Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

About a month into the semester, Felicia invites Mira over for a sleepover. On Friday after class, she, Felicia, and Felicia’s mother, Rita, take the F train to Queens. Felicia lives in one of a row of tightly packed brick bungalows. Inside the apartment, everything is very puffy. The couch is puffy. The curtains are puffy. A white shag carpet covers the floors. In the kitchen is a chart on the wall, and next to it a stack of stickers with gold stars and smiley faces. In Felicia’s bedroom, the carpet is pink. There is a bed in her room covered with a puffy bedspread and canopy. In her room are also laminated placards taped to the wall that read: BREATHE! PROJECT! SMILE!

The girls sit on Felicia’s bed. Her friend turns to her. “I can’t believe you’re a Mr. B girl now. It’s so amazing. I have one of Mr. B’s girls in my home right now. You are so lucky, Mira.”

“I’m sure he’ll choose you next.”

“Really?”

“I know so.” Mira didn’t, in fact, know anything of the sort. But it felt good to say it, to have this moment of intimacy, of sharing something — purely, simply — with another girl.

“I want to give you something.” Felicia gets up and places a jewelry box between them on the bed. She opens it for Mira to examine. “Take anything. Anything you want.”

Mira touches the things inside one by one: a macramé friendship bracelet; a feather brooch with half the feather broken off and exposed, its stem ragged; a diamond necklace that talks. It says, I am a beautiful princess! A haphazard, slightly grimy collection, a typical girl’s.

At the very bottom is a pearl necklace and pearl earrings. They are very white and round and shiny. Mira pulls these out, holds them up to her neck. “What do you think?”

“They’re real. Bite them. That’s how you can tell.”

Mira looks at her friend, quickly bites the round balls, and pushes them down to the bottom of her pocket.

Then Felicia is at the closet, pushing one of the wood-paneled doors back and pulling out a dented shoe box. She motions Mira over to where she squats. Felicia takes the lid off the shoe box to reveal an assortment of candy bars. They have soft, worn, creased wrappers, as if they’ve been handled too many times. Mira and Felicia huddle in the dark corner and finger them.

“Where’s your dad?” says Mira.

“He lives on Long Island. He owns a store, so he can’t come very often. But it’s okay. My mom and I are like a team. We understand each other. My dad doesn’t really get it.”

“My mom’s in California,” Mira says.

“Do you miss her?”

“No,” says Mira.

Rita serves dinner on a table set with glazed black-and-white ceramic plates and black-and-white zebra-striped napkins. Loud bangs of metal utensils on ceramic. On their plates, Rita piles some kind of grain and then carrots in a thin, oily sauce.

“Am I on a diet again?” asks Felicia.

“Felicia’s frame, unfortunately, she gets from her father,” says Rita. She looks at Mira. “ You have a thin frame.”

Mira blushes. A cozy, puffy world, just the three of them. What would that be like? Rita’s red lips glisten with canola oil. She looks at Felicia as if to say “I told you so.”

After dinner, Rita takes just Mira into her bedroom, where she does Mira’s hair in pigtail ringlets like Felicia’s, with the brush attachment to a hot curling iron, something Mira has never seen before. While she works, she tells Mira to close her eyes. But Rita is not happy with the results of her efforts and has to start all over: she brushes the curls out of Mira’s hair, then braids it into two very tight French braids. Now Rita is satisfied with the results.

Then Rita takes out a giant makeup kit that opens accordion-like into different levels, like a house with many rooms. She puts rouge on Mira’s cheeks and green eye shadow over her eyes. Rita applies the makeup with firm, confident strokes. Mira feels a pleasant, animallike warmth come over her. When Rita finishes, Mira looks at herself in the mirror. She looks feline — a thin face and big staring eyes.

“Do you think I could be in a commercial?”

Rita nods, smiles. “With your red hair and freckles? Of course you could!”

Rita puts her hand on Mira’s back and leads her into the living room, where Felicia is watching TV. Felicia squeals when she sees Mira.

“Mom, do me, do me!” Felicia says. Rita laughs. Then she takes Felicia into the bedroom and does her hair and makeup too: pink cheeks and blue, instead of green, over her eyes.

The three of them drive to a giant supermarket. Inside, people turn to stare — two made-up girls, and Rita. Mira imagines that they are both Rita’s children, both going to be stars. What would that be like, rushing around from audition to audition, always ready to go to a casting call, always beautiful with big eyes? She feels how the makeup makes her stronger. How the world turns a brighter face back to her. People smile at her. She smiles back. She is part of something. She is initiated — how strange, to make oneself stick out and then to feel that you belong. She sees that, too. It’s a raw kind of joy that rises from her collarbones into a blush.

They walk back to the car across the giant parking lot, carrying things they don’t need, in a light, cold rain, talking loudly. It smells like steel and fish, the inside of a star.

Later, when she is on the verge of falling asleep under that wood-tiled ceiling in Felicia’s puffy room, she feels a sharp pang, and as obliterating darkness falls, she doesn’t think of her father or of her mother — but of Maurice. Maurice in his green and gold living room, Maurice in his maroon car with his special box of a seat and special levers; Maurice showing her the poor Little Dancer statue, blackened with age, her tired face turned up to a hopeful sun. Mira shivers with a new kind of guilt, with the knowledge that she has somehow betrayed someone — or something.

The next afternoon after classes, Maurice is waiting by the Lincoln Center fountain. Mira walks up to him. He stares at her. Her eye shadow and eyeliner got smudged, so she tried to replicate what Rita did with some drugstore supplies.

He turns from her and walks his marionette walk up Broadway. For a moment, she considers not following him. It would be easy not to, to just get on the crosstown bus, head to her dad and Judy’s apartment. But who would she be then? Just a girl, one girl among many, without a mother, with a father who, she now knows, dries his underwear on the backs of kitchen chairs, and whose aftershave smells too strongly of peppermint, a father who she knows can hit her.

The crowd begins to swallow up Maurice’s diminishing form. She runs to catch up with him. When she reaches his side, he does not turn. He keeps going, shoving the gum wrappers aside with his walking stick.

He hails a cab and she climbs in beside him. “Where are we going?”

At first, he doesn’t answer. Then he says, “Home.”

When they pull up in front of his building, he turns to her. “Get out.”

In his apartment, he pulls her into the bathroom. He thrusts her towards the sink, grabs soap, and rubs it over her face. She starts coughing. He turns on the water and pushes her face under it. It’s too hot. She screams. He turns on the cold. Now he throws that on her face — she’s sputtering.

“That hurts,” she says.

“Who put that on your face?” he says.

“Rita did it.”

“Who’s Rita?”