Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

“Mom, that’s Mighty Mouse.”

She smiles again. Her voice lowers a notch and she hisses, “Attitude, please.”

It’s true. Here is Mighty Mouse. His enormous smiling face comes toward them, and then stops. His ochre-colored, prosthetic-looking limbs, too thin for the gourd-shaped body, his giant smile. Now the balloon is right above her. The arms and legs wave and shudder. There are many creases in the fabric. Something is wrong, she knows it. The balloon handlers, men in beige space suits, have stopped. They twirl and spin their spools of string, their eyes raised to the sky.

“Dad,” she says. “I think it’s going to fall.”

“No it’s not, honey. It’s just the wind.”

She sees people high above, their heads out the window, waving handkerchiefs. The balloon lists sharply to the side. Some of the spacemen unwind the string as quickly as they can; others wind it as quickly as they can. People are pulling their heads inside the windows. The crowd around them begins to shuffle.

“Dad, it’s really going to fall.”

“It’s okay, honey. They’re just adjusting it.”

Mira covers her head with her arms.

“Mira!” says her father.

The boy is laughing. “Combat zone! That thing is gonna combust!”

“Sam,” says the lady.

She peeks out. The smiling moon face is now lurching over to the other side. She looks around: everyone is laughing. The black-haired, electrocuted clown is back again and he is pantomiming the serious spacemen, with their somber engineer’s faces, their longshoreman’s caps over their heads. He is cartwheeling, leaping, tugging on an invisible line, now he is falling. Like border guards that are trained not to see what is in front of them unless it violates the rules, the spacemen do not look at him, they do not blink.

They right their ship through some effort of physical and mental communication that astounds Mira. And then they are walking again in unison.

“See. It’s just the way it is. It’s constantly in motion. Don’t you remember this is the way it is? You weren’t scared last year.”

Mira is amazed. It’s true: the trajectory of the balloon is not straight ahead but side to side down the long avenue. The spacemen are constantly running and spinning and frantically twirling their spools of string, eyes raised on the swollen body above them. She suddenly feels very tired.

To Sam, she says, “Ha-ha.” Then she turns to her dad. “I’m cold.” Her father hands her the plaid blanket he has been carrying under his arm and she wraps it around herself. For the next two hours, the little children around her — a boy of five or six and his younger sister, both sneaker-clad and moon-faced — jump up and down and squeal. Do all children secretly feel, somewhere, what she does now? Has she always felt like this — and just not known what it was? Was there always this chug under her heart when her dad raises the camera and says “Smile”? Like that cloud of fatigue that descends over her eyes when she hears there’ll be games — oh no, not apple bobbing or sack racing again? What does it mean? She is glad there are no balloons made of The Wounded Prince— of the Flower Princess, of the lame Prince, of the Sorcerer in her fiery red. She intuits that these are creatures of the imagination that would lose their power if blown up into great, unwieldy balloons knocking against the concrete world. She huddles against her father as she watches the floats and balloons going by.

When the parade is finally over, the pink-hatted lady turns to her dad and says, “All that fun and the cold air has really fired up my appetite. How about some lunch?” Her small eyes get smaller and focus on Mira, and her gloved fingers rest for a moment on Mira’s dad’s arm. She has sparkling diamonds in her ears and one gold ring over a gloved finger.

The next week, Mira finds Maurice waiting for her after rehearsal. He calls out to her from a parked car. At first she doesn’t know where his voice is coming from. Then she sees — a shiny, maroon Mercedes parked on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. She pokes her head through the open window. It smells deeply of new leather. The seats are a dusky maroon (a few shades darker than the outside) and the dashboard is black.

“It’s new,” he says. “My first car. They have all these devices now. It’s amazing.”

Inside it looks like an old-fashioned carriage, like the kind he took her in that first time. He sits at the wheel on some kind of box covered with sheepskin. There is a lever — he holds it with his hand — connected to the steering column. Attached to the rearview mirror hangs a chain with a tiny glass swan that spirals, its translucence lit by all the lights of passing cars.

“It’s got a lot of power. It handles divinely. The classic and the modern converge.” He laughs. “Do you like it, Mirabelle?”

“Why do you call me that?”

“I like to. Is it okay?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Would you like to get in?”

She’s been warned, of course, against getting into the car with a stranger. But he is hardly a stranger by now, Maurice— her Maurice. She looks at Maurice’s pale hands, his delicate fingers. Gary, who now lives with them, more or less, is a stranger; Maurice, who owns such beautiful things, who cares only about beautiful things, is not. She feels she is learning something about the world.

She goes around to the street side and gets in. She runs her fingers along the smooth cool leather of the dashboard, the slick, stippled leather of the seat that squeaks softly beneath her. Under the car’s soft skin, she can feel its metal body. She remembers the cool, strange quiet of his apartment, in which all noises of the city subsided and the past sprang up, rich and alive: the dim rooms, the inert smells of luxury, underneath it, an old familiar scent of apples and cinnamon, and beneath even that, something deeper and stranger. She recalls the gallery of black-and-white photos of famous dancers from the past, all of whose names he knew, and then, Pavlova’s frayed tiny shoe. She could almost hear it, the shoe, lit from above, beating in the center. All sounds outside fade.

She feels a rush of good feeling for this man, Maurice, her friend.

A strange spell comes over her; she feels no need to speak. She feels like she and Maurice are in a bubble, present only as watchers. It is powerful. They sit in the dark in the miasma of chemicals and leather without talking for some time. People pass on one side, cars on the other. Being inside the car reminds her of his apartment.

“I’m scared,” she says finally.

“Oh!” he says. “Of what?”

“I don’t know.” She watches the cars. The lights of the cars streak by. On her right, the ceaseless sidewalk parade continues.

Then the strange, now familiar laugh: a rusty laugh with high and low sounds, like an ancient language shouted in the hall of a mausoleum. She is growing to trust him; he appears, of all the adults in her life, to be the only one who tells her the truth — perhaps the only one who knows it.

“Let me tell you something. Do you know why my legs are like this?”

“No.”

“I had polio. When I was about your age I had polio. I was in an iron lung for eight months. When I got out I couldn’t walk right.”

“Oh.”

“Do you know what an iron lung is?”

She shakes her head. She does not look at him. She does not want reasons. She does not want him to explain anything about himself to her.

“It’s a giant machine that breathes for you. There were others in my room in their own machines. They often left the lights out, even in the daytime. When I lay in that darkness in that hospital, in that machine, I felt scared at first. I felt panic. I felt like I was dying. I heard the breathing of others around me, but I couldn’t see them. After a while, I realized I wasn’t dying. I was afraid. I was afraid of the dark. After more time, I knew I wasn’t going to die and I began to like the dark. I thought of it as my friend. It gave me cover, the cover of invisibility.