Girl Through Glass Read online

  No, she’s just a white girl with a weird mother.

  But now it scarcely matters anymore. Mira is eleven and can get herself to class. She travels with her friend Val who lives in her neighborhood but goes to a different school. They meet by the subway, their dance bags full, their hair already bound up in high ponytails, their hairnets and bobby pins in the outer pockets of their bags.

  Mira’s mother, in paint-splattered overalls and head kerchief, is conferring with a Selba’s saleslady. The saleslady is rifling through a stack of leotards and her mother is nodding distractedly—Mira can tell she is still thinking about one of her half-finished paintings.

  “Better to get them big,” her mother agrees. The saleslady picks up a cap-sleeved leotard that has come loose from its packaging and lies on the bottom of the bin. She brushes off the lint.

  “We’re supposed to wear spaghetti strap,” Mira says quickly. “Cap sleeve are for Level One and Two.”

  Mira’s mother looks from her eleven-year-old daughter to the wigged saleslady; her forehead pinches together. “Excuse me,” she says to the lady. Then, to Mira, “Outside!” On the sidewalk, they stand in a patch lit by the afternoon sun. The mica in the sidewalk glints all around Mira’s sandals. A fat pigeon with a clubfoot pecks along the curb. Down the narrow street that intersects with this one, Mira can see the tower of a factory spewing smoke into the gray air.

  Her mother puts her face right up to Mira’s. But she doesn’t yell. Instead, she leans against the wall and then slides down until she is sitting on the sidewalk. She drops her head in her hands. “Time for a break,” she says. You can hear a bit of her Manhattan voice creeping in, a snipping of the vowels and a hardening of the consonants.

  Mira sits down next to her. Her mother digs in her big suede shoulder bag.

  “Mom, people are staring.”

  “Who are these theoretical people?” Rachel pulls out a bag of crushed nuts and smashed raisins and offers some to Mira. Mira looks down the long, narrow street. In the distance, she can see someone coming.

  “Him.” They stare as a man’s form fills out with details. He has greasy hair and wears a plaid jacket. He is walking under a green and red awning. He is smoking a cigarette.

  “You think you’ll ever see him again?” her mother says loudly as the man lopes past.

  The man steals a glance at her mother, then stops, as if he just remembered something. “Got a light?” he says.

  Her mother scrounges around in her bag. Other mothers have purses, her mother has a bag—it is a big suede one made of colorful leather straps. She pulls out a dog-eared book of matches.

  “Hey,” he says, looking at the logo of the nightspot on the matchbook cover. “That’s a good place. They’ve got a good piano bar.”

  “I know,” she says. She pulls the kerchief off her hair, so that it falls down. It is long, wavy, and very red.

  “That’s some hair, lady,” he says.

  “Rachel,” Mira says. “Her name’s Rachel.” Her mother lets her call her Rachel sometimes. Sometimes she insists on it. It’s hard to say when she is Mira’s mom and when she is Rachel.

  He laughs. “Okay, kid. Okay.” Something bright and bubbling passes between him and her mother. Abruptly, her mother puts the bag of nuts back in her purse and stands up. She shakes her head so that her hair moves over her shoulders. She moves her weight onto one hip. “We have to get on with our shopping mission.”

  He begins to move away. With a few furtive looks back, he moves into the shadow of the next building. Then her mother’s hand is on the back of her head, pushing Mira inside. At the counter, her mother mumbles something. An emergency . . . tow to the Bowery . . . Can you watch her for twenty minutes or so? The ladies seem to understand something in her voice. Not quite her Manhattan voice. Not quite her Brooklyn voice. Something low and rolling behind the high, strained notes. The shop lady nods. As Mira climbs up on a rickety stool the shop lady has gestured toward, she knows there is no emergency. They took the subway here. Rachel’s eyes brush over Mira with an unseeing look, and, cheeks blazing, she exits.

  Mira sees through her sideways vision the man’s plaid coat disappear and she feels the rise of the familiar loneliness of waiting, while the city rushes, clocks, and clatters all around her.

  Ever since she was little, Mira remembers the feeling: her mother would be there, and then suddenly not. Mom, she would call. And then her mom would appear from another part of the house, or another part of a store, or even where she had vanished moments before from a crowded sidewalk.

  Her mother always comes back from wherever she goes, her voice, no longer fraught and high, but low and Brooklyn, full of salt and tide. Mira’s job is just to wait.

  On the subway ride home, amid the rhythmic clatter of the train, Mira looks up at her mother. “Do you and Dad love each other?” she asks.

  Her mother looks at her daughter, her daughter who, to her secret pride, is another version of her. Pale skin, freckles, hair the color of carrots simmered too long in broth.

  “Of course.”

  “What’s the difference between being in love and loving each other?” Mira’s voice is becoming higher, more anxious.

  Her mother sighs. “Being in love is like falling off a cliff. Being in love is like flying—or falling. All you feel is the wind around you.” She adds: “Loving someone is something you can feel along with lots of other feelings.”

  “Can you hate and love someone at the same time?”

  “Well, yes, I think you can. Yeah, I definitely think you can.”

  “Do you sometimes hate Dad?”

  “Of course not. Why would you ask that?”

  The train clatters and bangs in the tunnel under the water toward Brooklyn. When the train squeals into their station, they gather their bags and get off.

  They turn down Clark Street. They pass stores whose front windows are still shattered. Tape covers the web of cracks at the florist shop. A board covers the front of the shoe repair shop. A lightning strike to a power generator, they said. Act of god, they called it. But the fires and broken windows were not caused by god.

  They pass in front of the giant old hotel where old men gather pushing shopping carts stuffed with their belongings. Her father tells her to ignore these men, they are tenants who in time will be replaced, but her mother always greets them. “Evening, captains,” she says in her Brooklyn voice. The men show grins of missing teeth.

  A cool gust of wind blows in from the harbor. It is a clear evening, with darkness spreading across the sky.

  “I hope Dad is home,” Mira says. The shreds of a sunset hang over lower Manhattan, behind the lit-up jigsaw of buildings. An eerie silence comes over the city, as if it remembers how it is to be naked in the night.

  But her father is not home.

  “Maybe he’s just late,” says her mother, but her voice is low and unsure. Her Brooklyn voice. When Mira goes upstairs, she finds her father’s dresser top cleaned of cuff links and his closet empty of suits.

  CHAPTER 4

  PRESENT

  In Johnson, I climb the creaking stairs to the overheated turret. Up past the college’s alumni offices. Buttressed by a cup of coffee—black, no sugar—and the sweet smell of illicit cigarette smoke coming up from Dr. James’s (emeritus professor in classics) office below me, I’ll make it through office hours. Outside of the classroom, I’m not so easy with the students.

  The office on the other side of the hall belongs to the other visiting professor in performance studies, Bill Krasdale. He’ll be in later for office hours and then there will be a line of students waiting for him. That’s Bill, the vulnerable, the well-loved by students—more shaman than teacher. I may have a few groupies, but he inspires love.

  Sioban sits outside my office door. “Hola. Bonjour,” I say. I fumble with the keys in the lock.

  Inside my musty-smelling office, she flops into the metal folding chair. I squeeze by her, catching my dress on the edge of her chai
r, stuff myself behind my desk, and settle in. Behind me the ferns I brought up from seedlings have grown so thick they tickle my hair. They have flourished in the dim rafters here.

  Still wide-eyed from her ideas, she hikes one leg over the other and bounces a green neon sneaker on her knee. She wears only workout clothes—pants so tight that they grip every muscle or so loose you can barely see her form.

  “I just love your class so much, as you know.” She gives me a wicked smile that makes her long face look fuller. She begins picking at a Buzz Lightyear Band-Aid on her finger.

  I take in her nervous energy, her bitten nails half-stripped of their red nail polish, and it occurs to me that Sioban’s headlong rush into academia is simply the animal’s response to totally new terrain—fight or flight. It reminds me of myself in my twenties, when I was dancing modern in San Francisco, both fearful and willing to try anything. She is choosing to advance, to fight. I smile at her, a real smile.

  I take a slug of my coffee. “I’m enjoying having you in this class. Your perspective”—I look out the window. It’s started to rain lightly—“is invaluable.”

  “Thanks,” she says too brightly. I wonder if I’ve betrayed something.

  “So what can I help you with now?” I manage a warm, professional tone. To give myself something to do, I pull out my pile of mail and start sorting.

  She pulls out the syllabus. “For our next research paper? On early modernist choreographers? I was just wondering—Can I do Nijinsky? I know we already did him in class, but I just don’t feel as strongly about any of the others?”

  Her eyes really are translucent. “I’d like you to do someone else, at least as a—a—comparison.”

  I’ve come across a single white envelope with my name on it. Something about the letter gives me pause. It’s a plain envelope with my address in meticulous handwriting. I realize what’s strange about it: there’s no return address. I weigh the letter in my hand. It’s extremely lightweight; I wonder whether anything is in it at all. I slip a finger in and rip it open. Inside the envelope is a folded sheet of Florentine-style parchment paper that falls open in my hand. I recognize the tight, cursive handwriting—from another era. My eyes hit the initial at the bottom: M. I snap it shut.

  My head feels like it is buzzing with light; a crushing weight has landed in the back of my skull. Through all of this, I am apparently talking to Sioban about Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska. I’m trying to convince her to write a paper on Nijinska using Nijinska’s own memoirs, which is a terrible idea. “Bronislava was faithful to his modernist project. She wrote a memoir that’s very illuminating. It tells the story of their youth in the Russian imperial ballet, it may shed new light on things. It’s not authoritative but it gives insight—” I’m babbling. This tome will be hard to wade through. My fingers brush the shelves behind me and pull out the heavy book. I’ve actually been planning to read it through myself to see if there’s anything there I can build an essay on. And this—my own possible scholar’s find—I offer blithely to this girl for a term paper. She inspires a white streak of rashness in me.

  Sioban is leaning over my desk, letting loose a smell of patchouli and sweat. “Thanks,” she says taking the book. Her hand, the one with the Band-Aid, closes around my wrist. She’s trembling slightly. I register the trembling hand. The tattered cartoon Band-Aid. Her strange, gentle touch. I register the fact that she’s just violated the force field between professor and student. The door is open. I jerk my hand away. It’s ridiculously bold what she’s done. I’ve underestimated her. I shouldn’t have picked her side today in class. She slips her folder back in her bag and smiles at me in a shy, mischievous way. Her wide excited eyes and long face, the bloom of the acne scars, dark red now, her cheekbones. She thinks she’s onstage. She lives her life as if she’s onstage.

  I smooth my Ann Taylor sweater dress over my leggings, ignoring the snag that formed on her chair. She gives me another smile, this one coy and bright, maddening in its narcissism. She knows her power. I know that suddenly for certain. Despite everything, this makes me smile.

  The most violent emotion comes over me—I have to look away. Now a draft comes rattling through the lead-paned windows, turning my coffee certifiably cold.

  I stuff the folded Florentine paper back into the envelope and shove it under a stack of unclaimed student papers.

  At that moment, Bill pokes his head in. “Hi—how’s it going?” He’s wearing a Russian winter hat, black and puffy, and his face beneath it shines. He’s still handsome, but his opaque face is a toughened version of its younger self.

  Sioban zips up her jacket. “I’m psyched to read the book,” she says, her eyes gleaming. She thinks she has won. She thinks it’s a game. Oh god. God help me. She makes her way to the doorway, squeezes past Bill.

  Bill and I knew each other years ago when we overlapped at Berkeley. My last year of my PhD and in comes Bill the wunderkind first-year MA grad student, all loose-limbed from clown school in Europe. Over the course of that year, he sloughed off his clown exterior and studied his Laban and started focusing on illusion and a practice. He concentrated in theater arts instead of dance like me. I heard later that he started dating a hippie girl, Berkeley born and bred, who was troubled. This girl, Madeline, now his wife of thirteen years, and with whom he has two girls.

  Bill steps into my office. “Kate,” he says. “There’s something I have to tell you.” He takes his hat off. Some water drips from it. “I ended up putting in my application for the Pell.” I stare at him. “Madeline’s been happier—she’s been working at the new co-op here and—I haven’t been having much luck. The West Coast is all locked up.”

  The vibrations of Sioban leaving the room are still there. I stare at Bill, unable to speak. His face looks terribly smug. I’ve said nothing. He lowers his eyes. “I’m sorry, Kate. I know you were counting on this gig.” He sighs and I know it’s meant to evoke Madeline, his albatross.

  With a mammoth effort, I ask, “Is she okay?”

  He sighs. “She’s been better.”

  “When did you put in your application?” I say finally.

  “Last week.”

  “They took your application last week?” This is a bad sign. It means that it was probably an invitation. A buzz starts in my head. A crush of fatigue crawls over me, which makes it easier to speak. “Thanks for letting me know, Bill.” It comes out icier than I intended.

  His eyes widen. He opens his mouth, closes it. “Okay, okay. I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Bill—”

  He turns.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” he says. He looks tired, but I can see some damage has been done.

  At home that evening, I put on a bathrobe, light a cigarette, and give in to my rage. Did Bill lie to me? Did he apply earlier? If so, he wouldn’t be the first to keep a secret. It would only be karmic. The fact is, though, if the Pell doesn’t come through I’m pretty much screwed. The only other thing I have out there is Alquinon, a third-rate university on the bleak border of Canada. I put in an application for a dance professor position (mostly technique, though) because it seemed a “safety school.” But already a few other universities have passed on me.

  I take a deep drag on my illicit smoke-stick saved for emergencies of this sort. I pick up a glass paperweight with a red flower embedded in it, a gift from my mentor in grad school, a woman who was part of the 1960s new wave of dancers and movement artists, and who passed away last fall. I run my hand gently over the smooth glass, then I pick it up and hurl it across the room. It hits the wall and shatters. A shiver runs down my spine.

  After I clean up the shards of glass, I wander into my office and take a copy of my dissertation book—Corporeality Subverted: The (Dis)embodied Feminine in the Aesthetic of George Balanchine, 1958–1982—the minimalist gray and black cover, and hold it in my hands, looking out my back window toward campus. The sunset is starting up like some tired toy that keeps playing
the same old tune. It is disturbingly bright—the clouds have opened a stream of luminous pink-yellow light the color of a scab on a baby’s knee. The light has the brilliance of something having been saved up and now squandered all at once. Then the moment shifts: some tipping point of night has passed and I can only see myself, reflected in my window, surrounded by my office things, my big bright hair gleaming in all its hurrahs.

  CHAPTER 5

  SEPTEMBER 1977

  It’s been two weeks since her father left. Classes at The Little Kirov have started again. In the girls’ dressing room, Mira and her friends change. Mira loves this moment of transformation, when she gets to shed her jeans and emerges in her pink tights and black leotard—her second skin. Since her dad left, she has begun to wear her tights and leotards under her school clothes so she can skip the awkward moment of nakedness between her two selves.

  She has been working hard, harder than she ever has before. This work—she had not known what it was to work before—comes as a relief. She clings to it, to the feeling of twisting her mind around a combination, the quivering in her legs when she stretches her dégagés until her toes cramp.

  Val jumps up on a bench and begins singing the most recent hit song on the radio. Delia climbs up next to her, and Delia and Val sing together. Then Meaghan joins in. Standing on the bench behind her, they all sing together—the words are something about dreams, morning, kissing, and crying.

  Mira can hear the song’s orchestral crescendo in her head, but something stops her from joining in. She is too aware of the older girls—of Hannah turning toward them, of being caught in that smirking gaze.

  The older girls are gathered in a pack over on the other side of the dressing room. They are half in their ballet outfits, and half still in their school clothes. You can still see their separateness, how in the outside world they would never speak to each other. Robin, a Level 5 girl, pulls on leg warmers and picks her way between open soda cans and unwound Ace bandages, toward the dressing room door. She has a little heart-shaped face and limpid eyes that blink a lot when she comes in from outside, and no matter what the weather, her skin is always white with the opaqueness of alabaster. She goes to a performing arts school and arrives with her hair already tightly wrapped in a bun, her tights visible beneath short denim shorts, the straps of her leotard poking out of a scoop-neck sweatshirt. With her far-off, liquid gaze, Robin focuses on a horizon visible only to her. Mira wants to see what Robin sees. They all do.