Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Mira takes the pen and signs the papers. She signs over the too-small baby that she never holds. She signs over her mom’s and her dad’s privileges of ever knowing the child. She signs over Maurice, Mr. B, Tumkovsky, Danilova. What she is left with is unclear. Her signature is a girl’s careful loops, a round circle hanging over the stalk of the i . How she would give anything to be the fat girl at SAB and not a girl with a saggy belly in a hospital room signing some papers held by a lady in a blue suit. Afterward, she is an empty pitcher. She might eventually be filled with anything — she doesn’t care.

But then she changes her mind. She does care. She wants to be seen — one last time. She wants someone to know. That’s why she does it — why she writes Maurice’s name down next to hers on the line that reads: father.

In the fall, when school starts again, Mira works like she never has before. In dog-eared workbooks, with sharpened no. 2 pencils, nudged into her desk, the smell of sesame noodles hanging in the air, pencil shavings collecting under her chair, she attends to her homework. She opens the math textbook, the history textbook, the science textbook, English. Because her body doesn’t move like it did, she watches thoughts pile on top of one another, like rubber tires in a junkyard. They collect. For so long she was a limb of someone else’s mind — following marching orders as they came out of Tumkovsky’s mouth, looking for the light of response in Maurice’s eyes (but is he dead?), waiting for Mr. B to come into the classroom and tilt his turtle head at her and say, She’s mine .

San Francisco Superior Courthouse. Lives altered in the blink of an eye, the flick of a finger. In a dusty room with peeling-plaster walls, in front of a stern woman with close-cropped hair, Mira signs form after form. When she’s done, she’ll no longer have the name of a flower, the name of a bell. As if cauterizing a wound, she will cut the limb off: the hopeful girl, the yearning girl, the girl enthralled to beauty will become someone else. Beauty leads to a pain she has only begun to figure out how to survive. She signs over her too-hopeful name and gets a new one.

Kate Randell .

Kate , commonplace enough (yet she has never had a friend named Kate). Not too pretty, a name that does not ask you to watch it.

Randell, her mother’s maiden name, the name she never really knew, the name of a blinding-white Connecticut house her mother left behind when she married her dad, a name her mother took back when she got to California and now owns again, along with her giant shell earrings.

A half hour later, she holds a photocopied piece of paper with her name on it. This is me now. This is my new name.

She takes her mother’s hand and they walk to her rusty Peugeot. They walk right by the hippies selling dream catchers and don’t even stop.

I open my eyes to the light pouring in. The sun stretches all across the bed, and I feel it making a design on my face. Felicia must have gotten in late — her door is closed. Alain’s bag and coat are draped over the couch. I shower, dress, and head out, glad not to have to see them. I’m happy I don’t have to try to put yesterday into words. Last night, trying it with my mother was strange enough.

Out on the street, it’s still early for a Saturday in Manhattan. On Felicia’s block, the new trees are sprouting hard-shelled buds that I feel a tender pity for — what will happen to them if this warm spell ends?

As I make my way to the West Side subway, I pass construction site after construction site. Up Seventh now to Columbus Circle. Bangs and slaps of boards on concrete. Piles of sandbags. This is New York, this struggling into activity. There is an old-fashioned eagerness to it all, a twentieth-century enterprise, a thing making itself.

I’m relieved to descend into the subway. New York subways: I’ve forgotten that particular smell of dirt and ammonia. It’s an ancient industrial smell, so different from the mildew and food smell of the BART. The tracks start to rumble and the tunnel wind picks up. That old rising excitement, the quiver of air in front of me, and then the breakneck thunder of the train that shudders by inches from my face. Inside, the trains have the same submarine feel as when I was a kid. Metal, scouring fluorescent light, intimate anonymity. We barrel through the tunnels to Brooklyn. The knowledge of tons of water overhead and the sweat and the missing limbs of those who blasted tunnels in rock a hundred years ago.

Effortful, cheerful public service posters occupy the ad spaces. How hard the MTA is working to make things better! The Second Avenue line is on target! More Express buses! When I was a kid, these spaces were filled with ads for the lottery and skinny cigarettes, and they featured lots of girls in halter tops.

I watch a woman wearing high suede boots playing a game on her phone. The high-pitched sounds of fake gunfire reverberate over the clatter of the train and the station announcements. There is something primitive about this city, something honest and rapacious that hasn’t changed.

I get out of the subway at the first stop in Brooklyn. It’s the one nearest to my parents’ old house. I pass through a park that used to be deserted. Now it’s covered in AstroTurf and babies. Another blinding sky, this one blue, is pinned over the new MetroTech buildings. I pass several bars and upscale restaurants. All of this is new. Unlike Park Avenue, it’s really changed here.

As I head toward the river, I remember how my life here was one of pure sensation, of cold winds from the East River in the winter, of heat coming from the sidewalks in summer. I remember a certain leaf that squishes underfoot and turns to a yellow pulp. We called them “stink bombs” and threw them at each other — though not me — I was too quiet and serious for that. But is that true? I don’t know if I remember myself right at this age. It’s a slippery part of my past, even more slippery than all that happened with Maurice. This is a different kind of loss of memory.

The houses are better kept up than I remember. Bricks repointed, shutters painted. Some houses even have metal plaques bearing nineteenth-century dates. House proud.

Now I’m on the block where we lived before my mother got California religion and moved out west and I moved in with Dad. Here it is — the house where we had all lived in my earliest memories. My father, slim and without glasses, planed and scraped the walls, heroic to himself. He was younger than I am now. My mother in her bold colors and paisleys and kerchiefs.

I stand outside, looking. I find myself really looking, allowing myself, my eyes, to take in, to collect.

The house. In my memory, it’s a dreary place locked under a gunmetal sky, in a state of incomplete transformation. But now the outside is well cared for and cheery. The sidewalk in front of it is ironed flat. The weathervane on the roof is replaced with a satellite dish. The door has been painted a subdued gray-blue, a Martha Stewart folded-linens color. Outside, in the little yard — I see now it was a yard — someone has planted a magnolia tree. The magnolia is just starting its bloom, some early buds have even dropped a few petals onto a kid’s Radio Flyer bike leaning against the house.

A warmth under my armpits spreads though my body. Something shifts, like the floor settling, and I clasp my hands together.

I take the well-swept stairs slowly, one at a time. In the planters on the top landing sprout begonias. On either side of the door are two Victorian-style gaslights that border on kitsch. The makeshift world my mother sought here is clearly gone.