Girl Through Glass (19 page)

About a month into the semester, Felicia invites Mira over for a sleepover. On Friday after class, she, Felicia, and Felicia's mother, Rita, take the F train to Queens. Felicia lives in one of a row of tightly packed brick bungalows. Inside the apartment, everything is very puffy. The couch is puffy. The curtains are puffy. A white shag carpet covers the floors. In the kitchen is a chart on the wall, and next to it a stack of stickers with gold stars and smiley faces. In Felicia's bedroom, the carpet is pink. There is a bed in her room covered with a puffy bedspread and canopy. In her room are also laminated placards taped to the wall that read:
B
REATHE
! P
ROJECT
! S
MILE
!

The girls sit on Felicia's bed. Her friend turns to her. “I can't believe you're a Mr. B girl now. It's so amazing. I have one of Mr. B's girls in my home right now. You are
so
lucky, Mira.”

“I'm sure he'll choose you next.”

“Really?”

“I
know
so.” Mira didn't, in fact, know anything of the sort. But it felt good to say it, to have this moment of intimacy, of sharing something—purely, simply—with another girl.

“I want to give you something.” Felicia gets up and places a jewelry box between them on the bed. She opens it for Mira to examine. “Take anything. Anything you want.”

Mira touches the things inside one by one: a macramé friendship bracelet; a feather brooch with half the feather broken off and exposed, its stem ragged; a diamond necklace that talks. It says,
I am a beautiful princess!
A haphazard, slightly grimy collection, a typical girl's.

At the very bottom is a pearl necklace and pearl earrings. They are very white and round and shiny. Mira pulls these out, holds them up to her neck. “What do you think?”

“They're real. Bite them. That's how you can tell.”

Mira looks at her friend, quickly bites the round balls, and pushes them down to the bottom of her pocket.

Then Felicia is at the closet, pushing one of the wood-paneled doors back and pulling out a dented shoe box. She motions Mira over to where she squats. Felicia takes the lid off the shoe box to reveal an assortment of candy bars. They have soft, worn, creased wrappers, as if they've been handled too many times. Mira and Felicia huddle in the dark corner and finger them.

“Where's your dad?” says Mira.

“He lives on Long Island. He owns a store, so he can't come very often. But it's okay. My mom and I are like a team. We understand each other. My dad doesn't really get it.”

“My mom's in California,” Mira says.

“Do you miss her?”

“No,” says Mira.

Rita serves dinner on a table set with glazed black-and-white ceramic plates and black-and-white zebra-striped napkins. Loud bangs of metal utensils on ceramic. On their plates, Rita piles some kind of grain and then carrots in a thin, oily sauce.

“Am I on a diet again?” asks Felicia.

“Felicia's frame, unfortunately, she gets from her father,” says Rita. She looks at Mira. “
You
have a thin frame.”

Mira blushes. A cozy, puffy world, just the three of them. What would that be like? Rita's red lips glisten with canola oil. She looks at Felicia as if to say “I told you so.”

After dinner, Rita takes just Mira into her bedroom, where she does Mira's hair in pigtail ringlets like Felicia's, with the brush attachment to a hot curling iron, something Mira has never seen before. While she works, she tells Mira to close her eyes. But Rita is not happy with the results of her efforts and has to start all over: she
brushes the curls out of Mira's hair, then braids it into two very tight French braids. Now Rita is satisfied with the results.

Then Rita takes out a giant makeup kit that opens accordion-like into different levels, like a house with many rooms. She puts rouge on Mira's cheeks and green eye shadow over her eyes. Rita applies the makeup with firm, confident strokes. Mira feels a pleasant, animallike warmth come over her. When Rita finishes, Mira looks at herself in the mirror. She looks feline—a thin face and big staring eyes.

“Do you think I could be in a commercial?”

Rita nods, smiles. “With your red hair and freckles? Of
course
you could!”

Rita puts her hand on Mira's back and leads her into the living room, where Felicia is watching TV. Felicia squeals when she sees Mira.

“Mom, do me, do me!” Felicia says. Rita laughs. Then she takes Felicia into the bedroom and does her hair and makeup too: pink cheeks and blue, instead of green, over her eyes.

The three of them drive to a giant supermarket. Inside, people turn to stare—two made-up girls, and Rita. Mira imagines that they are both Rita's children, both going to be stars. What would that be like, rushing around from audition to audition, always ready to go to a casting call, always beautiful with big eyes? She feels how the makeup makes her stronger. How the world turns a brighter face back to her. People smile at her. She smiles back. She is part of something. She is initiated—how strange, to make oneself stick out and then to feel that you belong. She sees that, too. It's a raw kind of joy that rises from her collarbones into a blush.

They walk back to the car across the giant parking lot, carrying things they don't need, in a light, cold rain, talking loudly. It smells like steel and fish, the inside of a star.

Later, when she is on the verge of falling asleep under that wood-tiled
ceiling in Felicia's puffy room, she feels a sharp pang, and as
obliterating darkness falls, she doesn't think of her father or of her mother—but of Maurice. Maurice in his green and gold living room, Maurice in his maroon car with his special box of a seat and special levers; Maurice showing her the poor
Little Dancer
statue, blackened with age, her tired face turned up to a hopeful sun. Mira shivers with a new kind of guilt, with the knowledge that she has somehow betrayed someone—or something.

The next afternoon after classes, Maurice is waiting by the Lincoln
Center fountain. Mira walks up to him. He stares at her. Her eye shadow and eyeliner got smudged, so she tried to replicate what Rita did with some drugstore supplies.

He turns from her and walks his marionette walk up Broadway. For a moment, she considers not following him. It would be easy not to, to just get on the crosstown bus, head to her dad and Judy's apartment. But who would she be then? Just a girl, one girl among many, without a mother, with a father who, she now knows, dries his underwear on the backs of kitchen chairs, and whose aftershave smells too strongly of peppermint, a father who she knows can hit her.

The crowd begins to swallow up Maurice's diminishing form. She runs to catch up with him. When she reaches his side, he does not turn. He keeps going, shoving the gum wrappers aside with his walking stick.

He hails a cab and she climbs in beside him. “Where are we going?”

At first, he doesn't answer. Then he says, “Home.”

When they pull up in front of his building, he turns to her. “Get out.”

In his apartment, he pulls her into the bathroom. He thrusts her towards the sink, grabs soap, and rubs it over her face. She starts coughing. He turns on the water and pushes her face under it. It's too hot. She screams. He turns on the cold. Now he throws that on her face—she's sputtering.

“That hurts,” she says.

“Who put that on your face?” he says.

“Rita did it.”

“Who's Rita?”

“Felicia's mom.”

“This is not what a
dancer
wants. This is what a
whore
wants.”

“It looks special.”

He doesn't seem to hear her. He grips her harder. “This is beauty you can buy for ten dollars, twenty dollars. No one can give you the beauty ballet gives you.”

“Stop,” she says again.

He grabs her by the shoulders again. Then he yanks the string of pearls from around her neck and pulls hard. “These are fake.” They snap and spill all over the floor. They roll around in the hallway outside the bathroom and clink on the tile in the bathroom like pebbles against a window.

In the living room, he takes down a photo in a silver frame from a shelf. She's never noticed it before. It's a black-and-white photo of a large-bellied man in shirt and tie and funny, balloon-like pants. Through his pince-nez glasses, he stares out at the camera. His eyes are far apart, giving him a broad, fierce look. He holds the photo right up to her face. “
This
is the photo I've really wanted to show you. This is—was—my father. My mother always blamed ballet. And my father. For the polio. You know why?”

She shakes her head.

“Because I got sick right after seeing my first live ballet performance.” He leans in toward her. “I think she was just jealous because she didn't come with us. He only had two tickets and he took
me
.

“It was 1947. I was eleven. My father was home from one of his maritime adventures. And he had managed to get tickets to see Toumanova dance at the Paris Opera. Dancers were coming back from all over. Balanchine was in France again. Toumanova! Toumanova—she was no longer so young, it didn't matter. We loved her anyway. The baby Russians were now grown up. We'd seen them before the war as girls—now they were women. We loved them, too. And there were new ones. Ulanova. We could only hear stories of her. It wasn't for ten more years that we would see her. Still, she was all the rage.

“My father took me even though there was a polio outbreak in Europe then. People were sleeping on roofs, avoiding public places. But Toumanova was dancing, so my father was going. And he took me.” Now he is grinning at her, his eyes are moist and soft.

“About half of my father's comrades from the Balletomane Society were there, though they sat far apart. Some of them wore face masks to protect themselves. Not my father, though. And not me. I remember you could hear sounds reverberating off the empty boxes.

“I don't know why my mother let me go. She was very protective of me. I was not allowed to swim in public pools, for instance.” He gets up and hobbles to a shelf and pulls off a little tin box, brings it over. He opens it to show some ash. “But, at intermission, Father gave me a cigar at the café. The only cigar I ever smoked. He said to me, ‘Son, you may never go to war. The only other thing that teaches the same is ballet. When I watch the dancers, I see my fallen comrades. I see blood and bullets. I get the same feeling as right before a battle. That weird quiet—like angels passing.
Someone will die in a few minutes,
I would think. I never thought it would be me. Isn't that strange?'

“As we traveled home through the wet, cold streets, all I could think of was Toumanova as she did her port de bras and arabesques. She was so brave and clever, so beautiful! My mother had me soak in peroxide, put me to bed, and gave me onion soup for a week. But it didn't matter. At the end of the week, I got sick.”

There is something new and self-mocking about his smile. “My
father disappeared after that. He couldn't deal with me, an invalid son.”

Mira has begun to tremble. Her face is sore.

“Well, that is all in the past. But you see—I cannot escape your Mr. Balanchine—it was he who choreographed the piece for Toumanova I saw that night,
Palais de Cristal
.” He looks at her. His face clouds over again. Now he looks strange, sad. “I am a pale shadow of him. I am a shadow of my father.”

Mira is standing right in front of him. They are so close. She can smell him. His pale face hovers before her. “No, you're not.” She looks down, then up again. “You're not—a shadow.”

She reaches up and kisses him. His lips are dry. He does not stop her. Later on, she will wonder if she imagined it, but at the time she knows it is true: he responds. His lips move.

He pulls away and wipes his mouth, looks up at the ceiling. In a different voice, he says, “The wise child.” Who is he speaking to? He is speaking to the ceiling? Then she knows—
his father
.

“I don't regret it,” he says as she draws back, the strange feel of his dusty mouth on hers. “He only had two tickets. But, at intermission, Father gave me a cigar at the café. The only cigar I ever smoked.
I
got to go with him.”

They stand in the room, not talking, just breathing. What has happened? Something has changed, some line crossed. But he is quiet now. He seems calmer.

He waves his hand and smiles his little stones-on-a-ledge smile. “Do you still have that swan I gave you?” Afraid to speak, she nods. The heavy glass thing lolls about on her bedside table—it once got chewing gum on it, which left a sticky residue. It sits next to her other trophies: a fully-autographed SAB company catalog, Maurice's calling card.