Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

“He kissed me,” she says loudly.

Gary looks at her like he has forgotten something important.

Her parents stop at the threshold, in the doorway. Her father turns back to her.

Gary smiles a strange smile and holds up his hands. “Arrest me.”

“What do you mean? When? Where?” her mother says.

“I — shoot—” Gary drops his hands. The strange smile is stuck on his face.

“Gary, I think you should leave,” says her mother.

Then her father rushes at Gary and hits him straight in the face so that Gary bangs against the wall and clasps his hands to his nose, which explodes into something bright red. Mira has never seen her father hit someone, her father of two modes: homecoming joy and worried absence. She does not associate her father with violence at all. Thus, she does not recognize what she sees as violence, but as a strange dance of color and motion, somewhat beautiful, in slow motion, out of time.

“Carl!” her mother says now with more solid confidence.

“My stuff,” Gary mumbles as he sinks to the floor.

Her dad says, “Mira, pack a bag.”

“You can’t,” says her mother. “He’ll leave. I’ll make him leave.”

“I can and I will.”

“You don’t get to take the moral high ground.”

“Yes I do,” says her father, grabbing Mira a little too hard by the elbow. “Forget that bag. We’re leaving.”

Less than five minutes later, she has her jacket on, her school bag is packed with a nightgown and change of clothes, and her father ushers her out the door, his hands like a guided missile on her back.

“Mira!” her mother calls as they pass. “Mira!”

Gary is outside too in front of the house, gathering his things off the ground that her mother has been throwing out the door in batches. He wears his boots now, unlaced, and his nose is swollen and is growing purplish.

As Mira passes Gary, he gives her a sad grin. She likes him at that moment, she really does. He didn’t try to lie. Her father’s voice is low, a growl. “Come on,” he says. The slate of the sidewalk rises and falls in great slabs like shifting tectonic plates. Mira walks down the uneven block, her heels and toes rocking up and down, stepping carefully to avoid the cracks, which are everywhere. From behind them, she hears her mother’s rangy Brooklyn voice shouting, “I am not an unfit mother.”

Mira looks back at the stoop, at the peeling wrought iron and the weather-stained clapboard, and then she turns back to face the street ahead. Her father is taking her to Manhattan, where the lights, she imagines, will never again go out.

For the “time being,” Mira lives with her father while her mother “gets a grip.” She loves her father’s new apartment. It is small but it is very high. It has only three colors — black, beige, and white. It’s in a new building on Second Avenue in Kips Bay , a neighborhood she’s never known before. It’s very tall and made of glass and steel. From the windows you can see in all directions. To the south, red brick columns swell from the earth like primitive golems of clay. To the west, rise the Park Avenue fortresses of yellow sandstone. To the north, the midtown skyscrapers shine like monoliths glinting golden in the sun. Up here, she is elemental, protected.

But there is a third father, it turns out. He is not the whiskey-peppermint preoccupied father of the mornings, nor the cheery, doting shiny-faced father of after-dinner wine. This father brings back piles of dry cleaning and hangs them over the back of the kitchen chairs so that whenever you walk by you can hear the whisper of the plastic. He washes his underwear in the sink and hangs it over the towel rack. This father is always going off, in his ironed suits, to see lawyers to “argue for his rights.” He wants to keep her; he doesn’t want to send her back to her mother. When her mother calls she says, “The only reason I let him take you was that I didn’t want to fight over you.”

Her father’s new apartment is filled with sounds. The operatic blast of his new, digital clock radio. A tiny Pavarotti pours forth from the box you can hear from the kitchen. These are all sounds she has not known since the old sad gray house, when she was upstairs and he was down. The razor buzzes, the kettle he uses to make Sanka bleats, the spoon clinks as he carries his cup to the bathroom. Hollow drone of the coffee grinder, the lawn mower growl of the juicer; she has never known there are so many gadgets. They gather in the kitchen like costumed partygoers eager to show off — their sleek white and black plastic and invisible machine parts. Voice of the radio: traffic report heard through the hustle of static. There is the familiar bright, sharp, shattering whiskey-peppermint smell, which now she understands comes from a can of shaving cream with bold green swirls on it and a corroded metal bottom that she avoids looking at whenever she is in the bathroom brushing her teeth. But there is also a new bottle on his dresser. It’s a blue bottle in the shape of a ship. From it comes a deep, woodsy smell, dank and primitive, that she doesn’t like. It’s this smell that shatters her sleep if none of the sounds do first.

She and her father go back to the sad, gray house with the broken stoop to “get more of her things” for her. Gary is gone, his studio cleared out. Gone is the picture of the skinny man and the poster of Al Pacino. The walls have been spackled with a white as white as her hospital sheets had been. In the living room, the beaded lamps, the giant cushions, and the low table are all gone. There is a multicolored woven rug in the center with a brand-new sofa.

Her mother acts differently. She wears a pair of corduroys and a turtleneck with a scarf tied in her hair. She grips onto a coffee cup the whole time they are there. She holds it up to her chest as she follows her daughter around, watching her pack.

Nightgown, pants, shirts, socks, toothbrush, ballet tights, leotards. “Enough for two weeks,” her father says, but it will, she knows, be more than that. She takes the faded poster of the missing rat-faced boy from behind her door. She takes Maurice’s card — she’ll put it by her new bed.

“Where’s Gary?”

“He won’t be back,” her mother says. “I’m sorry about him, Mira. Did he hurt you? Tell me, did he?”

Mira shakes her head. “No. He didn’t hurt me.”

Her mother takes a sip of coffee and looks quickly at her father. Their eyes meet and there is something that passes between them. Her eyes are red and full of water.

“He won’t ever do that again. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, sorry.” She begins crying.

If Gary had been here, he would roll his eyes and she would laugh at her mother’s tears. He might say “Oh, Rachel — watering the lilies again?” Then her mother would laugh. In honor of Gary, Mira laughs. Both her parents look at her.

Her mother offers them pumpkin bread that she’s just baked. Mira is surprised that her father accepts. They all stand in the old kitchen on some new linoleum her mother has just put down. It is white with brown designs and it makes her feel strange. In the kitchen, everything is clean and orderly and shiny. Outside, it is getting dark and the squirrels chirp.

Her mother looks down at her clogs while her father eats. Her father hums a tune. He looks happy, like he has just won a prize. He looks like he is enjoying the bread very much. He glows with a proprietary shine.

Mira, looking at her mother looking at her clogs, feels bad for her. She sees that telling on Gary has cost her mother something. It has given her father something.