Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

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.