Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

He is staring at her in that way again. “She was the last of the great classical ballerinas. Trained by Petipa. She lived to see everything — the dissolution of it all — war, revolution, the birth of modern dance. The dear had such weak ankles. Her feet were disastrously arched. The agonies she suffered!”

“I know,” says Mira. She did not know any of this.

She stares at the shoe hovering in space. The cracked flank, its ripped toe box, the flushed skin, the brownish bloodstains. An organ removed from a body.

Then he raises the lights and she can see it rests on a glass pedestal. Some almost-invisible strings hold the tiny, battered shoe in place. Beyond the shoe, she sees the far wall is covered with photos of dancers. A few are autographed studio portraits of ballerinas she recognizes: Patricia McBride squints her cat eyes. Gelsey Kirkland’s doll-like face looks surprised. Merrill Ashley’s strong jaw commands the room. Kay Mazzo’s gamine gaze charms. But the majority of the pictures are black-and-white and faded. It is these that Mira finds herself drawn to. She wanders past this gallery of unknown ballerinas from times past. Strange unreadable writing is printed in the corners of some of the pictures.

“Where are these from?”

“All over the world. There’s a rare one of Michel Fokine in Harlequin .” He waves his hand at a picture of a muscular man dressed like a court jester. “Alicia Markova in a revival of Pas de Quatre . Here’s Nureyev as Drosselmeyer. Pierina Legnani as Odette and Odile. My father saw Legnani dance once. He said it was like wind blowing around on a stormy day. She was pre-Pavlova — squat, muscular. And, here, Olga Spessivtseva in Diaghilev’s Sleeping Princess .”

More than anyplace Mira knows — more than her crumbling, fried-food-smelling school, or her cold room at home, with its walls still half-flayed of paper, more even than The Little Kirov studios — she has the feeling of belonging in this room.

He points out a photo that shows a lady with a little helmet-like hat and red lips, holding a swan on her lap. The bird’s tiny face is nestled in her neck. “Here’s Pavlova with her pet swan.” Then he gestures to a photo right next to it of a woman on the ground in a white tutu bent over an extended leg.

“When she was dying, she said, ‘Bring me my swan!’ She died with her costume in her arms.” He smiles, somehow satisfied.

“Come on,” he says. She follows him back through the rooms. He stops in the living room, turns on the lights, and motions for her to sit on a couch that folds around the room. She perches on its edge. The walls are pastel green, the drapes yellow-gold. A portrait of a blond lady in a green dress hangs over the couch. Mira touches the cool leather of the couch. She loves the feeling of something so sleek and unmarked. So different from her own house’s dusty throw pillows, chipped wood furniture, scratched mirrors. She realizes that she is still in her parka and that it smells like French fries.

She hears a clatter of dishes. Now he’s back in the doorway holding a plate of cookies. He’s taken off his coat, and as he makes his way across the room, she can see for the first time how thin and stooped he is. A complicated set of maneuvers precedes each step he takes. One of his shoes’ soles is several inches higher than the other. The laces are thick. Shoes for a cripple! She feels something wild and green grow in her. Fear. Fear of a different sort.

At that moment, she thinks of her mother. She’s never wanted her mother so much: the feel of a certain scratchy purple dress her mother used to wear often. She imagines her mother opening a can of Chef Boyardee. The meat paste at the center. The sweet, watery tomato sauce. She feels her Brooklyn self rushing back — the clatter of her Shrinky Dink necklaces, the pilled bottom of her two-year-old bunny slippers; the stack of dusty records on her bottom bookshelf.

She sees from the clock that it is six thirty. She is usually home by now.

“Can I go now?”

He pauses in front of her with his mouth twitching. “Of course you can go, Mira.”

He goes to the phone on the wall, dials, and speaks into it. He is calling her a cab. Then he walks her to the front door. He pauses with his hand on the doorknob. Before he opens it, he turns to her. “It’s a secret, you know. Don’t tell anyone I let you see it. The shoe.”

She is walking into the bright hallway when he says, “Wait—”

She turns. He stands half in the brightness of the hall, half in the gloom of his apartment. She can barely hear him when he speaks again. “Can I have something — to remember you by?”

A cab is waiting for her downstairs. She is on her way home; it’s okay. She reaches in the pocket of her parka and pulls out a crumpled old hairnet with a bobby pin stuck in it and hands it to him. He takes the tangle of nylon and metal. Propping the door with his body, he examines it. He smiles. “Thank you,” he says.

On her way home in the cab, Mira anticipates her arrival: her mother will be on the phone with Mira’s father talking in low worried voices. The lights will be on, and the old TV in the corner of the living room will be blaring the evening news as her mother listens, in case there are reports about a child having been killed. When she finally walks in the door, her mother will grab her in her arms and say “I was so worried!” and Mira will allow herself to say “Mom.”

But when the cab pulls up, her house is dark. The whole downstairs is quiet. When she reaches the third floor and sees a light underneath the door of the junk room, her heart sinks. Every instinct flares up in her body and she knows what she’s not supposed to do. She does it anyway: she throws open the door.

Someone growls. Someone else shrieks.

Amid the chipped porcelain dishes and dusty piles of books, Gary is kissing her mother. Her mother’s body on an old weathered table pushed up against the wall. The fabric of her mother’s kimono spills around her and Gary is pressed up against her, his hand inside her robe.

Mira’s stomach rises to meet her mouth, so she is surprised words can get through. Apparently, she is shouting at them. Something that sounds like “You! You! You!” Gary jumps off her mother; her mother pulls her robe around her, too slow to hide the pale, flushed skin. The rage Mira feels is immediate, swift, fortifying.

“I hate you.” She doesn’t know which of the two she is saying this to.

“Mira!” says her mother. “Oh, Mira. What are you doing in here?”

“You didn’t even know I was gone!”

Her mother clutches her robe more tightly and stands up. “I — you were at rehearsal.”

Gary is pulling his shirt back on. His thick man-arms are yellow and bruised-looking. “Weren’t you even worried?”

“I have faith in you,” says her mother. “I trust you.”

Everything is moving too fast for her. Her mother’s quivering floral smell and some other thing: like warm metal bleeding out into the air. Mira touches her lips, her nose. Her nose is bleeding. “Why? Why do you trust me?”

“Gary, go get some tissues,” says her mother.

While Gary is gone, her mother puts her head down to Mira’s. She says, “Your father called. He wants to see you.”

Gary returns with a handful of toilet paper. As Mira cups the paper to her nose, she thinks of Maurice, the little crippled man who likes to watch her dance, whose quiet apartment is filled with pictures of dancers and Pavlova’s tattered pointe shoe. She decides then and there that she will never tell her mother — or her father — about him. She’ll never tell anyone about Maurice. He is hers. And she has the sense that this is another genuine secret, one that gives her power.