Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

“I’d like to resurrect her,” I say.

Felicia stops at the open doorway to a dim, cool room. “Bronislava,” she says. “No wonder, with that name. Well, professor, here’re your digs. Hope you like ’em.”

The blinds are pulled down. The air smells of perfumed air freshener.

“Okay,” she says, giving me an air kiss. “I’m off. I’m working a show at the Javits. I’ll be back later,” she says. “But don’t wait up for me. You know how it is — single gals.”

“Thanks, Felicia,” I say. “I really appreciate — everything.”

She gives me a quick hug and holds me at arm’s length. “Look at you — a professor. You’ve done everything right.”

“Well, not exactly.” I think of Sioban’s tearful embrace— you left me naked. And the folded letter, creased from all my handling, in an envelope in my bag. I enter the room. “Not everything.”

After Felicia leaves, I lie down on the bed. It is impersonal, surprisingly firm, like a hotel bed. When I open my eyes again it’s nearly dark outside. I shiver, get up, stretch, and pad into the living room and go over to the windows. How must it be to live like Felicia? It’s unclear to me what she does — and there have been a few things that make me know not to ask. The photos on her Facebook page, always taken by an invisible other person — her posing alone, stylish with her head cocked in an inviting way, in various foreign locations. Is she happy?

The sky to the west above New Jersey is pink and fierce. I pull a crocheted cashmere blanket from the couch, so soft it barely can be felt, over my shoulders. I watch the boats ply the water on the Hudson. The sunset is truly spectacular.

Maybe Maurice was wrong. Beauty is not about suffering. It is about being fulfilled, drinking in as much as one can; it is about life, not death. I think of Bernadith’s face, her kind bulldog face, and her words: What I see is a woman who is becoming. What you are becoming I really don’t know.

I watch a giant white cruise ship slip soundlessly out toward the Atlantic. I’m waiting for something. And then it comes: a calm falls over me. I go back to Felicia’s guest bedroom, the undertow pulling me under. I can sleep now. If I’m lucky, I will dream. And my dreams will prepare me for whatever is to come.

Manhattan is in love with ballet. Every ten blocks there is a store selling tutus and ballet memorabilia. People leave clutching signed programs and worn pointe shoes wrapped in tissue paper. Not just girls and their mothers shopping for leotards and tights and pointe shoes, but also middle-aged people, respectable people, carrying briefcases stuffed with office papers.

Ballet dancers are celebrities. Their faces gaze out from bus stops and from billboards next to gold watches or diamonds. Their limpid eyes melt the barren concrete. Their names spring from grown-ups’ lips in excited whispers. Baryshnikov. Kirkland. Makarova. Nureyev. On buses, sidewalks, subways, on TV you can hear impassioned discussions about which female dancer’s Swan Lake Act Three is most powerful, and which male dancer’s Act Two Giselle jumps achieve the greatest ballon.

The Russians, especially, are everywhere. Documentaries about them play over and over again, telling the same dramatic story of escape. Pictures of them bundled on tarmacs surrounded by men in trench coats and sunglasses, moments after they utter surely the most powerful words in the world: I defect.

These cold war princes and princesses had come over the past two decades, some before Mira was born. First Nureyev, his Tartar cheekbones turning from the cameras and mics, too-stiff, like the cold war had chilled him. Then Makarova came, bringing her tiny birdlike body, head wrapped in a gypsy scarf, her Swan Lake still intact, her back muscles famously rippling like feathers, they said. Baryshnikov came, while Mira’s dad lived with her mom, in a hail of photos, running to a getaway car. Godunov came last of all, his long hair and Thor face, and he became an actor in bad movies, and for this bunheads never forgave him.

Manhattan loves Balanchine, who is Russian, too. And Manhattan loves his academy, the School of American Ballet. To have a daughter accepted to SAB is to be chosen by the finest, harshest arbiters of beauty in the old doomed Soviet state. And to be accepted into SAB is the final stamp of approval in a world that is based on an ancient hierarchy. These Russians had abandoned their dying world to remake ours. So these girls offered themselves to the old Russians — and perhaps to save themselves from their own land of broken marriages and smog.

Their faces stare out from bus posters, taunting Mira, calling to her. Wait, she has to say. She has to wait a few more months, though she is ready now.

She can’t wait to leave this small studio with the thimbleful of light spilling across it. She has to get into SAB. She can’t stand another year here. Ms. Clement’s face seems to have shrunk and folded up into even more creases since the night Mira fell, and though her teacher’s hands still correct kindly, she senses something new in Ms. Clement’s attitude toward her — something that if she didn’t know better she would think was anger.

As for Val and the other girls, they now treat her differently. They are no longer mean to her. They speak to her with polite words and stony faces. She thinks about the girls she has known who got this treatment: they are the ones who have such badly broken homes or terrible skin conditions or such recklessness in their play that you cannot afford to be mean. You hate those girls with a hate that is based on fear. Your weapon against them — instead of meanness — is niceness. It is an effective weapon.

So she is one of those girls now.

She realizes that the more potent the gazes around her grow, the stronger her need to dance with a wildness no one can match. She feels a new violence at her core — a desire to do physical harm to someone, something. She imagines crushing her teacher’s gentle hands, punching Val. Her pirouettes have a new briskness to them; suddenly, she can do more than five fouettés in a row.

She just has to make it through the spring. In the summer, The Little Kirov suspends classes and she can go to David Howard’s studio or Steps, and her dad will pay for it, especially if she tells him it’s so she can get into SAB, the best ballet school in the city. He loves anything that is best.

Maurice takes her to the Metropolitan Museum. They enter the great facade, with its drooping eyes and stern mouth, and then the vast, dim, and cacophonous main hall. Even in the din of the crowd in the atrium, she hears the low timeless, hollow echo of the sea, like from a conch shell pressed to the ear. Warrens of rooms swim off into the catacomb-like recesses of the building. The sandy-hued marble stones and tomb-like echoes are foreign to her.

Upstairs she claps and skips alongside him as they enter a room filled with Degas paintings. There is one of two girls at a barre practicing their port de bras. Here is one of a couple of girls behind a curtain, waiting their turn in the wings, the sliver of a shadowed figure in a top hat watching them. There is one of a naked girl bending over her chair massaging her feet. Her discarded costume lies on the floor, a puddle of tulle. Another one of a soloist, dancing in a long tutu on pointe, surrounded by the faces of other dancers watching her. The chosen girl. Though Mira can only see their heads from behind, in shadow, she is sure they are locked in frozen smiles. But they hurry through — Maurice won’t stop.