Girl Through Glass Page 26

  “Really?” her mother says.

  Mira nods.

  “Never?” her mother says.

  Mira doesn’t answer. Her mother squints her eyes and looks at the ceiling, where Mira had just been staring. “Well,” she says, but doesn’t finish her thought.

  It turns out that her mother has already made an appointment in a beige building with a big crowded waiting room lined with posters depicting medical procedures. Her mother waits, while Mira is led to an examining room. Here a doctor with glasses asks Mira to pee in a cup and listens to her belly. Then he asks her a lot of questions like “Who do you live with?” and “Has anyone touched you?” Finally, he sits on a chair across from her and holds his own hands. “Do you know you are pregnant?” he says.

  People say they realize things in a flash, a bright bulb going off. Not Mira. She knows this doctor is right because she feels a dull thud in her chest. Her heart slows to a lizard’s crawl.

  “With a baby?”

  The doctor smiles. “Yes, a baby. About four months.”

  “But I’ve never had my period.”

  He nods. “It’s not impossible for a girl to ovulate before her first period. That’s when the egg goes into the uterus. It’s been known to happen—more frequently than you would imagine.”

  Egg, uterus. All of this she thought was simply about Pavlova’s shoe, her desire, his desire, her need, his needs. That stupid brief, terrible thing he did—they did—made a baby. What has she done? It’s unfathomable.

  He moves a little closer. “Whose is it? I can keep a secret.” But she won’t say anything to the doctor. There are no words yet for what has happened. She is too close to the volcano, she must be still.

  He continues: she can press charges, he says. She can make whoever it is pay. “Does anyone know about this?” he asks.

  She shakes her head.

  “This is not your fault,” he says. “I know you’re scared.”

  She’s not scared, though. Not like he thinks. He can never understand her world. She’s alone now: they were lying on the floor—and now she has a cat body with a baby inside.

  “I can’t remember,” she says.

  He sighs. He tells Mira to wait while he calls her mother into his office and they talk privately.

  Back home, Mira and her mother sit across from each other on her mother’s bed. “How did this happen?” her mother says.

  Mira puts her head in her hands, but no tears come. “Are you going to tell Dad?”

  Her mother looks at her for a long time. “Was it a boy at school?”

  She thinks: it could have been Oliver, if everything were different. It could have been. “Not from my school,” she says. She thinks about the other girls and things they did. Things she could have done if Maurice hadn’t always been there. “I just met him once. We rented a room at a hotel. They invited some boys over. I never saw him again.”

  “What was his name?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Did he force you?”

  If she says yes, they will look for him, for someone, to blame. She remembers some things—her own wild laughter, the Monopoly game, Maurice’s pale face. If there are people to blame, she is surely one of them.

  “No,” she says, sweating. “Please don’t tell Dad?” She can’t cry now, when it would help. “Please don’t make me go back.”

  Her mother sits down on the bed. “I have to think about this.”

  Several days later, Mira’s baking cookies with Brian when her mother comes into the kitchen. She takes Mira into the living room, which is empty. Mira now has her mother’s full attention. Her laser-like eyes are focused on Mira more than Mira can ever remember. Brian is humming in the kitchen. The streetlights are flowing in the windows. Her mother touches dried flowers in a vase on the table, then pulls her hand away quickly.

  “My whole life I’ve been keeping secrets. You know that, right? That’s why you came to me, right?” her mother says. “I left everything behind. It was the right thing for me. I was maybe too young when I had you or maybe—I don’t know.” She flushes, but it’s a soft kind, not a blaze.

  Mira stares at her mother. She’s wearing a bandanna, like in the old days.

  “You should know this—having you was the greatest moment of my life. It may be hard to believe but—it changed everything. A new life does that.” It takes Mira a moment to realize that her mother is crying. Not the kind of crying people do on TV, loud and desperate, but a delicate kind of crying. It’s like something is trying to get inside her mother and the tears are being pushed out.

  “But you left. Then why did you leave?”

  Her mother holds Mira’s gaze. “I left to—I had to—find myself.”

  Mira thinks about this. Can you really lose yourself? And if you do—how do you find yourself again? Has she lost herself too? Is that what has happened to her? She surprises herself by not being angry. She says, “Did you? Find yourself?”

  “Well—we all have many parts to ourselves it turns out. But I—I did find something—so, yes, I think I did. I mean, I have.” Her mother does not wipe away the tears, which have spilled onto her eyelashes and beneath her eyes. “But I have caused you suffering. I see that. You have paid for my lack of self-knowledge.” Her mother stares at her for a long time. Then she finally wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. “Oh, Mira,” she says. “I am sorry this happened to you. I am sorry I left—and—”

  Mira nods. She understands that her mother does not know what she should do. She could get rid of the baby or she could have it. Either way, what she understands is that it—this—has happened and can’t be undone. Her life will never go back to the way it was.

  “Do you know what an abortion is?” says her mother.

  Mira nods.

  “In some ways that is easier. In other ways, harder. But you can never be rid of a child.” Her mother wipes her wet eyes again. “Whatever you decide, I can give you this,” her mother says. “You can start again. I can give you that. I had that. And I can give you that.”

  It’s a decision free of effort. Like deciding she wanted to be a dancer with Maurice standing before her, asking her, telling her she had to decide. A decision made possible by someone telling you have to choose. It must be yes or no, not both, not neither. And for this reason she trusts her decision completely. “I’ll have it. The baby.”

  Her mother looks straight at Mira. “Okay. You’ll have the child.” She touches Mira’s shoulder. “Give it to a worthy couple. Then move on. Start over.”

  Mira gives her mother her cat eye stare. Mira’s hands are covered with dough. She nods, starts to sob, really sob, heavy tears. “Please don’t tell Dad.”

  Her mother’s eyes are lit with a too-bright light like they used to have in her studio, but her mouth, around it, is tired. She is quiet for a long time. “I won’t ask who? why? when? where? ever again. I won’t scream. I won’t tell. I’m not a Betty Crocker mom.”

  Then her mother does the most incredible thing. She gives Mira a hug. It’s not a simple hug, it’s complex and in stages. She presses Mira’s back with both hands and then clasps Mira to her chest.

  She’s never really sure if her mother kept her word. After that, her mom and her dad have murmuring conversations at night, but her dad stays away. Once she overhears her mother’s voice rise, and she says “on your watch,” before her voice lowers again.

  CHAPTER 41

  FALL 1980–SPRING 1981

  As the months move on, through the fall, Mira walks the five sunny, then rainy, blocks to Mission High School. It’s a huge public school. She is one of hundreds moving through this crumbling stone building while tired teachers look on. She listens to the teachers who speak half in Spanish and throw erasers at the kids—the ones in bandannas and with mustaches. No after-school drama clubs, no cabs whose waiting drivers ferry students to and from ballet class. But it’s easy to survive here compared to SAB and Professional Children’s School. Here, invi
sibility is an asset. She’s in the back of class hunched over the desk to hide her growing belly.

  She is too fat for ballet now. Her arms stay skinny but her breasts and stomach grow. Her body, which has always behaved so well compared to other girls’ bodies, has completely stopped doing so. She eats and eats. This is a new kind of hunger, and one she can’t defeat. She buys oversize shirts with company logos on the front and jeans she can leave unbuttoned. She buys Maybelline eyeliner—black—and draws lines above and below her eyes like she sees the girls on the streets do.

  Her body should be locked up. It should be devoured. How unappreciated it is. How much she had given it! When she looks in the mirror, she sees something besides herself—she sees a girl who does not correspond to her idea of how she should be. Gradually she is coming into a new shape, hip bones, breasts, fat. Yes, it is fat that is between her and herself now.

  Her mother takes her to thrift stores and buys maternity clothes with Kmart tags still scraping her thighs and underarms, seams so stiff they crack. Mira buys everything in black and too big and carries a notebook in front of her belly, so people will just think she’s a PIB.

  One day, a Chicano girl comes up to her. “What’s your name?”

  “Kate,” she says. It’s the first name that comes to mind. No longer a singular sensation, but one of a thousand.

  “Who you live with?”

  “My mother.”

  “You have a father?”

  Mira shakes her head. “He’s dead.” This too comes out easily.

  She nods. “Who’s the daddy?”

  Another thud in her heart spreads its dullness through her body. “He’s dead, too.”

  The girl whistles, low.

  Chinese slippers beneath her desk, an advent calendar, a metronome, a bottle of valerian to sleep at night. She sleeps and sleeps. The red kimono her mother lends her when she grows big. The orange plastic watering can on the bay window, a chart on the wall with a marker attached, names of her new housemates, next to their chores. Soon she is exempt from these. She sits at her desk and stares out the window, does worksheets in her math and vocabulary workbooks.

  She can feel the thing—the baby. They say it is a baby; she’s still not so sure. She knows only that it turns and pokes and kicks. It is not round and soft like babies are supposed to be but hard, all angles, ribs, elbows, knees, ankles, a bunch of sticks prodding her in the middle of the night.

  Even at her desk at school. She jumps up, toppling her chair with a clatter. The thing—the baby, whatever it is—had poked at her down there. She runs out into the long hall to the bathroom. She shuts the stall door. In the barren cigarette-smelling bathroom, tearless cries heave her body, cries that she couldn’t let her dad or Mr. B or Maurice or even her mother ever see. Suddenly, she can’t get air; she gasps and heaves, the air fades to gray, static. The clang, clang of the bell. Screams of other kids. The water runs, a squeaky faucet.

  She wakes in the bedraggled nurse’s station—the endless thrum of footsteps and shouting in the hallways outside. “You fainted,” says the nurse. She imagines the Russian lady who talked to her, standing over her, saying, “It’s not a question of fat—” But it is. It is a question of fat.

  She is really fat now. She is too embarrassed to be seen. She cuts school, lies in Dolores Park on the grass, the beards of the palm trees above her sway in the wind. The sky is a beaten-into-submission blue, clouds banished.

  She begins to sleep in her mother’s bed. Her mother takes her bed.

  One night in January 1981, Mira wakes up with vise-like pains squeezing at her sides. She feels like her belly is a cement mixer. Pain runs up and down her back. The sheets beneath her are soaking wet.

  “Mom,” she calls. “Mom!” Her mother comes in. She is pale. She is already dressed.

  “We’re going to get through this,” her mother says.

  Her mother tells Mira to sit on the stoop while she pulls the car from the lot. Mira is surprised to hear someone groaning. She realizes it is her. Her belly is hard as a basketball. The car pulls up with a squeak and Mira crawls into the backseat. At the hospital, a nurse brings her ice chips and tells her to sit on the floor and make like she is taking a shit. “Use those muscles,” the nurse says. Mira can’t get it right—her dancer’s muscles keep pulling up instead of pushing down. Her mother bites her lip and sits with her and counts and marks things on a paper and tells her to breathe. The nurse goes away and comes back and gives Mira a pill, and then the pain isn’t so bad. She passes out and the next thing she knows is that she is in bed and something—something hot and wet—is coming out of her. She thinks at that moment—weirdly—that Maurice is coming out of her and he’d been in there the whole time, and she begins to cry. And then she hears another cry and she realizes that it is Maurice and that he has been in there the whole time and that she has finally gotten him out and she cries with the relief of it but then a minute later she thinks no! He’s had something planted in me that can never be removed—claimed me in a way no one can ever touch—and this thing can always emerge whenever he wants—

  Then she feels an unbearable pain, like a sun burning through her, and she screams.

  The baby is small and very red, tiny and wrinkled and ugly.

  She doesn’t want to hold him. A nurse brings her applesauce and crackers and pulls down the shades, and she sleeps for a long time.

  She remembers the other time, in the hospital, when she leaped, when she trusted too much. She remembers the girl with the gap-toothed smile, whose heart wasn’t strong enough. Who is there to blame now? That what she and Maurice have done should have such consequences—hospital, nurse, a baby! When she was a child, she felt not like a child. Now she knows she is not a child and she feels more like a child than she ever has, like someone looking around at the dead bodies after a massacre, saying, “Did I do that? With my own two hands?” The reality of her own power to harm herself, to change things, to make things, descends on her. She hears a nurse’s squeaky shoes outside the room. She will be leaving—going home tomorrow—but she must stay this night to make sure there are no complications.

  The nurse pokes her head in, walks to her bed. She is carrying something. “Do you want to see him?” From the bundle in her arms comes a tiny noise, a baby sound, a gurgle, something human, something in-human. She turns her head away. This then was Kevin.

  She begins to cry for the thousandth time. Something has been taken from her, something that protected her from other people’s feelings about her. Some piece of her taken, along with the baby. The hole gapes, raw, and in it she can feel what other people feel about her. Before it was just Maurice and Mr. B—now it’s everybody. It’s not the child, who never belonged to her, but something else. She thinks of Maurice. She misses him. She misses her ballet body, how it made her feel strong.

  The next morning, while her mother is out getting coffee, a lady wearing a blue suit and high heels comes to visit. She carries a folder with Mira’s name on it. The lady says she has some papers for Mira to sign. The lady smells of shampoo. She thanks her for having the child. For giving joy to a childless couple. Right on, she says.

  The lady hands her a folder and tells her to sign where she points. Her nails are long and pink and perfect. She has a file with Mira’s name on it! It is that moment when Mira realizes she hates her name. This Mira who became Mirabelle, who became Maurice’s Bella. Mira: too many sounds, too hopeful. Is it hope that gets you in trouble?

  Mira begins to read the papers in her file. “Oh,” says the lady, “you don’t need to read it, honey. You just need to sign it.” Mira glares at her.

  She pages through the documents anyway. Attached to one of the forms is a photo of an old sad-faced couple. The address catches her eye—an address in Berkeley. The woman has brown bobbed hair and is smiling in front of a tree. The man has gray-blond hair and his arm around her. She is not pretty, not hopeful. When Mira looks up, she sees the blond lady averting her eyes and fiddling
with the hem of her skirt.

  Mira takes the pen and signs the papers. She signs over the too-small baby that she never holds. She signs over her mom’s and her dad’s privileges of ever knowing the child. She signs over Maurice, Mr. B, Tumkovsky, Danilova. What she is left with is unclear. Her signature is a girl’s careful loops, a round circle hanging over the stalk of the i. How she would give anything to be the fat girl at SAB and not a girl with a saggy belly in a hospital room signing some papers held by a lady in a blue suit. Afterward, she is an empty pitcher. She might eventually be filled with anything—she doesn’t care.

  But then she changes her mind. She does care. She wants to be seen—one last time. She wants someone to know. That’s why she does it—why she writes Maurice’s name down next to hers on the line that reads: father.

  CHAPTER 42

  FALL 1981

  In the fall, when school starts again, Mira works like she never has before. In dog-eared workbooks, with sharpened no. 2 pencils, nudged into her desk, the smell of sesame noodles hanging in the air, pencil shavings collecting under her chair, she attends to her homework. She opens the math textbook, the history textbook, the science textbook, English. Because her body doesn’t move like it did, she watches thoughts pile on top of one another, like rubber tires in a junkyard. They collect. For so long she was a limb of someone else’s mind—following marching orders as they came out of Tumkovsky’s mouth, looking for the light of response in Maurice’s eyes (but is he dead?), waiting for Mr. B to come into the classroom and tilt his turtle head at her and say, She’s mine.

  San Francisco Superior Courthouse. Lives altered in the blink of an eye, the flick of a finger. In a dusty room with peeling-plaster walls, in front of a stern woman with close-cropped hair, Mira signs form after form. When she’s done, she’ll no longer have the name of a flower, the name of a bell. As if cauterizing a wound, she will cut the limb off: the hopeful girl, the yearning girl, the girl enthralled to beauty will become someone else. Beauty leads to a pain she has only begun to figure out how to survive. She signs over her too-hopeful name and gets a new one.