Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Just then, with a sputtering flicker and a snap, the lights go out. Her record player whirs to a stop. Gary pulls away from her. She hears him walking into the hallway. “What’s happened, Rachel?” The first thing Mira thinks is: the world is ending. Mira feels her way out to the dark hallway. She hears her mother in the hallway below. “What now?” says her mother with a burst of glee in her voice. She loves it, thinks Mira. The world is ending and she loves it.

“Is everyone okay? Is it just us?” says her mother, reaching the third-floor landing.

They open the door of the junk room, and the streetlights are blaring inside the windows like a set of binoculars — two eyes burning down on them. Far to the right, if she squints her eyes she can just make out the digital clock on top of the Watchtower building blinking the time on and off: 7:15.

“It’s not the neighborhood,” says Gary. “It is just us.”

Then her mother is downstairs on the phone for a long time, yelling and cursing. “Process difficult to reverse,” she says, repeating something being said to her. Finally, she hangs up. “They say the electricity bill hasn’t been paid,” she says. She blames it on Mira’s dad, who she says was supposed to take care of it.

“It’s your fault,” says Mira, knowing that it is; everything is, will always be, her mother’s fault.

For the next two days, the house remains cold. The curtains billow with the air that leaks in through the splintered windowpanes. Mira walks around with blankets draped over her, as does Gary. Her mother won’t resort to blankets, but she wears a terry cloth robe over her kimono. All the parts of Mira’s body outside of the blanket grow purplish with cold. In the early morning, when she gets up, she can see her breath come out of her body. Sitting at her desk at school, her teeth chatter and her feet are numb for the first few hours of each day. She rubs them against the metal prongs of her chair to get the feeling to return to them. Everything hardens in the cold: her mattress grows into a slab of stone, the old oranges in the fruit bowl become bowling balls, her sheets crackling slivers of ice. Her pointe shoes are especially brittle. She, her mother, and Gary use candles and gas lanterns that her mother buys at a hardware store on Court Street. She places candles all around the parlor. Mira sits on the floor of the living room, the TV dark beside her, doing homework by candlelight. They carry the camping lanterns when they go up or down the stairs. With mincing steps, wrapped in a blanket, Mira bourrées her way over to her dresser. She draws lines under her eyes. In the oily light of the lamp, she gazes at her pale face. Gary’s eyes brush over her as she walks by in her long white nightgown, carrying a lantern. She lowers the light so that dark envelops her. Her mother comes into the room and says, “Oh! Our house is haunted!” Then she laughs her slipped-on-a-banana-peel kind of a laugh. . “Our house has ghosts! Whoo hooo. .” She rushes at her daughter the way she sometimes did at her studio when her work was going well and would grab Mira and spin her around. Mira smells her sharp flowery smell. Her mother stops and picks up a cold-withered orange from the buffet table next to her. Holding it, she walks through the flickering of the parlor to the window. “A generator. That’s what we need. A generator. We don’t need those Con Ed fuckers,” she says.

Mira dreams of Maurice. He is driving her in his car down the snake of the highway — it’s the East River at night, over the bridge. He parks on a side street. He takes her through the streets, looking for something. He takes her hand. There is a delinquent hush over these Brooklyn streets. He stops at a dented steel door in the alley behind a large building. She stands beside him, wearing her winter coats and mittens. He fiddles with the handle on the door and then pushes against it hard, then harder, against the dented metal. They go through the door into a cinder block hallway, which winds around until it leads to a big subterranean room. This room looks like it belongs at the bottom of an ocean. There’s a weird bluish light. In the middle of the floor is a cone of light, and in the middle of the light is a table and three chairs. In the room, there are at least a dozen kids from her age and up. A blond boy and two girls sit playing cards. The boy has very red eyes, reddish skin, and, when he smiles, red teeth. Maurice takes her hand and walks to the edge of the pool.

“Children, this was once the largest swimming pool in all of New York. They filled it with salt water. All the ladies came to bathe. My dear mother came. She said it was marvelous. That is why I decided to buy it.”

Yes, Mira now sees it is not just a hole in the ground but something built with an intention. All things at one time had a purpose, however difficult it might be to understand later.

Just then a girl with brown hair in tight braids that stick out from her head approaches them. She wears a smock and has the largest eyes Mira has ever seen. She wears no shoes.

She looks down and hands Maurice a bunch of wilted yellow flowers. “I saved them for you. We didn’t know if you would ever come back.” He laughs his bell-like laugh. She turns and runs back to a shadowed corner, from which Mira hears some whispers and shuffling.

Something inside Mira relaxes. She knows that girl somehow.

“Do they have homes?”

“No,” he says. “Or no longer.”

“Why?”

He laughs.

“Attention, caution,” says Maurice.

“Find me,” she says and runs off. Despite the fact that it is so cold in the house, she wakes in a sweat, with her heart pounding, shaking. She cries, not out of sadness but because, for a time, a few moments in this dream, she felt happy and complete.

In the middle of the fifty-sixth hour of their lights-out period, Mira reads in the cracked bathtub by the window in the junk room by the pale winter light. She’s covered herself with three blankets. There is no wind and the tree outside the window shimmers in the startled air. Now she is turning the final pages of The Black Stallion —the midnight thoroughbred is heading into the last furlong with victory in his stride — when she hears a deep voice echoing in the hallway downstairs, a male voice. “Helloowwww,” it says. “Anybody home?”

She stands. “Dad!”

Her father stands in the dim hallway. He looks huge-shouldered, giant.

“Carl!” her mother says, appearing.

“You could have called,” her mother says.

“I wanted to see how you were faring—” He looks at Mira. “What’s on your eyes? Why’s it so dark and cold in here?” Then he sees Gary, who appears in the doorway behind her mother. He stares at him for a long second. “Who is that rodent and why isn’t he wearing any shoes?”

All the attention focuses on Gary’s feet. Despite the cold, he doesn’t have any shoes on. A map of blue veins runs under the skin.

“I’m Gary.” He uses a strange, polite voice. He extends a hand. Her dad does not shake it.

“He rents a room for writing. A writing studio,” her mother says.

“Which room?”

Her mother looks down at her legs and smoothes the robe over them.

“Which room?”

“Your study.”

“Oh my God, Rachel.”

“Carl,” her mother says. “Carl. What was I supposed to do? You left me alone here. You hadn’t even paid the electric bill. What was I supposed to do?”

“Don’t play the victim, Rachel. I gave you the money to pay the bill.”

He gestures to the living room. “I want to talk to you.” Her mother begins to follow him out into the living room. When they leave, she and Gary will be alone in the shadowed hallway, with the beaten and broken furniture, her parents’ voices colliding in the parlor. She remembers Gary’s mouth on hers, scratchy, searching. The dark, she remembers, with a strange excitement, is coming again soon. What will happen?