Girl Through Glass Read online

  “Mira,” the woman says, taking a sip of her coffee. Mira keeps her eyes on a far roof through the window. “Your body—”

  The woman says something in Russian as she puts down her coffee, then picks it up again. “No one say you are fat. No girl here is fat. For ballet dancer, is not question of fat.” Her face smoothes out. “I remember one season at the Kiev, I eat only chicken and turnip. We are not allowed bread.” She smiles.

  “Some is made to be ballerina. You can do, do, do! Like ballerina. But some girls is not. We must find out this. Is better to know than not know. If not ballerina, something else.”

  Mira is so invisible now that she cannot move. She has turned into vapor at the same moment she is being told she has too much substance. “No!” she says suddenly. Then corrects herself. “I mean, okay. Okay.”

  The woman laughs. Mira has never heard this woman, whom she has seen in the hallways and classrooms so often, laugh before. It is a low, then high, unpredictable sound, like an animal skittering from corner to corner. “Mr. Balanchine likes you—you are a former Marie. But many girls change and we cannot do anything. Material is good but it—collapses.” She is talking about Mira’s body as if it were separate from Mira, a disappointment that has befallen them both. Her brows draw together—yes, sympathetic. “Dear, sometimes there is change. What can we do? No where to put girls then.”

  Mira’s head pounds. Tears spring to her eyes. Sympathy, immeasurably worse that cruelty. Mira feels the ground unsteady beneath her.

  In the moment before she turns, Mira notices, hanging on the wall a studio shot of a woman. It is a black-and-white publicity photo with that timeless look that means it could be from twenty or a hundred years ago. She is a smooth-cheeked young woman, in a black leotard on her pointes. Her expression is soft, her features delicate, well-spaced, exquisite. She has a serenity and generosity to her expression that Mira has never seen on her teacher Tumkovsky. But, yes, here at the bottom of the photo in embossed letters is her teacher’s name: Antonia Tumkovsky.

  In the distance, Mira hears clapping somewhere and the splat of water from the fountain outside.

  Mira walks blindly down the hallway. Her shoes squeak. She locks the door on a bathroom stall. She sits on the toilet with her bag on her lap. Her breath comes jaggedly. There are shuffles and clangs from outside the stall. A strong odor of rubbing alcohol. More girls are starting to arrive. Of course everyone will know. There is a line between the girls who have been talked to and the girls who have not, as visible as a road divider. On one side the traffic flows freely; on the other side, it crawls along, snarled.

  Breathing more regularly, she exits the bathroom and nods to the other girls, a few of whom are in her class. She opens her locker and begins to search for her morning classes’ leotard. She doesn’t dare investigate her body for its betrayal. For now, she treats it gingerly, like something broken that might have sharp edges she could cut herself on. Terrifying: she does not know how to fix it.

  Airy and indefatigable, a Tchaikovsky serenade floats out from the studios.

  Mira lies awake all that night. The next morning, she is strangely calm. It’s a Saturday, perfect. She pulls on underwear, her tightest jeans, a polo shirt and a long green sweater with a belt around the waist. She dumps out her giant dance bag onto her bed—the tangle of leotards and tights fall out into a twisted mass—then she pulls the items from under her bed—Maurice’s book and Pavlova’s shoe—and shoves them into the bottom of the bag. She packs an extra pair of jeans, her favorite boatneck shirt, two pairs of underwear.

  She climbs on the crosstown bus. At this time of the morning, the bus is mostly empty. There are no other bunheads. The streets are still quiet of the clatter of cars and horns and trucks. There are two old ladies who could be traveling together but don’t speak. One is frail, with a bent spine and a tacky raincoat and a plastic kerchief over her head. The other one is round, has a direct stare and pink saggy cheeks, and carries a cane. She fixes on Mira with a conspiratorial smile. The ladies get off at Fifth. A middle-aged man with a briefcase and untied shoes gets on. He opens the briefcase and begins shuffling his papers.

  Then it’s her stop. She stands, in her light windbreaker, belted green sweater, and penny loafers, in front of a diner on Sixty-sixth and Broadway. It is eight fifteen. She enters and orders a blueberry muffin, toasted, no butter. The boy behind the counter stares at her for a moment too long before he turns to make her food. Already, the clean early-morning air grows muddy with the regular people who are rising, demanding their coffee, their donuts.

  “Hey, Dimitri, doncha just stand there, get the girl her muffin. What’s wrong with you?” A burly man with the same hair as the boy claps him on the back.

  The counter boy hands over a warm ball of tinfoil. For a moment, both of their hands touch the pulsing mass of heat.

  Standing there in that diner, with this boy, she feels like she is turning back into a girl—not Bella, not Mirabelle, but Mira—a normal girl. Everything in her carefully constructed life is splintering. She can feel it happening: and in the spaces, those moments of weakness, like when she went into Sam’s room and he told her about Oliver.

  “Are you okay?” the counter boy says. She quickly looks away and flees back outside to class.

  The next week, she does something very difficult—she calls her mother and says she wants to come visit.

  “When?” her mother says. She had imagined her mother would be more excited.

  Mira begins to cry, heavy sobs that hurt her head. “Soon. Now.”

  “Whoa. Of course you can come soon. I’ll talk to your dad.”

  “They think I’m fat,” Mira says, breaking down.

  “Those Russian pricks?” says her mother. “Screw them.”

  As soon as school ends for the year, Mira is on the plane to San Francisco. Her mother hugs her and says how good she looks, how healthy. Rachel’s hair is long and she’s wearing the same shell earrings that Mira saw back in New York.

  CHAPTER 39

  PRESENT

  Back at Felicia’s, everything is quiet. She’s still out. I take the stack of letters out of my purse. At the bistro table, I spread them out and count them—twenty in all. I sit for a while with my hand on them and watch the lights crawl along the other side of the river. I’m not ready to read them yet. I’ll always have these now, to add to my collection, my exhibit of my past. But they are words, not objects. Evidence of someone’s heart, someone’s mind, someone’s soul. When I’ve read them all, I will know his secrets, too, what was inside his mind all these years. This knowledge keeps exploding in my head. That old feeling of being onstage and having the lights on me comes rushing back—the excitement and energy of that—even as I sit in Felicia’s silent living room. But that feeling fades and in its space is something softer.

  I call my mother again, and this time she picks up. I jump right in.

  “Mom, I met him.”

  “Who?”

  “My son.”

  “Oh my god. How?”

  “He found me. He’s been looking for me.”

  She’s very quiet.

  “He’s a man now. A lawyer. He wants a relationship with me.” My voice spirals up at the end like a girl’s.

  “Oh, Kate.”

  “But it’s okay, Mom. It’s okay. I know it will be.”

  “Well, that’s fucking wonderful then,” Rachel says after a long pause. Her voice is thick. I wonder if she is going to cry. Maybe she’s thinking about me as a pregnant teenager beached on my bed, clinging to my secrets.

  “You’re a fucking grandma.” I laugh.

  “A fucking grandma,” she says. And she laughs, too. “I need a cigarette.”

  But I will never tell her who is Kevin’s father. I will never tell her about Maurice. That is a secret I will take to my grave. Me, Maurice, and Kevin (and Rob? I wonder suddenly) are the only ones who can know that. But then I have this thought: this is something I may no longer get to dec
ide. Maurice was Kevin’s father. This information belongs to Kevin as much as it belongs to me. If he ever meets my mother, he can tell her who his father is.

  I start to dance. On Felicia’s clean carpet, I’m doing the same moves I was that night in the studio when Sioban found me—but now they feel brighter, easier. I start small, just my foot against the floor and my hands up, but soon let go. I’m dancing, in Felicia’s living room high above the Hudson. There’s something okay about this moment. Dancing in this luxury apartment. The air circulation system humming. I’m not sure if it’s the sweet sadness for what is lost, or for my own self, for Maurice, for the girl that I was and had abandoned. But at this moment it doesn’t matter.

  I wake in the middle of the night, my heart pounding. At first, I don’t know where I am. I look around the room. I am lying in Felicia’s guest room, staring at the ceiling. I am trying to grasp simple facts of memory, of the past and the present. Kevin who I just met in his tower of gold and glass. This boy—this man—needed me enough to have found me. He sought me out. I am his birth mother. I was raped by a man three times my age. I got pregnant. I hurt him but I did not kill him. These are the facts, how slippery they feel, and how much I have resisted them.

  I bring my hand up to the weak light from the window—thin fingers grown thicker with age, no-nonsense, the pale freckled skin that I’ve looked at for so long, now new to me. I feel tender toward it. I run one hand over the other, tracing veins, wrinkles, freckles. A life—one life. What will I do with the rest of it? I’ve squandered much of it by waiting, by giving in to my own fear of myself and what I could have done. But did not do. I hear my own notes from the modernism lecture in my head: the grotesque, ugly, brutal, and the strong, Nijinsky wielded like a weapon.

  Is it too late for me?

  Not to destroy the past, but to open up through thickets of inertia, new landscapes of future possibility.

  I insisted to Sioban that she can be a scientist and a dancer. What possibilities are there for myself that I have not allowed? Can I become a mother this late in the game? What ways are there of moving beyond anger and sadness that I have yet to discover? Can I stop sabotaging my own ambitions?

  CHAPTER 40

  JUNE–JULY 1980

  Mira’s mother lives in a colorful, peeling Victorian house that she shares with three other roommates. The overall impression is of macramé everywhere, shoes left in a pile by the door. Her mother’s roommates, Edana, Brian, and Ralph, pursue various life changes—Ralph is becoming a priest, Brian is becoming gay, and Edana is becoming single after the breakup of a long marriage. The common area is draped in hanging plants, woven rugs, and stacked with magazines. But the kitchen is the real control room. In the kitchen, there are an array of various tins, jars, containers of messy, organic substances that had to be cared for in certain ways—reconstituted or blended or hydrated or ground with an ancient stone pestle. They are kudzu, protein mix, nutritional yeast, flaxseeds. In her mother’s bedroom are her paintings and drawings, tacked up over mirrors, laid over bureaus and dressers, bound in portfolios piled underneath the bed and stacked in the closets. Mira sleeps in a room at the end of the second floor that is barely big enough for a bed, but she likes its smallness and its lack of furniture.

  Her mother takes Mira to the Castro Theatre, where she sits in gold-painted balconies to watch black-and-white movies. Her mother takes her out to eat, places where they sit on the floor. They walk up to Dolores Park and watch the dog owners exercise their pets in the brave, golden light. They continue walking up into the hills, where it smells of sawdust and eucalyptus. Mira marvels at the plants: the trees whose flowers look like party favors, the palms whose spider-leg fronds walk along the sky crazily whenever a breeze comes. The jade’s thick leathery leaves that burst into the air. Her mother tells her about “the California Dream,” which is all about, her mother says—her face hawk-like, insistent—freedom.

  At the end of a week, Mira doesn’t want to leave. Her mother is very quiet and her freckles stick out as she says, “This is a big decision.” She tells Mira that she’s been taking time off work and can’t do that again. “You’d have to take care of yourself a lot,” she says. Mira nods. “You’ll need to talk to your father about this.”

  Mira calls her dad. She tells him she wants to stay with her mother. “Why?” he wants to know. “How long?”

  “I just need to be with her for a bit.”

  “That woman—”

  “I haven’t seen her in a long time. She’s my mother. I want to spend some time with her.”

  There’s a pause and then he says, “Why?” Listening to his breathing, she imagines the brilliance of her princess life—her bed on the floor, her posters of dancer superheroes. She smiles, almost says, yes, she’ll come home. Then she remembers her terrible body, its spreading flesh, how shocked Judy would be. Of all the people in the world, only her mother can see her like this.

  “They put me on the weight list, Dad.” The silence on the other end lasts a long time. Into that crackly space, she wishes she could cry, but suddenly no tears are there. “Hang on,” says her father. Her dad has gone to get Judy, she knows. How can dads be so powerful and so clueless?

  Judy comes on. “Honey, your father told me. Mira, listen. I have a friend—she’s a dietician. She can make a diet for you that’s just perfect.”

  Judy’s pragmatism makes Mira pause. Maybe this is something Judy can fix with her friends, her lists—her devices? But she knows that she’s too far gone. This is what happens to girls who grow breasts and hips, who get too tall. There is no diet that can really change those things. She’s seen girls try. The giant worry-stone hip bones, the collarbones like lamb shanks. Thinness does not make you smaller, it just makes you thinner.

  “We can label all of your food. Ramona’s daughter was horribly overweight and that’s what they did—started labeling her food—and no one else could touch it and she was just feeling jealous it turned out. And it worked, she dropped twenty pounds. You just need a few pounds, right? Then, you’ll be back on top—”

  Mira feels it inside her, a broken, human thing. “I don’t think so, Judy.”

  There’s a silence. Then another silence. “And what about ballet?”

  The thing that had always kept her going was projecting herself into the future. It was a bright and simple place: dancing onstage, beautiful, before adoring eyes. His eyes. But that future is gone. She feels a swell of vertigo. This city of windswept hilltops and eucalyptus and orange is as far as she can imagine from that future. “I’ll quit,” she says.

  “Oh, dear. No, you don’t.” Then Judy is quiet for a long time. Then the phone rustles, and she breathes out a big sigh. “I’m putting your father back on—we love you.”

  Now her father is back on the phone. He asks to talk to her mother, and her mother takes the phone into her bedroom and she talks in a low, murmuring voice that reminds Mira of the days when they all lived in a house together. Before her dad hangs up, he says to Mira, “I guess—you can stay with your mother for a while. We’ll be here when you’re ready to come back. When you’re ready.”

  Mira moves into the room at the end of the hall. Because she fits in well, her mother is only asked to pay a bit more in rent. Her dad sends the money. Mira’s old life of grosgrain ribbons, hairnets, and Fiorucci sweaters is replaced by a small room, a window without shades, oversize shirts and sweaters strewn about, black eyeliner, antacids by her bedside. She takes in a desk off the street—someone had primed but not painted it. To go with it, a wooden thrift-store chair with a tie-on patchwork cushion that Edana, who sells things in flea markets, donates to her.

  Her mother isn’t home much, between her job at the lawyer’s office and evenings at her studio. But Mira quickly feels comfortable in the house. She makes cookies with Brian, pasta with Ralph, and vegetable stews with Edana.

  Mira spends most of July lying on the grass in a nearby park, letting the sun bake her. She likes to watch
the stray cats wander by. They stare at her without expression and then move on. Or she sits by the window in her room, staring outside at the crazy blue sky. She’s able to just sit now for hours. Just sit and stare, letting her eyes take in what she sees. Like a cat, she can just let her eyes move, take things in, let them come to her. They come to her in fits and starts—Ralph’s Gregorian chant tapes, Brian’s 1950s ballad singing, Edana’s conversations with her girlfriends from what she calls her “other life,” before she was married. People starting over. Lives after lives. Second, third lives. This city is filled with them.

  Maybe this is what freedom feels like—the freedom not to move, to just sit, to just be.

  One afternoon in the beginning of August, her mother comes and stands at the door, clears her throat. “We need to talk. I need to ask you something.” She’s holding keys on a chain, as if she were about to run out. She jangles the keys. “Okay. Do you have something you want to tell me?”

  Mira looks at the peeling ceiling.

  “Have you had your period?”

  Mira shakes her head. Her mother asked her the same question a few times before during their infrequent phone calls, in the too-open air of Judy’s kitchen, and she had shaken her head, the same as now, and said “no” with a secret proud smile on her face that she was glad her mother couldn’t see.

  “Do your friends have their periods?”

  “Most of the girls I dance with don’t.” Danced with, not dance with. “Danced.” The exercise keeps it away. That was what they all said to their parents, who believed them. But they also know that the less you eat, the more likely it is that your period will stay away. Even the girls who had had their periods pretended they didn’t. They hid their tampons and wouldn’t be caught dead with a bulging sanitary napkin. No ballet girl wanted her period. They wanted suffering, but not that kind.