Girl Through Glass (28 page)

“In some ways that is easier. In other ways, harder. But you can never be rid of a child.” Her mother wipes her wet eyes again. “Whatever you decide, I can give you this,” her mother says. “You can start again. I can give you that. I had that. And I can give you that.”

It's a decision free of effort. Like deciding she wanted to be a dancer with Maurice standing before her, asking her, telling her she had to decide. A decision made possible by someone telling you have to choose. It must be yes or no, not both, not neither. And for this reason she trusts her decision completely. “I'll have it. The baby.”

Her mother looks straight at Mira. “Okay. You'll have the child.” She touches Mira's shoulder. “Give it to a worthy couple. Then move on. Start over.”

Mira gives her mother her cat eye stare. Mira's hands are covered with dough. She nods, starts to sob, really sob, heavy tears. “Please don't tell Dad.”

Her mother's eyes are lit with a too-bright light like they used to have in her studio, but her mouth, around it, is tired. She is quiet for a long time. “I won't ask who? why? when? where? ever again. I won't scream. I won't tell. I'm not a Betty Crocker mom.”

Then her mother does the most incredible thing. She gives Mira a hug. It's not a simple hug, it's complex and in stages. She presses Mira's back with both hands and then clasps Mira to her chest.

She's never really sure if her mother kept her word. After that, her
mom and her dad have murmuring conversations at night, but her dad stays away. Once she overhears her mother's voice rise, and she says “on
your
watch,” before her voice lowers again.

As the months move on, through the fall, Mira walks the five sunny, then rainy, blocks to Mission High School. It's a huge public school. She is one of hundreds moving through this crumbling stone building while tired teachers look on. She listens to the teachers who speak half in Spanish and throw erasers at the kids—the ones in bandannas and with mustaches. No after-school drama clubs, no cabs whose waiting drivers ferry students to and from ballet class. But it's easy to survive here compared to SAB and Professional Children's School. Here, invisibility is an asset. She's in the back of class hunched over the desk to hide her growing belly.

She is too fat for ballet now. Her arms stay skinny but her breasts and stomach grow. Her body, which has always behaved so well compared to other girls' bodies, has completely stopped doing so. She eats and eats. This is a new kind of hunger, and one she can't defeat. She buys oversize shirts with company logos on the front and jeans she can leave unbuttoned. She buys Maybelline eyeliner—black—and draws lines above and below her eyes like she sees the girls on the streets do.

Her body should be locked up. It should be devoured. How unappreciated it is. How much she had given it! When she looks in the mirror, she sees something besides herself—she sees a girl who does not correspond to her idea of how she should be. Gradually she is coming into a new shape, hip bones, breasts, fat. Yes, it is
fat
that is between her and herself now.

Her mother takes her to thrift stores and buys maternity clothes
with Kmart tags still scraping her thighs and underarms, seams so stiff they crack. Mira buys everything in black and too big and carries a notebook in front of her belly, so people will just think she's a PIB.

One day, a Chicano girl comes up to her. “What's your name?”

“Kate,” she says. It's the first name that comes to mind. No longer a singular sensation, but one of a thousand.

“Who you live with?”

“My mother.”

“You have a father?”

Mira shakes her head. “He's dead.” This too comes out easily.

She nods. “Who's the daddy?”

Another thud in her heart spreads its dullness through her body. “He's dead, too.”

The girl whistles, low.

Chinese slippers beneath her desk, an advent calendar, a metronome
, a bottle of valerian to sleep at night. She sleeps and sleeps. The red kimono her mother lends her when she grows big. The orange plastic watering can on the bay window, a chart on the wall with a marker attached, names of her new housemates, next to their chores. Soon she is exempt from these. She sits at her desk and stares out the window, does worksheets in her math and vocabulary workbooks.

She can feel the thing—the baby. They say it is a baby; she's still not so sure. She knows only that it turns and pokes and kicks. It is not round and soft like babies are supposed to be but hard, all angles, ribs, elbows, knees, ankles, a bunch of sticks prodding her in the middle of the night.

Even at her desk at school. She jumps up, toppling her chair with a clatter. The thing—the baby, whatever it is—had poked at her
down there
. She runs out into the long hall to the bathroom. She shuts the stall door. In the barren cigarette-smelling bathroom, tearless cries heave her body, cries that she couldn't let her dad or Mr. B or Maurice or even her mother ever see. Suddenly, she can't
get air; she gasps and heaves, the air fades to gray, static. The clang, clang of the bell. Screams of other kids. The water runs, a squeaky faucet.

She wakes in the bedraggled nurse's station—the endless thrum of footsteps and shouting in the hallways outside. “You fainted,” says the nurse. She imagines the Russian lady who
talked to her,
standing over her, saying, “It's not a question of fat—” But it
is
. It is a question of fat.

She is really fat now. She is too embarrassed to be seen. She cuts
school, lies in Dolores Park on the grass, the beards of the palm trees above her sway in the wind. The sky is a beaten-into-submission blue, clouds banished.

She begins to sleep in her mother's bed. Her mother takes her bed.

One night in January 1981, Mira wakes up with vise-like pains
squeezing at her sides. She feels like her belly is a cement mixer. Pain runs up and down her back. The sheets beneath her are soaking wet.

“Mom,” she calls. “Mom!” Her mother comes in. She is pale. She is already dressed.

“We're going to get through this,” her mother says.

Her mother tells Mira to sit on the stoop while she pulls the car from the lot. Mira is surprised to hear someone groaning. She realizes it is her. Her belly is hard as a basketball. The car pulls up with a squeak and Mira crawls into the backseat. At the hospital, a nurse brings her ice chips and tells her to sit on the floor and make like she is taking a shit. “Use those muscles,” the nurse says. Mira can't get it right—her dancer's muscles keep pulling up instead of pushing down. Her mother bites her lip and sits with her and counts and marks things on a paper and tells her to breathe. The nurse goes away and comes back and gives Mira a pill, and then the pain isn't so bad. She passes out and the next thing she knows is that she is in bed and something—something hot and wet—is coming out of her. She thinks at that moment—weirdly—that Maurice is coming out of
her and he'd been in there the whole time, and she begins to cry. And then she hears another cry and she realizes that it
is
Maurice and that he
has
been in there the whole time and that she has finally gotten him out and she cries with the relief of it but then a minute later she thinks no! He's had something planted in me that can never be removed—claimed me in a way no one can ever touch—and this thing can always emerge whenever he wants—

Then she feels an unbearable pain, like a sun burning through her, and she screams.

The baby is small and very red, tiny and wrinkled and ugly.

She doesn't want to hold him. A nurse brings her applesauce and crackers and pulls down the shades, and she sleeps for a long time.

She remembers the other time, in the hospital, when she leaped,
when she trusted too much. She remembers the girl with the gap-toothed smile, whose heart wasn't strong enough. Who is there to blame now? That what she and Maurice have done should have such consequences—hospital, nurse, a baby! When she was a child, she felt not like a child. Now she knows she is not a child and she feels more like a child than she ever has, like someone looking around at the dead bodies after a massacre, saying, “Did I do that? With my own two hands?” The reality of her own power to harm herself, to change things, to make things, descends on her. She hears a nurse's squeaky shoes outside the room. She will be leaving—going home tomorrow—but she must stay this night to make sure there are no complications.

The nurse pokes her head in, walks to her bed. She is carrying something. “Do you want to see him?” From the bundle in her arms comes a tiny noise, a baby sound, a gurgle, something human, something in-human. She turns her head away. This then was Kevin.

She begins to cry for the thousandth time. Something has been taken from her, something that protected her from other people's feelings about her. Some piece of her taken, along with the baby. The
hole gapes, raw, and in it she can feel what other people feel about her. Before it was just Maurice and Mr. B—now it's everybody. It's not the child, who never belonged to her, but something else. She thinks of Maurice. She misses him. She misses her ballet body, how it made her feel strong.

The next morning, while her mother is out getting coffee, a lady
wearing a blue suit and high heels comes to visit. She carries a folder with Mira's name on it. The lady says she has some papers for Mira to sign. The lady smells of shampoo. She thanks her for having the child. For giving joy to a childless couple.
Right on,
she says.

The lady hands her a folder and tells her to sign where she points. Her nails are long and pink and perfect. She has a file with Mira's name on it! It is that moment when Mira realizes she hates her name. This Mira who became Mirabelle, who became Maurice's Bella. Mira: too many sounds, too hopeful. Is it hope that gets you in trouble?

Mira begins to read the papers in her file. “Oh,” says the lady, “you don't need to read it, honey. You just need to sign it.” Mira glares at her.

She pages through the documents anyway. Attached to one of the forms is a photo of an old sad-faced couple. The address catches her eye—an address in Berkeley. The woman has brown bobbed hair and is smiling in front of a tree. The man has gray-blond hair and his arm around her. She is not pretty, not hopeful. When Mira looks up, she sees the blond lady averting her eyes and fiddling with the hem of her skirt.

Mira takes the pen and signs the papers. She signs over the too-small baby that she never holds. She signs over her mom's and her dad's privileges of ever knowing the child. She signs over Maurice, Mr. B, Tumkovsky, Danilova. What she is left with is unclear. Her signature is a girl's careful loops, a round circle hanging over the stalk of the
i
. How she would give anything to be the fat girl at SAB and not a girl with a saggy belly in a hospital room signing some
papers held by a lady in a blue suit. Afterward, she is an empty pitcher. She might eventually be filled with anything—she doesn't care.

But then she changes her mind. She
does
care. She wants to be seen—one last time. She wants someone to know. That's why she does it—why she writes Maurice's name down next to hers on the line that reads:
father.

In the fall, when school starts again, Mira works like she never has before. In dog-eared workbooks, with sharpened no. 2 pencils, nudged into her desk, the smell of sesame noodles hanging in the air, pencil shavings collecting under her chair, she attends to her homework. She opens the math textbook, the history textbook, the science textbook, English. Because her body doesn't move like it did, she watches thoughts pile on top of one another, like rubber tires in a junkyard. They collect. For so long she was a limb of someone else's mind—following marching orders as they came out of Tumkovsky's mouth, looking for the light of response in Maurice's eyes (but is he dead?), waiting for Mr. B to come into the classroom and tilt his turtle head at her and say,
She's mine
.

San Francisco Superior Courthouse. Lives altered in the blink of an
eye, the flick of a finger. In a dusty room with peeling-plaster walls, in front of a stern woman with close-cropped hair, Mira signs form after form. When she's done, she'll no longer have the name of a flower, the name of a bell. As if cauterizing a wound, she will cut the limb off: the hopeful girl, the yearning girl, the girl enthralled to beauty will become someone else. Beauty leads to a pain she has only begun to figure out how to survive. She signs over her too-hopeful name and gets a new one.

Kate Randell
.

Kate
, commonplace enough (yet she has never had a friend named Kate). Not too pretty, a name that does not ask you to watch it.

Randell,
her mother's maiden name, the name she never really knew, the name of a blinding-white Connecticut house her mother left behind when she married her dad, a name her mother took back when she got to California and now owns again, along with her giant shell earrings.

A half hour later, she holds a photocopied piece of paper with her name on it.
This is me now. This is my new name.

She takes her mother's hand and they walk to her rusty Peugeot. They walk right by the hippies selling dream catchers and don't even stop.

I open my eyes to the light pouring in. The sun stretches all across the bed, and I feel it making a design on my face. Felicia must have gotten in late—her door is closed. Alain's bag and coat are draped over the couch. I shower, dress, and head out, glad not to have to see them. I'm happy I don't have to try to put yesterday into words. Last night, trying it with my mother was strange enough.

Out on the street, it's still early for a Saturday in Manhattan. On
Felicia's block, the new trees are sprouting hard-shelled buds that I feel a tender pity for—what will happen to them if this warm spell ends?

As I make my way to the West Side subway, I pass construction site after construction site. Up Seventh now to Columbus Circle. Bangs and slaps of boards on concrete. Piles of sandbags. This is New York, this struggling into activity. There is an old-fashioned eagerness to it all, a twentieth-century enterprise, a thing making itself.

I'm relieved to descend into the subway. New York subways: I've forgotten that particular smell of dirt and ammonia. It's an ancient industrial smell, so different from the mildew and food smell of the BART. The tracks start to rumble and the tunnel wind picks up. That old rising excitement, the quiver of air in front of me, and then the breakneck thunder of the train that shudders by inches from my face. Inside, the trains have the same submarine feel as when I was a kid. Metal, scouring fluorescent light, intimate anonymity. We bar
rel through the tunnels to Brooklyn. The knowledge of tons of water overhead and the sweat and the missing limbs of those who blasted tunnels in rock a hundred years ago.

Effortful, cheerful public service posters occupy the ad spaces. How hard the MTA is working to make things better! The Second Avenue line is on target! More Express buses! When I was a kid, these spaces were filled with ads for the lottery and skinny cigarettes, and they featured lots of girls in halter tops.

I watch a woman wearing high suede boots playing a game on her phone. The high-pitched sounds of fake gunfire reverberate over the clatter of the train and the station announcements. There is something primitive about this city, something honest and rapacious that hasn't changed.

I get out of the subway at the first stop in Brooklyn. It's the one nearest to my parents' old house. I pass through a park that used to be deserted. Now it's covered in AstroTurf and babies. Another blinding sky, this one blue, is pinned over the new MetroTech buildings. I pass several bars and upscale restaurants. All of this is new. Unlike Park Avenue, it's really changed here.

As I head toward the river, I remember how my life here was one of pure sensation, of cold winds from the East River in the winter, of heat coming from the sidewalks in summer. I remember a certain leaf that squishes underfoot and turns to a yellow pulp. We called them “stink bombs” and threw them at each other—though not me—I was too quiet and serious for that. But is that true? I don't know if I remember myself right at this age. It's a slippery part of my past, even more slippery than all that happened with Maurice. This is a different kind of loss of memory.

The houses are better kept up than I remember. Bricks repointed, shutters painted. Some houses even have metal plaques bearing nineteenth-century dates. House proud.

Now I'm on the block where we lived before my mother got California religion and moved out west and I moved in with Dad. Here it is—the house where we had all lived in my earliest memories. My
father, slim and without glasses, planed and scraped the walls, heroic to himself. He was younger than I am now. My mother in her bold colors and paisleys and kerchiefs.

I stand outside, looking. I find myself really looking, allowing myself, my eyes, to take in, to collect.

The house. In my memory, it's a dreary place locked under a gunmetal sky, in a state of incomplete transformation. But now the outside is well cared for and cheery. The sidewalk in front of it is ironed flat. The weathervane on the roof is replaced with a satellite dish. The door has been painted a subdued gray-blue, a Martha Stewart folded-linens color. Outside, in the little yard—I see now it
was
a yard—someone has planted a magnolia tree. The magnolia is just starting its bloom, some early buds have even dropped a few petals onto a kid's Radio Flyer bike leaning against the house.

A warmth under my armpits spreads though my body. Something shifts, like the floor settling, and I clasp my hands together.

I take the well-swept stairs slowly, one at a time. In the planters on the top landing sprout begonias. On either side of the door are two Victorian-style gaslights that border on kitsch. The makeshift world my mother sought here is clearly gone.

I ring the doorbell. I've dressed carefully today in a tight-fitting black jacket, black pedal pushers, a red scarf, and Louboutin flats. Something jangles inside and the door opens as if someone were just waiting behind it. The woman who faces me is young, her skin a bright nut color, her hair curly, her eyes almond. A newer denizen of yuppie hood? She wears tight jeans and a Patagonia fleece vest over a T-shirt.

Behind her, the hallway spreads into shiny flooring and blank, freshly painted walls, and, beyond, into an expansive living room scattered with a few toys.

I tell her I used to live in this house many years ago, when I was a girl. “I'm in town for a conference and was just walking by,” I say. She gives me a once-over and smiles. “Where do you live now?” she says. I hear an accent, a flat cheeriness and also a bit of a drawl.

“Ohio,” I say.

“I'm from Columbus!” she says. She sticks out her hand. “Victoria.”

“Kate,” I say.

The door opens wider.

She is smiling in such a pleasant way that I'm taken off guard. I'm not sure what I expected, but not this—unfettered kindness. “Would you like for me to show you around?” says Victoria. “I have a few minutes until I need to pick up my son.”

Is it really that easy to step back into your past? I thought I wanted this, but now I'm not sure. Part of me wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her:
You must be more discerning. You must be careful! This city can burn you up. Don't trust it too much!

But I don't. I can't. I'm caught in the grip of something stranger than I can say. What, I couldn't tell you. Only this: this strange, warm March week in New York when I have met my son. Kevin's face—his elfin face, precise energy, his emotional openness to me.

I follow her. I'm shocked when she leads me into the main room. It's totally unrecognizable. The parlor—as my parents liked to call it—is now a white rectangular box, all Bauhaus. It extends into an open kitchen. The whole back wall is windows. A couch and a few chairs float on a sea of oiled wool. A blank sail of walls. A few children's toys scattered about. “Sorry it's such a mess,” Victoria says. A
mess
? I think about my parents with the endless work, never done, the splintering boards, mordant peeling plaster, their shipwreck of a house, their Victorian nightmare. It's impossible to imagine this is the same place.

Now she is leading me to the kitchen, which is all bamboo and metal. It reminds me of Felicia's, with one difference, this one is being used. I put my hand on the counter, a sheet of metal—at once industrial and kind of delicate—where there is a plastic cutting board, covered with onions being chopped. Everything is floating in a pool of strewn light. This diffuse light coats everything, just like at SAB. This entire city is being rebuilt out of glass.

Victoria stands by the counter. She's saying, “We really love these old Victorians but they can be so claustrophobic. We wanted the light and air. We were so happy to see this one. The owners before us did a gut renovation.”

She picks up a workout bottle of water with lemon peels floating in it. She nods, gestures to the backyard. I can't really see out the back window into the yard because of all the light pouring in. “The people we bought it from put in a koi pond. I have to learn how to take care of it. I have to restock it this summer. It's not winterized or something. You have to actually move the fish.” She looks at me earnestly. “Do they have that here? Fish storage for the winter?”

I laugh. “When we lived here the yard was just an old patch of grass,” I say. “I lived here from when I was eight to about eleven. Only three years or so, before my parents split. It seems like a lifetime ago.”

Is she lost in all this newness, like we were lost in the oldness?

Then, before I know what I'm doing, I'm heading upstairs. I see the same blankness and careful curating in every room I pass. Then I'm on the third floor, heading down the hallway. I'm standing at the door of my old room. It's now a workout room of some kind. There's a pile of sneakers in one corner and an elliptical machine in the other corner. And on the far wall, a large wall mirror. Against the other wall rests a Japanese screen leaning against the wall printed with words in a calligraphic font,
Y
OU
C
AN
D
O
I
T
!

I hear her coming up the stairs behind me. Her voice, with its polite twang, now agitated. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” she's saying. I look around, at the Japanese screen, the workout machine, the mirror, the shoes. I remember Gary climbing up to
me,
my princess self waiting on the top, like it was a castle tower, waiting for my prince. He reaching
that same landing
that night the building lost power and he kissed me. I can see myself in the mirror across the room, trumpeting my fancy shoes. I want to take something. Maybe there is something in all this newness for me.

I turn around—she's coming down the hallway. She's clutching
her water bottle. Her brow is furrowed. “Please, I have to go get my son. I can't leave with you in the house.”

Victoria is younger than I will ever be again. She is rich, I am probably jobless. She is new, I am old. She has everything, I nothing. But there is something clean and new in my body that doesn't hate her.

There is nothing here for me. Nothing at all.

“We used to have a room full of junk here,” I say. “There's no junk anymore.”

I brush past Victoria. I walk the stairs like I'm descending from a high tower. I can hear her right behind me.

I was a fool to think it was the house. It was never the house, it was me, it was the city, wrapped in striving. It was my parents, it was Maurice, Mr. B, Tumkovsky, Danilova, the Russians coming from their distant land remaking us in the image of what they left. We were all caught in a vortex, the air on fire, the sirens ripping, and we danced so we didn't get burned. But everyone gets burned. Life burns.

I speed through the foyer, desperate to be back on the street, then jog down the stoop. I want to go to the water, to look at Manhattan. As I step onto the sidewalk, magnolia-strewn—as if the tree has pushed deeper into bloom in just the time I have been in the house—another memory returns. This one is different. It predates the selves of my wood-and-enamel box.

I remember. A concrete school yard. A half-inflated red ball burning toward the stone wall behind me, the splat of rubber on the wall, the thud of the ball on the ground. The gym teacher, a nervous man with a mouth twitch that showed his metal caps, yells, “Dodge!” The girls with braids squeal. The boys in T-shirts and Keds hurl spit. I'm back behind them all, not trying to win, but just ready, ready to move.