Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

“Nice job,” Christopher says, without looking at her.

He has switched to the other eye.

“Thanks,” she says, unable to look away. Again, those words: there is something wrong with him.

“But we still need to work on the lift,” he says. “You’re still holding back. You have to trust me, trust that I’ll be there.”

She pulls her leg warmers off, tosses them in her bag. The cooler air slides over her shins. She knows what he means. She hasn’t been able to recapture that feeling of abandon that she had the first day they rehearsed the lift — to close her eyes and just jump as if she were launching herself from the diving board into the deep end of the pool. Trust . Yes, that is the operative word. But she’s not sure that it is her fault. When Ms. Clement is not watching, he is cavalier, he is sloppy. He doesn’t plié enough, so that when she runs and leaps into him, it feels for a moment like a collision rather than a lift. She can feel his effort but it comes with a hitch, too late. Once he almost dropped her, she knows it, though he pretended it was just his jockstrap that had come loose. But can she say this to him, to a boy, a prince from ABT?

The truth is that she is disappointed in the difficult work of partnering. It is nothing like it looks: two bodies seamlessly flowing into and away from each other. It is nothing like dancing on your own, feeling the power of your own body transporting you. No, partnering is all sweating and grunting and hard-edged bones, hip bones jabbing into finger bones and taut thighs ricocheting, straining against a heaving shoulder, slick with sweat. It is unseemly and difficult, without the reward of self-mastery.

She surprises herself. “Maybe it’s not me, maybe it’s you, ” she says.

He looks at her. He looks tired, his face too long, his eyes too blurry, his skin sickly, his hair dank, too old and too young at once. There is something wrong wrong wrong with him. Then he steps back and regards himself. With the smudges beneath them, his eyes appear deeper set, his skin paler, his hair blonder. “It’ll be fine,” he says. “You’ll figure it out. Just keep practicing.”

She looks down — her turtleneck has hearts on it. How babyish!

She remembers Maurice’s story of Rostova and her partner. How he looked out for her. How he saved her when she caught fire. To trust and then leap. She needs to find a way to leap, she needs to close her eyes, she needs to ignore the hitch of his knees buckling, the unstableness of his stance, and the soft grunts that he might not even know slip out from somewhere in his slick-with-sweat throat. That is the job of the ballerina.

“Sorry—” she says.

He pulls his bangs back, rubs his fingers lightly over the skin of his forehead, investigating his pimples. “Are you going to audition in the fall?” he says.

She and Val had said they would audition for SAB and ABT someday, but it had been far off, an idea. Now she sees that it’s not far off at all. She must have nodded because he says, “SAB or ABT? Or both?”

For her only one shining, glittering acronym matters — the one owned by the wise, shadowy face she saw at the Russian Tea Room with Maurice. “SAB,” she says. “I met Mr. Balanchine once.”

He cocks his head and smiles, though it’s really more of a smirk.

I will go there. Next year. But she has to wait for August when they famously line girls up along a barre and lift their legs and check their arches and say which ones have a chance before they even dance. They wait for the last minute, a minute before September classes start, to hold the audition.

He nods. “You should. You’ll probably get in. You have the right line. No hips. They hate hips.”

“I’m only eleven,” she says.

“Yeah, well,” he says. “When I was your age, I was already the Nutcracker prince.”

“I know that.” She smoothes her white turtleneck with the hearts on it.

He laughs. “Of course you do. Did you read that book about me?”

She looks down and feels her face fill with blood.

He smiles slowly. “That’s all right,” he says. He is enjoying himself. He rubs his eyes quickly, almost violently, and shakes his hair.

He is about to leave. Suddenly, she doesn’t want him to go. She doesn’t want to be alone in the studio in the fading afternoon. She doesn’t want to go home on the train to her Brooklyn self, to her mother, to her absent father. She thinks about Gary, who, despite what he said, is over at the house all the time clattering away on a typewriter and lurking about, his hungry wolf’s face saying hello to Mira so that before Mira has to pee, she sticks her head out into the hallway to see if he is there. She thinks of her father with his head in his hands at the steamy diner. Her father’s new place: that bright apartment with the brown couch and squat black phone. She wants to say something to Christopher that will encompass all of this.

“My father skipped out.” Skipped out. She’s never said that before. She doesn’t even know what it means, exactly. It makes her blush.

He zips up his bag. “I’m sorry.” She can see he means it.

Now Christopher looks at her. His eyes look darker, deeper set, with the slight smudges beneath them. The old swooning feeling comes back to her. Only it is changed. She feels a vertiginous swell of something for this long-faced counterfeit prince. She knows now though that it is not love. What is it?

“That guy? Watching you that first day? I know him. I remember him. He comes around David Howard’s.” He begins lacing up his high-top sneakers. “Be careful of him. He’s a creep.” Now he doesn’t smile. He looks at her with his bruised-looking eyes. “There are creeps everywhere. The perverts are the ones who get caught.”

He pauses in the doorway and turns back around. “Ballet is not about me. It’s about you. You’ll see. Ballet is woman. That’s what Balanchine said.” He reaches in his pocket and holds out the eyeliner pencil. “Here,” he says. “It’s almost finished anyway. Try to get it right under your eye, otherwise it looks lame. It gives your eyes depth. If you burn it first, then let it cool for a minute, it’s even darker.”

She takes the pencil from him.

He turns and walks down the hallway to the elevator. She watches him go, her fist clenched around the little hard nub of a pencil.

She stops by the dressing room on the way out to get her coat. The room is deserted except for Robin, who has stayed after the older girls’ class to practice, no doubt, and is changing into her street clothes. Robin is naked. She has never seen Robin naked before — she usually arrives from school already with leotard and tights on underneath her street clothes. Her body is long and extremely white, more substantive than it appears in leotard and tights. Her nipples, big as raspberries, sit directly on her ribs.

There are two bright red spots on her pale cheeks.

Robin nods at Mira and begins pulling on a pair of jeans without any underwear.

Mira stands awkwardly in the center of the room for a moment. Then she surprises herself by walking up to Robin. “Are you going to audition?” Mira asks. Robin hunches over a bit and peers at Mira as if she is surprised to find her there. Mira realizes she has made a big mistake: she has come too close to Robin. But she doesn’t want to move back. If she moves back it will somehow be admitting she made a mistake to begin with. She and Robin are practically pressed up together. She can smell the certain combination of flowers and salt that she associates with those older than she is, with a next phase of life. She is dizzy with being so close to Robin’s long flat body, milky skin, and raspberry nipples.