Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

She looks at his records lined up on the bottom shelf, his trophies and banners on the next highest one, his orphaned sports equipment spilling out of the closet and piled in the corner. She feels a funny feeling in her stomach, something sour. So many props to play his sports! In Sam’s tropical-aired room, the neat clutter of his popular boy’s life lies unconfirmed by anyone but him. She has only her body, this cruel, fallible, and perfect thing. For a moment, she hates herself deeply. She points her foot and flexes it — it curves like a banana and straightens into a ruler — and she feels momentarily better.

Her own efforts at being a bunhead, in comparison, for the moment, seem like nothing. Mirages. Dreams. She begins to breathe quickly. Ever since that day when Ms. Clement said “Yes, we have something here,” and her father called her his little princess and she began to use that part of her that moved all the time, even when she was sitting still. Now: the way Judy introduces her to her most important clients even before she introduces her own son. The way her father looks at her after a performance and then quickly around the room with saucer eyes to see who else has seen that she belongs to him. And most of all, Maurice, who has, for three years now, secured her dancing in a fog of a dream.

“You’re coming to dinner tomorrow night?” she says.

“Yeah, they told me I had to,” Sam says. He’s turned around in his chair and looks at her. “Hey, I have to ask you something. I promised I would. You know my friend Oliver?”

“Oliver?”

“Yeah, he’s an attacker on the team.”

Who doesn’t know Oliver Corbitt? He’s a dark-haired boy in the tenth grade. He speaks with one side of his mouth down, says “gnarly” to everything, wears his blue blazer opened, wears moccasins without socks, and has one of those haircuts with the front left long.

She has seen Oliver on the field, all grass stains and ruddy face and clapping his teammates on the back. How must it be to feel the wind in your hair and root around in the dirt and try to hit a ball with a stick and scream about winning but in the end not care that much?

“So?”

“So what?”

“You are so retarded. So do you like him?”

She recalls once seeing Oliver’s muscular legs and flushed cheeks and thin face and green eyes with black lashes.

“Yes or no?”

“Yes,” she says. “No.”

Sam smiles and she watches his sixteen-year-old dimples grow. Her body flushes with a dark fear. She remembers Maurice, his announcement, his conviction: you are beautiful.

She looks down at her hand clutching at the long hair of the rug. She has pulled some strands out of their loops and left a messy patch. She is shocked that Oliver could see her as something concrete enough in the world to have an opinion about. She thinks of herself as a ghost, invisible when she isn’t dancing or with Maurice. She bites her lip. She imagines going out with Oliver. What do others her age do? Could he ever understand what twilight world she lives in?

“What did he say to you — exactly?”

He sighs. “He said, ‘Your sister is cute. She looks shy.’ I said, ‘She’s a ballerina.’”

She begins laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Fuck you,” she says. She’s on the verge of tears.

Sam shrugs. His face in the skewed light of the desk. “All right, have it your way.”

Famous dancers are not known for their cooking, their houses. They are famous for sleeping on hard mattresses on the floor and owning no furniture. Mira fought with Judy until Judy relented and let her get rid of her bed. Now she sleeps on a mattress on the floor. She got rid of the TV, too, and the cushioned chair, and kept only her desk, a trunk for her dance things, and a small white bureau — leotards in one drawer, tights in another. In her closet, her Fiorucci striped boatneck shirts in six colors, her suede boots, her white oxfords, and her blue pleated skirts.

In her spartan room, Mira curls up on her mattress and closes her eyes. She takes her nightly inventory:

Breakfast: one hard-boiled egg, a glass of orange juice, muffin.

Lunch: 4 saltines, 1 Yoplait, three Cheez Doodles.

Snack: 8 pieces of Bubble Yum.

Dinner: eight bites of couscous, five bites of peas, some rice.

Now she thinks about the old sad brownstone in Brooklyn. She remembers the house as the repository of all that was lost: the cold turned to adventure, the three of them at a distant impossible time in one place. She once overheard her father telling her mother, “The city works on me. It works on me.” And it never left her. At Judy’s place, everything, from salt and pepper shakers to stove, is the “best modern option.” Black and heavy, metal and steel, big and plastic. Why is life supposed to lead to more and more? In ballet, it is different: one becomes less and less, lighter and lighter.

A week later, she waits at the Lincoln Center fountain for Maurice . She hasn’t seen him since the previous Friday night — her unhappy birthday. He hasn’t shown up all week after class, but he would never miss Friday night dinner. Or would he?

It’s a cool spring evening, but at first it’s not cold. She’s still warm from her class. A long adagio sequence sings through her head and she mimes it with her feet as she waits. The last bit of purple sunset hangs over New Jersey. She watches it fade as Tumkovsky’s commands echo in her head. Now it’s just past gloaming. The wind picks up, it’s brisk, the smells of someone’s perfume.

Half an hour later, she’s still waiting. She lights a cigarette and pulls her peacoat against her chest. She’s said good-bye to Bryce, who is all dressed up because she’s going to meet her mom and her mom’s new boyfriend for dinner at Le Cirque. They pecked at each other’s cheeks the way they’ve seen their Russian teachers do. She’s watched the girls who are boarding together wander off in twos and threes comparing notes on pointe shoe ribbon sewing techniques. She watched from the corner as Tumkovsky, huddled in a black shawl, boarded a bus. The last of the bunheads — and their teachers — have been disgorged from the Juilliard building and disappeared into the city. Only she is left.

Where is he? Her face flushes as she remembers the last time she saw him. His pale face sunk in some kind of strange sleep, the sting of her solitary tears, and his pronouncement, so full of blame: you are beautiful. Her foot in his crotch. It had angered him — it was against the rules. What demon had caused her to act out? She feels it in her still, clawing just below the surface — neither Mira nor Bella — scratching at her skin. Her face retracts into her peacoat, hiding from the memory. A brutal wind scours in from the Hudson. Isn’t that what he wanted? A beautiful dancing girl to look at? She has been that to him. And he has been — what? Something else just as necessary to her.

Another fifteen minutes passes. She begins walking. The traffic lights mock her. Hot dog vendors behind clouds of steam. Cars glide by like sharks licking at her heels. He is somewhere in this city, but not with her.

Walking toward the park, her dance bag swinging, a girl lost in the chaos of a crowd. She raises her hand, hails a cab, and gives Maurice’s address.

When the cab pulls up to Maurice’s building, she gets out. Just as she stands outside the door, wondering if she should ring, someone — man or woman she can’t recall, as many times as she’s played the scene in her head — pushes the door open and, head down, slips by her without even looking at her. The city is full of people hiding their faces. But if this person had looked up and stared at Mira, seen her, she might not have gone in. If this person had taken her in — a pale girl with a strange stare and grimace (but don’t those ballet girls always look so grave and serious?) — everything might have been different.