Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Mira’s fame is growing at SAB. First a girl who Tumkovsky is mean to, then a Mr. B girl — and now a Marie. There are lots of girls Tumkovksy is mean to, a handful of Mr. B girls, but a finite number of Maries. Only one a year.

The other girls, and their imperfections, fade away as Mira runs ahead on a stream of energy and light. Her body tells her what to do and she just goes along with it. The steps are second nature. Her body turns, folds, extends, all on its own. It’s a song in her body. The high notes are sometimes so high and long that she is left wide-eyed in amazement along with everyone else. Something great is growing in her, unrolling its tendrils, sprouting buds in all directions. Sometimes the song in her body is almost too loud; it fills her eyes, makes them tear up in something like gratitude.

Mira misses a total of two weeks of school for her Nutcracker performances . In the party scene, Marie and her brother, Fritz, chase each other underneath hors d’oeuvres serving trays. Apart from the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act Two, they get the loudest applause. The music is spongy and bright and they bounce like bubbles in it. Then comes her favorite part. With a drumroll, Drosselmeyer appears, swishing his black cape, smelling of dusty oranges. Mr. B himself used to play Drosselmeyer, they all know that and still, his presence is there, in the cape, in the mask, in the staff. When she is offered the nutcracker, she grabs the doll and twirls, arms outstretched, showing off their secret — the great urn of a toy that steals the show. The cymbals crash and the drums pound, and the audience erupts. A thunder of clapping breaks in her ears.

Her dad and Judy come to see her every weekend. Judy brings a client to each performance and takes them backstage to meet her. Her mother flies in to see her, too, without anyone else, and wears a loose flowered dress. Maurice is there for every single performance — he doesn’t come backstage to see her, but he often sends flowers, and while she is surrounded by her dumb broken family, she senses him lurking, waiting just around each corner, behind some stage door. (Though when she peeks, she never sees him.) Then, he is there, waiting for her by the fountain at their time. He drinks her in and drinks in her success, and everything falls into place. He is with her, even when he is not.

Throughout the spring of 1979, Mira performs more than any other girl in her division. She is chosen for the premiere of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme with the great Rudolph Nureyev and Patricia McBride. Because she’s an SAB girl, one of Mr. B’s, she’s valuable outside the company, too. She appears in children’s roles with the Maurice Béjart and Maya Plisetskaya companies when they are in town on their American tours.

And the needle on the scale doesn’t budge for her, even as for others it swings upward. It seems she will never get bigger.

In April, Mira turns thirteen! Maurice takes her to an Afghan restaurant where the people are dressed colorfully and blankets are on the walls. She smiles so much her face hurts. Other girls have boyfriends who go around with shoes untied and braces with egg in them, but she has Maurice. She is the luckiest girl in the world.

The school year ends. Classes end. Summer comes. Mira’s invited to go to Saratoga with the entire NYC Ballet company for SAB’s elite summer session. One day that summer, Heather Watts turns to her in the hallway and says, “You’re Mira, right? I know he likes you.”

Her mother invites her out to San Francisco to stay with her in her new group house, but Mira doesn’t go. She’s working too hard, there’s too much at stake, and her mother wouldn’t understand that.

One night before classes end for the summer, Judy comes into Mira’s room and sits on her bed. She spreads a magazine across her lap. The front cover shows a gaunt-looking girl staring at the camera. The headline reads: ANOREXIA: THE EPIDEMIC SWEEPING OUR NATION. Judy is looking at her through squinted eyes, as she always does when she seizes on something she thinks is important.

“Of course, I had heard of anorexia nervosa, but I didn’t know the depths of it, the severity of it. . I mean the possible severity of it.” She taps the magazine cover. “I mean, there is a girl in the hospital now, a ballet dancer, who refuses to eat though she is dying. She’s at death’s door and was caught jogging by her bed. She has to be restrained so that she would not burn off the meager amount of food that she does consume. It’s just. . horrible!”

Mira says nothing. She wants to laugh. When she hears grown-ups talk about anorexia and bulimia, she has a curious detachment. How misplaced their worry always is! Her secret will always be safe because grown-ups look in the wrong places.

“Now, Mira, I want you to tell me if you recognize any of these symptoms in yourself or in others you know: reluctance to eat, creating rituals around food, severe hunger pains, distorted body image, a feeling of dislocation — that means, I don’t know what it means.”

“I know girls who are anorexic, Judy,” Mira says. “And believe me, I am not one of them. These girls are so skinny they are disgusting. They can’t even dance.”

Judy stares at her through wide eyes, perhaps hearing a tone she hasn’t heard before in Mira’s voice. But Mira knows Judy can’t say anything really because she herself is so invested in Mira as a dancer. She always loves to show Mira off to her friends at dinner parties.

She finds out that Felicia was not invited to return to SAB. Felicia’s stomach has begun to stick out more and more — Mira thinks of the candy bars in the closet, shorn of their skins.

They sit on Felicia’s bed in her puffy room. “What will you do?” says Mira. “Are you going to another studio?”

Felicia slides her eyes away, then looks right at her. “My mom and I are moving to L.A. to try our luck in Hollywood.”

In the fall, Mira is moved up another level at SAB. She’s in B2 now. She still wears a midnight blue leotard, she begins partnering. For Variations, she has the famous Danilova, who is teaching her the first scene of La Sylphide, the girl who enters a window at night to a sleeping house, a sprite come to visit the earthbound. Bourrée, bourrée, bourrée, head cocked, listen. Bourrée, bourrée, listen.

Mira switches to the Professional Children’s School, where students with her talent and schedule go. She loves it there. There are others like her there. There are a number of other SAB girls. And many actors, who leave in the middle of class for auditions. She sits next to kids she has seen on TV. They talk a lot in class and have holes in their jeans, which makes them different from the bunheads like her. Like the other dancers, she dresses neatly and doesn’t talk much in class, but always does her homework. The teachers are very nice and even try to be friends with the kids, because it is the kids’ lives that are the most important thing. They are what everything else must be arranged around. Some of these teachers even come see her perform and say things outside of class that they shouldn’t, about how great she is, how much better than anyone else.

In November, Nutcracker time comes again and she’s chosen for the Head Angel, which is a very good part. She wears a golden tiara and leads the other girls into tapestries of shiny gold shapes. Again, her mother comes into town, and her dad and Judy come every weekend with friends and clients, and even Sam comes twice with a new friend named Oliver.