Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

A little girl in a powder blue leotard, the youngest of those who can perform, pulls at her bag. She turns to the little girl and smiles. The girl pulls out a Nutcracker program from her bag. “Can you sign?” she says.

Yes, when she is accepted into a professional company, wherever it is, Maurice will follow her. He must. He will come see her dance every night. Then, they can be together, in the open, no longer hidden. “What’s your name?”

“Kate,” says the girl. She’s tiny, dark-eyed. Mira fingers her pack of cigarettes, checks her bun. She takes the pen and signs. After the girl is gone, she takes another big swig from the coffee cup, finishing it. Then she tosses it in the bin. She stops at the water fountain, gets a drink. The mysterious innards of the fountain thunk and the spurt of icy water hits her cheeks.

The evening of her birthday, Mira and Maurice sit at a table in the back of Chez Luis. She doesn’t like this restaurant, its out-of-the-way location, the curly-haired host who smirks at them, and the wine lists longer than the menu. The place shines of lacquered wood. Maurice’s father, of the fierce predator stare, might have come here, she imagines, in his pantaloons and pince-nez, to smoke a cigar. The only thing she wants here is the hamburger, which is way too fatty for her. She ends up with couscous and vegetables.

The waiter ejects himself from the shadows and waits to take their order. Though she orders the same every time, he never assumes. His face, blank, as she says, “The couscous.” Maurice orders the duck à l’orange with escarole. Her stomach lurches under her ribs so that she has to touch that spot with her hands, ease it open again. She smiles.

Usually, she can feel Maurice’s eyes moving over her, taking her in, her arms as she lifts her fork, the curve of her neck, the length of her back. But today there is a wall. Because he is not seeing her, she cannot picture herself. She lights another cigarette. He waves the smoke away.

She brushes her hand against his wrist, in that space above his cuff link.

“Bella,” Maurice says. “You know the rules.” He sighs, his eyes on his silverware. He is wearing that new bolo tie and a shiny silk shirt. Recently his way of dressing has changed. She doesn’t like it. In addition to the bolo tie and shiny shirts, he wears black turtlenecks. And he shaved his mustache off and got a modern haircut. He looks like someone from these times rather than from the black-and-white photographs on his wall, which are now bolder to her than the colors on TV.

“Even on my birthday?”

“Especially on your birthday.”

Yes, there were his rules. When they are walking in the park, hands just brushing lightly, and they see a boy and a girl, not a few years older than her, sitting with their hands up each other’s shirts or in each other’s pants, he says, “Disgusting.”

“Why?” she says. “Kissing is nice, so why not—? Why not that?”

“It is something,” he says, “that is not for dancers.”

She is a Mr. B girl, in Level B at SAB, and has a rich boyfriend with a fancy apartment who loves to watch her dance, lives to watch her dance. Well, how many girls have that?

Yet she sometimes wonders why she doesn’t feel happier. It might have to do with Mr. B, who has been absent from the school for the past month after a health crisis. No one knows what is wrong exactly. Some words are whispered — cancer, multiple sclerosis — but they are too terrifying. Mostly, they just whisper that he is sick . That is all they need to know. That the god of their universe is sick is a terrible blow. It is just not the same without the knowledge of his presence lurking somewhere in those halls and classrooms, the possibility that you will turn the corner and see him coming toward you on Suzanne’s or Karin’s arm, his ascot knotted neatly, his eyes suddenly — possibly — alighting on you and seeing you, bringing you out of yourself and into a new existence. Sometimes, as she stands at her metal locker in the clean dressing room before or after yet another class, a terrible word flies into her brain: why ? At these moments, she chastises herself. Maurice would say, as Mr. B himself would: don’t ask, just do. They are dancers, after all. They are vehicles, instruments.

Maurice would scoff at the very desire to question her mission, the chance she has that he never had. Compared to transcendence, what is happiness? He is right about that. He is always right. What would she do without him to keep her on the track of the beautiful, the true dancer?

Maurice. Dancing for Maurice. Her mother — gone, then back, then gone, with her turban and big shell earrings. Her sagging father. Judy. Sam. Only Maurice does not change. He is — must be — constant. Maurice is one of the constellations in the sky she reads about (but can never see from the city).

The maître d’ brings the food. Mira trembles with hunger but she makes herself wait to taste it. How warm and salty it is. Fearful of the complex anatomy of the “normal” meal, she has trained herself to taste only the primary and the elemental — warm, cold, sweet, salty.

She stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray that has appeared.

Mira may be the shy schoolgirl in her Jackie O. wool jumpers Judy chooses for her, and her slim Fiorruci jeans and boatneck shirts and penny loafers, but Bella is more of a creature than a girl. Bella feels what it is dangerous to feel. It is Bella who slips her foot out of her loafer — she still has her tights on from class — and props her heel on the edge of Maurice’s chair and nestles it into the place where his thigh meets his hips. She moves her toes around. (Bryce calls it a snail, and when it is ready, it “swims.”)

Now he claps his eyes to her. “What?”—he spits—“are you doing?” He pushes her foot to the ground. Hard. As quickly as the universe can expand under his gaze, it now contracts. What has she done? She is filled with a burning thought : I hate him. She lists the things she hates about him: She hates his perfectly arrayed lawn of white hair. She hates the turtlenecks and jeans he has begun wearing, hates his cream-colored snakeskin belt and the way his turtleneck looks tucked into his jeans. She hates his new calfskin fedora. She hates his twitchy pale hands with the manicured nails and signet ring.

She shoves her foot back into her loafer.

Studying her quarter-eaten plate of food, right then she even hates Pavlova’s dried-apricot pointe shoe waiting in the humidor for them to pay their ritual homage. She can’t stand it.

Fine, she thinks, fine. “Then you won’t have it.” The only power she has. To take all of herself away from him. “I hate you,” she whispers, looking down.

The book is on the table when she looks up. It’s open, its small lines of cramped handwriting filling each page. Next to the gold-edge paper of the book is a profiterole with a candle in it.

“Happy Birthday, Bella,” says Maurice, smiling his stones-on-a-ledge smile.

They know each other’s bodies. He knows every tendon and bone of her form and how flexible and how strong each is. She knows his curved back, his pale, well-groomed hands. His father didn’t want him, but I will take him. She looks at his legs, one white but normal — with faint muscles and man-hair. She doesn’t like this one. It is not hers. He has let her look at the polio leg without pants: it is like a baby’s, this leg, the skin very white and new-looking, knee strangely swollen, deep indentations in the skin. The white, dry skin through which you can see bones. She loves this leg. Without it, he wouldn’t be hers. This foot is a tender, warped white thing, almost bloodless in appearance, that reminds her of something on display, under glass. This foot is highly arched. It fascinates her. The “drop foot” is a friend: a foot in relevé, a foot balanced on nothing, on air. The ball of the foot pushes forward and the heel comes up, a consequence of a shortened tendon. He wears a special shoe. Thick soled with laces, a shell hard as a beetle’s, heavily laced. This shoe holds his heel down. Drop foot? Drop foot? She thinks it should be called raised foot . His leg rests in a long cradle of the brace made of metal and leather. He lets her put his shoe back on, lace it up, gently, severely.