Girl Through Glass (7 page)

In early November, Mira's father appears again. He says he's been staying with friends while he “figures things out.” But he wants to see Mira. So the Sunday morning after Mira follows Maurice home, her father comes to pick her up. He wears a new long, stylish coat with a fur collar, and his cheeks are freshly shaved and raw-looking. His eyes are rimmed with red.

She climbs in his car—a new silver Toyota. Inside, it smells of leather and air freshener. It strikes Mira that her father is a very neat man. She had not known this about him, exactly, or had not thought it in those terms:
my father is a neat man.
How has she not known this about him? For how long has he been living in her mother's messy, upside-down world?

They drive through the silent early-morning Brooklyn streets. The city has slid into a cold late fall. Dead leaves clog the gutters, and the dog shit on the sidewalk has started to freeze into hockey pucks that the boys at school will kick at the girls. The air has finally shed the burned smell. Now it slaps your face and freezes your lungs. The plastic bags in the trees whip in the wind like banners on ghost ships. She watches as a newspaper blows down the street, catching a man in the face.

Her dad asks Mira if she has eaten. She shakes her head. She imagines that he will take her to a restaurant—maybe in Manhattan—where they will eat things she has never eaten before. Maybe quail eggs. Or snails.

Instead, only a few blocks away, on Court Street, he parks the car in front of a storefront restaurant sandwiched between two gated jewelry stores displaying giant gold earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. A battered blue-lettered sign reads:
D
UT PAV LION
.
Despite living ten blocks or so from this stretch of commerce, Mira has never noticed the Donut Pavilion, much less been inside of it.

They enter: a harmless-looking drugstore with a lunch counter. It is steamy inside, with smells of frying. Next to the counter is a rack of ancient greeting cards printed with salutations like “I Miss You!” and “From the Moment I Met You . . .” and pastel pictures of sunsets, flowers, and butterflies. As her dad climbs onto one of the ripped orange stools, Mira fingers their warped parchment paper and embossed covers. She lingers on a pretty card with a raised yellow sunset reading “Together Forever.”

In a moment that moves past without a beat, Mira slides the card into the inside pocket of her jacket. The next moment, she is perched on the stool next to her father.

He leans toward her, as if he is telling her a secret. “
This
is a real diner. There was one like this where I grew up.” Only once has Mira been to the town where her father grew up—it was cold and gray, with empty, windy streets. She remembers a white front porch and a quiet room with a crucifix hanging on the wall. This was the house he'd grown up in. She had been scared—of that crucifix, and of her stern grandmother whose face was as hard as a cement mixer. Her grandmother had died soon after that.

Without the coat, her father looks more like himself. He wears a corduroy button-down shirt, khakis, and the rubber shoes he calls “duck shoes”: his weekend outfit. Behind the counter is a Hispanic man with a long, burnt-looking face and a white hat. He is constantly running an orange dishrag over the counter. Her father orders Mira a breakfast special—eggs and bacon and toast. He, himself, will eat nothing.

“How is your mom? How is the house?” he says.

“Okay.”

He looks down and, with a thick finger, traces the grain in the counter. “Your mother will have to sell that house.”

Mira's mouth is filled with the eggs and toast. “Really?” she says.

“We'll see,” he says.

She pushes her plate away without finishing her breakfast. Her father motions to have a powdered sugar donut placed before her.

“I'm not coming back,” he says.

Mira looks down at the donut, at her plate sprinkled with powdered sugar dust. When she looks up, she sees her father has an amazed, helpless look. His skin glows, as if a light is behind it, and his eyes are wide, as if he is seeing something wonderful in the distance. He is blinking a lot.

“At least for a while. We're going to see how it goes. Apart. This is something—your mother—we both have decided on.”

They sit there for some time, then she says, “I hate you” in a low voice.

“I know,” he says.

The counter guy sucks his teeth and wipes the counter aggressively with his dishcloth, veering very close to her father's coffee. Then he rips a check from the pad he keeps tied to his apron string and slaps the check down in front of them. Pale green, curled at the edges.

Her father shakes his head, as if that settles something.

Mira stares at two grease stains like small overlapping continents across the top of the check. Fingers, grease; it turns her stomach.

“I should have my own apartment soon.”

“Where?”

“I'm thinking Murray Hill, maybe Chelsea, maybe Kips Bay.” He laughs.
Manhattan.

As her father pays, the long-faced counterman barks something out. Mira's heart skips.

The counter lady looks at her. “You have something, sweetheart?”

Mira pulls the greeting card from her pocket and puts it facedown on the counter. The lady clicks her tongue and smiles kindly—a luxury, since she knows she has won.

“It's for my mother,” says Mira stupidly, the sallow impulse to lie springing up but fading.

“What's the matter?” says her father, who has walked back from the door.

“Your daughter almost shoplifted something,” says the lady. “But Jimmy here”—she gestures toward the counterman —“he see her. Right, Jimmy?”

Mira reaches into her pocket, where she carries her saved-up change and drops it on the counter. “I was going to pay,” she says.

The checkout lady, in one motion, gathers up the change and turns the card over with long beige fingernails as hard as pieces of sea glass. There is the glaring, gaudy sunset of turquoise and pink. And the horrible words. Her father looks at it, then at her, with a solemn face.

“It's my fault,” he says. “I wouldn't get it for her.”

“I don't really want it,” says Mira as she gives her father what she hopes is an accusatory stare. And she doesn't. She looks at the picture with the silly words. She sees, as if it is written out in front of her, for the first time, that in the gap between what is hoped for and what is, you can find all sorts of silly, embarrassing things. She must be careful, she must watch herself.

The lady drums her long fingernails on the counter.

“Are you sure?” her father says. Mira nods as hard as she can, bouncing her head on her neck hurriedly so that it hurts.

The counter lady peels the card off the counter carefully like it is a wet dollar bill and puts it on the other side of the cash register where Mira can only see its edge sticking out. She returns Mira's change.

Her father looks at her with his red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, Mira,” he says. “You must ask when you want something,” he says. “Or you're going to turn into your mother. Always taking, never asking.”

One afternoon soon after this, Mira passes a bunch of older girls
smoking under the awning of a camera store on the corner of Fifty-sixth and Seventh. When Mira nears the corner, she recognizes Hannah, her friend Portia, and two other girls she doesn't know by name. She is surprised to see that Val is among them.

After standing for a minute, Mira gets up her courage and walks up to the group. Hannah is wearing tight jeans and Frye boots. Her ponytail is gathered on one side of her head. Her eyelids shine with eye shadow. As she exhales, she closes her eyes halfway. Portia has her hair swept back with a toothed headband, and still wears some of her dance clothes: legwarmers over her sweats, leotard poking through her bomber jacket. The other girl, a small chunky girl whose name Mira knows is Noelle, barks out a laugh in agreement after Hannah says anything. They all hold cigarettes in their hands. Val raises the cigarette to her mouth and blows out a stream of smoke into the bright air. How does Val know how to do this?

“Hey,” Hannah says, catching sight of her. “It's the Flower Princess.”

Mira walks right up to them and tries to put her arm through Val's, but Val pulls hers away.

“I remember when I was the FP,” says Hannah. She flips her hair back. “I thought it'd be better.”

“It's for little girls,” says Noelle.

“There's the
Prince,
” says Portia, huskily.

“Yeah, the
Prince
. . . ,” says Hannah.

Mira does not know what to do with her hands. She looks at her feet. The sidewalk is dotted with smashed cigarette butts and black, discarded gum. She tilts her head back. The sky above is an ominous gray.

“It might rain,” she says.

Val looks at her with heavy eyelids. “So?”

“It might rain.”
One of the other girls imitates her.

“Want a smoke?” Portia holds out an already lit cigarette.

Mira thinks about the quiet studio upstairs. Robin will be there practicing already.

Mira drags on the cigarette. The smoke catches in Mira's throat, and she coughs, once, then twice. Then she can't stop. The other girls laugh. “She didn't even inhale,” says the freckled girl.

Val takes a step back. “God, Mira,” she says, when Mira finally stops coughing.

Val looks at her like she has just given her a dare. Mira tries to pull her eyes away, but Val holds them. Now the blood is in her ears. It is as if her whole life is under attack. Mira's eyes fill with a strange water, and the girls recede like chips of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

She runs. Their laughter comes from behind her. She hears someone say, “Shit”; someone else, “Damn”; someone else says, “Wait
.
”

In Middle Studio, Robin is already warming up. She has one leg on
the barre and is bent over the raised leg in a swan dive. She looks up briefly when Mira enters, nods imperceptibly, and lets her head flop over her leg again. Mira walks in and takes the barre against the other wall and begins to warm up.

During class, right before center, Ms. Clement stops the girls. She lifts the needle off the record. “Mira, come here.” Mira walks out to the center of the room with her feet turned out. Standing in a first position, she brushes her right leg out along the floor. “Notice,” Ms. Clement says, “the turnout begins at the hips, not at the knee.” Mira extends her leg, lifts her chin, and makes her face blank. As blank as a desert. She has learned how to do this so that the others will not have something for their hate to attach itself to (for this is the third time this week she has been called to demonstrate).

They all move into the center. The first center combination is
allegro
—a series of glissades, a pas de bourrée
, changement,
and
soutenu
. Mira is quick, birdlike. Her feet obey her mind exactly, beating the air with the sure strokes of wings.

She has never felt her power so cleanly or decisively.

The next Saturday when Mira leaves rehearsal, Maurice is waiting
for her outside The Little Kirov. He's bundled in a fur coat. He invites her to the Russian Tea Room. Despite its proximity to the dance studio, Mira has never been to the Russian Tea Room. She has only seen it in movies
.

He walks her around the corner and right through wooden doors festooned with lights. They sit in a puffy red booth. On the forest-green walls hang gold-framed paintings of jesters, clowns, and little girls. The room is a patchwork of colors and sounds: busy waiters wheeling clanking tea carts maneuver around a gold centerpiece clock whose wide, cheery face clicks and bongs. Beside their table is a giant silver pitcher with a spigot, which Maurice tells her is called a samovar
.
From it comes hot tea. Today Maurice wears all blue—dark blue trousers, a light blue sweater, and a red ascot. In this new guise, he reminds her of Jacques Cousteau. She is getting used to the fact that he appears in a different guise each time she sees him.