Girl Through Glass Read online

  “He came to our class today. He asked me to demonstrate.”

  “Ah.” He takes her hands in his. “He chose you?”

  The one thing in her tilting world, her scattered life, the one who held her to the side of the pool, told her to jump. She’d jumped. She looks at him. “Yes.” He smiles.

  Back at Maurice’s house, in his living room, he has not turned on the overhead light, and the streetlight shines in from outside, illuminating the space in front of the couch like a spotlight. He stares at Mira. He takes a few awkward steps toward her. His face is whiter than ever before.

  “Bella,” he says. He whispers: “Show me what Mr. B saw.” Behind his gold clocks, without his velvet, his chandelier, his exotic fish, his candelabras, he needs her.

  She dances on pointe, which is hard on his carpet. She does an extension in relevé. She bourrées from one end of the room to the other, thinking about what Mr. B said, feeling the same wind at her back, the shivery hot-cold feeling.

  When she is finished, she stands panting in the middle of the room. His eyes are shining.

  He leans forward. “I see it,” he says. “It’s a cold wind on a winter’s night that cuts the cheek, it’s that last breath in the body that does not want to leave, it is earth and sky. I have not seen that before. How did he get that?”

  “He told me to walk like a waiter at the Russian Tea Room.”

  He stares at her, then laughs.

  She laughs too. Her laughter sounds strange to her own ears.

  “If only my father could see this . . . ,” he says. His eyes are half closed.

  She moves closer. Then she takes another step toward him. They are nose to nose, about the same size. When did that happen? Did he shrink? Did she grow?

  “Can I see it?” She points to his bad leg.

  He bends down and shimmies his pants up his leg. The leg is withered, skin over bone held in by the crisscrossing leather straps of a giant metal brace. The skin is like a baby’s—raw, pink, unused but dented in furrows where the leather has cut into it.

  “A ballerina’s leg, it is said, is skin over steel. Mine is steel over skin.”

  “I want to touch it.” She reaches out, feels tenderness—and what she calls that feeling is love.

  Suddenly, he grabs her hand with one of his. Stops it in midair.

  “You are beautiful. This”—he hits his leg savagely—“is ugly.”

  He lets go of her arm, bends over, and rolls down his pants.

  He is backlit and she can see only his eyes gleam yellow in the glow of the streetlamp. He grips her shoulders. “Who invented the pointe shoe?” he whispers hoarsely.

  “Master Taglioni,” she says. “He invented it for his daughter.” She can smell the sweet-apples and sour-cinnamon smell.

  She can see him smile, even in the dimness, his white teeth lined up, rocks on the ledge.

  She relaxes. She can play this game. He has told her this story already a few times. It is so important to him. “Premier of La Sylphide,” she says.

  “Paris Opera House in 1832. He whispers in his daughter’s ear, ‘If you make a noise, I will kill you.’”

  “She does it. She dances silently,” she says.

  “The audience gasps! How?”

  “The pointe shoe,” she says.

  “Yes, and the Romantic ballerina was born.”

  PEARLS

  CHAPTER 29

  PRESENT

  “Whoa. Are you okay, professor?” Felicia opens the door, an orange feather duster in hand, a novelty item that she holds without any evidence of a joke. She’s wearing sweats and a workout shirt.

  I can no longer help it, can no longer help anything. I can’t hold it in any longer. “Something has happened, Felicia,” I say.

  She leads me to the living room and sits me down on the couch. There’s no sign of Alain now. I take the envelope out and put it on the coffee table.

  She sits across from me and lays the duster on the floor.

  She looks at me quizzically. I let it all spill out. “He wrote to me. I didn’t know if he was alive—didn’t want to know . . . I tried to forget. But I couldn’t. Then this—” I push the envelope toward her.

  “Hold on,” she says. She crosses her legs. “Who wrote to you? Please explain.”

  I take a deep breath. “Someone I knew a long time ago. When we were kids. At SAB. It was so long ago. But—”

  “Wait—oh my god—was it that weird guy with the limp? He used to wait for you after class, by the fountain?”

  “What?”

  She laughs. “Oh, Kate. We all knew about him. Sometimes we called him ‘the creepy guy.’ Bryce called you two Beauty and the Beast. He was a bizarre character.” She’s smiling now, not at me but with a secret that she’s preoccupied with. Something more in my chest drops away, and I’m overcome with tears. The room looks momentarily brighter and bigger. Felicia’s pale face glints through this new light. She has no lipstick on today.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” I take a deep breath. “It’s like this. Imagine if you’ve lived all these years thinking you were someone, but now you see you were wrong.”

  “Well, we all have lots of different selves.”

  “No, not like that. It’s like—you’re still a child and everyone else is a grown-up.”

  “But you’re a professor.”

  Attempts to describe an inner life, always doomed to fail. She wants to help, I see. I’m struck by the fact that somewhere, against the odds, she’s learned kindness. My focus splits and I see both this Felicia, this adult of the mysterious jobs and fluttering hands and crystalline skin, and also at the same time the girl whose earnest, pleading eyes and careful ringlets I admired so much until I understood the effort involved in creating them. I remember her mother, the strange quiet of their sequestered life.

  But these—I catch myself—are childish thoughts, childish categories of being: good, bad. Smart, stupid. But I can’t help it, I can no longer help anything. I am becoming that child again.

  It’s clear, I am out of the habit of trust. As an adult, my friendships have been practical, mutable, and not lasting. There were some grad student friends, others who were popping pills to stay up all night and show off their cerebral gymnastics. We traded tips on academic journals submissions policies and grants, and then retreated to our studio apartments where we tripped over our decades-long research projects and, in lieu of camaraderie, ferociously updated our blogs. But I was drawn mostly to the troubled or crazy ones who ended up dropping out. The others were competition, and the ambiguous childhood state that allows for friendship with natural enemies had dissolved by then.

  Felicia pours me a gin and tonic. A green lime that sparkles in the strange distilled light. I close my eyes. I take a sip of the drink. It’s sweet and bitter at the same time. I can taste both flavors. They bloom side by side in my mouth.

  When I open my eyes again, I ask her, “Do you believe in fate?”

  She looks out her large windows. The sky is brushed white, cloudless, and sullen. From where we sit, you can see just the tops and sides of buildings.

  Felicia examines her manicure. “I’ve wanted lots of things in my life—to be a dancer—a singer—an actor. I’ve wanted them with what I thought is the strength of desire that would deliver those things. But wanting something doesn’t make it real.” She says this cleanly, without self-pity. “I never thought I would be—whatever I am.”

  She stirs her drink, as if she’ll unearth something at the bottom. “I don’t know what you think you’ve done wrong, but it can’t be that bad. You walked in here with that grim professor face and that chilly voice. But now I see that you’re just like the rest of us. You’re human. Hu-man. That means—fucked-up.”

  By the time we finish our drinks, I’m completely exhausted. I tell Felicia I’m heading to sleep early. As I get ready for bed, I try to go over what I learned from Rob. Maurice is alive—probably. Armonk. Westchester. He is—could be—close. So
close.

  I listen to the water run in the pipes in the walls. Felicia, flushing the toilet, or taking a shower? My face fills with blood at overhearing someone else’s habits, this small intimacy,

  Maurice’s face drifts back to me. I want to smash it, to pulverize it, this face that has stayed with me. He is, apparently, still alive and has kept changing. This is perhaps what I am most angry about: that he has gone on changing.

  As I am climbing in bed, I see there’s a new voice mail on my cell. It’s from this afternoon, and it’s Sioban, who I gave my number to, in a moment of stupidity (or, possibly, compassion, it’s hard to know which). I listen with trepidation. Her voice is low, and soft. There is none of the anger from the last time I saw her. It’s hard to make out what she’s saying—her voice is garbled and there are long pauses between her words—but I catch “can’t stop thinking about you,” “please call,” “I’m scared,” and, finally, “I’m sorry.” The “I’m sorry” sends a cold shiver through me. Then the line goes dead. I turn it off. Anger I can handle, but sadness really scares me.

  CHAPTER 30

  FALL 1978

  About a month into the semester, Felicia invites Mira over for a sleepover. On Friday after class, she, Felicia, and Felicia’s mother, Rita, take the F train to Queens. Felicia lives in one of a row of tightly packed brick bungalows. Inside the apartment, everything is very puffy. The couch is puffy. The curtains are puffy. A white shag carpet covers the floors. In the kitchen is a chart on the wall, and next to it a stack of stickers with gold stars and smiley faces. In Felicia’s bedroom, the carpet is pink. There is a bed in her room covered with a puffy bedspread and canopy. In her room are also laminated placards taped to the wall that read: BREATHE! PROJECT! SMILE!

  The girls sit on Felicia’s bed. Her friend turns to her. “I can’t believe you’re a Mr. B girl now. It’s so amazing. I have one of Mr. B’s girls in my home right now. You are so lucky, Mira.”

  “I’m sure he’ll choose you next.”

  “Really?”

  “I know so.” Mira didn’t, in fact, know anything of the sort. But it felt good to say it, to have this moment of intimacy, of sharing something—purely, simply—with another girl.

  “I want to give you something.” Felicia gets up and places a jewelry box between them on the bed. She opens it for Mira to examine. “Take anything. Anything you want.”

  Mira touches the things inside one by one: a macramé friendship bracelet; a feather brooch with half the feather broken off and exposed, its stem ragged; a diamond necklace that talks. It says, I am a beautiful princess! A haphazard, slightly grimy collection, a typical girl’s.

  At the very bottom is a pearl necklace and pearl earrings. They are very white and round and shiny. Mira pulls these out, holds them up to her neck. “What do you think?”

  “They’re real. Bite them. That’s how you can tell.”

  Mira looks at her friend, quickly bites the round balls, and pushes them down to the bottom of her pocket.

  Then Felicia is at the closet, pushing one of the wood-paneled doors back and pulling out a dented shoe box. She motions Mira over to where she squats. Felicia takes the lid off the shoe box to reveal an assortment of candy bars. They have soft, worn, creased wrappers, as if they’ve been handled too many times. Mira and Felicia huddle in the dark corner and finger them.

  “Where’s your dad?” says Mira.

  “He lives on Long Island. He owns a store, so he can’t come very often. But it’s okay. My mom and I are like a team. We understand each other. My dad doesn’t really get it.”

  “My mom’s in California,” Mira says.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “No,” says Mira.

  Rita serves dinner on a table set with glazed black-and-white ceramic plates and black-and-white zebra-striped napkins. Loud bangs of metal utensils on ceramic. On their plates, Rita piles some kind of grain and then carrots in a thin, oily sauce.

  “Am I on a diet again?” asks Felicia.

  “Felicia’s frame, unfortunately, she gets from her father,” says Rita. She looks at Mira. “You have a thin frame.”

  Mira blushes. A cozy, puffy world, just the three of them. What would that be like? Rita’s red lips glisten with canola oil. She looks at Felicia as if to say “I told you so.”

  After dinner, Rita takes just Mira into her bedroom, where she does Mira’s hair in pigtail ringlets like Felicia’s, with the brush attachment to a hot curling iron, something Mira has never seen before. While she works, she tells Mira to close her eyes. But Rita is not happy with the results of her efforts and has to start all over: she brushes the curls out of Mira’s hair, then braids it into two very tight French braids. Now Rita is satisfied with the results.

  Then Rita takes out a giant makeup kit that opens accordion-like into different levels, like a house with many rooms. She puts rouge on Mira’s cheeks and green eye shadow over her eyes. Rita applies the makeup with firm, confident strokes. Mira feels a pleasant, animallike warmth come over her. When Rita finishes, Mira looks at herself in the mirror. She looks feline—a thin face and big staring eyes.

  “Do you think I could be in a commercial?”

  Rita nods, smiles. “With your red hair and freckles? Of course you could!”

  Rita puts her hand on Mira’s back and leads her into the living room, where Felicia is watching TV. Felicia squeals when she sees Mira.

  “Mom, do me, do me!” Felicia says. Rita laughs. Then she takes Felicia into the bedroom and does her hair and makeup too: pink cheeks and blue, instead of green, over her eyes.

  The three of them drive to a giant supermarket. Inside, people turn to stare—two made-up girls, and Rita. Mira imagines that they are both Rita’s children, both going to be stars. What would that be like, rushing around from audition to audition, always ready to go to a casting call, always beautiful with big eyes? She feels how the makeup makes her stronger. How the world turns a brighter face back to her. People smile at her. She smiles back. She is part of something. She is initiated—how strange, to make oneself stick out and then to feel that you belong. She sees that, too. It’s a raw kind of joy that rises from her collarbones into a blush.

  They walk back to the car across the giant parking lot, carrying things they don’t need, in a light, cold rain, talking loudly. It smells like steel and fish, the inside of a star.

  Later, when she is on the verge of falling asleep under that wood-tiled ceiling in Felicia’s puffy room, she feels a sharp pang, and as obliterating darkness falls, she doesn’t think of her father or of her mother—but of Maurice. Maurice in his green and gold living room, Maurice in his maroon car with his special box of a seat and special levers; Maurice showing her the poor Little Dancer statue, blackened with age, her tired face turned up to a hopeful sun. Mira shivers with a new kind of guilt, with the knowledge that she has somehow betrayed someone—or something.

  The next afternoon after classes, Maurice is waiting by the Lincoln Center fountain. Mira walks up to him. He stares at her. Her eye shadow and eyeliner got smudged, so she tried to replicate what Rita did with some drugstore supplies.

  He turns from her and walks his marionette walk up Broadway. For a moment, she considers not following him. It would be easy not to, to just get on the crosstown bus, head to her dad and Judy’s apartment. But who would she be then? Just a girl, one girl among many, without a mother, with a father who, she now knows, dries his underwear on the backs of kitchen chairs, and whose aftershave smells too strongly of peppermint, a father who she knows can hit her.

  The crowd begins to swallow up Maurice’s diminishing form. She runs to catch up with him. When she reaches his side, he does not turn. He keeps going, shoving the gum wrappers aside with his walking stick.

  He hails a cab and she climbs in beside him. “Where are we going?”

  At first, he doesn’t answer. Then he says, “Home.”

  When they pull up in front of his building, he turns to her. “Get out.�
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  In his apartment, he pulls her into the bathroom. He thrusts her towards the sink, grabs soap, and rubs it over her face. She starts coughing. He turns on the water and pushes her face under it. It’s too hot. She screams. He turns on the cold. Now he throws that on her face—she’s sputtering.

  “That hurts,” she says.

  “Who put that on your face?” he says.

  “Rita did it.”

  “Who’s Rita?”

  “Felicia’s mom.”

  “This is not what a dancer wants. This is what a whore wants.”

  “It looks special.”

  He doesn’t seem to hear her. He grips her harder. “This is beauty you can buy for ten dollars, twenty dollars. No one can give you the beauty ballet gives you.”

  “Stop,” she says again.

  He grabs her by the shoulders again. Then he yanks the string of pearls from around her neck and pulls hard. “These are fake.” They snap and spill all over the floor. They roll around in the hallway outside the bathroom and clink on the tile in the bathroom like pebbles against a window.

  In the living room, he takes down a photo in a silver frame from a shelf. She’s never noticed it before. It’s a black-and-white photo of a large-bellied man in shirt and tie and funny, balloon-like pants. Through his pince-nez glasses, he stares out at the camera. His eyes are far apart, giving him a broad, fierce look. He holds the photo right up to her face. “This is the photo I’ve really wanted to show you. This is—was—my father. My mother always blamed ballet. And my father. For the polio. You know why?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Because I got sick right after seeing my first live ballet performance.” He leans in toward her. “I think she was just jealous because she didn’t come with us. He only had two tickets and he took me.