Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

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.

“I’m offended,” I say, harsher than I intend.

“Be careful, Kate, be very careful. I am not the enemy.”

“Leave me alone,” I say. I am yelling. “Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Have it your way. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” His tone, dire and mean, is so out of keeping with his generally jovial demeanor we stare at each other in shock. Then he shakes his head. “It’s your decision to self-destruct, not mine.”

“Get out. You bigfooted me. You have no right—”

“You’re a tough one, Kate.” He shakes his head again and turns to leave. “I’ve tried to help. Don’t say I didn’t try.”

Then comes the weekend. It’s weekends like this that make me glad I live alone. I don’t want to have to think about anyone else right now. I shop and cook, I make a stew, I start grading the midterm. But my worry is constant — a ghost tic in my consciousness spouting new scenarios. What is going on with Sioban? Am I going to get a call from some parent somewhere, complaining of a crying, inconsolable girl? (I think of the trembling hand on my wrist, the crumpled sock on the floor.) Is she talking to friends? Does she have friends? She comes to class alone and leaves alone, quivering with ideas, rattling the others. I go so far as to look up her home address in the student register. It’s a town a few hours away that looks from a map like it could be considered a suburb of Cincinnati.

Or what if she is vindictive? What if she goes to the administration instead of her parents? What if she says — Dr. Randell put her tongue inside of me ?

By Sunday evening I’ve finished everything I need to do and, in this fallow time, I really start drowning. I try reading, but can’t concentrate. I try researching, but my mind wanders, the pen droops, and I become fixated on hunting for splinters of glass on the floor.

That night I call my mother again. The phone rings and then her piqued voice answers. Hello? She always sounds like she’s being interrupted. Hello? Hello? I imagine I’m catching her on her roof garden, at her mushroom breeding pots, her freckled knees reddening in the spring sun. Rainy season is almost over there in San Francisco. Things dry out quickly. The sun blankets and burns and chills the rooftops and soon the cool summer breeze will start up. The fog doesn’t ever come this far inland.

It’s enough just to think of her. I hang up, cutting off her annoyed hellos.

My phone is languid on the table now. It shows its dull off-line screen. The sky darkens outside of the curtains. Then my eyes rest on the knives I keep in a basket on the counter, a hodgepodge of well-used curiosities. Estate sale specials. I pick an old knife from the basket and run my palm along the edge of the blade. It surprises me when my hand comes away with a long cut. I watch the blood wind its way into the little wrinkles in my palm. I rip off a sheet of paper towel and wad it into my hand. Staunch the inevitable — but for how long? There is a universe of deception behind one secret. Not all secrets see the light of day. My life is a testament to that.

Why am I drawn to the illicit, the secretive? It’s like a curse I can’t shake, no matter how far I’ve come. What have these secrets cost me? A normal life, and intimacy of a typical kind. There is no doubt something still wrong with me, deep down, something that this letter has unearthed. Here I am, one secret at my heels, another blossoming before me. It’s absurd. I am absurd.

Holding my hand, I head to the bathroom to look for gauze.

I have to go to New York. There may still be people there — people from long ago, another era — who can help me put the pieces back together. There’s someone in particular I have to see — if he’s still there. I hesitate, then go to Facebook and, with my throbbing, bandaged hand, poke around. I am looking for Felicia, one of the few girls I used to dance with whom I’ve kept in touch with (at least sort of). I find her page: there are some posed photos of her in exotic locales, sunglasses and smiles, her black hair pulled back. But no new posts for six months, the last one a “like” for a salon. Still, I message her and say I am coming to town. “Any interest,” I ask, hoping I sound good-humored, wry in my own way, “in putting up an old friend?” (Was the word friend the right one?)

The performance will take place the weekend before Christmas: Saturday, December 17. There’s only a month left of rehearsal time, and one weekend is lost because of Thanksgiving weekend. They’ve just finished another rehearsal, but there is still so much to do — especially on the lifts.

Christopher and Mira gather their things silently. Out of the corner of her eye, Mira watches him fold his leg warmers and pack them in his bag. His T-shirt is wet with sweat and his face pale with effort. He pulls on a blue sweatshirt and takes a comb out of his bag and runs it through his damp hair. Then he uncaps a stick of something and walks up to the mirror. He pulls his high bangs back again and gazes at his forehead, rubs his fingers lightly over the skin. Then, carefully, with quick, sure strokes, he draws a dark line beneath one eye.