Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Her body should be locked up. It should be devoured. How unappreciated it is. How much she had given it! When she looks in the mirror, she sees something besides herself — she sees a girl who does not correspond to her idea of how she should be. Gradually she is coming into a new shape, hip bones, breasts, fat. Yes, it is fat that is between her and herself now.

Her mother takes her to thrift stores and buys maternity clothes with Kmart tags still scraping her thighs and underarms, seams so stiff they crack. Mira buys everything in black and too big and carries a notebook in front of her belly, so people will just think she’s a PIB.

One day, a Chicano girl comes up to her. “What’s your name?”

“Kate,” she says. It’s the first name that comes to mind. No longer a singular sensation, but one of a thousand.

“Who you live with?”

“My mother.”

“You have a father?”

Mira shakes her head. “He’s dead.” This too comes out easily.

She nods. “Who’s the daddy?”

Another thud in her heart spreads its dullness through her body. “He’s dead, too.”

The girl whistles, low.

Chinese slippers beneath her desk, an advent calendar, a metronome , a bottle of valerian to sleep at night. She sleeps and sleeps. The red kimono her mother lends her when she grows big. The orange plastic watering can on the bay window, a chart on the wall with a marker attached, names of her new housemates, next to their chores. Soon she is exempt from these. She sits at her desk and stares out the window, does worksheets in her math and vocabulary workbooks.

She can feel the thing — the baby. They say it is a baby; she’s still not so sure. She knows only that it turns and pokes and kicks. It is not round and soft like babies are supposed to be but hard, all angles, ribs, elbows, knees, ankles, a bunch of sticks prodding her in the middle of the night.

Even at her desk at school. She jumps up, toppling her chair with a clatter. The thing — the baby, whatever it is — had poked at her down there . She runs out into the long hall to the bathroom. She shuts the stall door. In the barren cigarette-smelling bathroom, tearless cries heave her body, cries that she couldn’t let her dad or Mr. B or Maurice or even her mother ever see. Suddenly, she can’t get air; she gasps and heaves, the air fades to gray, static. The clang, clang of the bell. Screams of other kids. The water runs, a squeaky faucet.

She wakes in the bedraggled nurse’s station — the endless thrum of footsteps and shouting in the hallways outside. “You fainted,” says the nurse. She imagines the Russian lady who talked to her, standing over her, saying, “It’s not a question of fat—” But it is . It is a question of fat.

She is really fat now. She is too embarrassed to be seen. She cuts school, lies in Dolores Park on the grass, the beards of the palm trees above her sway in the wind. The sky is a beaten-into-submission blue, clouds banished.

She begins to sleep in her mother’s bed. Her mother takes her bed.

One night in January 1981, Mira wakes up with vise-like pains squeezing at her sides. She feels like her belly is a cement mixer. Pain runs up and down her back. The sheets beneath her are soaking wet.

“Mom,” she calls. “Mom!” Her mother comes in. She is pale. She is already dressed.

“We’re going to get through this,” her mother says.

Her mother tells Mira to sit on the stoop while she pulls the car from the lot. Mira is surprised to hear someone groaning. She realizes it is her. Her belly is hard as a basketball. The car pulls up with a squeak and Mira crawls into the backseat. At the hospital, a nurse brings her ice chips and tells her to sit on the floor and make like she is taking a shit. “Use those muscles,” the nurse says. Mira can’t get it right — her dancer’s muscles keep pulling up instead of pushing down. Her mother bites her lip and sits with her and counts and marks things on a paper and tells her to breathe. The nurse goes away and comes back and gives Mira a pill, and then the pain isn’t so bad. She passes out and the next thing she knows is that she is in bed and something — something hot and wet — is coming out of her. She thinks at that moment — weirdly — that Maurice is coming out of her and he’d been in there the whole time, and she begins to cry. And then she hears another cry and she realizes that it is Maurice and that he has been in there the whole time and that she has finally gotten him out and she cries with the relief of it but then a minute later she thinks no! He’s had something planted in me that can never be removed — claimed me in a way no one can ever touch — and this thing can always emerge whenever he wants—

Then she feels an unbearable pain, like a sun burning through her, and she screams.

The baby is small and very red, tiny and wrinkled and ugly.

She doesn’t want to hold him. A nurse brings her applesauce and crackers and pulls down the shades, and she sleeps for a long time.

She remembers the other time, in the hospital, when she leaped, when she trusted too much. She remembers the girl with the gap-toothed smile, whose heart wasn’t strong enough. Who is there to blame now? That what she and Maurice have done should have such consequences — hospital, nurse, a baby! When she was a child, she felt not like a child. Now she knows she is not a child and she feels more like a child than she ever has, like someone looking around at the dead bodies after a massacre, saying, “Did I do that? With my own two hands?” The reality of her own power to harm herself, to change things, to make things, descends on her. She hears a nurse’s squeaky shoes outside the room. She will be leaving — going home tomorrow — but she must stay this night to make sure there are no complications.

The nurse pokes her head in, walks to her bed. She is carrying something. “Do you want to see him?” From the bundle in her arms comes a tiny noise, a baby sound, a gurgle, something human, something in-human. She turns her head away. This then was Kevin.

She begins to cry for the thousandth time. Something has been taken from her, something that protected her from other people’s feelings about her. Some piece of her taken, along with the baby. The hole gapes, raw, and in it she can feel what other people feel about her. Before it was just Maurice and Mr. B — now it’s everybody. It’s not the child, who never belonged to her, but something else. She thinks of Maurice. She misses him. She misses her ballet body, how it made her feel strong.

The next morning, while her mother is out getting coffee, a lady wearing a blue suit and high heels comes to visit. She carries a folder with Mira’s name on it. The lady says she has some papers for Mira to sign. The lady smells of shampoo. She thanks her for having the child. For giving joy to a childless couple. Right on, she says.

The lady hands her a folder and tells her to sign where she points. Her nails are long and pink and perfect. She has a file with Mira’s name on it! It is that moment when Mira realizes she hates her name. This Mira who became Mirabelle, who became Maurice’s Bella. Mira: too many sounds, too hopeful. Is it hope that gets you in trouble?

Mira begins to read the papers in her file. “Oh,” says the lady, “you don’t need to read it, honey. You just need to sign it.” Mira glares at her.

She pages through the documents anyway. Attached to one of the forms is a photo of an old sad-faced couple. The address catches her eye — an address in Berkeley. The woman has brown bobbed hair and is smiling in front of a tree. The man has gray-blond hair and his arm around her. She is not pretty, not hopeful. When Mira looks up, she sees the blond lady averting her eyes and fiddling with the hem of her skirt.