Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

How could she forget? The blood soup that tasted like dirt, the pale woman with the glittering ears, the golden clock that churned in the middle of the room.

“The Russians are scientists of the body. They have studied these things. The legs must not be too short, the head not too big, the instep pliant. It has taken them a hundred years to get the proportions right. I hear they do X-rays in the Soviet Union, but here parents wouldn’t like that. But why not? It’s better to know before serious training begins. Otherwise, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

“Aside from this, they will be looking for one thing: that you know the steps. Don’t worry about holding your pretty arabesques, just be quick, and clever, and to the point.”

She looks at him. Her face grows hot as the morning sun. She imagines him kissing her the way that Christopher was kissed by the jester, smothering her, taking all of the anger out of her, draining her of everything.

She nods. Her blood in her ears. She understands.

The SAB hallways are packed, filled with hive-like activity. Girls in leotards and tights, mothers stiff-backed, like generals before a march, sitting on benches. Each girl wears a number pinned to the front of her leotard.

She passes a plumpish girl. A girl who smells of a strong flower perfume. A girl whose mother is straightening the seams on her tights, a girl who wears her bun high on her head like a geisha, one girl, an older girl, Robin’s age — where is Robin? — whose feet poke out of her cut tights showing reddened, calloused, and bent toes, another older girl whose spine is so bony that you could play the xylophone on it. She passes a girl wearing a monogrammed robe and another whose father hugs his daughter to his chest, saying, “Do it for me, please.” One girl’s mother — a skinny woman with giant glasses — stands over her daughter while the girl does sit-ups.

Here she is not a girl who trusts too much, a girl who closes her eyes, a girl who lies in the hospital bed while they wash her big face off her little one. Last night, on the mattress at her dad’s apartment, staring at the ceiling, freshly painted white, she went over the steps as if going over multiplication tables. She gave each step a numerical value and added and subtracted until she arrived at a number she assigned herself. Now she feels a bolt of confidence, the kind you feel when you open your blue booklet and realize the test question is the one you studied for. Quick, and clever, and to the point, Maurice said.

In the office, a woman has Mira write her name in a book. Then she gives her a piece of paper with a red number on it—146—and a safety pin.

Mira goes to the end of the long padded bench, peels off her street clothes. Next to her stands a girl with an amazing turnout. This girl’s mother wears a white leather vest, white rhinestone-studded pants, and heels. She says to Mira, “I had a hell of a time getting here. An hour and a half on the Queensboro. If Felicia gets in, we’ll have to move to Manhattan. She’ll need a chaperone. And, I mean”—she leans toward Mira, so she is talking to her—“there are worse things for mothers to do, right?” The lady’s red lips part in a smile. For a moment, Mira wishes that this glamorous woman was her mother.

“I live with my father.” Mira uses a new, clipped voice, a Manhattan voice. She does not mention Judy or Sam.

The woman looks down at her hands. “Every situation is different, of course. But for Felicia, I would definitely need to be here.”

Felicia’s mother keeps talking, and her voice blends with the clomp of girls walking down the hallway in their pointe shoes, and the call-outs from the ballet masters in the audition studios, and the piano swelling up and then crashing to a stop. The girls five or six numbers ahead of her have begun to disappear. Mira catches Felicia’s gaze, and the other girl smiles, humble and sweet, a smile that so belies her well-trained body and pixie-cute face that Mira, despite her best effort, smiles back.

A brief barre and then they move to the center. The steps are not difficult, but they are done faster than she is used to.

The old Russian teacher speaks little English. Her English, when it emerges, is almost impossible to understand. Mira stops trying to understand. Instead, she just watches the old woman’s hands. Though veined and gnarled as old tree branches, they are quick and expressive. Watch them carefully and you can see the footwork. This woman was once, Mira sees from her hands, a very good dancer.

She follows this wordless direction, the old Russian teacher’s fast-moving hands. Then she is warm and not thinking anymore. Her regular mind is asleep; her snake mind is awake. She is dancing. But the other girls haven’t figured it out. There are girls with too-pointy faces and girls with too-round faces. When she sees them lined up in the mirror, her in their midst, she can see each one’s imperfections; it’s like an extra-special super power she has. Felicia of the perfect turnout is also managing to follow along. Some of the others are just standing and watching her and Felicia. A few of the girls have begun crying, softly. Others are flailing, turning blindly this way and that, beating their legs haphazardly, in their lovely leotards and their perfect buns. A girl runs out of the room. Another girl stands still without blinking, a stunned look on her face. They must avoid this girl — sometimes knocking against her.

The teacher adds yet another movement phrase, and now the combination is full of twists and turns, two allegro parts and one adagio, followed by another allegro. The only way she can keep going is to follow those hands, which, perhaps without her teacher’s knowledge, mold and shape, dropping clues.

The teacher smiles at her and Felicia and the one other girl who is keeping up. She is a tall girl with stick-straight brown hair that has escaped from her bun, legs like stilts. No. 152.

“Okay, girls. Yes? We begin.”

She understands that she has beaten these other girls. What is easy for her is hard for others! In this controlled competition, unmuddied by kindness or the pretense of equality, she has won. Mira lifts her chest, raises her arms, beats her feet in time to the old Russian’s gnarled hands. She hears Felicia’s ragged breath beside her; she hears herself gasping for breath like someone who has been submerged too long.

The woman in this office has a helmet of tightly curled hair, hard, painted nails, and a strange accent. She wears a heavy gold pin held on a bright, geometric-patterned jacket. Behind her is a framed series of old-fashioned-looking prints and an orderly bookshelf of bound books. Even the light from the shutters falls in disciplined strips across her body. Suddenly Ms. Clement’s flyaway hair and watery bug-eyes seem wrong to Mira. Horribly wrong.

The lady asks her one question: “Do you want to be a dancer?”

“Yes,” says Mira. But , she imagines her mother saying, she used to want to be in the circus too. And before that a veterinarian.

Her stone-gray eyes have the slightest smile to them, and in her manner, Mira understands, this woman is inviting her to embrace the gold pins, the quick short words, to enter the land of wanting, of becoming. There is no place in this world for Mira’s mother. The woman flicks her eyes away and adjusts a gold watch. There’s nothing her mother can do. She’s not here.

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

The lady smiles quickly at Mira.

“I was the Flower Princess,” Mira says. The woman nods, but it is already over, their moment of connection. “Congratulations and welcome to the School of American Ballet. You will be in Second Intermediate Level. This paper has your schedule on it. You will be expected to come to all classes. If you stay, and if you advance, you will need to come to daytime classes. This may require that you go to a special school. Many of our children go to Professional Children’s School.” The woman makes marks on a piece of paper and hands it to Mira. “You have some parents — some mother? Some father?”