Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Her mother takes Mira to the Castro Theatre, where she sits in gold-painted balconies to watch black-and-white movies. Her mother takes her out to eat, places where they sit on the floor. They walk up to Dolores Park and watch the dog owners exercise their pets in the brave, golden light. They continue walking up into the hills, where it smells of sawdust and eucalyptus. Mira marvels at the plants: the trees whose flowers look like party favors, the palms whose spider-leg fronds walk along the sky crazily whenever a breeze comes. The jade’s thick leathery leaves that burst into the air. Her mother tells her about “the California Dream,” which is all about, her mother says — her face hawk-like, insistent— freedom .

At the end of a week, Mira doesn’t want to leave. Her mother is very quiet and her freckles stick out as she says, “This is a big decision.” She tells Mira that she’s been taking time off work and can’t do that again. “You’d have to take care of yourself a lot,” she says. Mira nods. “You’ll need to talk to your father about this.”

Mira calls her dad. She tells him she wants to stay with her mother. “Why?” he wants to know. “How long?”

“I just need to be with her for a bit.”

“That woman—”

“I haven’t seen her in a long time. She’s my mother. I want to spend some time with her.”

There’s a pause and then he says, “Why?” Listening to his breathing, she imagines the brilliance of her princess life — her bed on the floor, her posters of dancer superheroes. She smiles, almost says, yes, she’ll come home. Then she remembers her terrible body, its spreading flesh, how shocked Judy would be. Of all the people in the world, only her mother can see her like this.

“They put me on the weight list, Dad.” The silence on the other end lasts a long time. Into that crackly space, she wishes she could cry, but suddenly no tears are there. “Hang on,” says her father. Her dad has gone to get Judy, she knows. How can dads be so powerful and so clueless?

Judy comes on. “Honey, your father told me. Mira, listen. I have a friend — she’s a dietician. She can make a diet for you that’s just perfect.”

Judy’s pragmatism makes Mira pause. Maybe this is something Judy can fix with her friends, her lists — her devices? But she knows that she’s too far gone. This is what happens to girls who grow breasts and hips, who get too tall. There is no diet that can really change those things. She’s seen girls try. The giant worry-stone hip bones, the collarbones like lamb shanks. Thinness does not make you smaller, it just makes you thinner.

“We can label all of your food. Ramona’s daughter was horribly overweight and that’s what they did — started labeling her food — and no one else could touch it and she was just feeling jealous it turned out. And it worked, she dropped twenty pounds. You just need a few pounds, right? Then, you’ll be back on top—”

Mira feels it inside her, a broken, human thing. “I don’t think so, Judy.”

There’s a silence. Then another silence. “And what about ballet?”

The thing that had always kept her going was projecting herself into the future. It was a bright and simple place: dancing onstage, beautiful, before adoring eyes. His eyes. But that future is gone. She feels a swell of vertigo. This city of windswept hilltops and eucalyptus and orange is as far as she can imagine from that future. “I’ll quit,” she says.

“Oh, dear. No, you don’t.” Then Judy is quiet for a long time. Then the phone rustles, and she breathes out a big sigh. “I’m putting your father back on — we love you.”

Now her father is back on the phone. He asks to talk to her mother, and her mother takes the phone into her bedroom and she talks in a low, murmuring voice that reminds Mira of the days when they all lived in a house together. Before her dad hangs up, he says to Mira, “I guess — you can stay with your mother for a while. We’ll be here when you’re ready to come back. When you’re ready.”

Mira moves into the room at the end of the hall. Because she fits in well, her mother is only asked to pay a bit more in rent. Her dad sends the money. Mira’s old life of grosgrain ribbons, hairnets, and Fiorucci sweaters is replaced by a small room, a window without shades, oversize shirts and sweaters strewn about, black eyeliner, antacids by her bedside. She takes in a desk off the street — someone had primed but not painted it. To go with it, a wooden thrift-store chair with a tie-on patchwork cushion that Edana, who sells things in flea markets, donates to her.

Her mother isn’t home much, between her job at the lawyer’s office and evenings at her studio. But Mira quickly feels comfortable in the house. She makes cookies with Brian, pasta with Ralph, and vegetable stews with Edana.

Mira spends most of July lying on the grass in a nearby park, letting the sun bake her. She likes to watch the stray cats wander by. They stare at her without expression and then move on. Or she sits by the window in her room, staring outside at the crazy blue sky. She’s able to just sit now for hours. Just sit and stare, letting her eyes take in what she sees. Like a cat, she can just let her eyes move, take things in, let them come to her. They come to her in fits and starts — Ralph’s Gregorian chant tapes, Brian’s 1950s ballad singing, Edana’s conversations with her girlfriends from what she calls her “other life,” before she was married. People starting over. Lives after lives. Second, third lives. This city is filled with them.

Maybe this is what freedom feels like — the freedom not to move, to just sit, to just be .

One afternoon in the beginning of August, her mother comes and stands at the door, clears her throat. “We need to talk. I need to ask you something.” She’s holding keys on a chain, as if she were about to run out. She jangles the keys. “Okay. Do you have something you want to tell me?”

Mira looks at the peeling ceiling.

“Have you had your period?”

Mira shakes her head. Her mother asked her the same question a few times before during their infrequent phone calls, in the too-open air of Judy’s kitchen, and she had shaken her head, the same as now, and said “no” with a secret proud smile on her face that she was glad her mother couldn’t see.

“Do your friends have their periods?”

“Most of the girls I dance with don’t.” Danced with, not dance with. “ Danced .” The exercise keeps it away. That was what they all said to their parents, who believed them. But they also know that the less you eat, the more likely it is that your period will stay away. Even the girls who had had their periods pretended they didn’t. They hid their tampons and wouldn’t be caught dead with a bulging sanitary napkin. No ballet girl wanted her period. They wanted suffering, but not that kind.

“Really?” her mother says.

Mira nods.

“Never?” her mother says.

Mira doesn’t answer. Her mother squints her eyes and looks at the ceiling, where Mira had just been staring. “Well,” she says, but doesn’t finish her thought.

It turns out that her mother has already made an appointment in a beige building with a big crowded waiting room lined with posters depicting medical procedures. Her mother waits, while Mira is led to an examining room. Here a doctor with glasses asks Mira to pee in a cup and listens to her belly. Then he asks her a lot of questions like “Who do you live with?” and “Has anyone touched you?” Finally, he sits on a chair across from her and holds his own hands. “Do you know you are pregnant?” he says.