Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

“Wonderful,” the voices say as she runs into the wings. Then back onstage for the second dance with the Lavender Girls. Val, Haijuan, and two other girls doing a pas de quatre. “Lovely,” says Mr. Feltzer, standing in the corner, his eyes bulging and liquid. And she knows it was lovely. Like a fisherman with a rod in the water, she feels the audience tugging on that line — and she reels it in, just a little tighter — and the line between her and the audience is taut. When she pulls, they tug; when they tug, she pulls. She imagines Maurice out there. When she rises up and can almost touch one of the suns, a girl flying high in the air, smiling, and she feels like she can touch Pavlova’s shoes. She and the Prince finally gaze at each other from across the stage, and they begin running toward each other, when the Sorcerer in red, played by Hannah this year (it was the only costume she could fit into, Mira had overheard the ladies saying), moves from upstage down between them, doing her flashy cancan kicks and tossing her head back, like she does when she barrels down the hall with her loose limbs and her big bouncing chest clamped down with an ace bandage, as the music booms and grinds cacophonously. Then, sure enough, the Prince’s horse (Enrique again, now sporting a canvas and papier-mâché horse’s head) rears up and tumbles to the ground with Christopher’s legs beneath him, and Mira too collapses (her head hits the floor dustily) under the Sorcerer’s spell. Hannah in her red jumpsuit does a deep grand plié and shakes with a vengeful anger, and the curtains jerk closed.

Intermission. Fifteen minutes. Costume changes. Makeup touch-ups. Everyone darting this way and that. Some sitting and playing cards. On her way to the changing room, she passes a group outside the stage door. Val and Haijuan are there, squatting in their Lavender Girl tutus, their faces smeared with the assembly line makeup: a crude dab of eye shadow across their lids and a smear of blush along their cheeks. The jester is sitting with them. He is a squat, muscular man in his early twenties in white face paint (black diamonds around his eyes), a shiny white unitard, black leg warmers, and a black beret. Val whispers something to the jester and he turns to look at Mira with his cool eyes. He rises from where he sits in the midst of the group and says, “Flower girl, little flower girl, I have some medicine for you.” Wearing a tiny smile on his face, he holds out his flask.

“I have to change,” she says and slips into the bunker-like makeup room to complete her costume change. Actually, she knows, and they know that she knows, that she could have stopped for a minute and laughed and drunk the sweet-smelling stuff the jester carries with him in his painted flask. (She’d tried it once and it set her throat on fire.)

Having completed her costume change, she pushes back into the wings to take her place for Act Two. In the little cubbyhole between the lighting booth and the backstage wall, underneath the scaffolding and wires, through a cloud of stage-lit dust, she sees the man in the white unitard pressing the flask to Christopher’s mouth like he is feeding a baby. Christopher is in his gray tights and blue velvet tunic, opened to show a white T-shirt. As she watches (they do not notice her), Christopher drinks from the jester’s hand the way the sparrows in the park eat from the fingers of decrepit old men. The man watches Christopher drink, his eyes glassy. Suddenly, he pulls the flask away and kisses Christopher hard on the mouth. Christopher does not fight him, does not sway, does not kick; in fact his whole body seems to relax.

Meanwhile, the curtains have opened, the music has started up, and the audience is swimming like hungry fish just beyond the suns that burn high in the sky and applauding, for Act Two is beginning and Mr. Feltzer is whispering, “Christopher, where are you? It is time. It is time.” Christopher’s eyes are opened already, but they look like they have just opened. Mira stands, still staring at Christopher and the jester with the wet smirking lips. Her face, under its painted-white mask, feels red hot.

“You—” she says. The pink girls, the littlest girls, are coming into the wings now, and the thrumming of their feet and their quick, startled breathing is all around them. In the midst of this commotion, neither she, nor Christopher, nor the jester moves. They are locked in a complex web of stares, the reverberations of which maintain the architecture of the moment even as it has passed and she has begun to disbelieve what she just saw.

“You said — I–I could trust you,” she says in a hushed, spasmodic whisper (she is still trying to observe, perhaps unconsciously, the rule of silence when backstage).

Christopher laughs as he buttons up his tunic. “I said should , not could .” The jester laughs, too. Mira notices he has a red striped candy cane painted on the front of his unitard. How did she not notice this before? Had he hidden it somehow? If so, how?

“You’re drunk,” she says. This word has the effect she wants.

Christopher straightens up and looks at her. “I’m fine. I can do this part in my sleep.”

“Christopher, you are late,” says Mr. Feltzer, who has appeared next to her. Christopher pushes past Mira and past Mr. Feltzer, and launches himself onto the stage, dragging one of his feet and hunching his back, for the prince is lame in the second act.

As if she is dislodging something from her throat, Mira says, “He was kissing.” She points at the jester. “Kissing.”

Then the jester comes toward her. She takes a step back. The veins are pulsing underneath his white face makeup. The black diamonds around his eyes quiver. Now there is the gathering of the music into a rattle-like force that means it is the jester’s turn. He bellows, “Do not,” he says, spitting the words in her face. “Puts your nose away from where it belongs.” The jester takes his beret and throws it on the ground. Then he screams in his other language, in which she hears the name of her country—“America.” He pushes through the crowd that has gathered around him, past Mira and Mr. Feltzer, and he leaps out into the false sunshine, where the Prince is waiting for him.

But Mira cannot let it go. She cannot let it pass. She feels this with certainty. It is a feeling, a knowledge, that trumps all other feelings. She has an obligation, somehow — to herself, to the Prince, to Christopher — to remember this moment. But she has no time to figure it all out as she too propels herself forward for her entrance.

She closes her eyes and leaps. The stretch in her legs, the rising feeling under the breastbone, the white space of flame in her head. She imagines Maurice saying, “Ah, yes, this is a leap. She leaps with her whole body.”

“I hate her,” she hears someone whisper in the wings.

Under her sternum, the fist of her heart releases, opening up its palm.

The force of her blind leap almost knocks Christopher over. She smells his sour, ragged breath. His arms buckle. He lunges to try to gain his balance. She lists to the right. She feels a cool breeze from the empty orchestra pit below. She realizes that she will fall; she is falling . She hears a grunt as he pulls her over to the left and with another heave she is above him, his hands on her hip bones, her back arched, her leg suspended. He has righted himself. At that moment, she realizes her dream of becoming the Flower Princess — there is an unbearable fullness in this, and then, as soon as she is aware of it, it is gone, this fullness, and in its spot, a strange new empty spot, a death at the center, a nothingness, of a star imploding. In its absence is a falling away of the girl who cares too much, who wants too much, who hopes too much, the girl who thrums with too much life, who needs too much. The spotlights blare down on her and she smiles, falling falling into the velvety darkness — victorious.