Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Finally school ends and so do The Little Kirov dance classes. On Judy’s recommendation, her dad enrolls her in an Upper East Side summer day camp. Here, instead of the familiar curriculum of macramé pot holders and noodle collages, she has a choice among fencing, horseback riding, and bridge. She tries each of these things. Ballet helps with fencing but there are no other girls who choose it, so she drops that. Horseback riding is incredibly difficult and fills her with a sense of fear at loss of control. When she sits on the horse, she is painfully aware that she can’t control it, and she knows it knows that. Still, she likes the stables and the types of tasks that you have to do before getting on the horse, the grooming and the feeding, the wooden-handled brush, and the clanking metal pails. In the end, she resorts to bridge, which is where the popular girls gather, and while they have a teacher walk them through the strategies, they exchange glances in a way that Mira recognizes from Judy’s — confident glances filled with ownership. These are Judy’s people, confident in their ownership of the world.

The trees burst with leaves. On the East River, little sailboats and tugboats dot the water’s edge with sunbathers on them. In Manhattan, people sit on park benches instead of stoops, into the warm evenings, eating ice cream. On the hottest days, a few fire hydrants lose their covers (just like in Brooklyn) and water streams along the curbs, just as they did the previous summer, and the one before that, all the summers of her childhood.

In the afternoons and evenings, she takes class at David Howard’s with other SAB and ABT girls and girls from lesser studios. To prepare for the audition she makes sure she works harder than any of the other girls. As summer lethargy falls over everyone else, she does not succumb to it, she does not let herself. She cannot. There is too much at stake.

In early June, her mother decides to move to California. She packs up her things and drives the old station wagon out of town. She hands Mira a jade plant that she tells her to look after, gets in the packed-to-the-brim car, and shuts the door. Mira’s dad has been right: he is charged with selling the old, broken house.

A few weeks later, she gets a letter from her mother.

Mira, you wouldn’t believe this giant country. How big it is! I pass in twilight through Battle Mountain, Nevada. Between two exposed mountain ranges, there’s a long strip of light. It is the BIGGEST gas station I ever saw. You wouldn’t believe how big they make them out here. The trucks that fuel up are immense beasts sucking the earth dry. There’s an old town up in the mountains that some hippies have taken over. It’s a ghost town! Should I go check it out? What do I have to lose? Everything in my life is gone, dissolved.

In July, another letter comes from her mother. She has arrived in California. She writes that she “drove until she couldn’t drive anymore.” She says that she stopped when she got to the ocean— the Pacific Ocean— and she knew the whole continent was behind her. She took a job at an art supply store in a place called Market Street. She lives in a house on Guerrero Street, which means “the Street of the Warrior.” However, her mother does not own this house. She lives in it with four other people, none of whom have children. She writes:

Talking to the other people in my house, I am beginning to realize how valuable you are to me. I know that I will return at some point, perhaps sooner than I think. This place is a Time out of Time. It is a place disconnected from other Places. I have no history here. I am truly an atom floating in space, as we all are, really. Someday you too might see things and understand. I am trying to capture this in my art — the sense of floating free. I have finally broken free.

But I miss you, Mira, you are the only thing that anchors me to Time and Place.

Soon after, Judy invites Mira and her dad to a “special” dinner at her apartment. Judy has a large apartment on the Upper East Side — about twenty blocks from Maurice. This far uptown the apartments are roomy, with views that dwarf much of the city downtown. At night the lights shimmer below. During the day, you can see the high-up secret rooftop decks and gardens where the wealthy retreat during the summer. Judy has one herself: a wraparound terrace with little trees and white wrought-iron tables and chairs, and a bar on wheels.

The dining room: a long, wooden table, marble busts, shellacked parquet floors, heavy drapery, chintz flowered chairs. At the table, her father has his suit jacket over the back of the stool, his tie loosened, his top shirt button unbuttoned. He is rattling the ice in a cup. Since March, they’ve been doing dinner at Judy’s. It’s going better. It’s becoming a regular thing.

Mira wears a new black velvet dress her dad bought her at Bloomingdale’s. Sam is wearing lacrosse clothes — a dirt-stained jersey and shorts. His hair has grown longer since she first met him. It hangs in his eyes. He does not look up at her, at any of them, very often, but when he does, his baby face — nothing at all like Judy’s, though his brown eyes are hers — is flushed, smug, cocky. Annoyingly handsome in a way that she is careful to ignore.

Judy compliments her on her dress. When they are all seated and served by Irma, the cook, Judy looks at Mira. “So she was taking class down at the Joffrey. But I hear it’s just so uneven, so it’s great that you are auditioning for SAB.”

“Mira, Judy is talking to you,” says her dad.

“What?” says Mira.

“I was just saying I was telling my friend about you and you know, her daughter goes to ABT — she’s so impressed with that school — and anyway, just like you, she’s going to audition for SAB and is taking class this summer at David Howard’s.”

“What’s her name?”

“Kelly.” A tall girl with bitten fingernails whom she has heard other girls calling in the dressing room.

Mira nods.

Judy is staring at her. “I just know you are going to get into SAB. To be at that studio would be an amazing thing.”

Sam looks up from his meal. Is he one of the best at what he does?

Despite herself, Mira feels a soaring in her chest. Her mother has never taken such an interest in ballet.

Just then, her dad clears his throat and makes a clatter with his silverware. He reaches over and squeezes Judy’s arm. “Mira, Sam — kids—” They exchange another look. “Sam — your mother and I — Judy and I — have decided to move in together, to join our families and make a new family.”

“Sam — you will be brother and sister now. Carl and Mira will move in with us.”

“When?” she asks.

Her dad and Judy look at each other. “Soon,” her dad says. “This fall,” Judy says.

“What room will she be in?” says Sam.

“The guest room will become Mira’s room. Is that all you have to say?”

“I just wanted to know.”

“Sam, you’ll treat Mira like a sister.”

“Fat chance.”

“We’ll talk about that, buster.”

He gets up and leaves. “Sam—”

“This is so not a democracy. Don’t she and I get a vote?”

“No, you don’t.”

“I hate being a kid.”

Mira looks at her father and Judy — two old people who are happy or trying hard to be. She breathes in the lemony smell of the furniture polish. She listens for the beep of the new microwave in the kitchen. She waits for anger, but it does not come. Instead, something like hunger, something like the understanding of what you have to give up to be beautiful. She understands that her father and Judy are working hard to be happy, the way she is working hard to be beautiful. Maybe this will be okay. Judy looks at Mira and crinkles her nose. Her lip gloss glitters and her plastic chunky earrings shine in the chandelier’s light.