Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

I ring the doorbell. I’ve dressed carefully today in a tight-fitting black jacket, black pedal pushers, a red scarf, and Louboutin flats. Something jangles inside and the door opens as if someone were just waiting behind it. The woman who faces me is young, her skin a bright nut color, her hair curly, her eyes almond. A newer denizen of yuppie hood? She wears tight jeans and a Patagonia fleece vest over a T-shirt.

Behind her, the hallway spreads into shiny flooring and blank, freshly painted walls, and, beyond, into an expansive living room scattered with a few toys.

I tell her I used to live in this house many years ago, when I was a girl. “I’m in town for a conference and was just walking by,” I say. She gives me a once-over and smiles. “Where do you live now?” she says. I hear an accent, a flat cheeriness and also a bit of a drawl.

“Ohio,” I say.

“I’m from Columbus!” she says. She sticks out her hand. “Victoria.”

“Kate,” I say.

The door opens wider.

She is smiling in such a pleasant way that I’m taken off guard. I’m not sure what I expected, but not this — unfettered kindness. “Would you like for me to show you around?” says Victoria. “I have a few minutes until I need to pick up my son.”

Is it really that easy to step back into your past? I thought I wanted this, but now I’m not sure. Part of me wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her: You must be more discerning. You must be careful! This city can burn you up. Don’t trust it too much!

But I don’t. I can’t. I’m caught in the grip of something stranger than I can say. What, I couldn’t tell you. Only this: this strange, warm March week in New York when I have met my son. Kevin’s face — his elfin face, precise energy, his emotional openness to me.

I follow her. I’m shocked when she leads me into the main room. It’s totally unrecognizable. The parlor — as my parents liked to call it — is now a white rectangular box, all Bauhaus. It extends into an open kitchen. The whole back wall is windows. A couch and a few chairs float on a sea of oiled wool. A blank sail of walls. A few children’s toys scattered about. “Sorry it’s such a mess,” Victoria says. A mess ? I think about my parents with the endless work, never done, the splintering boards, mordant peeling plaster, their shipwreck of a house, their Victorian nightmare. It’s impossible to imagine this is the same place.

Now she is leading me to the kitchen, which is all bamboo and metal. It reminds me of Felicia’s, with one difference, this one is being used. I put my hand on the counter, a sheet of metal — at once industrial and kind of delicate — where there is a plastic cutting board, covered with onions being chopped. Everything is floating in a pool of strewn light. This diffuse light coats everything, just like at SAB. This entire city is being rebuilt out of glass.

Victoria stands by the counter. She’s saying, “We really love these old Victorians but they can be so claustrophobic. We wanted the light and air. We were so happy to see this one. The owners before us did a gut renovation.”

She picks up a workout bottle of water with lemon peels floating in it. She nods, gestures to the backyard. I can’t really see out the back window into the yard because of all the light pouring in. “The people we bought it from put in a koi pond. I have to learn how to take care of it. I have to restock it this summer. It’s not winterized or something. You have to actually move the fish.” She looks at me earnestly. “Do they have that here? Fish storage for the winter?”

I laugh. “When we lived here the yard was just an old patch of grass,” I say. “I lived here from when I was eight to about eleven. Only three years or so, before my parents split. It seems like a lifetime ago.”

Is she lost in all this newness, like we were lost in the oldness?

Then, before I know what I’m doing, I’m heading upstairs. I see the same blankness and careful curating in every room I pass. Then I’m on the third floor, heading down the hallway. I’m standing at the door of my old room. It’s now a workout room of some kind. There’s a pile of sneakers in one corner and an elliptical machine in the other corner. And on the far wall, a large wall mirror. Against the other wall rests a Japanese screen leaning against the wall printed with words in a calligraphic font, YOU CAN DO IT!

I hear her coming up the stairs behind me. Her voice, with its polite twang, now agitated. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” she’s saying. I look around, at the Japanese screen, the workout machine, the mirror, the shoes. I remember Gary climbing up to me, my princess self waiting on the top, like it was a castle tower, waiting for my prince. He reaching that same landing that night the building lost power and he kissed me. I can see myself in the mirror across the room, trumpeting my fancy shoes. I want to take something. Maybe there is something in all this newness for me.

I turn around — she’s coming down the hallway. She’s clutching her water bottle. Her brow is furrowed. “Please, I have to go get my son. I can’t leave with you in the house.”

Victoria is younger than I will ever be again. She is rich, I am probably jobless. She is new, I am old. She has everything, I nothing. But there is something clean and new in my body that doesn’t hate her.

There is nothing here for me. Nothing at all.

“We used to have a room full of junk here,” I say. “There’s no junk anymore.”

I brush past Victoria. I walk the stairs like I’m descending from a high tower. I can hear her right behind me.

I was a fool to think it was the house. It was never the house, it was me, it was the city, wrapped in striving. It was my parents, it was Maurice, Mr. B, Tumkovsky, Danilova, the Russians coming from their distant land remaking us in the image of what they left. We were all caught in a vortex, the air on fire, the sirens ripping, and we danced so we didn’t get burned. But everyone gets burned. Life burns.

I speed through the foyer, desperate to be back on the street, then jog down the stoop. I want to go to the water, to look at Manhattan. As I step onto the sidewalk, magnolia-strewn — as if the tree has pushed deeper into bloom in just the time I have been in the house — another memory returns. This one is different. It predates the selves of my wood-and-enamel box.

I remember. A concrete school yard. A half-inflated red ball burning toward the stone wall behind me, the splat of rubber on the wall, the thud of the ball on the ground. The gym teacher, a nervous man with a mouth twitch that showed his metal caps, yells, “Dodge!” The girls with braids squeal. The boys in T-shirts and Keds hurl spit. I’m back behind them all, not trying to win, but just ready, ready to move.

I stand backstage waiting. The lights in the auditorium dim. A hush falls over the audience. The series organizer takes the stage to introduce me — the final presenter in the New York Library for the Performing Arts spring lecture series, Women in Dance Through the Ages: Goddesses, Sylphs, and Superheroes .

The room is filled, I’m pleased to see. “For today’s lecture,” the organizer, George, says, “We are honored to have a special guest, one who straddles two worlds. Kate Randell trained as a dancer at the School of American Ballet in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the final era of the great George Balanchine’s reign. Randell went on to get her PhD in dance history and performance theory from UC at Berkeley. As a feminist scholar, she has written about Balanchine aesthetics. Her book Corporeality Subverted: The (Dis)embodied Feminine in the Aesthetic of George Balanchine, 1958–1982, is published by Yale University Press. We are fortunate to have her as a scholar in residence at the New York Library for the Performing Arts this year.”