Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

“She,” I say.

She gives me a long look. “ She then.”

“She hasn’t been back to class.”

“Talk to her. You have the chance to — to — make it right.” Now she looks fierce and satisfied. As if we’ve concluded a difficult business meeting.

I try out a smile, and she returns it. “I’m hoping to go to New York for spring break,” I say. “I’m thinking of doing an article about Bronislava Nijinska.”

“By all means,” she says, and smiles more brightly. I see that she feels good, condemning me to further attempts at self-mastery.

She has gone back to her computer now, its blue radius pulling her in. “Just make sure you come back.”

I’m up now, about to open the door, when she stops me again. Her hands are on the keyboard. “Why — her? I’m curious.”

I look at the floor, stupidly say the only thing that is in my mind, which she has somehow wiped clean of artifice. “I don’t know.” Then I say, “She’s beautiful.”

She frowns. “Really? I know everyone has a secret — I wondered about yours — but I didn’t think it would be this ordinary.”

I have to say something in my defense. “The Vikings before they jumped off the cliff? The samurais before they commit hara-kiri? What the suicide bombers say before they detonate? Their heads are all filled with visions of beauty.”

“I won’t speak as director. I will speak as your friend.” She leans forward and squints at me. “What I see is a woman who is becoming . What you are becoming I really don’t know.” She shakes her head. “And, truthfully, Kate, I don’t know if you can do it here.”

Felicia Facebooks me that afternoon — a message saying she has an extra room and that as long as I can be, as she knows I am, “discreet,” she is happy to put me up. Discreet? Discreet how? Discreet like don’t leave underwear in the bathroom? Discreet like don’t bring heroin addicts you meet in Times Square into your room to shoot up? Discreet like don’t have sex with your students and if you do, certainly don’t get caught?

I honestly don’t know if I can be discreet anymore, but I don’t mention that. I buy a plane ticket for Wednesday, two days from now, which gives me a good five days in New York before I need to be back.

Dance is exploding onto TV and into the movies. Baryshnikov’s Nutcracker, with the cast of ABT, is broadcast to millions, a prime-time holiday special. In the theaters, the blockbuster movie is Saturday Night Fever , which celebrates the disco craze. Along with Mira, all of America has fallen under the spell of dance.

In New York City, that winter, the holidays come. Uptown, at Lincoln Center, there is New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker , where out-of-towners and New Yorkers alike, in a rare moment of solidarity, watch the tree grow while their daughters stare wide-eyed as Marie and Fritz enter the land of the synthetic snowflakes. Downtown, in Greenwich Village, at Judson Memorial and St. Marks, purposefully pagan performances feature dancers in cutoff sweats standing on chairs and rolling around on the floor to the sounds of an out-of-tune guitar. Even farther downtown, in the lofts of SoHo and Tribeca, glazed-eyed people gather to dance in altogether different ways into the early morning hours.

It is in the windy stretch of Seventh Avenue in the twenties in a lower midtown uncolonized by dance that The Little Kirov rents the musty basement theater of the Fashion Institute of Technology for their annual performance of The Wounded Prince.

Mira waits backstage for her entrance. It’s the opening of Act One. The Prokofiev score dips and rises cheerily. The prince’s hunting party is passing though the clearing. Between Mira and the world onstage, the motes of dust swirl like bugs on a warm spring night. When Christopher finishes his solo, he will glide offstage with his attendant (Enrique, joyous, hair wild despite the Polish dressing ladies’ best efforts, a gold-painted cardboard horn clutched in his right hand, eyes shining as if he were the prince). Then, it will be her turn, her cue. She must listen for the hill the music climbs, then the beginning of the fall into the valley, the long loose valley where there is sunlight and playful animals, and the flute calls back and forth from one end of the valley to the other. Her torso is itchy from the body suit she is wearing — a stiff pink thing made of mesh and a strong elastic material — under the Flower Princess’s yellow calf-length dress.

Christopher plays hide-and-seek with Enrique. He wears a sleeveless hunting shirt, brown britches, and moccasins. He carries a bow and arrow. He does a series of small leaps and draws his right hand back to pluck an invisible bowstring. His face is pasty white, white-white, as white as the palest rock beneath the river water, staring up at you. But the rock has a layer of garish paint on top of it.

She remembers earlier, seeing his face and hers in the mirror, side by side. The music rises, hovers, and then begins to fall. No, not this valley, she remembers, the next one.

She and Christopher sat in front of the long greasy mirror with the plastic Christmas-size bulbs trumpeting all around it, announcing their ghost faces being made into painted marionettes. Pink for lips and cheeks. Eyelids green as the brightest Crayola.

She feels a prick of heat at her knees. Her head is tight with the bind of hairspray holding her hair back into the many braids that it took the dressing lady — the black-haired one with the mole on her chin and the cigarette-smelling hands — so long to do that her scalp began to burn and she began to feel dizzy. The lady pulled and tugged and clutched at Mira. The bobby pins the lady gripped in her teeth moved up and down like insect antennae trying to communicate something dire.

The larger woman with the stomach making a ledge for her breasts worked on Christopher. She said, “It looks like much much, but it’s not much much. Onstage, you must be seen. Onstage, lights take away, so you must put back.”

Christopher looked down at a textbook he cradled in his lap while the blond one adjusted his costume. The other one’s hands worked on Mira’s shoulders, smoothing and gathering material under her arms where an opaque sleeve hangs too loosely.

“You know this, Christopher? Of course, he knows. You are big star, dancing at Metropolitan Opera House.”

She stepped back and touched up something on his cheeks.

The black-haired one said of Mira, “This one is so small. Last year’s was big, then bigger.” She clucked as she braided Mira’s hair. The blond one laughed.

Mira stared at her pale painted face and at Christopher’s in the blaring mirror. The prince of her nine-year-old self who could cause her to feel woozy. And now her own bright eleven-year-old self in a diaphanous yellow dress and a body suit made of flesh-like armor. Here are their faces side by side in the mirror.

His green tunic was being sprayed with fresh brown splotches of spray paint. He looked up from his textbook and caught her eyes in the mirror. His eyes were outlined in black and were bright and watchful. His long, narrow face was stately and remote and confident. He was important. He was the Prince. His fingers drummed softly against his green thigh. A hard, artificial smell floated out from her hair. She smiled and her hair crackled.

Now Christopher, in his green and brown tunic, has exited stage right. Enrique, whose darker skin seems to hold the stage lights better, raises the horn to his lips and arches his back in a series of fake blasts. This is her cue. The music hovers again, then begins to fall. She adjusts the wooden basket she carries on her arm, lifts herself up on her toes, raises her arms, and runs forward. This is all she can think: run forward, keep running, stop center stage, at the little blue X marked on the floor. Ronde de jambe. She picks the mushrooms. Glissade, bend and arch, glissade, bend and arch. She puts them in the basket that she carries on her arm. She is the flower girl. But she is also another girl. She is the girl watching the flower girl and she is judging this girl. Is she carefree enough? Is she smiling enough? Are her battements fast enough? Is her jeté high enough? She is behind the music, then in front of it. But then she is just the one girl, the carefree girl dancing, with movements so natural to her it’s as if they are her own. Beyond the lights like too many suns in the sky, she can see only darkness. She relaxes and moves easily in the music as if a fish in water.