Girl Through Glass Read online

  I think about the postmark on the blank envelope. “Do you know the name of the—place—the home?”

  “It’s been some years. About an hour north of here. Armonk? Yes, that’s right. A very nice place. He was receiving excellent care.” He turns his eyes to the street outside. Two men with large handheld metal tools scour the sidewalk with blasts of water. Gum removal specialists. “So, to answer your second question . . . I don’t know if he is dead.”

  The waitress brings my soup and his salad. The soup is way too complicated. It has lots of things floating in it. A minestrone. I push it away. Then I bring out the letter and slide it across the table to him.

  He runs his hand over the envelope, opens it gingerly, unfolds the light parchment paper, reads it. “Yes, this is his handwriting. . . . But this letter, it doesn’t sound like him. He wasn’t angry with you when I knew him.”

  I take the letter back. I fold it and put it back in the envelope.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  He looks troubled. “For a long time, I visited him regularly. It meant something, I think. To both of us. But then, several years ago, well, I stopped.”

  “Why?”

  “The boy.”

  “What boy?”

  “This boy. He was—not a boy, a young man.” He wipes his mouth with his napkin, and pushes the half-finished salad aside. Now he orders coffee. “He started to come visit every few months. He was, I thought, a bit strange. Intense. He flew all the way from California to visit Maurice.”

  My skin goes cold. All the new good feelings dissipate. A boy? A young man? I square my shoulders, raise my chin.

  He looks down at his plate and then up. His face is very sad. “Maybe I was jealous. I felt he didn’t need me anymore. Some of us—for better or worse—like to be needed.”

  I brace myself. “What was his name—the boy?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t remember.” He smiles sheepishly. “He was a lawyer.”

  He looks at me for several long moments while we sip our coffee. “Every year, Maurice gave a lot of money to SAB. They might have his contact information.”

  He gestures for the bill. “There’s something else—I don’t know if—but, well, one more thing,” he says. “The young man who showed up, well, Maurice introduced him as his son.”

  “His son?”

  Rob stands to leave. “The old fool. Surprised everyone.”

  CHAPTER 26

  FALL 1978

  So Mira becomes one of the three hundred girls who attend SAB. She is put into B1, Intermediate Level, where the color of leotards is midnight blue. She is one of the four routinely selected by call-outs to demonstrate the steps. Mira, Felicia, Natasha, Bryce.

  She feels that thing that was set loose by her fall—the part of her that wants to laugh and fling back her head and twist Ms. Clement’s kind hands until they break—brought her here. Under the stares of the Russians, this thing rears up, animated. The Russians hate her and she respects them for it. It makes her dance better. It is now these women, with their faulty English, their imperious attitudes, their quick jabs to her flesh, their movement tics and flourishes—it is this that she craves. It is this that makes her feel she has arrived.

  Maurice shows her a documentary called The Children of Theater Street. It is about the making of ballet dancers in the Soviet Union, the same great ballet factories that produced Baryshnikov and Makarova. She learns that in this other land the boys and girls come from all over—hundreds, even thousands, of miles—to audition. They are measured, and their natural gifts are tested, the way they tested Mira. The documentary follows the lives of the chosen few girls and boys who have been taken from their homes in the provinces and brought to Leningrad to train. One girl sleeps on a cot in the kitchen of her host family’s apartment. It is rolled out every evening and rolled away at five in the morning when the girl rises, and after a breakfast of beets and bread by flashlight (her host family still sleeping), she begins her hours-long journey to the Kirov studios, where she will have a long day of grueling classes. She is eleven years old.

  And now Mira is studying with these Russians, who had trained in those very same ballet factories; Mr. B—Balanchine—had gathered them together: Alexandra Danilova, one of his earliest partners. Kiev’s State Theater’s Tumkovsky and Hélène Dudin who emigrated after World War II. Felia Doubrovska, who danced at the legendary Mariinski Theater before the Russian Revolution. Former Bolshoi principals Nikolai Tarasov and Andrei Kramarevsky.

  Mr. B is both familiar father figure, warm and human, and as remote as a god. Each girl lives for the day he will visit her class, run his eyes over the lot of them, stop at her, and magically elevate her to the likes of one of his muses. Suzanne Farrell is his most revered. The newest of his muses, Darci Kistler, is scarcely two years older than Mira.

  Like a family, bound by its own mythology. One can hardly switch parents; one makes do, adapts. In family life, in a family of good children, each one strains to be the best.

  Mr. B’s girls. They are being molded into the stick-thin hipless Balanchine ballerinas, known far and wide as Balanchine’s “pinheads.” Pinheads. If there is a fairy tale at work here, it is not really Cinderella, but something more like Hansel and Gretel. A brittle finger bone, a threat of fire and oblivion, a trail of receding crumbs disappearing in the woods of a vanishing child-self.

  The SAB changing rooms are like a gym, with metal lockers, long wooden benches, and a back room with showers. The only thing that sets it apart from a gym changing room is the big cat litter–size box of rosin in the corner by the door, where the hard yellow rock sits chipped and battered amid a powder of its own skin.

  One afternoon after Mira has been at SAB a few weeks, she is in the changing room before class. She takes out her pointe shoes and bends to unroll the ribbons. The shoes are new. Capezios. Just this morning she closed her bedroom door on the toe box several times to break them in. (Judy shouting from the kitchen, “Mira, what are you doing? Stop making that racket!”) She shakes them out and runs her hand along the lining just to make sure. She heard about a girl who had to go to the hospital because someone put glass in her pointe shoes and it chewed up her feet so badly that she was out for several months. Or that was the story. You hear things, lots of things. You never know what is true.

  As she is slipping on her shoes, two girls come in from some class in sweat-drenched leotards. They both have brown hair, but one looks wispy and the other more solid. Yet another brown-haired girl comes in behind them, thinner than the other two.

  “How much do you have to lose?”

  “They want five pounds by the summer.”

  Mira thinks of Adele, a girl she’s heard stories of, who was supposed to have been great. Mr. B has picked her out during a class, once. But after Adele was talked to about her weight, she began peeling the skin from the bottom of her feet and the wounds caused an infection that finally put her out of class for a month. By the time she came back to class, she had gained more weight. She was not invited back after the summer. Though Mira has never met Adele, she is a present figure, ghostly, in her life.

  Mira watches the third girl. She reminds Mira of Robin from The Little Kirov. This thin girl is not B Level—she’s C Level, marked by black leotards. She has Robin’s dark hair, heart-shaped elfin face, and bow-shaped lips. She has Robin’s untroubled translucent skin. But Robin’s thinness is an ethereal slightness, whereas this girl’s thinness is one of will: her collarbones and ribs stick out like bony fingers. Only her calves and ankles are substantial. There is something about this not-Robin that, despite—or maybe because of—her anorexia, makes her look older, almost like a lady, a grown-up.

  Mr. B does not like anorectics. Thin is good, yes, but the anorectics end up getting sidelined and leave. Still, the line is fuzzy. A girl can be delicately thin and then, only a few pounds less, she can have the tell-tale gaunt rigidity of the anorectic. Anorectics are not reliable. They stick
around for a while, all bone, no muscle, downy hair growing on their backs, until they can’t dance anymore. Then they disappear. Mira does not know where they go.

  Not-Robin sits on the bench and pulls her leotard down so that you can see her pinprick nipples that barely rise from her ribs. She looks at Mira with some kind of raw emotion, and for a second Mira has to look away.

  Mira looks down at her new Capezios, with their barely cracked toe box. She feels some wall coming down, that she is growing less complicated, some jewellike part of her beginning to shine again. Her mouth opens to say something.

  Not-Robin turns to her locker, and when she turns back her face has changed. It is shut tight and strangely blurry. A closed window streaked with rain.

  Then Mira comes crashing into her ridiculous childhood self—and she is humiliated at the sight of her. Here again is the girl who dreams about being a princess, who loves the prince above all else, who thought saying “Fuck you” would solve all her problems, who accosts a jester because he kisses the prince (as if most ballet boys didn’t prefer boys). She has to look down.

  All at once, the other girls laugh.

  The taller girl snorts and says, “I hate when they get boners! I hate when they get them and stick them in your back.”

  “Oh yeah,” says the wispy girl. “Like when you’re partnering, like for pirouettes? They have to hold you around the waist and they get a boner and it’s sticking you in the back.”

  How many times has Mira come to this moment? She sees herself in the wings watching the jester kiss Christopher, his head back and broken-looking, the fierceness rising in her. How many times has she been asked to hate that ridiculous girl? Still, she can’t. She can ridicule her, but she cannot hate her. She is like a younger sister, stupid, fresh, naïve, ridiculous, but hers—her sister. But she thinks now of that night in the terms Maurice has laid out for her: she fell. You fell wonderfully.

  Everything will change—is changing. She will no longer be Mira, but “Bella”: someone new and better and braver.

  In October, Mira and her dad move into Judy’s big apartment off Park Avenue. Park Avenue from Sixtieth Street to Eightieth Street is its own world, a twenty-block island of determined wealth and privilege that abruptly ends with a stretch on Madison of public institutions—a big red brick school tagged long ago as a bomb shelter and a bedraggled public park. On this island, things are as they’ve been for a long time, or at least everyone has agreed to pretend so. Mothers in heels, wall portraits of family members, maids in uniforms in the kitchens, dining rooms with sideboards of weekly polished silver. Kids leave this world only to walk a few blocks to their private schools or climb into their family’s Mercedes to drive to the Hamptons.

  Brooklyn is an excuse for sitcoms, the Bronx shorthand for urban desolation and fear, but Park Avenue floats untouched, insulated. This is Judy’s world—and now her dad’s and hers.

  Judy enrolls her in an all-girls private school. Mira walks a few blocks to her new school, tucked in a town house off Fifth Avenue, built of marble and wood, nodding at the doormen on her way, who stand in the dimly lit antechambers in stiff hats and brocaded lapels, protecting what is left of her innocence.

  The difference between Brooklyn public school and Manhattan private school: everything. No cafeteria workers. No hot lunch. No Tater Tots. No bouncing baloney. In private school, kids buy—not bring—their lunch. Overpriced salads from the Madison Avenue deli. A steak sandwich from the deli two blocks away. Mineral water. At public school, no one got more than a dollar a week in allowance. Here, they get twenty-five dollars a week! “Recess” in a pebbled concrete yard is replaced by “gym” in a shiny wood-floored room of skylights and the squeak of sneakers and balls hitting the floor. In this shiny gym, she plays volleyball. The girls’ voices lower an octave and become hard and urge her on and if she hits the ball they thump her on the back and if she misses they turn away from her and clap their hands quickly to dismiss her failure. “Keep the energy up,” they say, clapping again.

  In public school, the teachers are decades older and have pockmarked skin, circles under their eyes. Their eyes skate over her in relief whenever she is silent. In private school, shiny-haired young teachers call on her when she doesn’t speak enough. The other girls look at her expectantly as she tries in her new voice to get her ideas across. The ideas flow up as if from nowhere: she sees wind as a symbol in Wuthering Heights. She sees the Chinese Confucian system as an enviable moral code and in one paper compares foot binding to wearing pointe shoes. Her mother lets her go to this school because her father is paying for the tuition. But having gone to a private school herself, her mother warns her daughter of “the snobs, fruitcakes, and counterfeits” who are at these kinds of schools.

  But the girls are nice to her for some reason, maybe because she is a bunhead, or maybe because she is Sam’s sister. Sam is popular for being a good lacrosse player. He goes to an all-boys private school—her school’s “brother school”—about ten blocks away.

  Or maybe it’s because she tells these girls that she has a rich, old boyfriend who is going to marry her when she graduates high school. Maurice gives her money on Friday nights—“the babysitting money” she would be making if she were really babysitting. With this money, she buys jewelry from Bloomingdale’s that she tells them is from her boyfriend. They gather around and their makeup-less faces—no makeup is allowed—press in to see her latest acquisition. They believe her, or appear to.

  After school, she climbs on the crosstown bus to SAB. It cuts through the park at Sixty-sixth Street and then travels west on Sixty-fifth. She gets out on the corner of Sixty-fifth and Amsterdam on the north side of Lincoln Center. The bus is often strangely empty. For some reason, not many people make the journey at this time of day from the East Side to the West Side.

  Mira takes her place at the barre. She nods at the other girls whose names are called most regularly. They nod back curtly, sergeants who offer passing acknowledgment of the heavy responsibilities the others carry. And that is a bond of some sort—not friendship—but it is a bond.

  The best girls—there are two of them besides Mira in this class—hold a careful alliance. Her two competitors are Felicia and Bryce. Felicia, in her Princess Leia buns, has the air of waiting. Bryce’s long limbs twitch as she warms up. They stand together along the far wall where the view of the mirror is most direct, and after class they gather in the hallway or dressing room to compare notes. Unlike at The Little Kirov, they do not envy each other, or not in the same way, not raw on the surface like children. They are already chosen—each of them—so they tolerate, they hate, one another as professionals.

  Felicia has perfect turnout, perfect arches, perfect extension, and perfect balance. She dances with an easy precision. Nevertheless, there is something vacant about it. Her face looks like she is watching TV. She shines at adagio.

  Bryce is long and gangly and a bit spastic. She moves constantly, even between combinations. She is loose-limbed like Hannah: her limbs fly up like she has no joints. In fact, she is double jointed. When she marshals her energy well, you can’t take your eyes off her. Her specialty is allegro.

  What Mira has that neither of them has is allegro and adagio together. But she worries that when Mr. B finally comes to their class, on that day Bryce will be wild and perfect, or Felicia will be a little less perfect and pay attention, and then it won’t matter what Mira can do. She will not be chosen.

  She tries to follow Felicia’s steps and duplicate Bryce’s energy—and to copy neither.

  Then the old Russians’ attention turns to her. “Mira! What do you do? What you make?” yells Ms. Tumkovsky, stamping her foot in her dusty funereal outfit.

  Then Mira can snap her eyes away from the out-of-the-ordinary thing. Mira feels the challenge of hate rising, some force of will, energizing. She can relax into it. And Ms. Tumkovsky’s critiques are a taut rope that Mira can clutch onto as she descends deeper into the class, into her body and its
needs, and the needs of the steps. Her mind, in the hands of another, grows pliant, as she keeps moving, her body leading. She is following a path into the forest, one stone, then another, and soon she is deep in the forest and doesn’t care that there is no light, no sound of birds, no mother, no house, no prince. Then there is no mind, just her body moving in space. There is just this and Tumkovsky’s voice that is around her.

  At the same time, she knows it is not enough to be small and have no hips. It is not enough to be one of the best. It is even not enough to be the best in the class, hated the most by the Russian teachers. You must be singled out by Mr. B during one of his random classroom visits. He might ask you to point your foot. He might ask to see an arabesque. It doesn’t really matter. It is his eyes that matter. They have chosen you. You are now one of “Mr. B’s girls.”

  And from there? You will be chosen for The Nutcracker—a child in the party scene, or a Hoop Girl, or a Polichinelle if you are older. From there, you will be put on the fast track. You will be invited to take company classes. Apprenticeship is within reach. He might give you your own perfume—he gave Karin L’Origan. Réplique is what he gives Suzanne (so that he knows who has been in the elevator and hallways). If you are very lucky, he will invite you to his apartment during summer season in Saratoga Springs and cook you his borscht and you will eat it (though it will be the only thing you eat all day) because he hates anorectics. Then you will dance on the stage at Lincoln Center, on the same stage as Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, you will wade through a carpet of rose stems that have been thrown at you during curtain calls. You will have an apartment near the theater with a small mattress and China tea set (but you will need nothing else). You will travel the world on tour, dancing on the stages of the great European capitals. You will be seen, you will be adored. You will be a ballerina in the greatest ballet company in the world.

  But she knows—they all know—that Mr. B only invites one or two girls a year into the company—and that’s on a good year. But despite these terrible odds, this is the only way to go from an SAB student to a New York City Ballet dancer.