Girl Through Glass

For Josh,
                       

from the beginning

The Beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, without its presence, would never have been revealed.

—J
OHANN
W
OLFGANG VON
G
OETHE

(1749–1832)

The garbage bags pile high on the sidewalks. The city shudders and heaves under the heat. The newspapers are filled with accounts of people being shot at night in darkened cars. Pride at New York City having its very own serial killer competes with the fear of going out after dark. At bus stops, children wearing keys around their necks—“latchkey” kids they are called—wait alone.

There is an infestation of bluebottle flies whose bug-out eyes see everything. They are poisoned to death in a citywide public health campaign, but barrelfuls of pigeons die too and their rotting corpses have to be stepped over while crossing the streets.

The sprinkler systems in the city parks break and, due to lack of funding, go unrepaired. Throughout Brooklyn the fire hydrants are decapitated and a barrage of water spouts forth. The children splash in the gutters with the pigeon corpses and dried Popsicle sticks and Twinkie wrappers, while the grown-ups stumble around, cursing and trying to drag them out.

Then there is the day in July when the lights go out. Block after block blinks off. Fans and air conditioners stall. Under the purple haze, people gather on street corners, in hallways, and in parks, around battery-powered boom boxes. A citywide blackout.

Thousands of ladybug eggs hatch in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's suddenly warm storage freezer. In the days afterward, they
blanket Brooklyn's parks and apartment windowsills. Then come the reports of looting and, up in the Bronx, of fierce fires in abandoned buildings. The people lock their doors and swear at the heat and pray for their city. The grown-ups are busy with the untenable state of their lives. Perhaps they feel relief at the darkness. It is the children who stand and watch their city extinguish like a dying flame.

When the ladybugs die, they fall to the grass, the floor, they crunch underfoot. They choke up vacuum cleaners. When the cool air comes, their husks are blown under piles of leaves, and, unheralded casualties of the ever-changing season, begin their descent into the earth.

Inside the world of asphalt and concrete, there is another world.
Things that look like they are made by someone's hands: grosgrain ribbons and spiderweb-thin hairnets and soft leather slippers. Down the crumbling school corridors and cracked sidewalks, these delicate things can be carried like talismans in jeans pockets or book bags.

In this other world, the girls do not wear tight jeans, scuffed Keds, or stiff pleated skirts that come in cellophane wrappers. Instead, they wear tights that range in color from a soft pink to a bright salmon. They wear cap sleeve or tank top black leotards with bands of two-ply elastic around their waists. They wear ballet slippers: Capezios, which are a tawny, russet-pink, with soles that crack in the middle of the arch, making it look like their pointe is better than it is, or orange-pink Freeds, which are made in England—and have an aura of exoticness. The poor or oblivious girls wear Selba's, which are a flat pink that looks both prissy and cheap.

These girls—known to each other as “bunheads”—wear their hair braided or twisted and wrapped around to form a solid nub held in place with bobby pins and a hairnet. As bunheads, they each own a few prized hairnets of human hair, so soft and fine that they hold their breath while handling them; they pull the bobby pins out carefully, fold the nets into small balls of fur, and slip them back into
their paper pouches. The mothers keep these pouches in their purse pockets—so expensive are they. Meanwhile, nylon hairnets from Woolworth's shift around the bottom of the girls' book bags while they are in the other world, catching on pens, the corner of books. The girls turn them round and round, searching for an unripped section.