes are foreign to her.

  Upstairs she claps and skips alongside him as they enter a room filled with Degas paintings. There is one of two girls at a barre practicing their port de bras. Here is one of a couple of girls behind a curtain, waiting their turn in the wings, the sliver of a shadowed figure in a top hat watching them. There is one of a naked girl bending over her chair massaging her feet. Her discarded costume lies on the floor, a puddle of tulle. Another one of a soloist, dancing in a long tutu on pointe, surrounded by the faces of other dancers watching her. The chosen girl. Though Mira can only see their heads from behind, in shadow, she is sure they are locked in frozen smiles. But they hurry through—Maurice won’t stop.

  Maurice leads her to a sculpture in the middle of the next room. It’s Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. It doesn’t look as good in real life, a midsize black statue of a girl. The statue is not shiny and sleek like the reproductions, but dull, rough-hewn. The dress she wears is old and faded pink, with too many pleats (her teachers would never allow a skirt like that). Mira takes in the girl’s sagging tights, her too-loose ribbons in her hair, her poor posture. Her hips are too wide, her turnout comes from the knee, not the hip. Her eyes are closed and her face tilts upward toward an invisible sun.

  Mira reaches out and grabs Maurice’s hand, which is cool and dry. He lets her hold his hand. It is the first time.

  “Here it is,” Maurice says. “Little Dancer. She was a dancer named Marie van Goethem. She posed for Degas to earn money for her family. They were very poor. It caused a sensation when he exhibited it.”

  “Why?”

  “No one wanted to think about the lives of these poor, hardworking dancers.”

  But Mira doesn’t like this girl; she doesn’t like anything about her. “She is daydreaming, not practicing. She’s not beautiful.”

  He laughs. “There is no beauty without suffering. She is not beautiful but she moves toward beauty. See? He made her beautif
ul. That is his power. Someday you’ll understand.”

  “She should open her eyes,” Mira says.

  He looks at her and raises his eyebrows. “Yes, indeed. She should.”

  That next evening, she comes home to find her dad on the couch with his too-loose grin. His gold buttons on a purple velvet vest glint. The TV is on a sitcom. Canned laughter floats out. He lowers a big book he’s reading—The Revolution in Marketing.

  “How was it last night then?” he asks. She wonders if he knows. He never lets on. For better or worse, Maurice is still her secret. She looks away, looks down at her dance bag, hides a smile. She feels how easy it is now to see Maurice whenever she wants. Her mother, for all her distractedness, could sometimes, all of a sudden, turn her attention on Mira and stare at her daughter like a drill trying to reach the center of the earth. But she can tell her dad anything she wants—“I’m babysitting” or “I’m going with my friend to a movie” or “I’m going roller-skating” (though she hasn’t done this in years) or even the old “I’m doing homework at someone’s house.” He looks at her and she sees he knows he is supposed to ask her something else, but he doesn’t know what it is. In the gap, she will say, like she does now—she sees his glass is empty—“Want another drink?” She goes to the little bar that has appeared in the corner of the living room and mixes him—he has shown her how to do this—a gin and tonic. In the gap, she gets the freedom to have her secrets, to know herself in a wider way, to ask him about the news of the day, all these things that make his face shine and him say, “Oh thank you, that’s nice of you,” vaguely, as if she were a stranger. She adds lime. Another drink?

  But now, strangely, unaccountably, she struggles with the tears that are filling her eyes. She struggles to get control over her face. It seems to be doing something on its own. She drops her dance bag and covers her face with a hand.

  “Are you okay?” her dad says. He hands her his drink napkin. It smells of lime.