Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Her father puts the bread down and says, “We got rid of him, didn’t we?” And he chuckles.

“Carl!” her mother says, without looking up from her feet. She says nothing more. Her parents are now in the grip of something new between them. She does not understand why they are being nice to each other now, her shiny-faced father and her red-faced, shy mother.

No one mentions Mira’s own performance, in which she fell, and Christopher did not catch her. Is there nobody but Maurice whom she can trust? Christopher had said “trust me,” but he couldn’t be trusted. Maurice who never asked for anything. She had followed him, had brought him forth from the city, and he had magically shown up.

Maybe the people who tell you to trust them can’t be trusted, and the people who ask nothing are the ones who are there when you need them.

That night she goes to her father while he is washing dishes in the kitchen.

“Did they ever find that boy?”

“Huh?” he says turning to her.

She says his name, pronouncing it the way that she’s pronounced it in her head — two long words with too many consonants — but it sounds strange in the air.

“Who?” he says.

She goes into her room, gets the poster, and presents the worn, crinkled sign to him as if it is an X-ray of her insides. “The boy,” she says, “the one they lost.”

He grabs the paper and before she can stop him, crinkles it up, and throws it into the garbage under the sink. “Mira, why do you keep stuff like this?”

Now she is yelling. “Did they find him? Did they? Tell me. Did they?”

He wipes his hands on the dishrag and reaches for her. “No, Mira. I don’t believe they ever found him.”

“Fuck you! Fuck you!” she yells. She’s said it once to her mother. Now she says it again to her father.

He slaps her then — a quick, hard slap to her face. He has never hit her before. His face is beet red and his jaw shakes. He holds his hand as if he has hurt it. Her cheeks burn as she stares at him. This third father is one who hits her, is the one who punched Gary. But then his violence was directed at a man she despised and there had been the giddiness to cover the fear — fear of her own father.

The slap stings more than hurts. But like the hand-washed underwear, Pavarotti radio, the cologne in the shape of a ship, it’s the strangeness of the slap that she hates.

Some shirts in their dry cleaner bags are piled on the back of a chair. She backs up into them, slips to the floor. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” Her father grabs his coat and says, “I am going to be late.” He pauses at the doorway to tell her that a babysitter will be there shortly. He locks the door behind him. Take care of yourself, he says.

An hour later, the babysitter still has not come and the snow has started. Mira goes to the heavy black phone, hard and thick as a giant beetle, and picks up the receiver. The dial tone, a low even moan, rushes out at her like the language of another species — and she giggles. She giggles again and again. She can’t stop. Then she dials the number on the card. The phone rings and rings, and on the fifth ring, a faint, sleepy man’s voice says, “Hello?”

She giggles.

“May I help you?”

“Can I please speak to Maurice. .”

“Mirabelle?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“At my dad’s.” She stops giggling.

“Who is there with you?”

“Nobody.”

“You’re all alone, then?”

“Yes,” she says. And now, instead of giggling, she begins crying.

“Okay,” he says.

“I’m scared,” she says.

“Turn out the lights. Look out the window,” he says. Her sobs slow down.

She is quiet.

“Do you see?”

She flicks the living room switch and stretches the phone cord as far as it will reach. “Yes.” Against the brick of the old building across the yard, the snowflakes are visible individually — puffy, like cotton balls, drifting slowly, joyfully. She tips her head back and stares up at the snow spinning downward in a crazy swirling vortex.

When she returns to The Little Kirov, Mira dances like a demon. She dances with a wildness that makes the other girls gape, and then snicker when she is out of sight. It isn’t that her breasts have grown or her toe shoe ribbons are grimy, but something in her far-off expression, the seriousness of her too-pale face, the flush of her cheeks as she works over and over again on her pirouettes and battements. She dances as if she is the only one in the room. She dances as if it’s Mr. B himself standing in the doorway watching her, and not a little studio on the seventh floor of a crumbling office building.

Even the little girls push themselves up against the walls as she passes.

Now Mira understands Hannah’s impulse to fling her head back and kick up her leg, and laugh like a tornado. She understands Robin’s blank face and scarlet cheeks. It is terrible to be singled out, to feel eyes on you all the time. It is wonderful, and terrible too. But more than that it does something to your insides: they don’t feel like they belong to you anymore. Your seams come loose and parts of you start coming out. It makes normal things — like walking or talking — feel hard, and things that are hard — like holding an extension until your leg shakes — feel easy.

She wears the wrist guard for a week more until the fracture heals. When she was young and fell down and scraped her knee, grown-ups were kind to her; they bent down and investigated her cuts and bruises, applying a Band-Aid and Mercurochrome. But no one is kind to her about this injury. It seems a dancer’s injury is different — it is to be treated with suspicion and avoided at all costs.

At the end of that week, she finds Maurice waiting for her outside The Little Kirov. She smiles and her smile is too big. She can’t help it. His newly white hair floats up from his head in a shimmering lawn. It makes his pointed chin and arched, still-black eyebrows look even more elfin. His brown eyes, with their large pupils, confront her with their amused gaze. It makes her laugh. Only he can make the coil of tension inside her subside.

“I like your hair,” she says.

“I’ve heard of that happening. Going white overnight.”

“Thank you for the flowers,” she says. She looks down. “I’m sorry.” She is surprised to find that she is about to cry.

His hand is on a new walking stick made of marbled wood, with a silver tip. “You were wonderful.” He says this word wonderful as if it’s never been said before. “You fell wonderfully.”

“I trusted him. It was his fault.”

“No, dear, this is not true. You closed your eyes.” He leans toward her. “No matter, you fell beautifully.”

That first building where I lived on my own in San Francisco was a real tenement. Bathrooms in the halls. It was young women who lived there — wannabe dancers, actors, models. I was there a year before I got my own rattletrap studio in the Tenderloin, the kind with the toilet two feet from the stove. I would be there for seven more years. Sometime in those years Felicia and I got together a few times. She was still in L.A. working at acting and getting some gigs. We tried to be friends for a while. Her apartment in Los Feliz was cheerful: Chinatown gauzy curtains, plush sample sale linens, Oscar de la Renta shirts and slacks hanging in her closet, sorted by Easter eggs colors. Her fingers twirled and her hands fluttered as she spoke. She was singing, cocktail waitressing, and working the perfume counter at Nordstrom. I admit it: I tried to drum up some marvelous pity for her — she’d not even gotten a BA — as someone who represented what I was leaving behind, but I couldn’t. She seemed too cheerful, and too charming. At her apartment, we drank coffee from Viennese cups and ate linzer tortes off Bloomingdale’s china. On the surface we had a lot in common — single ex-dancers living in apartments with antiquated plumbing. Were we really that different? Yes, we were. After a few moments together, any fool could see we were different animals.