Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Felicia has perfect turnout, perfect arches, perfect extension, and perfect balance. She dances with an easy precision. Nevertheless, there is something vacant about it. Her face looks like she is watching TV. She shines at adagio.

Bryce is long and gangly and a bit spastic. She moves constantly, even between combinations. She is loose-limbed like Hannah: her limbs fly up like she has no joints. In fact, she is double jointed. When she marshals her energy well, you can’t take your eyes off her. Her specialty is allegro.

What Mira has that neither of them has is allegro and adagio together. But she worries that when Mr. B finally comes to their class, on that day Bryce will be wild and perfect, or Felicia will be a little less perfect and pay attention, and then it won’t matter what Mira can do. She will not be chosen.

She tries to follow Felicia’s steps and duplicate Bryce’s energy — and to copy neither.

Then the old Russians’ attention turns to her. “Mira! What do you do? What you make?” yells Ms. Tumkovsky, stamping her foot in her dusty funereal outfit.

Then Mira can snap her eyes away from the out-of-the-ordinary thing. Mira feels the challenge of hate rising, some force of will, energizing. She can relax into it. And Ms. Tumkovsky’s critiques are a taut rope that Mira can clutch onto as she descends deeper into the class, into her body and its needs, and the needs of the steps. Her mind, in the hands of another, grows pliant, as she keeps moving, her body leading. She is following a path into the forest, one stone, then another, and soon she is deep in the forest and doesn’t care that there is no light, no sound of birds, no mother, no house, no prince. Then there is no mind, just her body moving in space. There is just this and Tumkovsky’s voice that is around her.

At the same time, she knows it is not enough to be small and have no hips. It is not enough to be one of the best. It is even not enough to be the best in the class, hated the most by the Russian teachers. You must be singled out by Mr. B during one of his random classroom visits. He might ask you to point your foot. He might ask to see an arabesque. It doesn’t really matter. It is his eyes that matter. They have chosen you. You are now one of “Mr. B’s girls.”

And from there? You will be chosen for The Nutcracker —a child in the party scene, or a Hoop Girl, or a Polichinelle if you are older. From there, you will be put on the fast track. You will be invited to take company classes. Apprenticeship is within reach. He might give you your own perfume — he gave Karin L’Origan. Réplique is what he gives Suzanne (so that he knows who has been in the elevator and hallways). If you are very lucky, he will invite you to his apartment during summer season in Saratoga Springs and cook you his borscht and you will eat it (though it will be the only thing you eat all day) because he hates anorectics. Then you will dance on the stage at Lincoln Center, on the same stage as Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, you will wade through a carpet of rose stems that have been thrown at you during curtain calls. You will have an apartment near the theater with a small mattress and China tea set (but you will need nothing else). You will travel the world on tour, dancing on the stages of the great European capitals. You will be seen, you will be adored. You will be a ballerina in the greatest ballet company in the world.

But she knows — they all know — that Mr. B only invites one or two girls a year into the company — and that’s on a good year. But despite these terrible odds, this is the only way to go from an SAB student to a New York City Ballet dancer.

After I say good-bye to Rob, I wander for a while until I end up in a café packed by tourists and decorated with cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. I pick up a turkey wrap and sit at a table to eat it. This food is just right — unobtrusive, barely food. I didn’t manage any soup and my head is pounding from the coffee.

I finish half the wrap and toss the rest away. My cell buzzes. A number I don’t recognize snakes across the screen. I turn off my phone and let it go to voice mail. Probably a wrong number.

I have to get out of here. I have to move because I have to think. I start walking east, toward Central Park.

Yes, there is a part of me that wants to believe I am blameless — like Rob suggested. I was only a child. I was not responsible for our relationship.

But some lines from the letter run through my head: I am one of the dead. I do not deserve to have commerce with the living. I wanted to tell you, my dear, because you too are one of the dead. Do you know that yet? Something hardens inside of me. This is Maurice. Maurice of the exotic fish, of the too-salty capers and arugula, the Cordon Bleu, of the Indonesian silk ties and New Zealand wool scarves. Not an old man in a convalescent home. In a relationship like ours that was based on aesthetics, perception is everything. If he saw himself as dead, did I in fact not kill him?

My assault on him caused him to become an invalid for the rest of his days. I did not kill his body, but did I kill his spirit? Perhaps. But maybe even as I destroyed one Maurice, I gave birth to another?

Because he destroyed me that night. That girl always searching for the spotlight. And gave birth to another girl. This girl became the woman I am now.

That girl took her mother’s last name. Symbolic? Yes, of course. But it made paperwork easier. Our insurance was through the small law office off Market Street where my mother worked part-time, later full-time, still doing her art in the evenings and on weekends, and having the same last name made everything easier.

Kate Randell is one who, instead of seeking out the spotlight — hungry for eyes to fill her up with their gaze — looks for the dark. Her eyes go to the peripheries where she can hide, her mind moves away from bright conversation — laughter, gaiety — to the murmured subterfuge among discontents. She seeks the cubbyhole at the library in the back away from the window, books with black-and-white photographs, creaky microfiche machines in the basements where she watches tiny decades-old dancers in black and white skitter and jump, and then, under the weight of her heavy spirit, she rears herself into battle for some words to put on the page. Each sentence, each page, each article, each lecture, a dim victory against him and what he has wrought.

I became a child who could sink into the blue sky, bottlebrush trees, Point Reyes, who knew what parasailing was. I watched my mother struggle from one artistic obsession to the next. I stopped dancing for a time, became a punk girl hanging out in video stores, on stoops, at Fillmore District clubs. A new sense of self bloomed: the watcher. I could watch. Others would do. Clearly, it was safer to watch than be watched. And out of the watching, grew the thinking, and out of that grew writing.

But I didn’t stop dancing forever. My body didn’t let me. By my senior year of high school, I had begun to dance again. Not ballet, though. I took modern and contact improv classes, which were held in raw spaces where there were raves at night and contact jams during the day. This was a dance world inverse to SAB’s, whose stars had not started dancing until college, whose bones had not been bred to turn out, whose ribs did not rise automatically at the opening bars of a familiar classical piece. Their feet were flat, their hamstrings tight, their torsos too thin or too thick, but they had vision. They didn’t care about beauty, but about art.

I went to some of their performances. They were held in cavernous lofts that smelled of ketchup and alcohol, and lights burning through cheap filters. These dancers moved in the half-darkness, across a bed of Styrofoam nails. They stood on their heads and stacked their bodies one on top of the other until the bottom person emerged gasping and red-faced. Sometimes someone onstage spoke a string of words. A grainy video popped up overhead and dancers moved in front of it as if it weren’t there. I looked around the room at all the people who sat there watching these shows and thought: they like this; they choose to see this; it is something . But what? What would Mr. B think? What would Tumkovsky think? What would Maurice think? They would hate it, of course — it wasn’t beautiful and it wasn’t tragic. There was nothing about it that made you want to cry, or leap with joy, or dance for a stranger in a dark apartment, or put on a swan’s costume and pas de bourrée in the moonlight. Nevertheless, it held a power, and it fascinated me.