Girl Through Glass Read online

  At first she liked the money because it could be turned into something—jewelry that she chose carefully because she imagined it was from him. It felt like a gift and she accepted it as such. But now it feels different. The money sits in her dresser drawer and collects there. She spends it on cigarettes, nail polish, but can’t think of enough things to buy. It makes her heart hurt that she can’t think of what to buy with it.

  In the narrow strips of gardens along the sidewalk, things are blooming—things that smell.

  Is it Mira who wants to cry? Or is it Bella?

  Or—is it someone else entirely?

  After Maurice leaves, she enters her dad and Judy’s building and nods at Felix, the night doorman. The elevator is too far away. She won’t make it, she knows suddenly. Her face crumples like a used dinner napkin. She drops her dance bag and covers her face with a hand.

  “Are you okay?” the doorman says nervously.

  “I have been lying,” she says. “There are no kids.”

  This is Judy’s world of nice-but-mean doormen, elevators to views of the city below, well-oiled furniture that feels dry and brittle. It is a world of fakes and phonies.

  She wipes her eyes, goes right up to Felix’s desk. Imagining that she is her mother, she says, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  He looks at her then. “Sure, you’re a pretty girl.”

  She smiles. “Would you like to kiss me?”

  He stares at her for a long moment. He is maybe fifty years old. His chin is droopy. His eyes have receded into papery folds. His posture is strangely good and he never sits. Now he stands, as stiff as a sharpened pencil, and looks at her, his eyes flash something she can’t read. He opens his mouth to say something, then he closes it again.

  “I think it is time for you to go upstairs.” He looks at her as a grown-up would a child.

  She looks down. She is ashamed. She is not her mother. She will never have her mother’s power.

  Now she truly begins to cry, babyish, trusting tears that pour out of her as if there is no end. Felix comes out from behind the desk and walks her to the elevator, a careful hand on her elbow as if she is an old woman.

  Judy’s apartment is filled with heavy shellacked furniture and puffy couches. This is furniture left behind by a previous life of Judy’s that she’s replacing slowly, since some of it still has sentimental value. Spilling out to the hall from the kitchen is a bright light, her father’s deep arguing voice. She pauses in the dark living room, trying to gain control over herself. Her skin burns, her throat is raw; her eyes feel full. The way Maurice looked at her when he called her “beautiful”—like a curse word. He has told her that beauty is the highest thing in the world. (Not the magazine kind, but another kind, a kind only he can see when she dances in the dark for him.) Bella must exist not just for him but also for others. He must have taught her something she can use. Slowly, she straightens up and lets her breathing return to normal. She wipes her eyes. She tries out a smile.

  Entering the kitchen, she finds Judy and her father standing at the breakfast bar. Her father has his suit jacket over the back of the stool, his tie is loosened. He is holding a rattling cup. Judy wears a long black dress with sparkling things hanging off of it. Her father’s cheeks lift up in a smile and Judy gives her a quick birdlike grin behind which lie a thousand questions.

  “Mira, your father’s judgment is really—” They like to argue but they have little smirks on their faces the whole time.

  “Judy, leave her out of this. Hi, darling,” he says going over to Mira and giving her a hug. He is too warm and smells thickly of alcohol. She recalls Maurice’s dry, powdery scent and feels an internal bolt of something—fear?—move through her.

  “Honey, your hair needs a trim,” says Judy, moving toward her and giving her arm a squeeze. “The ends look tired.”

  “She doesn’t need anything.” Her father pats Mira awkwardly on the back. “Her hair is beautiful,” says her father. A pie, waiting on the breakfast bar covered by plastic wrap, quivers and molts before her like an oasis. She feels the lurch of her whole body toward it. She allows herself an apple from the fruit bin, which she slices in half carefully on a napkin.

  “A trim, I said.” Judy snatches up the other half of the apple. “Can I?” she says as she takes it. She puts her hands on her hips and stares at Mira. Tiny beating veins stand out on her temples. “So, Mira. Listen to this. The congressman says, ‘I don’t think I can get involved in that discussion.’ And your father says ‘Well, that doesn’t hold City Hall back from getting involved!’ Even if he didn’t know that the congressman is backing the mayor’s zoning plans—which I don’t buy—he could have listened—”

  “I didn’t have a chance—”

  “Oh, come on! You could have guessed.”

  Her father sighs and turns to face Mira. “How was babysitting?”

  “Fine.”

  He turns back to Judy. “And you shouldn’t be so quick to judge—”

  “They are going to come into their own soon,” Mira says.

  “Hmm?” her father says.

  “The kids. They are going to be coming into their own soon.”

  “Oh, honey, they’re still little, right?” says Judy.

  “They’re getting bigger,” says Mira.

  “Well, believe me anyway, it takes a long time.” Judy and her father exchange a long look. Mira turns away, her face burns as if it has been slapped. She gets down off the stool, ready to leave.

  “It’s my birthday,” Mira says.

  “Oh, darling!” says Judy. “Of course it is!”

  “Right-o,” says her dad. “Happy birthday, honey,” says her dad.

  “Happy birthday. Happy birthday,” sings her dad. “Tomorrow we will celebrate.” He gives her another awkward pat.

  “We have reservations at Le Cirque for tomorrow night—our birthday celebration for you,” says Judy. “Sam is coming.

  “Mira, you must be hungry,” says Judy. “Please have some.” Judy whips off the plastic wrap and pushes the whole pie toward Mira. Mira’s stomach lurches again and the light-headedness she felt earlier comes back. Judy cuts a piece of the pie and wraps it in tinfoil and shoves it in the oven. She looks at the silver bowl of shellacked-looking lemons on the enormous black-topped stove, at Judy’s wrinkled-but-still-pretty frog face, and at her father’s starched-white middle straining against his tuxedo shirt. She is about to give in to the desire when Judy says it: “I’d like to know what you think.” That means it is a client’s pie.

  “No, thanks,” Mira says.

  Judy squints her eyes at Mira. “You may be a gorgeous little ballet dancer, and it may be your birthday, but you still need to eat to survive. Have you eaten anything all day?”

  “Yes,” Mira says.

  “What?” says Judy.

  “Things.”

  “What things?”

  “Things.” Mira pushes the warm pie away. She could eat it to satisfy Judy but she doesn’t feel like it. She still has a core of roiling energy cycling around, hitting all her organs like a pinball machine on tilt.

  “Not hungry. Where’s Sam?” Mira says as she turns to go.

  “In his room. Not out for once,” says her father. “Get some rest, darling. Tomorrow’ll be a good night. We have a lot to celebrate.” It is one of his sloppy, drunken late-night “darlings” that she distrusts because they disappear in the morning.

  “Good night, Dad.” She stands in the doorway for a moment.

  “You look tired,” Judy says, looking at Mira as if for the first time that night. “Oh, and the Egremonts are coming for dinner next weekend and they want to meet a genuine New York City Ballet dancer.”

  “That’s the company, Judy, and I’m—”

  “I know, I know—you’re in the school. Close enough.”

  Mira turns down the hallway, already leaving the complicated architecture of the kitchen behind. Her own hunger disappears strangely as she turns into the hallway. />
  Mira has gotten in the habit of stopping outside Sam’s room. Tonight there’s a light under his door. Sometimes there is a low thrum of music, but tonight it’s quiet. She stares at the sign on his door that reads in bold red letters IF YOU CAN’T PLAY NICE, PLAY LACROSSE. The door flings open and Sam stands there.

  She screams.

  He laughs.

  “Idiot,” she says.

  His baby face—his brown eyes are Judy’s—is flushed, cocky. He wears a robe that hangs open loosely and some kind of athletic pants tied with a drawstring. He has Judy’s practical competence—and cruel streak, too. His bare feet are big and bony and soft-looking. He is always bigger than she remembers. Behind him she can see his desk lamp spraying light on a loose-leaf binder.

  “Want to come in?” he says. He holds the door wide open. From inside the room comes a warm moist draft, like someone exhaling.

  She and Sam get along better now that they live together. He can say whatever he wants to Judy. Mira admires that.

  “Shut up,” she says, and walks straight in and sits on the floor. Now here, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She notices the tracks worn into the rug where the grain has been pushed down in one direction to his desk, another to his bed, and still another to the spot under his basketball hoop on the wall, where there is a worn circle. Sam pads back to his desk. She considers getting up and leaving—he has left the door partway open—but something holds her to the spot. She tangles her fingers in his beige shag rug.

  She looks at his records lined up on the bottom shelf, his trophies and banners on the next highest one, his orphaned sports equipment spilling out of the closet and piled in the corner. She feels a funny feeling in her stomach, something sour. So many props to play his sports! In Sam’s tropical-aired room, the neat clutter of his popular boy’s life lies unconfirmed by anyone but him. She has only her body, this cruel, fallible, and perfect thing. For a moment, she hates herself deeply. She points her foot and flexes it—it curves like a banana and straightens into a ruler—and she feels momentarily better.

  Her own efforts at being a bunhead, in comparison, for the moment, seem like nothing. Mirages. Dreams. She begins to breathe quickly. Ever since that day when Ms. Clement said “Yes, we have something here,” and her father called her his little princess and she began to use that part of her that moved all the time, even when she was sitting still. Now: the way Judy introduces her to her most important clients even before she introduces her own son. The way her father looks at her after a performance and then quickly around the room with saucer eyes to see who else has seen that she belongs to him. And most of all, Maurice, who has, for three years now, secured her dancing in a fog of a dream.

  “You’re coming to dinner tomorrow night?” she says.

  “Yeah, they told me I had to,” Sam says. He’s turned around in his chair and looks at her. “Hey, I have to ask you something. I promised I would. You know my friend Oliver?”

  “Oliver?”

  “Yeah, he’s an attacker on the team.”

  Who doesn’t know Oliver Corbitt? He’s a dark-haired boy in the tenth grade. He speaks with one side of his mouth down, says “gnarly” to everything, wears his blue blazer opened, wears moccasins without socks, and has one of those haircuts with the front left long.

  She has seen Oliver on the field, all grass stains and ruddy face and clapping his teammates on the back. How must it be to feel the wind in your hair and root around in the dirt and try to hit a ball with a stick and scream about winning but in the end not care that much?

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “You are so retarded. So do you like him?”

  She recalls once seeing Oliver’s muscular legs and flushed cheeks and thin face and green eyes with black lashes.

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes,” she says. “No.”

  Sam smiles and she watches his sixteen-year-old dimples grow. Her body flushes with a dark fear. She remembers Maurice, his announcement, his conviction: you are beautiful.

  She looks down at her hand clutching at the long hair of the rug. She has pulled some strands out of their loops and left a messy patch. She is shocked that Oliver could see her as something concrete enough in the world to have an opinion about. She thinks of herself as a ghost, invisible when she isn’t dancing or with Maurice. She bites her lip. She imagines going out with Oliver. What do others her age do? Could he ever understand what twilight world she lives in?

  “What did he say to you—exactly?”

  He sighs. “He said, ‘Your sister is cute. She looks shy.’ I said, ‘She’s a ballerina.’”

  She begins laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Fuck you,” she says. She’s on the verge of tears.

  Sam shrugs. His face in the skewed light of the desk. “All right, have it your way.”

  Famous dancers are not known for their cooking, their houses. They are famous for sleeping on hard mattresses on the floor and owning no furniture. Mira fought with Judy until Judy relented and let her get rid of her bed. Now she sleeps on a mattress on the floor. She got rid of the TV, too, and the cushioned chair, and kept only her desk, a trunk for her dance things, and a small white bureau—leotards in one drawer, tights in another. In her closet, her Fiorucci striped boatneck shirts in six colors, her suede boots, her white oxfords, and her blue pleated skirts.

  In her spartan room, Mira curls up on her mattress and closes her eyes. She takes her nightly inventory:

  Breakfast: one hard-boiled egg, a glass of orange juice, muffin.

  Lunch: 4 saltines, 1 Yoplait, three Cheez Doodles.

  Snack: 8 pieces of Bubble Yum.

  Dinner: eight bites of couscous, five bites of peas, some rice.

  Now she thinks about the old sad brownstone in Brooklyn. She remembers the house as the repository of all that was lost: the cold turned to adventure, the three of them at a distant impossible time in one place. She once overheard her father telling her mother, “The city works on me. It works on me.” And it never left her. At Judy’s place, everything, from salt and pepper shakers to stove, is the “best modern option.” Black and heavy, metal and steel, big and plastic. Why is life supposed to lead to more and more? In ballet, it is different: one becomes less and less, lighter and lighter.

  A week later, she waits at the Lincoln Center fountain for Maurice. She hasn’t seen him since the previous Friday night—her unhappy birthday. He hasn’t shown up all week after class, but he would never miss Friday night dinner. Or would he?

  It’s a cool spring evening, but at first it’s not cold. She’s still warm from her class. A long adagio sequence sings through her head and she mimes it with her feet as she waits. The last bit of purple sunset hangs over New Jersey. She watches it fade as Tumkovsky’s commands echo in her head. Now it’s just past gloaming. The wind picks up, it’s brisk, the smells of someone’s perfume.

  Half an hour later, she’s still waiting. She lights a cigarette and pulls her peacoat against her chest. She’s said good-bye to Bryce, who is all dressed up because she’s going to meet her mom and her mom’s new boyfriend for dinner at Le Cirque. They pecked at each other’s cheeks the way they’ve seen their Russian teachers do. She’s watched the girls who are boarding together wander off in twos and threes comparing notes on pointe shoe ribbon sewing techniques. She watched from the corner as Tumkovsky, huddled in a black shawl, boarded a bus. The last of the bunheads—and their teachers—have been disgorged from the Juilliard building and disappeared into the city. Only she is left.

  Where is he? Her face flushes as she remembers the last time she saw him. His pale face sunk in some kind of strange sleep, the sting of her solitary tears, and his pronouncement, so full of blame: you are beautiful. Her foot in his crotch. It had angered him—it was against the rules. What demon had caused her to act out? She feels it in her still, clawing just below the surface—neither Mira nor Bella—scratching at her skin. Her fa
ce retracts into her peacoat, hiding from the memory. A brutal wind scours in from the Hudson. Isn’t that what he wanted? A beautiful dancing girl to look at? She has been that to him. And he has been—what? Something else just as necessary to her.

  Another fifteen minutes passes. She begins walking. The traffic lights mock her. Hot dog vendors behind clouds of steam. Cars glide by like sharks licking at her heels. He is somewhere in this city, but not with her.

  Walking toward the park, her dance bag swinging, a girl lost in the chaos of a crowd. She raises her hand, hails a cab, and gives Maurice’s address.

  When the cab pulls up to Maurice’s building, she gets out. Just as she stands outside the door, wondering if she should ring, someone—man or woman she can’t recall, as many times as she’s played the scene in her head—pushes the door open and, head down, slips by her without even looking at her. The city is full of people hiding their faces. But if this person had looked up and stared at Mira, seen her, she might not have gone in. If this person had taken her in—a pale girl with a strange stare and grimace (but don’t those ballet girls always look so grave and serious?)—everything might have been different.

  Mira catches the door on the backswing. Her overburdened dance bag on her bony shoulder, she avoids the elevator, climbs the stairs.

  She stands at the door to his apartment. She has never had to ring the bell before. She does so now. She hears it chime inside. Soon she hears voices—Maurice’s high, peevish voice that makes her tremble, and another voice, lower and ready to chuckle.

  Maurice stands in front of her in a black-and-white striped button-down shirt and matching string tie. His hair is slicked back. Behind him is another man.

  “Mira!” says Maurice. He does not invite her in. The other man appears at his side. He has a cropped beard on his long face.

  “Hello,” he says. “I’m Rob.” He holds out his hand. His eyes are glittery and kind. She looks down. He wears no shoes, only socks.

  “I—” she says.

  The man turns to Maurice. “I assume you know this young lady.”