Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Maurice leads her to a sculpture in the middle of the next room. It’s Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. It doesn’t look as good in real life, a midsize black statue of a girl. The statue is not shiny and sleek like the reproductions, but dull, rough-hewn. The dress she wears is old and faded pink, with too many pleats (her teachers would never allow a skirt like that). Mira takes in the girl’s sagging tights, her too-loose ribbons in her hair, her poor posture. Her hips are too wide, her turnout comes from the knee, not the hip. Her eyes are closed and her face tilts upward toward an invisible sun.

Mira reaches out and grabs Maurice’s hand, which is cool and dry. He lets her hold his hand. It is the first time.

“Here it is,” Maurice says. “ Little Dancer. She was a dancer named Marie van Goethem. She posed for Degas to earn money for her family. They were very poor. It caused a sensation when he exhibited it.”

“Why?”

“No one wanted to think about the lives of these poor, hardworking dancers.”

But Mira doesn’t like this girl; she doesn’t like anything about her. “She is daydreaming, not practicing. She’s not beautiful.”

He laughs. “There is no beauty without suffering. She is not beautiful but she moves toward beauty. See? He made her beautiful. That is his power. Someday you’ll understand.”

“She should open her eyes,” Mira says.

He looks at her and raises his eyebrows. “Yes, indeed. She should.”

That next evening, she comes home to find her dad on the couch with his too-loose grin. His gold buttons on a purple velvet vest glint. The TV is on a sitcom. Canned laughter floats out. He lowers a big book he’s reading— The Revolution in Marketing.

“How was it last night then?” he asks. She wonders if he knows. He never lets on. For better or worse, Maurice is still her secret. She looks away, looks down at her dance bag, hides a smile. She feels how easy it is now to see Maurice whenever she wants. Her mother, for all her distractedness, could sometimes, all of a sudden, turn her attention on Mira and stare at her daughter like a drill trying to reach the center of the earth. But she can tell her dad anything she wants—“I’m babysitting” or “I’m going with my friend to a movie” or “I’m going roller-skating” (though she hasn’t done this in years) or even the old “I’m doing homework at someone’s house.” He looks at her and she sees he knows he is supposed to ask her something else, but he doesn’t know what it is. In the gap, she will say, like she does now — she sees his glass is empty—“Want another drink?” She goes to the little bar that has appeared in the corner of the living room and mixes him — he has shown her how to do this — a gin and tonic. In the gap, she gets the freedom to have her secrets, to know herself in a wider way, to ask him about the news of the day, all these things that make his face shine and him say, “Oh thank you, that’s nice of you,” vaguely, as if she were a stranger. She adds lime. Another drink?

But now, strangely, unaccountably, she struggles with the tears that are filling her eyes. She struggles to get control over her face. It seems to be doing something on its own. She drops her dance bag and covers her face with a hand.

“Are you okay?” her dad says. He hands her his drink napkin. It smells of lime.

She has a sudden painful burst of longing for her mother — not the mother she wishes Rachel was — but actually her mother, her big, strange-smelling self, her weird books, her too-long hair, everything about her that is wrong and out of control. She longs for that. Especially that gutsy cauldron of a laugh that sometimes erupts from her mother. When she left her mother’s house, Mira told herself she did not care — she was getting out of there —out of her mother’s life, of Brooklyn, of public school. She was moving to Manhattan, going to SAB, breaching two great walls. Her mother had felt like empty baggage she was putting on the curb.

But nothing has turned out how it was supposed to. Mira wipes her eyes, gains control over herself. Her dad pats her head distractedly. He makes her some frozen pizza, and they stand at the counter in the kitchen eating it.

“Honey, do you remember that woman Judy we met at the Thanksgiving Day parade?”

Mira nods.

“Well, she and I have become friends. She’d like to come over to make us dinner. Would you like that?”

“No,” she says.

“Mira,” he says, “I think it would be a good thing. For both of us.”

She looks at her father. She looks away. When she looks back, his gaze has not wavered. This surprises her. “Okay,” she says. “Yes.”

A few weeks later, Judy comes over to make them dinner. Her dad isn’t back from work yet. Judy makes several trips to her car, bringing in more kitchen devices than Mira has ever seen — a blender, a Cuisinart in a metal armature, a pizza pan, an electric juicer. She plays Elton John tapes in the kitchen while Mira ignores her, doing her homework in the living room. “One nice thing about a small kitchen,” she yells cheerily, but doesn’t finish her sentence.

By the time her dad finally comes home, Judy has covered the glass coffee table in the living room with a tablecloth. They sit on the floor around the coffee table for dinner. Their plates are piled high with some black sauce over what looks like rolled-up balls of hay. It tastes salty, chewy.

“This tastes gross,” Mira says.

Judy stops eating, looks down at her plate.

“Mira,” says her father.

“No, Carl,” says Judy. “I know this is hard for you, Mira. It’s a lot of change. Your mother leaving and your dad meeting me so quick.” She hates that Judy says “quick,” not “quickly.” “It was hard when my husband and I split — and Sam, he had a lot of trouble.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care about you or Sam. I wish you’d leave us alone.”

Judy sighs, wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Well, honey.”

“Don’t call me honey,” says Mira.

“Mira!” says her father.

Mira gets up and goes to her room.

Through her door, she hears Judy sigh and say, “Maybe — if you had made it back from work earlier—” Her room, cold, white, ridiculous. In the corner, she sees: someone has hung a silver-framed Pierrot, a smiling clown with tears flowing down his face.

She screams as loud as she can.

Over the next few months, her dad and Judy spend more time together. Every week they go out to dinner. Every week, new things appear in Mira’s dad’s apartment. “She gets all this free stuff. They send it to her. So she can figure out how to sell it. She’s really amazing that way. And this isn’t junk like your mother brought in, you know. This is up-to-the-minute stuff. Modern. State-of-the-art.” He holds up a big bowl made of metal with gold stripes across the rim. It is so shiny Mira can see her face staring at it. “If you bought this in a store, it would cost at least two hundred bucks. They sell it at museums.”

“What is it for?” Mira says.

He puts it on the coffee table, looks at her annoyed, then laughs. “That is not the right question.”

The other things that appear: purple velvet pillows, a giant sectional mirror, linked by a geometric gold filigree design. Are these things any different from the ripped furniture and chipped dishes her mother brought home? The fireplace bellows when they had no fireplace? The cracked umbrella stand that leaked rainwater. How is a bowl with no real use different from these things? Are Judy’s things any more of a solution than are her mother’s broken macramé and ripped pillows? Is it any more real than the stuff her mother brought home, sitting inert, lonely and desperate and wanting? She doubts it. Mira asked for the crying Pierrot picture to be removed, and her dad took it away. “Just don’t bring any more of that stuff into my room.” She thinks of Maurice saying you can’t have beauty without suffering. “Don’t touch my room,” she says. She likes it clean, white, like an empty box.