Girl Through Glass (21 page)

I look at her.

“Those are our names for it.” She squints at the screen. “But then, he stopped about ten years ago. Nothing.”

“From Dress Circle to nothing?”

“Wait! But then, a year ago, he gave a million dollars!”

“A million? That's Inner Circle, right?”

“Sure is.”

“Is there anything else?”

“There's a name, the name of a lawyer, Kevin Fox, and an address on Park Avenue.” Now it's my turn to squint at the screen. I pull out Felicia's pad—the one with Latinate lettering at the top—and scribble down the name and address. I notice, for some reason it's clear now, that the lettering reads
Carpe Diem
.

In early November, Mira stands in front of the hallway bulletin board. Her eyes rest on a single sheet of white paper, the typed cast list for
The Nutcracker
. At first, she doesn't see her name anywhere on the list. Her heart beats too fast. Then she sees, yes, it is there.

Party Scene

Angels

Hot Chocolate

Candy Canes

Polichinelles

Hoop Girls

At the very bottom,
Marie.
And next to
Marie
—Mira Able!

When she tells Maurice, his glittering smile falls into place, like it was he who had gotten the part. He says, “Of course.”

She doesn't see Mr. B again until a Friday afternoon
Nutcracker
rehearsal
. Mr. B is there, wearing a cowboy shirt and a string tie. His turtle face looks handsome. He's whispering with the New York City Ballet children's ballet master, who is scarier to her than anyone. He's legendary for his yelling and berating, his blow-dried hair. When they put the Nutcracker doll in her hand, it's lighter than she could have imagined, and she pantomimes the steps she knows by heart now. As she cradles the doll, gazing at its big Easter Island
face, she imagines Maurice. She imagines dancing for Maurice, the silence and the splendor of that.

Mr. B walks forward, stops the pianist. “I know this one,” he says. Then he's beside her, playing Drosselmeyer. He swings a pretend cape, takes out the doll, offers it to her. He smells of straw and coffee. “This Marie,” he says, “has the energy of my Tanny.”

Tanny, he called her Tanny!
the girls in the dressing room will whisper with envy. Tanny—short for Tanaquil—Mr. B's fifth wife. An exceedingly beautiful girl with an incredible extension, tragically crippled by polio in the prime of her career. Mr. B nursed her for years. The other girls' whispers will be loud with envy and hate, but they are also far away and can't reach her.

Mira's fame is growing at SAB. First a girl who Tumkovsky is mean
to, then a Mr. B girl—and now a Marie. There are lots of girls Tumkovksy is mean to, a handful of Mr. B girls, but a finite number of Maries. Only one a year.

The other girls, and their imperfections, fade away as Mira runs ahead on a stream of energy and light. Her body tells her what to do and she just goes along with it. The steps are second nature. Her body turns, folds, extends, all on its own. It's a song in her body. The high notes are sometimes so high and long that she is left wide-eyed in amazement along with everyone else. Something great is growing in her, unrolling its tendrils, sprouting buds in all directions. Sometimes the song in her body is almost too loud; it fills her eyes, makes them tear up in something like gratitude.

Mira misses a total of two weeks of school for her
Nutcracker
performances
. In the party scene, Marie and her brother, Fritz, chase each other underneath hors d'oeuvres serving trays. Apart from the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act Two, they get the loudest applause. The music is spongy and bright and they bounce like bubbles in it. Then comes her favorite part. With a drumroll, Drosselmeyer appears, swishing his black cape, smelling of dusty oranges. Mr. B himself
used to play Drosselmeyer, they all know that and still, his presence is there, in the cape, in the mask, in the staff. When she is offered the nutcracker, she grabs the doll and twirls, arms outstretched, showing off their secret—the great urn of a toy that steals the show. The cymbals crash and the drums pound, and the audience erupts. A thunder of clapping breaks in her ears.

Her dad and Judy come to see her every weekend. Judy brings a client to each performance and takes them backstage to meet her. Her mother flies in to see her, too, without anyone else, and wears a loose flowered dress. Maurice is there for every single performance—he doesn't come backstage to see her, but he often sends flowers, and while she is surrounded by her dumb broken family, she senses him lurking, waiting just around each corner, behind some stage door. (Though when she peeks, she never sees him.) Then, he is there, waiting for her by the fountain at their time. He drinks her in and drinks in her success, and everything falls into place. He is with her, even when he is not.

Throughout the spring of 1979, Mira performs more than any other girl in her division. She is chosen for the premiere of
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
with the great Rudolph Nureyev and Patricia McBride. Because she's an SAB girl, one of Mr. B's, she's valuable outside the company, too. She appears in children's roles with the Maurice Béjart and Maya Plisetskaya companies when they are in town on their American tours.

And the needle on the scale doesn't budge for her, even as for others it swings upward. It seems she will never get bigger.

In April, Mira turns thirteen! Maurice takes her to an Afghan restaurant where the people are dressed colorfully and blankets are on the walls. She smiles so much her face hurts. Other girls have boyfriends who go around with shoes untied and braces with egg in them, but she has Maurice. She is the luckiest girl in the world.

The school year ends. Classes end. Summer comes. Mira's invited
to go to Saratoga with the entire NYC Ballet company for SAB's elite summer session. One day that summer, Heather Watts turns to her in the hallway and says, “You're Mira, right? I know he likes you.”

Her mother invites her out to San Francisco to stay with her in her new group house, but Mira doesn't go. She's working too hard, there's too much at stake, and her mother wouldn't understand that.

One night before classes end for the summer, Judy comes into Mira's
room and sits on her bed. She spreads a magazine across her lap. The front cover shows a gaunt-looking girl staring at the camera. The headline reads: A
NOREXIA:
T
HE
E
PIDEMIC
S
WEEPING
O
UR
N
ATION
. Judy is looking at her through squinted eyes, as she always does when she seizes on something she thinks is important.

“Of course, I had heard of anorexia nervosa, but I didn't know the depths of it, the severity of it . . . I mean the possible severity of it.” She taps the magazine cover. “I mean, there is a girl in the hospital now, a ballet dancer, who refuses to eat though she is dying. She's at death's door and was caught jogging by her bed. She has to be restrained so that she would not burn off the meager amount of food that she does consume. It's just . . . horrible!”

Mira says nothing. She wants to laugh. When she hears grown-ups talk about anorexia and bulimia, she has a curious detachment. How misplaced their worry always is! Her secret will always be safe because grown-ups look in the wrong places.

“Now, Mira, I want you to tell me if you recognize any of these symptoms in yourself or in others you know: reluctance to eat, creating rituals around food, severe hunger pains, distorted body image, a feeling of dislocation—that means, I don't know what it means.”

“I know girls who are anorexic, Judy,” Mira says. “And believe me, I am not one of them. These girls are so skinny they are disgusting. They can't even dance.”

Judy stares at her through wide eyes, perhaps hearing a tone she hasn't heard before in Mira's voice. But Mira knows Judy can't say anything really because she herself is so invested in Mira as a dancer. She always loves to show Mira off to her friends at dinner parties.

She finds out that Felicia was not invited to return to SAB. Felicia's
stomach has begun to stick out more and more—Mira thinks of the candy bars in the closet, shorn of their skins.

They sit on Felicia's bed in her puffy room. “What will you do?” says Mira. “Are you going to another studio?”

Felicia slides her eyes away, then looks right at her. “My mom and I are moving to L.A. to try our luck in Hollywood.”

In the fall, Mira is moved up another level at SAB. She's in B2 now.
She still wears a midnight blue leotard, she begins partnering. For Variations, she has the famous Danilova, who is teaching her the first scene of
La Sylphide,
the girl who enters a window at night to a sleeping house, a sprite come to visit the earthbound.
Bourrée, bourrée, bourrée,
head cocked, listen.
Bourrée, bourrée,
listen.

Mira switches to the Professional Children's School, where students with her talent and schedule go. She loves it there. There are others like her there. There are a number of other SAB girls. And many actors, who leave in the middle of class for auditions. She sits next to kids she has seen on TV. They talk a lot in class and have holes in their jeans, which makes them different from the bunheads like her. Like the other dancers, she dresses neatly and doesn't talk much in class, but always does her homework. The teachers are very nice and even try to be friends with the kids, because it is the kids' lives that are the most important thing. They are what everything else must be arranged around. Some of these teachers even come see her perform and say things outside of class that they shouldn't, about how great she is, how much better than anyone else.

In November,
Nutcracker
time comes again and she's chosen for the
Head Angel, which is a very good part. She wears a golden tiara and leads the other girls into tapestries of shiny gold shapes. Again, her mother comes into town, and her dad and Judy come every weekend
with friends and clients, and even Sam comes twice with a new friend named Oliver.

There's talk of her being chosen for a workshop performance next year. They pick only a few girls. Mainly C level. Then she could be offered a company apprenticeship. In two years, she could even be in
Swan Lake,
dancing in the corps, onstage with her idols. Maybe then she'd be down to a high school correspondence course. But who would care about that if she were sixteen and dancing with New York City Ballet?

Her mother has been calling her regularly. She comes to visit in January
and suggests that they go to places she
never
would have before—museums and even a Broadway show. She invites Mira out to San Francisco for a few weeks in the summer. She's in another group house. She tries to make it sound fun—
dance classes nearby
! Mira has to explain that there are no classes like SAB classes, and if she's chosen again to go up to Saratoga for summer session, she'll have to go, since this is her chance to show she's company material. But maybe, she adds, crinkling her eyes the way Judy does, she could spare a week at the very end of August? Her mother gets red between her freckles and says, “Your room will be there for whenever you want to come.” Then, as if to reassure herself more than Mira, “I've got a good job now. It pays the bills.” Her mother looks so proud of herself, which makes Mira feel both happy and sad. Mira doesn't know what to do with her face, so she smiles and says, “That's great, Mom!”

Soon after, she dreams that she stands in the dark, watching Maurice
sleep. She feels strong, brave, and beautiful. Then he rises from his sleeping position—but it is like he is still asleep—and his hair has grown so that it is long and silver-white, down his back all the way to the floor, hanging like a veil. And then he takes out a wand—yes, she knows, it's cheesy—and he hands her an apple to eat. It is shiny and red and looks delicious, but there is a wormhole in it and she
can't take her eyes off of it and the longer she looks at it, the bigger and rounder it grows until she feels like she is looking into a dark tunnel to the center of the earth. And then she hears Maurice's voice—but it is changed, like a woman's voice, like her mother's voice from a long time ago. (She used to tell those stories, really long involved stories.) “Who are you?” she says, but the woman doesn't respond. She just looks at Mira and smiles. And she doesn't know what to say. Then she realizes that she has no shoes on and her feet are bare and there are leaves under them that crunch when she walks. It is like walking on old brittle bones. And then she has this amazing feeling of power move though her. It feels like she is being lifted up off the ground, like she is floating out of her body, and it feels so good. Then the lady with the veil is gone and the hole to the center of the earth is gone and it is Maurice again.

She knows what the dream is about, she knows what she has to do: it is a sign telling her to do what she has wanted to do since she turned thirteen and knew about the birds and the bees. She wants to have him touch her, to touch her in a way he never has before, with warm hands. She wants him to whisper in her ear “I love you, Mira.”

Walking home from the bus, Mira passes the bar Dorrian's, that
famed outpost of debauchery, where Sam and his friends have started to gather. Even early in the evening, it's going full swing. She purposefully crosses to the other side of the street, evading the bar's overflow onto the sidewalk. She and her sister SAB bunheads don't talk about boys, sex, clothes, hair, drinking—the courtship rituals that occupy most girls' time. As a bunhead, she is exempt—barred?—from all that. For one thing, there isn't even time. They have Technique twice a day—morning and evening. In the early afternoon they have Variations or Partnering. Then all day Saturday they are in class, with a break for Music Theory. As her life has turned to maintaining an elite routine, the routine and focus of a professional athlete, her nighttime dreams have exploded into strangeness and mystery. Sometimes, as she goes through her day, she has the sense
of being a sleepwalker. But her dreams are wild and vivid. Only when she is dancing does she feel as alive as she does when she is dreaming.

At SAB, she'll soon be in Level C, the Advanced division. There's no
doubt. For Variations, Danilova is now teaching her a sequence from
Coppelia
. Ms. Tumkovsky continues to be mean to her, and now she shines under this meanness because it shows she is good; she is a Mr. B girl. For Variations, they wear white leotards, so thin they look see-through. No elastics, no leg warmers, no warm-up pants allowed. It's as if their bodies, now edging toward complete, are owned by SAB, as if the results of all their efforts are to become less substantial—ghosts, rays of light, permeable. On some girls, you can see small breasts sprouting and hips spreading. These girls are placed in the back rows, off to the side, at the end of the line. A lot of the girls complain about the see-through leotards, but she likes them. Her body is small and strong, her legs fly on their own, she turns and turns in her spot, whipping her head around to her internal song. She hears the song all the time now. She has become a body in space that can read Danilova's, and Tumkovsky's, and most of all Mr. B's mind. When he calmly walks into the room and his eyes rest on her, she knows without him speaking what he wants. There is no need for words anymore.

At one point she finds herself onstage with Merrill Ashley, whose eyes are as big and bright as ancient coins. She is so close she can smell the sweat on Merrill's skin and watch the ribbons of muscle in her back quiver as she arabesques.

There's no longer any need to tell Maurice what she's learning—she simply shows him, dancing longer and longer in his parlor room, into the night in her private display for him. Sometimes she does a whole class for him. He watches, eyes glistening. Their dinners grow shorter, then nonexistent. They come to his place, eat cookies and guzzle Coke, and she dances, the sweat light on her skin. She's never felt more beautiful.

She loves him. She does. Their relationship is special. She could
never have it with a boy her age. She loves his fine delicate fingers, his pale skin withered like a faint crust over milk that moves with her hand when she touches it. She loves his hair smelling of something strong and stern, she loves his bony back with the shoulder blades like wings and the fine sinewy forearms and the bent leg. She loves the stone on his finger, blue in a gold setting. Most of all she loves his bones, his joints, the places where they come together—he is an animated skeleton. She sees his young face in his older face, so that she thinks he looks younger than people her own age. What she sees is raw desire—and love.

The spring of 1980 comes, cold and wet. The rain gutters overflow.
Discarded umbrellas lie in heaps against garbage cans. The hallways of SAB smell of ragg wool and rubber, but aside from that, the school is immune to the weather—to everything outside. Like a humidor, it's kept on the cool side so that sweat dries easily, but not too cool to get in the way of a good warming-up of muscles.

Mira's hurtling toward her fourteenth birthday.