Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Her mother reaches out and grabs Mira’s arm. “The only reason we got married,” she says, “is that we were in love.” She turns back to her game of solitaire. Slap, slap. The cards continue.

Mira feels a jab of hate for her mother. She thinks about that loose snapshot in her parents’ wedding album. How many times has she stopped when leafing through this album to stare at this snapshot, which is a different size and shape than the official wedding photos? Her mother, in her long white dress, is standing on top of a table full of young men. She’s striking a pose, her head thrown back wildly, and she’s laughing. The men have their bow ties loosened and the table is littered with corsages. It’s late in the evening. Mira’s father also sits at the table. Unlike the other men, her father is not laughing. His arms hang at his sides. He stares up at his wife, gaping, as if he is caught in a fire, burning alive.

“My mom is totally destroyed,” she says to her friends who stand around her in the dressing room. “She wails all day and night. You can’t even go near her. She wears this kimono and doesn’t take it off. And she doesn’t shower.” Only the part about the kimono is true.

There is a part of Mira that has floated free with her father. The part that is left cares less about what others think and whether what she says is true or not. She often feels like laughing suddenly, for no reason.

“Maybe you should call Social Services,” says Meaghan.

“Oh, come on,” says Val, gnawing on her fingers. “You’re exaggerating.” Val’s parents split when she was five and her sister was seven. When they’d met, Val was the one with tough luck, without a father, and with a shitty childhood. Mira, with her two parents, with her big house, couldn’t understand, didn’t know . Now Val is afraid of losing her trump card.

“Are you saying I’m lying?” says Mira, staring hard at Val. She never used to be able to stare at anyone without looking away before.

“Yes,” says Val. She turns to Delia and whispers something in her ear. Meaghan titters, then whispers something to Delia.

“What?” says Mira. “What?”

When she gets off the train in Manhattan, she walks slowly down the streets, looking at each window of each apartment. A million people hiding behind curtains, her father in one of them. That you could lose your father in a city. That he can disappear into the streets, leaving only cuff links behind. It makes her stomach feel funny.

“Hurry up,” says Val. “I’m sick of always waiting for you.” Val rushes on ahead.

Mira goes up to a doorman standing in front of the giant apartment building on Fifty-sixth. It could be this very building. “Is Carl Able staying here?” she says to the doorman in his livery. “He’s my dad.”

The doorman steps inside and pulls out a clipboard from behind his desk. His chin doubles over as he pursues his list. “Sometimes they forget to update me. Did he just move in?” If a doorman, whose job it is to keep track of residents, can lose count, how would she ever find her father?

October turns cold. The old shutters knock against windowsills as a strong breeze buffets the house. Her mother sits cross-legged on a throw pillow on the floor, a blanket on her lap, papers spread out before her. “Look at me!” her mother says loudly. “I’m doing bills!”

Across the room, Mira sits in a chair and does her homework in the glow of a glass table lamp with a bordello shade. Mira’s posture is unusually straight, as if she sits with her back to a wall. Only her head is tilted downward toward the ruled page of her notebook.

Her mother puts the bill in front of her to the side and looks at the one beneath it. It is from The Little Kirov, typed in heavy ink on onionskin paper. She holds it up.

“Agh,” says her mother, shaking the paper. “What do you like so much about ballet?”

Mira does not look up. “It’s beautiful?”

Her mother writes some numbers in her bank book. “It’s 1977. Beauty? Where has it gotten us?”

Mira looks up. Her mother’s red kimono, now wrinkled and dull; it hangs on her like a too-big sheet. Her mother looks small and pale. Dwarfed by the things in the room. The junk, her father would say. Her mother laughs her skittish laugh and covers her face with her hands. “Where has it gotten me ?” She drops her hands and in a louder voice says, “Let it go down in flames!”

“Why don’t you sit on the floor? You don’t look comfortable,” says her mother.

“I like this chair,” says Mira.

“I am thinking of taking all the chairs out.”

“No!” Mira says. When she sees her mother’s expression, she wants to look back down. But she doesn’t. Mother and daughter stare at each other for several moments; there is something between them, then nothing.

It’s time. The letter. I hadn’t forgotten, not exactly. The rage toward Bill had to be dealt with first, but now I go get the letter from my bag. In my ochre reading chair, under a gray-white Ohio sky, I spread the letter out on my lap.

I have gone away to a place where the dead go — no, not Hades, a city that befits me. No ballet here, only early bird specials and other sad people who have been banished to a city with no reason for existing.

My mind treads water, eddies pull. That voice. It’s his. How can it be? Can he still be alive? How old would he be now? I quickly do the math — eighty. Possible. But why now ? Why contact me after so long?

I close my eyes. To leave the body. To abandon the body. I know this trick. It doesn’t work. The body goes on. So I call myself back. To the Dutch Colonial that I fell in love with on my tour of the town late last spring. Its blue slate roof on the cupola (with pewter detailing) like ancient armor, and inside the hardwood floors and clean white walls, all of which felt vast after my last two small, linoleum-tiled (and ammonia-stink) faculty accommodations.

I open my eyes. Everything looks altered. The red ceramic vase my mother gave me for my doctoral ceremony, for which I have both an abiding revulsion and love. I’ve carried it with me from college town to college town over the past four years. I look over at my black office chair, my spindle-necked desk lamp, my modular desk to which I had attached an ergonomic keyboard. It’s like peering through glass — everything looks altered, too big or too small in this space. Objects tossed together with no coherency. I remember only the compulsion, the desire and guilt in each item’s acquisition. Only the rug under my feet feels familiar and recognizable, with its bold geometry of circles and triangles, a faux Mondrian pattern. These things — my chair, my rug, my desk — I’d chosen to create a workspace, now pulling apart.

I force myself to keep reading:

You killed me and I must thank you. I am one of the dead. I do not deserve to have commerce with the living. I wanted to tell you, my dear, because you too are one of the dead. Do you know that yet? You will always be — no way to avoid it. When you kill, you become one of the dead yourself.

I’m sure of it, suddenly! He is still alive. How raw, how familiar is his penchant for melodrama, for vitriol even. No one can hate like him — except me, perhaps. I have hated him with a passion that burns my scalp and palms, and stifles my voice. I have struggled with this hate, suffered it, abided it. At times it’s been overpowering, at times it’s ebbed; it’s always been there, my whole adult life.

My legs are ready now; I stand; a burst of energy carries me into the bedroom and toward the closet. But I’m not heading to the closet anymore. Instead I’m reaching under the bed. Here, now, on the bed in front of me is an inlaid wood and enamel box. It was a long time ago, the last time I opened it. I open the box and take out one tiny pointe shoe that looks like it would only fit a child. It is the brownish color of a bruised nectarine. Barely larger than one of my hands — and worth at least twenty thousand dollars. Worn by Anna Pavlova in the second half of a performance of Giselle, in which the great ballerina had a rare tumble as she threw herself at the dying Albrecht. (Only one camp of balletomanes agrees that this was actually a fall. Another thinks it was a kind of seizure, a harbinger of the pneumonia that would eventually kill her.) At least, this was one of the several stories Maurice told me about the shoe over the years. You can no longer discern the bloodstain that Maurice pointed out to me. The fabric is worn away at the tip of the toe box, exposing the layers of binding underneath. The ribbons are brownish and shredded at the end but have held up better than the rest of the shoe.