Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

There’s talk of her being chosen for a workshop performance next year. They pick only a few girls. Mainly C level. Then she could be offered a company apprenticeship. In two years, she could even be in Swan Lake, dancing in the corps, onstage with her idols. Maybe then she’d be down to a high school correspondence course. But who would care about that if she were sixteen and dancing with New York City Ballet?

Her mother has been calling her regularly. She comes to visit in January and suggests that they go to places she never would have before — museums and even a Broadway show. She invites Mira out to San Francisco for a few weeks in the summer. She’s in another group house. She tries to make it sound fun— dance classes nearby ! Mira has to explain that there are no classes like SAB classes, and if she’s chosen again to go up to Saratoga for summer session, she’ll have to go, since this is her chance to show she’s company material. But maybe, she adds, crinkling her eyes the way Judy does, she could spare a week at the very end of August? Her mother gets red between her freckles and says, “Your room will be there for whenever you want to come.” Then, as if to reassure herself more than Mira, “I’ve got a good job now. It pays the bills.” Her mother looks so proud of herself, which makes Mira feel both happy and sad. Mira doesn’t know what to do with her face, so she smiles and says, “That’s great, Mom!”

Soon after, she dreams that she stands in the dark, watching Maurice sleep. She feels strong, brave, and beautiful. Then he rises from his sleeping position — but it is like he is still asleep — and his hair has grown so that it is long and silver-white, down his back all the way to the floor, hanging like a veil. And then he takes out a wand — yes, she knows, it’s cheesy — and he hands her an apple to eat. It is shiny and red and looks delicious, but there is a wormhole in it and she can’t take her eyes off of it and the longer she looks at it, the bigger and rounder it grows until she feels like she is looking into a dark tunnel to the center of the earth. And then she hears Maurice’s voice — but it is changed, like a woman’s voice, like her mother’s voice from a long time ago. (She used to tell those stories, really long involved stories.) “Who are you?” she says, but the woman doesn’t respond. She just looks at Mira and smiles. And she doesn’t know what to say. Then she realizes that she has no shoes on and her feet are bare and there are leaves under them that crunch when she walks. It is like walking on old brittle bones. And then she has this amazing feeling of power move though her. It feels like she is being lifted up off the ground, like she is floating out of her body, and it feels so good. Then the lady with the veil is gone and the hole to the center of the earth is gone and it is Maurice again.

She knows what the dream is about, she knows what she has to do: it is a sign telling her to do what she has wanted to do since she turned thirteen and knew about the birds and the bees. She wants to have him touch her, to touch her in a way he never has before, with warm hands. She wants him to whisper in her ear “I love you, Mira.”

Walking home from the bus, Mira passes the bar Dorrian’s, that famed outpost of debauchery, where Sam and his friends have started to gather. Even early in the evening, it’s going full swing. She purposefully crosses to the other side of the street, evading the bar’s overflow onto the sidewalk. She and her sister SAB bunheads don’t talk about boys, sex, clothes, hair, drinking — the courtship rituals that occupy most girls’ time. As a bunhead, she is exempt — barred? — from all that. For one thing, there isn’t even time. They have Technique twice a day — morning and evening. In the early afternoon they have Variations or Partnering. Then all day Saturday they are in class, with a break for Music Theory. As her life has turned to maintaining an elite routine, the routine and focus of a professional athlete, her nighttime dreams have exploded into strangeness and mystery. Sometimes, as she goes through her day, she has the sense of being a sleepwalker. But her dreams are wild and vivid. Only when she is dancing does she feel as alive as she does when she is dreaming.

At SAB, she’ll soon be in Level C, the Advanced division. There’s no doubt. For Variations, Danilova is now teaching her a sequence from Coppelia . Ms. Tumkovsky continues to be mean to her, and now she shines under this meanness because it shows she is good; she is a Mr. B girl. For Variations, they wear white leotards, so thin they look see-through. No elastics, no leg warmers, no warm-up pants allowed. It’s as if their bodies, now edging toward complete, are owned by SAB, as if the results of all their efforts are to become less substantial — ghosts, rays of light, permeable. On some girls, you can see small breasts sprouting and hips spreading. These girls are placed in the back rows, off to the side, at the end of the line. A lot of the girls complain about the see-through leotards, but she likes them. Her body is small and strong, her legs fly on their own, she turns and turns in her spot, whipping her head around to her internal song. She hears the song all the time now. She has become a body in space that can read Danilova’s, and Tumkovsky’s, and most of all Mr. B’s mind. When he calmly walks into the room and his eyes rest on her, she knows without him speaking what he wants. There is no need for words anymore.

At one point she finds herself onstage with Merrill Ashley, whose eyes are as big and bright as ancient coins. She is so close she can smell the sweat on Merrill’s skin and watch the ribbons of muscle in her back quiver as she arabesques.

There’s no longer any need to tell Maurice what she’s learning — she simply shows him, dancing longer and longer in his parlor room, into the night in her private display for him. Sometimes she does a whole class for him. He watches, eyes glistening. Their dinners grow shorter, then nonexistent. They come to his place, eat cookies and guzzle Coke, and she dances, the sweat light on her skin. She’s never felt more beautiful.

She loves him. She does. Their relationship is special. She could never have it with a boy her age. She loves his fine delicate fingers, his pale skin withered like a faint crust over milk that moves with her hand when she touches it. She loves his hair smelling of something strong and stern, she loves his bony back with the shoulder blades like wings and the fine sinewy forearms and the bent leg. She loves the stone on his finger, blue in a gold setting. Most of all she loves his bones, his joints, the places where they come together — he is an animated skeleton. She sees his young face in his older face, so that she thinks he looks younger than people her own age. What she sees is raw desire — and love.

The spring of 1980 comes, cold and wet. The rain gutters overflow. Discarded umbrellas lie in heaps against garbage cans. The hallways of SAB smell of ragg wool and rubber, but aside from that, the school is immune to the weather — to everything outside. Like a humidor, it’s kept on the cool side so that sweat dries easily, but not too cool to get in the way of a good warming-up of muscles.

Mira’s hurtling toward her fourteenth birthday.

I spend the rest of the afternoon wandering and mulling things over. Kevin, a name Maurice would not have approved of. Is this lawyer the son Rob mentioned? But his last name is not Dupont , so maybe he’s not the one Rob mentioned. I don’t plan on going back to Felicia’s. Not until I try to meet Kevin.