Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

What had I expected? Not this level of anger and self-righteousness. I say, “Sioban, what we did was wrong. I take full responsibility. But it can never happen again.”

She scoffs in the midst of her great, heavy gulps. “Love is never wrong.”

Oh dear god, I think.

When I don’t respond quickly enough — my brain is whirring too fast to speak — she says “Don’t you love me?” There is nothing good I can say here. I look down at her beige carpet, where there are no longer any errant socks.

Love? That had — truly — never occurred to me. What does this say about me? This is a professional situation, I think. Make it right.

I go to her and reach out my hand. My hand hovers over her head. “I care about you, Sioban,” I say. I see the pain I’ve caused the girl. I can see her. Not just because of my contacts. Her face, overwhelmed, but unafraid. My early performing made me into a weathervane for others — I don’t want that for her.

“You are too gifted, too young to lose your way,” I say. I want to touch her face. “You have your life ahead of you. And I mean it. I don’t want to get in your way. Dance. Be a scientist. Show the world what can be done. I’ve made rules for myself that I maybe didn’t have to. But it’s too late for me to fix that.” I laugh and my laughter sounds strange to me. “But maybe I can fix some of it. We’ll see.”

She stands, turns into me, and then my arms are around her and it is a hug but it is a strange hug. There is nothing sexual in it. Her thin body seems thinner. It’s like hugging myself, her bones and muscles are my own. I feel incredible tenderness. I am amazed that I have managed more kindness toward her than I have toward myself. I feel relief and something else, maybe something like hope.

“Listen, I am going to take a trip—” I say. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

She clings to me. She grabs my arm, the one with my injured hand. Though it’s wrapped in my jacket, a pain shoots up my arm. Then I notice that Sioban’s science textbook is propped up by another book, a thick one. I can just catch the brown cover and the ornate font, a generic title treatment in those days. It’s Bronislava’s memoirs. She’s been using it to prop up her textbook. She catches me staring at the book. I pull away and bury my face in my bag as I search for one of my cards. I pull one out. It’s actually from my previous college, but that doesn’t stop me. I scrawl my cell number on the back of it and tack it to her wall with one of the push pins sticking there. “I’m going to New York,” I say. “Call if you need to.”

“Fuck you,” she says, but her voice is lighter. Something has shifted again. She is letting me go. She has reclaimed something. She knows it. My heart is racing and my stomach sinks. This will be harder than I thought. It’s almost impossible to maintain my boundaries with this girl. The tidal pull toward her is too strong.

She turns back to her desk like a snail into its shell, to her graphs and charts, to her highlighter, to her young rage and pain, and as much as I want her, I want that, even that, with a burning heart, I want all of that.

Maurice is right. The dark does come.

A few days after she’s out of the hospital, Mira is back at home, sitting on her scratchy blue flowered comforter in her unpainted room. She’s listening to Don Giovanni . She wears her terry cloth robe and dangles her feet in her puffy bunny slippers over the side of the bed. She finished her homework early and then alphabetized her bookshelf, which is filled with old books, many of which originally belonged to her mother. She fiddles with her beige adhesive wrist guard. Underneath this device, which she must wear for another week (but thank God it will be off in time for the SAB auditions), her skin itches as the tiny fracture heals. The itch has settled under the flesh-colored fabric. It is always there, rummaging about in the kitchen, doing its homework. Sometimes it jumps up, startled, and yells, and that brings tears to her eyes. She never knew an itch could poke you with the hot end of a poker. She never knew an itch could make you cry. She wants to tear off the wrist guard and rip the itch off, but she can’t. She is not allowed. If she plays the opera loud enough, the itch is quiet and she can’t hear her mother or Gary laughing or doing whatever they do downstairs.

Her eyes run over the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, with their cracking cardboard covers and gingery smell, and her four old records, The Osmonds Greatest Hits, Free to Be You and Me, Burl Ives, and one called English Songs of Old, stacked on the lower shelf, dusty now. In her closet, her shirts and dresses hang neatly, a sight that gives her pleasure even now that she is almost twelve. On the desk against the wall, her cat mug with pens and pencils in it sits on an old leather blotter that had belonged to her father. The two posters on her walls half-scraped of their wallpaper: one black-and-white of Baryshnikov as Albrecht in Giselle leaping like a pouncing cat, and one of Makarova — she had wanted Kirkland but the message to her mother had gotten garbled — in a penché in front of a dusky sunset studio backdrop.

She is listening to one of the records she recently found in the corner of her parents’ closet. Her father’s opera records that he didn’t take with him— Die Fledermaus and Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni ’s opening aria begins. She braces herself against the thundering orchestra and the trills and vibrato of exalted, expelled emotion. Something cracks inside her, and then flows like liquid. She doesn’t know the story — doesn’t care to — but she understands it is a drama of impending doom and revenge. The itch pokes its head up. She rubs at the outside of the hideous wrist guard. She imagines Giselle with a meat cleaver, thundering in among the Wilis, hefting it toward Albrecht’s head, his head rolling off his neck, blood on the Wilis’ white tutus.

There is a knock on her door. Louder now. She can’t ignore it. She opens the door wide as the aria blares behind her. Gary stands before her in his ripped T-shirt and black engineer boots. She glowers at him.

“Can I read you a poem?” he says. “I just wrote it.” He comes into her room and sits on her bed. He holds a piece of paper. He reads to her:

Killer black house flam flap flapper eyes cold flat palm greenbacks

mother, daughter flypaper hooters stuck down pinned beneath the viaduct

I live in darkness shout out I can hear only — hold me.

“What do you think?”

“I hate it,” she says.

He smiles. “I thought you would,” he says. He reaches out and touches her wrist.

“Does it hurt?”

She shakes her head.

He doesn’t take his hand away. “I can’t believe that guy didn’t catch you. What an asshole. Your mother thinks ballet is reductive claptrap, but you know, I thought you were great. You were really pretty. Beautiful.” He is close enough that she can smell the coffee on his breath. She can see pores on his nose like little holes in cheese. She doesn’t pull her hand away.

“She says, ‘Who defines what is beautiful? Whose definition is it?’ She can’t stand that you are getting sucked into some old dead guy’s idea of beauty, I guess.” He laughs. “Maybe I’m just an old guy.” He smiles and she notices his eyes are gray. They look sad. For a second, she doesn’t hate him. “Or maybe,” he says, pulling her closer, “she’s just jealous.”

A hand brushes against her wrist and grabs. She holds this hand, dry and calloused, but firm. On the other side of her she can feel a bony shoulder against hers. He pulls her to him. It is a bony chest full of need, a scratchy feeling on her neck, his scratchy lips eating her skin, and to her surprise she does not cry out. The mouth finds its way to her chin and wrestles upward, fighting for her mouth, finds it, and rests there. It recoils at first in surprise, then presses harder against her. She closes her eyes. She imagines it is Maurice. She kisses the mouth back. It is her first real kiss. Mira thinks: This is real. This is real. She does not know what this means, but it comes to her in a swift fall of words, like a curtain descending.