Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

The cops wrap yellow tape around trees on Squibb Hill. It says DO NOT CROSS. No one ever removes it, though bottles and Band-Aids and Newport cigarette packs gather around so that by next spring, when Mira has moved to Manhattan, it looks like there’s been a party.

Ms. Clement waves her hand in the air to start the class, slips a Chopin record out of its sleeve, and puts it on the turntable. The scratching needle starts up the tinkling piano tune and the girls begin the movements that by now are rote.

Mira holds the barre, the smooth, round wooden pole that draws a line around the room. She points her foot in a tendu. The air is bright with afternoon light, an elbow of shadow rests on the floor. Ms. Clement walks slowly along the barre, surveying her girls. Mira feels Ms. Clement’s half-lidded eyes on her and then her dry, pointy fingertips rest gently on the small of Mira’s back. “String through the top of the head,” she says. Her other hand massages the air in time to the Chopin waltz.

Ms. Clement runs The Little Kirov. She’s a dancer in her fifties with a vague past — a “European touring career” is how she puts it. Ms. Clement wears too much of the wrong kind of jewelry and chiffon to have really been a Russian dancer, even in her assumed prime. Mira thinks about something her mother said to her once — that Ms. Clement looks like something out of an Ingmar Bergman movie. She doesn’t know who Ingmar Bergman is, but she pictures him like someone small and stooped with bright eyes. “A woman,” Rachel said, “standing by the window, with the light a certain way. Not miserable, not happy, just there .” What Mira knows is that Ms. Clement belongs with them more than in the world of adults. Mira has seen her talking to the parents after the recitals — her big eyes wandering around the room and her fingertips drumming restlessly on top of the piano. Unlike her classroom teachers, who stand in front of the blackboard in their starchy pantsuits and winged hair and gaze at them with malevolence, Ms. Clement looks at them with a gentle fatigue, like someone who has just drunk a glass of milk before bed.

Today Ms. Clement wears a knee-length black chiffon skirt and a long-sleeve black leotard gathered with an iridescent pin at the nadir of her sloping breasts. She moves on to Val, whose elbow has dropped again. “Arms round as a beach ball, Valerie,” she says. She puts a hand on the back of Haijuan’s head. “Don’t forget,” she says, and they know how she will finish: “A little magnet on the chin. Chin to collarbone.”

In Ms. Clement’s class, something secret blooms in her. Mira doesn’t get this feeling anywhere else. She is learning that ballet makes a science out of the movements of living. She is learning how to walk in that special dancer way — like a bright, fearful bird. She is learning how to hold her fingers as if she has just let go of a dainty teacup, still feeling the pressure between her thumb and middle finger. She is learning how to smile and lift her chin as she pliés. She is learning that to be a girl is to be strong and tireless. She smiles and lifts her sternum, moves her arm from a first, to a second, to a fourth position, gathering up the air and redelivering it. She will be reborn, transformed. She can feel it.

Yes, she is a girl in pink tights and ballet slippers, a girl with a heart beating. Her body will move; it will take care of itself. Plié, plié, grande plié. Open her arms, close her arms. As if relearning the very rhythms of breathing. Outside, above the rusted fire escapes, the birds circle high above Seventh Avenue’s canyon of buildings. Relevé, turn to the other side.

“Movement,” her mother once said as she watched Mira practice, “is the thing that interests me now. How one thing changes into another.”

Tendu, dégagé, tendu, dégagé. Passé. She rises on her standing leg, bends her other knee, and points her toes into the crook of her standing leg.

Ms. Clement, in her breathy monotone, says, “Lovely, Mira. Nice long legs. Yes, little ones.”

As the girls are leaving the room, Ms. Clement calls out to Mira to stay behind. She drapes her long arm over the girl’s shoulders, then dips her head and looks at Mira over her bifocals. The glasses are red and overly large. In them she looks like a regal fly, the dotage queen of some insect tribe. Mira stares at the nicely scuffed toes of her Capezio slippers. She has done her elastics in an X, the way she has seen the SAB dancers do in photographs in the books her father has given her.

“Please accompany me to my office,” Ms. Clement says.

The small, cluttered office has a faded carpet and a gingery smell. A steady peck peck of a typewriter comes from one side of the room, where the office manager, Mr. Feltzer, a hunchbacked man in black-framed glasses, works on bills.

Ms. Clement positions herself on a battered office chair and covers her shoulders with a shawl. Mira sits on the hardwood school chair facing her teacher. Mira had never thought of Ms. Clement as old, but next to the piles of papers on her desk, flanked by two towering filing cabinets, Ms. Clement looks tiny and ancient.

“Dear,” starts Ms. Clement. “We think you are doing very well here. You have good line and, even more, you have the je ne sais quoi.”

The sound of the typewriter stops briefly. “For this year’s Little Prince, we would like you to be the Flower Princess.”

“But Robin is the Flower Princess,” says Mira.

Ms. Clement laughs — a strange sound — like music from a rusty toy.

“The Flower Princess is a part, dear, a role, for each girl to step into as she will. Robin, yes, she is a lovely Flower Princess, but so will you be, and so will the girl after you. It is a part. . ” Here she trails off, adjusting some papers.

Mira sits on the scratchy wood of the chair. She feels suddenly very hungry, a deep ache that comes not pleading and insistent as hunger from her stomach, but general and complete, from the farthest reaches of her body: her ears ache with this hunger, and her buttocks, and ankles, and toes. She sees herself as the Flower Princess, onstage, healing the Prince. But the image fades, leaving a darkness as if the sun blinked and never opened its eyes again.

That night I dream of New York City. It’s summer and heat radiates off the concrete. The trees billow with leaves and plastic bags. Light shimmers over the jagged tops of buildings, revealing the complex geometry of the skyline. I am a girl again, wandering the streets, and there are other kids wandering with me, each of us with large pockets for our hands and blimps for our heads that keep rising toward the sky. I begin floating up. The wind is so powerful. Night falls and the city is dark and cold, now hunkered down in ice. I am myself, but a child, floating along the rooftops. I see the darkened frozen canyons stretching out below me, all sandstone and brick. The wind is frigid and I wear only a thin jacket. Above me, beyond the balloon of a water tower, a shadow speaks with his voice. And there is his smell, sour and sweet, and his breath like ancient paper. I reach out to him, but he crumbles to dust, like rice paper. I try to pick up this dust, to save it, but it’s too late. I am already falling into the darkness, into one of the canyons.

I’ve been to New York City several times for conferences in the last decade. It now has very little to do with the tumultuous, rioting city of my youth. The city I have seen as an adult, from the midtown hotels I’ve stayed at, is a sparkling, renovated version of my childhood city.