Girl Through Glass Read online

  They enter: a harmless-looking drugstore with a lunch counter. It is steamy inside, with smells of frying. Next to the counter is a rack of ancient greeting cards printed with salutations like “I Miss You!” and “From the Moment I Met You . . .” and pastel pictures of sunsets, flowers, and butterflies. As her dad climbs onto one of the ripped orange stools, Mira fingers their warped parchment paper and embossed covers. She lingers on a pretty card with a raised yellow sunset reading “Together Forever.”

  In a moment that moves past without a beat, Mira slides the card into the inside pocket of her jacket. The next moment, she is perched on the stool next to her father.

  He leans toward her, as if he is telling her a secret. “This is a real diner. There was one like this where I grew up.” Only once has Mira been to the town where her father grew up—it was cold and gray, with empty, windy streets. She remembers a white front porch and a quiet room with a crucifix hanging on the wall. This was the house he’d grown up in. She had been scared—of that crucifix, and of her stern grandmother whose face was as hard as a cement mixer. Her grandmother had died soon after that.

  Without the coat, her father looks more like himself. He wears a corduroy button-down shirt, khakis, and the rubber shoes he calls “duck shoes”: his weekend outfit. Behind the counter is a Hispanic man with a long, burnt-looking face and a white hat. He is constantly running an orange dishrag over the counter. Her father orders Mira a breakfast special—eggs and bacon and toast. He, himself, will eat nothing.

  “How is your mom? How is the house?” he says.

  “Okay.”

  He looks down and, with a thick finger, traces the grain in the counter. “Your mother will have to sell that house.”

  Mira’s mouth is filled with the eggs and toast. “Really?” she says.

  “We’ll see,” he says.

  She pushes her plate away without finishing her breakfast. Her father motions to have a powdered sugar donut placed before her.

  “I’m not coming back,” he says.

  Mira looks down at the donut, at her plate sprinkled with powdered sugar dust. When she looks up, she sees her father has an amazed, helpless look. His skin glows, as if a light is behind it, and his eyes are wide, as if he is seeing something wonderful in the distance. He is blinking a lot.

  “At least for a while. We’re going to see how it goes. Apart. This is something—your mother—we both have decided on.”

  They sit there for some time, then she says, “I hate you” in a low voice.

  “I know,” he says.

  The counter guy sucks his teeth and wipes the counter aggressively with his dishcloth, veering very close to her father’s coffee. Then he rips a check from the pad he keeps tied to his apron string and slaps the check down in front of them. Pale green, curled at the edges.

  Her father shakes his head, as if that settles something.

  Mira stares at two grease stains like small overlapping continents across the top of the check. Fingers, grease; it turns her stomach.

  “I should have my own apartment soon.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m thinking Murray Hill, maybe Chelsea, maybe Kips Bay.” He laughs. Manhattan.

  As her father pays, the long-faced counterman barks something out. Mira’s heart skips.

  The counter lady looks at her. “You have something, sweetheart?”

  Mira pulls the greeting card from her pocket and puts it facedown on the counter. The lady clicks her tongue and smiles kindly—a luxury, since she knows she has won.

  “It’s for my mother,” says Mira stupidly, the sallow impulse to lie springing up but fading.

  “What’s the matter?” says her father, who has walked back from the door.

  “Your daughter almost shoplifted something,” says the lady. “But Jimmy here”—she gestures toward the counterman —“he see her. Right, Jimmy?”

  Mira reaches into her pocket, where she carries her saved-up change and drops it on the counter. “I was going to pay,” she says.

  The checkout lady, in one motion, gathers up the change and turns the card over with long beige fingernails as hard as pieces of sea glass. There is the glaring, gaudy sunset of turquoise and pink. And the horrible words. Her father looks at it, then at her, with a solemn face.

  “It’s my fault,” he says. “I wouldn’t get it for her.”

  “I don’t really want it,” says Mira as she gives her father what she hopes is an accusatory stare. And she doesn’t. She looks at the picture with the silly words. She sees, as if it is written out in front of her, for the first time, that in the gap between what is hoped for and what is, you can find all sorts of silly, embarrassing things. She must be careful, she must watch herself.

  The lady drums her long fingernails on the counter.

  “Are you sure?” her father says. Mira nods as hard as she can, bouncing her head on her neck hurriedly so that it hurts.

  The counter lady peels the card off the counter carefully like it is a wet dollar bill and puts it on the other side of the cash register where Mira can only see its edge sticking out. She returns Mira’s change.

  Her father looks at her with his red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, Mira,” he says. “You must ask when you want something,” he says. “Or you’re going to turn into your mother. Always taking, never asking.”

  One afternoon soon after this, Mira passes a bunch of older girls smoking under the awning of a camera store on the corner of Fifty-sixth and Seventh. When Mira nears the corner, she recognizes Hannah, her friend Portia, and two other girls she doesn’t know by name. She is surprised to see that Val is among them.

  After standing for a minute, Mira gets up her courage and walks up to the group. Hannah is wearing tight jeans and Frye boots. Her ponytail is gathered on one side of her head. Her eyelids shine with eye shadow. As she exhales, she closes her eyes halfway. Portia has her hair swept back with a toothed headband, and still wears some of her dance clothes: legwarmers over her sweats, leotard poking through her bomber jacket. The other girl, a small chunky girl whose name Mira knows is Noelle, barks out a laugh in agreement after Hannah says anything. They all hold cigarettes in their hands. Val raises the cigarette to her mouth and blows out a stream of smoke into the bright air. How does Val know how to do this?

  “Hey,” Hannah says, catching sight of her. “It’s the Flower Princess.”

  Mira walks right up to them and tries to put her arm through Val’s, but Val pulls hers away.

  “I remember when I was the FP,” says Hannah. She flips her hair back. “I thought it’d be better.”

  “It’s for little girls,” says Noelle.

  “There’s the Prince,” says Portia, huskily.

  “Yeah, the Prince . . . ,” says Hannah.

  Mira does not know what to do with her hands. She looks at her feet. The sidewalk is dotted with smashed cigarette butts and black, discarded gum. She tilts her head back. The sky above is an ominous gray.

  “It might rain,” she says.

  Val looks at her with heavy eyelids. “So?”

  “It might rain.” One of the other girls imitates her.

  “Want a smoke?” Portia holds out an already lit cigarette.

  Mira thinks about the quiet studio upstairs. Robin will be there practicing already.

  Mira drags on the cigarette. The smoke catches in Mira’s throat, and she coughs, once, then twice. Then she can’t stop. The other girls laugh. “She didn’t even inhale,” says the freckled girl.

  Val takes a step back. “God, Mira,” she says, when Mira finally stops coughing.

  Val looks at her like she has just given her a dare. Mira tries to pull her eyes away, but Val holds them. Now the blood is in her ears. It is as if her whole life is under attack. Mira’s eyes fill with a strange water, and the girls recede like chips of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

  She runs. Their laughter comes from behind her. She hears someone say, “Shit”; someone else, “Damn”; someone else says
, “Wait.”

  In Middle Studio, Robin is already warming up. She has one leg on the barre and is bent over the raised leg in a swan dive. She looks up briefly when Mira enters, nods imperceptibly, and lets her head flop over her leg again. Mira walks in and takes the barre against the other wall and begins to warm up.

  During class, right before center, Ms. Clement stops the girls. She lifts the needle off the record. “Mira, come here.” Mira walks out to the center of the room with her feet turned out. Standing in a first position, she brushes her right leg out along the floor. “Notice,” Ms. Clement says, “the turnout begins at the hips, not at the knee.” Mira extends her leg, lifts her chin, and makes her face blank. As blank as a desert. She has learned how to do this so that the others will not have something for their hate to attach itself to (for this is the third time this week she has been called to demonstrate).

  They all move into the center. The first center combination is allegro—a series of glissades, a pas de bourrée, changement, and soutenu. Mira is quick, birdlike. Her feet obey her mind exactly, beating the air with the sure strokes of wings.

  She has never felt her power so cleanly or decisively.

  The next Saturday when Mira leaves rehearsal, Maurice is waiting for her outside The Little Kirov. He’s bundled in a fur coat. He invites her to the Russian Tea Room. Despite its proximity to the dance studio, Mira has never been to the Russian Tea Room. She has only seen it in movies.

  He walks her around the corner and right through wooden doors festooned with lights. They sit in a puffy red booth. On the forest-green walls hang gold-framed paintings of jesters, clowns, and little girls. The room is a patchwork of colors and sounds: busy waiters wheeling clanking tea carts maneuver around a gold centerpiece clock whose wide, cheery face clicks and bongs. Beside their table is a giant silver pitcher with a spigot, which Maurice tells her is called a samovar. From it comes hot tea. Today Maurice wears all blue—dark blue trousers, a light blue sweater, and a red ascot. In this new guise, he reminds her of Jacques Cousteau. She is getting used to the fact that he appears in a different guise each time she sees him.

  It is barely more than two weeks since their first meeting, but she already feels she’s known him forever. When their cups are filled with the hot liquid from the samovar, he raises his glass and says, “Nazdrovia!” She tentatively lifts hers and he clinks his glass to hers. He smiles and points at the wooden dolls lined up on a shelf across the room. “This place is a hundred percent Russian. With a little kitsch. But who says kitsch isn’t Russian? They are really quite art brut.”

  She nods. For once she knows what he is talking about. Her grandmother had given her a Russian nesting doll for her tenth birthday. The dolls painted on oblong wooden eggs. The women get smaller as the eggs get smaller. Each woman rests inside another woman until the last tiny woman stands there wobbling on the table.

  Maurice waves a waiter over and orders some things Mira can’t pronounce. Then he smiles at her. The noises—the laughter, the tinkling silverware, the clatter of food carts—grow louder as she looks at him, her eyes burning.

  “They used to be my friends.”

  “Who?”

  “Val. And the other girls—”

  He laughs. “They’re not destined for greatness as you are.”

  Her eyes are filling up again. The room is collapsing into blurry shapes and streaks of light. She hasn’t been able to get the girls out of her mind. “They whisper.”

  “Enough,” he says. “Mira, I want to tell you a story. Imagine, dear, before electrical lights. No spotlights, no disco balls. This is how the first ballerinas danced—in theaters lit by gaslights, close to the fire. Now, these early ballerinas would sometimes get a little too far downstage, too close to the lamps, and their fragile tutus, which were longer in those days than they are now, well—they would catch fire, go up, poof! The ballerina engulfed in flames! Many ballerinas died this way. But they didn’t stop the show. Poor Clara Webster burned in front of the audience and they carried her off and the show went on.

  “One night a dancer named Rostova was performing Swan Lake—there it was, the fire. In the mirror, she saw her own wings in flames but rushed out onstage right on cue. Siegfried, without missing a beat, grabbed a blanket from backstage, pas de bourréed over to her and wrapped her in that blanket. He had second-degree burns on his hands from trying to tamp out the worst of the flames. But they were onstage for the next act, Siegfried doing lifts with a bandaged hand. And Rostova danced the rest of the evening beautifully.”

  Mira’s head throbs.

  “The audience, interviewed afterward, said that they thought the fire was part of the performance. The audience only knows what it is told.”

  He looks at her, his black eyes boring into her. “Now these girls. They are like your fire.” She makes herself meet his eyes. “Mira, you must learn to dance with the fire.”

  There is a din inside her head that matches the one in the room. She looks around the room: everything glitters strangely. It’s too bright, like a dollhouse come to life. She feels like she’s seeing it all for the first time.

  Suddenly, her gloom lifts.

  A bow-tied waiter places a bowl of soup before her. It is a deep purple red, hot and salty, with bits of something like earth floating in it. Beneath the earth and salt, the tangy silver of the spoon. Then a plate of folded pancakes arrives on their table. A number of small dishes accompany them—sour cream, apples, jam. Her mouth waters at the tastes on display. She tries each one in succession—she has always been a good eater, with a taste for sweet and salty, sour and bitter.

  Then Maurice leans over to her and whispers in her ear, “My dear, do you see that man over there?” Mira looks at the corner where Maurice is pointing and she sees an older man—a man with white hair and the small wizened face of a turtle—gazing at a young girl sitting across from him.

  “That, my dear, is the great Balanchine.”

  There’s not a girl who dances in New York City who doesn’t know about Balanchine—Mr. B. He is synonymous with the great and the rare. He is father of the “pinhead ballerina”—that new variety—the waif with the strength of an ox. But to Mira, he is a confusing figure, more shadowy than the stars he has produced, more mysterious than Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, the show-stoppers of ABT.

  The great Balanchine wipes his mouth heartily. His twinkling eyes scan the room. They rest on her for a second before they continue on. Mira’s eyes shift to the girl next to him. She sits with her hands in her lap, looking down. From her small ears hang strands of diamonds. When the girl looks up again, Mira sees that she’s not a girl but a woman.

  Balanchine and the young-but-old woman gather their things. They don’t have much—he has no coat and she has only a tiny gold-clasped purse that hangs from one long-fingered hand. She puts her other arm through Balanchine’s. Her eyes are trinkets—wide and bright. She doesn’t smile. He steers her among the tables of the room as he makes his way toward their table. Then he and the glittering waif stand before them.

  Balanchine nods at Maurice and turns to Mira. His eyes are small and almond shaped, and through his skin you can see the bones of his skull. His eyes crinkle as he takes her in.

  “Is she one of mine?” he says.

  “No,” Maurice answers. “Not yet.”

  “Ah,” he says.

  “Her name is Mirabelle.”

  Mr. B nods. The woman blinks her startled eyes. They turn and make their way toward the door.

  CHAPTER 13

  PRESENT

  Sioban doesn’t come to contact class on Tuesday. She doesn’t show up to Dance History on Wednesday morning either. We are doing Léonide Massine and Balanchine, the early days of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the years when Bronislava choreographed her masterpiece, Les Noces. I imagine Sioban back in class, her tightly pulled back hair and lean body, her eyes anodyne, her speech subdued. I will say, Sioban, we need to talk. But where should our talk be? A
booth in the coffee shop in town? In the classroom after everyone’s gone? My office? Each place rife with danger.

  Then comes Friday afternoon. I’m in my office. Bill pokes his head in. I am sure he’s going to tell me he’s been given the Pell—delivering me into a year of deep income instability and insecurity, another overly educated, impoverished vagabond floating around the country. I am preparing the acrid congratulations, when he says. “Kate, are you okay?”

  I’m caught off guard. Is my distress that obvious?

  “You look like hell,” he says, grinning.

  I haven’t been able to deal with my contact lenses, so I am wearing an old pair of glasses—tortoiseshell frames that leave an orange greasy smudge near my temples where the chemical coating is wearing off. The prescription is years old. But it’s a relief in a way to see less well: if I can’t see as well, perhaps others won’t look so closely at me.

  Bill disabuses me of that.

  “Thanks,” I say. “It’s just a scratched cornea.” I have no idea where I get this lie. “And my shower’s been broken.” Lie, lie. “But thanks for your concern.” I am not able to keep the bitterness out of my voice. My disdain for him at that moment is pure and unadulterated.

  He is saying something about his aunt rupturing her cornea but I’m not really listening. My worse vision helps me see the broader outlines of his face, the shape of it—I realize that the name Krasdale must be a shortened form of something more ethnic.

  Then he claps his hands on his knees a few times and says, “Kate, the other night, I was driving home after coming back from dinner and I saw”—he looks away—“I saw you and that student—I saw her in your office the other day, just walking together.” Then he looks right at me now. “You walked side by side without talking. Exactly in step together. Like you were going to an important meeting or something.” He laughs.

  “God, Bill. Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  “Listen,” he says. “I’ve been there before—almost there.” I wish I could see his expression better. Is he smiling or grimacing? I have the strange thought that he’s flirting with me.