Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

I take out a tangled mess of grimy pink pointe shoe ribbons. Something a cat might have played with and discarded. Sometime after college, I found a giant tub of my old pointe shoes in the basement of my father’s Connecticut house, where he and Judy were living before they finally divorced. I cut off all the satin ribbons, leaving the shoes, denuded, cracked, and bent but still startlingly pink in their satin skins. A childish gesture. Like cutting the hair off an old favorite doll. I threw the heap of limp ribbons in the garbage. Then on second thought, I went back and picked them out of the garbage can, balled them up, and put them at the bottom of my suitcase. Back in San Francisco, where I was getting my MFA, I stuffed them in this box. It was a maudlin gesture. Hyperridiculous. Bathetic, even.

Next, I finger a bent graying business card with NEW YORK LIBRARY OF THE PERFORMING ARTS on it. Not sure this one gets “exhibit” status. I put that aside and remove a perfume decanter top. Exhibit C. I never had the bottle. It has the telltale Victorian flourishes. The body of a swan is etched in the glass. The wings are open behind the swan so that it looks like it is exploding out of the glass in a Victorian fantasy of flight. I hold the top in my hand, roll it back and forth. When I was younger, when he gave me this, I thought it was huge. It still seems uncommonly heavy, from another era when beautification rituals required a different kind of attention and commitment. One’s perfume. Like another limb. It’s a perfume bottle stopper. I sniff it. It smells of some kind of adhesive and musk.

Then I pull out a little book with a curled black leather cover. The pages inside undulate. They are yellowed and brittle. Still, you can make out the writing. Even black cursive with uneven line breaks, punctuated by dates.

One entry:

10/15 Bella chosen for Angel — next year will it be Polichinelle? I want to see her as a Polichinelle.

She must work on adagio. Développé and ronde de jambe en l’air. The shaking in her thigh. I have seen it. The problem is core strength. Will it come with time?

The Polichinelle variation will require work on her jumps. I must watch carefully how she lands. She must stop that birdlike flutter of her hands. Annoying. I don’t care what B. says to her.

There are a couple of other things in the box — odds and ends whose significance I don’t try to recall because his face — the very last time I saw it — comes back to me. Maurice’s face. He woke up before I left the room. I see him now as he lay on the floor looking up at me and laughed. Bravo, bravo, my dear, your finest performance. His face is gray, his hair yellowish white against the stain of dark red that grows from the side of his head, his grin monstrous. He wears his old smile that shows his teeth lined up. It is full of brilliance.

“Stop making fun of me,” I say.

His smile fades. He looks stricken. “I have never made fun of you.” Then the wild, bewildered look. Then he closes his eyes. I leave. I run out of the room.

In the middle of October, Mira comes home from school to find her mother and a strange man sitting on the living room cushions. Her mother has finally changed her clothes. She wears a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck, and her hair is tied back in a frizzy bunch with a bandanna. The man sits across from her, cross-legged. The bottoms of his jeans are frayed. He has taken his shoes off; his socks are all wrong — shiny and too new for the rest of him. Though he is a big man, his hands are bony. Mira dislikes them immediately. They are attached to bony wrists that stick out of the sleeves of a blue worker’s jacket like the kind that men working at the gas pumps wear. Although he is inside, he wears the jacket zipped all the way up. When he takes a sip of tea, Mira wants to shout a “No!” that will make this man disappear from her living room. His eyes, under his taxi driver’s cap, are bright and watchful. He reminds her of the men her mother draws and paints from her Court Street studio window — those lurking outside Club Wild Fyre, the strip club, who push things along the curb with the top of their broken-soled shoes. She has invited them into their house now.

Mira looks straight at him. He takes a sip and places the cup on the carpeted ottoman that serves as their makeshift table.

“This is Gary Rosen. He is going to rent a room upstairs for a studio. He’s a writer.”

He takes off his hat and looks down at his cup. Mira regards him with suspicion. Someone who sits in a room and puts words on a page. But for what? And whom for? And why would one need a special room to do it in?

“What room?” Mira says. She does not drop her backpack. She does not say “hi.”

“The extra room,” says her mother.

“The junk room?”

Her mother smiles sheepishly at the man. “We used to call it that because that’s where we kept all the extra furniture and stuff.”

“Extra furniture?” he says. “Wow, man. What a concept.”

Her mother’s cheeks grow red. “It’s not like we bought it. It was here, it came with the house.” Mira looks at her mother, for she has used her Manhattan voice in their house, in Brooklyn, with this raggedy stranger.

“Sure thing,” he says, looking around. “This is a far-out place.”

“You’re going to live here?” Mira says.

“Mira!” says her mother. “Don’t be rude!”

He shakes his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll be out of your hair. I’ll mostly be here during the day when you’re in school.”

Mira turns and walks out of the room, up the creaky steps.

“Mira! Come back here!” But her mother’s voice breaks into the beginning of laughter.

She hears the man say, “Well, I should be going.”

She hears her mother laughing again — high-pitched, energetic — as if her daughter’s rudeness has fueled something in her. “Red hair,” she hears him say. She hears him say: takes after her mother.

Soon after, a boy from their neighborhood is kidnapped. He is, it is said, kidnapped in broad daylight, while waiting for the school bus. It happens down below Squibb Hill, where Mira and her friends never go. There is nothing there — only old deserted factories. But this boy lived down there. The thought of a boy living down there makes her squirm inside. It is like imagining living on the moon. His sticking-out ears and cloud of curly hair appear on posters everywhere, under the headline MISSING. The graininess of the photocopied paper makes it look like he is staring out from behind layers of static, of white noise. So the world has grown less safe, not just for her, but also for everyone. Missing. One might go missing, one’s face staring out from telephone booths and street signs, covered by a static blanket. Sometimes she has to pinch herself just to be sure she is here — that she can be seen.

After school, on the way home, Mira stops at one of the MISSING posters. She rips down the faded and watermarked paper and takes it home. She carries it to her room and hangs it on the back of her closet door. Sometimes she will talk to this boy, sometimes she won’t. She will tell him about her father. She will tell him she hopes he is okay. Just to hang in there. She will feel better looking at him, knowing that someone always leaves something behind, even if it is just a static-y smile.

The temperature drops again and the rats hide in garbage cans and make nests under the grease-stained hamburger. The leaves fall from the trees. The hanging sneakers blacken with soot. Sirens comb the streets, the lights raking across her ceiling. Her mother thinks they are still looking for the looters, the people who broke in stores and stole . Bulky men in blue loiter on street corners giving the stink eye to passersby. She knows they are looking for the boy. But they won’t find the boy. He has disappeared, just like her father.