Girl Through Glass Page 14

  She has a sudden painful burst of longing for her mother—not the mother she wishes Rachel was—but actually her mother, her big, strange-smelling self, her weird books, her too-long hair, everything about her that is wrong and out of control. She longs for that. Especially that gutsy cauldron of a laugh that sometimes erupts from her mother. When she left her mother’s house, Mira told herself she did not care—she was getting out of there—out of her mother’s life, of Brooklyn, of public school. She was moving to Manhattan, going to SAB, breaching two great walls. Her mother had felt like empty baggage she was putting on the curb.

  But nothing has turned out how it was supposed to. Mira wipes her eyes, gains control over herself. Her dad pats her head distractedly. He makes her some frozen pizza, and they stand at the counter in the kitchen eating it.

  “Honey, do you remember that woman Judy we met at the Thanksgiving Day parade?”

  Mira nods.

  “Well, she and I have become friends. She’d like to come over to make us dinner. Would you like that?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Mira,” he says, “I think it would be a good thing. For both of us.”

  She looks at her father. She looks away. When she looks back, his gaze has not wavered. This surprises her. “Okay,” she says. “Yes.”

  A few weeks later, Judy comes over to make them dinner. Her dad isn’t back from work yet. Judy makes several trips to her car, bringing in more kitchen devices than Mira has ever seen—a blender, a Cuisinart in a metal armature, a pizza pan, an electric juicer. She plays Elton John tapes in the kitchen while Mira ignores her, doing her homework in the living room. “One nice thing about a small kitchen,” she yells cheerily, but doesn’t finish her sentence.

  By the time her dad finally comes home, Judy has covered the glass coffee table in the living room with a tablecloth. They sit on the floor around the coffee table for dinner. Their plates are piled high with some black sauce over what looks like rolled-up balls of hay. It tastes salty, chewy.

  “This tastes gross,” Mira says.

  Judy stops eating, looks down at her plate.

  “Mira,” says her father.

  “No, Carl,” says Judy. “I know this is hard for you, Mira. It’s a lot of change. Your mother leaving and your dad meeting me so quick.” She hates that Judy says “quick,” not “quickly.” “It was hard when my husband and I split—and Sam, he had a lot of trouble.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care about you or Sam. I wish you’d leave us alone.”

  Judy sighs, wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Well, honey.”

  “Don’t call me honey,” says Mira.

  “Mira!” says her father.

  Mira gets up and goes to her room.

  Through her door, she hears Judy sigh and say, “Maybe—if you had made it back from work earlier—” Her room, cold, white, ridiculous. In the corner, she sees: someone has hung a silver-framed Pierrot, a smiling clown with tears flowing down his face.

  She screams as loud as she can.

  CHAPTER 22

  SPRING–SUMMER 1978

  Over the next few months, her dad and Judy spend more time together. Every week they go out to dinner. Every week, new things appear in Mira’s dad’s apartment. “She gets all this free stuff. They send it to her. So she can figure out how to sell it. She’s really amazing that way. And this isn’t junk like your mother brought in, you know. This is up-to-the-minute stuff. Modern. State-of-the-art.” He holds up a big bowl made of metal with gold stripes across the rim. It is so shiny Mira can see her face staring at it. “If you bought this in a store, it would cost at least two hundred bucks. They sell it at museums.”

  “What is it for?” Mira says.

  He puts it on the coffee table, looks at her annoyed, then laughs. “That is not the right question.”

  The other things that appear: purple velvet pillows, a giant sectional mirror, linked by a geometric gold filigree design. Are these things any different from the ripped furniture and chipped dishes her mother brought home? The fireplace bellows when they had no fireplace? The cracked umbrella stand that leaked rainwater. How is a bowl with no real use different from these things? Are Judy’s things any more of a solution than are her mother’s broken macramé and ripped pillows? Is it any more real than the stuff her mother brought home, sitting inert, lonely and desperate and wanting? She doubts it. Mira asked for the crying Pierrot picture to be removed, and her dad took it away. “Just don’t bring any more of that stuff into my room.” She thinks of Maurice saying you can’t have beauty without suffering. “Don’t touch my room,” she says. She likes it clean, white, like an empty box.

  Finally school ends and so do The Little Kirov dance classes. On Judy’s recommendation, her dad enrolls her in an Upper East Side summer day camp. Here, instead of the familiar curriculum of macramé pot holders and noodle collages, she has a choice among fencing, horseback riding, and bridge. She tries each of these things. Ballet helps with fencing but there are no other girls who choose it, so she drops that. Horseback riding is incredibly difficult and fills her with a sense of fear at loss of control. When she sits on the horse, she is painfully aware that she can’t control it, and she knows it knows that. Still, she likes the stables and the types of tasks that you have to do before getting on the horse, the grooming and the feeding, the wooden-handled brush, and the clanking metal pails. In the end, she resorts to bridge, which is where the popular girls gather, and while they have a teacher walk them through the strategies, they exchange glances in a way that Mira recognizes from Judy’s—confident glances filled with ownership. These are Judy’s people, confident in their ownership of the world.

  The trees burst with leaves. On the East River, little sailboats and tugboats dot the water’s edge with sunbathers on them. In Manhattan, people sit on park benches instead of stoops, into the warm evenings, eating ice cream. On the hottest days, a few fire hydrants lose their covers (just like in Brooklyn) and water streams along the curbs, just as they did the previous summer, and the one before that, all the summers of her childhood.

  In the afternoons and evenings, she takes class at David Howard’s with other SAB and ABT girls and girls from lesser studios. To prepare for the audition she makes sure she works harder than any of the other girls. As summer lethargy falls over everyone else, she does not succumb to it, she does not let herself. She cannot. There is too much at stake.

  In early June, her mother decides to move to California. She packs up her things and drives the old station wagon out of town. She hands Mira a jade plant that she tells her to look after, gets in the packed-to-the-brim car, and shuts the door. Mira’s dad has been right: he is charged with selling the old, broken house.

  A few weeks later, she gets a letter from her mother.

  Mira, you wouldn’t believe this giant country. How big it is! I pass in twilight through Battle Mountain, Nevada. Between two exposed mountain ranges, there’s a long strip of light. It is the BIGGEST gas station I ever saw. You wouldn’t believe how big they make them out here. The trucks that fuel up are immense beasts sucking the earth dry. There’s an old town up in the mountains that some hippies have taken over. It’s a ghost town! Should I go check it out? What do I have to lose? Everything in my life is gone, dissolved.

  In July, another letter comes from her mother. She has arrived in California. She writes that she “drove until she couldn’t drive anymore.” She says that she stopped when she got to the ocean—the Pacific Ocean—and she knew the whole continent was behind her. She took a job at an art supply store in a place called Market Street. She lives in a house on Guerrero Street, which means “the Street of the Warrior.” However, her mother does not own this house. She lives in it with four other people, none of whom have children. She writes:

  Talking to the other people in my house, I am beginning to realize how valuable you are to me. I know that I will return at some point, perhaps sooner than I think. This place is a Time out of Time. It
is a place disconnected from other Places. I have no history here. I am truly an atom floating in space, as we all are, really. Someday you too might see things and understand. I am trying to capture this in my art—the sense of floating free. I have finally broken free.

  But I miss you, Mira, you are the only thing that anchors me to Time and Place.

  Soon after, Judy invites Mira and her dad to a “special” dinner at her apartment. Judy has a large apartment on the Upper East Side—about twenty blocks from Maurice. This far uptown the apartments are roomy, with views that dwarf much of the city downtown. At night the lights shimmer below. During the day, you can see the high-up secret rooftop decks and gardens where the wealthy retreat during the summer. Judy has one herself: a wraparound terrace with little trees and white wrought-iron tables and chairs, and a bar on wheels.

  The dining room: a long, wooden table, marble busts, shellacked parquet floors, heavy drapery, chintz flowered chairs. At the table, her father has his suit jacket over the back of the stool, his tie loosened, his top shirt button unbuttoned. He is rattling the ice in a cup. Since March, they’ve been doing dinner at Judy’s. It’s going better. It’s becoming a regular thing.

  Mira wears a new black velvet dress her dad bought her at Bloomingdale’s. Sam is wearing lacrosse clothes—a dirt-stained jersey and shorts. His hair has grown longer since she first met him. It hangs in his eyes. He does not look up at her, at any of them, very often, but when he does, his baby face—nothing at all like Judy’s, though his brown eyes are hers—is flushed, smug, cocky. Annoyingly handsome in a way that she is careful to ignore.

  Judy compliments her on her dress. When they are all seated and served by Irma, the cook, Judy looks at Mira. “So she was taking class down at the Joffrey. But I hear it’s just so uneven, so it’s great that you are auditioning for SAB.”

  “Mira, Judy is talking to you,” says her dad.

  “What?” says Mira.

  “I was just saying I was telling my friend about you and you know, her daughter goes to ABT—she’s so impressed with that school—and anyway, just like you, she’s going to audition for SAB and is taking class this summer at David Howard’s.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Kelly.” A tall girl with bitten fingernails whom she has heard other girls calling in the dressing room.

  Mira nods.

  Judy is staring at her. “I just know you are going to get into SAB. To be at that studio would be an amazing thing.”

  Sam looks up from his meal. Is he one of the best at what he does?

  Despite herself, Mira feels a soaring in her chest. Her mother has never taken such an interest in ballet.

  Just then, her dad clears his throat and makes a clatter with his silverware. He reaches over and squeezes Judy’s arm. “Mira, Sam—kids—” They exchange another look. “Sam—your mother and I—Judy and I—have decided to move in together, to join our families and make a new family.”

  “Sam—you will be brother and sister now. Carl and Mira will move in with us.”

  “When?” she asks.

  Her dad and Judy look at each other. “Soon,” her dad says. “This fall,” Judy says.

  “What room will she be in?” says Sam.

  “The guest room will become Mira’s room. Is that all you have to say?”

  “I just wanted to know.”

  “Sam, you’ll treat Mira like a sister.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “We’ll talk about that, buster.”

  He gets up and leaves. “Sam—”

  “This is so not a democracy. Don’t she and I get a vote?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I hate being a kid.”

  Mira looks at her father and Judy—two old people who are happy or trying hard to be. She breathes in the lemony smell of the furniture polish. She listens for the beep of the new microwave in the kitchen. She waits for anger, but it does not come. Instead, something like hunger, something like the understanding of what you have to give up to be beautiful. She understands that her father and Judy are working hard to be happy, the way she is working hard to be beautiful. Maybe this will be okay. Judy looks at Mira and crinkles her nose. Her lip gloss glitters and her plastic chunky earrings shine in the chandelier’s light.

  “He’ll just need a little time,” she says.

  Mira’s desire to be a dancer has become synonymous with being seen—with being chosen. But looking at Judy right now, she has a thought, almost rebellious in its insistence. The thought goes like this: maybe Judy can see something neither her father, nor her mother, could see? Judy gathers them for dinner under chandeliers, while Mira sleeps in her white room and dances. Judy puts people together the way Mira is learning to put steps together. Judy raises her glass and smiles, and Mira returns the smile.

  CHAPTER 23

  PRESENT

  I wake up in Felicia’s guest room feeling weirdly great. I stare at the burnished wood ceiling fan, at the desk across from me. I roll over and stretch. I take the envelope, finger the letter inside, then tuck it back into my bag.

  I hear voices next door, a door closing. I look at the clock: 9:03, late for me. Time to get going.

  In the bathroom, I brush my teeth and wash my face and do the ritual with creams. In the light of Felicia’s mirror, my freckles stick out. They make me look, I think, not younger, just preposterous. I’ve often thought of my face as existing on two planes: the under-plane, pale as the palest river rock, and the top layer, gravel or silt washing over it. The top layer floats over the bottom layer. Which one is more visible, I never know.

  A man’s travel bag—black, leather—is open on the sink.

  The hallway carpet is plush on my bare feet and a shock of pleasure goes through me. How must it feel to live surrounded by such luxury? What permissions does Felicia give herself that I can only imagine?

  Back in my room, looking through my suitcase, I realize I’ve brought mostly black things. A few brown, and beige, and one taupe cardigan sweater. Middle-age colors. At the bottom of the suitcase, I find a bright scarf that a married lover once gave me as a gift. I’ve never worn it. I lay the scarf out on the bed. It feels soft in my hands, generous. My old lover’s bearded face comes into my mind. I hold it there for a second. It was good for a while, wasn’t it? I remember his face, his eyes—they were kind, sometimes. I treasure you, Kat. You are my secret treasure. I hoard you. I pull on a pair of black Banana Republic pedal pushers and a black long-sleeved button-down top, the black suit jacket, and a pair of green leather flats. I put on some simple pearl earrings and then tie the scarf on.

  I take the old business card with me, as well as Maurice’s letter. I put everything in my backpack and leave the room, shutting the door quietly behind me.

  In the living room, Felicia sits on the couch next to a man. They sit side by side, comfortably, as if they are a married couple. The man—a handsome, very dark-skinned man—reads a paper, his coffee in front of him. They both wear white robes, bright white, and their feet are bare. On the table is a pot of espresso and a set of black china cups and a box of Italian biscotti. A newspaper in French called Il Est Midi is folded in quarters, well creased, belonging to someone used to traveling. Light spills into the spotless living room.

  Felicia turns to me. “Good morning.”

  “Morning,” I say, suddenly shy as a girl.

  The man looks up over his spectacles and smiles.

  “Kate, Alain. Alain, Kate. Kate is an old friend.”

  “Ah,” he says. He stands and offers me a warm, dry hand. “Old friends are gifts.” His voice is deep and resonant. He has a strong French accent, with a rolling undertow of humor.

  “She’s a professor now. A professor of dance. Here on academic assignment.”

  “Ah,” he says again, sitting again.

  Alain, I learn, is Senegalese. He went to school in Wisconsin. He is a diplomat who works for much of the year at the United Nations. He has two wives in Sene
gal and a place in New York near the U.N. However, he prefers to stay with Felicia. He finds it “utterly satisfactory.” Felicia smiles and doesn’t miss a beat.

  “Felicia and I saw the recent Mark Morris at BAM. I found it somewhat disappointing.”

  “He’s incredibly talented,” I say, “but spread thin.”

  “I agree,” he says.

  “His operas are best.”

  “Dido and Aeneas is an accomplishment.”

  “When in doubt,” I say, “turn to the Greeks.”

  “The African myths rival those of the Greeks, you know.” He is smiling.

  “My great Western ignorance.” I smile.

  “I will fill you in.” He winks at me, picks up his newspaper.

  Felicia has gotten up and is pouring more coffee; a cup has appeared for me and then I am sitting with them, engulfed in their casual intimacy. Felicia goes to the kitchen and comes back with a plate. “Please, join us.”

  “No thanks,” I say. “I’m off on assignment.” I try a smile.

  “Kate is researching—a woman choreographer—who exactly is it again?”

  “Bronislava Nijinska.”

  He smiles and lowers the newspaper. “The great Nijinksy’s sister? And likely the true genius?”

  “If I can sufficiently resurrect her.” I strap on my backpack. “The Performing Arts Library has a great selection of archived works by Bronislava. And a state-of-the-art screening room. Great footage of her early pieces, which I’ve been teaching.” This much is true at least. What would they say if they knew? Bronislava is a red herring, a ruse.

  The streets, the canyons of buildings, are less cavernous than I remember them. The temperature is in the fifties, the sky a slate blue and cool, but underneath there is a softness to the air, the same harbinger of spring I felt yesterday. People are in overly optimistic fashion choices—shirtsleeves, light jackets, hatless. They look vulnerable, unadorned.

  There is something in the air in New York that makes my blood pound the way it did when I was a child. At Columbus Circle, the explosion of people excites me after the mostly unbroken quiet of Ohio streets. I head up Broadway, then cross over to Lincoln Center.