Girl Through Glass Read online

  Kate Randell.

  Kate, commonplace enough (yet she has never had a friend named Kate). Not too pretty, a name that does not ask you to watch it.

  Randell, her mother’s maiden name, the name she never really knew, the name of a blinding-white Connecticut house her mother left behind when she married her dad, a name her mother took back when she got to California and now owns again, along with her giant shell earrings.

  A half hour later, she holds a photocopied piece of paper with her name on it. This is me now. This is my new name.

  She takes her mother’s hand and they walk to her rusty Peugeot. They walk right by the hippies selling dream catchers and don’t even stop.

  CHAPTER 43

  PRESENT

  I open my eyes to the light pouring in. The sun stretches all across the bed, and I feel it making a design on my face. Felicia must have gotten in late—her door is closed. Alain’s bag and coat are draped over the couch. I shower, dress, and head out, glad not to have to see them. I’m happy I don’t have to try to put yesterday into words. Last night, trying it with my mother was strange enough.

  Out on the street, it’s still early for a Saturday in Manhattan. On Felicia’s block, the new trees are sprouting hard-shelled buds that I feel a tender pity for—what will happen to them if this warm spell ends?

  As I make my way to the West Side subway, I pass construction site after construction site. Up Seventh now to Columbus Circle. Bangs and slaps of boards on concrete. Piles of sandbags. This is New York, this struggling into activity. There is an old-fashioned eagerness to it all, a twentieth-century enterprise, a thing making itself.

  I’m relieved to descend into the subway. New York subways: I’ve forgotten that particular smell of dirt and ammonia. It’s an ancient industrial smell, so different from the mildew and food smell of the BART. The tracks start to rumble and the tunnel wind picks up. That old rising excitement, the quiver of air in front of me, and then the breakneck thunder of the train that shudders by inches from my face. Inside, the trains have the same submarine feel as when I was a kid. Metal, scouring fluorescent light, intimate anonymity. We barrel through the tunnels to Brooklyn. The knowledge of tons of water overhead and the sweat and the missing limbs of those who blasted tunnels in rock a hundred years ago.

  Effortful, cheerful public service posters occupy the ad spaces. How hard the MTA is working to make things better! The Second Avenue line is on target! More Express buses! When I was a kid, these spaces were filled with ads for the lottery and skinny cigarettes, and they featured lots of girls in halter tops.

  I watch a woman wearing high suede boots playing a game on her phone. The high-pitched sounds of fake gunfire reverberate over the clatter of the train and the station announcements. There is something primitive about this city, something honest and rapacious that hasn’t changed.

  I get out of the subway at the first stop in Brooklyn. It’s the one nearest to my parents’ old house. I pass through a park that used to be deserted. Now it’s covered in AstroTurf and babies. Another blinding sky, this one blue, is pinned over the new MetroTech buildings. I pass several bars and upscale restaurants. All of this is new. Unlike Park Avenue, it’s really changed here.

  As I head toward the river, I remember how my life here was one of pure sensation, of cold winds from the East River in the winter, of heat coming from the sidewalks in summer. I remember a certain leaf that squishes underfoot and turns to a yellow pulp. We called them “stink bombs” and threw them at each other—though not me—I was too quiet and serious for that. But is that true? I don’t know if I remember myself right at this age. It’s a slippery part of my past, even more slippery than all that happened with Maurice. This is a different kind of loss of memory.

  The houses are better kept up than I remember. Bricks repointed, shutters painted. Some houses even have metal plaques bearing nineteenth-century dates. House proud.

  Now I’m on the block where we lived before my mother got California religion and moved out west and I moved in with Dad. Here it is—the house where we had all lived in my earliest memories. My father, slim and without glasses, planed and scraped the walls, heroic to himself. He was younger than I am now. My mother in her bold colors and paisleys and kerchiefs.

  I stand outside, looking. I find myself really looking, allowing myself, my eyes, to take in, to collect.

  The house. In my memory, it’s a dreary place locked under a gunmetal sky, in a state of incomplete transformation. But now the outside is well cared for and cheery. The sidewalk in front of it is ironed flat. The weathervane on the roof is replaced with a satellite dish. The door has been painted a subdued gray-blue, a Martha Stewart folded-linens color. Outside, in the little yard—I see now it was a yard—someone has planted a magnolia tree. The magnolia is just starting its bloom, some early buds have even dropped a few petals onto a kid’s Radio Flyer bike leaning against the house.

  A warmth under my armpits spreads though my body. Something shifts, like the floor settling, and I clasp my hands together.

  I take the well-swept stairs slowly, one at a time. In the planters on the top landing sprout begonias. On either side of the door are two Victorian-style gaslights that border on kitsch. The makeshift world my mother sought here is clearly gone.

  I ring the doorbell. I’ve dressed carefully today in a tight-fitting black jacket, black pedal pushers, a red scarf, and Louboutin flats. Something jangles inside and the door opens as if someone were just waiting behind it. The woman who faces me is young, her skin a bright nut color, her hair curly, her eyes almond. A newer denizen of yuppie hood? She wears tight jeans and a Patagonia fleece vest over a T-shirt.

  Behind her, the hallway spreads into shiny flooring and blank, freshly painted walls, and, beyond, into an expansive living room scattered with a few toys.

  I tell her I used to live in this house many years ago, when I was a girl. “I’m in town for a conference and was just walking by,” I say. She gives me a once-over and smiles. “Where do you live now?” she says. I hear an accent, a flat cheeriness and also a bit of a drawl.

  “Ohio,” I say.

  “I’m from Columbus!” she says. She sticks out her hand. “Victoria.”

  “Kate,” I say.

  The door opens wider.

  She is smiling in such a pleasant way that I’m taken off guard. I’m not sure what I expected, but not this—unfettered kindness. “Would you like for me to show you around?” says Victoria. “I have a few minutes until I need to pick up my son.”

  Is it really that easy to step back into your past? I thought I wanted this, but now I’m not sure. Part of me wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her: You must be more discerning. You must be careful! This city can burn you up. Don’t trust it too much!

  But I don’t. I can’t. I’m caught in the grip of something stranger than I can say. What, I couldn’t tell you. Only this: this strange, warm March week in New York when I have met my son. Kevin’s face—his elfin face, precise energy, his emotional openness to me.

  I follow her. I’m shocked when she leads me into the main room. It’s totally unrecognizable. The parlor—as my parents liked to call it—is now a white rectangular box, all Bauhaus. It extends into an open kitchen. The whole back wall is windows. A couch and a few chairs float on a sea of oiled wool. A blank sail of walls. A few children’s toys scattered about. “Sorry it’s such a mess,” Victoria says. A mess? I think about my parents with the endless work, never done, the splintering boards, mordant peeling plaster, their shipwreck of a house, their Victorian nightmare. It’s impossible to imagine this is the same place.

  Now she is leading me to the kitchen, which is all bamboo and metal. It reminds me of Felicia’s, with one difference, this one is being used. I put my hand on the counter, a sheet of metal—at once industrial and kind of delicate—where there is a plastic cutting board, covered with onions being chopped. Everything is floating in a pool of strewn light. This diffuse light coats e
verything, just like at SAB. This entire city is being rebuilt out of glass.

  Victoria stands by the counter. She’s saying, “We really love these old Victorians but they can be so claustrophobic. We wanted the light and air. We were so happy to see this one. The owners before us did a gut renovation.”

  She picks up a workout bottle of water with lemon peels floating in it. She nods, gestures to the backyard. I can’t really see out the back window into the yard because of all the light pouring in. “The people we bought it from put in a koi pond. I have to learn how to take care of it. I have to restock it this summer. It’s not winterized or something. You have to actually move the fish.” She looks at me earnestly. “Do they have that here? Fish storage for the winter?”

  I laugh. “When we lived here the yard was just an old patch of grass,” I say. “I lived here from when I was eight to about eleven. Only three years or so, before my parents split. It seems like a lifetime ago.”

  Is she lost in all this newness, like we were lost in the oldness?

  Then, before I know what I’m doing, I’m heading upstairs. I see the same blankness and careful curating in every room I pass. Then I’m on the third floor, heading down the hallway. I’m standing at the door of my old room. It’s now a workout room of some kind. There’s a pile of sneakers in one corner and an elliptical machine in the other corner. And on the far wall, a large wall mirror. Against the other wall rests a Japanese screen leaning against the wall printed with words in a calligraphic font, YOU CAN DO IT!

  I hear her coming up the stairs behind me. Her voice, with its polite twang, now agitated. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” she’s saying. I look around, at the Japanese screen, the workout machine, the mirror, the shoes. I remember Gary climbing up to me, my princess self waiting on the top, like it was a castle tower, waiting for my prince. He reaching that same landing that night the building lost power and he kissed me. I can see myself in the mirror across the room, trumpeting my fancy shoes. I want to take something. Maybe there is something in all this newness for me.

  I turn around—she’s coming down the hallway. She’s clutching her water bottle. Her brow is furrowed. “Please, I have to go get my son. I can’t leave with you in the house.”

  Victoria is younger than I will ever be again. She is rich, I am probably jobless. She is new, I am old. She has everything, I nothing. But there is something clean and new in my body that doesn’t hate her.

  There is nothing here for me. Nothing at all.

  “We used to have a room full of junk here,” I say. “There’s no junk anymore.”

  I brush past Victoria. I walk the stairs like I’m descending from a high tower. I can hear her right behind me.

  I was a fool to think it was the house. It was never the house, it was me, it was the city, wrapped in striving. It was my parents, it was Maurice, Mr. B, Tumkovsky, Danilova, the Russians coming from their distant land remaking us in the image of what they left. We were all caught in a vortex, the air on fire, the sirens ripping, and we danced so we didn’t get burned. But everyone gets burned. Life burns.

  I speed through the foyer, desperate to be back on the street, then jog down the stoop. I want to go to the water, to look at Manhattan. As I step onto the sidewalk, magnolia-strewn—as if the tree has pushed deeper into bloom in just the time I have been in the house—another memory returns. This one is different. It predates the selves of my wood-and-enamel box.

  I remember. A concrete school yard. A half-inflated red ball burning toward the stone wall behind me, the splat of rubber on the wall, the thud of the ball on the ground. The gym teacher, a nervous man with a mouth twitch that showed his metal caps, yells, “Dodge!” The girls with braids squeal. The boys in T-shirts and Keds hurl spit. I’m back behind them all, not trying to win, but just ready, ready to move.

  EPILOGUE

  PRESENT

  I stand backstage waiting. The lights in the auditorium dim. A hush falls over the audience. The series organizer takes the stage to introduce me—the final presenter in the New York Library for the Performing Arts spring lecture series, Women in Dance Through the Ages: Goddesses, Sylphs, and Superheroes.

  The room is filled, I’m pleased to see. “For today’s lecture,” the organizer, George, says, “We are honored to have a special guest, one who straddles two worlds. Kate Randell trained as a dancer at the School of American Ballet in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the final era of the great George Balanchine’s reign. Randell went on to get her PhD in dance history and performance theory from UC at Berkeley. As a feminist scholar, she has written about Balanchine aesthetics. Her book Corporeality Subverted: The (Dis)embodied Feminine in the Aesthetic of George Balanchine, 1958–1982, is published by Yale University Press. We are fortunate to have her as a scholar in residence at the New York Library for the Performing Arts this year.”

  A healthy burst of applause. “Thank you,” I say and step to the lectern. The back of the room rises into dimness, but I can see the faces in front.

  It’s been a good year since I left Ohio. I have a nice apartment on the East Side. I have a few friends here, too—I’ve never needed many. Felicia, Alain, and Kevin, sort of. The beginning of something. Kevin and I have seen each other a half dozen times since I moved here. We seem to enjoy each other’s company, which is a strange thing to say of one’s son. But there it is.

  An essay on Nijinska, “Modernism’s Midwife,” will be coming out in a few months. I seem to have found something in the administrative part of my residency, and there’s talk of hiring me as a program director next year. Bernie was kind enough to give me a good recommendation (since this position includes no teaching). I’m starting to be in demand as a speaker. The extra income from the speaker’s fees is what has allowed me to buy the shoes I’m wearing tonight, a gorgeous pair of red Manolo Blahniks. I have even been choreographing original work again, for the first time in years. I’m working on a group piece. I’ve found three young dancers and am renting a studio in Bushwick for our rehearsals.

  Sioban withdrew her complaint before it was heard for review. I’ll never know exactly why, but I do know that she started seeing a counselor at student services. We met once to discuss her “No Credit” in my class. She sat across from me and swiveled her body this way and that. She looked at me with her intense face, as if she were searching for something. I tried to hold my ground. She gave me a grimace that I realized was meant to be a smile. “I have abandonment issues,” she said. She gathered her hair into a tighter ponytail. She had her sober scientist-student face on, pale except for her excitable acne scars. “But you left, and I didn’t die.” She makes her grimace-smile again. “That’s progress.”

  Yes, I thought, you didn’t die. I wanted to say thank you to her but I couldn’t. It was impossible. Still, I thanked her in my mind. I feel gratitude toward her. I will never forget the press of her long body into mine, and the taste of her, and how our moment together strangely spurred in me some tenderness for myself that I haven’t lost.

  I know why now. Why she, of all my students. It was the simplicity of her beautiful unencumbered form bringing me back to the time when the body—my body—was elemental. The world was elemental, too. I moved through it like each step mattered. And maybe because it did to him. To one man. Maurice. That was the gift he gave me.

  Now at the lectern, I pick up my clicker and begin my talk: “We all know by now how the Balanchine myth begins—in 1946, Lincoln Kirstein freed George Balanchine from his duties as a choreographer of circus elephants and placed him in charge of the first great American ballet company. This became the New York City Ballet.” A few knowing exclamations, and I say, “I see I’m among friends here. Balanchine has become a legend for modernizing ballet for America. Except for trotting out the party dresses for the annual Nutcracker bonanza (which could fund an entire NYC Ballet season), he eschewed the old stories and dramas. No Giselle. No Swan Lake. He is credited with inventing the ‘Balanchine look’—the pinhead ballerina
—hipless girls with long, lean limbs, and skin, as he once famously said, ‘the color of a peeled apple.’ In the Balanchine universe, the ballerina did not think. She became a vessel for his genius. Thus, the master chose his dancers young, driven only by an animal instinct to dance. She appears onstage in a simple unitard, perhaps a few feathers in her hair. She is no princess, no swan lady, she is simply female; she dances. ‘Ballet is woman,’ Balanchine opined. She is a chord on his piano, a drumstick to his drum. Balanchine looked for girls whose servitude to Terpsichore, goddess of dance, made her worthy of worship. But where to find her? And what did she look like? What did that mean for ballet in America?”

  I click through my images of Balanchine history—the early years: Tanaquil Le Clercq in Stars and Stripes. When I reach the 1950s and Maria Tallchief, I pause. Look around the room. The faces are interested. I move on to more examples from the middle period of the 1960s, Balanchine’s minimalist leotard-and-tights stage, severe lines and classical myths, his Martha Graham moment. I click to a screen of Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, at their most Olympian, in Agon. A few gasps at the extraordinary bodies on view. “But what of the Balanchine body?” I say. “Much has been made of it, but it bears reexamining from a feminist perspective. In Balanchine’s choreography, no longer was the woman pirouetted on the arm of the prince. She stepped forward on her own by embodying her own physical power. It was no longer sublimated.” I switch to the famous photo of Allegra Kent leaping with abandon in Seven Deadly Sins.