Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Airy and indefatigable, a Tchaikovsky serenade floats out from the studios.

Mira lies awake all that night. The next morning, she is strangely calm. It’s a Saturday, perfect. She pulls on underwear, her tightest jeans, a polo shirt and a long green sweater with a belt around the waist. She dumps out her giant dance bag onto her bed — the tangle of leotards and tights fall out into a twisted mass — then she pulls the items from under her bed — Maurice’s book and Pavlova’s shoe — and shoves them into the bottom of the bag. She packs an extra pair of jeans, her favorite boatneck shirt, two pairs of underwear.

She climbs on the crosstown bus. At this time of the morning, the bus is mostly empty. There are no other bunheads. The streets are still quiet of the clatter of cars and horns and trucks. There are two old ladies who could be traveling together but don’t speak. One is frail, with a bent spine and a tacky raincoat and a plastic kerchief over her head. The other one is round, has a direct stare and pink saggy cheeks, and carries a cane. She fixes on Mira with a conspiratorial smile. The ladies get off at Fifth. A middle-aged man with a briefcase and untied shoes gets on. He opens the briefcase and begins shuffling his papers.

Then it’s her stop. She stands, in her light windbreaker, belted green sweater, and penny loafers, in front of a diner on Sixty-sixth and Broadway. It is eight fifteen. She enters and orders a blueberry muffin, toasted, no butter. The boy behind the counter stares at her for a moment too long before he turns to make her food. Already, the clean early-morning air grows muddy with the regular people who are rising, demanding their coffee, their donuts.

“Hey, Dimitri, doncha just stand there, get the girl her muffin. What’s wrong with you?” A burly man with the same hair as the boy claps him on the back.

The counter boy hands over a warm ball of tinfoil. For a moment, both of their hands touch the pulsing mass of heat.

Standing there in that diner, with this boy, she feels like she is turning back into a girl — not Bella, not Mirabelle, but Mira —a normal girl. Everything in her carefully constructed life is splintering. She can feel it happening: and in the spaces, those moments of weakness, like when she went into Sam’s room and he told her about Oliver.

“Are you okay?” the counter boy says. She quickly looks away and flees back outside to class.

The next week, she does something very difficult — she calls her mother and says she wants to come visit.

“When?” her mother says. She had imagined her mother would be more excited.

Mira begins to cry, heavy sobs that hurt her head. “Soon. Now.”

“Whoa. Of course you can come soon. I’ll talk to your dad.”

“They think I’m fat,” Mira says, breaking down.

“Those Russian pricks?” says her mother. “Screw them.”

As soon as school ends for the year, Mira is on the plane to San Francisco. Her mother hugs her and says how good she looks, how healthy. Rachel’s hair is long and she’s wearing the same shell earrings that Mira saw back in New York.

Back at Felicia’s, everything is quiet. She’s still out. I take the stack of letters out of my purse. At the bistro table, I spread them out and count them — twenty in all. I sit for a while with my hand on them and watch the lights crawl along the other side of the river. I’m not ready to read them yet. I’ll always have these now, to add to my collection, my exhibit of my past. But they are words, not objects. Evidence of someone’s heart, someone’s mind, someone’s soul. When I’ve read them all, I will know his secrets, too, what was inside his mind all these years. This knowledge keeps exploding in my head. That old feeling of being onstage and having the lights on me comes rushing back — the excitement and energy of that — even as I sit in Felicia’s silent living room. But that feeling fades and in its space is something softer.

I call my mother again, and this time she picks up. I jump right in.

“Mom, I met him.”

“Who?”

“My son.”

“Oh my god. How?”

“He found me . He’s been looking for me.”

She’s very quiet.

“He’s a man now. A lawyer. He wants a relationship with me.” My voice spirals up at the end like a girl’s.

“Oh, Kate.”

“But it’s okay, Mom. It’s okay. I know it will be.”

“Well, that’s fucking wonderful then,” Rachel says after a long pause. Her voice is thick. I wonder if she is going to cry. Maybe she’s thinking about me as a pregnant teenager beached on my bed, clinging to my secrets.

“You’re a fucking grandma.” I laugh.

“A fucking grandma,” she says. And she laughs, too. “I need a cigarette.”

But I will never tell her who is Kevin’s father. I will never tell her about Maurice. That is a secret I will take to my grave. Me, Maurice, and Kevin (and Rob? I wonder suddenly) are the only ones who can know that. But then I have this thought: this is something I may no longer get to decide. Maurice was Kevin’s father. This information belongs to Kevin as much as it belongs to me. If he ever meets my mother, he can tell her who his father is.

I start to dance. On Felicia’s clean carpet, I’m doing the same moves I was that night in the studio when Sioban found me — but now they feel brighter, easier. I start small, just my foot against the floor and my hands up, but soon let go. I’m dancing, in Felicia’s living room high above the Hudson. There’s something okay about this moment. Dancing in this luxury apartment. The air circulation system humming. I’m not sure if it’s the sweet sadness for what is lost, or for my own self, for Maurice, for the girl that I was and had abandoned. But at this moment it doesn’t matter.

I wake in the middle of the night, my heart pounding. At first, I don’t know where I am. I look around the room. I am lying in Felicia’s guest room, staring at the ceiling. I am trying to grasp simple facts of memory, of the past and the present. Kevin who I just met in his tower of gold and glass. This boy — this man — needed me enough to have found me. He sought me out. I am his birth mother. I was raped by a man three times my age. I got pregnant. I hurt him but I did not kill him. These are the facts, how slippery they feel, and how much I have resisted them.

I bring my hand up to the weak light from the window — thin fingers grown thicker with age, no-nonsense, the pale freckled skin that I’ve looked at for so long, now new to me. I feel tender toward it. I run one hand over the other, tracing veins, wrinkles, freckles. A life — one life. What will I do with the rest of it? I’ve squandered much of it by waiting, by giving in to my own fear of myself and what I could have done. But did not do. I hear my own notes from the modernism lecture in my head: the grotesque, ugly, brutal, and the strong, Nijinsky wielded like a weapon.

Is it too late for me?

Not to destroy the past, but to open up through thickets of inertia, new landscapes of future possibility.

I insisted to Sioban that she can be a scientist and a dancer. What possibilities are there for myself that I have not allowed? Can I become a mother this late in the game? What ways are there of moving beyond anger and sadness that I have yet to discover? Can I stop sabotaging my own ambitions?

Mira’s mother lives in a colorful, peeling Victorian house that she shares with three other roommates. The overall impression is of macramé everywhere, shoes left in a pile by the door. Her mother’s roommates, Edana, Brian, and Ralph, pursue various life changes — Ralph is becoming a priest, Brian is becoming gay, and Edana is becoming single after the breakup of a long marriage. The common area is draped in hanging plants, woven rugs, and stacked with magazines. But the kitchen is the real control room. In the kitchen, there are an array of various tins, jars, containers of messy, organic substances that had to be cared for in certain ways — reconstituted or blended or hydrated or ground with an ancient stone pestle. They are kudzu, protein mix, nutritional yeast, flaxseeds. In her mother’s bedroom are her paintings and drawings, tacked up over mirrors, laid over bureaus and dressers, bound in portfolios piled underneath the bed and stacked in the closets. Mira sleeps in a room at the end of the second floor that is barely big enough for a bed, but she likes its smallness and its lack of furniture.