Girl Through Glass (3 page)

In Johnson, I climb the creaking stairs to the overheated turret. Up past the college's alumni offices. Buttressed by a cup of coffee—black, no sugar—and the sweet smell of illicit cigarette smoke coming up from Dr. James's (emeritus professor in classics) office below me, I'll make it through office hours. Outside of the classroom, I'm not so easy with the students.

The office on the other side of the hall belongs to the other visiting professor in performance studies, Bill Krasdale. He'll be in later for office hours and then there will be a line of students waiting for him. That's Bill, the vulnerable, the well-loved by students—more shaman than teacher. I may have a few groupies, but he inspires love.

Sioban sits outside my office door. “Hola. Bonjour,” I say. I fumble with the keys in the lock.

Inside my musty-smelling office, she flops into the metal folding chair. I squeeze by her, catching my dress on the edge of her chair, stuff myself behind my desk, and settle in. Behind me the ferns I brought up from seedlings have grown so thick they tickle my hair. They have flourished in the dim rafters here.

Still wide-eyed from her ideas, she hikes one leg over the other and bounces a green neon sneaker on her knee. She wears only workout clothes—pants so tight that they grip every muscle or so loose you can barely see her form.

“I just
love
your class so much, as you know.” She gives me a wicked smile that makes her long face look fuller. She begins picking at a Buzz Lightyear Band-Aid on her finger.

I take in her nervous energy, her bitten nails half-stripped of their red nail polish, and it occurs to me that Sioban's headlong rush into academia is simply the animal's response to totally new terrain—fight or flight. It reminds me of myself in my twenties, when I was dancing modern in San Francisco, both fearful and willing to try anything. She is choosing to advance, to fight. I smile at her, a real smile.

I take a slug of my coffee. “I'm enjoying having you in this class. Your perspective”—I look out the window. It's started to rain lightly—“is invaluable.”

“Thanks,” she says too brightly. I wonder if I've betrayed something.

“So what can I help you with now?” I manage a warm, professional tone. To give myself something to do, I pull out my pile of mail and start sorting.

She pulls out the syllabus. “For our next research paper? On early modernist choreographers? I was just wondering—Can I do Nijinsky? I know we already did him in class, but I just don't feel as strongly about any of the others?”

Her eyes really are translucent. “I'd like you to do someone else, at least as a—a—comparison.”

I've come across a single white envelope with my name on it. Something about the letter gives me pause. It's a plain envelope with my address in meticulous handwriting. I realize what's strange about it: there's no return address. I weigh the letter in my hand. It's extremely lightweight; I wonder whether anything is in it at all. I slip a finger in and rip it open. Inside the envelope is a folded sheet of Florentine-style parchment paper that falls open in my hand. I recognize the tight, cursive handwriting—from another era. My eyes hit the initial at the bottom:
M.
I snap it shut.

My head feels like it is buzzing with light; a crushing weight has landed in the back of my skull. Through all of this, I am apparently talking to Sioban about Nijinsky's sister, Bronislava Nijinska. I'm
trying to convince her to write a paper on Nijinska using Nijinska's own memoirs, which is a terrible idea. “Bronislava was faithful to his modernist project. She wrote a memoir that's very illuminating. It tells the story of their youth in the Russian imperial ballet, it may shed new light on things. It's not authoritative but it gives insight—” I'm babbling. This tome will be hard to wade through. My fingers brush the shelves behind me and pull out the heavy book. I've actually been planning to read it through myself to see if there's anything there I can build an essay on. And this—my own possible scholar's find—I offer blithely to this girl for a term paper. She inspires a white streak of rashness in me.

Sioban is leaning over my desk, letting loose a smell of patchouli and sweat. “Thanks,” she says taking the book. Her hand, the one with the Band-Aid, closes around my wrist. She's trembling slightly. I register the trembling hand. The tattered cartoon Band-Aid. Her strange, gentle touch. I register the fact that she's just violated the force field between professor and student. The door is open. I jerk my hand away. It's ridiculously bold what she's done. I've underestimated her. I shouldn't have picked her side today in class. She slips her folder back in her bag and smiles at me in a shy, mischievous way. Her wide excited eyes and long face, the bloom of the acne scars, dark red now, her cheekbones.
She thinks she's onstage
.
She lives her life as if she's onstage.

I smooth my Ann Taylor sweater dress over my leggings, ignoring the snag that formed on her chair. She gives me another smile, this one coy and bright, maddening in its narcissism. She knows her power. I know that suddenly for certain. Despite everything, this makes me smile.

The most violent emotion comes over me—I have to look away. Now a draft comes rattling through the lead-paned windows, turning my coffee certifiably cold.

I stuff the folded Florentine paper back into the envelope and shove it under a stack of unclaimed student papers.

At that moment, Bill pokes his head in. “Hi—how's it going?” He's wearing a Russian winter hat, black and puffy, and his face beneath it shines. He's still handsome, but his opaque face is a toughened version of its younger self.

Sioban zips up her jacket. “I'm psyched to read the book,” she says, her eyes gleaming. She thinks she has won. She thinks it's a game. Oh god.
God help me.
She makes her way to the doorway, squeezes past Bill.

Bill and I knew each other years ago when we overlapped at Berkeley. My last year of my PhD and in comes Bill the wunderkind first-year MA grad student, all loose-limbed from clown school in Europe. Over the course of that year, he sloughed off his clown exterior and studied his Laban and started focusing on
illusion
and a
practice.
He concentrated in theater arts instead of dance like me. I heard later that he started dating a hippie girl, Berkeley born and bred, who was
troubled
. This girl, Madeline, now his wife of thirteen years, and with whom he has two girls.

Bill steps into my office. “Kate,” he says. “There's something I have to tell you.” He takes his hat off. Some water drips from it. “I ended up putting in my application for the Pell.” I stare at him. “Madeline's been happier—she's been working at the new co-op here and—I haven't been having much luck. The West Coast is all locked up.”

The vibrations of Sioban leaving the room are still there. I stare at Bill, unable to speak. His face looks terribly smug. I've said nothing. He lowers his eyes. “I'm sorry, Kate. I know you were counting on this gig.” He sighs and I know it's meant to evoke Madeline, his albatross.

With a mammoth effort, I ask, “Is she okay?”

He sighs. “She's been better.”

“When did you put in your application?” I say finally.

“Last week.”

“They took your application
last week
?” This is a bad sign. It means that it was probably an invitation. A buzz starts in my head.
A crush of fatigue crawls over me, which makes it easier to speak. “Thanks for letting me know, Bill.” It comes out icier than I intended.

His eyes widen. He opens his mouth, closes it. “Okay, okay. I'll be seeing you.”

“Bill—”

He turns.

“I didn't mean—”

“I know,” he says. He looks tired, but I can see some damage has been done.

At home that evening, I put on a bathrobe, light a cigarette, and give
in to my rage. Did Bill lie to me? Did he apply earlier? If so, he wouldn't be the first to keep a secret. It would only be karmic. The fact is, though, if the Pell doesn't come through I'm pretty much screwed. The only other thing I have out there is Alquinon, a third-rate university on the bleak border of Canada. I put in an application for a dance professor position (mostly technique, though) because it seemed a “safety school.” But already a few other universities have passed on me.

I take a deep drag on my illicit smoke-stick saved for emergencies of this sort. I pick up a glass paperweight with a red flower embedded in it, a gift from my mentor in grad school, a woman who was part of the 1960s new wave of dancers and movement artists, and who passed away last fall. I run my hand gently over the smooth glass, then I pick it up and hurl it across the room. It hits the wall and shatters. A shiver runs down my spine.

After I clean up the shards of glass, I wander into my office and take a copy of my dissertation book—
Corporeality Subverted: The (Dis)embodied Feminine in the Aesthetic of George Balanchine, 1958–1982—
the minimalist gray and black cover, and hold it in my hands, looking out my back window toward campus. The sunset is starting up like some tired toy that keeps playing the same old tune. It is disturbingly bright—the clouds have opened a stream of lumi
nous pink-yellow light the color of a scab on a baby's knee. The light has the brilliance of something having been saved up and now squandered all at once. Then the moment shifts: some tipping point of night has passed and I can only see myself, reflected in my window, surrounded by my office things, my big bright hair gleaming in all its hurrahs.

It's been two weeks since her father left. Classes at The Little Kirov have started again. In the girls' dressing room, Mira and her friends change. Mira loves this moment of transformation, when she gets to shed her jeans and emerges in her pink tights and black leotard—her second skin. Since her dad left, she has begun to wear her tights and leotards under her school clothes so she can skip the awkward moment of nakedness between her two selves.

She has been working hard, harder than she ever has before. This work—she had not known what it was to work before—comes as a relief. She clings to it, to the feeling of twisting her mind around a combination, the quivering in her legs when she stretches her dégagés until her toes cramp.

Val jumps up on a bench and begins singing the most recent hit song on the radio. Delia climbs up next to her, and Delia and Val sing together. Then Meaghan joins in. Standing on the bench behind her, they all sing together—the words are something about dreams, morning, kissing, and crying.

Mira can hear the song's orchestral crescendo in her head, but something stops her from joining in. She is too aware of the older girls—of Hannah turning toward them, of being caught in that smirking gaze.

The older girls are gathered in a pack over on the other side of the dressing room. They are half in their ballet outfits, and half still in their school clothes. You can still see their separateness, how in the outside world they would never speak to each other. Robin, a Level
5 girl, pulls on leg warmers and picks her way between open soda cans and unwound Ace bandages, toward the dressing room door. She has a little heart-shaped face and limpid eyes that blink a lot when she comes in from outside, and no matter what the weather, her skin is always white with the opaqueness of alabaster. She goes to a performing arts school and arrives with her hair already tightly wrapped in a bun, her tights visible beneath short denim shorts, the straps of her leotard poking out of a scoop-neck sweatshirt. With her far-off, liquid gaze, Robin focuses on a horizon visible only to her. Mira wants to see what Robin sees. They all do.

Hannah, another Level 5 girl, is changing too. Over her tights, she still wears a white oxford with a Catholic school emblem on the breast pocket. Her half-undone pointe shoe ribbons have edges dark with grime. (She has taken to walking around with them undone.)

Last spring, excitement over Hannah's discovery, her possible rise, spread through the hallways of the Kirov. Hannah had performed the Flower Princess in the Kirov's annual production of
The Wounded Prince
and a reviewer from the
Times
singled her out. He praised her for “a rare musicality” and “an extension that made her limbs appear to fly on their own.” Mira had spent the rest of the spring huddled in the doorway of the older girls' class, dissecting Hannah's turnout, her arch, her anatomy, searching for clues, for understanding.

Then, in the spring, Hannah got to the final rounds of SAB auditions. Fewer than fifteen blocks north of Little Kirov is the newly renovated SAB, or School of American Ballet, boasting warehouse-size classrooms with industrial flooring and diffuse light. Here the mothers spend their time with their noses pressed to windows to catch glimpses of New York City Ballet dancers. A few blocks south of SAB is ABT, the American Ballet Theater's school, which fills an entire crumbling brick building with dark, sweaty, mysterious warrens of classrooms and rehearsal spaces.

SAB and ABT signify the community of the chosen. Getting into one of these schools means a shot at getting into one of these compa
nies. All the other studios throughout the city, including The Little Kirov, are feeding ponds for SAB and ABT. Essentially, you go on to one of these two schools—or you go nowhere.

The long, hot summer has ended, classes have started up again, and Hannah remains at the Kirov, in the Level 5 class, with the other fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. Hannah has missed her chance. Mothers whisper about “problems with her architecture.” Was it her spine—or was it her hips? Or her feet?

Mira notices that Hannah no longer bothers to put her hair up in a bun for class but lets it swing loose in a ponytail. She has rounder thighs and now wears a bra that makes a lumpy shape in her leotard. As she comes down the hall, her ponytail swinging, all fresh air and unabashed anger, Mira avoids her “what's it to you?” stare. Mira pushes herself up against the wall and looks at her feet; she gets out of Hannah's way.

Too late. Hannah's gaze rests on her. Mira feels a wash of cold flood through her, which leaves her fingertips hurting. Behind her, Val and the others are still singing.

“You're good, right?” Now a smile is playing at both sides of Hannah's face.

Mira nods. She
is
good. That promise she has made to herself at the start of this year has bloomed into some beating, driving bird that pumps its strong, tiny wings in her chest during class. The harder she works, the higher the bird tries to fly.

“Leave her alone,” Robin says.

“Oh yeah?” says Hannah.

“Yeah. Leave her alone.”

Hannah laughs. “Or else?”

“Girls!” Laura's mother stands in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “Please!” Mira looks at Val and then down, fighting a smile. Laura's mother is the kind of ballet mother Mira and Val make fun of, the kind who goes up to the barre after recitals and tries to do some of the ballet moves herself, the kind who stands in the doorway and yells “We need a new nutritionist for Laura!”
Laura stands with her back to the wall, looking at her mother in dismay. Mira catches sight of Laura's prissy pink vinyl-shiny ballet shoes. Anger cleaves at her—who is this girl, who are any of them, to flout the sartorial rules of this world that can turn children into princesses and princes?

Hannah gives Laura's mother a stony stare. Laura's mother touches her hair self-consciously and turns. Laura's mother can't really yell at the older girls. They are the linchpins of this world.

“Come on,” Hannah says.

The older girls brush by Mira and Val, Laura's mother, and the other girls and mothers, with a swish of their warm-up pants and the clunk clunk of pointe shoes against the floor, swaying under the weight of their giant dance bags. When they have passed through, a hush follows.

To Mira and Val, Laura's mother says, “Have some respect, would you? Go play outside in the hallway.”

But even if Mira's mother were here, she wouldn't care. Her mother ties ribbons in Mira's hair when she remembers, and then they loosen, droop, and fall out, and her mother doesn't even notice. And now, with her father gone, she is even more distracted. In her red kimono or rotating sets of overalls, she is transforming the living room with stuff she carries down from the junk room.

“
One,
” her mother sings, “
singular sensation,
” as she walks upstairs with a beaded lamp shade she commandeered from somewhere in the house. The living room begins to fill up with big plants, throw pillows, and low soft-glow lamps that perch on the floor like sleepy cats. Ashtrays appear, too. Her father hates smoking.

If only her mother were wailing in the kitchen by the dim light of one bulb, red-faced, tragic and beautiful, Mira would understand. But her mother seems almost cheerful. She seems to have more energy. Her mother zips up and down the stairs, carrying objects from one part of the house to another, loudly humming show tunes Mira didn't know she knew.

One night when Mira was much younger, she is awakened by her
parents coming home giggling. In the morning, they stand with steaming coffee in their hands in their apartment's tiny kitchen, and with their faces flushed, they keep breaking up in laughter. Rachel's laugh is a skittering, uneven thing that can't seem to stop. Mira's father's is a full, throaty laugh that makes Mira nervous. He is normally reserved.

Her mother does most of the talking. “We've bought a house!” she says. “A Victorian house!” The house had been owned by the same family for generations. Some of the rooms upstairs have not been used for decades, Rachel says. They are filled with furniture—lamps, spinning wheels, moth-eaten couches. The elderly brothers who now live there are moving to a small condominium in Florida; what do they need with three floors' worth of dusty Victorian furniture? They've offered her parents all the furniture in the house for one dollar. One dollar! With some reupholstering and repairs, it is probably worth a fortune. How can they refuse? As they speak, her mother uses words she has never heard before:
parlor, foyer, banister, wrought iron, parquet.

When her mother is finished, her father clears his throat and smiles his shiny-penny smile. “It's a good investment,” he says finally.

The new house, a clapboard from the 1850s, is in a neighborhood that people describe by telling you about all the famous people who used to live there a hundred years ago. The old slate sidewalks crack and buckle. The rain gutters are full of Q-tips and cellophane. Plastic bags hang in the spindly trees. Sneakers garland the telephone wires. Chunks are missing from the stone stoops in front of the houses.

Their new house is on the edge of this neighborhood, in the middle of an especially cracked-pavement block. The block ends at an ele
vated overpass where you can feel the scrape and roar of the highway beneath you. It is a sad, old building with dark windows, sandwiched between two similar houses. An old ladder leans against the front, and, in the open pit behind the fence, there is a sawhorse, scrap wood, cement bags. The first time they pull up in front of the house, Mira feels something fall in her chest. “It smells gross,” Mira says, when they are inside the dank front hallway. Neither Rachel nor her dad responds. The wallpaper in the hallway is coming loose in places and flops down in strips. From the ceiling, wires dangle from holes. The house needs stripping, painting, wiring, new plumbing.

In the beginning, they all live on the first floor, which is the only habitable one. Mira moves up to the second floor while it is still under construction, where her father, after work, still in his shirt and tie, attacks the imperfections of the old house's walls. For a time, Mira falls asleep at night to the swish and scrape of the planer, believing that this frantic, willful energy is enough to build a sturdy-walled version of reality, to keep the fairy tales at bay. In the dark, at night, in bed, Mira strains her eyes at the strange shapes the close moonlight makes against the walls half-scraped of their wallpaper. It is a form of prayer, this staring, this hoping, this squinting. She listens to the sounds of the house, the creaking and groaning, the words between her parents, high and angry, low and sweet. She imagines her parents singing a song she once heard at a Broadway play her grandmother took her to, their bright eager faces and open mouths. It makes her feel calmer to imagine this song, her parents singing it.

She has just started taking ballet at The Little Kirov, and she thinks
often about the little room around the corner from the older girls' classroom, where the costumes are stored for the annual performance of
The Wounded Prince
. In early December the costume room will be opened and the dusty tutus hung by color, in descending size order, will be shaken off, their synthetic tulle fluffed, and
the girls who were the Pink Girls last year will become the Blue Girls, the Blue Girls become the Yellow Girls, the Yellow Girls become the Flower Girls. She does not know what the Flower Girls become. And then there is the Flower Princess—there is only one Flower Princess. She wears a long dress and garlands of flowers pinned in her hair. She wears the most diaphanous white gown and tiara and, when all the action on the stage stops and turns to her, she must do the longest, slowest, most beautiful
penché,
and stretching out her arm, still deep in an arabesque, with her wand touch the Prince's lame leg. . . .

But time goes by and the house is not fixed. She doesn't know whom
to blame for this—her mother, her father, or the house itself. Her parents still recline after dinner on chairs that creak and groan. They sip wine. When the caning finally snaps, the broken chairs are stacked in the corner, one on top of the other. These chairs can only be salvaged by certain old-time craftsmen—weavers, caners, upholsterers—whom Rachel hunts for by going in and out of antique shops, with a little notebook in which she has sketched the broken furniture. Soon, though, she has to take a break. They go to Chock full o'Nuts, where Rachel orders Mira a cream cheese on raisin bread sandwich, sips her coffee, and thumbs through her notebook, still blank of names. Her father pulls down another chair from the rooms upstairs. They still giggle as they look around the room, flush with their own bold visions. But, as the years go by, their efforts disappear into the house like the pennies and nickels thrown in a deep wishing fountain.