Girl Through Glass Page 3

  Hannah, another Level 5 girl, is changing too. Over her tights, she still wears a white oxford with a Catholic school emblem on the breast pocket. Her half-undone pointe shoe ribbons have edges dark with grime. (She has taken to walking around with them undone.)

  Last spring, excitement over Hannah’s discovery, her possible rise, spread through the hallways of the Kirov. Hannah had performed the Flower Princess in the Kirov’s annual production of The Wounded Prince and a reviewer from the Times singled her out. He praised her for “a rare musicality” and “an extension that made her limbs appear to fly on their own.” Mira had spent the rest of the spring huddled in the doorway of the older girls’ class, dissecting Hannah’s turnout, her arch, her anatomy, searching for clues, for understanding.

  Then, in the spring, Hannah got to the final rounds of SAB auditions. Fewer than fifteen blocks north of Little Kirov is the newly renovated SAB, or School of American Ballet, boasting warehouse-size classrooms with industrial flooring and diffuse light. Here the mothers spend their time with their noses pressed to windows to catch glimpses of New York City Ballet dancers. A few blocks south of SAB is ABT, the American Ballet Theater’s school, which fills an entire crumbling brick building with dark, sweaty, mysterious warrens of classrooms and rehearsal spaces.

  SAB and ABT signify the community of the chosen. Getting into one of these schools means a shot at getting into one of these companies. All the other studios throughout the city, including The Little Kirov, are feeding ponds for SAB and ABT. Essentially, you go on to one of these two schools—or you go nowhere.

  The long, hot summer has ended, classes have started up again, and Hannah remains at the Kirov, in the Level 5 class, with the other fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. Hannah has missed her chance. Mothers whisper about “problems with her architecture.” Was it her spine—or was it her hips? Or her feet?

  Mira notices that Hannah no longer bothers to put her hair up in a bun for class but lets it swing loose in a ponytail. She has rounder thighs and now wears a bra that makes a lumpy shape in her leotard. As she comes down the hall, her ponytail swinging, all fresh air and unabashed anger, Mira avoids her “what’s it to you?” stare. Mira pushes herself up against the wall and looks at her feet; she gets out of Hannah’s way.

  Too late. Hannah’s gaze rests on her. Mira feels a wash of cold flood through her, which leaves her fingertips hurting. Behind her, Val and the others are still singing.

  “You’re good, right?” Now a smile is playing at both sides of Hannah’s face.

  Mira nods. She is good. That promise she has made to herself at the start of this year has bloomed into some beating, driving bird that pumps its strong, tiny wings in her chest during class. The harder she works, the higher the bird tries to fly.

  “Leave her alone,” Robin says.

  “Oh yeah?” says Hannah.

  “Yeah. Leave her alone.”

  Hannah laughs. “Or else?”

  “Girls!” Laura’s mother stands in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “Please!” Mira looks at Val and then down, fighting a smile. Laura’s mother is the kind of ballet mother Mira and Val make fun of, the kind who goes up to the barre after recitals and tries to do some of the ballet moves herself, the kind who stands in the doorway and yells “We need a new nutritionist for Laura!” Laura stands with her back to the wall, looking at her mother in dismay. Mira catches sight of Laura’s prissy pink vinyl-shiny ballet shoes. Anger cleaves at her—who is this girl, who are any of them, to flout the sartorial rules of this world that can turn children into princesses and princes?

  Hannah gives Laura’s mother a stony stare. Laura’s mother touches her hair self-consciously and turns. Laura’s mother can’t really yell at the older girls. They are the linchpins of this world.

  “Come on,” Hannah says.

  The older girls brush by Mira and Val, Laura’s mother, and the other girls and mothers, with a swish of their warm-up pants and the clunk clunk of pointe shoes against the floor, swaying under the weight of their giant dance bags. When they have passed through, a hush follows.

  To Mira and Val, Laura’s mother says, “Have some respect, would you? Go play outside in the hallway.”

  But even if Mira’s mother were here, she wouldn’t care. Her mother ties ribbons in Mira’s hair when she remembers, and then they loosen, droop, and fall out, and her mother doesn’t even notice. And now, with her father gone, she is even more distracted. In her red kimono or rotating sets of overalls, she is transforming the living room with stuff she carries down from the junk room.

  “One,” her mother sings, “singular sensation,” as she walks upstairs with a beaded lamp shade she commandeered from somewhere in the house. The living room begins to fill up with big plants, throw pillows, and low soft-glow lamps that perch on the floor like sleepy cats. Ashtrays appear, too. Her father hates smoking.

  If only her mother were wailing in the kitchen by the dim light of one bulb, red-faced, tragic and beautiful, Mira would understand. But her mother seems almost cheerful. She seems to have more energy. Her mother zips up and down the stairs, carrying objects from one part of the house to another, loudly humming show tunes Mira didn’t know she knew.

  One night when Mira was much younger, she is awakened by her parents coming home giggling. In the morning, they stand with steaming coffee in their hands in their apartment’s tiny kitchen, and with their faces flushed, they keep breaking up in laughter. Rachel’s laugh is a skittering, uneven thing that can’t seem to stop. Mira’s father’s is a full, throaty laugh that makes Mira nervous. He is normally reserved.

  Her mother does most of the talking. “We’ve bought a house!” she says. “A Victorian house!” The house had been owned by the same family for generations. Some of the rooms upstairs have not been used for decades, Rachel says. They are filled with furniture—lamps, spinning wheels, moth-eaten couches. The elderly brothers who now live there are moving to a small condominium in Florida; what do they need with three floors’ worth of dusty Victorian furniture? They’ve offered her parents all the furniture in the house for one dollar. One dollar! With some reupholstering and repairs, it is probably worth a fortune. How can they refuse? As they speak, her mother uses words she has never heard before: parlor, foyer, banister, wrought iron, parquet.

  When her mother is finished, her father clears his throat and smiles his shiny-penny smile. “It’s a good investment,” he says finally.

  The new house, a clapboard from the 1850s, is in a neighborhood that people describe by telling you about all the famous people who used to live there a hundred years ago. The old slate sidewalks crack and buckle. The rain gutters are full of Q-tips and cellophane. Plastic bags hang in the spindly trees. Sneakers garland the telephone wires. Chunks are missing from the stone stoops in front of the houses.

  Their new house is on the edge of this neighborhood, in the middle of an especially cracked-pavement block. The block ends at an elevated overpass where you can feel the scrape and roar of the highway beneath you. It is a sad, old building with dark windows, sandwiched between two similar houses. An old ladder leans against the front, and, in the open pit behind the fence, there is a sawhorse, scrap wood, cement bags. The first time they pull up in front of the house, Mira feels something fall in her chest. “It smells gross,” Mira says, when they are inside the dank front hallway. Neither Rachel nor her dad responds. The wallpaper in the hallway is coming loose in places and flops down in strips. From the ceiling, wires dangle from holes. The house needs stripping, painting, wiring, new plumbing.

  In the beginning, they all live on the first floor, which is the only habitable one. Mira moves up to the second floor while it is still under construction, where her father, after work, still in his shirt and tie, attacks the imperfections of the old house’s walls. For a time, Mira falls asleep at night to the swish and scrape of the planer, believing that this frantic, willful energy is enough to build a sturdy-walled version of reality, to keep the fairy
tales at bay. In the dark, at night, in bed, Mira strains her eyes at the strange shapes the close moonlight makes against the walls half-scraped of their wallpaper. It is a form of prayer, this staring, this hoping, this squinting. She listens to the sounds of the house, the creaking and groaning, the words between her parents, high and angry, low and sweet. She imagines her parents singing a song she once heard at a Broadway play her grandmother took her to, their bright eager faces and open mouths. It makes her feel calmer to imagine this song, her parents singing it.

  She has just started taking ballet at The Little Kirov, and she thinks often about the little room around the corner from the older girls’ classroom, where the costumes are stored for the annual performance of The Wounded Prince. In early December the costume room will be opened and the dusty tutus hung by color, in descending size order, will be shaken off, their synthetic tulle fluffed, and the girls who were the Pink Girls last year will become the Blue Girls, the Blue Girls become the Yellow Girls, the Yellow Girls become the Flower Girls. She does not know what the Flower Girls become. And then there is the Flower Princess—there is only one Flower Princess. She wears a long dress and garlands of flowers pinned in her hair. She wears the most diaphanous white gown and tiara and, when all the action on the stage stops and turns to her, she must do the longest, slowest, most beautiful penché, and stretching out her arm, still deep in an arabesque, with her wand touch the Prince’s lame leg. . . .

  But time goes by and the house is not fixed. She doesn’t know whom to blame for this—her mother, her father, or the house itself. Her parents still recline after dinner on chairs that creak and groan. They sip wine. When the caning finally snaps, the broken chairs are stacked in the corner, one on top of the other. These chairs can only be salvaged by certain old-time craftsmen—weavers, caners, upholsterers—whom Rachel hunts for by going in and out of antique shops, with a little notebook in which she has sketched the broken furniture. Soon, though, she has to take a break. They go to Chock full o’Nuts, where Rachel orders Mira a cream cheese on raisin bread sandwich, sips her coffee, and thumbs through her notebook, still blank of names. Her father pulls down another chair from the rooms upstairs. They still giggle as they look around the room, flush with their own bold visions. But, as the years go by, their efforts disappear into the house like the pennies and nickels thrown in a deep wishing fountain.

  IRRECONCILABLE

  DIFFERENCES

  CHAPTER 6

  OCTOBER 1977

  It’s over a month since her father left. In her red kimono, her mother plays game after game of solitaire at the table in the parlor. “He isn’t coming back,” she says. She doesn’t take her eyes off the cards. “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.” Then she says some other words meant for Mira not to understand: irreconcilable differences, separation by consent. In response, Mira has her own words. “You said you loved him! You lied!” Rachel’s face is set in stone. “This really has nothing to do with love.”

  Her mother reaches out and grabs Mira’s arm. “The only reason we got married,” she says, “is that we were in love.” She turns back to her game of solitaire. Slap, slap. The cards continue.

  Mira feels a jab of hate for her mother. She thinks about that loose snapshot in her parents’ wedding album. How many times has she stopped when leafing through this album to stare at this snapshot, which is a different size and shape than the official wedding photos? Her mother, in her long white dress, is standing on top of a table full of young men. She’s striking a pose, her head thrown back wildly, and she’s laughing. The men have their bow ties loosened and the table is littered with corsages. It’s late in the evening. Mira’s father also sits at the table. Unlike the other men, her father is not laughing. His arms hang at his sides. He stares up at his wife, gaping, as if he is caught in a fire, burning alive.

  “My mom is totally destroyed,” she says to her friends who stand around her in the dressing room. “She wails all day and night. You can’t even go near her. She wears this kimono and doesn’t take it off. And she doesn’t shower.” Only the part about the kimono is true.

  There is a part of Mira that has floated free with her father. The part that is left cares less about what others think and whether what she says is true or not. She often feels like laughing suddenly, for no reason.

  “Maybe you should call Social Services,” says Meaghan.

  “Oh, come on,” says Val, gnawing on her fingers. “You’re exaggerating.” Val’s parents split when she was five and her sister was seven. When they’d met, Val was the one with tough luck, without a father, and with a shitty childhood. Mira, with her two parents, with her big house, couldn’t understand, didn’t know. Now Val is afraid of losing her trump card.

  “Are you saying I’m lying?” says Mira, staring hard at Val. She never used to be able to stare at anyone without looking away before.

  “Yes,” says Val. She turns to Delia and whispers something in her ear. Meaghan titters, then whispers something to Delia.

  “What?” says Mira. “What?”

  When she gets off the train in Manhattan, she walks slowly down the streets, looking at each window of each apartment. A million people hiding behind curtains, her father in one of them. That you could lose your father in a city. That he can disappear into the streets, leaving only cuff links behind. It makes her stomach feel funny.

  “Hurry up,” says Val. “I’m sick of always waiting for you.” Val rushes on ahead.

  Mira goes up to a doorman standing in front of the giant apartment building on Fifty-sixth. It could be this very building. “Is Carl Able staying here?” she says to the doorman in his livery. “He’s my dad.”

  The doorman steps inside and pulls out a clipboard from behind his desk. His chin doubles over as he pursues his list. “Sometimes they forget to update me. Did he just move in?” If a doorman, whose job it is to keep track of residents, can lose count, how would she ever find her father?

  October turns cold. The old shutters knock against windowsills as a strong breeze buffets the house. Her mother sits cross-legged on a throw pillow on the floor, a blanket on her lap, papers spread out before her. “Look at me!” her mother says loudly. “I’m doing bills!”

  Across the room, Mira sits in a chair and does her homework in the glow of a glass table lamp with a bordello shade. Mira’s posture is unusually straight, as if she sits with her back to a wall. Only her head is tilted downward toward the ruled page of her notebook.

  Her mother puts the bill in front of her to the side and looks at the one beneath it. It is from The Little Kirov, typed in heavy ink on onionskin paper. She holds it up.

  “Agh,” says her mother, shaking the paper. “What do you like so much about ballet?”

  Mira does not look up. “It’s beautiful?”

  Her mother writes some numbers in her bank book. “It’s 1977. Beauty? Where has it gotten us?”

  Mira looks up. Her mother’s red kimono, now wrinkled and dull; it hangs on her like a too-big sheet. Her mother looks small and pale. Dwarfed by the things in the room. The junk, her father would say. Her mother laughs her skittish laugh and covers her face with her hands. “Where has it gotten me?” She drops her hands and in a louder voice says, “Let it go down in flames!”

  “Why don’t you sit on the floor? You don’t look comfortable,” says her mother.

  “I like this chair,” says Mira.

  “I am thinking of taking all the chairs out.”

  “No!” Mira says. When she sees her mother’s expression, she wants to look back down. But she doesn’t. Mother and daughter stare at each other for several moments; there is something between them, then nothing.

  THE WOMAN

  WHO BLED

  IN HER SHOES

  CHAPTER 7

  PRESENT

  It’s time. The letter. I hadn’t forgotten, not exactly. The rage toward Bill had to be dealt with first, but now I go get the letter from my bag. In my ochre reading chair, under a
gray-white Ohio sky, I spread the letter out on my lap.

  I have gone away to a place where the dead go—no, not Hades, a city that befits me. No ballet here, only early bird specials and other sad people who have been banished to a city with no reason for existing.

  My mind treads water, eddies pull. That voice. It’s his. How can it be? Can he still be alive? How old would he be now? I quickly do the math—eighty. Possible. But why now? Why contact me after so long?

  I close my eyes. To leave the body. To abandon the body. I know this trick. It doesn’t work. The body goes on. So I call myself back. To the Dutch Colonial that I fell in love with on my tour of the town late last spring. Its blue slate roof on the cupola (with pewter detailing) like ancient armor, and inside the hardwood floors and clean white walls, all of which felt vast after my last two small, linoleum-tiled (and ammonia-stink) faculty accommodations.

  I open my eyes. Everything looks altered. The red ceramic vase my mother gave me for my doctoral ceremony, for which I have both an abiding revulsion and love. I’ve carried it with me from college town to college town over the past four years. I look over at my black office chair, my spindle-necked desk lamp, my modular desk to which I had attached an ergonomic keyboard. It’s like peering through glass—everything looks altered, too big or too small in this space. Objects tossed together with no coherency. I remember only the compulsion, the desire and guilt in each item’s acquisition. Only the rug under my feet feels familiar and recognizable, with its bold geometry of circles and triangles, a faux Mondrian pattern. These things—my chair, my rug, my desk—I’d chosen to create a workspace, now pulling apart.